Similarly but not genuine

Genesis 11:21 “And Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters.”

In the book of Jubilees we read in its synchronized account: ch 11:1-4 “1 And in the thirty-fifth jubilee, in the third week, in the first year thereof, Reu took to himself a wife, and her name was ‘Ora, the daughter of ‘Ur, the son of Kesed, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Serug, in the seventh year of this week in this jubilee.

And the sons of Noah [broad term for all of his descendants] began to war on each other, to take captive and to slay each other, and to shed the blood of men on the earth, and to eat blood, and to build strong cities, and walls, and towers, and individuals began to exalt themselves above the nation, and to found the beginnings of kingdoms, and to go to war people against people, and nation against nation, and city against city, and all began to do evil, and to acquire arms, and to teach their sons war, and they began to capture cities, and to sell male and female slaves.

And Ur, the son of Kesed, built the city of ‘Ara of the Chaldees, and called its name after his own name and the name of his father. And they made for themselves molten images, and they worshipped each the idol, the molten image which they had made for themselves, and they began to make graven images and unclean simulacra, and malignant spirits assisted and seduced them into committing transgression and uncleanness.

Interestingly enough, Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original. The simulacra are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. [changing, inconsistent]

Simulacra breaks the sign-order into 4 stages: The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality”, this is a good appearance, in what is called “the sacramental order”.

The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality as an “evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence”. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. This is the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.