This week, I’m going to beat to death the idea that this blog is designed to make Ars Magica easier for outsiders to understand, by taking the deepest dive yet into Mythic Europe’s cosmology and escatology.

In vanilla Mythic Europe we have the following features:

  • The magi who best understand how the clockwork of reality moves are the Criamon magi.
  • These magi are followers of Empedoclean thought, in Greek, Sufi and Helleno-Buddist modes.
  • Empedocles said time was a circle, beginning with a paradise, a metaphorical cosmic egg, called the Spharios,  and returning to it after aeons of strife.
  • Jews, Christians, Muslims and Zoroastrans are roughly correct about the nature of the Divine in Mythic Europe. Therefore there will be a judgement. Time is not a circle. The Criamon are wrong.
  • Despite this, the Criamon know and do a lot of cool stuff because they know a bit about how the machine behind stage dressing of reality works.

There’s a way to pull Criamon mysticism and game mechanics, mostly intact, into the Jeudo-Christian framework. Doing so redefines what the point of magic is, and it might give us a new way of looking at many of the houses of the game. It’s also somewhere we have almost gone before.

When I was back in university, decades ago, I noticed that the origin story given for mortal magic in Order of Hermes for second edition was very similar to the destruction of the Tanu in Julian May’s Pliocene Exile stories. Those stories are prequels and sequels to her Galactic Milieu series, and I love them.  A key point in them is that, in broad terms, a Jesuit paleontologist called Pierre Tielhard de Chardin was right about the fundamental nature of reality.

de Chardin was a scientist who believed in evolution, and he was also a theologian who believed in God, and his way of bridging those two beliefs is what interests us as a game cosmology. He believed that evolution started early. His force toward coherence he calls Love, which is handy because that’s what the Criamon already call theirs.

Initially matter is formed, then it becomes more complex and becomes the dead Earth, the geosphere. Out of the elements in the dead earth, life emerges. creating the biosphere. Out of the live elements of the biosphere, self-reflective life emerges, creating the noosphere. That’s us, creating thought and culture. Evolution does not stop there. Out of the noosphere emerge ultrahumans, not only more intelligent but more ethical than us, driven by Love into increasingly complex forms, until, as the universe collapses, it is transcended. All matter, time, power, information and wisdom exist in a single omniscience.

This is called the Omega Point. To a Criamon magus, that looks an awful lot like the Spharios. To a Christian if you describe a spiritual force that exists in everything, knows everything and can control everything, you’re basically describing God. de Chardin takes it a step further, and notes that since it’s God materially embodied, that’s Jesus. This is the Second Coming, in some sense.

So, House Criamon are building a Genius Locus in their cave complex, in the metaphysical heart of the world. It is easier to say they are building a mechanism which allows magi to ascend from the human to the ultrahuman? That magi in Twilight are not trapped in a Void awaiting  Gabriel’s Trumpet, but are drawing the universe toward a final unity?

A superficial argument against this, and one I wrote, is that the power which drives magic is caused by the decay of the universe toward the swirl of chaos, predicted by Empedolcean cosmology, and the demons are inhabitants of the swirl. Perdo is easier than Creo, because the world is decaying. Entropy increases, giving time direction and magic polarity.

de Chardin would suggest that there are two types of energy. Sure, the physical energy of the world is decaying, but that’s not important. The spiritual energy of the world is continuing to become more complex, leading to a transcendence of the material. Creo is hard is because you aren’t as good at it as Perdo. Ultrahumans might be. Arguably they might find Perdo difficult, driven as they are by a higher form of wisdom than humans. It’s not that the world is falling apart: it’s that magi have yet to rise.

This lets me sneak Reason as an idea back into the game, not as a paltry denial of actual facts, but in the way it was used in the Enlightenment, as an obvious way of exploring the creation.

A side note: There are some people who follow de Chardin’s ideas who seem his work as not so much spiritual as mechanistic: the cosmological Jesus is basically a supercomputer. These people tend to suggrst that because the end is already known, the preconditions that lead to that end are implacable. That is, in a sense, everything is destined: the machine creates itself ab initio. God comes from fire and goes back to fire. The Criamon have the shackles of the Goddess of Inevitability as their House sign.

Those of you who have played Over the Edge will know that such a machine has already been used in Atlas Games before. The Throckmorton Device, in that setting, is forcing the present to curve toward the future in which is becomes real. Jesus is like the Throckmorton Device, but he loves you, so that might be OK.

So, the Divine are the elements of Creation which are closest to the Omega Point. Magic is a catalyst that can be used to speed humans toward that point. Magic is information, and information is Love. Faerie is made of stories, which are a reserve of spiritual complexity. The Infernal is…I’d argue it’s the result of a felix culpa.  It exists so that the Omega Point is more than just Adam, Eve and some shrub.

Drawing on the Jewish idea that all evil comes from God, because everything comes from God, rather than the Evil as Absence model, we could posit that the Infernal’s function is to force the Universe to experience itself. To draw Empedocles back in, he thought the  Spahrios cracked because of his, personal, sin, and the point of reality was its expiation. Maybe the point of the Infernal is to enhance Creation?

So, if you want to play Criamon, or Holy Magi, and you don’t want to use the cosmology we’ve used before: maybe a little de Chardin can show you new ways to explore the underlying structure of Mythic Europe.

 

 

Leave a comment