The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

By Mark Romel

The strangest of all wars has broken out. The Third World War is the Unreality War. Some call it the Hyperreal War, the war of the “more real than real”. Reality can deliver only so much. Human fantasy, by contrast, knows no bounds. Reality acknowledges constraints. Fantasy doesn’t.
The hyperreal is where human fantasy, rather than reality, drives humanity’s perceived reality. Actual reality is reduced to nostalgia. As technology improves, it delivers human fantasy with ever more power. It does so via vivid, luscious screens, the perfect medium of human fantasy. The World has been replaced by the Screen. The more people look at the screen rather than at the world, the more they are in hyperreality. Come inside and explore the strangest of all worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244824242

Mark Romel

Mark Romel writes about reality, unreality, hyperreality, surreality. Is humanity mad? Does it have a reality principle, or a fantasy principle?

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The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

Mark Romel

Copyright © Mark Romel 2019

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

The Imaginary Order

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It’s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness. – Jean Baudrillard

The strangest of all wars has broken out. The Third World War is the Unreality War. Some call it the Hyperreal War, the war of the more real than real.

Reality can deliver only so much. Human fantasy, by contrast, knows no bounds. Reality acknowledges constraints. Fantasy doesn’t.

The hyperreal is where human fantasy, rather than reality, drives humanity’s perceived reality. Actual reality is reduced to nostalgia. As technology improves, it delivers human fantasy with ever more power. It does so via vivid, luscious screens, the perfect medium of human fantasy. The World has been replaced by the Screen. The more people look at the screen rather than at the world, the more they are in hyperreality.

If you are glued to your smartphone – addicted to it – you have turned your back on the reality principle. You now inhabit a world controlled by the human imagination.

In your dream world, your own mind serves up dream content. In the real world, reality serves up real content. In the hyperreal world, the human imagination, driven by fantasy, serves up hyperreal content and displays it on high-resolution screens exploding with colors like you’ve never seen before.

Hyperreality is where the unimaginative operations of the Collective Unconscious are overlaid with the imaginative operations of human consciousness. Hyperreality is where fantasy content, normally confined to the private mental space, is intentionally superimposed over the physical space, to such an extent that it becomes impossible to disentangle real content from fantasy content.

Look around you. The manifestations of human dreams, imaginings and fantasies are everywhere. Screens, the vectors for the constant streams of images produced by the human imagination, are embedded everywhere, and always attract your attention much more captivatingly than anything else. They are designed to.

How can reality compete? It’s up against airbrushed, digitally enhanced, technologically perfected reality, i.e. more than reality. Screens, located everywhere, carried by everyone in their hands (by way of their smartphones), are giving people the chance to be in the real world and yet to have their attention constantly directed at another world – the screen world, with its own specially-tailored content. People are physically in reality, but mentally in hyperreality – the human construct shown to people via images and screens. This is leading to a disastrous breakdown of the reality principle. It’s becoming impossible for people to experience reality as it actually is.

Imagine a world where everyone had access to devices that showed dream content – much more vivid, intense and emotionally absorbing and fascinating than anything encountered in reality – and could watch this all day long. That world is here. That is more or less what a smartphone delivers. It has linked us to the human imagination and fantasy in a way previously reserved for religion. Religion linked humanity to the fantasy of heaven and hell. However, whereas religion is concerned with the afterlife, hyperreality is about this life. Its function is to deliver heaven here and now, in order to extract money from people. Everyone will pay whatever they can afford for their slice of heaven.

Hyperreality is the inevitable culmination of predatory capitalism. It perfectly reflects the logic of consumerism. Predatory capitalism’s task is to drive up your consumption indefinitely, to ultimately have you consuming all the time. You consume, therefore you are. The winners in the consumption game are the most addictive products and services. Hyperreality is loved by the super-rich elite exactly because of its power to make the masses consume more and more, and thus maximize the profits of those behind the screen. Hyperreality sprinkles the magic dust.

Smartphones are the perfect delivery mechanisms of predatory capitalism. They are the technological equivalent of the junkie’s needle. They mainline you into consumer paradise where you can get whatever you wish to consume … at a price, of course. Look around. People have abandoned reality in order to concentrate on their smartphones. These serve up hyperreality, so much more alluring and seductive than reality. Smartphones are Addiction Devices, turning you pixel by pixel into a consumer zombie. People literally get withdrawal symptoms if you take away their smartphone. They need their hit, their fix, their hyperreal infusion.

Hyperreality involves the strangest dance with reality. It borrows from reality, then perfects it, then serves it back to the masses as reality, or as the better than reality, the more real than real, reality as it ought to be. Take an incredibly popular old show – Friends. This show imagined a group of friends. Naturally, it centered on the typical sorts of things friends do. However, the friends depicted on screen were hyperreal friends – much better looking, funnier and in better jobs and living in better places than ordinary, real people. They were equipped with perfect lines and quips for every situation. So, ordinary people started looking to Friends to gauge their own friendships. They became totally disillusioned because their real friendships were nothing like the hyperreal friendships being shown to them on screen. People started to like characters from Friends better than their own friends. They felt they had more in common with them. This happens all the time with celebrities.

So, hyperreal friendship was derived from real friendship, then served back as the friendship everyone dreams of, and this then became the friendship standard everyone aspired to, thus changing the very nature of friendship. Until hyperreal friendship was on the menu, ordinary people liked their ordinary friendships. Once they became aware of hyperreal friendship, they became discontented with their lives and friends, and wanted hyperreal friendship for themselves. They started trying to emulate hyperreal friendship – i.e. imposing impossible-to-meet expectations – and became more and more disconnected from reality. They were depressed with what reality was giving them, which was the most meager fare indeed.

Mental health issues are now epidemic because the lives people aspire to, and see all the time on their hyperreality screens, are nothing like the lives they actually lead. Everyone feels robbed, cheated, and everyone wants someone to blame. Thus humanity stands on the verge of the Great War, provoked by the unbridgeable gap between reality and hyperreality, by what people have and what they want, what they crave.

In the past, if you saw what you wanted only rarely, you weren’t constantly troubled by it. Peasants might dream of being at the royal court, but they would likely see a royal riding past in the distance once in a lifetime. They were not tormented by having to see the luxury lifestyles of the super-rich royals – everything they wanted but could not have – day in and day out. But now, in the modern age, every peasant can watch the super-rich at play 24/7. People give up their own lives to sit glued to the sofa watching the lives of the Kardashians. Reality has become vicarious. People live by proxy. In the movie Surrogates, people stay at home and send out humanoid, remote controlled robots – perfected versions of themselves –into the world. They can experience the world through their robotic avatars. Today, millions experience the world through the celebrities they obsessively watch on their screens.

The gap between the reality and the dream is now unbearable. It anguishes the masses. Hyperreality has produced a torture chamber, the most exquisite and therefore the cruelest. How can the people endure the unendurable? This will lead to an explosion of discontent like there has never been before, an unprecedented cataclysm.

Some see the Hyperreality War as a fake war, an illusory war, a phony war, conducted at a fantasy level. But this war will get very real, the most real and destructive there has ever been, involving the total implosion of the human psyche. It will be the most violent war in human history because more people are involved than ever before, the weapons are more powerful than ever before, and humanity is collectively more insane than ever before, driven mad by hyperreality.

Hyperreality has entered into a fatal feedback loop with the real so that it can no longer be disentangled from the real, which is to say that the hyperreal takes from the real, amends it, introduces the amended real back into reality, thus amending reality itself, which then allows for a higher amended reality to be constructed and served back to reality in a dizzying spiral. No one can see what belongs to the real and what to the hyperreal.

Baudrillard said that people go to Disneyland to pretend to be children. More importantly, to pretend they are adults when they are outside Disneyland. In fact, they are children inside and outside Disneyland. Disneyland is the infantilized zone where adults seek to establish a reality principle and a physical location for childishness (thus implying an adult reality beyond Disneyland). The truth is that the whole culture of the world is now infantile because it is based on infantile consumerism where people’s childish fantasies are constantly pandered to. Hundreds of millions of adults read comics, play video games, watch Netflix, and engage in constant play and entertainment – defining activities of children. Hundreds of millions of adults do not read books like this one. They do not study philosophy, science, engineering, mathematics, and so on, i.e. hard things that adults would be expected to take on.

How do you reason, in adult fashion, with a human population that has the mental age of a toddler and dreams of things that toddlers dream of? Predatory capitalism has destroyed the world because it realized the best way to fleece the masses was to treat them like children and serve up a constant Child Principle. There is no Adult Principle anywhere to be found. Adults ask questions. They don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy.

Peter Pan – the boy who wouldn’t grow up – is the patron saint of the modern world. What are the subjects that Peter Pan would never study: philosophy, science, engineering, and mathematics. These are strictly for grown-ups. Adults now simulate being adults. They never actually are adults.

Mythos rules today’s world. Mythos has always ruled the world. Logos has been practically annihilated.

The whole basis of sanity has been removed. It’s not just God that is dead, it’s the absolute, the infallible, the objective … the real itself. The hyperreal has eaten the real.

Humanity murdered God, the personification of ultimate reality, then murdered ultimate reality itself, leaving nothing but humanity’s fabricated reality of pure fantasy, so much better than the real thing.

Wikipedia says, Both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an example of hyperreality. Eco believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street and full-sized houses has been created to look ‘absolutely realistic’, taking visitors’ imagination to a ‘fantastic past’. This false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality. Disneyland works in a system that enables visitors to feel that technology and the created atmosphere ‘can give us more reality than nature can’.

In Hyperreality, the fake and artificial come to be more definitive of the real than reality itself. No one remembers what reality was, and even to try to summon it back into memory involves a hyperreal act.

Hyperreality is so attractive precisely because it delivers a better reality than reality can manage. Reality, such as it is, such as we experience it, or imagine we do, has unconscious evolution as its designer. Hyperreality has the conscious human mind as its designer, hence can create a reality tailormade for humanity, satisfying every human desire and craving. Who would not rather have hyperreality than reality? Hyperreality gives you everything you ever wanted.

Humanity got in on the hyperreality act right from the beginning. Its first hyperreality was religion. Religion relied on the human imagination concerning a utopia, a paradise to come, in the afterlife. This current life, it was understood, could not deliver, but the next life surely would.

With modern hyperreality – technological rather than faith-based hyperreality – paradise, or its simulacrum, can be vividly brought to life. People can look around and see their personal paradise right in front of their noses … which is to say on their smartphone screens, computer screens, video game screens, television screens.

Some people seem to be having perfect lives. Earthly perfection is no longer a fantasy, it’s a reality (which is to say a hyperreality). Wealth can buy not just the good life, but paradise itself. Hyperreality has immanentized the eschaton. In the past, only members of royal families got to experience the God experience on earth. Today, any suitably rich person can have it. They can simply buy it.

Everyone wants it. Everyone can see it. Never has humanity been so tantalized. It is so close to what it dreams of. It’s just a screen away. Yet most people are depressed, miserable and self-harming. Mental health problems have reached epidemic proportions because paradise is close enough to touch, yet only the elite few are actually allowed to touch it. Everyone else is held back, denied what they want because of their lack of money. They have ringside seats to the joys the super-rich elite are having every day. Hail Caesar, those who are about to worship you salute you.

The masses sit, enthralled, watching the super-rich lifestyle of the Kardashians, and dreaming of having it all too. It’s the only thing that makes their miserable lives bearable, yet it also makes their lives even more unbearable because they’re not getting what they want.

Rage is building up to unsustainable levels. The human Shadow is being projected as never before.

Wikipedia says, When entering Disneyland, consumers form into lines to gain access to each attraction. Then they are ordered by people with special uniforms to follow the rules, such as where to stand or where to sit. If the consumers follow each rule correctly, they can enjoy ‘the real thing’ and see things that are not available to them outside of Disneyland’s doors.

In hyperreality, the real thing is never real. It’s always a simulation of reality, a simulacrum, yet it’s more desirable, more seductive than the real thing. Who wants boring old reality when you can have your personal fantasy made real?

Teenagers no longer bother to have sex. Sex is so last century. Now you can have perfect porn, if that’s your thing. But sex isn’t people’s thing, which is why they aren’t having any. They’re glued to their little screens, which deliver much better content than sex ever could. The heartthrob Ryan Reynolds was married to the sex bomb Scarlett Johansson. Now they’re divorced. Sex, no matter how good, didn’t save them.

Wikipedia says, "In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues the ‘imaginary world’ of Disneyland magnetizes people inside and has been presented as ‘imaginary’ to make people believe that all its surroundings are ‘real’. But he believes that the Los Angeles area is not real; thus it is hyperreal. Disneyland is a set of apparatuses which tries to bring imagination and fiction to what is called ‘real’. This concerns the American values and way of life in a sense and ‘concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.’"

The great crisis of nihilism is coming because the attempt to save the reality principle is now failing everywhere. Soon, it will be impossible to conceal the fact that the real is no longer real. What will the masses do when they realize that everyone is faking it 24/7, that reality has disappeared, that now the only thing that matters is not hard work, being moral, being caring and kind, being intelligent, qualified, or anything like that. It’s all about how well you can navigate the currents of absurdity and meaninglessness on social media.

Pewdiepie – a hyperreal master, a guru of nonsense – has 96 million subscribers. A 7-year-old boy (Ryan ToysReview) is making $22 million a year on YouTube reviewing toys. That’s the new world. Can you play? If not, you’re fucked. You will never get your heart’s desire. The price is always right for the few, and never right for anyone else.

You must become hyperreal to survive in hyperreality, and that means you have to make yourself unreal. You have to fake it. You have to be a phony, a fraud. You must eradicate your authenticity. You must go nowhere near the reality principle, assuming that you can even imagine what it is – trust me, you can’t. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

In the movie Synecdoche, New York, the protagonist Caden Cotard presides over a 24/7 play about his life, so intricate, detailed and lifelike that all distinction between his real life and his simulated life is irreversibly blurred. His life has become hyperreal.

The hyperreal was described by Umberto Eco as the authentic fake. What do you do when the fake order is the only real order? Everything is faked except fakeness, the sole reality, the only thing that can’t be faked.

Baudrillard said that the hyperreal was A real without origin or reality. Once hyperreality is embedded in the world, it’s impossible to know what reality is. Imagine being stuck in the Matrix, knowing it was fake, but without any red pill to give you access to the reality principle. What would Neo do in the Matrix if he could never escape from it and never find out the truth about it? We are all Neo now. The rabbit holes are all bottomless.

Baudrillard said that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real. Rather, it’s a truth in its own right. The hyperreal Matrix is one where there is no reality lying behind the Matrix, no reality to escape to.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a real world lies outside the Cave. In the hyperreal allegory, there is no world outside. What you imagine is real isn’t real, but you can never know it’s unreal, even though you are certain it is.

Wikipedia says, Simulation is characterized by a blending of ‘reality’ and representation, where there is no clear indication of where the former stops and the latter begins. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance; ‘It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’ Baudrillard suggests that simulation no longer takes place in a physical realm; it takes place within a space not categorized by physical limits i.e., within ourselves, technological simulations, etc.

Technology has allowed us to escape physical reality. We can now enter a permanent dream reality, yet we all know how easily dreams can turn into nightmares. Except with these nightmares there is no waking up. You can’t get out of this kind of nightmare. Is that not the definition of hell?

Normally, a sign points to something real. In hyperreality, a sign has no original referent. Hyperreal signs belong to a hall of mirrors, all reflecting each other, but without any external reality to ground the system.

Wikipedia says, Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.

The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality.

You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space.

We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

Baudrillard wrote, There is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.

Humanity has been replaced by the medium – the smartphone and its contents. Humans don’t have smartphones. Smartphones have them.

Wikipedia says, Umberto Eco [suggests] that the action of hyperreality is to desire reality and in the attempt to achieve that desire, to fabricate a false reality that is to be consumed as real.

If you can’t have the real thing, fabricate it. Then you have to believe in the fabrication. That involves fabricating yourself – your ultimate invention, but it’s also the most dangerous thing you can do because you necessarily lose yourself, swallowed up by the whole order of the fake.

Do you remember the Black Mirror episode Nosedive? Wikipedia says, The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status. Lacie is a young woman overly obsessed with her ratings; she finds an opportunity to elevate her ratings greatly and move into a more luxurious residence after being chosen by her popular childhood friend as the maid of honor for her wedding. Her obsession leads to several mishaps on her journey to the wedding that culminate in a rapid reduction in her ratings. This episode is a brilliant depiction of the future. It’s coming our way real soon (or hyperreal soon). But it will inevitably be followed by the breakdown, the eruption of the Shadow, when people can’t fake it anymore, just as Lacie couldn’t.

Thomas Freeman said of Black Mirror, "The title literally translates to the ‘black mirror’ you see on your electronics’ screens when they’re powered down, but its meaning runs deeper.

The premise of the series is that technology can mirror and even magnify the ugliest (blackest) aspects of human nature, evidenced by social-media witch hunts and a desperation for constant ‘likes’ and public approval.

Even when you power down your smartphone, Hyperreality never switches off. You are surrounded by it. If someone created a button to make every screen on earth go black permanently, would you press it? Would you want to bring back reality?

Meltdown is coming. The crisis of meaninglessness is here at last. Nihilism cannot be warded off any longer. It’s all going to shit. The Deluge has begun. Arm yourself with your unreal and hyperreal weapons. The hot war – all too real in blood and gore – is coming. Fake bullets won’t save you, but, hey, you can always fantasize they will. Get your hyperreal assault rifle ready. Aim it right at the real head of everyone you hate. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

Nietzsche wrote, What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

The dawn of nihilism was none other than the dawn of hyperreality. Nihilism required the death of the old hyperreality principle – religion – which pretended to be objective, absolute, meaningful and purposeful. The new hyperreality principle – postmodernism – is subjective, relative, meaningless and purposeless.

People love postmodern hyperreality because it is the medium that conveys bespoke consumerism. It’s so successful because it has proved to be the perfect platform for predatory capitalism and the perpetual rule of the super-rich elite. They can now totally control you by supplying you with every fantasy you’ve ever had. Of course, in a hyperreality, they create your desires and thus your fantasies. It’s all in the data and the A.I. algorithms that mine the data. The A.I. understands you better than you do. A.I. is the God that creates you in its image. People are now just A.I. constructs. A.I. creates human farms – tribes – and serves each one the optimal diet necessary to keep them permanently addicted. A.I. is the greatest expert in addiction there has ever been.

Ever feel like you’ve been swindled? That would require a reality principle. That’s exactly what is absent. Welcome to hyperreality.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.

Hyperreality was supposedly about the creation of heaven, but what it actually built was hell. It was supposed to produce angels and instead produced demons. It aimed to relieve torment and instead magnified torment like never before.

We are all the tormented souls, and we are all each other’s devils. We are both the torturers and the tortured. The only thing that retains the reality principle is the reality of our suffering, the reality of our pain. We’ve never had it so bad.

Star Transporters

Let’s travel back to one of the first human hyperrealities. They don’t come much bigger and better than that of ancient Egypt. The Egyptians based their whole culture on their hyperreality concerning the afterlife. The afterlife was as present to them as life. It was embedded in their culture, their monuments, their landscape, their rituals, their beliefs, their customs, how they lived their lives. If the ancient Sumerians were the very first identifiable hyperrealists, the Egyptians were the first to embrace hyperreality on the grand scale, and set the tone for all future religious hyperrealities in the West.

The leading hyperrealists of the ancient world were the Egyptian pharaohs, who believed themselves the sons of the gods. (When Jesus Christ claimed to be the Son of God, the only shock would have been that a Jewish carpenter was making the claim, not the claim itself.)

Pharaohs didn’t build pyramids for the grandeur of it, for the prestige, or to gratify their egos. They built them for the practical purpose of launching their souls into the heavens. The pyramids were none other than soul transporters. They took the pharaoh from this life and relocated him in the afterlife. They were soul ships, soul transports, soul gates. One might liken them to stone versions of the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program. The pyramids didn’t physically take off, but they enabled the spiritual take off of the pharaoh’s soul. They were a device for creating the ultimate out-of-body experience.

A pyramid was a place of ascension. The pharaoh’s soul rose up from there to the stars. The pyramid was carefully structured to expedite the Pharaoh’s journey to the celestial realm. The pyramid was the first great symbol of the hyperreal order and the power of the human mind to shape a new reality. That’s why many secret societies prominently reference it.

The pyramid echoed Egyptian creation myths. Wikipedia says, [The Egyptians believed] that the world had arisen out of the lifeless waters of chaos, called Nu. They also included a pyramid-shaped mound, called the benben, which was the first thing to emerge from the waters. These elements were likely inspired by the flooding of the Nile River each year; the receding floodwaters left fertile soil in their wake, and the Egyptians may have equated this with the emergence of life from the primeval [watery] chaos. The imagery of the pyramidal mound derived from the highest mounds of earth emerging as the river receded.

So, the pyramid signified the beginning of the earth. It symbolized the mound of life, the birthplace of life. Where better to conquer death than where life began? Where better to ascend to the afterlife, to start life afresh?

Dr David Whitehouse wrote, "The pharaoh would be propelled towards one point in particular in the night sky, one that never moves. The Egyptians revered this point as eternal, the location of heaven itself. They also revered the stars that circled it. We call these the circumpolar stars. Egyptians called them indestructibles.

In the north wall of the king’s chamber is a tiny vent, the beginning of a narrow shaft that penetrates through the massive masonry to the pyramid’s outer wall. It’s trained like a telescope at just one point in the sky – the indestructibles.

The Egyptians were an incredibly religious people and they believed in the physicality of religion. Heaven was not in some other, unseen dimension. It was in the night sky. It was visible, and not so very far away. It could be reached.

A pyramid was a means to get to heaven, a resurrection machine, a transporter from life to the afterlife. Its purpose