[UA] The Unknown Truth version 1

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

> What follows is a bit of cosmology that I've been working on for a series of
> short stories and maybe a novel. It's obviously been adapted to the
> UnAverse.
>
> Mystical power, or energy, was once very free flowing. It was an omnipresent
> force on the world, like a blanket that covered the earth. With time,
>

...


> Here's a second idea. This is a rehash of a game that I wrote with a friend
> of mine by the name of Jon. The game's called Enigma.
>
> There are three primary forces in the world. Chaos, Order and Creation.
> Chaos and Order are pretty obvious. They tear down, they build up. Left
> alone, they form symnetry. Enter Creation. Creation is the force that
> separates the other two. It creates a space between order and chaos that
> allow for development.
>

Writing like this is all well and good on the UA list, but we should
keep in mind that the whole point of a "postmodern magic" system is to
eliminate any Werewolf-esque cosmological dogma.  Both of these are
valid descriptions of a magical cosmology... but the whole point of
being an adept is that you aren't bound by any of these rules.  UA is
all about that moment where the hermetic adept, convinced that the
symbolism of his opponent's magical power and role in the story
delineate him as a force of Order, he pops up and starts singing TV
jingles and shooting flaming feces from his fingers.  To paraphrase the
guy from Army of Darkness: "Order, Chaos, Creation... I'm the guy with
the gun."  That, IMHO, is what UA is all about.

In fact, I'm even wary of having something like the Clergy.  I suppose
that one can argue that having a mindshare in the collective unconscious
gives your actions some power, regardless of any other magical rules.
And maybe what's cool is that, as the Clergy changes, the rules of magic
start to change.  All the old hermetic crap worked great as long as
everyone Up There (in the S-Sphere) relied on the same mythos, the same
universal symbols of meaning that have evolved in alomst all cultures in
the world... but as the old patterns of meaning became garbled by
cultural collisions, the rules of magic (and reality) became
inconsistent and out of whack.  There might be adepts out there who
exploit misreadings of religious texts to work their magic, like
rennaissance artists who painted bibilical figures in doing weird things
that were actually mistranslations or typos in local bibles.  In fact,
that might make a really interesting school of magic in and of itself,
or maybe just an idea for a cryptomancer... gaining power through
exploiting common misperceptions.

Matt Norwood
Flaming fecal fountain




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