Parallel Earth: 470111
Designation: Permanent Collection
Parallel Historians: Courtney McKenna and Ben Tumbling.

Sobriety Crown
Unknown Luminarian Artist, 2015
Luminarian wire, amethyst, obsidian, labradorite, pyrite, quartz, brass, wood, and plastic

Through the millennia, we have imposed our own ideas onto our shared-world neighbors. We perceive them through our own experiences. Monarchical Europeans imagined faerie kings and queens. Aboriginal nomads dreamed of spirits that guided them through the wilderness. Ancient Babylonians dreaded otherworldly bureaucrats that demanded fees for administrative services, such as making sure your name appeared correctly in the books of the living and the dead.

Luminaria is the latest in a long list of names we’ve assigned to these beings, so coined because their presence is marked by photonic phenomena. Their physical manifestations are accompanied by balls of lightning, shimmering haze, twinkling slivers, ghostly outlines, and sudden swallowing darkness. While our stories about them have helped shape our cultures, modern scientific study has revealed some basic facts about their nature.

Luminaria are highly intelligent, social, and creative. Wayfinder Crowns are some of the most remarkable expressions of these traits. The crowns are three dimensional models: part map, part journal.

Click images above to enlarge.

Ranging in size from a tea cup to a top hat, the crowns are almost always cylindrical. The usual design consists of a wire base holding various small objects in place. The wire cage is actually a complicated mathematical representation of the path the creator took through normal space. Each object represents a landmark guiding them from one dimensional portal to another. A quartz from a cave stands in for that cave. A bottle cap stands in for a convenience store.

The wire is always the same thickness, down to the nanometer, no matter where in the world the crown is found, so authenticity is relatively easy to determine. It also helps that real Luminarian artifacts, when worn, cause humans to feel various strong emotions such as clarity, confidence, empathy, or euphoria.

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