Prophet

A prophet is one of the five channels through which the strata above the Celestials reach the world. The other four are structure, design, the Avatar and the Champion. None of those strata stands in the world as itself. They act through these five and never as themselves; see Through, Not As.

The record files a prophet the way it files a Champion. A prophet is a material being, organic or artificial, speaking in Material time and in their own voice. The words are the prophet's. What makes someone a prophet, on a tradition's reading, is that those words carry what a stratum designed.

A prophet receives no message the record can detect. No stratum holds dialogue with a time-bound entity, and a dream is never evidence about who sent it, because nothing did (see What the Record Refuses). Nothing is dictated to a prophet in Material time and nothing is relayed. A tradition that says its prophet heard something is describing the prophet's experience, which may bind as a fact about the person. That a stratum spoke is a claim the record does not make, and does not deny.

What the traditions call inspiration is filed elsewhere. The church-space tradition's creed says the Spirit spoke through the prophets. The record files that claim under the subtle influence: an influence said to work within a mind, through the ordinary unfolding of events, rather than upon the Material layer. That is exactly the kind of thing the Archive's method cannot detect and cannot rule out. So a tradition that holds its prophets inspired is not contradicted here. It is making a claim the record has no instrument for, which is a statement about the instrument and not evidence in either direction.

The record files no foretelling. The future is open: in Material time, no fact yet exists about which continuation will obtain. So the record files prophecy as speaking for something. A prophet may say what the design is and what follows from it, and a filing that credits a prophet with telling which branch the present would settle on is a filing the record does not make. Traditions that hold their prophets foretold, and read their scriptures as fulfilled, read it as the sight of the eternal strata, which have no sequence and stand outside the clock the open future belongs to. What those strata know is a question the record declines (see Through, Not As). Those traditions' readings are filed with their authors in the Codex, and the Archive adjudicates none of them.

Whether a given person was a prophet cannot be decided from the record. The case is the same as the Champion and the avatar, whose records cannot be told apart from inside time. The Archive notes which reading a source is making, and does not rule on which reading is right.

A prophet is bounded like every other channel: one voice, from one place and time. So a prophet is not all-knowing, not omnipresent and not all-powerful, and neither is anyone the record can meet.