Eumenides Teaser Text - The Eight Cthonic Powers
This is the taxonomic breakdown of occult powers that shape the Sea of Time in Eumenides. In some ways, it's just a footnote to some other things in the game -- the powers the Executors wield and spring from are separate from these. However, I think it's pretty clever stuff, synthesizing a lot of afro-carribean diaspora material with more conventional western occultism. The italics are art notes for the tarot arcana type plates depicting these forces.

The Eight Cthonic Powers

The cthonic forces divide naturally into eight taxa. These eight divisions are known to the Executors and their servants and to mortal sorcerers as well, for any careful study of the world’s occult principles will reveal them. These eight powers are often but not always made manifest as energies capable of resolving and directing the specific outcome of certain stereotypical chaotic systems like fluid dynamics or the interactions of plasma and magnetic fields. Though they are referred to by the names of individuals and spoken of as people or deities, these powers are thoughtless and without self-awareness, not deities but flavors of occult sheer and torsion. Deities spring from these powers, and may be quite formidable, but the powers themselves are not “gods”.

Hermes Trismegistus, Via Ad Portas
Hermes Trismegistus is depicted as a young child leading the viewer through a doorway, the door of which is open about 1/3 of the way. The road beyond the doorway is a rainbow.

The road and the doorway, the via ad portas is a force represented only indirectly. Hermes Trismegistus is the conduit of occult power that allows the Executors to manipulate and shape the other power of the Sea of Time, to move history and reality, to create and maintain the interface to the Maze of Twisting Stairs. This metaphysical force is the gateway through which the power of the All-Lords flows, and a great weakness of their reign. What they can manipulate, others can likewise twist. This force is the root of the Ariadne Heresies and mortal sorcerous Initiation. The Executors would surely cause it to cease if they could, but then the Dreamers would have no handle with which to shape the Sea of Time.

The power that arises from the via ad portas influences other cthonic forces. The Via Ad Portas is typically the source of power for Final Age scenarios where humanity creates powerful artifical gods.

Geburah Father of Laws
Geburah Father of Laws is depicted as an old man with his face half-blindfolded, in direct tribute to the Rider-Waite 9 of Swords and the one eye of Odin; perhaps he is justice peeking, perhaps he has paid the price of wisdom. In one hand he holds a pan balance with a heart and a feather on it. They are in perfect balance. With his other hand, he holds a sword, which he is cutting a child in half with. Two women wail but his face is emotionless.

Geburah Father of Laws is the source of all logical systems. Hierarchies, rules, heuristics, other formal second-order systems are the domain of this power. Geburah Father of Laws is present in mathmematics, engineering, legalism and the practice of law, science and theology. The power of Geburah is the mastery of ordering. That which arises from Geburah commands and is obeyed. Geburah, Father of Laws is a common focus for Final Age cthonic eruptions involving all-encompassing police states or viral takeovers of the populace by an invasive AI. Deities that spring from Geburah are beings of order and rules are most often sprung from books, artificial worlds and other second-order realities.

Stella Maris
Stella Maris is depicted as a direct tribute to the image Madonna in Heaven by Albrect Durer. No baby jesus please. Maybe add in some elements of Guan Yin, pouring out the bottle.

Stella Maris is the force governing oceans and the behavior of great bodies of water – tide, currents, waves and so on. It also governs the moon, and lunar influence on things other than the seas are also part of the Stella Maris. These elements of the Sensual World are so pervasive and the large-scale fluid effects so specialized that they have their own managing force. Stella Maris also manages plate tectonics and mantle-crust interactions due to relatively similar rules.

The Executors and mortal sorcerers mostly interact with the Stella Maris by commanding it to produce oceanographic phenomenon or tremblors. Its many complexities go largely unplumbed. Deities arising from the Stella Maris are known as undines. These beings are relatively common, but most are intent on aqueous matters and of little note to the human narrative. Those that do become involved in the mortal world do so as explorers and dabblers, and are called nymphs. These explorations can be quite destructive, as the mortal world is alien and mysterious to their watery consciousnesses.

The Stella Maris is often the source of power in Final Age narratives where the human race is dealt a terrible psychic injury by some experimental mishap or industrial accident, whose resonance in the cthonic fields leaves mankind broken-minded or totally insane.

Athena Oya
Athena Oya is depicted as a thin, androgynous man / woman clad in a Dukes of Thunder mobility carapace, carrying a lightning bolt. Like Loki, her red hair is an actual tongue of flame. She is depicted descending into a laboratory that mixes alchemical and scientific apparatus. She is causing a laboratory fire as well as bringing inspiration to the rapt eyes of a researcher. This is an archetypal prince of chaos – slim, andro, armored, beautiful.

The Athena Oya is the force of raw change and unfettered entropy. From it spring fire, genius, wind, storms, lightning and magic. The Athena Oya is often used in a technical manner during the shaping of reality and when engendering great changes or disasters in the world, but it has only a transitory place in the Sea of Time. This power’s arbitrarily destructive aspects make it erosive and unstable, and it will either grow and blossom into a conflagration or annihilate itself – it exists only to react.

Deities arising from the Athena Oya are called Surt-sylphs, and they are self-perpetuating bonfires of mutation and eradication. These vortexes of fire, wind and gold can be conjured and enslaved, but only at great hazard, for their isolation must be total. Final Ages that involve the Athena Oya tend to be those that seek to tap cthonic power for limitless energy or as power for terrible beams or bombs.

Yellow Emperor, Keeper of Grain and Soil
Yellow Emperor is depicted as a physically perfect man with completely empty eyes in kingly robes. He is standing alone in a wasteland, and smiting a great rock with his scepter of office. There is a crack in the rock where he strikes it, and both paradise and serpents are spilling forth in equal measure from the fissure.

Yellow Emperor is the governing force of the additive components of the natural process. It is the ruler of the spheres of growth and radiative adaptation, plants and other sessile animals, reproduction, digestion and metabolism. Yellow Emperor is balanced by Guede, and these two forces together form the equilibrium of the natural world, just as Sophia Tlazolteotl and Geburah Father of Laws form the central narrative of human civilization.

Deities arising from Yellow Emperor spring from large organized life-systems. These tend to be dense and offer a great deal of biological activity on several scales. Thus, forests are the archetypal locale for such a manifestation, as are coral reefs, but algal blooms are not. Yellow Emperor deities who are focussed on their locale are called dryads. Those that are focussed on the world outside it are called leshys. While Yellow Emperor is not as volatile as Athena Oya, its expansion into unutilized potential is certain and inexorable, and it too is ultimately erosive, though it tends more to subsume other powers into itself rather than merely exposing them to arbitrary change.

Yellow Emperor is the father of Final Ages where humanity achieve a new collective existence or group consciousness through the utilization of cthonic forces, but that mode of existence is not sentient or self-aware. In these existences, individual humans are reduced to mere tissues of a great hive, which lives, but lives to no end.

Sophia Tlazolteotl
Sophia Tlazolteotl is depicted as a demimondaine. Three well-dressed men sit at her table, exchanging money and favors, while heaping her with gifts. Her daughter sits at her knee learning her mother’s trade. Who would have thought Sarah Bernhardt’s mom would be one of the eight arrows of Chaos?

Sophia Tlazolteotl is the governing force of informal, diffuse and capillary structures. This force governs water runoff and river systems, the growth and development of offspring, and human social interactions involving emotion, crookedness, sexuality and vice. The Sophia Tazolteotl is one of the primary tools of the Executors in governing the human race. Through its interaction with Guburah Father of Laws is human political history shaped.

Deities that spring from Sophia Tlazolteotl tend to have a flow or cascade that powers them. Often this is a river system, but it can be a major hub in an administrative system dedicated only to the flow and processing of requests and reports. Regardless of if they arise in a river or data center, they are called rusalka if they merely linger in their place of origin to gossip, seduce and murder, and hags if they go abroad to seek out sexual encounter and wickedness.

Hags are hated by the Vehmgericht especially, as they compete with the vehm for the same niche in the occult-political ecology. This is the one kind of deity the Vehm can be counted on to suppress. However, those that do survive by subverting their hunters or stealthy growth into a political fixture are tremendously guileful. Sophia Tlazolteotl is the mother of Final Ages where the human race breeds cthonically-inhabited god-children, or poisons the entire world beyond habitability and slays all life incidental to pursuit of the cthonic powers.

The Wieland Force
The Wieland Force is depicted as a great engine hurtling along tracks that are about to end. On the front of the engine is the head of bull lowered to charge.

The Wieland Force governs the actions and states of those things that have the ability to change the world but no real volition in doing so. This is primarily animals and machines. The Wieland Force also governs the alien intelligences that arise from these contrivances when they are elevated beyond the level of mere tools and granted volition while still being creatures of purpose only.

Deities that arise from the Wieland Force are called magerrach. They are most common in the Age of Industry or later, where they sometimes come into existence in large industrial works. Those that become externally focussed often have an approach similar to the Interlopers known as Svartalfar without the emphasis on spreading between narrative arcs. However, magerrach are sometimes observed in large groups of animals, and they can also emerge among human mobs during riots.

The Wieland Force is one of the powers most commonly involved in the human race’s self-destruction. Final Ages governed by the Wieland Force are those where humanity is crushed beneath the iron heels of an android uprising or slain by its own machines. It also rules those where man is downsized out of existence by an emergent system of mechanical rule incidental to global automation of policy choices and financial markets.

Guede
Guede is depicted as a laughing, Grateful Dead-style skeleton-man in the tophat and sunglasses of Baron Samedi. He is opening the door to a hearse or funeral dilligence, and sweeping one arm elaborately to invite the viewer inside. “My Ride’s Here”.

Guede is the negative and subtractive hand of entropy. It is the force governing rot, decay, senescence and the passage of that which is to that which was through arbitrary circumstance. It is the punctuation of equilibrium and the downward pressure on curves in the Volterra-Lotka equations. It is also the patron of decay bacterias and fungus. Guede is Yellow Emperor’s natural complement, and shares its erosive kinship with Athena Oya.

Deities of guede arise from places of decay – ruins, cemeteries, charnel houses. They walk the line between life and death, exploring decay and ritual murder. These deities are called ghouls if they haunt their home, or manes if they walk abroad. Deities arising from Guede power tend to be especially terrible to the eyes of humanity, and even seeing them can often kill non-Initiates.

Guede is involved in the destruction of the human race primarily in those Final Ages where humanity resurrects the dead with cthonic power, either as black-masked slaves or in the form of electronically resurrected spirits of the human ancestry, but it is involved indirectly in every ending.