The Multifoliate Soul

 

The Multifoliate Soul by Dr. Siddharth Mukerji is the recommended introductory textbook to manesology textbook by the Carnacki Foundation and the textbook Martin’s School uses for its introductory manesology class. Though Old Adam prefers to teach his class by starting with early manesological texts from the 19th century to demonstrate to students how the science of manesology has evolved from its beginnings, the Curriculum Officers have determined from data and simulations that it would be best for student test scores to start the class at the end of manesology instead of the beginning. Tests typically ask what a certain theory is, not how that certain theory developed. There was also the concern over sensitive topics raised by the texts in question–Dr. Plaras received many phonecalls about passages that speculated on whether or not different races produced different qualities of souls.

 

Old Adam has revised his curriculum and has moved its historical context to a new history class–The Historical Development of Manesology. It’s a popular elective. The students like looking at “forbidden texts,” especially when they confirm their suspicions that old people have no idea what they’re talking about.

 

The Multifoliate Soul takes its title from the conclusion of Dr. Matthew Ernst’s 1863 academic paper The Analysis Of Manes, which argued against the prevailing view of the time that the behavior of manes was influenced by the environment around them.

 

“Manes are complex, fascinating beings. We have exhausted the wealth of man’s folkloric knowledge to describe them and still we can describe them only obliquely. The multifoliate rose of Dante, seating the souls of heaven upon its many petals, comes closest, I believe, for each manes is, as has been demonstrated, a heaven onto his or herself.”

 

Samples from The Multifoliate Soul follow:

 

The Carnacki Foundation Oath

 

 

I, on my honor, promise to respect di manes and their attachments, to give voice to their silent frustrations, to unearth their troubled secrets, to give reason to their hauntings, and to never fear them. I promise to protect manes from men and men from manes and work so that man may know his soul and his soul may know man

 

The Manesological Theory Of The Soul

 

 

…Souls, known alternatively as Astral shadows, psyches, and extended neurological superstructures, are impressions of complex physical information made upon the local Astral. Humans have souls. Thule have souls. Artificials have souls. Animals also have souls. Locations, events, and even languages all have souls, for complex information need not be thought, though information in its most complex form is thought, meaning the largest and most powerful souls tend to be the souls of living, thinking beings.

 

There are two sides to the Astral cosmos surrounding physical reality differentiated by how their Astral matter interacts with physical thought, which forms the border between physical reality and the Astral.

 

On one side, Astral matter is thought-responsive and readily seeks out thoughts to give it form. This side is known as the unconscious Astral, for left untouched by physical thought, its Astral matter has no thoughts of it own. It is known as the Astral Light, or Cosmos of Light, though these terms are considered dated in a modern context and fell out of academic usage around the 1960’s. On the other side, Astral matter is though-generative and and does not seek out thoughts to give it form. This side is known as the conscious Astral, or in dated terms the Astral Darkness or Cosmos of Darkness.

 

The unconscious Astral, Astral light, radiates down upon the noosphere seeking complex thought which gives it form. When the form Astral light takes has independence of the thought which gave it form, it is known as a thought-form, and inhabits an Astral Layer, a cosmos where physical reality and the near Astral overlap, called the Bessant Layer, named after early thought-form researcher and theosophist Annie Bessant. When the form is directly controlled by a thinker, it is known as a dream-form and inhabits the Dream Layer.

 

When the form clings closely to the thinker, passively mirroring whatever information it can be it emotions, memories, or simply a thinker’s physical appearance, it is known as a soul and inhabits the Odic Layer named so for odic, the energy form of ectoplasm.

 

Thought-forms, dream-forms, and souls are all composed of Astral light, but the aforementioned differences with how they interact with physical thought warrants that the Astral light that composes them be classified into three distinctions. The Astral light that composes thought-forms is called Bessant, the same name as its layer, the Astral light that composes dream-forms is called Morphos, and the Astral light that composes souls is called Psyche.

 

All Astral phenomena is capable of manifesting in physical reality, though this manifestation is not of the Astral light itself. When it is said, for instance, that Bessant manifests in physical reality, the Bessant itself does not leave the Astral and become physical. Rather, it creates a physical extension. When this physical extension is in the form of matter, it is called nadi. When this physical extension is in the form of energy, it is called prana. When Morphos manifests as matter, it is called salt, and when it manifests as energy, it is called blas.

 

When Psyche manifests as matter, it is called ectoplasm, and odic when it manifests as energy.

 

When a soul’s mirroring process is disrupted, most often by the destruction or death of the mirrored subject, the soul detaches from the mirrored object and becomes a manes, informally, a ghost. A soul can also be detached through willful meditation on behalf of the mirrored subject. The thaumaturgists, who were the first among men to study ghosts, even before the manesologists, believed willfully detaching their souls, which they called “Holy Guardian Angels,” and communicating with them was key to their development as men of learning.

 

One of the most interesting discoveries made by early manesology was that Psyche was both the most and least thought-responsive of the three kinds of Astral light. When bound to a host body, it was extremely thought-responsive, thought-dependent even, and could do nothing but mirror the thoughts and feelings of the host body. But when detached as manes, the soul responds to its on thoughts. While a manes can still be influenced by the thoughts of others through the soul components that make up the Sema, the Rn and Ib, thoughts cannot direclty act upon a manes as they can a thought-form or dream-form.

 

It is because of this change in thought-responsiveness between bound souls and manes that souls were called “Astral steel” by manesologist  Matthew Ernst. His metaphor was that, as bounded souls, souls were pliable like steel in a smith’s furnace, but when out of the furnace, when no longer warmed by the fires of life, they became rigid and durable manes.

 

Those Without Souls

 

…It is estimated that around 2% of mankind does not have souls. This may not sound you much as a percentage, but it adds up to about 500 million. These men and women face daily hardships not only from the physical disadvantages that derive from lacking a soul bond but from deeply engrained cultural prejudices resulting from conflating the philosophical, religious conception of a soul (the immortal totality of a person, a person’s innate humanness and worth) with the manesological soul (an entity of Astral light bound to a person’s mind formed in the image of that person).

 

Souls bind themselves to natural phenomena–human minds, but all natural phenomena has variation, and the human mind is not exempt from this variation. Some minds so not bind to a soul. The reason for this is not wholly understand, and a reason why some people do not have souls is one of the burning questions of manesology.

 

Though manesology has spoken out against stigmatizing those without soul bonds since the science began, prejudice remains even in our modern era. Lacking a manesological soul does not mean a person lacks humanity. It does not mean a person lacks feelings or virtues. When it was discovered that some people did not have soul bonds at the very dawn of manesology, a few manesologists, Charles Weber being the most notorious, sprang upon studies with low sample sizes to draw all sorts of conclusions about people without souls, mostly negative. They concluded that people without soul bonds were irrational, more prone to criminality, and were all-around deficient without a soul bond.

 

These manesologists and their conclusions were rejected by the Carnacki Foundation as soon as the ink was dry on their reports. It was obvious from the beginning that they were working from a vested interest. Many of them were thaumaturgists and believed that manesological souls were both extensions of a man’s moral development and source of continued moral development. But though Weber’s ideas were discredited, they continue to find root in the minds of many today.

 

Though a man without a soul bond is just as much a man as any man with a one, there are real physical disadvantages to no not having a soul. The soul protects the mind from the influence of thought-forms similar to how a body’s immune system protects against infection. Some of the worst cases of thought-form possession in history have involved people without souls. It is as if thought-forms sense an empty place in the human mind and seek to fill it. Dr. Julie Bell, head TIMS therapist at Martin’s School, provides an example. Born without a soul, her traumatic childhood made her the target of a extremely powerful and virulent fear-based thought-form known as “Mad Mary.” That Dr. Bell has managed to tame Mad Mary and use it to help children suffering from thought-form possession is testament to the strength of her will and character.

 

Those without souls also struggle with the mankind’s noosphere data network. They have to interface with the noosphere through the use of electronic terminals, which places them at a disadvantage compared to others when it comes to communication and research.

 

Multiverse travel, when it involves the Astral, can also be difficult for people without soul bonds as most Astral projection technologies are calibrated for humans with soul bonds.

 

TIMS and the Carnacki Foundation strongly recommend people without soul bonds to bond with artificial souls. Though there are certain advantages to not having a soul bond such as never having to worry about odic shock or preparing and updating legal documents relating to the inheritance of a manes, these advantages do not outweigh being a target for opportunistic thought-forms.

 

In the past, artificial soul bonds were created by “rehoming” a natural manes, often wisps without any obvious personality or memories that could compete with the host body’s own. It was believed that wisps, being relatively “blank” compared to other types of manes, would serve the place of natural souls. Unfortunately, wisps were far from the complete tabula rasas manesology assumed them to be, and what was more, the natural tendency for wisps to cluster together led hosts becoming “magnets” for wisps in the environment. One particularly bad case of “magnetic” attraction led to the violent “Legion of Orleans” incident of 1953.

 

In light of this history, it is understandable that many would have misgivings over getting an artificial soul bond. But Manesological knowledge has improved by leaps and bounds since the days of wisp bonding. Artificial soul bonds are safe and effective. The soul is generated artificially within the subject. Without the possibility of psychic cross-contamination from previous host bodies, there can be no danger. The artificial soul is indistinguishable from a natural one save that it forms later.

 

How To Interact With And Address A Manes

 

 

…It is generally not seen as disrespectful to call a manes “ghost.” Ghost is the common term for a manes throughout the English speaking word. There is no stigma attached to the name and early manesologists used manes and ghosts interchangeably along with terms that have fallen out of fashion like “intelligences” and “. It was only after the Slade Laws referred to manes with the honorific di manes, meaning the honored dead, that manes became the formal way to refer to a manes and ghost the informal.

 

Today, manesologists tend to use the term “ghost” when talking amongst themselves, but manes is the preferred term for academic publications.

 

How to address a manes has been a tricky subject for manesologists since the science began. Even the answer “how they want to be addressed” is not sufficient for several cases. Say the manes of an ancient warrior possesses his descendent, and demands to be referred to with the descendants name because he views himself as the descendent. To address him by his chosen name would no doubt add to the considerable distress his unwilling host is experiencing.

 

Early manesologists were divided on whether or not to address manes by the name of their host body. The question was rooted in the thornier topic of a manes personhood and legal status. Matthew Ernst believed that manes should be addressed by the name of his or her host body. “The manes is an extension of a man and his memories, thus he is an extension ” he once wrote. Others like Stephen Bester believed differently. “The manes is an impression of a man upon the Astral, but it is not the man in and of itself.”

 

In cases where the manes is on good terms with the family of the deceased, they may find it acceptable to refer to the manes with the name of the host body. In cases of a dispute where the manes insists on the name and the family does not, use “Manes of X.”  In cases where a name isn’t in the equation at all, use descriptors from the environment. “Manes of Kyoto castle” or “Manes of the silver armor.”

 

When a person unbinds their soul through the Abramalin operation, he or she develops a deep and profound connection with their unbound manes. They will let you know how they would like to be addressed. Some pairs answer to the same name, some do not. In the case that a soul was accidentally awaken from torpor or awaken by someone that didn’t truly know what they were doing, a very ugly situation may form with each claiming to be the “real” person and rightful user of the name as was the case in 1879 when thaumaturgical dabbler Richard Swan made an enemy of his own soul and became the first man in history to sue his own soul, which he sued along with the Carnacki Foundation for refusing to separate his soul. He was unaware that doing so would have subjected him to a painful and likely fatal odic shock, which goes to show how little Richard Swan understood about what he involved himself in. The Swan episode provided amusement for the broadsheets, but more importantly, it helped deter other dabblers in the thaumaturgical arts.

 

In such cases as the Swan affair, use “manes of X” to refer to the manes and “living host of X” to refer to the human being.

 

In the field, practicality trumps all. Modern field work is based on the principal of establishing communication with a manes in order to bring them to a state of lucidity. The earliest field work put containment before communication. You went in, secured the area, set up gaeitie candles and Carnacki pentacles, and then tried to communicate with the raging manes as it was subdued. Nowadays, manesology stresses the reverse. Attempt communication, even in the midst of a whole house being shaken apart, and only take offensive action as a last resort.

 

Address the manes with as many names as possible. Brother, uncle, father, son. The mind of a manes is a lock and names are the keys. The right key may not be obvious. Matthew Ernst, was able to establish communication with the violent manes of Dantalion castle in 1880 after calling him a student. This brought to mind fond memories the manes had of his host body’s tutor and convinced him to listen to Matthew.

 

If that takes addressing the manes as the Easter Bunny, then you address them as the Easter Bunny. Sometimes you may even have to lie to a manes about who you are. If it takes pretending to be someone’s relative to get a berserk manes to stop, then you pretend.

 

When in doubt, trust to simple truth. The standard form of address for a manes across all situations is “manes of X.” For it is the simple truth that a manes is a manes of something–a man, a bloodline, a location.

 

Manesological Field Tools

 

 

…Gaeite has remained the backbone to a manesologist’s toolbox since it was unearthed beneath Luxor in 1861. By telepathically sharing the dreams of the superbeing Baltim slumbering beneath the Valley of Kings in Egypt, thaumaturgists were able to locate a ruined city beneath Luxor whose buildings were made of a wonderous amber-colored metal that the dreams told them was part material, part Astral. They could not hear a name for it within the dreams. Many years later, they would learn the Dyeus called it ananael, which meant great wisdom. They called it gaeite, for it came from beneath the Earth, harvested from ruin that looked as if they were the works of divinity. “We raid the palace of a Titaness.” explorer and superhuman Dr. Stone once said of a dig he accompanied.

 

The Dyeus used gaeite to create a culture in which the living communed with their own souls. Their gaeite spires reached into the Astral even as they reached into the sky, and eventually he lure of the Astral and its wonders would call the Dyeus to leave the Earth and physical reality entirely, leaving their ruins and their gaeite behind for man.

 

Gaeite was created in a dream. The Dyeus took it from the Dream Layer of the Astral and combined it with matter, namely carbon, to create a thought-responsive mixture of matter and morphos salt. When heated, or when electricity was ran through gaeite, it became incandescent and emitted a serene, white light. This light allowed one in physical contact with the gaeite to project their thoughts through the gaeite radiance, called olprt by the Dyeus. Olprt transformed will and creativity into Astral power. In the olprt radiance, the wielder of gaeite could, with firm mental discipline and knowledge of Dyeus meditation rituals called operations by the thaumaturgists, interact with the Astral. Many are these operations and many are their effects. The Ozongon Operation, the ritual of winds, allowed one to project his or her thoughts across the Astral and communicate telepathically with beings across the planet–or even across the stars. The Othil Operation, the ritual of the throne, projected one’s thoughts into the Dream Layer and fortified them, a key part of the larger Abramelin Operation, the principle operation of the thaumaturgists. But of concern to manesologists were the rituals that acted upon souls and manes–the Perkunos Operation which acted upon the djed soul component being the most important to learn because of its practical uses in protecting the living from the dead.

 

It was difficult to harvest gaeite in the 1860’s. Not only was it underground, it was in the form of colossal spires, some larger than Mt. Everest. No earthly tool could hew gaeite. It had to be carved by the mind, and only the most diligent and trained could chip it away. Still, it was harvested, and manesologists reaped the benefits.

 

The first gaeite tool used by manesologists (you must never call them weapons, even if they are used as weapons. Remember the Carnacki Foundation oath.) was the gaeite candle, essentially a simple stick of gaeite (insomuch as gaeite can be called simple) attacked to a metal base that runs an electric current through the stick modulated by knobs and buttons. The manesologist would activated it, the gaeite would turn incandescent, a gaeite field would be projected, and the manesologist would conduct Dyeus rituals through the field. Gaeite candles were rare in the early days because the Luxor dig was the only known Dyeus ruin at the time. It held all the gaeite in the known world. When the Carnacki Foundation was established in 1870, the entire organization had 12 candles–just 12, and these candles were distributed around the Foundation’s offices the world over! It’s hard to imagine today when every manesologist worth his salt has a stock of gaeite. Mankind figuring out how to create gaeite in the 1950’s turned gaeite from the most valuable material in the world to merely one of the most valuable materials in the world.

 

Gaeite candles did their job. With the proper application of the Perkunos Operation, even a manes as powerful as King Justice the First and Last, a true kleos eidolon, would be divested of most of his or her power. But there was a notorious weakness–if too much current was ran through the gaeite candle and a the mind directing the gaeite field wavered in attention, it could start to draw odic from the Odic Layer. The world learned how destructive a “melting candle” could be when a manes got ahold of a careless team’s gaeite candle in 1865 and created the Great London Fire which engulfed the entire city. This also made governments and industrialists aware that gaeite could be used for much, much more than exploring the Astral. There was limitless energy in the Odic Layer, and a single stick of gaeite could draw all that energy down into physical reality, if the man holding the gaeite was strong enough. This caused thaumaturgists to restrict access to gaeite and to only grant access to the Luxor site to those they deemed worthy–but it was a moot point as other sites were discovered around the world. The Dyeus culture covered the entire planet at its height. There were ruins on every continent, and the thaumaturgists could not stop mankind from making use of gaeite’s destructive potential in the Great War in the Air.

 

From 1865 onwards, gaeite candles were created for different skill levels of manesologists. Each progressive skill level ran more and more wattage through a stick of gaeite with the highest level reserved for experts like Thomas Carnacki and Matthew Ernst. Thaumaturgists, masters of the mental arts, didn’t use gaeite candles. They simply willed them into incandescence without the aid of electricity. They also didn’t use sticks of gaeite. They used entire towering spires, just like the Dyeus, for they traveled and fought and explored far beyond the Odic Layer and dealt with entities stranger and more powerful than manes. A thaumaturgist using a gaeite candle would have been like someone trying to drink up the ocean with a straw.”

 

In 1873, using the resources of his newly established foundation, Thomas Carnacki created the electric pentacle, a large circuit of gaeite tubes which could protect from manes without need of the Perkunos Operation or any thought at all. The Pentacle did all the work itself by radiating rapidly shifting frequencies of olprt. The electric pentacle had several advantages over gaeite candles which saw to its swift adoption as a manesological tool. It could protect a manesologist without the need for a ritual, ward an area, ward an innocent, imprison a manes, and unlike gaeite candles, posed no danger of being seized by a manes. But they did have some disadvantages which led to them complimenting, but not replacing, gaeite candles. They weren’t as versatile as candles. It’s olprt was fitful and unfit for ritual use. It could ward ghosts, but that was all it could do. It also required a lot of energy to operate. Gaeite candles required only a little wattage, for the rituals were the most important element to their power, and that only required mental concentration. Pentacles could–and did–fail in the field. Pentacles also had to be taken apart and rebuild after every use to prevent the gaeite from settling in certain frequencies, depriving the olprt radiance of strength. Most importantly, they did not separate the djed as the Perkunos Operation did. This meant it could be overcome by enough force, be it physical force or Astral force. This limitation was slightly mitigated when Carnacki improved his pentacle in 1885 into the “spectrum defense” model, named so because of the iridescence of the olprit radiance it produced. The spectrum defense oscillated olprt across a wider range of frequencies allowing not only for a stronger defense but the ability to, through the manipulation of switches, attract and repel manes as needed. The spectrum defense model proved its worth in 1886 when Thomas Carnacki used it against The Hog, a incredibly powerful manes in the image of a pig.

 

Though gaeite is capable of acting upon the greatest, most powerful manes with the most miraculous powers, remember the words of Marcus the Great, general of the Borderland who led that afterlife against Earth in 1912–“They say gaeite is our Achille’s heel. Why? A simple knife can rob a man of much more than gaeite robs a spirit, yet do men speak of knives as the ultimate nemesis of mankind? Hardly.”

 

Part of what makes gaeite so effective in the field is that the kind of violent manes encountered in the field don’t have a head for tactics. They don’t know how to make the most of their powers and abilities. They will charge headlong against the olprt radiance and be depowered. Smarter manes know about gaeite and avoid. Smarter manes, when faced with gaeite, will do things like teleport away and telekinetically hurl objects at the field manesologist.

Always put trust in your gaeite gear, but never all your trust.

 

1919, a significant advancement was made in gaeite candles based on observations made during the Borderland Invasion. The electronic base that gave gaeite candles their name was improved into a case with lenses made of rhecite, the flowing metal, a derivative of gaeite with a silvery color. These rhecite lenses shifted from the same electrical battery the gaeite drew upon and focused the olprt radiance as needed. Gaeite candles were shields. They projected an aura of olprt. Gaeite lanterns were cannons. They blasted olprt like a powerful shotgun burst. They also had circuitry that mimicked Carnacki’s electric pentacle. The lanterns had two modes–they could proejct the operational light of the candles or the pure force of the pentacle.

 

Though gaeite remains the main manesological tool today, it is bolstered by new inventions. Force projectors have been used since the Carnacki Foundation requested surplus from the Black Terror army during the 1940’s. While a manes can never be overcome by force alone, a timely forcefield can save lives. And sometimes, you just been someone to hold the manes’ ectoplasmic form still in a force beam while you shake your head free of the cobwebs and prepare the gaeite lantern. Many manes, particularly the violent kind, are too feral to realize that there’s more to them than their manifestation. If you push the manifestation, they will try and push back simply on reflex and forget about trying the stuff that’s harder to defend against–like possession.

 

Photite projectors are also commonly used these days. The sheut soul gives manes senses that replicate human senses. Only manes that are very powerful or very self-aware can expand their senses, meaning that most of the manes encountered in the field can be tricked with photite illusions. Some manes are so diminished in self-awareness that the most obvious tricks fool them. In 1864, Matthew Ernst fooled the Manes of Sunrise Lane by quickly putting a mop over his head and pretending to be the wife of the manes’ host body. Nowadays, photite projectors can do much more than put a mop on your head. Photite projectors are incredibly useful. Manesologists have had their lives saved by a field partner suddenly projecting someone important to the live of a violent mane’s host body. Even a simple flash of light and loud noise can distract a manes and redirect their violence. In 1945, Carnacki Foundation manesologists defeated the manes of infamous serial killer Robert Rook using photite equipment borrowed from the military. They projected images of Rook’s victims, and when the manes saw that he could no longer hurt them or cause them pain, he broke down.

 

Photite projectors have had such success in the field that they’re now standard field equipment for all Carnacki Foundation manesologists. Who knows what invention will be the next to be added?

 

Calling and Affixing Manes

 

 

…It’s easy enough to say what should be done when a manes is encountered in the field. Attempts at communication are made, and then, if necessary, you use gaeite. But how do you get to that point? How do you make a ghost appear before you?

 

The Odic Layer is in the Astral, and the Astral is beyond time and space. Because of this, manes do not have a corporeal form. They can create corporeal forms through ectoplasm and odic, but these are extensions of their Astral psyche. This makes it very hard to subdue manes. You can destroy their ectoplasmic body, but their psyche remains in the Odic Layer beyond the reach of any physical force. But there is a silver lining. Because the Astral is beyond space and time, everything in the Astral touches any point in space and time. A thaumaturgist or a superhuman with Astral powers and abilities can, with enough skill, call (never use the word summon. We call manes, not summon them. We aren’t summoning demons here) any manes to their side with a thought. But these beings typically have greater matters to attend to than a haunting, so what’s the average field manesologist to do? As for many problems, the solution is gaeite.

 

The Zacare Operation, the ritual of movement, reaches across the Astral to call manes to the presence of the summoner. With enough time and skill, a manesologist can call any manes to any location, but time is often an issue. You can’t wait a month in your office while a violent haunting is in progress. To speed up the Zacare Operation, one taps into several component souls–the ib, the rn, and the sheut, using the Pehuson Operation for the ib and rn and the Hngnis Operation for the sheut. One finds someone special to the manes, someone the ib resonsates with, often a blood relative of the host body. One conducts culturally specific rituals to tap into the rn–crosses in the Western world, incense for the Eastern world. These things work to tap the rn because even the most isolated person understands their significance in spiritual matters. One stands in the haunted place the manes is bound or holds an object close to the host body in life to tap the sheut.

 

Once called, the Nothoa Operation, the ritual of garments, is then used to affix the manes attention upon a certain object, often the gaeite itself, in combination with other Operations, often the Perkunos Operation, to weaken the manes and render him or her harmless.

 

The Nothoa Operation serves to “bind” a manes, though the psyche is completly undisturbed up in the Odic Layer. The “terminal screen” metaphor is commonly used to explain how the Nothoa Operation works. Imagine you’re at a noos terminal playing a game. You are the psyche, your game avatar is the ectoplasmic and odic manifestation. Suddenly, there’s a bright flash, and you are hypnotized by something on the screen. Your avatar can’t move. You can’t move. That is how the Nothoa Operation works and how manes can be “trapped” by physical objects.

 

Once subdued, the violent manes can be assisted through Dyeus rituals that strengthen certain component souls, most often the Operation of Sehul and Menot, which strengthens the ba and brings clarity and recollection to a manes.

Man’s History With Souls:

Changing Conceptions

 

…Early manesology was a struggle between folkloric and religious preconceptions of the soul, the philosophical soul, and the observed phenomena that was the manesological soul. Nowadays, it is understood that there is a firm separation between the speculative souls of philosophy, between souls that are the immortal totality of a person, souls that are the seat of a person’s humanity, and the observed souls of manesology, but in the late 19th century, this separation was not clear. The work of manesologists in the early years of the science was extremely challenging. Not only did manesologists seek to answer how manes were generated and what they were composed of, they had to answer challenging questions about the role of manes in human society.

 

Could a manes be held accountable for the crimes of his or her host body? Could a manes be drafted? Could a manes vote? Could a manes own property and if so was he or she entitled to property in the name of his or her host body?

 

If a person did not have a soul, what did it mean? Was something wrong with them and if so, could they be helped? If a manes was disruptive or violent, if he or she killed people as in the Great London Fire of 1865, was the host body to blame? Did some deficiency on behalf of the host body lead to the violent nature?

 

“It is torturous.” leading manesologist Matthew Ernst once wrote, “Never have I felt such sympathy for Hades. The afterlife is upon Earth, but it is presided over not by angels, not by demons, not by any sort of divinity or fallen divinity, but man. God have mercy on us! We cannot enact just laws for humanity, how can we enact just laws for manes? God forgive us! We will need his forgiveness!”

 

When students look back on the early history of man and manes, they often recoil in horror. There are many incidents to turn one’s stomach–Putnam’s Crusade of 1865, the 1862 Lautrec Engine, and the Slade Affair of 1870 to name just a few. When students read about these events, they ask “How could they have done this? How could they have been so cruel?” The answer is that they were working on preconceived notions and refused to change these notions in light of new evidence either out of stubbornness or vested interest in the status quo. Henri Lautrec’s conception of the soul as “an animal of the air” was rejected by manesology as soon as it was proposed, but it continued to held a great amount of influence among laypeople because it provided simple answers to complex questions. Manes weren’t people, they were animals, so it was meaningless to speculate on their rights. What was more, it also justified the profitable exploitation of manes. The Lautrec engine was no more evil than harvesting cattle if Manes were animals.

 

Let it be a warning to the burgeoning manesologists reading this text as well as to all scientists in general–science changes. Those that do change their minds in accordance with new data risk being remembered as monsters by history.

 

Conceptions Before The Modern Era

 

…Throughout most of human history, man has held to a belief in philosophical souls, in a belief that there was some vital, intangible force within all animate matter. Some cultures held that this force was unitary, that one, indivisible thing controlled the human body. Other cultures held that this force had divisions, that the force of animation was dissimilar from the force of emotions which was in turn dissimilar to the force of reason. Plato held that the soul had three parts–appetite, emotion, and reason. Aristotle held the men, plants, and animals held teleological based psyches. The psyche of an animal was its inclination to move, feed, and respond to stimulus, and when it could no longer do these things, it was dead. No longer truly an animal, it was a corpse without a psyche. The psyche of a man was his reason for being, his purpose in life, and when he perished, his psyche perished with him. Psyche was not immortal. But man also had an immortal reason, or nous, which transcended and survived man and entered into higher realms. The ancient Egyptians believed in around 8 different kinds of souls.

 

But no culture ever had to deal with manifested souls, with souls occupying physical space, and so never conceived of the manesological soul and the challenges it posed to mankind in the late 19th century, not to mention the challenges the manesological soul continues to pose in the present day. Every culture assumed a firm separation between man and unbound souls. When separated from their bodies, souls went to the afterlife where they were subject to the laws and customs of what was effectively another world. Questions modern man had to ask himself in the 19th century–was a ghost of a man also subject to the debts and penalties of his body? Could a ghost deny an inheritance written in his will? Could a ghost be drafted?–were assumed by ancient man to be answered by gods and psychopomps.

 

The Holy Guardian Angel–The Thaumaturgical Conception

 

In 1860, occultist Samuel Mathers established telepathic contact with a being beneath Egypt who, in the language of dreams and visions, told Mathers about the ancient Dyeus culture who inhabited the Earth before man evolved and reached enlightenment by communing with their own souls with the assistance of a material which Mathers called gaeite.

 

From the instruction of this being, who Mathers called Abramelin, Mathers developed the Abramelin Operation, a mental exercise that when used in conjunction with gaeite allowed one to commune with their own souls.

 

The thaumaturgists from the beginning did not believe they were their souls. Souls were Holy Guardian Angels, beings that stood at the threshold of a man and the higher Astral. They were partly of man, partly of the world beyond man, and so the thaumaturgists believed they were perfect guides. They understood the heart of their host while being objective through their independence. They did not share their names with their souls in recognition of this fact. Given the historical interests of the thaumaturgists, they commonly gave their souls names derived from the occult. For instance, the American thaumaturgist Robert Luman named his Holy Guardian Angel Cicle, which in Enochian, the language of angels and the Dyeus culture, meant mystery.

 

Some thaumaturgists had great success with their Holy Guardian Angels. Powerful souls were highly beneficial to their hosts in many respects. Through the soul component khet, they granted control over physical reality. Through the soul component sekhem, they granted control over the minds of others. Through the soul component ib, they granted glimpses of the future and foretold their host of danger. But most importantly, powerful souls gave salient observations on the heart of their host. No one knew a host better than his soul, not his friend, not his family, and not himself.

 

But not all souls were powerful. Not all souls were lucid. Some could barely talk. Look at the wisp classification for an example of such souls.

 

What were they? What were the thaumaturgists to make of such Holy Guardian Angels?

 

They decided that any deficiencies in the soul were the result of deficiencies in the mind, a position early manesologists would adopt. These deficiencies had to be corrected through introspection, meditation, and the many Dyeus rituals gleaned from the memories of Abramelin.

Here we find the deficiency of the thaumaturgical conception–a soul that was not ideal had to change. Souls that identified themselves as their host to their host were seen as being corrupted by the excess ego of the host. The host would use the Operation of Sehul and Menot to weaken the ba, the soul component that copies the memories of the host while strengthening the ka, which gives a manes a sense of identity independent of the copied memories of the ba.

 

Today, we and modern thaumaturgists see that as robbing a being of his precious memories and sense of identity, but the thaumaturgists of the 19th century saw it was liberating the manes from their own ego and helping them take on an identity that was always their own. The thaumaturgists believed that ego was the ultimate sin of mankind. Ego was small and petty compared to the cosmos and held man back form recognizing the greatness within himself that resonated with the cosmos. Ego was the false will that hid the true will, which was man’s will in accordance with reason and love. But gradually, they came to see that in forcing their souls to be what they were not, they were in fact projecting their ego. “I blotted out Cicle’s memories, my memories, because I believed no higher being could remember what I remembered, could have a personality that cared about what I cared about.” Robert Luman would confess, “This was ego–the belief that I could will away what I saw as extraneous parts of myself, even when they appeared before me in the form of my divine double.

 

In 1870, the thaumaturgists declared an end to ba eradication, though some would continue the practice even to this day.

 

As for people without souls, the thaumaturgists held that they were people of exceptionally poor will and intellect, but as they came to know men without souls who had excellent wills and incredible intellects, they decided that their souls were displaced–meaning scattered across time and space. “The Astral is beyond time and space. Someone, in our ego, we ignored that obvious fact.” Robert Luman remarked when he reflected on the early days of thaumaturgical discrimination. “Those without souls have souls, but they are souls scattered across time. One man’s soul may well be out in the Astral as a manes. Cannot one man’s soul become the soul of another? Do we not see how manes, through the ib component, maintain telepathic ties to entire families? And when we argue “This is my soul, it belongs to me and no on else,” is that not ego blinding us again?”

 

No one was to judge a man without a soul. They simply had a different quest from those that did have souls.

 

“If I cannot find my soul within myself, I must search for it out in the world.” thaumaturgist Alan Adams remarked on his soulless condition. Alan experienced firsthand the discrimination the early thaumaturgists had for those without souls and by his actions helped end that discrimination. Alan would bond to several manes he befriended in the Borderland before abandoning his search for his soul entirely. “I have searched enough.” he said, “Let my soul come to me or not at all.”

 

Alan would perish during the Borderland invasion, leaving not one manes behind, but several–all the manes he befriended. Perhaps that, in the end, was his soul.

 

Mental Models–The Early Manesologist Conception

 

The first hurdle early manesologists had to surmount was in determining if a soul as they defined it was the same as a soul as religion and philosophy defined it.

 

This was never a hurdle for the thaumaturgists, for they believed, as many of the ancient pagans that influenced their views did, that there was, on one hand, a physical, perishable totality to a man that could be termed a “soul” or a “psyche.” This psyche was as Aristotle understood it–the teleological summation of a man, his purpose, his drive, his reason for being. On the other hand, there was the soul, their Holy Guardian Angel, separate yet bound to a man. This the Greeks called the daemon.

 

The thaumaturgists never had to ask whether a soul was a soul. They never had to ask if a man was his manes. The manesologists had to, not just for their philosophical and religious understanding, but because unlike the thaumaturgists, they were humans of the here and now. They didn’t and couldn’t spend all their time passing through the Astral realms. They lived in societies ran by governments and had to contend with a force that went right under the radar of the thaumaturgists–the law.

 

Everything else aside, was a manes the same entity as his or her host body–legally speaking?

 

No one was going to take up this question besides the manesologists, so it fell to them to set the stage for legal rulings.

 

It fell to them to decide how man, the common man, would view manes.

 

The manesologists began building their conception of the soul by firmly establishing that what they were observing was not what was talked about in sermons. This separation, which would commonly be called the separation between the philosophical soul and the manesological soul, was first discussed all the way back in 1861 with Edward James’ Multiple Intelligences Within the Human Body, the famous paper that proved the existence of souls and manes.

 

“I cannot attest to the existence of anything that can only be known by intuition or faith.” Edward James wrote, “I cannot attest to the existence of any intelligence called a soul. I leave the matter to the priesthood. But what I can attest to is the existence of the observable intelligence which can be measured and recorded both inside the human body and as a remnant intelligence within the environment.”

 

Once that separation was established, they turned to the deciding on what manesological souls were. As the thaumaturgists had some experience with souls, they turned to them for answers. They agreed with the thaumaturgists that manes were a product of the mind, and like the early thaumaturgists, they believed that variation in the mind produced variation in the manes. Unlike the thaumaturgists, they did not hold a model for what a manes should be. Whether its ba was strong or its ka was strong, whether they answered to the name of their host body or called themselves Prince Zor of the Astral Plane, that was normal, for there was no normal established.

 

Instead of focusing on what a manes should be, manesologists focused on what a manes did. Was a manes harmful? Was a manes violent? Manesologists quickly found themselves positioned as “ghost breakers,” especially after the 1865 London fire when claimed the lives of hundreds. They not only studied manes, they kept them from harming people. “Observe and contain” was the motto of the early manesologists.

 

In trying to determine why a manes was violent and how one could prevent manes from turning violent in the first place, manesologists turned to the theory of psychic contamination. They knew that the unconscious Astral was thought-responsive. Many manesologists doubled as nousmorphologists and had first-hand experience of thought-forms. They knew how to attract them, repel them, and lead them. Some were even dreamwalkers and like the thaumaturgists kept their own dreamworlds. They figured that if a manes was violent, it was because something in the environment was making him or her violent. They suggested violent thoughts, conscious or subconscious, from nearby people and perhaps even thoughts imprinted upon the environment. But this theory was short-lived. In 1863, Matthew Ernst published The Analysis of Manes in which he demonstrated that the environment, outside what the component soul shut imprinted upon at the time of the manes awakening, had no effect on a manes behavior. It was not violent thoughts that influenced a manes. If a manes was violent, it resulted from the complex interworking of a manes’ soul components.

“There is unfortunately, no single explanation for manes violence.” Matthew Ernst wrote, “The idea that we can stop manes from being violent by simply removing “psychic contamination” is attractive in its simplicity, but it is false.”

 

What Ernst wrote would prove ironic given his attitude toward his own manesological theory.

 

Shortly after 1863, manesologists felt they knew enough about manes to suggest what should be done about them legally–but only suggest. No one felt confident in directly addressing the topic of the law, mostly because there wasn’t a single lawyer among the early manesologists. They consisted of psychologists, occultists, physicians, and physicists.

 

Their suggestions were as follows:

 

–Manes were not legally the deceased. They could willingly take on the debts and obligations of their deceased host body, but these debts and obligations could not be forced upon the. They were not entitled to the property of the deceased, though the deceased could leave property for their manes in their will.

 

–The component souls of a manes should not be altered by Dyeus rituals save to prevent harm (it was here that they diverged strongly from the thaumaturgists).

 

–Manes should not be affixed by the Nothoa operation save to prevent harm.

 

These suggestions were slowly formed into law, though politicians were noticeably reticent when it came to addressing manes until the 1865  Great Fire of London. Before the fire, manes were seen as little more than strange images, little more than curiosities which, while odd, were mostly things that concerned odd people and kept to their own odd corner of the world. Debating on whether a manes could purchase stock was interesting in an academic sort of way, but it meant nothing to peoples’ daily lives.

 

But after the fire, people wanted as many mysteries about manes cleared up as possible.

 

Still, the 1865 Manes Charter, which was founded in England and copied around the world, would prove insufficient to prevent the crimes of Slate and Lautrec.

 

Demons vs Children Of Our Souls–The Putnam Conception VS The Lopez Conception

 

Science was both an advocate and enemy of manes. Scientists that followed Edward James believed that manes had rights, that they were more than “animals of the air.” Those that followed Henri Lautrec believed that manes should not only be exploited for man’s benefit, but that it was the only way to guarantee catastrophes like the Great London Fire from happening again.

 

Religion was also both an advocate and enemy of manes. Most churches believed that, while manes were not the souls of men, they were, in the words of advocate Father Ricardo Lopez, “The children of our souls. They come from our minds as our children come from our blood. They share with us something of our minds as our children share with us something of our blood. God has tasked us with rearing our children, with guiding them, disciplining them, but above all else, loving them. I abhor this Lautrec engine for the abomination that it is. For it is not merely a crime against man, not merely a crime against nature, but a sin against God.”

 

Father Ricardo Lopez was a hugely influential figure in the early days of manesology. He was a Kansas abolitionist, a strong man who fought in the streets for his convictions, and saw his work with manes as an extension of his abolitionism. His 1862 essay Children of our Souls, in which he directly called for the prosecution of Henri Lautrec, became popularly circulated. In 1865, after the Great London Fire, he urged calm with Fear and Freedom. “Did not Nero blame the Christians for his fire? Did he not blame one Christian but all all Christians? A manes was responsible for the destruction of London, a manes, a single manes. Why blame all manes for London? If we stack up the crimes of man against the crimes of ghosts, do not the crimes of man seem the greater? How many cities has man razed to the ground? Should man not be punished more than ghost?”

 

Lopez’s Kansas church, The Church of St. Anthony, became a model for churches around the world in its treatment of manes. Many manes found solace within churches in the early days of manesology and many still do today. When their families turned them out, when society debated on whether they had any rights at all, there was the Church, ready and willing to accept them as another soul for Christ. Churchgoers uncomfortable sharing cloister space with transparent men in Father Lopez’s church soon found that churches around the world were opening their doors to manes. Nowadays, it is common to see manes in churches around the Western world. Places of worship in the Eastern, particularly Japan, have been slower to allow manes into their ground owing to a stronger cultural tradition of consecrated spaces being sequestered from the outside (how can a manes ritually purify himself if everything passes through his body?) and less experience with manes compared to the West. But even so, there are temples of both the Buddhist and Shinto faiths in Japan ran by yokai, who understand well being outcasts within Japanese society, that are more than willing to accommodate manes. The shrine of daitengu Daranibo, located on Mt. Fuji, is one such shrine. It is managed by the youngest daughter of Daranibo, the kotengu Himari.

 

It is because of Father Lopez that the tradition of tessellating exists in churches. Humans put on their Sunday best when they go to church, manes tesselate. The story goes that a manes struggled to find something he could do to pay back the kindness Father Lopez and his congregation showed him. “I want to be of service, Father Lopez.” the manes said. “But what can I do? I am but a bit of smoke, a bit of light.”

 

Father Lopez then pointed to the church’s stained glass windows and said “Then be a light for the Lord, my son.” Thus was born a tradition that survives to this day. When manes enter a church, they shapeshift their ectoplasmic form so that it becomes a tessellation like stained glass. “Thus do they beautify the house of the lord with their bodies.” as Father Lopez once said.

 

Though father Lopez was undeniably a positive influence in the early days of manesology, it would not be fair to history or the man to gloss over the failings of his conception of manes. Father Lopez believed manes were the children of the soul, and that meant the families of their host had authority over them. He did not believe manes could be trusted with autonomy, property, or the vote. “They are confused.” he wrote, “They come into the world screaming as infants do, knowing as little as infants do. The know things inherited from the mind that bore them, that England is a country, that the sky is blue, that birds fly and fish swim, but this is not true wisdom. They have the wisdom of newborns and cannot be trusted to act of their own accord. To expect reason on the level of a man from a ghost is absurd, but more than that, it is cruel. It is expecting the blind to see or the lame to walk.”

 

But to be fair, let it be said that in his later years he did seem to come around on the issue, at least to an extent. “I have met many, many ghosts in my life. Now that I prepare for my mind to create a ghost, I look back on my earlier attitudes with some embarrassment. There is a special wisdom to ghosts that I find hard to describe. I in no way ascribe to the belief of the pagan sorcerers (by this he meant the thaumaturgists) that ghosts are guardian angels come to take man by the hand, I have seen too many struggle to speak to believe that, but there is a wisdom that I find hard to describe. At any rate, I have met ghosts far smarter than the average man. I have met ghosts smarter than myself.”

 

Father Lopez passed away in his sleep in 1902. His manes, feeling like Father Lopez but far younger, decided to take up mission work and journeyed out into the Astral to preach the word of God. There he settled in the Borderland, where he was honored by its ruler Marcus the Great as a “visionary who foresaw the superiority of ghosts over men.” Father Lopez informed Marcus the Great that he was mistaken in his own fashion–by punching him in the face. Saddened by the rejection but pleased by Father Lopez’s spirit, Marcus kept him under house arrest during the Borderland Invasion until he was freed by the Circled Square at the war’s conclusion. While under watch, he nonetheless contributed to the struggle against Marcus by convincing his own guards of the error of their ways and recruiting them to distribute his words to various resistance cells throughout the Borderland. Today, Father Lopez continues to preach in the Borderland, an eternal firebrand for Christ.

 

If Father Lopez represents the positive effect religion had on manes, then Silas Putnam represents the negative.

 

Silas Putnam called Henri Lautrec a hero and through religious justification and fervor behind his proposals. He called for nothing less than a modern crusade in his 1865 screed Demons Walk Among Us.

 

“I call for nothing less than a modern crusade, a holy war upon the demons (he never called manes anything but demons). They deceive us with the faces of our loved ones. They lay claim to their things, their houses, their names, their identities, everything they stood for. They are cuckoos. Parasites. They steal our affection with the pleading voices of those we love, voices we cannot ignore. Are these souls? Are these angels, or brotherly spirits, or whatever it is the deceived and wicked call them? Would God create souls with twisted faces? Or sometimes, without any faces? Would God create souls that bleed, that show wounds? Are these wiggling blobs, these twisting forms, souls? No, my brothers and sisters, no! They are demons!”

 

Silas Putnam gained a degree of influence through his publications, but it wouldn’t be until the Great London Fire that people started to listen to him out of fear. The catastrophe stoked the fires of panic and Putnam was more than eager to fan the flames. In the Fall of 1865, “Putnam’s crusade” sweept over Europe and North America. It was a string of violent actions taken against those Putnam blamed for “opening the gates of Hell,” manesologists, advocates like Father Lopez, and families who housed manes. It was the last group that especially earned the mob’s ire. Entire families were dragged into the streets and beaten with the hopes of “exorcising the devil” from their souls. In some cases, manes fought back. In some cases, the rioters perished, and this added to the fervor of the mob. When all was settled the body count was estimated to be in the triple digits.

 

Though many were held accountable for the violence, Putnam remained out of jail. He was tried for his part, but was convicted of nothing and walked out of the courthouse a free man. Many suspected it was due to how his ideas complimented Lautrec’s own–and the ideas of many nations and industrialists interested in the Lautrec engine. But though Putnam escaped punishment, his movement collapsed. There were too many stories of innocent manes forced to watch their families brutalized. What was more, crusaders that perished in the violence left manes, and those manes felt intense guilt for what they had done when they got to see what it was actually like to live as a manes. One in particular, a man by the name of Philip Wertham, was so ashamed of himself that he traveled to Kansas to join Father Lopez’s church where he wrote Behind the Eyes of a Demon in which he denounced Putnam and his ways. Behind the Eye of a Demon would prove effective in dissuading many from following Philip down his path.

 

What more can be said of a man whose legacy is one of mob violence and prejudice? Nothing, save that there is some amusement in what came from his death.

 

It is ironic that when Silas Putnam passed away in 1909, his manes became a stalwart supporter of Marcus the Great and his belief that ghosts should rule man as “benevolent guardian angels.” Manes are known to differ from their hosts, in some ways differ substantially, but it’s rare for a manes to flip so radically in beliefs from their host.

 

But perhaps Silas was always an opportunist out to benefit whatever group he belonged to the the expense of others.

 

Young Gods–The Ernst Conception

 

…That manes are similar to the homo fabula, the gods and god-kin of the conscious Astral, in how they’re overwhelmingly thought-generative instead of thought-responsive, was not lost on early manesologists who speculated on the significance of such a link. Matthew Ernst, famous for his 1863 paper The Analysis of Manes which argued against the unitary conception of the soul, put forth the theory that manes were a nascent form of Homo Fabula in his 1872 paper Young Gods.

 

His theory was that humanity and other sapient lifeforms functioned as living converters transforming unconscious Astral into conscious Astral. Ernst understood that even the most resolute manes were still made of unconscious Astral and were still thought-responsive, albeit at a reduced level compared to other entities of the unconscious Astral, but he believed that there was a third state of Astral between unconscious and conscious and that manes would evolve into it and then into conscious Astral. He speculated that the natural thinning of the Archon walls, which was known as far back as 1860, would eventually cause a turning point where “the infant deities ascend in mystical splendor.”

 

Ernst’s theory was very attractive to advocates of manes rights as it positioned even the lowest wisp as a potential god. Little was known of the homo fabula in the 19th century. Many believed that every homo fabula was as mighty as the beings the thaumaturgists observed hanging up stars in their Astral visions. The idea that one day manes would reward those kind to them–and punish those that weren’t–was seen by many as an idea that could curb manes exploitation. Ernst’s theory gradually became accepted not for its veracity but because people, good people who saw the exploitation of manes and wanted it to stop, badly wanted it to be true.

 

In 1880, dreamwalking thaumaturgists dove deep into the mind of Abramelin and uncovered a memory of the Blue Time, the dawn of the multiverse when all the stars were young and blue. The thaumaturgists learned how the Firsts of the Astral shared their supernal powers with the first sapiens of the multiverse in an attempt to create something truly novel in the cosmos, something that was neither god nor man, mortal or immortal, but something new. Their attempt was stopped by the Archons, who sealed up the supernal powers within the Archon walls, but perhaps it was not stopped fully. Matthew Ernst and others believed that it survived in part through manes. “Finally, we can put the ugly history of Lautrec and Slade behind us.” Matthew Ernst wrote in response to the dreamwalker discovery. “My theory showed the future, this report shows the past. Now we know what mane are turning into and why. Surely this will encourage man to develop sensibly as the Dyeus did, for I believe most of man is reasonable, and here we see that there is a cosmic reason for manes to be. And as for the minority of man who are not reasonable, there is the fear of what the little wisps will do to them when they become sky-shaking titans.”

 

But already some harm had resulted from Ernst’s theory. Cults dedicated to certain manes who used their powers, consciously or subconsciously, to impersonate anything from angels to demons to ancient Dyeus warrior kings, began to form. These cults fleeced hundreds out of money and property to pave the way for the promised coming pantheon of divine ghosts. They also inspired fear in the populace–the last thing Matthew Ernst wanted. People wondered–if manes were truly turning into gods, did anything make sure they were turning into good gods?

 

Humans without souls anxiously wondered if they would be treated well by manes in the future. Humans that had souls had some connection to the manes, but what connection did they have? Would they be cast aside when the time came?

 

The Ernst theory ran into a snag in 1888. Thaumaturgists had finally developed the ability to do more than observe the worlds of the Astral–they could finally interact with the beings of the Astral. Even though thier interactions were limited to vague conversations with the beings they met in the form of half-materialized shadows, they were still able to communicate with the homo fabula lords of several afterlives. They talked with Hades, and Yama, and Michael, and learned something–that not only homo fabula were mortal. Many of the souls they governed came from beings of the Astral, from beings that were not gods but god-kin, and they could leave manes.

The discovery unturned the Ernst conception. How were manes turning into something that had manes of their own? Still, Matthew Ernst supported his theory, not for its truth, but for what he believed it represented. “I cannot back down.” he wrote in a letter to his friend Joseph Morton, “Say it isn’t true. It likely isn’t true, not what what has been learned. But does my theory not serve a good? I cannot say it does not serve a good. If even one manes is helped by it, then why end it? If my theory is truly baseless, time will wash it out as time has washed out the theories of the past. But when that hour rolls in, it’ll be in a future that respects manes far more than today.”

 

Matthew Ernst was right about time washing out his theory–to an extent. Though nowadays debunked, his theory continued to be highly influential for decades after 1888, likely owing to the credit attached to Matthew Ernst’s name. He was famous. He was the manesologist the common people knew. His exploits as part of Ernst, Morton, and Glass, the manesologist investigators that served Blackwall city since 1865, were recorded and published by his friend and colleague Martin Glass. People read of how he solved this case and that case, how he helped this manes and that manes, and trusted him.

 

Ernst’s young god theory would be adopted by Marcus the Great, the manes that united the various afterlives of the Borderland under his rule in 1910 to supplement his philosophy that manes had to rule mankind for its own good. “We have made the mistakes they right now are making, that they will their fallible flesh will continue to make. We hold the wisdom their history books have forgotten. We are forever, they are for a day. We contain the spark of divinity. They nurture it, but we are the ones that contain it. Is it not right and proper for gods to rule mortals?”

When the Borderland invaded Earth in 1912, Matthew Ernst was rounded up along with other men Marcus the Great found virtuous, even though they were of corruptible flesh, and delivered to Marcus’ citadel to be entertained by the dictator himself.

 

Matthew desperately tried to explain to Marcus that his theory was groundless, that he only supported it for the sake of manes.

 

Marcus chuckled. “I knew it, of course. But you were right Dr. Ernst, the message of the theory was what was important, not its veracity.”

 

Matthew Ernst spent his life helping manes, and his manes continues to help manes as a psychopomp. He was exposed to so much gaeite during his life and conducted so many Dyeus rituals that his manes had the uncanny ability to handle gaeite without setting off an odic explosion. In life and death, Matthew Ernst was an advocate for manes–but his legacy will forever had a black spot owing to his insistance upon his theory in the face of evidence to the contrary.

 

Let Matthew Ernst be a lesson to all young manesologists reading this text–great men can make costly mistakes when they insist that things are how they wish they were and not as they actually are.

 

Individuals With Agency–The Modern Conception

 

…The Carnacki Foundation believes that manes are as diverse and varied in their makeup as humans–perhaps even more so. The classification system enclosed in the text is proof to that. Manes should be treated as one thing with one expectation. The tendency to measure mans by some standard and then force manes to apply to that measure as the common sin of previous conceptions. Even Matthew Ernst, celebrated advocate of manes and their rights, fell into this trap and did some harm by it.

 

The goal for all manesologists when it comes to interacting with manes is to hold to truth while acting with understanding. We want to understand manes. We want to understand why they go bump in the night, why they possess people, why they scream at the top of a tower every midnight. Manes tell us their secrets, their hidden pain, and sometimes we’re the first kind face they’ve seen in centuries. We want to understand and respect their feelings. We want to call them by the name they want to be called. We want to set them in environments where they feel comfortable, where they have their old stuff and old memories.

 

However, we must also hold to truth.

 

The truth is that when a person dies, they are dead. Then there is the manes. There is the dead man, and then there is their manes. If there was no difference, manesology would be biology, and veterinarians would treat animals with gaeite lanterns. That’s a funny comparison, but nothing is funny about the pain well-intentioned manesologists have created by treating manes like humans, like things that should be humans and treated like humans. Recall the 1874 case of Dr. Arno Sheridan who believed he could fix a manes problems if he got his family to accept him and so used the Pehuson Operation to strengthen the manes’ ib, which imprints upon the loved ones of the deceased. The sudden strengthening flooded the family with emotion, and they accepted the manes back into their home. What Dr. Sheridan had done was discovered by Matthew Ernst, who reported him to the police and undid the Pehuson Operation. The family, disgusted by how the manes had telepathically violated them, kicked him out, and Dr. Sheridan was imprisoned after a highly publicized trial.

 

The truth is that, though families can, have, and will make arrangements, and should make arrangements for manes, manes do not have the right to force others to accept them as a continuation of their host. Neither do manes have a right to possess others and take away their autonomy, even if the manes does so in an attempt to communicate or understand the thoughts of a being imprinted upon its ib, its heart.

 

Manes have rights, but so do humans. It is always sad to see a manes rejected by a family. But consider the situation from the family’s perspective. Suddenly, there’s this being entering their lives. This being may look like their deceased loved one, or it may not. This being may act like their loved one, or it may not. But this being wants to hold them. It wants to live in their house. It wants to touch the things that were precious to their loved one.

 

It wants to be accepted, but it does not have the right to force this acceptance. The manes has no more a right to be considered to be the same person as the deceased than the family has a right to foist upon the manes the debts and obligations of the deceased.

 

It is the family that decides if a manes is legally a continuation of the deceased. As cruel as that may seem, it is the the truth, and we must hold fast to the truth as manesologists.

 

 

A Timeline Of Early Manesological Events

 

 

1860–Mankind’s hyperstatic climacteric begins when Samuel Mathers establishes telepathic contact with the sleeping superbeing known as Baltim, who he called Abramelin, buried deep below Egypt. The Archon walls around our local reality warp and seep, giving mankind’s noosphere an unprecedented degree of contact with the hyperkeimenon and Astral.

 

Through vague dream-impressions, Mathers learns of the ancient Dyeus culture and how they used a material called gaeite to interact with their own souls and become enlightened. Mathers terms the various rites the Dyeus used in conjunction with gaeite to commune with their souls the Abramelin Operation.

 

Through Astral projection via the Othil Operation, mankind gains knowledge of both the conscious and unconscious Astral and the beings that dwell there–homo fabula, thought-forms, dream-forms, and manes. The observations, adventures, and anecdotes of various thaumaturgist explorers are collected by Robert Luman and published as The Astral Atlas.

 

1861–Following the memories of Abramelin, Mathers locates a Dyeus culture ruins beneath Luxor, Egypt. The ruins are excavated and its gaeite studied. it is found to just as wonderous as Mathers dreamed it was. Mathers and his thaumaturgists begin to experiment with gaeite and learn how to commune with their souls.

 

Physicist Edward James publishes Multiple Intelligences Within the Human Body, the first academic study on the soul and manes, becoming the “father of manesology,” though he referred to himself as a physicist and referred to souls as “intelligences” and manes as “remnant intelligences.’

 

Awakening And Manifesting

 

 

…A common mistake for manesology students is to confuse awakening with manifestation, so let us spend a few words to address the difference and expand our manesological vocabulary.

 

When a soul is bonded to a living being, he or she is said to be in torpor. He or she is “sleeping” and unaware of even their own existence. They passively mirror and record information from their host body “flowers before the sun, lost in peaceful, deep quietude.” When a soul is unbound and becomes a manes, this state of torpor continues, and in some cases can continue indefinitely. Following torpor comes a state known as phantasmagoria. The manes starts to dream. He or she plays through the memories of the ba component, and indeed, the strength of the ba influences torpor and phantasmagoria. Manes with stronger bas have shorter periods of torpor and longer periods of phantasmagoria.

 

Past phantasmagoria is awakening. The manes is aware of itself and its surroundings, though the exact nature of this awareness varies by the class of manes. Eidolons are as aware of themselves and what goes on around them as the average human. They can reason, converse, and think abstractly. But other manes only have an awareness of a limited, near-animalistic quality. Manes classified as lemures aren’t aware of much at all. Some lemures are only about as intelligent as a cat or dog. Other manes may act like they’re sleep walking. Babbage types have powerful rn and sekhem which cause them to  pantomime over and over the actions of their host body, even if such actions make no rational sense. But these are all examples of a manesological awakening.

 

It is not known what exactly causes the change from torpor to phantasmagoria to awakening, but the natural warping of the Archon walls is noted to have an effect. For most of human history, manes have floated in torpor up in the Odic Layer where psychopomp guide them to various afterlives. Awakened manes are given a choice of afterlife (or, in the case of some brutal afterworld rulers, not given much of a choice at all) while manes in the midst of torpor or phantasmagoria are taken to protected areas where they’re safe from the predations of thought-forms from the Bessant Layer. Part of a psychopomp’s typical duties, be the psychopomp a fairy, angel, or tutelary animal guide, consists of grouping manes in the phantasma state so that they harmoniously share in their dreams. When manes in the phantasmagorical state are brought in close proximity to each other, their dreams merge and they partake of the reality of each others’ minds bas. Manes from similar cultures and times harmoniously share these dreams as they expect to see each other. They are recognized by the rn and ba of the other manes. But Manes from different cultures and times create chaos. If you try and put the manes of a 20th century Black Terror soldier next to the manes of a Hyborian swordsman, they’re going to have fitful dreams and when they finally awaken will do so in a panic–often a violent panic. Imagine if you were in an idyllic dream consisting of the best parts of your life on repeat–and then suddenly there’s a Roman soldier dragging his memories to clash with yours. You would be confused and upset, wouldn’t you?

 

This was how the afterlife was for manes for most of human history, but as the Astral walls thinned around the human noosphere, manes began to awaken with the Odic Layer and either return to Earth via the Odic Shadow, the portion of the Layer nearest physical reality, or congregate amongst themselves and form independent afterlives, the largest being the Borderland.

 

Manesologists theorize that, given continual decay of the Astral walls and the indefinite expansion of the complexity of the human noosphere, torpor will cease to be a state all-together in the far future. Man and ghosts will live side-by-side on Earth as they did for the Dyeus culture, but while the Dyeus needed mastery of gaeitie to accomplish this, man of far future will need nothing.

 

Manifestation is not awakening. Manifestation is when a manes acts upon physical reality either by acting upon physical reality directly (throwing objects, haunting houses, setting people on fire) or by using the Astral to telepathically interact with the minds of humans (dream walking, possession, odic shock). Manifestation is purely for when a manes acts on physical reality. When it acts upon the Astral, it’s simply called “acting upon the Astral.”

 

How To Make Observations In The Field

 

 

…There are two things to keep in mind. First, no manes is ever studied with only one classification system. When a human is taken into a hospital and examined, the examination includes several elements–blood pressure, subjective pain questions, pulse rate, etc. Manes cataloged at TIMS or the Carnacki Foundation have files full of metrics. Secondly, it is impossible to simply look at a manes in a split second and determine what they are.

 

Some of you may have been exposed to manesological fiction like The Ghost Gang or Friends In Darkness where manesologists categorize manes just by glancing at them. This is inaccurate fiction.

 

The Carnacki Foundation believes that it takes around twenty minutes of observation and interaction in the field to determine a tentative classification, and this classification likely will change as more information comes to light. Stories romanticize the life of a manesologist as they romanticize all things. They would have you think that a manesologist spends most of his or her time running from manes, running after manes, and making profound discoveries like the manes being the manes of a main character’s lost relative or that the house haunted by the manes is built over buried treasure a gang of supervillians is after. Most of the time, manesological work is boring. It consists predominantly of making slow observations about manes from behind the protection of a Carnacki pentacle, and that’s assuming you’re even in the presence of a manes. Modern noos cameras can transmit all the information a manesologist needs right into their office. If you aren’t watching manes, you’re talking to them in a safe, controlled environment, and the manes you talk to are likely to be ones with weak bas, and your conversation will consist of trying to find something to spark their memory.

 

If you want to go into manesology as a career, go into it for a love a manes, not a love of excitement.

 

The Egyptological Classification System: The Ogdoad Quad

 

 

Before Matthew Ernst’s 1863 publication The Analysis of Manes, it was assumed that manes were unitary, that is to say, of one form and function. But this assumption did not hold up to observations in the field. One manes would appear as their host body did, another would appear as a smear of light. One manes could communicate, another could not. One manes could levitate objects, another could not.

 

To explain these observed differences, early manesologists looked to human hosts and the environment. A ghost that had trouble moving things was the soul of a person with a weak will. A manes that had trouble appearing in a human form was the soul of a person with a weak self-image. A manes bound to a location must have been soul of a person with a historical connection the the location. Perhaps they died there? But gradually, evidence flowed in that while the human mind did produce variation in manes in some circumstances, in others, variation was entirely due to manes in and of themselves. People with strong wills had manes with weak powers. People with weak wills had manes with strong powers. The manes of one murder victim could be bound to the site of his or her murder, but they could also be itinerant.

 

But by 1863, there was enough evidence to the contrary that Ernst and others felt comfortable disputing the unitarian hypothesis, and their stance would be supported by a wealth of discoveries in the following years. Thaumaturgists, in their meditative explorations of the memories of Abramelin, learned several gaeite rituals of the Dyeus culture which could separate a whole manes into components–but do note, when manesologists speak of “separating” manes into component souls, it is not meant that a component is fully severed from a manes, though it may appear that way at times. The Astral is beyond physical concepts such as distance, and component souls are of the Astral. Manesological separation can be thought of as pulling items apart in a plastic shopping bag. The objects move apart, but they remain in the shopping bag together.

 

The most important ritual to the Thaumaturgists was the Operation of Sehul and Mehnot which separated the component which held the memories of the host body from the component which held the vitality and personal memories of the manes, components we now term the ba and ka respectfully. The Operation of Sehul and Mehnot was important to the Thaumaturgists because they believed their personalities and egos had to be shed from their Holy Guardian Angel for it to fully form as an individual. They saw their personalities as giving their Holy Guardian Angels a “false will.”

 

Thaumaturgical explorations of the Odic Layer and the afterlives contained within also provided evidence that manes were made of components. The five rivers of Hades stripped away certain portions of a manes as they crossed, drawing them into the mystical waters like metal to a magnet. For instance, the river Phlegethon is a living embodiment of supreme power, similar to Vril and the power source known as Sleg from the universe known as the Kingdom. The Phlegethon pulls power into itself, including the Djed, the component soul of a manes which governs a mane’s control over physical reality and the Astral. “Water” (it appears as black fire) sourced from the Phlegethon is today a valuable manesological tool as it allows a field manesologist to quickly dampen a violent manes.

 

Under this data, Manes were clearly not unitary beings. There were components to their souls. They were composed of souls just as humans were composed of organs, and just as organs worked together to maintain the body, so did these component souls work together to maintain the soul.

 

To classify these component souls, manesologists turned to the ancient Egyptians, who believed in a multitude of souls and a strong culture in dealing with manes, so much so that Thomas Carnacki called them the first manesologists. While the resultant classification system  borrowed heavily from the ancient Egyptians, it is not a direct copy. Manesologists repurposed and reinterpreted Egyptian concepts in much the same way theosophists repurposed and reinterpreted Indian believes to classify thought-forms, which is why a Bessant’s energy manifestation is called prana and its material manifestation is called nadi.

 

The system Egyptological system has been slightly modified throughout the years. The current system recognizes eight component souls divided into four complementary pairs which gives the system the name “Ogdoad Quad,” meaning “the eightfold four.”

 

Though English names are provided with every class, it is worth noting that manesologists almost exclusively use the Egyptian names–simply because they make great shorthand. It’s far easier to jot down “Djed” than “The Power Soul.”

 

The Power Soul (Djed)

 

 

The Djed was not considered a soul by the ancient Egyptians. Rather, it was a symbol of strength, ability, and stability. It was a representation of the backbone of the god Osiris, who was cut into pieces by rival god Set and pieced back together by the goddess Isis. Osiris was a mighty god, and the Egyptians sought to channel some of that strength through the icon of his vertebrae.  Djed amulets were common in ancient Egypt. They were placed over the backbones of mummies in the hope that in the next life, the mummies would have a strong back and be able to stand up. The physical body was not simply blood and tissue to the ancient Egyptians, it was a spiritual vessel upon which the fate of the spirit on the afterlife relied. A body with a broken back would have a ghost with a broken back.

 

In Manesology, the term Djed is applied to the component soul from which governs the ability for a manes to move itself both physically and Astrally–and also to move objects. The Djed is the “backbone” of a manes’ power. With a weak Djed, a manes may have trouble moving his or her physical manifestation and moving between the thoughts of living human beings. With a strong Djed, a manes is capable of miraculous feats. He or she can telekinetically move houses and telepathically enthrall households.

 

The Djed is separated by the underworld river Phlegethon. whose black flames attract all manner of energy, and by the Perkunos Operation of the Dyeus culture, which involves running an electrical current through a stick of gaeite to create what manesologists called a “gaeite candle” due to is incandescence. Gaeite candles were notoriously unstable, which contributed to the Great London Fire of 1865, and were improved upon by Thomas Carnacki in 1873 with his Carnacki Pentacle, which combined several gaeite candles into a circuit which could ward areas from manes.

 

The Djed is divided into the components Khet, which governs how easily a manes can interact with physical reality, and Sekhem, which governs how easily a manes can interact with the Astral.

 

The Physical Power Soul (Khet)

 

 

To the ancient Egyptians, the khet was the spiritualized human body. Unlike other cultures, the ancient Egyptians denied a firm separation between body and soul. The soul was a body and the body was a soul. This is why mummification was so important to the ancient Egyptians. A preserved, intact body was an enduring soul. A ghost with a rotting corpse was itself rotten, for the corpse was a soul in and of itself.

 

Manesologists use the term khet to refer to the component soul that governs a manes’ physical powers. It is through the khet that a manes projects a physical presence into the world. A ghost with a weak khet has no physical form, or has a physical form that is barely tangible, a shadow on the wall, a cry in the dark, a cold spot, or a crackle of electricity down a wire. In manesological texts, the khet is represented by an image of a sarcophagus lying on its back.

 

It is a common mistake to think that a khet is synonymous to an ectoplasmic manifestation. An ectoplasmic manifestation is merely one way a khet can manifest, and manes that completely lack an ectoplasmic manifestation can still have a strong khet. Any form of physical manifestation is part of a khet, from telekinetically hurling furniture to making loud bumps in the night.

 

The powers granted by a khet are virtually limitless. A ghost with a sufficiently powerful khet has powers over the physical world limited only by his or her imagination. “The living have no defense against the dead.” is an old manesological saying for a good reason. A powerful khet allows a ghost to alter and annihilate matter, project and nullify energy, change gravitational values, raise and lower temperatures, warp space and time, etc.

 

The khet is the most researched and most understood component of the soul due to three reasons. First, it produces phenomena that be measured and quantified. The thickness of an ectoplasmic manifestation, the amount of joules in a telekinetic thump, the frequency of an electronic moan, these are all things that can be observed and recorded, all thing that can be given numbers.

 

Second, as humans inhabited physical reality, learning how manes interacted with physical reality became of the utmost importance to human manesologists–because manes violently interacting with the physical world set off a wave of hysteria.

 

The early thaumaturgists studied ghosts because they believed interacting with them to be an integral part of the development of human virtue. The early manesologists studied ghosts because they found them enigmatic. Neither group saw a pressing societal need to study ghosts, neither group believed they had to study ghosts or else, but the tragic London Fire of 1865 proved that ghosts had the potential to be a serious threat to mankind. If just one ghost could threaten an entire city, what could several do? When manesologists predicted that as the Archon walls thinned, the world’s population of ghosts would skyrocket, fear gripped the world. The bestselling book of 1868 was a book called The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps which presented a rosy view of ghosts and the afterlife which assuaged the public’s fears, but the second bestselling book was The Invasion of Heaven by Mark Jacobson, in which the various factions of the afterlife, tired of having to continue the wars and grudges of Earth in their paradise, elect Kublai Khan their leader and raze the Earth clean of human life. Man gets a peaceful afterlife and the Earth is restored to a garden of Eden. The moral of the story, given by the ghost of Shakespeare as he watches overtake man’s cities, was “It certainly wasn’t the right home for us!”

 

Marcus the Great, the manes who led the Afterlife Invasion of Earth in 1912, liked The Invasion of Heaven and considered it his favorite comedy. Mark Jacobson was one of the “great men” abducted by the initial invasion force and brought to Marcus’ citadel where he was treated like royalty until the Circled Square defeated Marcus at the Battle of Phlegethon in 1918.

 

Jacobson claimed that he wrote the book not as a statement on the danger of manes but as a satire on man’s propensity for war and the dangers of protective pacts between nations. Still, it cannot be said that his book didn’t rise to popularity on a tide of ghost-based hysteria. The zeitgeist post-1865 was one of fear, and manesologists worked hard to fight against that fear by putting all their resources behind investigating the khet–which in the end proved ironic as the sekhem proved to be much, much, much more dangerous. But telepathic attacks aren’t as attention-catching as city-wide infernos, even if they end up with higher body counts, and so the public outcry was on manesologists to study and prevent the physical disasters of manes, and that meant studying the khet. So synonymous were manesologists with “fighting back” against ghosts during this period that they were called “ghost breakers,” which now gives its name to an amusing period drama. As an aside, the actor who plays Matthew Ernst is an actual real-life manesologist. He’s responsible for the shows’ verisimilitude–though in the end, it is still a show and not a work of historical fact. Matthew Ernst never investigated Dracula, though he did write an influential paper speculating as to what he was, which probably influenced the show.

 

And thirdly, though it is sad to say, some manesologists wanted to exploit the physical powers of ghosts. The Lautrec engine of 1862 was as energy efficient as it was inhumane. “Manes make money.” was a common expression of the time, and it was true. Though the Slade Laws forbade the harnessing of manes for energy without their consent, this law was circumvented time and time again. Dr. Stone, Spring-heel Jack, Caliban, and other superhuman vigilantes often fought what Dr. Stone called “little Hades.”  Even after the Borderland Invasion, manes remain enslaved in the dark corners of the world. As horrible as this interest in manes is, it cannot be denied that it furthered mankind’s understanding of the khet.

 

With the khet being the most researched and best-understood component soul, you, dear reader, can take these words to heart–the khet cannot be overcome by physical force.

 

Time and time and time again those who seek to intervene against a violent ghost with a strong khet make the mistake of thinking that overpowering the physical effects of a khet–putting out the fires, countering force with force, insulating the ball lightning–defeats the khet. This mistake is most often made by superheroes with limited knowledge of manesology, but even manesologists themselves make the mistake. Trying to defeat the khet with force shows a great misunderstanding of what it is. It is not force, it is a power that creates force. Trying to overpower a khet is like trying to cure a disease by solely treating the symptoms. You cannot punch a manes into submission or blast it with plasma beams. It may seem impressive and effective to destroy a manes’ ectoplasmic corpus, but there’s nothing stopping him or her from making another.

 

Remember, “The living have no defense from the dead.” If a ghost cannot be turned by Astral means then it simply cannot be turned away at all.

 

Also take note that though the khet primarily governs a manes’ physical power, it is technically not the only soul component to do so. The djew and its components the sah and shut possess a degree of physical power. If a manesologist weakens a manes through the Perkunos Operation and separates the khet, the sah will still maintain a physical manifestation that a manes recognizes as his or her “self.” The Perkunos Operation will stop a manes from levitating a manesologist off the ground and hurling them against the wall, but the “body” remains. The translucent man with a gaping headwound can still walk over to the manesologist and choke them. The shut also maintains a physical manifestation. Many are aware of the ketsueki katanna, one of Japan’s most infamous manesological cases–it provides a great example of how a shut can keep a manes physically dangerous when his or her khet is separated. The ketsueki katana, “bloody sword,” was a blade forged by the infamous sword master Sengo Muramasa. A hyperstatic weapon of power, it could cut through anything, but inflicted a horrible bloodlust upon its wielder. Once drawn, it had to kill–and if no one was around but the wielder, that meant the blade was turned against the wielder. The blade was used by madmen and the desperate to kill many people throughout Japanese history, most infamously by Matsudaira Geki during an 1823 rampage through Kyoto castle in which he slaughtered several of his superiors and left the halls running red. The ketsueki katana drank of the blood of many, many men, so when it started flying around taking life without any need of a hand on its grip in 1954, manesologist assumed it contained the shut of a couple of manes. It turned out to have the shut of 789 different manes. And ever single one had to be identified and separated. Japan’s superhero community was pushed to its limit to contain a flying, murderous sword that could cut through anything long enough for manesologists to work through 789 different manes.

 

Never forget that manes are composed of interconnecting souls. Just as the human body can still function and be a threat when one limb is damaged, so too can manes be a threat after the Perkunos Operation.

 

The Astral Power Soul (Sekhem)

 

 

Sekhem was an Egyptian word meaning “power.” For instance, the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser-tety named himself Sekhemkhet, “the powerful one,” and the lion goddess Sekhmet, whose power was compared with that of Ra himself, was “the powerful woman.” A type of staff, pictured above, was known as a sekhem staff and was carried by priests to symbolize their power and authority. Sekhem was also the name given to one of the many souls ancient Egyptians believed in. It was, as you may suspect, a powerful soul. There’s not much more to elaborate on the sekhem, much of its role and function has been lost to history, but it would seem that it related it some way to the judgement of the soul in the afterlife. If a soul passed the judgement of Anubis, it rose as a sekhem, galvanized by its trial.

 

Manesologists use the term sekhem to refer to the soul component which controls a manes control over the Astral. Through the sekhem, a manes can travel the noosphere, enter dreams, enter minds, possess people, and induce odic shock by interacting with bound souls.

 

Though the Great London Fire of 1865 made people fear the khet, the sekhem was what they should have been afraid of. Through a khet cannot be overcome by conventional means, its effects can be warded against and mitigated. Fires can be put out. Levitating furniture can be bolted down. But there are no conventional solutions to psychic attacks. The vast majority of deaths caused by manes are due to the sekhem. Through these deaths are not as attention-getting as deaths caused by a khet, they are deaths nonetheless. A person who dies by suddenly collapsing on the ground is just as a dead as a person who dies in a burning city.

 

Though the sekhem primarily governs a manes’ power over the Astral, it is technically not the only component soul that does so. Early manesologists were shocked to encounter ghosts who, after being exposed to the Perkunos Operation, still maintained their power. Even if the sekhem is separated, the sema still maintains a level of limited Astral power. Say a manesologist is attempting to exorcise a manes from a possessed host and finds that the host is still enthralled after the Perkunos Operation. Something either went wrong the ritual, or the sema is to blame. It could be that the possessed was close to the host body in life and that the manes ib acts upon them, but it could also be that they are acted upon by the rn. In 1959, the superhero Knight Light was possessed by the first man to take the name Knight Light, who perished during the Worlds War. The possession was a tragic case of unintentional harm. The fist Knight Light had a weak ba. Disoriented and confused, he believed the Knight Light running atop the buildings of Mainline City was actually himself and entered his body. It was difficult for manesologists to exorcise the first Knight Light as he was bound to the second not by his sekhem but by his rn, by the reputation of the name Knight Light. Fortunately, the story had a happy ending. The first Knight Light’s ba was strengthened, and realizing that he had died, made his peace with the second Knight Light and became his mentor.

 

The Perkunos Operation is the first line of defense against violent manes, but never assume that it is a silver bullet. Though it can take away some of the powers of a manes, it cannot take away all powers.

 

The Intelligence Soul (Akh)

 

 

To the ancient Egyptians, the akh was the union of the ba soul and ka soul. It was an elevated soul, powerful, wise, and associated with the light of Ra. it was the soul of intelligence and represented by an ibis, the sacred bird of Thoth, god of knowledge, who was often depicted with the head of an ibis.

 

Manesologists use the akh to refer to the union of aa and ka, just as the ancient Egyptians did. Unlike other pairs in the Ogdoad Quad, the ba and ka work in opposition to each other. The stronger a manes’ ba, the more he or she will feel like their host body and the more compelled they will feel to behave in accordance with their memories. Manes with strong bas will feel like their host, only without skin, and will seek to quickly get back to “how things were” before “they” died.

 

. The stronger a manes’ ka, the more  he or she will feel like a being separate from their host body’s identity. Manes with strong kas feel more at home in the Astral than on Earth and like. They fill driven to be doubles of their host, not continuations.

 

Manesologists have long debated on whether it is healthier to have a stronger ba, a stronger ka, or to have them in perfect balance. It is likely that the debate will never be resolved. There have been manes that remember nothing of their host’s life through weak bas that go on to live happy lives as entities completely separate from their host’s personality. There have been manes that cling fast the memories, name, property, spouse, and work of their host and live happier lives than hosts ever did.

 

Is it better to change or to remain as one already is? When do memories stop being treasures and become chains? Man can’t answer these questions for man, so how can he answer these for manes?

 

However, modern manesologists believe, and this belief is supported by decades of manesological psychology studies, that it is not healthy to have either a ba or ka completely overpower the other. When an akh is nearly completely dominated by the ba, the manes clings fervently, near-mindlessly, to their memories. They become a parody of their host body. They become something like Sartre’s bad faith waiter. They know they’re acting from compulsion, not reason, but can’t change. When an akh is nearly completely dominated by the ka, the manes is restless, ungrounded, and unfocused. Depression typically results. They have a strong, restless urge, but no framework in which to contextualize and resolve their urge. They have a strong urge to fly, but nowhere to fly to.

 

Balance may not be key for happiness, but opposition is.

 

The akh is separated by the Operation of Sehul and Mehnot, the ritual of sun and moon. The Dyeus culture referred to the ba as the moon of the soul, for it reflected the memories and personality of the host as the moon reflected sunlight, and the ka as the sun of the soul, for it generated memories and thoughts that belonged solely to the soul just as the sun generated light.

 

Even slight alterations to the akh can produce drastic changes in a manes’ personality. The Operation of Sehul and Mehnot is not something to use lightly. For most Operations, the Carnacki Foundation only requires field manesologists to have the permission, explicit or tacit, of their immediate supervisor in the field. For the Operation of Sehul and Mehnot, every single use needs prior approval from the section chief.

 

The underworld river that separates the akh is not a single river, but two closely connected rivers that feed into each other. The ba is separated by the Lethe, the river of oblivion and forgetfulness. It is a black river, the blackest river in all existence, blacker than slate, blacker than night. The Lethe is a child of the first night, of Nox, and flows from out of Nox’s Hadean cavern. She is Nox’s forever-young child, a child so young as to have never seen the first sunrise, for there has never been a sunrise in Hades and never will be. The Lethe has a scent, indescribable beyond it smelling fresh, like something exposed to the air for very first time. The Lethe erases memories, and what could possibly be more anathema to living memory than a river which can wipe the memories of even the gods? Ba cannot so much as approach the banks of the Lethe, it repels them absolutely and keeps them to her banks.

 

The Cocytus, the cold river of tears, is a bright, clear river and separates the ka. It is, by appearance, a beautiful river. Through its waters, one can see the black bottom of Hades shining like an opal. But its touch is sorrow itself. It dampens, chills, and stops the vitality of the ka. The Cocytus is often pillaged by mystics and thaumaturgists, and in response Hades often posts Cerberus to this river, for just a taste of its waters grants knowledge of the multiverse. It opens the mind to other worlds where other choices were made, other possibilities explored, and it will bring great wisdom to the thaumaturgist if their ka doesn’t leap out of their skin to weep. For the ka is desire, and the the Cocytus floods the ka with images of countless what-could-have-beens when the ka knows, deep down, it can only be one thing.

 

The Memory Soul (Ba)

 

 

The ancient Egyptians believed the ba to be a soul that was, in some respects, separate from a man. It was related to the word bau, an abstract term which has been translated as “effectiveness,” “Impressiveness,” and “reputation.” The ba can be thought of as a manifestation of a being’s will, something like an avatar. The sun was described as the ba of Ra. The Apis bull was said to be the ba of Osiris. Pyramids were said to be bas of their owners. Court officials were called the bas of the Pharaoh. The ba was the spiritual agent of a man, protecting his body, guiding his way, and even communicating with him. In this way, it is similar to the daemon of Greek thought.

 

The average human’s ba was depicted as a falcon with a man’s head, an image adopted by manesologists to represent their conception of the ba.

 

To manesologists, the ba is the soul component that stores memory and personality. A manes with a weak ba remembers very little about their host body. A manes with a strong ba remembers more about the life of his or her host than the host themselves did.

 

Manes with intermediately strong bas may replicate a personality tied to a specific memory. Instead of acting like a host body at the time of demise, they instead act like the host body when they were a child, or when they were in college. This is not to suggest that all manes that exhibit this “inner child” behavior only know the memories the host held at a specific point in time. A manes that replicates the host at age 5 doesn’t necessarily only remember what the host remembered at age 5. Recall the 1872 case of Douglas Meredith. Douglas and his wife made arrangements for his manes to carry on just as if he and Douglas were one and the same, but a problem presented itself when Douglas mane manifested as Douglas Meredith–at age 18. The teenaged Douglas wasn’t interested in Mrs. Meredith, or in holding down a job at a clerk’s office, or in living in stuffy, dirty, crowded London. He wanted to go to sea. It’s what he wanted to do since he was a boy.

 

Believing that an abnormality of the ba was at fault for her husband’s manes turning out “wrong,” Mrs. Meredith asked Matthew Ernst to perform the Operation of Sehul and Menot to restore the manes memories and thus his personality. But while talking with the manes, Matthew learned that his ba wasn’t weak–it was in fact, extremely strong. The manes remembered everything about Douglas’s life, including the things he had forgotten, like his love of the sea. Understanding Douglas, Matthew declined to perform the Operation on him, and wished him well as he took to the sea on a boat raised from shipwrecks, a creaky husk of abandoned dreams. As Matthew waved him good-bye, he announced that he was going to be more than a man of the sea–he was going to be a pirate, something he dreamed of being ever since he read Treasure Island, a copy of which he found burred in Douglas’ closet.

 

Mrs. Meredith then sued Matthew Ernst, believing that he had conspired with a business rival to sink Douglas’ business without the mature man at the helm, thus the Meredith case became the first time a manesologist was sued by his clients.

 

The 18 year old Douglas Meredith continues to playfully plunder ships around the world and hasn’t aged a day. He never steals a thing, for what need does he have for things, but he has stolen many hearts.

 

The case of Douglas Meredith illustrates a salient point about bas–they can be strong without turning the manes into a carbon copy of the host. While it is true that many manes with very powerful manes end up with “eternal moment syndrome” in which they cling to their host’s personality at the time of his or her death, unable to change or evolve even the slightest bit, when a ka is sufficiently strong enough to provide a balancing factor, manes with the strongest bas can end up having very surprising, very novel personalities totally unlike that of their hosts.

 

The Vitality Soul (Ka)

 

 

The ancient Egyptians believed that the ka was the vital essence of a person, their life force, similar to that of chi in Eastern cultures. One’s ka even had to be fed to keep up its energy. Offerings of food and drink were made to the ka at small “ghost house” shrines. The ka was often depicted as a pair of arms beneath the head of a living being. These arms represented the transfer of ka “energy,” from father to son, from pharaoh to subject, and from god to pharaoh. To the ancient Egyptians, ka emanated like light from Ra.

 

Manesologists adopted the term ka to refer to a manes self-generated instinct and intelligence. Ba grants memories, but the ka grants novelty and creative thought. Manes with a weak ka lack willpower and their personalities are often drawn to follow the dictates of other soul components. A manes with a weak ka but a strong ba, for instance, will act like an eternal copy of the host body at the time of death, a frozen recollection, and a manes with a weak ka but a strong sheut will become a caretaker and guardian of that location, bound to walk its halls for eternity.

The stronger a manes’ ka, the less likely he or she is to consider themselves to be a continuation of the host body. A manes with a weak ka is likely to consider themselves the host entirely. They see themselves as just the host but transparent, especially if their ba is strong. A manes with a stronger ka is likely to consider themselves an extension of the host, but not the host themselves. They consider themselves something like the host’s offspring. They take after the host while being their own individual. A manes with an even stronger ka is likely to consider themselves entirely independent from their host. They are likely to see other soul components as interfering with “their” personality. Some may even turn to gaeite and Dyeus rituals to try and separate and weaken these aspects. This is not advised. Manes dominated by their ka are called the Restless Dead for good reason. They travel the Earth and Astral, hungry for a reason for their existence that they could not find in themselves. Nothing they find appeases them, which isn’t surprising. If they couldn’t accept what was within them to begin with, why would they accept anything new they find out in the world to fill that hole?

 

The Environment Soul (Djew)

The Djew was not a soul to the ancient Egyptians. Rather, the Djew was a symbol of the world in much the way other civilizations would use a globe or a firmament. The ancient Egyptians believed that the heavens were held up by two sacred mountains and in-between them was the Nile, life-giver to Egypt. And so, Djew represents the entire world to an ancient Egyptian–“Heaven and Earth.”

 

Because the Djew represents the world, it was chosen to represent the environmental component soul which governs non-mental impressions made upon the manes that are attenuated. In other words, these impressions cannot be readily changed. They are “locked in,” and require an extreme effort on behalf of the manes or others to change, if they can even be changed at all. This is in contrast to the Sema, discussed below, which governs non-mental impressions made upon the manes that are not attenuated. The Sema, unlike all other soul components, is thought-responsive, and is constantly changing based on the thoughts of others. But the Djew does not change. The entire collective unconscious can decide that a man looked a certain way in life. The Djew won’t care. It will replicate the host body down to the smallest hair. A manes’ family can decide that a certain house is worthless. The Dejw won’t care. It will have its manes cling to the house if it was precious to the life of his or her host body.

 

It is because of the Djew that manes, unless they have a weak Djew, instinctively take the form of their host body and are drawn to objects that were of use and concern to their host. The Djew is also responsible for various haunting phenomena, from a manes haunting an old house to a manes haunting an old pen, or an old doll, or an old sword.

 

The Djew is separated by the underworld river Acheron, a shimmering river with the appearance of gold whose name means pain. The angels call it the garmen boze, which in Enochian means “great pain and suffering.” The Acheron separates the Djew by inducing numbness in a manes’ ethereal senses so that he or she cannot feel the distant tug of the Djew. The Djew is also separated by the Hngnis Operation, a gaeite ritual from the Dyeus culture brought to the modern world by Thaumaturgists combing through the memories of the immortal Baltim. The Dyeus cutlure believed that the Hngnis Operation was a rite of passage for manes, that in abandoning what bound them to a specific shape and location, they became more powerful and more fully developed as individual beings.

 

The Djew divides into the component souls Sah and Shut. Sah involves the biological impression made by the host body and is why manes can readily assume detailed copies of the human form even if their control over ectoplasm is relatively limited. Shut involves the impression of objects–home, property, and personal effects.

 

The Imprinted Body Soul (Sah)

 

 

The ancient Egyptians held the sah to be the spiritual form of the human body created after the judgement of Anubis. It is not an easy concept to grasp, as the human body in and of itself was already spiritualized by the Egyptians. The sah can best be thought of as an idealized, perfected form of the khet made in its image. It was capable of interacting with deities, meeting them on their level, and was even capable of taking vengeance upon humans on Earth.

 

Interestingly, Sah, or Sahu, was also the name of an obscure diety mentioned in the Old Pyramid Texts said to be the father of the gods and identified with the constellation of Orion. Perhaps Sah was the sah of Ra?

 

Though a visual depiction of the sah has not been found, manesologists borrow the imagery of the stellar Sahu in representing the sah as a five pointed star.

 

Manesologists use the term sah to refer to the “spiritual” body of a manes, that is to say, the information on the physical host body imprinted upon the Astral. The sah is not the personhood of a manes. A manes’ mental concept of selfhood is the akh, which is created out of the competing influences of the ba and ka. The sah refers strictly to bodily information. When a soul mirrors and stores the information of his or her host, it is not merely the host’s mind that is mirrored. The entirety of the host, including his or her body, is mirrored, and it is mirrored in its entirety provided that the sah is strong.

 

Skin, organs, hair color, even cellular structure are all mirrored by a strong sah. If a manes’ sah is strong enough, it can be the ultimate clue in a homicide. It will perfectly record the damage done to a body–every entry wound, every poison, every illness. In 1874, Matthew Ernst assisted the manes of Charles Lighter in solving his murder. Matthew Ernst was able to determine through Charles’ sah that Charles wasn’t actually poisoned by a business rival as he and the police believed. Charles was actually the victim of a heart condition he never knew he had, and because he never knew he had it, his ba didn’t know he had it. But his sah knew. The Lighter case would go down in history as the first time evidence from a sah was used in criminal proceedings.

 

If a bonded soul’s sah is strong enough, it can be used to diagnose his or her host’s illnesses. There were no physicians or healers in the ancient Dyeus culture. Every citizen was able to diagnose and treat themselves by studying the sah of their souls. Today, diagnosis by sah is steadily growing as a practice, and who knows, one day physicians may be retired as a profession, or greatly altered from what we know today.

 

The sah is responsible for human manes appearing when they assume a physical ectoplasmic form. When a manes wishes to appear as themselves, they reflexively draw upon their sah. Manes with weak sahs may appear merely humanoid, as featureless silhouettes. Manes with very weak sahs may appear as stick figures, or as “sheet ghost.” Old Adam, manesology teacher at Martin’s School and candidate for being the oldest human manes on record, provides an example of a manes with a weak sah who appears as a “sheet ghost.”

 

A manes with a strong khet can use his or her khet’s powers over ectoplasm and odic to mitigate a weak sah to an extent. They can use their sah to construct an ectoplasmic body around themselves with as much detail as they can give any of their ectoplasmic constructs. But they will always have to make an effort to do so. They will never have the reflexive ease that comes with a sah.

 

The typical sah, such as what an eidolon class manes has, appears much as the host body did with a few differences. The manes has an eerie glow, or their voice reverberates, or their skin is translucent. Manes with abnormally strong sahs appear nearly identical–or exactly identical. Manes with strong sahs sweat. They don’t feel the waxy feel of ectoplasm when touched, their skin feels like skin. Under a microscope, cells can be seen. They even have fingerprints–a fact used by the manes of Richard Travis in 1880 to frame him for the theft of several hundred dollars–quite a lot in those days. The manes of Richard Travis, upon getting a good, objective look at the man, found him to be a heartless cheat and a swindler, and decided to make him pay and ensure that infamy would follow him to the grave. He actually got away with it, and his crime only came to light because he confessed. “In the end, I didn’t have it in me to be him.” he said.

 

Manes with strong sahs may find themselves compelled to stick as close to model as possible. They may find it hard to fly, because their host body couldn’t fly. They may find it hard to walk through walls, because their host body couldn’t walk through walls. They may find it the easiest thing in the world to create dragons and monsters out of ectoplasm, but can’t alter one hair on their head.

 

The Object Soul (Shut)

 

 

The ancient Egyptians believed that the silhouette of a man, his shadow, was one of his souls, and one to be carefully guarded. It was, apparently, rather vulnerable for a soul, and both gods and affluent men like pharaohs and priests protected their shadows by locking them inside shadow boxes.

 

The sheut was, however, more complicated than simply the shadow of a man. The ancient Egyptians believed that anything made in the image of a man was part of his shadow. Statues and drawings were part of a man’s shadow. Any sort of mark man’s image made upon the Earth was his shadow.

 

Manesologists adopted the term sheut to refer to the soul component that imprints on objects in the environment. These objects were important to the host body in life. They were locations where the host body lived, worked, and died. They were personal effects that the host body carried with them every day–a wallet with a picture of a loved one, a trusty pocket knife, a life-saving firearm. Any physical object has the potential to be imprinted on by the sheut.

 

A manes with a weak sheut won’t feel any particular attachment or compulsion to an object. A manes with a sheut of average strength will feel an attachment to certain objects and locations and will be able to exert an influence over these objects and locations. A manes whose host body died in a hallway can make that hallway stretch into infinity. A manes armed with the six-shooter of his gunfighter host body can fire odic bullets that always hit their target.

 

A manes with a strong sheut can feel whenever someone enters into their haunted house or picks up their haunted object. They may even feel this pull through time as well as space. In 1874, a manes materialized in the image of a man completely unknown to the Balmoral clan in the middle of their ancestral mansion. The Carnacki Foundation was called in to investigate and found that the manes was actually a descendent of the Balmoral clan from the year 2020. He grew up faschinated by the palatial estate of his bloodline and became its curator. When his host body perished, his sheut was so strong it pulled him back through time to when Balmoral estate was in its prime. The manes, simply called Mr. Balmoral, couldn’t remember much about the future due to the stresses of temporal travel, but he remained a celebrity until the birth of Lennox Balmoral in 2000. Mr. Balmoral combined with the soul of the infant Lennox and became his godparent, instilling a great interest in the Balmoral clan’s history even as he foretold the child’s doom in 2020. Fortunately, the future is never written in stone, and Lennox cheated his death in 2020, sending his soul into the past while avoiding his demise at the hands of the prophesized doom (it turned out to be the supervillain Dr. Contrariwise, who, obsessed with temporal anomalies, wished to add the unbound manes of Lennox Balmoral to his collection).

 

Manes with strong sheuts may also feel compelled to interact with their haunts. They may feel great anxiety or even pain if taken from them, This leads to the common “haunted house problem.” A manes is bound to a piece of real estate and the owners want them gone. A major reason Thomas Carnacki founded the Carnacki Foundation in 1870 was to resolve these disputes amicably. Manesologists were loathe to remove manes from places that meant so much to them even when the 1865 Manes Charter declared manes a “special class of being” that while entitled to happiness and fair treatment, was not entitled to own property. The Carnacki Foundation would fund the creation of attics, basements, and even entire rooms to give a manes a place to live in peace and quiet–though some unscrupulous real estate owners would take these “ghost rooms” and display them as spectacles to guests.

 

Today, ghost rooms can be found in many Victorian and Edwardian mansions, and the ghosts are usually still inside.

 

It was ounce theorized that the sheut was unique among the component souls in that while all other component souls were expected to strengthen with the natural warping of the Archon walls, the sheut was expected to weaken. It is the way of matter to decay, and it was observed that when imprinted objects were destroyed, the manes would experience pain and potentially madness, a brief return to the phantasmagorical state, or even a brief return to torpor. But the pain would pass and the attachments would be gone. That meant the sheut was weakened, right?

 

No. Examinations of the sheut through the Hngnis operation revealed that it was not diminished at all. What was more, it was found that in the absence of imprinted objects, the sheut sought out new objects to print through the rn and ib of the sema. If a mane’s haunted house was burned to ash, the sheut would seek out a new house to haunt, be it a house owned by a relative or a house in the same neighborhood. Never try and solve a haunted house problem by burning the house down. The manes will simply move to a different house and make its owners hate you and all manesologists for bringing trouble to their doorstep.

 

Manes can not only replace imprinted objects, but imprint on entirely new objects. Matthew Ernst painted every manes he befriended and found that his friends, if their sheut was strong enough, could feel when he gazed upon the paintings with remembrance. His collection of paintings were put on display in New Orleans’ House of Ghosts in 1943, smuggled out of England to avoid seizure by the Nazis, who were strongly against manes autonomy and believed they were property of the state.

 

It was not long after the discovery that the sheut could imprint upon new objects that the Carnacki Foundation used this principle to create artificial bodies for manes to inhabit in 1878 which Carnacki called somatic manes, arguably the first artificials in human history.

 

When the sheut is exceptionally powerful, it can make an entire area feel comforting to manes. While the imprinted land of this powerful sheut won’t register to the manes as their sheut, it will register as a place of profound comfort. This is why manes tend to congregate around powerful sheuts. For instance, the Eternal Lady, Ankhesenaten, has turned the bases of the Monster League into haunts teeming with ghosts just by frequently gracing them with, appropriately enough, her shadow. The Klaris Cafe nightclub has the best swing band in North America, and none of them have a pulse. McQuarrie Science Base has restless researchers. There are always lights that come from the windows of Hodgman Manor though none of them are electric.

 

The most famous example of a powerful sheut is Pax, a massive continent sized kingdom beneath the Atlantic Ocean created by incredibly powerful manes King Justice, the First and Last in 1941 to provide sanctuary to the manes of the world and keep them from fighting endlessly in the Worlds War. Pax was mankind’s first Earthbound afterlife, or “halflife” (as in “halfway to an afterlife”) and is the most populous nation on Earth by far. Pax attracts wandering manes from around the world. So great was its reach that the Borderland felt it was a threat and tried to declare war on Pax through a false flag when it claimed King Justice abducted Helen of Troy in 1943. In 1942, inspired by Pax an wishing to give manes an alternative to living in a monarchy under the ocean, the  American branch of the Carnacki Foundation created the two Great Houses of Manes in New Orleans by generating an artificial sheut, the first of its kind. The House of Ghosts became a place of celebration, an eternal cathartic party where manes could change their identities behind a masquerade. The Palace of Spirits became a place of mourning and healing, a quiet, solemn place of rest.

 

As the number of Earthbound manes continue to increase, many wonder what the world of tomorrow may look like. There are only so many objects on Earth and only so much land. Manes are forced to interact with each other like never before as their sheuts overlap and manes long in torpor awaken. Haunts in the days of Matthew Ernst and Thomas Carnacki tended to be one ghost in one location. Now they’re much more complicated. One location can house several ghosts–and they may squabble with each other. Human are typically afraid of strange manes, and the the same can be said of manes themselves.

 

One day in the far future, the Earth may crackle with the voices of overlapping ghosts as it does on Paox, a planet in our Milky Way galaxy whose people destroyed themselves in a war aeons ago and reduced the surface of their planet to silt. The manes of Paox war over this sand, battling to form the sand of the civilization they fought for. One manes forms the sand into a city just for another to roar by like a hurricane and smash it to pieces. Paox one came to the attention of mankind in 1936 when the Space Savage told its history to fellow Intercessor Connor Elgin, the Astral Knight, and also how he helped a group of listless, tired manes on Paox by moving a moon into the planet’s orbit whose rocks they could form into a new world, one disconnected from the endless wars of the old.

 

Let Paox be a lesson to all. The human race may not reap its sins, but humanity’s manes will.

 

 

The Thought-Responsive Soul (Sema)

 

 

The Sema was not considered a soul by the ancient Egyptians. It was instead a symbol representing unity, symmetry, and balance. The ancient Egyptians saw the sema in many things–the lungs, in the windpipe, and the genitalia.

 

The sema symbol was adopted by manesologists to represent the part of a manes that is thought-responsive, the part of a manes that “does not belong to itself.” All other component souls are thought-generative. They do not respond to any thoughts save the mane’s own, but not the Sema. It is the “other side” of a manes.

 

The Sema reaches across space and even time. Through the Sema, a manes knows when his or her name is spoken. Through the Sema, a manes knows instinctively when and where a loved one is in jeopardy.

 

The Sema is separated by the underworld river Styx, a massive, unimaginably powerful thought-form of pure hatred and antipathy, so much so that its name means Hatred. The gods themselves swear upon the Styx, for not even Dionysius himself can make light of such a dismal river, such a dismal being. The very presence of the Styx causes the Sema to recoil from a manes, for the Sema is built on feelings of human sympathy and obligation. The Sema is also separated by a gaeite ritual from the Dyeus culture known as the Pehuson Operation, which was used by the Dyeus to call isolate and strengthen the Sema so that manes could function as seers, warning the entire community of dangers from the future and as guardian spirits capable of protecting entire bloodlines. Dyeus history is filled with stories of warrior princes battling the Vovin dragon alongside the tutelary manes of their bloodline.

 

The Sema divides into the component souls Rn, which is the component soul that responds to the collective unconscious of mankind, and Ib, which responds to the individual thoughts of those that knew the host body in life.

 

The Name Soul (Rn)

 

 

A person’s name, or rn, was incredibly important to the ancient Egyptians. They believed that a name had life–a life that had to be protected. It would die if it was no longer spoken. Thus, the Egyptians took great pains to preserve their names both physically and spiritually. It was common for names to be found in writing and engravements. The practice of cartouches, of printing the name within an oval, was a protective measure. As the name was surrounded and protected on paper, so would the rn be protected. If the ancient Egyptians ever had a bone to pick with someone, they would strike their names from statues and records, which is what they did to Akhenaten, father of the Eternal Lady, one of the most powerful manes today.

 

Manesologists use the name rn (the name name, essentially) to refer to the soul component that acts upon and responds to the collective unconscious. A rn consists of what others thought of the host body as well as cultural beliefs and expectations concerning manes. The rn is why many manes in Western countries appear as “sheet ghosts” when they have weak sahs and feel strong and energized on Halloween and Christmas. It is why many manes in Eastern countries appear as “tailed ghosts” when they have weak sahs and feel strong and energized on the Zhongyuan festival and the Bon festival.

 

Manes with strong rns are in touch with their reputation and legend and are in some cases, beholden to it. Take the 1871 example of Herman Sykes, who killed himself after he was accused by relatives of killing his wife after an argument. Herman’s manes, due to his reputation, believed himself a murderer and sought to murder the rest of his wife’s family. His delusion was brought to an end by Matthew Ernst performing the Pehuson Operation, and so great was his guilt that he sought for ways to punish himself. He joined several Lautrec inspired engines as a living power source and encountered Matthew Ernst several more times before resolving to leave the Earth behind and join the Borderland. Matthew Ernst would encounter him again during the Borderland invasion where he was part of the unit sent to capture him and bring him to Marcus the Great’s citadel as an “honored man.”

 

The Social Soul (Ib)

 

 

The ancient Egyptians held the hear to be a sacred, spiritual organ of the human body, much more than a mere circulatory pump. The heart, or ib, was formed from a single drop of blood from a person’s mother. The ib was the seat of empathy, morality, and clear thought. When the deceased was brought to Anubis, his or her heart gave testimony to the judge of the dead. The ib was weighed against the

 

The ib has remained the most difficult soul component to observe and study. Like the rn, it is an extension of the manes over the noosphere. Unlike the rn, it does not interact with the collective unconscious, it instead interacts with those who had deep, personal connections to the host body. In this respect, it is the part of a manes that belongs least to his or herself and most to humanity–not the information of mankind, not the noosphere–humanity. It belongs to warmth. It belongs to empathy. When one thinks about a manes and feels a ever indescribable chill or warmth flood their being, they partake of the manes’ ib.

 

Academics have long been frustrated by the ib. When does a person become part of the ib? What makes one person truly special to another? What is love? Can you put it under a microscope? In their frustration, they insist on calling it the “social soul,” and as you can see printed above, it has become the common name for the ib. But it is no more the soul of socialization than love is mere socialization.

Some things in life are not to be understood and intellectualized. Some things are to be intuited and felt. Some things are simply matters of the heart.

 

Manes with weak ibs do not feel it when someone special says their name, though they may if they do it when looking at their grave. Manes with strong ibs feel something whenever someone special remembers their face. Manes with strong ibs are heavily involved in the family of their host body. They want to help the family. They want to be apart of the family. When they are rejected, they are as destroyed as anyone would be if rejected by their family. Recall the tragic 1869 story of the Francis murders. The manes of slain, beloved patriarch Gerald Francis was cast out as a demon by his family, and so he acted as a demon and slayed them all. But let us not close on that tragedy, as the ib is a component of love first and foremost. Look to the example of the superhero Bloodline, who holds one of the oldest superhero legacies in North America. In 1935, New Orleans banker Alan Moreau learned that he was protected from all harm by the manes of his family line–all of them, in fact, going all the way back to prehistory. Alan used his manes army to become a vigilante folkhero, as was the trend of the time, and not only fought crime as Bloodline, but thumbed his nose at FDR’s superhuman regulations by using his family as an itinerant labor force across Louisiana. He of course drew considerable manesological attention as many wondered as to why Charlemagne’s paladins were riding across the United States and was imprisoned by the FDR’s enforcer Gold Star, who bound his family in a piece of gaeite with the Nothoa Operation. But Gold Star was already having misgivings about superhuman regulations and “accidentally” allowed one manes to escape–the manes of a girl from the time of the Sun King. Gold Star figured that being the most innocent person involved in the whole affair, she should be the one to decide how it resolved.

 

The child, of course, followed his heart.

 

Common Classifications

 

Note: Classifications for the strength of soul components goes: very weak, weak, intermediate, strong, very strong.

 

For many manes, it is not the strength of a component that makes a difference, but the relative strength it has against other components in his or her make-up.

 

Eidolons, Functional Benchmarks

 

 

 

Djed

Khet: Intermediate

Sekhem: Intermediate

 

Akh

Ba: Intermediate

Ka: Intermediate

 

Djew

Sah: Intermediate

Shut: Intermediate

 

Sema

Rn: Intermediate

Ib: Intermediate

 

Eidolons are manes with components all of typical strength. Their khet allows them to manifest in reality as sound, light, heat, force, or the sudden nullification of these elements in the environment. It also allows them to manifest ectoplasm, though outside of their self-manifestation, these manifestations tend to be simple, though manifestations in the image of of objects close to the living can be very detailed–keepsakes like prized pocket watches and jewelry, for instance. Reality alteration through the khet is possible for eidolons, but only to a very limited degree as determined by the personality of the akh. The manes of a talented chef can fill a room with the scents of a busy kitchen. The manes of a great artist can put masterpieces on the walls of an entire house–and on the ceilings and floors. The manes of a professional swimmer, or a man of the sea, or the victim of a drowning, can fill an entire building with water that won’t flow a drop from the presence of the manes, that won’t empty under doors or seep through cracks.

 

An Eidolon’s sekhem allows him or her to travel through the Dream Layer of the Astral. They can appear to people in dreams, and their ib, can always locate and enter the dreams of those close to them in life. Their Ba and Ka grants enough personality and will to shape the dreamlands as well as the average person. An Eidolon can travel deeper into the local Astral and enter the Bessant Layer where thought-forms grow and evolve, though doing so is highly dangerous. Many thought-forms have evolved to ensnare manes and harvest them as perpetual sources of emotions. Psychopomps stand ever ready at the border of the Bessant Layer to ward away wandering manes.

 

An Eidolon’s sekhem is potentially more dangerous to a human being than his or her khet. The physical effects of a khet can be mitigated through physical means. A spontaneous fire can be put out. Levitating chairs can be pushed back to Earth. But through the sekhem, a manes can tamper with the mind and memories of a living being. A manes can even enter the mind of a person and possess them. But the deadliest thing an Eidolon can do to a person with his or her sekhem is to directly interact with the psyche of an individual’s bound soul–and pull it from the body. This results in a case of odic shock that is nearly always fatal. And they can touch a psyche over a distance–any distance, as a matter of fact–if they are not called to focus their attention on a specific manifestation with the Nothoa Operation

 

To give an idea of how deadly an Eidolon’s sekhem is, consider the Borderland Invasion of 1912 which in turn spurred the German invasion of New York which kicked off the Great War in the Air. It is estimated that, if the thaumaturgists of the Circled Square hadn’t intervened on behalf of mankind, Earth would have fallen to the Borderland in about thirty minutes. That’s in fact what happened in the analog universe Beta Delta.

Remember, the primary reason King Justice, the First and Last, established the earthbound afterlife of Pax in 1941 was to give manes the world over a safe place to rest after their host fell in battle. A close secondary reason was to keep the world from weaponizing manes. Adding Astral warriors to a war that already expanded beyond the borders of the universe could have led to humanity’s destruction.

 

An Eidolon’s ba and ka are sufficiently strong enough so that his or her their personality largely resembles that of their host. They remember most things that their body remembers, though a few gaps in the memory are expected and normal. Their ba and ka are in balance, so they do not demonstrate the slavish repetition of manes whose ba greatly overpowers their ka nor do they ever question their humanity as seen in manes whose ka greatly overpowers their ba. Most Eidolons do not see themselves as their host body and believe themselves to be separate individuals, but they still see themselves as strongly influenced by their host. They see themselves as the “child” of their host. They care about what their host cared about. They want to do the same things their host did and talk to the same people their host did. Navigating between the influence of their host and the reality that they are not their host is the continual struggle of their afterlife.

 

An Eidolon’s sah is such that they are comfortable manifesting the image of their host body and can do so readily and reflexively, but they are not bound to this image. With effort, they can alter how they appear. The image of the host body also contains imperfections. They tend to glow, or the light passes through them, or make a humming sound. Often they are marked in the manner in which the host body perished. A manes whose host perished from a blow to the head may leak his brains from his ears. A manes whose host perished from drowning may cough up water. When you interact with these manes, try not to draw attention to their “death marks.” It’s rude to stare for humans and doubly so for manes.

 

An Eidolon’s sekhem is strong enough to give them an awareness of and longing for familiar places. They know when someone is in their house. It also makes them very possessive of their personal effects. Treasured keepsakes bring them comfort. Some manes keep close to the belongings of their host. Some Eidolons live in a room plastered with old photographs. Others try to weaken the hold objects have over them by willingly divesting these objects to trusted individuals, often individuals that resonate with their ib. The Palace of Spirits and House of Ghosts in New Orleans have “torch days” where manes “pass the torch” to young people and entrust them with their sekhem imprinted keepsakes.

 

The Carnacki Foundation strongly recommend that everyone has legal documentation detailing what they will and won’t leave to their manes. Manes and family members having to guess the wishes of the deceased creates very brutal circumstances. Even children–especially children–should have documentation. Further elaboration as to why should not be necessary.

 

An Eidolon’s rn is such that they feel whenever someone vocalizes their name with the true intent that they take notice. Their rn is not to the point in which they are influenced by their public reputation, and frankly, even if their rn was strong, most Eidolons are like most people–they are not public figures and are unknown to the world at large. But their rns are strong enough so that cultural expectations slightly influence them. They feel a jolt when October 1st comes around and feel energized on Halloween night. Cemeteries and churches make them feel calm and lethargic.

 

An Eidolon’s ib is strong enough that they can feel when the loved ones of their host are in great distress or elation. With concentration, they can telepathically communicate with them–and their loved ones can do the same. It is always a time of great uncertainty when a manes comes into a family. Families can prepare for a manes as much as they like, but when they come, they create an emotional situation like no other. Think of it from the perspective of a family member–suddenly there’s this being in your life. He’s not your loved one, but he acts like your loved one, and looks like your loved one, and wants to be part of your life like your loved one. Many families that plan for a manes still end up severing all ties with them–which is an emotional pain the manes like no other. The ib connection can help prevent such an episode from passing. Telepathic feeling can communicate things mere words cannot. Because of this, the Carnacki Foundation, in combination with TIMS, has offered free telepathic instruction to families with manes to help families get the most out of their ib connection since 1952.

Eidolons are the most common form of manes in the world, and as such, are thoroughly studied. They serve as the measuring stick by which all other manes are classified, But do note that they serve as a baseline only for manes within the human noosphere. Attempting to use them as baselines across noospheres, for instance, for manes of the “ghost plant” Paox or manes of the United Bloodlines Of Many Worlds, is a little like using the human body as a base lane for their biology. Remember, the world of human manes is vast, but it is only one world out of many.

 

Kleos Eidolons, Godly Ghosts

 

 

Khet: Very Strong

Sekhem: Very Strong

 

Ba: Very Strong

Ka: Very Strong

 

Shah: Very Strong

Shut: Very Strong

 

Rn: Very Strong

Ib: Very Strong

 

A Kleos Eidolon, “Glorious Double,” is the most powerful form of manes. Every component soul of the manes is powerful, and the combination of these souls creates a being whose power is far, far more than the sum of his or her parts. Any potential weakness in their components being too strong is mitigated by the strength of other components. A strong shah in other manes can make it difficult for an ectoplasmic manifestation to appear as anything other than the body, but for a Kleos Eidolon, this is mitigated by a strong khet. A strong rn can force a manes to behave as people remembering them, but for a Kleos Eidolon, this is mitigated by a strong ba. Like the average Eidolon, they are balanced, but their capabilities are on a vastly different level.

 

Kleos Eidolons can be very, very powerful. Their rn and shut are so strong that they know when someone speaks their name, walks in their sacred places, and handles their objects of power–and they know across space and time.

 

Their khet and sekhem are so strong that they can alter reality as it is known across the multiverse. They have an intuitive understanding of the the workings of reality–and can change them to their will.

 

They are often confused for gods. The distinction is hard to make. They can hear prayers and answer them. They know when votive images are made of them through their sekhem. Their haunts are less like haunted houses and more like temples in which divine presence flows.

 

Not every Kleos Eidolon has this kind of godly power, but all potentially can. There are manes out in the world right now who are unware of being Kleos Eidolons simply because they have never had to assert themselves.

 

For those that hold souls to be “holy guardian angels” as the thaumaturgists do, awakening their personal soul as a kleos eidolon is the ultimate goal of spiritual communion so that the kleos eidolon may share his or her knowledge and power.

 

An example of a Kleos Eidolons would be the Eternal Lady, the ghost of Ankhesenaten, daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaten. When she manifested in 1925, she joined the Monster League as one of its most powerful members. She demonstrated her power and her control over her components by developing her ib into an independent being–her daughter, whose name and whereabouts are a closely guarded secret known only to the Monster League and TIMS. Her daughter is a manesological marvel and TIMS carefully monitors her development.

 

Another example is King Justice, the First and Last, creator, ruler, and protector of the earth-bound afterlife of Pax located beneath the Atlantic ocean. King Justice provides a rare example of a Kleos Eidolon with a weak component–his ba. King Justice remembers nothing about his life. His earliest memory is of him floating above the Atlantic, despairing that he couldn’t remember what he was, only remembering enough to know that he couldn’t remember enough, a painful feeling common to many ghosts.

 

Though manesological science disagrees with him, King Justice attributes his vast power to his weak ba, claiming that when he stopped worrying over who he was in life, it allowed him to act without limitations in death.

 

And really, what are manesologists to disagree with him? When it comes to beings that can rewrite reality with a thought, do any of our rules truly apply?

 

 

Wisps, Sparks of After-Life

 

 

 

Djed

Khet: Very Weak

Sekhem: Very Weak

 

Akh

Ba: Very Weak

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Weak

Shut: Very Weak

 

Sema

Rn: Very Weak

Ib: Very Weak

 

Wisps are the faintest, weakest, least intelligent form of manes. They drift through the Odic Layer, barely aware of themselves or anything around them. The forms they take, when they take form, if they can take form, are very crude and simple–a muffled sound, a mote of light.

 

As the weakest and least aware of manes, they have historically been a target of exploitation. It was believed by some in the earliest days of manesology that wisps were not worth consideration, that they were mere fragments of odic unable to feel let alone think. This led to the preserve mistreatment and cruel exploitation of wisps, the most infamous being the 1862 Lautrec Engine. We now know that wisps are capable of thought, muddled and unclear though it may be, and capable of experiencing discomfort, fear, and pain.

 

In 1873, the Carnacki Foundation discovered that, when brought into contact with each other, wisps form mutually beneficial networks that strengthen each other. One wisp with a slightly stronger ib serves as the ib of a wisp with a weaker ib. Wisps support each other in this manner until strong, coherent, wisp-phantoms form. These wisp-eidolons are born out of the memories and personalities of several people and for that reason are sometimes called “jigsaw eidolons.” These eidolons keep wisps happy and content.

 

The natural tendency for wisps to seek each other out and congregate may be the reason why afterlives readily form within the Odic Layer. For all the disadvantages wisps have compared to other manes, they have one advantage–they have an instinctual ability to navigate the Odic Layer and locate afterlives. Unlike other manes, they never need the assistance of a psychopomp, and psychopomps often travel with wisps to take advantage of their inerrant instincts.

 

Lemures, Cryptic Menaces

 

 

Djed

Khet: Varies, at least strong, at least stronger than the Sekhem.

Sekhem: Varies

 

Akh

Ba: Very Weak

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Weak

Shut: Very Weak

 

Sema

Rn: Very Weak

Ib: Very Weak

 

Lemures are named after the destructive, violent ghosts of Greek mythology for a very good reason. Wisps are pitiful. People usually think of them as beings to be protected from harm and exploitation. Wisps are seen as infants. Matthew Ernst called them “The truest children of man, for they will remain children indefinitely.”

 

Now imagine children with the power to lift buildings.

 

Suddenly, they’re a lot less pitiful. They’re frightening, even.

 

Their lack of coherent thought prevents Lemures from applying their powers and abilities creatively. but they are still one of the classes field manesologists dread to encounter. A lemure’s akh is weak, meaning it is difficult to communicate and reason with them. It is difficult to track down the history of a lemure’s host body as a weak sah means they never appear in anything approaching the image of their host body and a weak sheut means they are not bound to a location or object which could give a clue. It is notoriously hard to call a lemure through the Zacare Operation as there is nothing to aid the ritual. A weak ib means there is no special person. A weak sheut means there is no special place. A weak rn means there is no special cultural rite. Still, there is a silver lining–lemures are impulsive, and simply wandering into their haunt is likely to get them to manifest purely off curiosity.

 

Lemures are hard to communicate with, hard to research, hard to call, and hard to subdue, because while weak in all the components that could conceivably help a manesologist, they’re strong in the one that hinders.

 

And to make them even worse, they maintain the clustering behavior of their wisp cousins. If you find one, there are likely several nearby. And they are often attracted to strong sheuts, so if you’re encountering a violent manes with a strong sheut, be aware that you may have to deal with violent lemures too.

 

Field manesologists hate running into lemures.

 

But there is something worse to encounter than a lemure…

 

Nightmares, Psychic Killers

 

 

Djed

Khet: Varies

Sekhem: Varies. Stronger than the khet, at least strong.

 

Akh

Ba: Very Weak

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Weak

Shut: Very Weak

 

Sema

Rn: Very Weak

Ib: Very Weak

 

Do they really deserve the name?

 

Yes, they do.

 

These are the ghosts that get people killed every year. It’s not the ghosts that haunt buildings, or carry out grudges, or plot or plan in any way. It’s these wild balls of psychic furry.

 

Take the problems already posed by lemures and add to them. Not only is hard to reason with, research, and call nightmares, not only do they cluster in groups and follow the stronger sheuts of other manes, but now, because their sekhem is stronger than their khet, they feel more comfortable using their Astral powers over their physical powers. Lemures, because their khets were stronger, typically did things that could be mitigated by physical intervention. They made fires that could be put out, they levitated furniture that could be bolted down, but nightmares go for the psychic powers.

 

They are flying, intangible, often invisible creatures who handle a person’s odic boundary with his or her soul with all the grace of a child handling silly putty. They commonly produce odic shock, and when they don’t, they possess the body. Even if exorcised, they typically cause irreporable damage to the mind, body, and odic boundary. They may also cause an awakening, which means while you’re trying to fight one, their victim is screaming because they can see their own soul, and their soul is screaming back at them because the nightmare tore it to shreds as it played with their odic boundary.

 

And as if this wasn’t already more than enough to make them the most dreaded class, when they first manifest, they are sometimes misidentified as thought-forms, leading to inefficient measures being deployed against them. Manesologists often joke that nightmare cases are “TIMS and Carnacki Foundation parties.”

 

These manes are nightmares, pure and simple.

 

Babbage Types, Recordings Of The Past

 

Djed

Khet: Varies

Sekhem: Varies

 

Akh

Ba: Very Weak

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Strong

Shut: Very Strong

 

Sema

Rn: Varies

Ib: Varies

 

In the year 1837, polymath Charles Babbage speculated on the possibility that spoken words somehow imprinted themselves on the physical environment, that the air “recorded” voices and that this sound could later be released. The Carnacki Foundation remembered Babbage’s speculation when they classified these kinds of manes.

 

Though field manesologists sometimes call them “Babbages,” this is not the official name. Please use “Babbage types” in all your formal writing. Babbage types are also known as “stone records,” as in records of historical events “imprinted on the stones” of their haunts. But again, this is not something to call them in formal writing. “Field lingo” has its place, but it isn’t behind a writing desk.

 

Babbage types are result when a very strong djew meets a very weak akh. Babbage types are living records of events, manes trapped in repeating loops of activity. Owing to their weak akh, they are not aware of anything outside their loop. A Babbage type of a medieval sentry dutifully performing his patrol has no idea that he walks ruined walls, that the castle he defends is rubble an dust. A Babbage type of a Worlds War soldier wanders the battlefield on which he fell, trying to find enemies that no longer exist. A murder victim does her hair, walks down the hallway, and is stabbed to death by a maniac. Then she does her hair, walks down the hallway, and is stabbed to death by a maniac. If their akh was stronger, they would realize the state they were in and experience a hellish existential terror. But because they are fully absorbed into the “loop,” they don’t realize their life is repeating. They exist entirely within the moment.

 

Babbage types are not hard to deal with. They are easy to identify and their aims are easy to discern–they play them out periodically for all to see. You don’t need to do a lot of guess work and research to figure out what a Babbage type wants. It’s very hard to be harmed by a Babbage type. And yet, this is a reason they have a surprising number of kills on record. “Ghost chasers” and amateur manesologists treat Babbage types as theme park attractions and thus take risks they shouldn’t. They call out to the Worlds War soldier on patrol. They try and step between the killer and his victim. They try and quote Hamlet to the medieval watchman guarding his stones.

 

Frankly, if you’re on the Carnacki Foundation’s payroll and you get hurt by a Babbage type, don’t even bother showing up to work the next day.

 

It is nigh impossible to communicate with a Babbage type. “They are their history.” in the words of Matthew Ernst. From the perspective of a Babbage type, they recontextualize all attempts at communication. The medieval sentry sees the man trying to communicate to him as a French soldier and readies his bow–if he even sees them in the first place. If one disrupts the “loop” by causing something that cannot be recontextualized, say by having another manes grab the medieval sentry, carry him away from his ruins, and deposit him at the nearest Johnny Winter’s so he is awash in modernity, then the loop will simply reset.

 

For Babbage types with slightly stronger bas, some success in communication has been made by researchers who “play along” with the recorded event. For instance, in 1876, Matthew Ernst was able to communicate with the sentry of Hemworth castle by dressing up as another soldier and announcing that he had come to relieve him. But for the most part, you don’t try communicating, you act.

The Operation of Sehul and Menot is the how you break a manes out of a loop–but be warned. Don’t use it to strengthen the manes’ ba. That sounds intuitive, doesn’t it? If the problem is that the manes isn’t aware that he or she is trapped inside a repeating environment, then shouldn’t it be solved by making them aware of their situation? That’s what Matthew Ernst thought when he first encountered the sentry of Hemworth castle. he conducted the Sehul and Menot, strengthened the sentry’s ba, and found that the sentry was quickly driven insane by the understanding of his situation.

 

Matthew Ernst nearly perished as the sentry lashed out, trying to will away the reality that now knew was false from the reality that was. He brought all the power of his sekhem and khet together as a wave. The ruins rumbled. Their stones flew. Matthew Ernst quickly performed the Perkunos Operation in his head as a stream of rubble propelled by supernatural power, but it was of little use. Though gaeite wards against the Astral, it has no special power over physical reality, and momentum is momentum whether a rock of thrown by the hands of a man or a manes. Matthew Ernst was struck in the head, and would have perished in Hemworth castle if his friend Joseph Morton didn’t come to his aid, conduct the Operation of Sehul and Menot to weaken the ba, and drag Matthew out of the haunt.

 

Remember, no field manesologist ever goes into a haunt alone. Isolation will get you killed.

 

Matthew Ernst discovered why you shouldn’t try and help a Babbage type by strengthening their ba–they become an Interned, one of the deadliest classes of manes. They become extremely emotional and violent, lashing out in all directions, trying in vain to escape the loop. Instead of strengthening the ba, strengthen the ka. This forms a manes known as a Haunter, a “living haunt.” The manes will think of itself as the location, as a genius loci. This creates a psychological separation between the manes and his plight. The manes doesn’t see himself as a prisoner. The manes doesn’t see himself as a person within the haunting at all. The manes sees itself as the haunting itself and from that identity you can then safely strengthen the ba.

 

Here’s how Matthew Ernst did it: after recovering from his head wound (or rather, after he woke up. Matthew Ernst never took time off for sickness or injury), Matthew communicated with the sentry disguised as a soldier come to relieve him. Upon seeing Matthew’s headwound, the sentry, who’s ba was still somewhat strengthened from Matthew’s earlier Operation, expressed weary resignation that the castle was so besieged that even the wounded had to take shifts. From that comment, Matthew got the idea of strengthening the sentry’s ka. As a Haunter, the sentry would be the entire castle–including its men and commander. Matthew performed the Operation again, strengthened the sentry’s ka, and talked with the captain of the garrison. After convincing the captain that the enemy had fled, which he did so by conversing with him for three days and nights (if he fell asleep and stopped conversing, he risked the loop resetting), the captain withdrew the sentry out of the rain.

 

Now that he had excused himself of his duty, the sentry was able to respond far better to the strengthening of his ba. The case became a classroom example of how to handle a Babbage type and the sentry himself, in recognition of his many, many years of tireless service, was granted the castle by its modern day owners. He still patrols the ruined walls, but now he does so for a reason–Hemworth castle now contains one of the largest haunts by manes population in all of Europe, all drawn to the sentry’s sheut.

 

Though the Carnacki Foundation recommends action over communication when it comes to Babbage types, sometimes communication is needed. Babbage types are often considered a great source of objective historical information. They are “movies of the past,” provided that the contamination from the rn doesn’t occur. Even a slightly strong rn can make a Babbage type appear historically inaccurate. Take the 1891 Ripper, for instance. It was rumored that the infamous superpowered serial killer known only as Jack the Ripper perished in 1890 after the French superhero Fascinax chased him into a burning building. The public was incredulous. No body meant no proof. Soon, people began to report of a shadowy man walking the foggy streets of Whitechapel, large blade gleaming in the gaslight. Then the bodies started. At first there was one, and the police said that the cuts appeared to have come from a piece of glass and that it was an accident. The poor lady slipped and fell onto a broken beer bottle. But the next body had cuts that could only have bene made by a knife–and many of them. That was when the public panicked. The Ripper was back–or maybe even his manes. A quarter of a century after the Great London Fire, the event made many fearful of manes, and now here was a manes of the most notorious serial killer in human history. The public was hysterical.

 

All sorts of superpowered mystery men descended onto Whitechapel–Caliban, Spring-heeled Jack, and even a young Dr. Stone. Of course, Fascinax joined the hunt. His nemesis, Numa Pergyll, had an uncanny knack for cheating death, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t have another nigh-immortal nemesis to deal with. They encountered the Ripper and confirmed that he was in fact a manes of some sort. Caliban swung his walking stick right through him. Spring-heeled Jack shot him to no effect. Fascinax, having the gift of telepathy, reached out to the Ripper and realized it was not the same being he fought before. If it was his manes, it had nothing that made him Jack the Ripper.

Fascinax recruited Matthew Ernst to investigate, feeling that there was something strange about the manes that he couldn’t place, not even with his telepathy. Matthew met Dr. Stone, Caliban, and Spring-heeled Jack during the investigation. “I felt the age of the superhuman dawning.” he said. “I stood in the shadow of beings that could perform miracles the likes of which I had only seen in the hands of manes and gods. I did my best to be useful. I was amazed. They treated me with such respect, though I was balding and my hand wobbeled on top of my cane. “Dr. Ernst, the Ghost Man” they called me, the same way people called them Fascinax, the Prince of the Invisible and Caliban, the Master of Cities. I had no idea why.”

 

With Caliban holding him in one arm, Matthew chased what he thought was the Ripper across London, but discovered that what they were chasing was in fact the Peckham Ghost–a superhuman that wasn’t a ghost at all and was confused for both a manes and Spring-heeled Jack when he was first sighted in 1872. The Peckham Ghost, who called himself John, was a superhuman with what we now call a metapathogen–a hyperstasis that negatively impacts its hyperstatic. John was covered in an incandescent, chitinous exoskeleton that protected him from all harm but made him look inhuman. But even he, feared outcast that he was, came to try and stop the Ripper.

 

He revealed to Matthew that he had thought often of seeking him out to ask his professional opinion on what he was, not because he believed he was a manes, but because Matthew seemed to have a gift for explaining the unexplainable. John wanted to know what he was, but feared that if he asked Matthew that not even he could tell him.

 

Matthew gave John some comfort by telling him that as far as he could tell, John was a man.

 

With the aid of the Peckham Ghost, Matthew and Caliban were able to locate the Ripper. After imprisoning the Ripper within an electric pentacle, Matthew discovered that the Ripper was the manes of the first victim, the one who died by an accident no one believed. Her name was Margaret Spier and she had in fact died in an accident. But the people refused to believe. Their belief that there had to be a Ripper and that she had to be his victim acted upon her abnormally strong rn. She became the Ripper. She prowled White Chapel, which her strong sheut had imprinted upon, and manifested the Ripper in ectoplasm where there was none.

 

It is a sad fact of reality that the slain are talked about less than their killers.

 

Margaret Spier, disgusted by what the rumors of man had done to her, fled Earth for the Borderland and has remained there ever since.

 

As you have just read, the rn can confound the verisimilitude of a Babbage type considerably. Before drawing any kind of conclusion from the pantomime of Babbage type, the Carnacki Foundation must certify as to the weakness of the rn.

 

If you converse with a Babbage type for historical research, take great care that you don’t get sucked into the loop. Babbage types with strong khets can alter within their haunts. A single room can suddenly fit an entire countryside. Superpowers may be nullified if they’re from a time period where superhumans were the stuff of myth and legend. Time and space may suddenly shift. You may actually find yourself projected through the sekhem back in time to scare the living host body, as you will appear to them as a manes. Babbage types with strong sekhems may alter your mind to fit in with the narrative of their loop. You may suddenly find yourself speaking in a language you don’t know. You may suddenly find yourself committing actions you don’t remember doing. They can make you think and do anything to keep up the narrative. They can make you the hero or the villain of the story, the killer or the victim. As a safety precaution, make sure that the Babbage type is unaware of several members of the field team, that way if anyone starts to be drawn into the loop, help can come to them swiftly.

Wights, Faceless and Formless Ruin Dwellers

 

Djed

Khet: Varies

Sekhem: Varies

 

Akh

Ba: Very Weak

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Weak

Shut: Very Strong

 

Sema

Rn: Varies

Ib: Varies

 

Wights are Babbage types who have very weak instead of very strong sahs, meaning they don’t look like people. This makes them good challenges for the detective skills of nascent field manesologists. Who is the oozing shadow of Brale Hall? Why does the formless figure haunt the Broussard Projects?

 

Manesologist students have to pay attention to the actions of the manes and the environment to solve the mystery, but doing so for a wight is far easier than doing so for other manes. The wights are on repeat. If you missed a clue the first time, just pay better attention the next time.

 

Because rookie manesologists teams spend so much time with wights, they often adopt them as “mascots” whose identification is part of the rite of passage for new members. For instance, Martin’s School’s young manesologist club has adopted a wright known as the Black Tide of Joyous Harbor as their “pet wight.” They affectionately call him Inky. That’s apparently the name of some sort of video game character.

 

 Interned, The Imprisoned and Insane

 

Djed

Khet: Varies

Sekhem: Varies

 

Akh

Ba: Varies. At least Intermediate

Ka: Very Weak

 

Djew

Sah: Very Strong

Shut: Very Strong

 

Sema

Rn: Varies

Ib: Varies

 

Babbage types aren’t typically “loud” manes. They go about their afterlife with clockwork precision, not aware of anything beyond their loop. Even violent Babbage types, say a woman who gets knifed in her bedroom every night at midnight, are only violent within their loop. But when a manes has a strong enough ba to be aware that they’re trapped in a loop, things get very loud and very nasty. The manes hurl the totality of their sekhem and khet at the walls of their prison-reality, not knowing how to escape, unable to escape because they themselves are the ones trapping them within the haunt, but still they claw at themselves, driven completely insane.

 

Matthew Ernest once described being inside an Interned’s haunt as “Being inside a giant watch as its breaking down. Familiar parts are disconnected and slammed back together. Pitch-black midnight follows a bright afternoon follows a misty morning. The clocks are always wrong. Furniture hangs from the ceilings. People walk on the walls.”

 

Everything in the haunt moves without any awareness of field manesologists. Imagine being a mouse trapped on an assembly line. Reality is nothing but a serious of emotional outbursts shaped into memories, and if you are in the way of these outbursts, you are going to die. The manes will shape reality right through you. They will put a table right through your chest, a wall right through your head.

 

Interned are one of the possible manes to encounter. Their one consolation is that they don’t sneak up on you. You’ll know you’re walking into the haunt of an Interned. The house will be screaming.

 

Only enter an Interned’s haunting with your gaeite lanterns on setting 20. Have the field leader go first with his pentacle shield at max power. Use the Kora formation, drop pentacles at every 50 meters. Go in like soldiers invading enemy territory under fire.

 

But if you’re a student reading this, you won’t have to worry about Interned for a long, long time. Rookie field manesologists aren’t allowed anywhere near them.