I said I would write a post about rudimentary blood magic and here it is.
“Was it so unlikely? Ten assassins had no chance against one man?”
“No chance at all. We are speaking of the Thaumatarch. He is not one man. He has so Changed his own mind that he may handle dozens of tasks at once and still remain aware of every breath around him, every tensed muscle, every subtle shade of light. He is garlanded with Talismans. Ten assassins, or thirty, would be naught but a moment’s distraction.”
“A distraction from what?”
“If we ever meet Sarcifer, we may ask him.”
It’s Xthonos, I say: the Beginning of All Things. Kleitos is like a living god, and what task befits a god better than the pursuit of Origin itself? For such a man-made-god, how can mere ants compare? What worth are they, when the world itself waits to be discovered?
The great irony is that he will fall to these ants. The world he and his forebears created allows no other outcome in the end. And his task, whatever it may be, will likely die with him, unfinished.
But that’s getting far, far ahead of ourselves. First, a crucial disclaimer: this is all highly speculative and should not be mistaken for proper lore. Our protagonists have barely glimpsed the wider world, and that’s not a great foundation for what I’ll be trying to do: crafting a world model for blood magic itself. But let’s try nevertheless.
The Perceived World ·「 The Mask of Reality 」
Form (Nature) · Purpose
Change · Memory ·「 Spirit 」
The Beginning (the Unknowable)
Altogether pretty simple. These are layers of abstraction stacked on top of each other, beginning with an unknown state and ending with the everyday world. I believe the role of Theurgic trance is unmasking these layers in order to perceive underlying principles: we peel back the mask of reality to perceive nature and purpose (telos), so that we can Change them. With enough training, a Theurge can peel back the mask of form and purpose itself, unveiling principles that Karagond materialism would call “meta-telos”: principles that shape how Change itself behaves.
"There is a meta-telos built into the fabric of time and form: the tendency of things to return to their original nature. Years of philosophical training is required to understand this enough to perceive it. Mastering it is one of the conditions for being admitted to the Third Kyklos as a Theurge."
—Cerlota
Change itself is an emanation of the Beginning: the difference between “then” and “now” is what’s changed in the meantime. Thus, blood magic becomes the power closest to the beginning — what some might call the work of the divine. That’s what Theurgy literally means.
The Beginning is unknown, and for the purpose of our story, would remain unknowable. Some cultures would say it’s Xthonos: the Natural Law, Order incarnate. The Seracca might answer the Nagyeh, “the Gods Who Play, Many and One, in whose Song we all dance, ancestors and the living together”, the origin of immaterial spirit for the Seracca. The anti-Xthonic philosophers of old Erezza argued that flux was the deepest nature of things; some Nyrish philosophers write of a primordial kenon — the philosopher’s void yearning to be filled — as the source of all things. But from all of these, we can derive Change to set the world in motion.
The world is constructed from the Beginning to the final end, but Theurgy itself is a journey from end to beginning. Let’s anchor ourselves to that start of that journey and examine it closely in the context of this world model.
Within the game, we have two methods of entering our first Theurgic trance. Let’s begin with the First Exercise:
I see that nothing comes into the world without purpose. Fear does not cloud my vision. I see the world without its masks. I see myself without a mirror. I see the ends of all things. And I know I am the nature behind nature. I am the cause behind the final cause. I am a Maker of Change.
There’s nothing here about the Aristotelian elements; there’s nothing here about blood or aether. It’s all about perceiving the realm of nature and purpose. Within our world model:
The Perceived World ·「 The Mask of Reality 」
Form (Nature) · Purpose ← you are here
Change · Memory ·「 Spirit 」
The Beginning (the Unknowable)
Here, I believe Karagond Theurgy has biased our protagonists’ perceptions about what’s happening at this layer, and this has been interpolated onto how our protagonists interpret what they’re seeing. We should not trust what we perceive as “nature” — our conversation with Horion specifically poses the question of what nature is, and we are allowed to give two diametrically opposed (but not incompatible) answers: that “Any law that runs counter to nature will fail eventually” or that “everything changes. Even what we call nature”; this dichotomy is reflected in the Lykeion’s challenge to all First Kyklos Theurges, a ship of Theseus problem.
‘If you change wood’s teloi to all be the same as iron, do you still have wood, or iron, or something new?’
The Thaumatarchy perceives “nature” through a prism of control: that helots are called by the Angels to be sacrificed, that their Order is the order of Xthonos itself. Purpose is built into this nature.
What we call “nature” can instead be viewed as a construct, encompassing both purpose and what something is. I’ve chosen to call that “form”; you could also call it “material” or “matter”. It’s just something tangible in the world.
I make this distinction because out in the Xaos-lands, we can find a surprising number of connections to the concept of「 form 」specifically, or nature absent purpose. Becoming a Healer of Xaos is one such illustration:
Something in the hand remembers what it was to have bones, to be divided into digits…and the shift in that direction also lurches wild, out of your control. Now Veorn’s hand is stiffening, becoming more stone-like, shedding flakes of what looks like flint or bone chips. […]
You fight grimly to keep the hand from petrifying, search for the purpose of grasping and touching, try to bring it to the fore.
Pay attention to the order here: Veorn’s hand emerged first, before its basic telos (grasping and touching) had set. We dragged that memory out of the chaos and imbued it into his hand — but the memory of shape came first, stone-like, petrifying. I would argue that this stone is nearly pure form — form that defines nature. Unmoving, unyielding stone. Perhaps an imperfect imitation of something like…
pure elemental stone; there’s not even the usual trace of fire that you might have used to make it lighter. To your mind’s eye it immediately radiates hardness, utter impenetrability, to a degree you’ve never sensed in any other substance. You think that you could consume all the blood in your body without Changing it at all.
The towers of Vigil: a form so pure that it defines its nature as untouchable.
As for Vigil itself, well:
Witnessing the melting of all nature and purpose in the colossal Xaos-storm is as horrific as you’d expected. […]
Barely veiled by the chaos is a blaze bright enough to burn a hole in your mind. You throw up your hands reflexively in front of your now tightly-shut eyes, but it makes no difference—the white-hot light pounds through you as if flesh, bone, and eyelids were so much dust. That giant shape behind the Storm, the stony tree or city, is incandescent with raw power. Its gaps and hollows pulse with it.
To confess my bias, I have long suspected that the entity within Vigil is a tragic collective (un)consciousness, a dreaming people who’ve lost their form. What the Seracca might call a vortex of immaterial spirit (their origin of blood magic), gone horribly wrong. I find the duality of a formless power ringed by towers of pure form to be narratively compelling, if true. And it would speak to Vigil’s sheer power if it transcended entirely the realm of form and purpose, existing in the deeper abstraction of pure Change and Memory (that is to say, two principles intimately connected with Xaos-storms). For Vigil to be so eldritch and incomprehensible that we, untrained as we are, literally cannot perceive it as anything but raw power — and for the chance that should we return, years from now, with wisdom and knowledge, we might finally perceive the truth.
But this possibility is only just that: a single possibility, emergent from the world model’s plane of form and purpose.
And with that, we reach the threshold of our Theurgy, the kind our protagonists wield. We’ve walked through the steps of the First Exercise, but first I should address how the Aristotelian elements (earth, water, air, fire, and aether) emerge from this world model. For a world composed entirely of just these five elements, you could conceptualise them as base units of nature, with all matter being their span. Or they could simply be among the easiest abstractions to latch onto in a Theurgic trance, and only seem to be fundamental as a result. Regardless, they fit easily.
Frankly, it’s at this point that I’ve gotten pretty tired of writing this and so I’ll wrap things up here. My understanding of Aristotelian philosophy and metaphysics is poor, all things considered, and I really welcome comments/roasts from people more knowledgeable on that front. Anyway, I’ll end with a tl;dr:
The Perceived World ·「 The Mask of Reality 」 ← the normal world
Form (Nature) · Purpose ← basic Theurgic trance
Change · Memory ·「 Spirit 」 ← source of blood magic, meta-telos
The Beginning (the Unknowable) ← the end of the road for Theurgic study
I suggest these are masks of the world, layered in a stack that is gradually peeled away, and that as we study blood magic, we’ll delve deeper and deeper. The final objective of Theurgy may be to trace its origins to the source of all existence. A key point of this model is that nature and purpose are not truly foundational. I would suggest, for example, that Ward-work’s secret technology may be operating on the level of Change and Memory itself, tinkering with how things are perceived by the world rather than what they are or do. Likewise for Vigil.
Once again, could be completely wrong about all this. But I figured it was worth sharing.