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The following is a leaked draft for a never-published Occult Underground sourcebook. It appearedon rpg.net when it became apparent that the line was dead.I have removed the name of the poster in order to avoid causing him trouble.04-04-2006 08:18 AM
Re: (Unknown Armies) Is the line defunct?
 Wow, I still have my preliminary drafts for a never-finished Occult Underground book around - well,since the line's dead, here we go, complete with comments by Ken, John, Greg, and Chad.The History of the UndergroundIn one sense, the Occult Underground has been around ever since humans first began to hide secretsfrom each other; secrets of power, secrets of sex, secrets of death, sometimes even secrets of wisdom. From the dark rituals of the bear caves to the backroom executions of the New Inquisition,the essential quality of the Underground has always been its hidden nature, its dependence upon theshadows.At the same time, however, the Underground can be defined more sharply. The simple existence of the supernatural did not create the Underground; rather, it is a very specific subculture of the West; born in Rome and now chiefly found in the United States. Magicians, Avatars, secret groups seeking power; these exist everywhere, but outside of the West they have, historically, interacted with eachother and the rest of society in very different ways to those of the Underground. The history of theUnderground, therefore, is inevitably tied up with Western culture.Just as certain places and times seem peculiarly conducive to art, philosophy, and music, so havesome times been better for the Underground than others. The Underground depends on a supply of new adepts - avatars have always been a lesser element – and the cultural conditions under whichmore people become adepts are quite specific. Magick depends on a deep-seated belief in the power of the individual, a conviction that the will of one person can change the world around him, and soadepts flourish when the society around them allows for individualism, opportunity, and adventure.Times when the world itself seems to be changing, and politics, science, or exploration opens up newworlds, have also been critical periods for the Underground; when anything is possible, so is magick.Total disintegration of society destroys the Underground, however; there’s not the infrastructure tosupport adepts, and people who feel powerless aren’t open to the possibility of magick. (A short period of desperation, however, especially when a more prosperous society is close by, drives peopleto extremes; the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Irish potato famine both produced a largenumber of new adepts.) The Underground thrives with enough chaos to keep things interesting, andenough order to prevent it all from falling apart. Its great times have always been in cities; Rome,London, New York, Chicago - the Underground is fundamentally an urban creation. While adeptsoften come from the countryside, where isolation and insularity often makes the break fromconventional reality easier to make, many gravitate to the cities like rats or chain stores once theyrealise where the action is.One thing the Underground has never been, however, is innovative. Magick is not a creative force; itfollows behind and imitates, and the Underground is such a small and hidden sub-culture that it hashad a relatively small influence on the rest of society. Even movements like spiritualism, theosophy,and Wicca, which have had some influence on mainstream society, originated outside of, and were
 
only peripherally involved with, the Underground. The power of magick often depends on the values,however twisted, of a particular school being in some degree important to society; a school which is‘ahead of the times’ makes very little sense. Occultists also tend to be a conservative group.Whereas normal people are often forced out of entrenched habits by the rest of society moving on,occultists exist within, to some extent, their own little world, and their worldviews are often so tiedup with one viewpoint that when the world moves on, they’re left behind. There also seems to be anatural feeling among the kind of people who are interested in the occult - though not necessarilyamong adepts themselves - that old equals better. Familiarity, comfort, nostalgia, and mentalcommitment to an outdated way of doing things means that a goodly percentage of the Undergroundis always out of touch, and ripe for being overthrown by a new generation of hot young adepts - whowill themselves be the calcified conservatives within twenty years time. As the pace of social andtechnological change speeds up, this process of outdating and overthrow has got ever faster; withthe solitary exception of the Sleepers, all the major current organisations within the Underground,from the New Inquisition to Max Attax, were founded within the last ten years. I thought I’d writtenmajor here already … good catch.The Mystery CultsSerious scholars of magick are pretty rare; credible ones are rarer. Establishing anything about thehistory of magick is tough, because of its secret and paradoxical nature, and crackpot theoriesabound. The one thing that most theoreticians seem to agree on is that the first glimmerings of magick come with the mystery cults, organisations dedicated to the worship and emulation of a particular Archetype of the Invisible Clergy. How exactly they started is as contentious as the originsof religion as a whole, and everything from primitive humans chanting in bloody primal homage toWar through to Babylonian hive-minds and the rarefied rites of Egyptian pharaohs has beenimagined.However they began, the mystery cults were always secretive, though known, organisations. Their attitude towards the Archetypes they followed was deeply religious, unlike the rather more pragmaticapproach of many modern Avatars. The first clear indication of the existence of the cults is in ancientGreece, where initiation into various mysteries was a strong element of Hellenic culture. Themysteries of Demeter, goddess of fertility, were especially prominent, and occult historians expresslittle surprise at this, stroking their moustaches and mentioning the Mother, most likely the firstArchetype of the Clergy.These mysteries weren’t simply about being an Avatar; the earliest schools of magick were formedunder the aegis of the cults, much as Pornomancy today is based around the worship of the NakedGoddess. The Cult of the Naked Goddess is very similar to the mystery cults, the chief difference being, perhaps, that the Cult wishes to spread the faith, rather than keeping Her wisdom restricted toa chosen few – although they have found themselves smacked down fairly hard by the Sleepers andthe New Inquisition. (For other mystery cults operating today, see page XX)XXX INSERT BOXED TEXT XXXTestimony: Deirdre Lauren Cook Witch and Pornomancer In the beginning, all magic flowed from the Goddess. She was worshipped throughout the world, inall Her glorious aspects; fire, wood, water, stone, love, fertility, strength. Her rule was administrated by a benevolent hierarchy of priestesses, who dealt out justice, worked magic, and administrated[[(sic)?]] [Yeah, I was aiming for the rather earnest and clumsy style of bad Wiccan writing] her Order. Great stone circles and burial mounds were raised to her, and the land was at harmony.
 
But there were certain men who were not happy under her rule, and they conspired against theGoddess. They found new ways of working magic, perverted, power-hungry ways, and they rose upagainst her priesthood and destroyed the Natural Order. Women became dominated by men, and theland was twisted. Consequently, She retreated from our world, unhappy at the desecrations wrought by Her Children upon Her Body, the Earth.But now She has sent us a new Avatar, the Naked Goddess, shown in all Her true glory. Onlythrough the worship of the Goddess can we restore the land. Only through Her can true peace andharmony come again!XXX END BOXED TEXT XXXThe Glory That Was RomeThe powers of the mystery cults were partially responsible for the continuing prominence of ancientGreece, and Alexander the Great’s knowledge of the secrets of the Clergy aided him in becomingGodwalker of the Conqueror, his attempt at ascension stopped only at the last moment through a‘chance’ illness. Eventually, though, Greece was conquered by the newly powerful civilisation of Rome. Some occult historians put this down to the Romans having a better perception of theArchetypes than the Greeks, but it seems more likely that individual mystic wisdom, and sometimeseven power, was no match for Roman discipline and military skill. A couple of decades beforehand,the Carthaginian cults, dependent on a constant bloody stream of human sacrifice [this is probablytrue, even if the infant sacrifice stuff isn’t], had proved equally unable to withstand the better organisation and sheer persistence of the Romans during the horrendously bloody Punic wars.The Romans, however, went on to eagerly absorb Greek culture, slavishly imitating Greek  philosophy, art, and religion, and with these, inevitably, came the mystery cults As Rome expanded,new cults arrived from foreign cultures, particularly from Egypt and Persia. Perhaps the mostimportant of these was the worship of Mithras, a god of war, which was hugely prominent in thearmy, the foundation stone of Roman civilisation. His mysteries combined several archetypes - War,the Masterless Man, and the Martyr - and many a Roman commander had cause to be grateful for their aid.The cult of Isis was also prominent, but noted mainly for its popularity among somewhat gulliblemiddle-aged Roman matrons. The cults of Horus and Thoth were sometimes followed by those moreinterested in sorcery (and those interested in impressing young women by their ‘ancient Egyptianwisdom’, a line that dukes use to get laid even today), but the most powerful magicians, however,were part of the cult of Cybele, a Syrian goddess whose worshippers castrated themselves in sexualecstasy, as part of their initiation into the mysteries of the Mystic Hermaphrodite.The Birth of the UndergroundBy the 1st century BC, Rome had become the first modern city, a teeming metropolis of half amillion people or more. As the Roman Republic crumbled, the chaos and conspiracies around itsdrawn-out death inevitably drew in the Mystery Cults. Among the violence, sex, and intrigue, withinstitutions collapsing and individual leaders becoming ever more prominent, some unknownmagician made the breakthrough from magick based around the imitation of a god to magick  powered entirely by the force of his own will.Exactly what this first non-Avatar based school of magick was, nobody knows, but the big threesoon popped up (as well as numerous smaller schools); magick based on sex, magick based onmoney, magick based on the body. Roman magicians practised them in very different ways frommodern-day adepts. Their equivalent of plutomancy, for instance, was based not on acquisition, but
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