NEPHILIM: KALIYUGA SESSION 1

This is the second in an ongoing series of articles about a campaign in Chaosium's 1994 Nephilim. In Nephilim, the player character is an inhuman elemental spirit that incarnates in a series of human hosts over the course of history. 

IN ENGLISH, THE SECOND TAROT TRUMP is usually labeled as number I, and called either the Magus or Magician. It is worth noting however it is often referred to as the "Juggler." That last appellation formed the inspiration for much of this session.

A frequent criticism of 1994's Nephilim is that it is essentially a game about "possession." I've already shared my thoughts on this elsewhere, but I think these criticisms have more to do with the blinders that secular humanism, Western culture's celebration of (obsession with?) "individuality," and two thousand years of the Gerasene demoniac story getting repeated have put on many potential players. After all, in RPGs you can play a professional killer, a tomb raider, or a blood-drinking monster, but if you play a spirit that incarnates in a human host people suddenly start developing qualms. As modern Westerners we have been taught that "uniqueness" and "autonomy" are the two greatest traits a person can possess, even though very few people actually possess them. Hermeticism directly challenges this assumption, and there is no way Nephilim could be authentic without doing so as well.

That aside, this session was a chance to dig into incarnation, and so we decided to frame it from the point of view of the simulacrum. What does incarnation feel like?

THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Dr. Trevor Bennett, 42, is a Las Vegas-based forensic pathologist. He lives with his wife, Lucinda, and his daughter Marisol. On the surface his life appears suburban, successful, and happy. In reality, it is all caving in.

When I run Nephilim I always start from the perspective of the simulacrum, and I always ask the player to build a "dark night of the soul" into the backstory. The term comes to us from Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross (la noche oscura del alma), and signifies the spiritual crisis and crumbling of identity as one approaches union with God. It is hardly, however, limited to Catholicism. Buddha's confrontation with Mara on the eve of his enlightenment is another famous example. In many mystical traditions, the individual breaks down and endures a period of blackness before reintegrating and achieving union with a higher spiritual force. In Hermeticism, this is the alchemical process of nigredo. 

In Nephilim, the elemental spirit lacks a soul (Sol, Solar Ka). It is made of five other elements corresponding to heavenly bodies (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Luna) but has no center, no core. Humans possess only Solar Ka. Incarnation then is the reformation of a complete microcosm, with the Nephilim's elements coming into orbit around the human's Sol. It makes both the elemental spirit, and the human host, a complete being. But as the core element, Solar Ka can dominate the elemental forces, so prior to incarnation, the Nephilim blindly and instinctively seeks out hosts in a period of crisis, a moment of weakness when the Sol is wavering. 

For Trevor Bennett, this means being on the edge of losing everything. Years ago he was set up into spending the night with a prostitute by a local drug cartel, las Polillas Calaveras, the “Skull Moths” (Death’s Head Moths in English). They have been extorting him ever since into falsifying death reports, switching bodies, and lying about causes of death. Now, his ambitious younger rival, Dr. Emily Yang, has discovered his involvement with the Moths and has threatened to expose him if he doesn't step down.

Bennett is drinking too much and sleeping too poorly, his world about to end, when the incarnation occurs.

The session starts with a dream of listening to his mother playing piano downstairs, the metronome ticking. He awakes suddenly and hallucinates a gigantic serpent, like a constrictor, slithering across the carpet towards his bed (the player chose a Snake Metamorphosis). It is just a trick of the light. And yet he feels strongly a presence in the room.

THE JUGGLER

The next morning he awakes and climbs out of bed to go downstairs... only to suddenly find himself in a woman's body. The character's first incarnation was an Egyptian priestess (Nofretiti) in Thebes, 1350 BC, and Bennett is suddenly experiencing her memories. Befuddled, he struggles to understand where he is, who he is, and what is happening to him. The scene shifts again and he is now a man again on the streets of Elizabethan London (the second incarnation). Both hallucinations pass and he finds himself befuddled in his kitchen, his wife staring at him wondering why he hasn't gotten dressed for work yet while his daughter plays a game on her phone.

Bennett goes into the office and we introduce Emily Yang, and roleplay out the tension of the situation. Soon after, Bennett begins to hallucinate both Nofretiti and Avad Levinson (the Theban and Elizabethan incarnations), seeing them as people in the room only he can see or hear. They try to explain what has happened to him.

The elemental spirit never "speaks" in the session. Again, this is consistent with the idea that lacking a Sol, the Nephilim is not a person. The two previous incarnations, however, are fully realized identities that Trever Bennett now carries around inside him. Over the course of the campaign they will appear less and less to him as external beings as he integrates more with their memories, but early on they play the role of narrators easing him into his new reality. Bennett is "juggling" these identities around.

Bennett goes to the gang member who pulls his strings, Axel Escribano. He tries telling the gangster that he is not going to be able to go on as their man inside the crime lab much longer. Escribano, who is young, well-dressed, but with shockingly pink dyed hair, explains how unfortunate that would be for Bennett's wife and daughter and suggests taking Emily Yang "out."

Persuaded by the new voices in his head, Bennett attempts (and fails) a spell to seduce Emily Yang and bring her around to his side. This only makes matters worse and intensifies the trouble Bennett is in. That night, however, Yang is killed in a very convenient car accident, too convenient by far...

THE MAGICIAN

The previous incarnations urge Bennett to both find and locate his stasis object, as well as seek-out and make contact with his Arcanum, the Magician. Signs, omens, and Ka vision point him in the direction of the latter.

In our Nephilim Vegas, the Penn & Teller/Siegfried & Roy analogue is Black & White. Merlin Black and Arthur White run a nightly performance in the Luxor hotel and casino, and Bennett uses a lot of cash and resources to get a VIP backstage pass to their performance. Merlin Black is in fact Ras-khem-ka, a Nephilim Bennett knew previously in London as Dr. John Dee. Arthur White is the Magister Templi of the Stella Auream, a Rosicrucian society working unwittingly for Black. They will help Bennett seek out his stasis, but there is another complication coming...

THE VIRGEN NEGRA

The gang extorting Bennett all these years is a particularly vicious one, engaged in both human and drug trafficking between northern Mexico and the souther United States. Rumors are that they are run by a woman, called only la Virgen Negra (the Black Madonna). Merlin Black is extremely distressed to hear Bennett has dealings with this gang. He suspects the Black Madonna is not a woman, not human, and not even alive, but an ancient Aztec Selenim operating in the region for centuries. Bennett finds this a shocking coincidence that his life has been entangled with the world of the Nephilim all these years without knowing it. Merlin Black tells him there are no coincidences, and that it time he will understand that his life, and the existence of Temek'Tel (the Moon Nephilim incarnated in him) have been entangled all along.

Returning home that night, Bennett has a visitation from Emily Yang. Dead, nude, and showing her autopsy scars, she hovers inches about the ground staring at him. In Ka vision he sees her shrouded in dark tendrils of Black Moon Ka.

I see you, she says, but it is the Black Madonna doing the talking. 

NEPHILIM: KALIYUGA Session O

IN THE TAROT, the Zero Arcanum is called "the Fool." At gaming tables, "session zero" has become a popular designation for getting the players together, creating characters, and talking about the game before actual play begins. The two concepts dovetail nicely, as the Fool is the card of initiation, of beginning from scratch, of starting from nothing.

Pre-pandemic I was running a Glorantha campaign, but that all went on hold last year, giving me time in the interim to collect that campaign and others into two books. I have never run a game online, and have been extremely resistant to the idea. As a means of sticking a toe into the waters of distance gaming, I decided to run a one-on-one session with one of my regular players. The game we chose was Nephilim.

I have already talked extensively about Nephilim here, here, and here, so I will spare you the introductions and just point you in those directions. Nephilim is one of my favorite pieces of game design in existence, but given its subject matter (and its extreme faithfulness to that subject matter), it is easy to see why many people just didn't "get it." Shams Shirley, one of the co-authors of the English edition, commented after my first Nephilim post;

The Chaosium edition of Nephilim was an alchemical work intended to catalyze gnostic awakening, or to move the (player) closer down that path. Not a great marketing strategy, & prone to misinterpretation because the reader sees into it only to the depth that they are able to understand.

I've had several discussions with Shams about that and I agree: Nephilim is hard to grasp if you come at it from the standard post-modernism of the 21st century. But then again, King Arthur Pendragon is hard to play if you don't understand concepts like chivalry, Call of Cthulhu loses something if you don't embrace the existential dread, and RuneQuest makes less sense if you don't grok the entire Bronze Age mythology approach. Nephilim is asking you to take a step that many find hard to do, namely to embrace the possibility that humans are not the pinnacle of existence, that there is a chain of being, and that humans cannot ascend it without help.

Fortunately that was not going to be an issue with my player, who, like me, is an occultist and an initiate in a Western esoteric tradition. So this time Nephilim was being tackled by two people who speak the language. My mission here, in these blog posts, is to try and make it accessible to everyone else, and show why the game is really not as hard to play as you might have heard.

The Campaign

The first English edition of Nephilim tapped heavily into the "millennialism" of that decade, with the Templar's "Plan" set to culminate in 1999 and waves of Nephilim awakening en masse to stop it. 22 years later, however, we are all still here. Fortunately, there is always an apocalypse somewhere on the horizon. For ours we need look no further than renowned mythologist and Traditionalist René Guénon, who wrote in his  Les Quatre Ages de L’Humanité that the Kali Yuga, the Age of Kali that we currently live in, was due to end in 2030. In this campaign then, The Nephilim were unable to stop the Templars back in 2000, and the Plan has begun. It will reach its climax in 2030, and if the Nephilim cannot stop it before then the world will be lost.

However, at the end of session zero I had the player draw three Tarot cards for the past, present, and future. The final card was, interestingly enough, the Fool. In Nephilim, the Arcanum of the Fool are those Nephilim who believe in the coming of messiahs, beings that are born as Nephilim and do not become Nephilim via incarnation. They acknowledge four; Akhenaton was the Messiah of Air, Moses of Fire, Jesus of Water, and Mohammed of Earth. Rumors haunt occult circles that back in 2000 the fifth and final Messiah, the Moon Messiah, was born and will come into their full power at the age of 30. So the elevator pitch might be:

As the Templar Plan enters its final stages, whispers abound that the Last Messiah walks hidden amongst us. As the circle comes to a close, is it a new beginning, or the end of all that is...

The Character  

When the idea to play Nephilim again came up my first impulse was to run it using Basic Roleplaying and "bolt-on" Nephilim elements. My previous posts had generated a lot of discussion in the gaming community and based on feedback the general consensus was that Nephilim had a lot of moving parts and could stand being streamlined a little. But it had been awhile since I had run it, and so the player and I decided to do it "as is" to make a fresh assessment of the game for ourselves. Going forward I will talk about some of the ideas for streamlining it, and what we ended up going with.

For the campaign, my conception was to run it from the point of view of the 21st century simulacrum. Incarnation occurs and the individual slowly starts remembering past lives and their Nephilim identity. In Basic Roleplaying, I would probably have had the players simply create a modern human character and as past lives came up in the game, add "Life Experience" for that particular period to the sheet. Life Experience already exists in Nephilim. It "is taken once for each historical period in which the Nephilim has lived. It deals with all cultural knowledge of a particular time and place..." (Nephilim, p. 98). My idea was to expand that to cover all skills the Nephilim might have believably learned in that past life. So if the Nephilim had been a medieval knight, horseback riding and the use of a long sword would be covered by the skill too. It would reduce all past life skills to just a couple of skills on the character sheet and eliminate the need for double skill columns (Nephilim and simulacrum).

As I said, we decided to play Nephilim straight up, however, so we created the character the standard way.

The player wanted an Onirim or Moon Nephilim, with a Serpent metamorphosis. We decided to use the Emotional Metamorphosis system from Chronicle of the Awakenings rather than the one in the core rules. With these choice made, the player selected Magician as the character's Arcanum, and we moved on to step 3, "past lives."

The player decided to go with two prior incarnations and we looked at the combined list of available periods from the Gamemaster's Companion for ones in which the Magician Arcanum was active. He decided to go with Thebes, 1350 BC (Akhenaton's Revolution) and London 1590 (The New Camelot). We read the descriptions of each period, which the player really got a kick out of, and followed the instructions in those sections. The first incarnation was a priestess, and he decided to go with Bast for her. The Nephilim's stasis was a statuette, so he made that of Bast as well. Jumping ahead, in London the player rolled an alchemist, and decided to make him Jewish. 

The process of determining past lives is repetitive (find out how old the simulacrum was when incarnation occurred and generate skill points from their age, find out how long they lived as Nephilim and generate occult development points from that) but not difficult, and going through the process made be discard the idea I had had for a Basic Roleplaying adaptation. Reducing all past life experience to a single skill reduces these past incarnations as characters. Taking the time to assign points to their skills fleshes them out, gives them substance, and makes them more real. We both liked the past lives section "as is."

I should note that for the first incarnation in Thebes, the only form of magic available was sorcery, and we decided to use the alternate sorcery system presented in Liber Ka. In the second incarnation, all magic systems were available and the player decided to set a few points into summoning.

The final step is to select the modern incarnation. I compiled a list and added a percentile roll to it to make the process random, while making it clear to the player if he didn't like the result he could roll again or just select.  The result was a doctor, a 42-year old forensic pathologist with a husband and child. He decided to keep the result but switched the gender to male.
 

It is never very difficult to create BRP system characters, and neither of us found Nephilim any exception. The rules are clear, and by the time we were done we felt we had a layered, complex character. The next session then will be about breathing life into it and the world.

     

NEPHILIM, PART THREE

A MAJOR OBSTACLE for many potential Nephilim players and gamemasters was that they simply weren’t sure what to do with it.  Once your Nephilim character was made, what did it actually do?  What are adventuress like?  When my players asked me, I simply quoted Hermes Trismegistus to them; 

“Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

― Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius

Well that clears everything up, doesn’t it.

But really, it does.  Hermes is describing to us the Golden Path, the Road to Agartha.  He is laying out what every Nephilim must aspire to do.  Because “veiled,” “obscure” and “impenetrable” are all good synonyms for “occult” however we can expect it takes a fair bit of deciphering to make sense of it!  Fortunately the original authors already handed us the keys in simple numbers; to reach Agartha you need 90% in a Third Circle Occult Technique, 90 points in your Dominant Ka, 90% in a Hermetic Lore, and 90 points in your Metamorphosis.  With those numbers we can start to make sense of the passage.

“Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem...that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science...”

Mastery in a handful of key skills dates back to RuneQuest, and the requirements for becoming a Rune Lord.  With a wink and a nod, Nephilim is saluting its parent game here.  But Hermes too urges the initiate to seek mastery.  Specifically in game terms four masteries, mastering at least one Hermetic Lore and three circles of an Occult Technique.

To increase their knowledge of the Occult, Nephilim need resources.  They need libraries and laboratories.  They need to seek our rare tomes—the older the better—from private collections and museums.  They need to hunt for artifacts.  This probably requires a fair bit of globe trotting, and adventures that lie somewhere between The Ninth Gate and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Nephilim as “treasure hunters” is probably the most accessible mode of the game for most players.  And don’t forget mundane resources!  It takes money to zoom around the globe, and safe, secure labs and libraries are not cheap.  Entire adventures could be built around Nephilim raising capital to finance their Occult pursuits, putting off nosy reporters, the curious, and dangerous rivals.

“Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal...”

To reach Agartha, a Nephilim must also raise its Dominant Ka to 90.  This is developing its spiritual nature to its very highest potential.  A Ka of 90 is practically a demigod.  Raising skills is a matter of study and having the right materials.  Raising Ka is what we call “initiation.” It only happens through the successful exercise of magical powers.  GMs should always remember to “mix the planes” in a good Nephilim campaign.  In other words, “as above so below,” and even mundane adventures should provide opportunities for magic use, making them also initiations.  The idea of the Symbol and the Veil is critical in the Occult.  A Nephilim doing something as pedestrian as conjuring a breeze to air out a noxious smelling room is, on another level, understanding the Nature of Air as an agent of Change.  In this game, everything has meaning, everything is a symbol of something else.

(F)nd your home in the haunts of every living creature; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave...

A requirement for Agartha is complete Metamorphosis; 90 points must be achieved across five characteristics, marking total union of the Nephilim spirit and the mortal host. Just as a Nephilim needed 90 points of Dominant Ka for Agartha (signifying perfection of spirit), it needed 90 in Metamorphosis to signify perfection of flesh.  “As above, so below. “    Metamorphosis is described as a physical transformation of the host, not the spirit.   

GMs must take care to emphasize the importance of the Simulacrum in their games.  Nephilim pursue the Golden Path because they cannot ascend without the human element; the Simulacrum is a critical element, the base matter, the lead being made into gold.  Outside of a Simulacrum, a Nephilim is an unconscious creature driven by instinct, as we see in both Khaiba and Narcosis.  Identity, Will, Awareness, these are all Solar traits.  Only Incarnated can a Nephilim think and act.  Further it seems clear from Hermes that Solar cyclicity, the way the Sun rises and falls, dies and is reborn, is also part of the Golden Path to Agartha.  For these reasons the Simulacrum is critical to Agartha, and something a wise Nephilim takes good care of.

The Trumps Lovers, Art, and Sun from the Thoth deck, or in Nephilim terms, Incarnation, Metamorphosis, and Agartha

This makes Nephilim something of a super-hero game.  Like Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, or Clark Kent, the Nephilim leads a double life.  The Simulacrum is necessary to it, and a clever gamemaster will spin plots about this.  Does an ex-wife reach out to the Nephilim because their son needs an organ donation or transfusion the Nephilim is a match for?  Does the Simulacrum have a vengeful rival at the office making like difficult for the Nephilim?  Does the Nephilim still maintain its job and social engagements?  Conflicts between esoteric and exoteric matters are at the heart of the game.

...the Pure will be thought insane and the Impure will be honored as Wise.  The Madman will be believed brave and the Wicked esteemed as Good...

― Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius

Come now...you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?

While the Nephilim struggle for the Light, they are surrounded by enemies.  The Templars, Thule Brudershaft, and the Carbonari pursue global schemes of world domination.  The Black Star hunt you for your magic.  In many ways this is a game of Occult espionage, where every government, every corporation, conceals a dread conspiracy.  Assassination, extortion, spying is everywhere.

Or perhaps it is a game of horror.

There is a secret society of things that make vampires look tame...and they have not forgotten the Nephilims’ betrayal.  The Selenim—as cannibalistic ogres, murderous werewolves, soul destroying succubi and the mummified blood-drinking dead—plot revenge in the shadows.  Then there are the Old Ones and their cults, the ancient Saurians, cyclopean Titans double-crossed by the KaIm.  In the deep places of the earth, beneath mountains and seas, they lie dreaming but not dead, waiting for the stars to be right for their return.  Beyond these, the world is full of elemental beings, some monstrous, for the Nephilim to face.

    

NEPHILIM, PART TWO

NOTE:  This is the second part of an ongoing series of articles about Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.  Part One can be found here.

The Hebrew word that is translated as “giants” in the book of Genesis is Nephilim. This word is believed to be derived from Nawphal, “to fall...” Biblical literalists believe that this passage describes a historical event – angels in physical form interbreeding with humans before the time of Noah’s flood...In an esoteric sense, however, these readings are incorrect and miss the point of the passage... The simplest esoteric explanation of the Nephilim story is that it was created to explain the existence of individuals with spiritual or magical abilities...The marriage of Angel and Human that opens the door to greater magical power and understanding...(this) has much in common with a successful marriage, and the “child” brought forth from this union is in fact the magician him or herself, enlightened and perfected...

Scott Michael Stenwick, The Descended Angel

NEPHILIM IS A GAME. This is obvious, but having just spent the previous article showing how Nephilim is a fairly accurate depiction of the Western Mystery Tradition, it needed saying.  A completely authentic game depicting the progress of the Initiate in their quest for gnosis would be monstrously dull indeed!  Thus, while Nephilim's entire core premise--the marriage between a spiritual being and a material one that elevates both--is an honest reflection of Traditional teachings, much of the game arises from the imaginations of its authors and players.

While future entries might further explore the myriad ways Nephilim weaves occultism into its saga of secret societies and elemental entities, I would like here to focus on Nephilim as a game and as, despite what you may have heard, an extremely playable one.  If I have done my work correctly, hopefully by the end you might consider picking up a copy and giving the game a try.

THE MYTHOLOGY

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Following the publication of the first article, a brief conversation with one of the authors of the original French edition, Fabrice Lamidey, confirmed something long suspected and revealed something I had not been aware of.  Namely, that two of the game's literary influences were Umberto Eco's tour de force Foucault's Pendulum, and The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers.  Eco's novel is a favorite of mine; in Tokyo, where space is somewhat limited, most of my novels are now read digitally, but if I turn my head slightly to the right Pendulum sits there proudly beside a few rare others.  It concerns a group of bored Italian editors at a publishing company which opens a vanity press department for writers of occult books.  Reading these insane and conspiratorial manuscripts, the authors start to play a game in which they re-imagine all of human history as a behind the scenes battle between secret societies, and eventually concoct "the Plan," a theory want these societies are after.  The joke is on them, however, when secret societies do start coming out of the woodwork believing these editors have stumbled across their designs.  

I start with Foucault because Nephilim owes so much inspiration to it.  It is, in fact, a game that re-imagines all of human history as behind the scenes battles between secret societies.  Chief amongst these in both the RPG and the Eco novel are the Templars, and in both works the Templar's Plan is strikingly similar.  To set the table for the rest of this essay, then, let's dig into the mythology of the game.

Science is an Illusion, History is a Lie

In the primordial Chaos, the ether, centers of order began to form; the stars.  Our local one was the Sun.  Its life-giving and creative solar energies brought planets into being around it.  Each acted as a sort of lens, transmuting the solar force into something else.  Mercury generated the force of Air; Venus generated the force of Water; Mars generated the force of Fire; Jupiter formed the force of Earth.  Another body, the Moon, generated the Lunar force, and out beyond Jupiter on the edge of the Void a dark force manifested in the form of Saturn.

There are, of course, elements in the classic sense, meaning they have spiritual, celestial, and material correspondences.  Everything in the mythology of Nephilim depends on them.  Certain colors, certain forms of life, certain gems and minerals, days of the week, signs of the Zodiac, etc etc ad infinitum are associated with them.  

The energies of the five planets formed as nexus and a seventh body formed amidst them...Earth.  Too distant, Saturn initially had no influence.  Because the Moon was closest to Earth, the Lunar force was strongest and the dominant life form on the planet was the great reptiles, the Saurian Priest-Kings.  Decadent, alien, sensuous, they created a sorcerous civilization and engaged in all manner of perverse delights.  

Around this time another type of being, formed by conjunctions of the five elemental fields, started to appear.  These were the KaIm, beings of Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, and Water.  When the Saurians conceived of a plan to create a second Moon, a Black Moon that would blot out the hateful Sun and create eternal night for them to bathe in, the KaIm intervened.  The Black Moon exploded, damaging the White Moon so that it would thereafter wax and wane.  Their powers greatly diminished, the Saurian went extinct or into eternal slumber, and the KaIm inherited the Earth.

These beings possessed mastery over the elemental magic fields and could form bodies at will, but they lacked the capacity to evolve, change, and ascend to even greater heights.  This is because they were missing the Solar element.  To rectify this, in their empire paradise of Atlantis they started breeding life forms rich in Solar force.  They had particular success with a species of apes that came to be called "human."

The original plan was to perfect these humans into vessels for the KaIm.  They would fuse their elemental forces with the humans' solar force, uniting higher and lower into a Perfected Being.  Two things went horribly wrong, however.  On one hand, a KaIm known as Prometheus took it upon itself to "awaken" humanity and give them sentience.  On the other, the Black Star fell from the sky.

A comet or meteor from the planet Saturn, it smashed into the KaIm paradise of Atlantis drowning it, and melted into the planet's core.  The dark essence of Saturn infused the metals of the planet, especially iron.  This was a sort of "anti-element" that destroyed the other planetary energies on contact.  The KaIm fell, losing the ability to create bodies and losing their center.  Now subject to mortality, and severely weakened, they called themselves the Nephilim, or Fallen Ones.

Some humans learned how to use the new Saturn-infected metals against the Nephilim, rising up and hunting them.  Some wanted to destroy the Nephilim, others enslave and use them.  Thus the first Secret Societies were born. The weakened Nephilim might have fallen if not for an unexpected and terrible ally...the dread Selenim.

While most Nephilim were experimenting with Solar force and merging with photo-human vessels, a faction led by Lilith became fascinated by the artificial Black Moon element created by the Saurians.  Merging with it and shedding their other planetary energies, they became Selenim, creatures of darkness that devoured living Solar force (just as the Black Moon had been fashioned to eclipse the Sun).  Because the Black Moon was artificial, it was immune to the baleful energies of Saturn.  In the Ice Age caused by the Black Star colliding with the Earth, the Selenim began to hunt humans en masse, ravenous for their Solar life force.  The humans with their Saturnine iron weapons could do nothing against them.

And thus, a bargain was struck.

Humans and Nephilim began to form alliances against the Selenim.  The Nephilim learned how to preserve their spirits in material objects called stases, and could emerge from these to temporarily inhabit specially trained human shamans.  This gave the shamans the Nephilim power of magic, and protection from the Selenim.  In return, periodic incarnation allowed the Nephilim the focus and concentration they needed to pursue spiritual evolution and perhaps escape their fallen state.  Eventually, the Great Compacts was formed, in which the Nephilim were allowed to permanently fuse with certain royal and priestly lines.  These divine priest-kings built civilizations and empires, using their powers to rule over and protect the non-Nephilim human race.  History as we know it began.

Behind the Veil

In Nephilim, all of human history is a secret war between the Nephilim and the secret societies. Every major event veils a "true history" behind it.  The pharaoh Akhenaton, for example, was not a mortal king revolting against Egyptian priesthoods; he was a Nephilim revolutionary who shattered the Great Compact and defined 22 paths to Agartha, the transcendent, perfected state in which the Nephilim reclaims not just the lost powers of the KaIm but access to higher planes of being as well.  He carved these into 22 Emerald Tablets, the Major Arcana of the Tarot, each of which became a society of Nephilim, a tribe.  

Against these are the human secret societies, the most dangerous of which are the Templars.  These are not the crusader knights of human history--that was just an exoteric manifestation--but a society with its roots in ancient Egypt bent on enslaving the Nephilim and seizing control of the magic fields generated at the center of the Earth.  Some societies seek to use the Nephilim, some to serve them, others to bind them...but all are distractions and obstacles on the Nephilim's True Path.

Playing the Game

That "True Path" and the singular focus of the Nephilim is Agartha.  It involves raising one's elemental energies to the highest levels, mastering fields of occult knowledge and magical techniques, and well as completing the fusion of the spirit and the host into a single, united whole.  The few able to complete this find the doors of higher reality opened to them; they become immortal again, with mastery over the magic fields.  This makes Nephilim that rare RPG with an actual endgame.

The heart of a Nephilim campaign lies in getting there, however.

In a typical campaign, you create a character by choosing the spirit's elemental focus--is it an Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, or Water Nephilim--and one or more past lives.  Since their Fall, disembodied Nephilim do not experience the passage of time, have no sense of space, no real "consciousness," and cannot interact with the material world.  Worse, their elemental energies degrade over time until they cease to exist.  Thus each Nephilim needs a stasis, an enchanted artifact or object that holds its slumbering spirit between incarnations.  When the planets are right, it awakens and unites with a nearby human host.  If that host dies of old age or some other cause before Agartha, the Nephilim returns to stasis and tries again later.  These previous attempts are then the past lives.

When the Nephilim awakens again at the start of the campaign, it incarnates in a human host.  This host, the simulacrum, experiences a mystical awakening, a moment of revelation.  John Smith the English banker suddenly realizes he is also Orogariel the Phoenix, a Pyrim (fire Nephilim).  He is still John Smith--he knows his wife Miriam and his two children, he remembers his entire life--but now he also remembers being Memtet the ancient Egyptian charioteer, Iulian the Carolingian knight, and Sir Richard Stone, the student of John Dee.  He remembers their lives and inherits many of their skills and abilities.  More importantly, he remembers how to do magic, and because of his new elemental powers, is able to make it work.

What happens next is up to the player, the GM, and the campaign.  Does John Smith remain with his wife and family, conducting his search for Agartha on the side?  Does he slowly separate from them in an amicable divorce?  Does he simply vanish into thin air?  This is in the hands of the player; only they know if John's love for his wife and children is more important to the new Nephilim that Agartha.  The game does not dictate this.  Each player navigates the dual identities of the character.  

This is not a bug, it is a feature.  It is not unlike a comic book; how does Peter Park balance his relationship with MJ and Aunt May along with the duties of being Spider-man?

The Possession Problem...Again

Ah! Mr. Waite, the world of Magic is a mirror, wherein who sees muck is muck.

Aleister Crowley, The Goetia

Despite the above, there will always be a potential player or two who chooses to see incarnation as "possession."  Initiation is not for everyone, neither is Nephilim.  The world of the occult is a mirror that shows us ourselves.  If you look into it and see evil and the Devil, perhaps what you are really seeing is a Fundamentalist religious background you were raised with.  If you look at the Nephilim and see body-hijacking, possession, and rape...perhaps there are issues you should first deal with that a game cannot cure.

For most players, though, it is easy to get around this.

1. Meet Dax.  Around the same time Nephilim appeared to an English-speaking audience, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine audiences were introduced to Jadzia Dax.  Jadzia was a young woman fused with an alien symbiont, Dax.  Captain Ben Sisko had known Dax before in a previous host, Curzon.  Over the course of the show, we learn all about the symbiont's previous hosts, and see Jadzia die and Dax implanted in a new character, Ezri.  Each host is different, but has all the memories and abilities of its previous hosts.  This complex character is the perfect analogue for how to deal with a Nephilim character.  Have the potential player revisit the show.

2. Meet Castiel.  In the horror-drama Supernatural, protagonists Sam and Dean Winchester ally with an angel, Castiel.  Spirit beings, angels do not have bodies of their own, he has incarnated in a human host, Jimmy Novak.  This is something Novak prayed for, however.  He wanted union with Castiel.  If this helps the player, simply have the Simulacrum being a willing host.  Perhaps they are an aspiring magician who located a Nephilim stasis and awoke the spirit hoping for incarnation to occur.

3. A Second Chance.  Something I have used in previous Nephilim games is incarnation as a second chance.  One player decided his simulacrum was a human on the edge of committing suicide when the incarnation occurred and gave him a new purpose and meaning in life.  Another, and my favorite, was my college girlfriend, who created a simulacrum who was a seventy-five-year old dementia patient abandoned by her family in a retirement home.  Sitting in the same chair alone, day after day, she is reborn when an Air Nephilim comes to her and for the first time in years she gets up and walks out of the hospital.  Incarnation can be a blessing, not a curse.         

4. Feels Like The Very First Time.  Perhaps the easiest way around discomfort is for this to be the Nephilim's first incarnation.  Nephilim are born in the nexus of planetary energies...perhaps a new-formed Nephilim blindly incarnates in banker John Smith.  Suddenly John starts developing weird senses and magical abilities, but has no sense of being anyone else.  There are no past lives to remember.  Eventually he stumbles across the world of the Nephilim, joins one of the 22 Arcana, has his first stasis made, and selects a Nephilim name for himself. 

These fixes should open the game to just about anyone, but there will still be some for whom the human is the end-all and be-all.   Perhaps they can play a human ally of the Nephilim?  Though of this, I suppose Frater Perdurabo would say;

A Sorcerer by the power of his magick had subdued all things to himself. Would he travel? He could fly through space more swiftly than the stars. Would he eat, drink, and take his pleasure? there was none that did not instantly obey his bidding. In the whole system of ten million times ten million spheres upon the two and twenty million planes he had his desire. 

 And with all this he was but himself. 

 Alas!

Crowley, The Book of Lies, Chapter 27

In the next part, we will look in depth at what a Nephilim campaign might look like, and how a typical scenario might go.

NEPHILIM, PART ONE

NOTE: This is just the first in a series of essays examining Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.  This time we look at the core concepts and some of the controversy around them.  Next time, we will look at the game universe in greater detail.

GIVING THE GAME ITS DUE

TO DATE the most popular articles on this blog have been the occult ones. This probably comes as a surprise to those who have joined me more recently as the focus has shifted largely to gaming.  My series on Andrew Chumbley's Azoetia, the basic principles of Hermetic thought, and even traditional witchcraft come out slightly ahead of even the most-read game reviews (to date, the stunning new edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep).  Conceptually, I don't disassociate magic, writing, or gaming however, so the recent refocusing hasn't been that much of a sea change in my mind.  

I mention this though because if you do the math, the bulk of the traffic here has been either for occultism or Chaosium games.  So it is somewhat astounding looking back that I never actually got around to dealing with the work that unites those two streams.  It becomes particularly shocking if I admit truthfully that in the (un)holy trinity of my favorite games, Chaosium's Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying might actually be slightly nearer and dearer to my heart than either RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu.  

A BIT OF BACKGROUND

It's probably inaccurate to lump Nephilim in with the host of "urban fantasy" RPGs that flooded the market in the wake of Vampire: The Masquerade. Many critics do, but the fact remains the original French edition of Nephilim was published in 1992, not even a year after the 1991 publication of Vampire, and Vampire was not quite yet the phenomenon it would become. Given its quasi-Biblical subject matter and country of origin, it is far more likely that Nephilim owed more to 1989's In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas than any World of Darkness title. 

Chaosium's edition appeared in 1994, and was part of a new trend of translating European games into English (both Kult and The Mutant Chronicles had appeared in English the year before). Multisim, the publisher of the original, had licensed Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying System so it was natural for Chaosium to be the ones to bring the game to the States. However, this was a year after Mage: The Ascension had hit the shelves, and it was an easy assumption to make that Chaosium was just trying to ride its coattails. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however. Yes, you can look at the two games as magician protagonists waging secret wars behind the facade of everyday reality, but the two games are as different as day and night (or rather, Postmodernism and Tradition). Mage, with its "reality is whatever you make it" approach was the ultimate vehicle for a pluralistic, self-referential, epistemologically relative age. It had far more in common with Dr. Strange or The Invisibles than anything even vaguely resembling real life occultism. Nephilim, however, was immersed in the "Tradition."  The game was a love letter to perennial philosophy.    

Despite being a monster hit in France, Nephilim never quite managed the same sort of popularity dans le monde anglophone. There are complicated reasons for this. Shannon Appelcline, in his terrific Designers & Dragons (and this is the point where yet again I urge anyone seriously interested in the hobby to get and read that series of books) puts much of the blame of the fact that the English edition was rushed to print too early and poorly supported in its first year. This is probably true--Shannon was there in the midst of it and knows better than I--but being the guy who bought the rules the moment they hit my local game store, and started running it soon after, my experience was that Nephilim ultimately was the victim of its own authenticity. 

THE PROTAGONIST PROBLEM

Mage was an easy sell to a modern Western public.  "You wake up one day and realize that the world is what we make it and humans have the potential to be gods."  This is, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much the entire message of the 20th century.  Don't get me wrong, I like Mage, but it does seem designed to stroke our Postmodern human egos.

Nephilim was a far harder sell.  "You are an element spirit that fell from grace, and in order to re-ascend to perfection needs to merge with a human host, uniting the lower and higher worlds."  The player characters in Nephilim are technically not the humans but the spirits.  I say "technically"--and I firmly believe this was a crucial misunderstanding of the game--but the fact remains in the world of Nephilim humanity isn't the center of the universe.  In its struggle to attain Agartha (the transcendent perfected state) your Nephilim character has reincarnated in as many as a half dozen human hosts down through history.  The spirit needs the human, who possesses the vital solar essence that the spirit lacks, but humans are pretty much the junior partner. This doesn't quite masturbate the ego of the human player in the same way Mage does!

On the other hand, the core principle of the game is accurate to the Western Mystery Tradition, which has always held that humanity cannot save itself.  Bound to the animal world of matter, only those who form a partnership with a higher spiritual power can become inhuman and ascend to higher reality;  

...The mutation of one’s deepest structure is the only thing that matters for the purposes of higher knowledge. This knowledge, which is at the same time wisdom and power, is essentially nonhuman; it can be achieved by following a way that presupposes the active and effective overcoming of the human condition... 

Julius Evola, Introduzione alla Magia 

To this end the Tradition has long embraced the principle of uniting with an alien, spiritual being;  

(there) is an auxiliary divine, or semi-divine (daimônic) spirit...called a παραδρoç in Greek. Such auxiliary spirits were permanently attached to the magician after certain rites were performed, not just for the duration of the operation, but for life. In such an instance, the magician is thought to gain a certain kind of union with that entity—to become a “son” of that god or daimôn. The essence of the magician and that of the entity have become, or are becoming, one. This is why the magician can himself be worshiped as god or daimôn... 

Stephen Flowers, PhD, Hermetic Magic 

By the Renaissance, in Christianized Europe the idea of "semi-divine" spirits had become associated with the Biblical Nephilim, or "fallen ones."  Discussed in far greater detail in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, they nevertheless get several mentions in the Bible from Genesis forward.  Essential, they are half-human half-angelic entities, the Jewish equivalent of demigods like Heracles or Jason.  Hermeticism--a form of the Tradition born in Hellenic Alexandria in the first centuries after Christ--attributed to these Nephilim all of the arts and sciences, including magic (again, this is in the Book of Enoch as well).  

The Nephelim (sic), the "fallen" angels, are nothing less than the titans and "the watchers," the race that the Book of Baruch (3:26) calls, "glorious and warlike," the same race that awoke in men the spirit of the heroes and warriors, who invented the arts, and who transmitted the mystery of magic. What more decisive proof concerning the spirit of the hermetico-alchemical tradition can there be than the explicit and continuous reference in the texts precisely to that tradition? We read in the hermetic literature "The ancient and sacred books," says Hermes, "teach that certain angels burned with desire for women. They descended to earth and taught all the works of Nature. They were the ones who created the [hermetic] works and from them proceeds the primordial tradition of this Art... 

Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition 

These Hermetic precepts form the core of the Nephilim RPG. A race of spirit beings, fallen from on high, teach humanity all arts and sciences, guide human civilization, and merge with certain mortals to form half-human half-spiritual beings.  To achieve perfection, the spirit and its host slowly merge together through as process called Metamorphosis.  The human and spirit overcome their conditions and become something inhuman, something higher.  An Agarthan.  All of this is perfectly correct from the standpoint of the Western Mystery Tradition.

In the eyes of many potential players, however, humans became mere "flesh vehicles" for the body-hopping Nephilim.  That this spectacularly misses the point is lost on a generation of Postmodern thinkers for whom "esoteric" means "out there" (it literally means "in there") and mystical is some nebulous concept.  The goal of the Nephilim is the "chemical wedding," to become one with its human host, and from the timeless and transcendent perspective of Agartha, they thus always were one.  This is the message of the very last page of the book, which closes with a quote from the Sufi mystic and poet Jalal al-din Rumi;

The moment I heard my first love story, I starting looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.  They're in each other all along.

Nephilim was not, as some critics felt, "body rape" but rather a love story.  But from a modernist perspective, games where humans become blood-sucking corpses, werewolves, ghosts, mages, and mummies are all well and good...so long as it remains all about the human condition.  Suggest there might be something higher or beyond the human condition, and sales suffer.

ENOCHIAN MAGIC: THE CRY OF TEX, THE 30TH AETHYR

NOTE: This is the first in a series of Enochian inspired visions.  Please read this Introduction before proceeding.

I FELL, upwards from the face of the world.  Up, up, up amongst the wheeling stars I plummeted into the night sky.  I saw the constellations moving around me like living beings of pale, blue-white fire.  Pegasus, Draco, and Scorpio moved by me.  Then I saw great wheels all around, tracing out the courses of the stars and planets.  It was as if I found myself in some great astrolabe of crystal.  Earth was at the center, around which all the heavens turned.

Then it seemed to me my eyes adapted to the dimness, for everywhere about me I could now see turning gears of transparent glass.  They were impossibly ornate, like the rose windows of a cathedral, or snowflakes.  They all moved in harmony with each other, the motion of one affecting the next, and thus maintaining the motions of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, as well as the turning of the Earth.  

Suddenly I saw the Angels all about me, everywhere.  Like ants they swarmed.  I perceived they were the engineers, maintaining the system of crystalline gears ceaselessly, diligently.  Everywhere they flew.  One of their countless number passed near me and I hailed him to stop.

He was fashioned of the same pale blue fire as the gears, but liquid and less dense.  He flamed and flickered like the blue of a gas flame.  Winged and robed, he bore no halo.  He was immaterial and ghostly.  Turning towards me he demanded my name.

SOMUE, I told him.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Ah, said he, a Thelemite.  Then I say unto thee ‘Love is the Law, Love under Will.’

Cautious I gave the LVX signs to see if he was a hostile spirit, but he returned them with ease.  I asked him his name.

I am ZAAMPE, he replied.  I asked him to spell this for me and he did.  Then to me he asked, Why come you to this place?

I wish to walk all the Aethyrs, seeking the First.  What can you tell me of this Aethyr?

This is TEX, the Machinery of the Universe.  This is the densest of the Aethyrs, and most like unto the material world.

I recognized the phrasing.  Machinery of the Universe?  Is its character like Yesod, then?

Only distantly, he answered.  Man makes machinery of the world…machines of the animals, of the soil, of nature itself.  It is a defect in perception, seeing only half of what is.  TEX is the understanding of the Universe possessed by Man.

I considered this.  It is then only Man’s perception of the Universe, not its true character?

This Aethyr is shaped by the perceptions of those billions down below, he replied, gesturing towards the blue-green globe of the Earth hanging in the center of the void around us.  This is the machine of their making, as indeed they make we who work upon it.

What is the true nature of TEX, then?  I asked.  Can you reveal it to me?

At this, the Angel took up a great hammer.  His face suddenly bunched up in fury he swung the weapon in a great arc, shattering the closest gear.  A chain reaction spread through all the heavens.  The countless wheels screamed and shattered in a rain of jagged glass.  One by one the stars burst and faded to blackness.  The planets crumbled.  The Earth went dark.  All that was left was a desolate darkness, through which a wind howled and moaned.  

This is the true nature of things, from whence they come and to which they return.  The Void, the Angel told me.

I shivered in the darkness.  Are we to fear this?

You are to Understand and Embrace it, said the Angel.  Only this way can you cross the Abyss when that time comes to you.  The Machinery of the Universe, made by Man, with its calendars and clocks and laws is Illusion.

Suddenly, the darkness was lifted, and I beheld the stars and planets again.  The gears were back in place, restored by the angels.  They had dutifully repaired the machine.

Can you tell me any more of the nature of TEX?  I asked him.

I can only show you, he replied.  He took me by the hand and we fell downwards into the world, falling through the atmosphere and clouds, until I saw racing beneath us snow-capped mountain peaks.  So high were these jagged mountains that they seemed to touch the very sky. 

Then, on the highest of the high peaks, I beheld a terrifying figure in silhouette.  He was impossibly tall, looking like one of those towering mecha from Japanese animation, with massive, outstretched wings like an eagle and great horns upon his head.  He stood motionless on the mountain, arms reaching up like Atlas to support the sky.  We landed at his feet, tiny, like ants.

This is the essence of the Plane, the soul of TEX, my Guide informed me.

Then a great voice, like thunder or the roar of a titanic engine, boomed out.  MORTAL THING.  INSIGNIFICANCE.  COME FORWARD AND KNOW ME.  LAY YOUR PUNY HAND UPON MY FOOT IN OBEISANCE.

I did as he bade me, stepping forward through the deep drifts of snow.  I felt ridiculously small as I approached his massive right foot.  I saw now that his body was made of rusting iron plates, all haphazardly riveted together, piece by piece.  As I reached out to touch this Machine God, the rusted iron crumbled beneath my fingers.  The crumbling spread, and soon the entire statue was raining down upon me in jagged pieces and iron dust.  I caught one fragment in my hand.  The Eye of Horus was etched into the metal, inside a Triangle.  

That which ceases to move becomes stagnant, my Guide whispered in my ear.  Subject to entropy and decay.

As the great juggernaut disintegrated, the sky came crashing down with it.

September 30th, 2004