Friday 7 February 2020

283 - Dead Archetypes

Unnatural Phenomenon: Dead Archetypes

Not all archetypes are able to be deposed by new ones. The Mother, the Warrior, some symbols are too primal and universal to brook alteration. Others avoid removal not because they're intrinsic to the human condition but because there's no replacement for them, instead they end up culturally superseded and slowly fade from view. Arguably this is worse.

You can't kill an idea, but you can certainly kill a person and ultimately that's what archetypes were and can be again. The House of Renunciation serves as an outlet for the usurpee but nothing exists to clean up after the god that no one believes in anymore.

Left moldering in the crawlspace of reality these carcasses bear strange fruit. It is the confirmed source of at least one Otherspace (a surprisingly idyllic meatscape populated by extremely pious mosquito-person aesthetes) and the theoretical precursor to the Linguistic Void. As unnatural resources the idea of harnessing an archetype's pussiannce is too mouthwatering for many to maintain scruples for long.

One suspiciously well-funded parapsychology department owes its success to pragmatic metaphysical graverobbing. A team of careful anthropologists, psychologists, archaeologists and one former godwalker of the Magus have already dug up something and drained all the magical juice they could out of it with cold iron electrodes. Now they're hot on the trail of a second orphaned archetype, traipsing through the heart of South America after rumours that one of the old religions holds clues to where they might find it. Cat and mouse games with a militaristic rival cabal led by their original founder threaten to spill the beans to the Occult Underground at large. Both assume and hope that's where the interference they've run up against is coming from, the possibility that their quarry might be stirring is something neither wants to contemplate.

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