I’ve been reading Amanda Montell’s book Cultish (2021), which is about the centrality of language in the creation and maintenance of cultish communities (which she defines broadly to include everything from the obvious examples to exercise fads and multilevel marketing). It made me wonder about how Butler uses language in the Book of the Living.

I ran a unique word analysis, eliminated common words, and combined similar words, in order to reveal the most commonly used words of significance. You can see the results below. It’s a little window into the most important Earthseed concepts.

Not surprisingly, God, Change, shape, and Earthseed were the most common. Variations of life, adapt, Destiny, partner, learn, and teach had high occurrences as well. Some surprises were the high frequency of new, Self, and death. Destiny, though high, didn’t occur as often as I thought it would.

Where multiple variations of a word are listed, I’ve put them in order of frequency. Usually, the first word listed has a significantly higher usage than the other variations.

Words which occur most often in The Book of the Living:

God/God’s 78
Change/changes/changing 37
shape/shapes/shaped/shaping/shaper 36
Earthseed 25

Words which occur 10-20 times:

new 19
life/life’s 18
Self 14
adaptability/adapt/adaptable/adaptation/adaptations/adaption/adaptive/adapts 13
Destiny 13
partner/partnership/partnered 12
learn/learning/learns 11
death/dead/die 10
teacher/teach/teaching/teachers 10

Words which occur 9 times:

become/become/becoming, give/gives/given/giving, grow/growth/growing/grows, people, pray/prayers, purpose/purposeful, universe

Words which occur 8 times:

fear/fears, intelligence/intelligent, live/lived/lives/living, struggles/struggle/struggling

Words which occur 7 times:

beware, group/groups, root, seeds/seed, stars

Words which occur 6 times:

belief/believe, Earthlife, greatest/great/greatness, love/loving/loves, past, power/powerful

Words which occur 5 times:

chaos, children/child, civilization, embrace/embraced, forethought, make, rules/rule/ruled, serve, world

Words which occur 4 times:

achieve/achievement, adulthood, clay, create/creates, demanding/demand, earths/worlds, exists, guides/guided, harm, ignorance, infinite/infinitely, kill/killed, mind, need/needs, paradise, perceive/perceives, victim, working/work

Words which occur 3 times:

alone, benefit, direction, Earth, emotion, end, Godseed, good, inexorable, obsession, peace, positive, rewards, species, tree, wealth, wisdom, worship