What You Want

[Joe Iglesias]

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Stacy Stroud wrote:

I'm going to quote a whole lot of this, because Stacy's said it much
better than I could:

> Hmm.  I've been trying to figure out the secrecy angle myself.  I'm
> actually more comfortable with the "Claws of the Tiger" motivation for
> everyone to be informally secretive than with the existence of a group like
> the Sleepers that actively enforces secrecy.  I like the fact that the
> occult underground is not a secret society with rules to enforce its hidden
> nature, but a subculture in which everyone's personal reasons for keeping
> secrets lead to the whole thing being more-or-less hidden from the populace
> at large.
> 
> This may be another case of my being influenced unduly by Tim Powers (who
> doesn't seem to have *any* evident secrecy-enforcement mechanisms in his
> modern-occult setting), but I'd even venture that the underground isn't so
> much secret as merely obscure.  Being a clued-in occultist is like being a
> really serious gamer, or comics fan, or member of some other weird
> subculture.    You have your own celebrities and events that you keep track
> of and talk about, and there's not really any active effort to conceal
> those things from anyone who's interested.  It's that interest factor
> itself that's the barrier.  Most people just don't *care* to know what you
> know, and a subcultural celebrity like John Tynes just doesn't get the
> media coverage of John Grisham, however talented we may believe him to be.
> Of course, gamers and comics fans don't have actual supernatural powers for
> the mundanes to covet.  But by the UA rules, anyone with actual powers (an
> adept or an avatar) is pretty much required to be sufficiently eccentric as
> to be unacceptable in polite society -- and the more obvious the powers,
> the tighter the behavioral restrictions.  So either you function in society
> by keeping your eccentricities *and* powers well hidden, or you're
> sufficiently odd that no one takes you seriously anyway.  Remember, even in
> the real world, plenty of people claim to be able to work actual magic, and
> even more have had at least an isolated encounter with something they
> perceived as "unnatural."  Unless you willingly become part of the
> subculture, you're never going to see enough to prove anything beyond doubt.
> 
> >From this I would also draw the corollary (which certainly seems true in
> Powers' world, though I don't know if Stolze and Tynes intend it to be so
> in the UnAverse) that the occult underground is much larger than most of
> the secret supernatural groups found in other RPGs.  Of course, the
> population drops off steeply as you measure greater and greater levels of
> clued-in-ness.  But there are lots of people somewhere in the fringe.  Of
> course, that far out, most of them may well fervently deny that they belong
> to the same subculture as any of the others, who all have radically
> different beliefs and agendas.  There are probably real magickal adepts who
> know nothing of the existence of schools other than their own, or who know
> of magick but not of the archetypes.  Undoubtedly there are those who are
> following (accidentally or on purpose) the path of one archetype, and have
> that path sussed out pretty well, but know nothing of the Invisible Clergy
> as a group.  There are people know they have powers, but who attribute them
> to the wrong source (like the theurgists posted here recently, or Rebecca
> DeGhoule).  There are many, many ways to be "clueless" and still dangerous,
> even on the magickal front.
> 
> So, basically, there are many points on the spectrum between clueless and
> clued-in, and there are probably a lot more people somewhere on that
> spectrum than would really be recognized by the "real" practitioners at the
> high end.  A lot of the people who are considered complete mundanes are in
> fact relatively clueless folks who have come up with their own ways of
> classifying and dealing with whatever weirdness they might have come across
> in their lives, whether than explanation involve an alien abduction
> experience or the tenets of some mainstream religion.

Yes, exactly.  I thought that the secrecy in the UA-verse was more of an
"organic" conspiracy than a concerted effort.  There isn't any one (or
two, or three) monolithic groups of Adepts in Smoke-Filled Rooms
micromanaging every occult manifestation like you get in some versions of
the World of Darkness.  I'm surprised that so many people seem to find
this counterintuitive.

Is this a result of reading Tim Powers, I wonder?

Joe
---
"I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite
space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
Howling lunacy here: http://members.xoom.com/McGuffins/