Ganhir
In the city of Ganhir there is a curious practice of life extension stretching back to antiquity. You may be familiar with this city, for their memoirs and letter-collections feature heavily in the corpus. However this tradition of theirs is one not exported. It is an esoteric practice, that I was only able to observe through subterfuge.
In illness or old age, a citizen of Ganhir will request to be brought a pen, the Record, and crushed petals of the fulva, that which promotes memory. After consuming the flower through a long, thin pipe of cedar and chalcedony, they will begin to write into the Record, haphazardly, deliriously, a string of images and references and associations, sometimes lapsing into the famed Ganhiric memoir style but then returning to sequences of tetralemmic formalisms in the manner of the South. The object is nothing less than to externalize, latently, the geodesics of thought and the generating function of their mind onto the page before their death. No thought is too trivial to encode, no secret is too close to hold back. For nobody but themselves will ever read this text.
On the anniversary of the writing, and then repeating in doublets, two years, four years, et cetera, the Shaman—the term is difficult to translate, perhaps the Official—will consume the crushed imago of a certain species of beetle, which is a dissociative. Her assistants will then cover with silk the other parts of the Record, all but what the one writer had written. She will be for the time ghóstis, host and guest simultaneously, and those who knew the writer or wish to seek their counsel will be ministered to, and ask questions. For all present it is as if the writer is present, and in the language of Ganhir there is no distinction between this presence and life, for they perceive none.
In modern times, with the introduction of the geneseed and the other gifts of technology, where this is no illness, the tradition has not died out but has changed. Now the writer will take the pen and the Record and the fulva at an appointed age, generally 70, and write as before. On the date of the reading they will be their own Shaman and assistant, who consumes the dissociative and places the silk, and they will read their past writing, and become as they were. At 140 this will be repeated again, and 210, and so forth, such that for each man the Record now has many men, and the reading-places have become crowded with the voices of the ancient.
This is the tradition of Ganhir, which they refer to by the name of its intoxicant, the imago, and this is not used for any other purpose, that is forbidden.