# Bloodlines and Lineages

## Purpose

Bloodline stories organize continuity, inheritance, legitimacy, secrecy, and destiny. The Oracle rejects racial hierarchy, ethnic blame, antisemitic tropes, and supernatural claims about protected groups. This chapter is an index and a method: it shows how to explore the subject without collapsing documented history, current research, reported experience, fiction, community belief, and Oracle synthesis into one truth claim.

## Reading Method

1. **Locate the Tile.** Read its Primary Class to learn what kind of thing it is, then its Inquiry Domains to learn which questions it can illuminate.
2. **Name the material mode.** A science-fiction, mythology, political-mythology, experiential-report, or established-science label identifies context; it is not a score of spiritual or personal importance.
3. **Read claims layer by layer.** Begin with the literal-and-empirical layer, then the cultural-and-historical layer, and only then the symbolic-and-divinatory layer. An evidence state applies to one bounded claim, not to the Tile as a whole.
4. **Open the sources.** A concept-specific citation can support a history or bounded claim. A class-level contextual citation only locates the Tile in a wider field. Neither one certifies every interpretation.
5. **Follow typed edges.** Compare the exact verb and rationale. “Fictionalizes,” “opposes,” “echoes,” and “investigated-by” are not interchangeable. A resemblance edge is not proof of historical influence.
6. **Integrate through action.** Use Gift, Shadow, Threshold, and the integration practice to identify one grounded choice that remains useful even if a favored ontology is wrong.

## Worked Comparison

1. **Bloodline Memory** is a States & Experiences Tile centered on Origin & Lineage. Its literal layer is **not-applicable**; its symbolic question is: “What evidence, relationship, or material condition would distinguish insight from projection here? Answer by testing how inheritance used to authorize identity meeting continuity through retained traces changes perception and choice without necessarily proving an external explanation against inheritance, transmission, rupture, and the authority claimed by beginnings.”
2. **Bloodline** is a Myths & Storyworlds Tile centered on Origin & Lineage. Its literal layer is **not-applicable**; its symbolic question is: “What changes when trace the earliest attested form, each handoff, and what later tellers added, rather than assuming the preferred interpretation? Answer by testing how inheritance used to authorize identity placed within origin & lineage provides roles and causal shapes before evidence has settled the world against inheritance, transmission, rupture, and the authority claimed by beginnings.”
3. **Dynasty** is a Myths & Storyworlds Tile centered on Origin & Lineage. Its literal layer is **not-applicable**; its symbolic question is: “Where is the dynasty motif placed within origin & lineage shaping the situation, and what would make the response more accountable? Answer by testing how the dynasty motif placed within origin & lineage provides roles and causal shapes before evidence has settled the world against inheritance, transmission, rupture, and the authority claimed by beginnings.”

Compare these examples by asking what changes when the class, evidence state, or edge verb changes. Do not treat the most vivid Tile as the most factual. When a reading crosses into health, identity, conspiracy, or current politics, show the card’s safety flags and preserve an alternate explanation.

## System Links

- [How to Use](HOW-TO-USE.md) for reference, reading, and game workflows.
- [Graph](GRAPH.md) for edge semantics and provenance.
- [Divination](DIVINATION.md) for reflective reading rules.
- [Glossary](GLOSSARY.md) for Classes, Domains, Modes, and Evidence States.
- [Source Registry](../research/SOURCE-REGISTRY.md) for source tiers, scope, and rights.

## Canonical Tiles

- [Bloodline Memory](../cards/states/sfoc-states-bloodline-memory.md) — Within the Oracle, Bloodline Memory holds together inheritance used to authorize identity meeting continuity through retained traces and inheritance, transmission, rupture, and the authority claimed by beginnings. That combination creates both an interpretive tool and a responsibility.
- [Bloodline](../cards/myths/sfoc-myths-bloodline.md) — Bloodline concentrates inheritance used to authorize identity placed within origin & lineage into a durable story-pattern through which communities organize possibility and fear. Its value lies in examining inheritance, transmission, rupture, and the authority claimed by beginnings without exceeding the evidence layer.
- [Dynasty](../cards/myths/sfoc-myths-dynasty.md) — The working core of Dynasty is the dynasty motif placed within origin & lineage: a pattern that can reorganize attention, relation, and action. motif comparison must not erase provenance or living authority.
