The Nokizi: A Fictional Necromantic Manifesto, Part 1

I was playing through TES III: Morrowind recently, and I came across three books in a necromancer dungeon: Darkest Darkness, Arkay the Enemyand N’Gasta, Kvata, Kvakis. I remembered these from years ago, and was excited to see them again: these are necromantic books you can actually read in-game–they’re short, and they give you a bit of insight into the beliefs and ideologies of the black mages you’re going up against. My favorite was A Game at Dinner, which was a sort of epistolary novel from a spy to their dark lord.

I’m writing a new story about the necromancer Yute, who I spoke about in my last post about the psychopathic mind, and one of the main plot points of the story is his own manifesto, The Nokizi. The Nokizi is meant to be a book similar to Arkay the Enemy: something to be passed around and read by the initiated members of the necromancer community.

But ever since I first conceived Yute, I wanted his necromancy to be at odds with the popular ideas of the day–I imagined him as an unorthodox figure, a radical other necromancers would be wary of, like Malcolm X or Timothy Leary. As soon as I imagined him, he needed an establishment to rebel against.

The Nokizi is Yute’s critique on the current state of necromancy and the major figures whose work has influenced it. These figures include Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail, all three of whom have achieved a different kind of immortality and huge followings of acolytes. These three are sort of like Hindu gurus who promise their followers eternal life and enlightenment if they follow their teachings. Yute, meanwhile, is based off the Bodhidharma, the iconoclastic founder of Zen in China.

I imagined that Yute brought all of his new ideas before the gurus first, expecting to gain praise and recognition from the masters and cement his position as a new master. It would be a sort of “look at me, I found a new path that is undeniably better than all of yours, and now you must admit it.” Instead, he was laughed and jeered out of their temples and abodes and derided by all their students, one after another. Yute, not one to take humiliation well, devised his Nokizi as a critique of the establishment that rejected him, and a manifesto for his new method and philosophy.

The actual critique is a blend of mathematics, paradoxes, parables, German philosophy, and Rinzai Zen, with the goal of showing that 1) Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail are all going about immortality in the wrong way, 2) the current conception of time and the self are wrong, and 3) that immortality seekers should employ mathematics, not body-modification or other techniques, to achieve immortality.

At the very end of the Nokizi is an encrypted portion, along with the promise that anyone who solves the cipher will gain the secret to his new method. The idea is that, though the necromantic community rejected him before, he is willing to allow converts into his new method if they are clever enough. But it’s all a trick–the insanely complicated cipher encrypts only a bunch of gibberish and nursery rhymes, as a giant, spiteful fuck-you. “You had your chance to be my acolytes, and you laughed me down,” is Yute’s internal reasoning. “So I’ll show you what you’re missing, offer you my secrets, then laugh at you.”

Yute’s a twisted kind of character.

You can read the first part of the Nokizi here.

My New Grimoire

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I love this book. I picked it up from Poetic Earth’s booth at New York Comic-Con this year, and it’s got a hand-tooled leather cover. Last night, I made the first entry in it on the title page (see above).

The triangle-tesseract design is the same one that came to me in a dream several years ago, after a night of reading too much about fractals. If you place each letter of the word “OROBORO” at the right vertices, the name should repeat perfectly across the whole design, meaning you can read “OROBORO” forever in three dimensions.

Beneath that is the phrase “ONE THOUSAND EYES OPEN.” This is the same phrase I used for one of my artists books, which used origami and an eye design to create an interactive little book that read “ONE THOUSAND EYES OPEN” no matter how you folded it.

At the far bottom, I drew the symbols of the three gods in my canon: Erroth, Sol, and Ormun.

I’m planning on using this book as a reference document for my worldbuilding, especially magic systems. Right now, I’m thinking of including diagrams of the Sephiroth, Qliphoth, Eightfold Path, the Five Skandhas of Existence, Pascal’s Triangle, and the Sierpinski Gasket, along with notes from my notebooks. This way, I’ll have all my notes and inspirations in one convenient tome.

THE OCCULT READING LIST VOL. 3: Three Body Problem, Language as Magic, and New Retro Wave

This is Vol. 3 of the Occult Reading list, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week.

Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.

Disclaimer: There’s no conspiracy between me and New Retro Wave–I just listen to their songs all the goddamn time. But if they want to talk sponsorship deals, I’m down to sell out and get some of that sweet 80’s merch.

Trevor Something, give me a call. We’ll work something out.

“It’s like people only do things because they get paid. And that’s just really sad.”

 

occult triangle lab three body problem fantasy sci-fiTHE Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This is the Hugo Award-winning sci-fi book by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. It’s garnered some unreal praise, and I finally got around to reading it. So far, I’m 200 pages in and I’m not a fan. Putting aside the difficulties of translation, the plot and pacing are where the book comes up seriously short. So far, the plot has been a very choppy clockwork affair, with the main character essentially shuttling himself from place to place, listening to exposition, then periodically popping in to the VR world of Three Body. Every exposition scene happens almost back-to-back, with Wang Miao acting as a plot-automaton who decides, “hey, let’s give this person a call,” followed immediately by “let’s visit this person,” and then “they told me to visit this person, so let’s go here and speak to this person.” Rather than Jack Bauer in 24, who is propelled from place to place by desperation, gunfire, and a constant stream of new discoveries, the countdown Wang faces doesn’t drive the action, and the only thing Wang needs to do is go to places so people can talk at him. There’s no tension or challenge to ferreting out the information he needs, and the plot comes off as a series of mechanical scenes strung together without much attempt at subtlety or tension. The scene in which Wang discovers the murder of Shen Yufei and listens to the revelations of her husband are the worst perpetrators of this.

On top of the lackluster plotting, the video game world of Three Body ends up being a bizarre, pseudo-metaphorical dream sequence. Unlike Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash or William Gibson’s Grid in Neuromancer, the rules and logic of the virtual world are opaque and confusing. Characters can randomly speed up the passage of time as it suits them, the logic and mechanics behind player dehydration are completely unexplained (do they go into spectator mode? Log out?), and it’s not even clear if the entities Wang is encountering are NPCs or players. The most baffling question is about advancement: the game revolves around trying to predict the movements of the sun, but a succession of players (if they’re indeed human players) seem to put forth antiquated versions of the solar system. No human player but the protagonist seems to contribute to the game or its advancement but the protagonist, who always arrives at exactly the right time to see the key developments.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I’m feeling like The Three Body Problem is going to be a monumental disappointment.

occult triangle lab tor fantasy magic language7 Different Ways Fantasy Has Used Language as Magic

This is a nice survey of how different fantasy series have used language as the basis for magic systems (a topic I’ve written about in relation to both binary and poetry). It deals with the big-name franchises, including LoTR and Harry Potter, but also The Spellwright Trilogy and video games like Skyrim and Treasure of the Rudras.

I still remember opening up a book in Morrowind after clearing out a den of necromancers and reading about the Nords shouting down their enemies’ walls with the magic of their voices, and how the most powerful had to be gagged to keep their voices from destroying everything around them. At the time, I thought “They could never turn that into a real magic system. It’s cool flavor, though.”

So it was an awe-inspiring bash to the head to find out that that little, innocuous passage from the early 2000s was kept in mind across the development of Oblivion and brought to glorious fruition in a fully realized magical language and system in Skyrim. Next, I want to see the snake people from that one hidden continent!

occult triangle lab V.E. Schwab darker shade of magicNo Mother Tongue: Language in the world of Magic

This is a cool little post from V.E. Schwab, author of A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows, both of which I own (thanks, publishing friends!). Schwab touches on the difficulty of composing languages for a fantasy world, as well as the promise: she explains how the poetry and sound of language can reveal something about the nature of the world and its speakers, and how it can immerse a reader in the world of the story by forcing them “to learn as they go, just as travelers would, when passing through a foreign land.”

Schwab also touches on the dangers of fantasy languages: “Used poorly, fictional languages can feel like a wall, preventing all but the well-versed from feeling included in a world.” I’ve seen this pretty often, and it comes from the tricky management of a learning curve within the narrative, by which a reader learns about the world, the culture, and the events of the book. Introducing too much foreign information leads to alienation and frustration, like a mother spelling out words so she can speak over the head of a toddler. “Don’t you know what a ba’aleth is, reader? No? It’s very important.”

Fuck that noise.

Thoughts on Nomenclature in Fictional Worlds

This is just a couple thoughts from Eric Honour, who has a page on Medium. It’s mostly some criticism on the simplicity and lack of verisimilitude that characterizes language and naming in fantasy. One thing he touches on is how monolithic language and names become when the creator just sits down and pushes two words together like a caveman, like “Iron Walker” or (my personal pet peeve term from Dune) “lasgun”. But one particular insight from Eric struck me:

“This is something that turns me off about a lot of fantasy. It’s also something that I can see is difficult to navigate — having multiple names for things is more realistic, but also can feel like it’s overwhelming the reader. Real-life historical names are full of metonymy and misapplication and the shifting sands of living language, and that’s a level of complexity that might not even be advantageous to a fictional world. But not even making the attempt feels sort of lazy.”

Something that the articles from Tor and V.E. Schwab also touch on is that language shifts and changes to reflect its culture and its world. To create a language, or even naming conventions for armies, you have to think about how words and people use and abuse terminology. A great example is military slang and acronyms like FUBAR, SNAFU, BDU, and MOPP, or the backronyms of gang culture. There’s something more than the denotative meaning of words, a kind of vitality to them, and that’s what a lot of fantasy writers gloss over.

“Just Like You (Hazy Mountains Remix)” by Chromatics

One of my top three favorites from the world of New Retro Wave, Just Like You is one of those haunting love songs that evokes the kind of otherworldly, illusory lover that ELO sang about in Yours Truly, 2095, or even the twisted virtual love in Bad Religion’s I Love My ComputerIt’s a song wrapped up in nostalgia and ethereal, lovesick illusions, and the reverb clings to your mind like cobwebs. Most disturbing (or enticing) of all is the idea of a doppleganger, a lover who “looks just like you/he even says the same things/he even wears the same clothes,” who ultimately “loves like you used to.”

“The Glory” by Reapers

The Glory is another of my top three favorites from the good folks over at New Retro Wave (THERE IS NO SPONSORSHIP DEAL), and one of my favorite songs, period. The contrast between the low, dirge-like like chanting and the full-throated, almost plaintive rock-and-roll yelling of the chorus gives the whole song a sense of loss and bitterness. The lyrics, which seem to be an ode to death, end up making it the perfect song for people interested in the dark side of the 80’s.

Like me.

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Worldbuilding: Spell Maps and a Pathfinder Puzzle

A group of New York friends have asked me to DM a short Pathfinder session for them, which means the last couple days have been spent rummaging through my notes from the last campaign I ran, which was about four years ago, back in Washington State, with about 7 people. It ended up being a fantastic experience, despite the fact that, over the course of that 8-month campaign, every character tried to kill themselves at least once out of a combination of despair and existential angst.

But this group doesn’t know that.

The Pathfinder session is going to take place in the fantasy world I’ve established in my stories, which means house-ruling a lot of the magic. It also means I end up spending hours on designing extremely complex puzzles for my players.

This particular puzzle stopped being a puzzle at about the 3-hour mark and became an Occult Triangle Lab project. It’s got everything: triangles, some research into magnetism, mathematics, and a practical application in a fantasy setting.

occult triangle lab

These are my notes for a spell map that will allow one of the mages to enchant a piece of magnetite so that it becomes a strong, permanent magnet. This is meant to be a major plot point in the upcoming session, so I wanted to take some extra time to create something more engaging, rather than just have the players roll a dice and beat a hard DC.

The rabbit hole I fell down was creating a spell map for the enchantment (If you haven’t read my post on spell maps, you can check it out here). After reading up on magnetite, which is the source of naturally occurring magnets called lodestones, I found that it naturally forms octahedrons. Rather than having players working on a 3-D puzzle, I drew out a 2-D version of an octahedron on graph paper and started seeing if I could make a sort of Sudoku puzzle:

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The idea was that the spell map would be a miniature octahedron, reflecting the crystalline structure of magnetite, but the sudoku idea didn’t work out so well. Still, the diamond pattern ended up forming some interesting patterns: the octahedrons in magnetite are actually formed by thousands of smaller octahedrons, so it was cool to graph out a spell map that was made up of small versions of itself (huzzah, it’s recursive!).

But I wanted the players to feel like they’re actually learning about magic rather than just doing a stock puzzle, so I started seeing if I I could weave information about magnetite into the puzzle, such as its melting point, durability, metallic qualities, etc.

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But that didn’t lend itself to puzzle solving. I took a look at the cool, nested design of the 2-D octahedron and thought maybe it would be fun for the player to use the patterns found in magnetism itself to solve the puzzle. I tried superimposing the lines of magnetic pull on the octahedron pattern:

occult triangle lab magnetism

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I found out I could superimpose the patterns in a simple bar magnet on a lattice of octahedrons to create a pretty cool design that might have the material needed for a puzzle: structure, patterns, and a goal. That led to this design:

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The idea would be to build a sort of “connect-the-dots” puzzle built on the patterns in both magnetism and the structure of magnetite, with the player following rules to recreate the design formed by the magnetic paths (which are like big loops radiating out from the North and South poles).

Below are some of the important graph points I isolated (along with the qualities of magnetite). At the center are the two poles, with the outer dots forming the boundaries of the magnetic patterns. These are meant to form the guidelines of the puzzle, which will require the player to do some tracing to recreate the drawing in the previous picture.

 

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Eventually, I created a blank grid of numbers, which the player will use to reconstruct the whole design by following a set of instructions (sort of like a human computer program).

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Compare the grids and sketches above to the sketches in the last post about spell maps:

occult triangle lab chris mahon worldbuilding fantasy spells

What I found was that this layout, made up of numbers arranged on a grid, ended up looking a lot like Pascal’s Triangle, which in turn forms the basis of the Sierpinski Gasket, one of my favorite fractals:

fractal triangle occult triangle lab

 

I don’t know if the puzzle will end up being a functional part of the upcoming session, but I thought I’d share it here on the blog. It’s a cool intersection of geology, mathematics, and fantasy, and it ended up being good practice for figuring out how a mage would go about enchanting a rock to become a compass.

 

Worldbuilding: Spell Maps and Magic Systems

Despite this being the Occult Triangle Lab, I haven’t spoken much about occult trigonometry. I’ve talked about using binary code as the basis for magic systems, as well as magic as poetry, but not much to do with triangles. Except for that origami pyramid wrapped up with Zen.

The origami pyramid Nirodha.

Magic in fantasy, as I’ve said before, shouldn’t be a science. It shouldn’t be a palette-swapped form of electricity or physics, where mages carry out “experiments” like Isaac Newton (though he himself was apparently a big fan of alchemy). The reason is that magic, when approached like a science, brings up same reductionism that haunts modern people: if we’re all just chemical reactions in our brains, is there space for truth, or meaning, or wonder? Because those are the very things fantasy can explore like no other genre.

I think magic in fantasy should have rules. The way I conceive it, it should undergird the workings of nature and the world, similar to how Ursula LeGuin’s used taxonomy as magic. But when I imagine magic, there’s something transcendental about it that goes beyond science and materialism. How do you begin designing a system like that? It’s like making up a fictional branch of aeronautics. But that’s what’s so amazing about worldbuilding: you get to make the rules.

What follows is the basic building blocks for a magic system that I conceived back in 2014, combining the art of Buddhist mandalas, computer coding, and musical theory with metaphysics, astronomy, and trigonometry. This is, in the realest sense, a product of an occult triangle lab. One note, however: this is all hypothetical. I don’t have a degree in linguistics like Tolkien, or in graphology. To actually create the symbolic language I describe and to embed these kinds of patterns in it would be something akin to making a crossword puzzle out of an entire language. It would take years of careful construction. So maybe a long-term project for me.

But in the meantime…

Spell Maps, COMPUTER CODE and GEOMETRY

A couple years ago, I started to sketch out the beginnings of a written magic system for my fantasy world. I imagined putting together a bunch of symbols in a sequence that expresses what you want to happen, like you’d do with a line of computer code. But there is something inherently beautiful about how these symbols would fit together: if you deconstruct the interactions between the symbols, you would find that all the symbols could be grouped into discrete units, with the groups’ unity based around shared markings in their graphic composition (similar strokes and dots in the symbols) or the part of the spell they affect (such as binding or flight). These rows of symbols would form rectangular paragraphs, and these rectangles could be oriented to one another like building blocks to form geometric shapes, with each paragraph forming a side of the shape.

occult triangle lab chris mahon worldbuilding fantasy spells

These shapes would be arranged into a “spell map,” a geometric representation of how the different parts of the spell work together. It would form a radial or symmetrical design based around a central polygonal figure, such as a square or hexagon. Arms extending from the central polygonal shape would represent the different aspects of the spell, and the smaller components of the arms would be based around their own geometric patterns, making a chain of hexagons, squares, triangles, and so on. So the patterns contained within the individual lines of magical code would eventually form spirals of meta-patterns.

A functioning, well-written spell would have perfect symmetry when all the symbols are arranged in this manner, so a mage writing a new spell could actually lay out their writing in a half-made spell map and figure out what to write next based on their knowledge of geometry and angles. They can also figure out where their spell is going wrong based on the symmetry of the design.

Spell Maps, Triangles, and Designa

The thing is, every polygon is made up of triangles. When you have a regular polygon, like a pentagon, you can subtract 2 from its number of sides and multiply that by 180 to get the sum of its internal angles. Why 180? Because that’s the sum of the angles in a triangle! If you’re trying to create huge, perfectly geometrical spiral designs, the key lies in the shapes that will work well with the central polygonal shape; linking together a hexagon and a pentagon will make for some crowded, chaotic spiral arms. Shapes made from the same sort of triangles that make up the central polygonal figure, on the other hand, might work to create perfect mandala-like designs.

Working with triangles as the basic building block of all shapes, you can figure out the angle measures of the “ideal” triangle for your central polygon (say, a hexagon, which is made up of equilateral triangles with angle measures of 60 degrees) and create a grid made entirely of those triangles. Using this grid, you can be assured that all shapes made from those triangles will have angles measures and lengths that will synch well together. If you’re a mage, it also means that you have all routes for the development of a new spell map.

occult triangle lab chris mahon worldbuilding fantasy spells
But in practice, single-triangle grids may not contain all the triangles necessary to create perfect designs, especially if you want a mix of different shapes. You’ll need permutations of the right triangle, the equilateral triangle, and 30-60-90 triangle, with angles and lengths adjusted to fit the angle measures of your central polygonal figure to have all possible options. This means, to see all possible shapes, you should be working with three triangles grids superimposed on top of one another, calibrated to the right angle measures.

So that’s where things get complicated.

A book I picked up from The Strand is a great guide to this kind of geometrical drafting–it’s called Designa by Wooden Books, and it walks you through the history, drafting techniques, and mathematics behind different designs from all over the world, including Muslim religious patterns and Celtic knots. Woven into these patterns are symbolic meanings and symmetries, reflecting beliefs about the universe, nature, and God.

So there you have the first stage: the idea of a spell map, a meta-pattern that gives a geometric structure to a normally linear, code-like spell made of symbols. Like a computer system, it can be revised and troubleshot based on the patterns embedded in its operations. When it’s evoked, it casts the spell coded into it.

SPELL MAPS, MAGIC, and MUSIC

After looking at the triangular grids I’d made, I used the horizontal lines made naturally when you mirror two rows of triangles vertically to measure the size of a map, which would express its “magnitude”: the larger and more complex the spell, the more space on the grid it will require, and the greater its “magnitude,” since larger spells means using more lines of symbols. And that led to a new idea.

As I looked at the designs I’d made, I wondered what it would look like if I tried to reduce all of the symbols and patterns to binary, so that a spell could be fed through a punch card-computer, like UNIVAC. I also realized that the “magnitude lines” I’d drawn also imposed something like a musical staff on the whole design. It reminded me of Deadmau5 playing the Castlevania theme on a bunch of modular synthesizers, and the Black Midi series, especially this one, where the designs made by the notes end up looking like large spell map. I imagined playing cross-sections of a spell map like Black Midi, with every symbol being a note.occult triangle lab chris mahon worldbuilding fantasy spells

Music is made of patterns and mathematics, and the same kinds of waves that describe sound can apply to light, energy, and matter (I dove into sound waves and quantum mechanics in this post). In my sketches, I started to see how a given spell could be expressed as a song as well as a mandala-like graphical representation. And if you look back to wizards like Vainamoinen, spell-songs are exactly what mages used to change the world around them. It’s a really cool piece of synchronicity, and it’s one of the fascinating coincidences that pops up when you delve into this kind of worldbuilding.

Metaphysics, Spell Maps, and the Universe

But when I looked closer at my sketches, another pattern started to appear. I started to see how a spell map could also be a reflection of the symmetry of the universe, in the same way that Buddhist and Hindu mandalas supposedly reflect the order of all creation. In fact, the structure of a spell map looks like a universe of sorts: it’s a miniature galaxy, with spiral arms containing dozens of individual ‘solar systems’ (symbol-rows grouped around the center of a shape) containing sometimes hundreds of individual ‘worlds’ (symbols) and comprising thousands of ‘people’ (individual strokes that make up the symbols).

In my conception of this magic system, this is where magic crosses over from being a computer program and reveals its ties directly to metaphysics. Like a fractal, the pattern of the whole universe is expressed in miniature in the spell map, because magic is essentially a way to change the universe. And in this system, the way to change reality is to build a microcosm of the universe and rewrite it by hand. In this way, a spell map could also act as a kind of divination or scrying tool, like the I-Ching (a book that fascinated Phillip K. Dick to no end), reflecting the conditions of the world rather than changing it.

mandala occult triangle lab spell maps

Conclusion

Great worldbuilding should work like an iceberg: 10% on the surface, 90% below the waterline. I think this is one of the reasons the worldbuilding in Dark Souls rakes in such unreal praise. There’s a sense that beneath the immediate information you’re given, there’s whole volumes of knowledge and secrets to learn and immerse yourself in. It’s the opposite reason people can’t get through Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion. But whether you’re revealing all of it or letting the reader unravel how everything fits together, I think the best way to accomplish that feeling of a vast, immersive world is to actually build it behind the scenes. I spoke about this before, but the small details are crucial to making fantasy work, and this is especially true when it comes to magic.

So if you’re a fantasy writer building a world from the ground up, explore everything. Everything feeds into everything else, the world is a frightening and wonderful place, and when you dig deep enough, triangles lie at the heart of everything.

occult triangle lab mandala

Worldbuilding and the Marks of a Bona Fide Wizard

I think anyone who wants to write mythopoeic fantasy should pick up The Encyclopedia of Russian Criminal Tattoos.

The Encyclopedia is a collection of tattoos from a very specific time and place. Most of the tattoos and their owners were prisoners in the GULAG, the nation-spanning prison system of the Soviet Union, where everyone from political prisoners to murderers and “hooligans” were forced to work under horrifying conditions. The tattoos, as the book explains, act as a resume for a criminal, and each tattoo can have several layers of hidden meaning based on where it is on the body, what words and symbols appear on it, etc. It’s fascinating how the cruelty, despair, corruption, and sheer violence of the whole Soviet police state is summed up so elegantly in one medium, the prison tattoo.

occult-triangle-lab-russian-criminal-tattoo-wizards-worldbuilding

As you read through the encyclopedia, the book asks you to think about the language of symbols. It asks you to imagine a world in multiple dimensions. You have to take on the mindset of an artist, an anthropologist, and (especially with the tattoos) an occultist. This is the mindset of esotericism, where everything has hidden meanings, and it’s the mindset that should inform worldbuilding.

The symbols and levels of initiation in the Russian criminal underworld, as well as the “made men” of the Mafia, ended up inspiring the way I thought about mages and hedge wizards–if a true wizard is a master of his or her craft, how do they distinguish themselves from one-trick mages and beginners? If there’s no central authority that dubs people bona-fide wizards, like Roke in Wizard of Earthsea, what keeps amateurs from claiming to be masters?

Wizards and the Bona Fide Hallmarks

“When I was growing up, there were seven hallmarks to a wizard: a name, a song, a card, a craft, a hand, a tongue, and tired feet. For Muzin, there were tattoos added in.” — Samal of Muzin

Masters of any craft can always recognize one another. It’s expressed in the smallest things they do: how a wu-shu master walks, how a carpenter makes his measurements, or how a guitarist bends a string up only a half-step.

When you become a monk of the Shaolin temple, you are told to master three types of techniques: physical or “basic” skills (like stances, stamina, and balance), combat skills (like barehanded and weapon fighting), and the 72 arts of Shaolin qi-gong. Similarly, when you become a Buddhist monk you are given several different tiers of techniques to master, each one more difficult than the last. When I imagine wizards, I think in these terms. I ask “What kinds of things does a mage have to master to become a bona-fide wizard?”

I decided that wizards, true wizards, would have something like a secret handshake that would allow them to identify who was bona-fide and who was a neophyte. I came up with certain hallmarks that would serve as guidelines. These would not be meticulously defined tests; whether someone met each of the hallmarks would be left up to the observer, but for those who were bona-fide, there would be no question.

  • A Name: every wizard an epithet or nickname bestowed on them, similar to those given to the warriors in The Illiad. It sums them up and serves as the center of their reputation.
  • A Song: every wizard has a song or a story about their accomplishments. These don’t have to be true, but behind the lie should be something significant. A Song should be a wizard’s legend.
  • A Card: every wizard has a trick, a little demonstration of who they are and what they’re capable of. Like someone who can tie a knot in a cherry stem, it should be simple and quick. This is their “calling card.”
  • A Craft: every wizard must be a master of at least one school of magic, whether it be weather control, elemental control of water, beast-taming, summoning, or something else. Mastery is relative; if no challenger can beat a wizard in a contest, they are considered a master.
  • A Hand: every wizard must have a part of their body replaced with something other than flesh. This alteration often gives them heightened abilities, such as a second heart granting the ability to survive impalement.
  • A Tongue: every wizard must be fluent in at least one other language, though the best can speak multiple languages. This is meant to demonstrate one’s worldliness and commitment to understanding different sides of the world.
  • and Tired Feet: every wizard must have traveled to the ten extant continents and stayed at least a year in each. This is, again, meant to demonstrate one’s worldliness, as well as one’s ability to travel and survive many different parts of the world.

Any mage can begin trying to attain these hallmarks, but only once they gain all seven can they try to claim the title of bona-fide wizard. Every self-respecting mage, however, would have at least Card, a little demonstration of who they are so that other mages could recognize what kind of mage they are.

But as the wizard Samal says in his short scene with his apprentice in The Crownless King, the original and enduring hallmark of a bona-fide wizard is much more pragmatic:

Samal made eight points on his chest with his fingers, each one touching a different star. “The eight points of the world, the eight ports…the seven hallmarks and the tattoos show you’re bona-fide.” Samal shook his head slowly. “Real bona-fide wizards don’t die.”

Samal reveals that the most important hallmark is the one that is unspoken: survival. If a wizard is dead, they can no longer influence the world. They no longer matter. This belief is a product of its world, and it guides the ethos of its masters, the wizards. The Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo offers the ultimate counterpoint, however: for Tsunetomo, the ultimate hallmark of a bona-fide samurai is loyalty for their master, demonstrated through their death in his service. Tsunetomo claims that the masters of swordsmanship and martial prowess, the samurai, are not masters because they are able to survive any opponent, but because they have already resigned themselves to death.

The Grinning Man: Necromancer Helmet Concept Art

When I think of necromancers, I imagine a cross between a Zen Buddhist monk, an amateur surgeon, and a hardcore survivalist preparing for the end of the world. It’s not about raising an army of the dead and taking a kingdom, it’s about being the last man standing when the Sun falls out of the sky. It’s about living forever. This is someone with the apocalypse constantly on their mind, thinking of contingencies. That obsession with survival made me think of an astronaut’s space helmet, a kind of sealed, self-contained piece of headwear that could protect the skull and seal out dust, fire, and the vacuum of space.

I started to wonder what a survivalist necromancer’s helmet would like, so I drew on some of my favorite helmet designs from across all kinds of media, from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Elfen Lied to Daft Punk and TES III: Morrowind. The final product was appropriately macabre, frightening, and functional for someone bent on eating souls and living forever.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: The Native Chuzei Bonemold Helm

chuzei native bonemold helmet morrowind

(If you haven’t read my long-ass post about how Morrowind should be the gold standard for fantasy worldbuilding, read it here)

Morrowind’s Bonemold armor is so damn cool: crafted from bonemeal, the individual pieces of armor are molded in hard, light shapes, like the lacquered wooden armor of samurai. Each Dunmer House has its own style of armor, with their own custom helmets and shields, each reflecting their own unique character. House Redoran’s helmet had a shawl to keep out the dust and House Telvanni had some kind of insane squid helmet because they’re weird-ass wizards who live in mushrooms. But the single coolest helmet in the history of fantasy gaming is the Native Chuzei Bonemold Helm.

The swept-back design with the swooping crest on the back and lack of conventional eyeholes in favor of dual slits made it look intimidating, alien, and sort of like a grinning, demonic face. I loved this helmet, and I wanted to steal its design for any kind of helmet I made in the future.

Daft Punk: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s helmet

I have an obsession with Daft Punk, especially their helmets. There’s something about the anonymity of masks that makes the wearer larger than life. My favorite version of Guy-Manuel’s helmet is still the one used in ELECTROMA.

When I was still in high school, I actually attempted to make Guy’s gold and black helmet from a skateboard helmet, a motorcycle visor, and a paintball mask:

daft punk plans japanese cosplaydaft punk helmet plans

I loved the helmet design so much that I wanted to incorporate in my stories, which is where Guy Manuel’s helmet merged with the Chuzei helm to create the helmets that the Elves in my stories wear:

cagnazzo orpheus helmet photo chris mahon occult

Elves in my stories are the end-products of generations of the pursuit of immortality: humans warped and altered into a completely different species. Their helmets, like my initial astronaut helmet idea, allowed them to survive the vacuum of space, like the starfish-headed Old Ones in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. And like other human necromancers, survival was the ultimate priority.

The skull-hugging shape, smooth lines and lack of conventional eyeholes stuck with me in particular. But that changed when I saw…

Neon Genesis Evangelion: EVA Unit-01’s helmet

By fora on Deviant Art

Evangelion is my favorite piece of media, hands-down. Between the Kabbalah occultism, the Phillip K. Dick-inspired apocalyptica, the complex mathematics and existentialist philosophers snuck into the show, it is the Space Odyssey: 2001 of mindfucks. And they had some really cool robots.

There’s a rumor that Hideaki Anno, the creator of NGE, wanted the EVA units to be extremely complicated so that the famously aggressive Japanese toy industry wouldn’t be able to create action figures of them. In the end, we still got Evangelion canned bread.

The most beloved EVA unit, and my favorite, too, is Unit 01. It’s got a kind of kabuto helmet, and its giant, toothed jaws are both really cool and absolutely horrifying once it starts screaming and eating other EVA units.

 

Yeah, the EVAs are nightmarish homonculi made of human flesh and bone grafted onto mechanical parts, animated by trapped human souls with the capability for madness and rage. The reveal that EVA Unit 01’s helmet covers something approximating a metallic skull is one of the images from NGE that stuck with me. The teeth and jaw especially appealed to me.

Elfen Lied: Lucy’s helmet

elfen lied manga helmet

Elfen Lied is the most violent, gory, and traumatic romantic comedy anime ever (only half-joking here). From the opening minutes of the first episode, a naked pre-pubescent girl sealed in a helmet from The Man in the Iron Mask starts vivisecting, decapitating, and ripping the literal hearts out of a team of security personnel in a juxtaposition of eroticism, innocence, and relentless, brutal gore.

elfen lied gore violenceAnd damn is that helmet cool.

 

Lucy’s helmet is relatively simple, both in its design and concept: round head and jaw piece sealed onto the skull to restrain a prisoner in a test facility. It looks suitably clinical, the kind of medical appliance you’d imagine would be in use in a telekinesis research facility. In Lucy’s case, wearing this helmet isn’t a choice–it’s forced onto her, as a means of control, as if they were trying to seal her skull in a container, like an airtight jar.

The Necromancer Helmet: THE GRINNING MAN

Building off the idea of “the crownless king,” the title I made for a necromancer who could survive decapitation, I wanted to create a helmet for a character who would keep their head sealed in a helmet like a safe. This would be Oroboro, the same necromancer mentioned in the Ergodica posts. From there, this character could actually substitute other people’s heads for their own, as a sort of voodoo: with possession of another person’s head, they could gain all of that person’s knowledge, speak in their voice, and communicate with their ghost. The idea emerged of a necromantic collector, someone who collects trophies from their dead enemies and binds their ghosts to his helmet by stealing their heads.

I imagined an eyeless helmet with a hinge on the front, so the entire thing could open like a pear of anguish, and a removable jaw.

Culaith helmet draft Chris 3 Culaith mask draft Chris 1 Culaith mask draft Chris 2 Culaith mask draft 4 Chris

I decided to describe the helmet to a friend of mine, Joel, who has done a lot of fantasy concept art in the past. This is what I told him:

“When you consume someone’s ghost or soul, you gain all of their memories, identity, and knowledge…he keeps the heads of people he values in his helmet, or their teeth embedded in it. The teeth are like quick-keys to call up the ghosts of those he wants to channel, and the head in the helmet is possessed. He’s supposed to be an abomination. The helmet and everything connected to it breaks every rule I could think of when it comes to magical morality…I’m not sure how I want the jaw mechanism to work–I was hoping you could help me figure that out. The goal of it is to be able to unhinge the jaw, so he can take abnormally large objects into himself, like a snake. As for the material, I was thinking of either iron or heavily pitted and varnished wood.”

After some back and forth about the lore behind the helmet, the magic and mechanisms, Joel produced this rough sketch, meant to depict an iron helmet:

Culaith helmet sketch Joel

Joel described his sketch like this: “I really liked the worked metal aspect around the teeth, like it’s been scratched or welded into shape to hold the teeth, so I ran with that. Tried to give it more of the welded look, it makes it look almost flesh while the rest of the helmet is obviously metal. I thought the concave shape around the teeth gave it a more unnatural look and gave the impression that you almost had to dig out some of the mask to find the teeth underneath.”

I loved Joel’s sketch, especially the teeth–they evoke the ravenous, all-consuming potential of the eyeless Langoliers from Stephen King’s story The Langoliers, as well as David Hine’s graphic novel, “The Man Who Laughs,” published by Self Made Hero, which was the inspiration for Batman’s Joker. I decided to dub this helmet “The Grinning Man.”

With Joel’s rough sketch showing how it all would fit together, I decided to do a sketch of my own based off Joel’s art, showing the complete helmet:

chris oroboro culaith helmet necromancy

Conclusion

Necromancers can be a lot more than guys summoning skeletons. These are the people who are plumbing the depths of life and death, the decay of the body and the action of time, searching for the line between man and god, mortal and immortal. They can be horrifying in their own right, and they don’t even need zombies to get the job done. And they can look absolutely terrifying while doing it.

 

ERGODICA, Part 2: Interdimensional Necromantic Blues

Be sure to read Part 1 of ERGODICA here.

Last post, I brought up the idea of a “corpse book,” a piece of ergodic literature that uses the human body as the blueprint for its narrative structure. Before I start unpacking the insanity behind this idea and the ensuing project (which will involve philosophy, mathematics, occultism, and the nature of reality) it’s helpful to know what the hell “ergodic” means. According to the internet, “ergodic” means:

“relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points”

Ergodic literature, however, is defined as the following:

“In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.”

The corpse book, as I imagine it, makes sense in both of these definitons–mathematical and literary. So sit back and open your mind here–we’re going to take a journey into the wondrous world of imagination, starting with the oh-so-fun topic of death and Kierkegaard.

There is a famous work written by Soren Kierkegaard, under the name Anti-Climacus, titled “The Sickness Unto Death.” The title comes from the Bible, in the Gospel of John–in that Gospel, Jesus comes across a dying man named Lazarus, and utters the words “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God.” ‘This sickness’ refers to his dying condition, and the meaning of Jesus’ statement can be read as “This man’s death isn’t for nothing–it is part of God’s plan.”

Death is the focus of a lot of different philosophies, but especially existentialism and Zen Buddhism: death represents the annihilation of the self, including our memories, our personalities, and everything that forms our identity. Death, in a lot of ways, is the crux of all philosophy, which led Albert Camus (who I hate) to say that the only true philosophical question worth pondering is suicide.

For Kierkegaard, the truly frightening thing is the sickness unto death, the death that is for nothing and no one, the death that means nothing. Kierkegaard imagines the human soul as trapped between the infinite and finite, always being pulled in both directions at once: on the one hand, we are divine creatures with immortal souls, but on the other we are bound to our bodies, senses, and everything that entails. The pursuit to reconcile these two is the heart of Kierkegaard’s existentialism, and offers a meaning to life. But to reject that quest, to say IMG_0955“fuck the infinite and the finite!”, is to choose despair. To choose despair, and to keep living, is to choose the sickness unto death.

In my stories and my world, the question of the sickness unto death is the chief philosophical concern. Death comes about from one thing: decay. So necromancy has risen up to deal with the practical concerns: how to keep the body intact and repaired ad infinitum, how to move a soul out of a decaying flesh body into a vessel like a phylactery or an artificial body, etc. Some kinds of necromancy, even more complicated and rare, aim to alter the body’s place in time, allowing people to slice minutes or seconds as thin as hairs, stretching out the moments. In all of these cases, the body is the central concern. Without a body, you have no tie to earthly existence, to the finite. So the body is the chief concern of necromancers.

This is the central feature of the “corpse book” I’m imagining: to tell a story about a necromancer, the story itself would have to take on the form of a body…or a corpse.

Part 2: Kabbalah, Evangelion, and the Oneness of Things

In Kabbalah, the Sephiroth is a map of all god’s creation, laid out symbolically. It’s made of twelve different parts, called sephira, each one representing a different aspect of the universe, God, and a step on the path to ultimate enlightenment. As you climb up the Tree, from the lower to the higher 6271sephira, more is revealed by the different interconnections between them: the relationships between the sephira mean as much as the sephira themselves, creating layers and nets of meaning.

One of the many ways to understand the relation of the different sephira is to see them as parts of a giant body, with the feet (malkuth, the lowest sephira, representing the material world) touching earthly existence and the head (Kether, the highest sephira, representing God’s consciousness) touching the heavens. With this symbolism, the human body itself becomes a map of the universe and the path to enlightenment.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons Evangelion pisses me off so much, making me say “God DAMN it, that’s clever.”

The Tree of Sephiroth shows up as a consistent motif across the Evangelion series, all the way to End of Evangelion, where the Mass Production EVAs enact a ritual that lifts the crucified EVA-01 into the sky, rising in a formation with an overlaid Sephiroth pattern, each EVA representing a different sephira. Below, from the clouds, rises a giant white body, which is the unity of Lilith (the female aspect of creation) and Adam (the male aspect of creation). The giant Lilith-Adam becomes the catalyst for Instrumentality, tumblr_inline_o091y7adxv1tryobx_540subsuming Shinji and all human souls into itself in order to either destroy humanity or cause its rebirth. So what we’re given here is a literal reenactment of the Sephiroth, the map to the totality of God’s creation, as a giant human body initiating the destruction and creation of the world. The giant has its feet on the surface of the Earth, and it’s head is in fucking space, staring at Shinji so he can have a liaison with Kether by being literally sucked into Rei’s forehead.

So there you have it: a narrative, visual synthesis of Kabbalah, a protagonist’s literal apotheosis, and the culmination of a story about understanding the human condition through one person’s journey into themselves. It’s perfect. Damn it.

The relationship of the Sephiroth to the human body speaks to an interesting phenomenon in mysticism and philosophy: the multiple meanings of things, and the conflation of different meanings. The Tree of Sephiroth can represent the human body just as it represents the map of creation, just as it represents a map of the path to enlightenment, just as it represents God. Thus, the body is the universe is God is enlightenment. This is why mystics keep talking about the “oneness” of things, that we are all “one.” To their eyes, the eyes of the enlightened, everything is everything else. The smallest insect is an expression of the ultimate truth of being, just as the rhizomantic nature of a flock of birds points to the order within the seeming chaos of being. The world is filled with hidden symmetries and patterns that all form the tip of a single iceberg.

It all sounds like some real mystical bullshit until you become aware of the existence of fractals.

Part 3: Fractals, Infinity, and Triangular Gaskets

So the human body, the vessel of the soul and the central feature of necromancy in my world, has a lot of meaning attached to it. Most of these meanings transcend the flesh and blood of human anatomy, but some are very literally embedded in it. Fractals are “a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale.” Fractals have a metapattern that nests within itself, with the smallest complete part of the pattern being a miniature reflection of the whole pattern.
Fractals show up in snowflakes, wave patterns in the ocean, crystl-systemresults2als, and plants, among other places. When electricity is injected into certain mediums, the resulting branching pattern has fractal qualities. But the most immediate example is human veins, which resemble patterns called L-Systems. L-systems are also found in tree limbs and wheat stalks, and appears in mathematical models of population growth for simple kinds of life, like algae. In pure mathematics they show up in Pascal’s Triangle and infinite recursion, among dozens of other places. In each of these cases, the fractals form patterns that nest inside themselves and expand outside of themselves forever–in their purest forms, fractal patterns are infinite.

mandelbrot_set-zoom_in

So let’s break this down. There is a type of pattern that is found in both nature and in pure mathematics that affirms the idea that no matter how large or complicated the pattern, the smallest piece of something can reflect its whole. This pattern has within its very nature the potential to be infinite, but is also found in finite forms: veins within human bodies, branches on trees, etc. Fractals seem to be, in a lot of really fascinating ways, a bridge to understanding the way to reconcile the impossible poles of the finite and infinite, the micro-scale and the macro-scale. Contained within fractal patterns, then, is potentially an expression of the path to enlightenment.

But then there’s the Hausdorff dimension.

I am not a mathematician. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. But the relationship between fractals and their Hausdorff dimension, to me, is one that seems to evoke sheer madness.

When you measure the sides of a square, you get a solid number. 10 centimeters. 18.465 centimeters. But when you try to measure a fractal shapes’ dimensions, the answer depends on how big your magnifying glass is. Since true fractals repeat in smaller and smaller iterations forever, measuring a true fractal would be impossible, since every time you tried to measure a part of it, you would discover an even smaller part contained within it which needed measuring, and an even smaller part within that one. Think of cutting the corners off of a table, turning a square into an octagon. Then cut the corners off the octagon. So on. This is something akin to the famous Zeno’s Paradox, mentioned in my previous post about Mr. Powell.

The Hausdorff dimension tries to measure the dimension of objects, whether one dimensional or three dimensional. Usually the Hausdorff dimension can be expressed as a whole integer, like 2 or 3. But fractals, which tinker with infinity, have bizarre Hausdorff dimensions, ones that defy logic or reality. They’re anomalous, impossible, but like the arrow in Zeno’s Paradox, it’s hard to draw the line between being mathematically impossible and physically impossible–especially when fractals seem to form some of the underlying patterns across nature and math.

My favorite is still the previously mentioned Pascal’s Triangle, which was part of the inspiration for “Chris Mahon’s Occult Triangle Lab.” The patterns within the triangle, when drawn out, create a well-known fractal pattern, the Sierpinski Gasket.

tumblr_mvd748vmla1sj97z5o1_400IMG_0861

Part 4: Fractal Immortality, Interdimensional Necromancy, and You

I mentioned a couple ways that necromancy deals with staving off death from the physical body. I mentioned the alteration of the body through repair or the use of a vessel, like a phylactery. I also mentioned the manipulation of time.

Imagine you’re a particularly clever necromancer, one who explores the soul’s connection between the infinite and the finite, those two binary positions. If the finite is expressed as 1, then the infinite could be expressed as 0. These are mathematical limits, and the human soul exists between them somewhere. But what if you explored mathematics in addition to necromancy? Things like Zeno’s Paradox and the nature of fractals. You would find that between two limits, even 0 and 1, there is an infinity of points curling in on themselves, nested upon one another to eternity. If the human Hausdorff dimension exists somewhere between 0 and 1, is there a bizarre decimal value, a little valley where you could live inside the limits but outside of existence? Is it possible for mathematics to come across a piece of math that takes it outside of anything math can explain?

It’s absolutely possible. In fact, it’s impossible to prove it’s not.

There’s a theory called Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. From Wikipedia:

“The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (i.e., any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.”

What this boils down to is that there is no way to definitively prove that any given system, like mathematics, is consistent when you use that system to test itself. So imagine you want to escape the finite and the infinite from within that system of 0 and 1. It’s not impossible. In fact, there are already things within that boundary that show that there’s whole worlds within the bounds of 0 and 1, where everything breaks down and the rules become meaningless: fractals.

IMG_0855Imagine escaping three dimensions for 1.38 dimensions. Death has no meaning there. Your body has no meaning there. It’s a kind of infinity, just a smaller type, a stranger type within a bigger infinity. Your soul, your self, that’s infinite, too. You could live forever. But it’s the crossing over that would be difficult–transcending or descending from this dimension.

And this is where everything goes wrong for our necromantic protagonist.

He doesn’t make it from this dimension into the fractal dimension. He makes a mistake, somewhere deep in his arcane mathematics. And now his soul, his self, is trapped between the finite, the infinite, and another, fractal infinity. As you can probably imagine, this non-Euclidean, neo-Lovecraftian experience can drive a person insane.

The effect of this cross-dimensional interpollation, in my conception, would be the decay of the soul instead of the body: instead of hanging in stasis between finite and infinite, the closed system would become unstable, with the soul getting ripped apart and slowly sucked into the fractal dimension like water going down a drain. This would be a gradual annihilation of the soul over a period of time that couldn’t be measured in reality, but rather by its own, internal clock.

This would be the plot of the corpse book.

Part 5: Ergodic Literature, Ciphers, and Counting Down to Annihilation

Fractals form the heart of the structure and narrative of this book, linking together time, death, immortality, the decay of the body, the infinite, finite, and wide-eyed madness, and the way to read about it all necessitates a special way to navigate the story.
The story told in this corpse book is one told across several limbs, or tertiary books, all of which are interconnected in the same manner of the Tree of Sephiroth. All of the books combined represent the symbolic body of the protagonist, divided into respective facets of his self.

In my current plan, each of these limb books are to contain approximately 10,500 words. This is because the average person reads at roughly 175 words per minute. With five limb books (head, feet, arms) and a central “torso” book of 63,00 words, that adds up to roughly 12 hours of reading time. This is the “internal clock” I was talking about: as you’re reading each word, minutes pass in both your world and the world of the narrative, meaning that the protagonist’s soul is gradually dissolving in real time.

These are the last 12 hours of his life, and the individual pieces of his self are disappearing one by one, infinity eating him alive. The name of the book would be OROBORO.

occult triangle lab oroboro

Imagine trying to navigate a mind like that. Instead of a clean, perfectly symmetrical path across his Sephiroth, the path would be jumbled, fragmented, insane. This would be more like piecing together a falling building than reading the linear chronology of an adventure. So I imagine that each limb book would be fragmented, asking you to return to the central torso book a couple times to help unravel its individual story, with the narrative crossing the boundaries between the books and the reader decoding the path forward as they go along.

My initial idea is to have a word or a name become a cipher, something with significance. Using a process similar to my last post about encoding true names into hexadecimal or binary, certain phrases would be ciphers to figure out the path of the narrative, whether that was a page number, a certain passage, or one of the other limb books though I’d probably keep the torso book as the main “reference” book for each limb book to keep things simpler. The torso book would be like a dictionary or an astrology chart peppered with hidden pieces of the story, unintelligible until you saw the rest of the puzzle.

Tied into this idea of moving between a cipher guiding a reader’s path through the torso book and the constant decay of the protagonist’s soul in real time, I thought it would be appropriate to use a system that involved modular arithmetic, the same system that clocks use.

410129712_origThe modulo would begin at twelve, the number of hours until the final dissolution of the protagonist’s soul, and with each passing limb book (which take 2 hours to read), the modulo would decrease by 2. The advantage is that the modulo system is a relatively easy kind of mental arithmetic, something readers could do in their heads or on the back of a Post-It. Another possibility would be to use a Sierpinski gasket as the main mechanic, using the numbers and patterns contained in it as an easy cipher.

If everything is done right, the process of figuring out the cipher will force the reader to inhabit the same mindset as the protagonist himself, immersing them in the same world of arcane mathematics and hidden patterns that brought him to where he is now. This is a world of fantasy, after all: a world of wizards and necromancers who bury themselves in old, dusty, esoteric tomes to find forbidden knowledge that takes them deep into an unseen world.

It reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, in some ways. Once the heroes penetrate the city of the Old Ones and begin exploring its depths, they begin to find walls of pictograms that show their history, from their arrival on earth to the rebellion of the Shoggoths. There’s dozens of pages recounting this history as the protagonist unravels it, and instead of feeling like it’s an information dump, it begins to illuminate everything else about the city.

16_hpl_mtsmadness_hbrown

The way I see it, the whole cipher-puzzle system asks readers to learn something new as they read, picking up the skills and mindset naturally as they follow the narrative, until they find themselves applying it to advance the story. The story would ask you not just to absorb it, but navigate it, and that navigation would bring you closer to understanding the central character and the esoteric, frightening, and entrancing arts of interdimensional immortality, and what drove him to seek it out.

Part 6: V FOR VENDETTA, Ideas, and the Outro

So what we have is Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Buddhism, immortality, Kabbalah, fractals, and Godel’s Incompleteness theorem woven into a piece of experimental literature about an interdimensional necromancer trapped between two infinities. That’s the basic layout of this project I’m working on, the elevator pitch. It’s fun to weave all these ideas together, to play around with them and find weird, interesting parallels and symmetries. When I read V FOR VENDETTA, one of the things I wondered was if Alan Moore and his co-writer started getting freaked out when they put together all of the striking connections between Guy Fawkes, the letter V, and the number 5, the symbol for anarchy, quotes from Faust, and the story they were weaving. It seemed like it all fit together too well, as if these patterns were all there from the beginning, waiting to be discovered. Of course, when you’re a writer you try to force everything to fit together into a perfect thematic pattern, but maybe there comes a point, like in Foucault’s Pendulum, when yov-for-vendettau begin to feel like you are part of the pattern, not the one creating it. Terrifyingly enough, that sentiment, too, is part of V FOR VENDETTA:

“I had to see it. There wasn’t much left. But when I was there it was strange. I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It’s like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched all the way back before Larkhill. I felt like I could see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realised we’re all part of it, and all trapped by it.”

There’s a lot more to writing a story that piecing together a lot of really cool ideas. I said that before about Neal Stephenson. But a famous writer once said that writers end up writing the kind of thing that they want to read. This is the kind of thing I want to read, because it’s exciting, bizarre, and fascinating. I bet if I looked, I could find other people who think the same thing. It’s inspiring to test the bounds of imagination and creativity and storytelling. I think that’s one of the things that makes writing fiction so unique.

occult triangle lab sketches

The Crownless King

‘The crownless king’ is a necromantic concept I’ve had in my head for a couple years now, waiting to be woven into a story. It’s meant to be an honorific, a title, an honor. It came partly from Kabbalah, from the Tree of Sephiroth: the highest sephirot is Keter, the Crown, which is equated with the head of God, the King of Creation. 

The ‘crownless king’ came up in one story, but the draft was never finished. The story was about chiromancy, the magic of altering and manipulating the human body. Here’s an excerpt from the story, which deals with the concept.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

— Chris

###

Samal looked down at the bailing knife in his hand, held it up to the light, and tilted it. He held it out to Iz.

“Hold this.”

One by one, he began unbuttoning his coats, jackets, and shirts, until the illuminated, tattooed skin of his chest was bare. When he was finished, Samal sighed.

“When I was growing up, there were seven hallmarks to a wizard: a name, a song, a card, a craft, a hand, a tongue, and tired feet. For Muzin, there were tattoos added in.”

Samal made eight points on his chest with his fingers, each one touching a different star. “The eight points of the world, the eight ports…the seven hallmarks and the tattoos show you’re bona-fide.” Samal shook his head slowly. “Real bona-fide wizards don’t die.”

Iz was staring at him. Samal could see his mind working.

“I’ve seen friends of mine take a bullet to the lung and keep laughing. One of them walked out of a hostel without his jaw. They knew the amount of blood in their bodies down to the thimble, and they could weave muscle faster than yarn. The only way to get seven hallmarks was to be a stitcher, bones, blood, or tissue. Now we’re back to just that. There’s only one hallmark left now, and it’s the crownless king. You ever heard of the crownless king?”

Iz shook his head slowly. The knife was getting tighter in his hand. Samal put both hands on his head.

“A crownless king is when you can take away a person’s head, sever it from the spine, and the person doesn’t die. They don’t drain blood, they don’t need air, they don’t eat food. Their body is perfect, no matter where you cut it. There have been twenty-two crownless kings in our age. My teacher was one of them.” Samal nodded to Iz. “Now, I’ll show you how to harvest muscle.”

Samal pointed at one of the stars on his chest. “You’re going to open me from the north to the south star. Half an inch deep. That’s this much.”

Samal held up a half-inch between his thumb and forefinger.

“If you cut too deep, it won’t matter to me. Just take your time.”

Iz’s body stiffened up, and his shoulders rose, but he didn’t say anything. His neck jerked to the side, then his arm, all the way down his body, like a puppeteer tugging on each joint. Then he stepped forward with the knife. With careful precision, he laid one hand on Samal’s chest and inserted the blade into the skin. With steady pressure, he dragged the tip down Samal’s sternum, watching the tip of the knife with rapt attention. Samal could feel the cold sensation of metal parting the skin, and almost shivered at the smoothness and ease: either Iz had a practiced hand at carving, or he was half-asleep.

Then it was finished. A thin line divided Samal’s chest, cutting the tattoos in half. He took the knife and made two more long cuts, perpendicular to the first, creating a tall ‘I’. He peeled back both wings of skin and revealed the wet, red muscle of his chest. Iz stared like was looking toward the horizon.

“No blood,” Iz said softly. “None of it’s spilling out.”

“It’s hemostasis. Instant clotting, and the rest flows along the flesh like a magnet. You did a good job, too. Half-inch.”

Samal sighed, and the muscles bulged outward with his diaphragm.

“You have to be careful with this, especially in the cold. All the heat escapes, and diseases can get right into the flesh. You have to be very careful.”

Samal reached in and made two incisions on either side of a length of muscle, about three inches long. With the tip of the knife, he lifted out the strand and set it in his other hand.

“When you’ve got a body like mine, it heals very quickly, but I have to eat food, drink, and rest. I’ll get this strand back in two days. Now, bring me your bowl.”

Iz brought him the little bowl of water, and Samal set the strand of muscle in it.

“You’re going to grow this strand, just like my body will grow it. I’ll give you the powder, and you sing to it. In a few days, it’s going to grow into a sheet. When it’s ready, you can start using it again. And when you’re finished with the skull, I’ll show you how to harvest your own muscle.”

Iz took the bowl. “How long did it take your teacher to become a crownless king?”

“It took him eighty-two years, I think.”

“Is he still alive?”

Samal bit his lip and exhaled through his nose. “No.”

“What killed him?”

“He killed himself.”