All articles filed in Thirty Objects of Desire

The Tenth Object is a small drawing of a serpent with the feet of a chicken. It is, presumably an illumination from a book, although the backing material, whatever it was, has been completely destroyed by the mystical properties of the object. This left only a thin layer of metallic paint or leaf, which was mounted on a cerulean…

The Ninth Object is sometimes called the Maghribi Pen. There is no  evidence that the Object comes from North Africa, but the only pen of similar structure found by early Academicans belonged to a noble from that region. It is unusual in that it has a reservoir for ink within the stem of the pen. The…

The Eighth Object is of a type familiar to any Hermetic magus: it is a mirrored bowl made of pure silver, three feet across. Many magi use a similar container to study vis in a laboratory.   Inscribed on the bottom of the outside of the dish are a series of simple pictures, using a mixture of doodles, Criamon symbolism,…

The Seventh Object is a portrait, of remarkable clarity, drawn magically on paper with colours as from life. It shows a young woman with dark hair and eyes. She has undergone skullbinding, and so her head is markedly elongated. The depicted woman has the Mark of the Inevitable on a visible wrist, and so many assume she is a Criamon…

The Sixth Object is a rug of Asiatic design, predominantly red in colour, with a stylised floral pattern upon its upper surface. It appears to be woven from a plant fibre, knotted to a design traced to the Kurdish people. It contains dyes not native to, or known to be traded in, areas of Kurdish…

The Fifth Object looks like an ivory chess piece, and was, for a time, used as one. The Order recovered it from the home of a minor noble of the House of Giovanni in Venice during the Autumn of 1242. His mother, being carefully interviewed by agents of the Order, recalls finding the Object in a street market in Padua…

The Fourth Object enters the historical record when an Arabic traveler gives it to a serving girl in the palace of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, in 1224. It was, then, a single sprig of blue flowers. How little did he understand the significance of these tiny blossoms!  The cerulea plants first propagated from this sprig…

The Third Object seems to be a mortarium, a dish-like vessel used for grinding in the Roman Imperial period. In function it is much like a mortal and pestle, or a ball mill, and indeed, this object was retrofitted as a ball mill by the magus who owed it: a small sphere of steel which can…

The Second Object is a golden ring, set with a large diamond, of unusual clarity and cut. It is presumed to be of magical manufacture. The ring has a small, smooth split in its back, if the setting be considered the front, but this is not, apparently, damage. Some Verditus magi have suggested it is…

The First Object is called such merely by tradition, and because this assemblage is clearly a discrete object that has been broken into parts, much like the Fifteenth Object. Such was this Object’s lack of grandeur that for many years, this Academy did not accept its place in the Sequence, and considered it a secondary product of the manifestation of the Eighth…