Consuming Mystagogue

This episode went live early. Here’s a transcript of the episode as recorded. I may take a second bite at the cherry and write up the mystagogic path for the monthly collation.

Why do faeries teach Mysteries? I was reading a story the other day which suggested that it was because it makes the acolyte more delicious.

I won’t record “The Man Who Went To Far” by E.F. Benson into the podcast, because it takes ten minutes to get going, but in summary, a man meets a friend who appears to have become younger. He considers it likely the result of a vacation, but the man reveals that he has been meditating in the woods, (which is a Sacrifice of Time) and is drawing closer to the force of nature, which he calls “Joy”. As a result, he has been revivified, so he’s now, physically, a late teenager. There are several other effects.

The clearest effect is that the young man has the Oversensitive Flaw. He cannot view ugly things: they draw him away from his next initiation, into the innermost mystery of Nature. He flees a child with a scraped knee, his fingers in his ears. He hears a flute-like sound that others cannot hear, and is enraptured by it. It gets louder as he comes closer to the end of his path, and makes him disappear into his own thoughts for increasingly lengthy times. He sleeps outside in a hammock.

He does gain some other benefits, however. He can communicate emphatically with animals (Animal Ken), can hypnotise his friends to sleep (Entrancement) and seem to have The Way of the Woods.

The downside, is that, as his friend points out, Nature isn’t pure Joy: every animal in nature feeds on something. Nature is pain. The characters suggest that the man has failed to balance progress in the two paths. This leads to a final scene, which could be read several ways. At its simplest, a faun, presumably Pan, stamps the young man to death.

Why Pan does this is not clear. Here are some options:

• Pan represents the path not taken, and the two paths contest with each other. Joy is about to get a new champion, so Pain destroys him. Fear was the wrong response: the man should have fought.
• Pan is the mystagogue and the man screaming in fear is the wrong response to him. Sacrifices or abasement were required, and the man failed a Personality check or a Cult Lore roll.
• The man is about to become one with Nature, which is a potent Magic Spirit, and the faerie is destroying him to prevent the piercing of the bubble of Faerie that coats most settlements. This also explains why Merinita joined Nature, and then a Faerie interloper took over her house and massacred the people who followed her mysteries.
• The man becomes more delicious as he develops Cult Lore. The entire process of initiation is just a way of marinating the victim. If this is true, your player characters should discover this before they reach the final stage. If they can still get the benefits they won’t feel it’s a bait and switch.