The Origin of "Alterhuman"

[lb_lee]

Hey, while searching for something else, we happened to stumble upon what looks to have been the creation of the term "alterhuman!"

Coiner: Lio of the Crossroads System (FKA Malchior, AKA tumblr user @phasmovore)
Created: 2014, September 24 (right after the genic war started)
Location Used: tumblr (spread elsewhere?)
Definition: "A category of personal identity which encompasses identification that is alternative to the common societal idea of humanity. [...] AHPI identities may include, as per personal discretion:
"-Therian, phytanthrope, otherkin, and fictionkin identities
"-Multiple, plural, median, and walk-in identities
"-Spiritual self-identities which may still include degrees of humanity such as angelics, celestials, starseeds, god shards, reincarnated gods, vampires, etc
"-Identities involving shared self-identification with nonhuman or other alternative human entities/concepts such as animal-hearted, godspouse, soulbond, and spiritual medium identities
"-Identities of alternative humanity through disassociation, trauma response, or non-neurotypical mental status." (phasmovore)

Originally written as "Alter-human/Alternative Humanity Personal Identity “AHPI,” alterhuman was intended as an umbrella term for all forms of unusual forms of humanity, since otherkin was apparently not suitable for the purpose. I'm not totally clear as to how it got spread and boosted (possibly through the Otherkin FAQ? Overlord Mordax? I dunno, tumblr is harder to trawl these days and we were never part of the alterhuman culture).

EDIT: thanks to frameacloud, it looks like mord of Alt+H (the same as Overlord Mordax? unsure) helped spread the term! Quoth Lio, "mord of Alt+H however was the major person involved in actually refining the concept and actually using it. I had just started college at the time, so I was way too busy to really do much by way of interacting with the community."

House of Chimeras's A Timeline of the Alterhuman Community goes into the history, but it didn't come out until late 2021, so can't be attributed to the term's spread.

Sources:

Lio [phasmavore], (2014, September 26). "Alter-human/Alternative Humanity Personal Identity." Crotchety Dragon on Tumblr, Retrieved from https://phasmovore.tumblr.com/post/98482696958/this-will-probably-be-my-last-post-on-semantics

Lio [x-rds]. (2023, February 19). "Just for the record" [tumblr post]. XRDS on tumblr. Retrieved from https://x-rds.tumblr.com/post/709694807213211648/problemaddtic-thelunastusco-problemaddtic

Comments

[frameacloud]

That's correct, that is the coining post for alterhuman! At the time of its writing, the coiner did go by Malchior, username phasmovore. However, now the coiner goes by Lio (it/its) of the Crossroads System (X-RDS), so that's how I cite it now.

As for what popularized the word, it was the Alt+H organization, which was active from 2016 to 2023.

Random people often misattribute the coinage of the word to Alt+H or to a wide variety of unsuspecting members of the communities. It's also common for people to define it wrongly in a way that specifically contradicts how the coiner meant for it to be used. The most common mistake is when people wrongly use it as a narrow synonym for nonhuman, when it was intended as a wide umbrella term that can include people who consider themselves to be human in different ways than usual for humans, such as fictives of human fictional characters, people who identify as species of humans that don't live in this world, and plural systems whose members are all human but who relate enough to their life experiences as being alternative to normative definitions of humanity (as being one person in one body all the time and matching one's physical human body with only memories of this lifetime in this world) that they opt into describing themselves as alterhuman. It's evident from this that many people who use the word never saw its coining post.

(This is an example of what Kurt Leland in the book Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan calls "source amnesia," where a concept or spiritual technology gets passed around by oral lore in a culture not trained in responsibly preserving oral lore, resulting in the lore getting distorted through a game of telephone and gaining a false history of its origin and significance. His book very carefully documents how the Western world's idea of chakras came to be known its current form by passed around by various occultists and New Age speakers during the past century, and how these departed from authentic ancient Yogic descriptions of this metaphysical anatomy. Source amnesia is a useful concept for alterhuman communities of all sorts, since we share ideas among ourselves in similarly chaotic ways, though unfortunately the verbiage "source amnesia" coincidentaly sounds a little too similar to terminology that we use for something completely different!)

Because of all this confusion circulating in the communities about what the word alterhuman means and where it came from, a couple of years ago, I collected this roundup of blog posts that were foundational to the coining, defining, and spread of the word, plus some commentary at the end added by a reblog from the coiner of the term: https://frameacloud.tumblr.com/post/770138471929135104

[lb_lee]

Sneak: Oh my gosh, thank you so much! This is super helpful! ^_^ We're working on a many-selved eytmological dictionary right now, and you just helped a lot! :D

[quailfence]

Your posting of the index reminded me - I’m mutuals with Overlord Mordax (now going by Sinister System) (ed: at least that’s what I primarily know them as, they might still go by Mordax as well) on Tumblr, I can ask them and see if they remember and are willing to share more details?

[lb_lee]

Hmm, I dunno. If I'm remembering right, Mordax has requested I not speak to them, so I really don't want to act like I'm getting around that boundary by sending someone else as messenger. I'm curious, but I don't want to bother them.

[quailfence]

Yeah, I didn’t know they asked that of you, so I won’t speak to them

[lb_lee]

It’s fine, you couldn’t have known! Thanks for asking!