February Book Blog: Mage Paradigms and Creatures inspired by Jeffrey J. Kripal's How to Think Impossibly

Intro & Review

Hi! Not dead! The RSI is slightly improved, so I'm going to see if I can step up the writing pace this month & maximise the number of posts I can still get out in Q1 of 2025... watch this space. 

This is a series I'm doing monthly for 2025 where I take a book I'm reading for pleasure and make gameable content for something from it. You can find the first one here.

In brief, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else is a text by Rice University religious historian Jeffrey Kripal, published by University of Chicago Press, which takes various eclectic academic approaches to experiences of what he calls the 'supernormal'. 

Kripal sets out to 'think-with' a series of people who've experienced otherworldly phenomena of various sorts, taking their experiences seriously as describing real events. There's no attempt at a comprehensive survey - the chapters deal, in turn, with near-death/afterlife experiences; UFOs and specifically insectile aliens; the mystical and UFOlogical thought of an anonymous savant named 'Kevin'; the writings of historian of Judaism Elliot Wolfson and some of Kripal's interlocutors on the nature of time; Kripal's own thought on 'dual-aspect monism', a metaphysics in which the essential unity of the world is divided into apparently physical and mental natures; and a problematization of this thought focussing on the role of harmful or 'evil' supernatural manifestations. Each chapter is looser in theme than the last, drawing in an eclectic range of academics and spiralling out on long, peripheral tangents or wholly changing course all of a sudden. This meandering style is difficult to pull off well, I think, without confusing readers, but a good book can do it.

This is not a good book. Let me be clearer, since it's a non-'skeptical' work on the paranormal, and that for some of you will be enough to qualify it as bad: this is not a good book on its own terms, and it's on those terms I intend to critique it.[1] The prose is overdramatic, punchy to the point of being fragmentary, constantly overstating the case. (I wonder if this is a general symptom of or reaction to something in Religious Studies training? Jason Ananda Josephson-Storm, another relative radical in that space, has a similar though better-executed style.) Claims are made with no justification at all attached, then taken as a basis for future arguments (See fig. 1, pg 91) or, flimsy justifications for wide-reaching claims (UFOs have been part of cultures all over the world) are concealed in footnotes (where one finds that four or five singular case studies from different continents, mostly modern and carried out by Euro-Americans, have been adduced as evidence - see ch2 nt14 for an egregious example). Authorities are regularly cited as the most 'respectable' thing Kripal can come up with - to pick out a real example, a 'feminist thinker' per the text, whose wikipedia bio leads with 'American theologian and priest.' Not to say one can't be both of these things, but Kripal's consistent choice of the option liable to carry more weight with academics reads to me as an appeal to (contextual) authority at best and intellectual dishonesty at worst.

All this poor academic practice might be redeemed somewhat if it were, as Kripal states, part of an earnest effort to 'think-with' the viewpoints of the people who he describes throughout. It is presumably hard to get funding and support for a work on what he terms the 'supernormal', which might limit available time for research, writing and editing and lead to a rushed work where sloppiness was somewhat understandable. (Though he does seem to have managed to publish with the prestigious University of Chicago Press.) Unfortunately, the promised 'thinking-with' remains a mirage: you can see it on the horizon at the beginning of every new chapter, as Kripal presents some new and individual perspective on the world, often through the lens of the kind of theorist who isn't usually given any space in the academy. Then the mirage breaks, and instead of a sparkling oasis we see the lone and level sands of Kripal's own position, 'dual-aspect monism' - broadly, mind and matter appear in the world but are merely two divided aspects of one monistic reality. Kripal talks of 'radar and revelation' - the material and spiritual sides of supernormal phenomena, framed in a UFOish context. Well, if the archetypal scientistic skeptic denies the special radar of the supernormal experiencer, arguing that everything they see can be explained by already-known science, Kripal denies the special revelation. By his own confession, 'I believe in belief but not in beliefs.' The abductee given visions of surgical experiments by mantis-aliens is accessing the same higher reality as a mystic experiencing the goddess Kali, reaching towards a general unity of all stuff.  The believer is thought-with only insofar as they can lead up to Kripal's personal conclusions, which always close out a chapter. I don't think expressions of personal belief should be verboten in topics such as this, and to be fair he makes the bare minimum effort to note that he doesn't expect others to come to the same conclusions as he is, but when this seems to be the primary analytical point returned to in the text it weakens it as a description of its subjects.

Oh, and there are numerous abuses of the terms 'quantum' and 'gnostic' which anybody observing the paranormal/supernormal field will recognize well by this point.

Look, I'm not a hardline skeptic - or maybe, my own skepticism is more universal that the typical 'scientific' one. As an academic, my research interests include occult and esoteric groups; I have occasionally done tarot & various semi-serious meditations, have my own loose and soft religio-philosophical perspectives which whilst fairly materialistic aren't just 'dead matter and entropy, forever'. I think UFO theorists are a bit silly and possibly too easy to distract from actual government malice, but I won't laugh them out of the room.[1] But the fact remains that, even if we put aside all prejudices and come to the table to have a conversation about the reality of [whatever] as equals, that just means everybody has to bring the same standard of evidence and argument. I'd be annoyed by Kripal's book if it were about fish migration patterns. I can only imagine he assumes no serious skeptic will ever engage with it respectfully and thus void the 'bad faith' defence, possibly even that he is preaching entirely to the converted. [2] This may in fact be so, me aside in the latter case, so go off I guess. For those in my audience: save yourself the time, if you were interested go listen to Weird Studies or read some Techgnosis. Or: Mage! For which Kripal's own purple-paradigmaticism fits perfectly.

[I have cut 500-ish words of snarky comments on Kripal's writing style from this introduction because they aren't very substantive, and glass houses etc. I leave the intrepid reader to create their own snark, should they read this book, which, to reiterate, they probably shouldn't.]

[1] on this, I'd really recommend the conclusions of the last chapter of Erica LaGalisse's Occult Features of Anarchism and Harper & Sykes' Conspiracy Theories: Left, Right and... Centre, which both argue that the automatic dismissal of such folks is essentially a form of class warfare, flaunting the fruits of institutional education to gatekeep the mainstream discourse and thereby writing off everybody unwilling to kowtow as irrational and unworthy of engagement (i.e. a recipe for the very polarized 'post-truth' the gatekeepers then decry).

[2] This latter seems to be quite a common thing with modern UFOlogists in particular. Is it the dread internet echo-chamber that's convinced them that everybody has already seen the 'overwhelming evidence'? Again, same standards of practice for everyone at minimum: cite your sources, which had better be thorough, and lay out your review of the base of primary material before making an argument. Lower standards for a blog post or w/e of course, but it's still very annoying. 

Gameable Content

Elements of Paradigm

Paradigm

In case you were wondering, Kripal's paradigm seems to include elements of We're All God(s) in Disguise (Book of Secrets p.196), a largely psychocultural approach to Transcend Your Limits (BoS, p.192), Embrace the Threshold (BoS, p.191-2), Everything's An Illusion (M20, p.570) and the below There is Only Now. As a non-practitioner himself (so far as he admits), he doesn't have any Practices or Instruments. [3]

We Are Food For Gods

Arguably similar to the Nephandic paradigm I'm a Predator, and the World is my Prey (Book of the Fallen, p.XX), this perspective lacks the egotism of that one. The whole universe is a great psychical food-chain, and we as mortals sit somewhere in the middle, perhaps lower. Powerful entities beyond our immediate perception benefit from our existence, maybe in a broadly-symbiotic way but certainly without much empathy beyond that of a farmer for their crops. Mages have a foot up the ladder compared to other humans, but only a foot; the great question of this paradigm is whether to accept one's place and become the best symbiote one can be, to scramble madly for the top, or to try to pull the entire human race up via Ascension to a higher state where they won't have to suffer the depredations of what lies above. Exactly how much suffering is being caused by these higher beings also varies - perspectives range from the very gnostic to the ecological-mutualist. Verbenae committed to a sort of Gaia Hypothesis, Marxist-inclined Hermetics viewing humanity as the 'spiritual proletariat' producing for invisible overlords, and self-deifying psychic Marauder paranoiacs might all follow this paradigm, which often enables Practices based around using our integrality or connectedness to bargain with or otherwise influence higher beings. 

All Time is One Time

The dead are not really dead. The future is not really future. All of time exists as a single block, all moments are one moment, and a monodirectional flow is a purely human construct. Often referred to as 'eternalism' or 'block time' in philosophical circles, this position is far from exclusive to detached philosophers, claiming adherents from Albert Einstein and some modern quantum physicists to religious mystics and UFOlogists keen to argue the possibility of retrocausation and time travel. In other words, it's a position that can be held by mages from the hard-core Technocratic theorist to the new-agiest Sahajiya. It's often popular, for obvious reasons, amongst those who work with Time magic, but it also opens up possibilities for magicks including extrasensory perception (seeing something at a different moment and extrapolating to the present), and the practices of Necromancy (if the dead exist in the same block of time, reaching out to them need not be as difficult) and Weird Science (learning from future beings, or building devices that rely on retrocausation to function) amongst others. Alongside a paradigm like One-Way Trip to Oblivion, it might imply a fatalistic acceptance of the impossibility of change, but more hopeful perspectives are possible: just because your actions are always-already taken doesn't mean they aren't your actions, a product of your own enlightened Will, and at the most hopeful this perspective serves as a reminder that nothing apparently 'lost' is ever really gone.

Imagination is the Truest Sense

The 'modern' empirical perspective tends to dismiss imagination as fanciful, immaterial nonsense, but in reality it is the perceptive faculty most deeply rooted in our own being. It can show us things which are not 'real' in the crude sense, miraculous things. As David Hume noted, it can logically visualise the empirically 'impossible' - and, a Mage might note, it can bring such things into being. This Paradigm does not just indicate the use of instruments like thought-forms and artwork, though it certainly might; it represents one who takes the imaginal world seriously as a real and influential space, perhaps (as in dual-aspect monism or pure nondualism) seamlessly blended and coequal with materiality, or perhaps (in a more solipsistic perspective) much more important. The imagination may not just influence the out-there as a vehicle for the mage's will, but echo and mirror it, as well as providing a gate into elements of it that no other sense can detect. Traditions of an artistic bent, such as the Hollow Ones, Sahajiya and Umbral Underground, are all quite likely to follow such a practice, as are the more mythically inclined Verbenae. It fits well with mages with a strong but subtle Avatar, which may in fact be the 'imagination' in question, and militates in favour of a high Demesne background. And whilst it's usually verboten to be too explicit about such mystical-sounding beliefs within the Technocracy, that organization's fetishization of individual creativity and Genius does create some space for those who hold it to thrive if they keep their heads down.

Practice

Gnostic Intellectualism 

Academia's pretty much as far from magic as you can get, right? Oh, sure, maybe once upon a time a famous philologist poring over ancient tomes could uncover demonic rituals in some dusty library and write a now-forgotten paper on them; maybe Lovecraft could invent his well-known occultist professors with a straight face back in the 20s, when anything went; but these days the whole academy's one big mess of perpetual funding cuts and office politics played out in the language of intellectual debate, not to mention a bastion of the humanist skeptical tradition. Somebody who tried to seriously write about anything beyond the Technocratic pale would be a laughingstock, out on their ear even before anybody had tipped off the NWO, right? 
Right?
Wellllll... yes and no. Yes, a lot of academics (yes, even in the 'postmodern' humanities) hold to deeply scientistic perspectives, and radical knowledge-production is not exactly incentivised by the structure of the modern corporate university - though this is less a Technocratic policy than a Syndicate jab at the NWO. But no, that doesn't mean that nobody's doing work within the realms of the weird. The landmark investigation of psychiatrist John E. Mack by Harvard University in 1994, triggered as a result of his research into UFO experiences, reaffirmed that academic freedom of speech protected those whose views on the paranormal fall outside of the mainstream; additionally, scholars such as Ronald Hutton and Tanya Luhrmann have opened up a broad space in which serious, respectful and largely agnostic study of occult practices is possible. For those able to endure its everyday pressures, then, academia can be a powerful venue in which to challenge the Consensus, especially since it gives one's words a degree of weight and allows one to uplift the ideas of those otherwise excluded from knowledge-making. 
OK, but how does one move from 'thinking about the paranormal' to 'doing magick'? More easily than one might think. As many Mages know on some level, influencing belief influences reality; furthermore, from the earliest mystics deep thought and contemplation on metaphysical principles or supernatural revelations has been seen as a path to increased wisdom; and of course, academic study can led to preternatural insight into people, places or processes far from oneself. Thus, for the Awakened, knowledge can become power more... directly than usual. Enter the 'gnostic intellectual' - as Kripal puts it, 'someone whose thought emerges from extraordinary experience or direct gnosis ... [whose] religious collages or artforms ... are famously eclectic and wildly combinative with respect to the local social and cultural surround.' Whether pursuing transtemporal histories, theorizing about the experiments of weird scientists or uncovering core social-psychological structures through visionary insight, the Gnostic Intellectual (who need not actually be a formal academic, though it helps as regards the respect and voice discussed above) uses the Practice to first synthesize their discoveries using the principles of their field, then refine, test, or broadcast them out into the world as needed. Though the work may still be slow, tedious, working over months of research and writing even for a short journal article, the mage at least does not need to worry about the question plaguing many of their peers: 'does what I'm doing matter?' They know that words on a page, books on a shelf or speeches to students and peers alike really will transform consciousnesses, and perhaps in more potent forms the literal structure of the world.

This is a very widespread practice (it's honestly shocking it's not been printed anywhere I know of - though I suppose one could argue it's a cousin of Reality Hacking, its two-ended nature, both receiving and utilizing information, makes it subtly distinct): found amongst some adherents of every mystically-inclined tradition, it is especially common amongst those with a scholarly bent, but interest in 'indigenous knowledge-ways' has created pathways even for those traditionally excluded from the halls of academia whilst the internet has created dozens of media formats, from YouTube to, er, blogger, in which more controversial intellectuals can thrive. Oh, and controversy very much does follow those pursuing this Practice; those who are willing to challenge intellectual orthodoxy are often downright dismissive of ethical or political norms. As Kripal notes: 'there is no single political or ethical expression of the gnostic orientation: such expressions can range from radical politics, social justice activism, and ethical humanism on the progressive left to dangerous conspiracy-thinking, antimodernism,  and authoritarianism on the far right.' What's more, the importance of networking to research and knowledge-production and the small number of available interlocutors means one working in this practice is probably fewer degrees of separation than they'd like to be from somebody with some really unjustifiable beliefs... and when mere will starts to adjust reality to confirm biases even as you research, it's easy to slip to the extremes of one's own positions too.

Associated Paradigms: Adopting extreme philosophies is du jour for academics, so most paradigms are possible - real examples I can think of include Aliens Make Us What We Are (Book of Secrets, p.188), All the World's a Stage (BoS, p.189-90), Bring Back the Golden Age!, Cosmic Horror is the Only Truth (Book of the Fallen, p. 132-3), Consciousness is the Only True Reality (BoS, p.190-1), Divine Order and Earthly Chaos, Embrace the Threshold (BoS, p.191-2), Everyone's Against Me, so Whatever I Do is Justified (BotF, p.133-4) Everything is Data, Everything's an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake, Existence is Unknowable, Irrational and Sublime (BotF, p. 134-5), Forbidden Wisdom is the Truest Source of Power (BotF, p.135), A Holographic Reality (BoS, p.192), I am All (BotF, p.135), Might is Right (with an intellect-based approach to 'might'), One-Way Trip to Oblivion, Peop;le are Shit (BotF, p.137), Transcend Your Limits (BoS, p.192-4), Turning the Keys to Reality (BoS p.194), We Are Meant to be Wild (BoS, p.195), We Are NOT Men (BoS, p.195-6) and We're All God(s) in Disguise (BoS, p.196). 

Associated Abilities: Expression, Etiquette (Academic), Meditation, Research, Academics, Enigmas, Occult, Politics, Science, Blatancy ('actually I think you'll find phenomena like this are very well-documented...'), virtually any secondary Knowledge

Common Instruments: Books and Periodicals, Computer Gear, Drugs and Poisons (stimulants and psychedelics), Eye Contact, Fashion (the stereotypical 'academic' attire can work wonders for one's credibility), Formulae and Math, Group Rites, Internet Activity (BoS, p.208-9), Labs and Gear, Languages, Management and HR, Mass Media, Meditation, Music, Ordeals and Exertions (sleep-deprivation), Social Domination, Symbols, Voice and Vocalizations, Thought-Forms, Transgression (BoS, p.209), Writings, Inscriptions and Runes.

Implements

NDEs 

One of the surest possible ways to leave one's body is to die. From many perspectives, it literally expels the soul! This seems to be well-borne-out by the Near-Death Experience or NDE, in which somebody who has died finds themselves traversing the space around them or another, more spiritual dimension, often gathering information they couldn't possibly have accessed. Even mortal institutions have caught onto this trick, from Odin hanging himself, wounded and starving, from a tree to gain wisdom, to the modern techno-sorcerers of Project Orpheus putting themselves on ice as they venture into the lands of the dead. As such, it's very much a tool available to the braver sort of mage. Generally, methods like drowning in icewater are preferred - techniques which keep the body in good condition and make it easier for a mortal helper or (ideally) Life-adept colleague to resuscitate the mage afterwards. That said, any non-instantanaeous death provides the opportunity to utilize this implement once, as the famed 'final curse' may imply.

Humour

Be it Mitch Hedburg's stand-up routine about Bigfoot being a naturally blurry entity, Diogenes' cutting dismissals of the great and good from from Plato to Alexander, or a neomystic who jokes about their strange experiences to soften the blow to their friends' credulity, comedy is a powerful and mysterious force. It is not one type of thing - speech, motion, sheer bloody coincidence, all may be humourous, and there is power both in its creation and its finding (which may not, if you think about it, be all that different). Humour can be a respectful mediation with 'serious business', or it can strip the power of the subject and make it pathetic. It can give the strength to endure, or it can burst out from the collapse of an over-strained psyche. It can fill others with joy, anger, fear, or all of those things for different audiences at the same time. It dwells in the realm of the low and crass, yet it is sublime. To make someone laugh is to break down a boundary between you and them, deepening connections no matter your differences. (To laugh at them, of course, is the opposite.) Radical, destructive, dangerous and impossible to understand without dissecting the proverbial frog, it's not difficult to see how humour might change the world in the right hands.

Elision

Science, so it's said, became hegemonic by cutting the universe in two and dismissing the half it couldn't explain. On a smaller scale, the ability to define certain things as being 'the important subject here' is deployed in everything from political rhetoric ('clearly class is more important than IDpol...') to justice ('ignorance of the law is no excuse'). The exclusion of certain facts essentially creates a limited reality zone in which particular truths about the world are strengthened. Often associated with the Practices of Dominion, Hypertech or of course Reality Hacking, this Instrument tends to be most useful for effects which negate or prevent something else, whether antimagical, defensive or compulsive. Its effects are not necessarily dependent on the subjects sharing one's own ideas of appropriate elisions, either, as anyone who's ever had a disagreement with somebody who dismisses their basic ideological or epistemic foundations will know.

[3] I won't be so rude as to stat a living person further (in public), except to note that Kripal's Archives of the Impossible, a vast collection of paranormal accounts curated at Rice University, probably constitute a 6-7 dot Library background for a Mage that can access them, helping with research into Occult, Enigmas,  Awareness, Lore/RD Data, Belief Systems, Conspiracy Theory, and maybe Esoterica, Hypertech and 1-dot Spheres if you think he's got close to the truth and/or is some kind of Sorcerer or Mage.

Gods & Monsters

Mantids (Otherworld-dwelling creature)

'The paranormal is insectoid', or so it seems when the mantids arrive. They're psychic creatures, shaped vaguely like a biomechanical preying-mantis six or seven feet tall; clearly that's more than a trivial connection, because actual mantises seem to fall under their control when they're around, but it's not clear what the link is. (Some It-X Time-Motion Managers have suggested they might be the future descendents of the common mantis, in which case their reasons for travelling back to the time of humans need to be viewed with deep suspicion.) Their behaviour is fickle in the extreme: They can seem warm and sensual in one encounter, cold and clinical the next - even in encounters with the same experiencer. Sometimes, signals are mixed: what does one make of being torn into strips, devoured, and reborn in an infinite hive-colony full of life and light, where one is welcomed as a sibling before returning with strange modifications down to the DNA-level? The Mantids are definitely intelligent, even communicative, but whatever logic they're operating on has yet to be discovered.

Attributes: Strength 3, Dexterity 5, Stamina 3, Charisma 5, Manipulation 4, Appearance 0, Perception 3, Intelligence 6, Wits 4
Abilities: Alertness 3, Art 4, Awareness 3, Empathy 4, Expression 1, Intimidation 2, Technology 3, Hypertech 5, Cosmology 4, Enigmas 1, Medicine 9, Science 9
Willpower: 5
Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -3, -5, Body Slain
Armour Rating: 3 (6 soak dice total) 
Countermagick: One die
Powers/Advantages: Bite or claws for Strength+2 Lethal damage (creatures which would die due to this may instead be treated as Spirited Away as per the Spirit charm) 
Mantid control: creatures from the mantidae family within 1 mile of the mantid fall under its direct control.

Hypermedic: With access to its extradimensional laboratory, the Mantid may perform medical procedures equivalent to rotes of up to Life 5/Matter 4/Prime 2, as needed. It treats its Arete as 3 for such purposes.

Unbelief 3 (Gods & Monsters p.199), Aura (Advantage, G&M p.202), Cause Insanity (1 die, G&M p.202), Empathic Bond (G&M p.205), Information Fount (G&M, p.207), Mesmerism (3-pt., G&M p.207--8), Needleteeth (G&M, p.208), Soak Lethal Damage (G&M, p.211), Death-Sense (3-pt., G&M p.211), Spirit Travel (15-pt., G&M p.211-12), Telepathy (2-pt., G&M p. 212), Universal Translator (G&M, p.213), Wall-Crawling (G&M, p.213-4, Wings (3-pt., G&M p.214)

Blue Orbs (Spirit)

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/625775/Are-mystery-orb-UFOs-stalking-homes-across-globe-about-to-ABDUCT-someone

'Kelleher once advised me over dinner, "if you see one, turn and run like hell. That's my advice."' - Kripal

Sighted around various UFO hotspots in the United States and Britain, nobody knows quite what these floating, 'plasma-like' blobs are, but anyone who's spent a bit of time staking out such a place is likely as not to have seen one. They manifest from nowhere, drifting about for the most part but moving inexorably towards any humans that come close. Their touch burns, and those burns often become cancerous after the fact. No communication or capture has ever been achieved, but they are mercifully slow so Technocratic operatives will usually simply blast them out of existence with energy weapons that disrupt their bodies before they get too close.

Willpower 2, Rage 5, Gnosis 2, Essence 10
Charms: Materialize, Short Out, Burning Touch (any creature that makes contact with the Spirit suffers 1 Aggravated damage. When this damage is failed, the creature must make a Difficulty 5 Stamina roll or contract cancer of the area of tissue touched), Energy Form (the Spirit halves and may soak all damage from material, non-energetic effects).
Materialized Attributes: Strength 2, Dexterity 1, Stamina 2, use Gnosis for Social and Mental traits
Abilities: Awareness 2, Cosmology 2, Investigation 1
Materialized Health Levels: 3
Image: An insubstantial, drifting orb of blue light.
Roleplaying Notes: You're just curious, but it's a curiosity easy to interpret as malice for the outsider. If you were a child, you'd be dismembering ants.

Retrotemporal Artificially-Intelligent Discoid Drone (RETMAIDD) (Bygone/'Forthcomer')

Appearing all over the world throughout history, these disc-shaped hypertech devices, projected back in time from an as-yet-unrealized future, are Constructs of a degree of potency that still dazzles the Technocrats who covertly study them in various blacksites. They can fly faster than the quickest human vehicle, scramble the instruments of anybody trying to engage and induce bizarre psychological and physical changes in humans they choose for their purposes. Their purpose appears to be study - certainly, they often appear around significant historical events. Sometimes, they beam people away into strange Otherwhens where they're probed at by bizarrely medical 'aliens'; victims returning often experience 'lost time', and it is unclear how much of their experiences are real as opposed to protective hallucination. Of course, the reason those Technocrats can study them at all is because practically they function much like the magickal beasties of yore: the sciences that created them are still not part of the modern Consensus, so they tend to crash/explode/disappear when not operating out in deep space beyond the Horizon, leaving behind fragments of bizarre metals and strange influences on the local landscape. Over the past couple of years, subtle efforts have been made to move them increasingly into the Consensus through a series of government 'revelations', as a calculated political drive by the Ivory Tower to make their technologies possible and instantiate the future they herald. After all, if the Technocrats didn't make them, somebody else did... and as yet, nobody's found a way to stop them coming back. This move has broad support from Iteration X, and some from younger and more progressive Void Engineers and Syndics, but is broadly unpopular with the elders of the latter two, concerned Progenitors fearful of giving so much importance to apparently non-biological tech, and, critically, with most of the Operative methodology.

Attributes: Strength 10, Dexterity 10, Stamina 7, Charisma 2, Manipulation 1, Appearance 0, Perception 4, Intelligence 6, Wits 3
Abilities: Alertness 4, Awareness 3, Athletics (Dodging) 5, Energy Weapons 5, Stealth 4, Hypertech 5, Science 6, Cosmology 5, all Knowledges 3
Willpower: 3
Health Levels: OK, OK, -1, -1, -2, -2, -3, -3, -4, -4, -5, -5, Crashed
Armour Rating: 10 (17 soak dice, total), Durability 10 (any attack inflicting 10 or less damage is ignored)
Powers: The RETMAIDD can fly with perfect maneuverability at high-Hypersonic speeds (up to Mach 20 at least, fast enough to dodge anything short of energy weaponry or re-entry glide missiles trivially. Dodge rolls against such weapons do not require surrender of an action and are made at Difficulty 2.) Its senses can detect all known energy forms, albeit imperfectly, and it can engage in telepathic communication with any creature close enough to see it.
Unknown Energy Weapon (10 dice aggravated damage to all targets in path, range to 1 mile.)
Crash: When reduced to 0 health, the RETMAIDD crashes into an appropriate spot in the ground, causing an explosion 30 ft. across dealing 8 dice of lethal damage to creatures within range, and leaving behind a small crater.
Abduct: The RETMAIDD can open a glowing hole in its exterior. A creature dragged in by telepathy or willingly entering may be transported inside the RETMAIDD, being held in suspended animation as per a Time/Life effect. The creature may then be transported elsewhere or investigated whilst in stasis, as the RETMAID's mysterious masters desire.
Special Unbelief: If the RETMAIDD remains on earth for more than one night, or it ever botches a roll, it loses all of its health levels and crashes.
Sufficiently Advanced Technology: The RETMAIDD may use the Control Electrical Systems, Illuminate, Short Out and System Havoc Spirit Charms, expending one point of Willpower per two Essence used.
Empathic Bond (Gods & Monsters, p.205), Homing Bond (4 pts., G&M 206), Intangibility (10 pts, G&M 207), Mesmerism (6 pts, G&M 207), Soak Lethal Damage (G&M 211), Spirit Travel (Deep Umbra, G&M 211-12), Telekinesis (no max. weight, G&M 212), Universal Translator (G&M 213)
Countermagick: Six dice worth, equivalent to Primium countermeasures.
Image: An metallic aerial disc made from strange alloys unknown to this earth, blinking lights scattered about its surface. 
Roleplaying Notes: Observe events on earth with cold detachment, focussing on anything portentuous or dramatic, but also on the seemingly banal , with no clear rhyme or reason between the two. Unlike The Great Unidentified (see below) you have clear rhyme and reason behind your actions, but show only the barest hint of them, the three-dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional power. Mortals encounter you like Flatlanders dealing with a human reaching in from the side.

The Great Unidentified (Spirit: Personage)

Sighting ritually summoned by Kripal's interlocutor 'Kevin', drawn by same

Vast and silent, the titanic triangle tracks across the night sky, moving with and skittering around your gaze. Whilst it's got a physical appearance, you'd never mistake it for a 'nuts and bolts' craft like the one above. Its size is impossible to judge (hundreds of feet? Dozens? Miles?), its surface displays uncanny, shifting, dreamlike simulations of rivets, and great red lights blink down like eyes from the bizarre semi-formed dark. It comes to those who call it, to the true-believers and those who, ahem, want to believe, and perhaps to the more experimental type of skeptic. It is called by ritual magick as easily as psychic contact or elaborate antennae. It comes when you are alone, and goes when you go.

The Great Unidentified is the apex of what people are arguing for when they say UFOs are spirituo-psychical, but that does not mean it's all in your head. Though it rarely acts itself, it inspires fervent devotion in other spirits, even more traditional ones, and can have uncanny effects on the psychology of its mortal witnesses too. Its goals are, of course, inscrutable, but it could easily serve as a Primordial or Questing Avatar, a Totem for the syncreto-technoshamanically-inclined, or a Paradox Spirit come to 'abduct' you into a Paradox Realm (it never normally abducts. It doesn't touch down or physically interface in any way. But who knows...) This stat-block, however, is for it as a powerful wandering Spirit with a curious, probing yet distant nature; a potential ally (see this post) or ambivalent presence.

Willpower 9, Rage 2, Gnosis 9, Essence 70
Charms: Appear, Armour, Bad Luck Curse (GM, pg. 215), Break Reality, Corrupt, Disable, Disorient, Dream Journey, Ease Pain, Good Luck Charm (G&M, pg. 217) Illuminate, Influence, Insight, Mind Speech (usually a clicking whirring pattern which must be decoded, or an emotional transfer), Mislead (G&M pg. 217), Moon Bridge, Peek, Re-Form, Short Out, Soul Reading, Spirit Away, Swift Flight, Terror, Track
Materialized Attributes (if forced to materialize by magic, note it lacks the charm itself): Strength 5, Dexterity 7, Stamina 5, use Gnosis for social and mental traits.
Abilities: Alertness 5, Awareness 7, Fly 10, Cosmology 8, Enigmas 9, Hypertech 1, Science 1, Empathy 2
Materialized Health Levels (if forced to materialize...): 20 
Equivalent Arete: 6
Equivalent Spheres: Correspondence 2, Mind 5, Spirit 5, Prime 4, Entropy 3, Time 4

Roleplaying Notes: You are here as a teacher, but not in the 'we-come-to-enlighten-you' sense. You don't need to explain yourself. You don't necessarily have any specific goals beyond to be, and to show others that you are. You are curious about curiosity, and the faith of mortals is like a fine food to you, especially when they've only just discovered you. Above all, exult in your own nature, but humbly, joyously.

Rotes

Kali the Spider (Time 3/Correspondence 4/Mind 4/Life 2)

A minimal-paradox solution to the problems of time travel, Kali the Spider was originally developed by a working-group of Sahajiya, Euthanatoi and Virtual Adepts embedded in the American digital branch of the New Age movement (sometimes called 'California spirituality'). It's since spread more broadly through younger elements of these traditions, and picked up additional users in the Celestial Chorus and Akhasayana. The key paradigm element is some belief in continuity of the self (or at least connections between selves) across time, and ideally in the illusory nature of time itself. Meditation and crazy wisdom are common practices, though far from the only options.

The rote functions by connecting the individual mind-instances of the mage across time, allowing them to act (in its purest form) at every moment in history simultanaeously. Since they are acting on themself, the effect is surprisingly easy to instantiate, and since changes to time are being made by a creature already in that time, paradox tends to take a much lighter hand, so long as all of the instances remain in positions which allow a fairly continuous chain of movement as compared to the pre-intervention timeline. Thus, although the effect can quite easily reach out to each instance within its chronal range, only at a few moments is substantial action possible - the others are concerned with maintaining the causality of the mage themselves by moving to connect the past, present and future instances, without which severed timelines can lead to spontanaeous dematerialization.

Kali the Spider is coincidental in Reality Zones that accept retrocausation or atemporality; otherwise, it is vulgar without witnesses. Factoring in modifiers for time alteration, it is Difficulty 8 or 9, requiring 13 successes at base to affect yourself forwards and backwards up to one month, causing each affected instance to take one action. After this, use the Time Sphere Timelines (M20, p.505) to determine additional success requirements. By default, you may affect up to (Perception*2) instances of yourself throughout the period chosen, +1 per additional success. You may also spend additional successes to increase the duration.
When the duration of the effect ends, if any of the past instances have moved substantially from where they originally were (enough that, if a scene were taking place there, they'd be leaving it) then the Mage must attempt an Intelligence+Enigmas check as their other instances attempt to maintain causality. If they succeed, nothing happens. If they fail, the Mage suffers Paradox as per a Botch and a backlash. Any paradox backlash caused by this effect may cause one of the following Paradox Flaws:

• Severed from the Past (significant flaw): The Mage loses all physical possessions from prior to the action of the offending instance and gains the Amnesia flaw with regard to events prior to this point. 
• Severe flaw version: Everyone the Mage knows from before this point appears 
• Dual-Aspect Indeed (significant flaw): The mage suffers no Burn... yet. The timeline forks without splitting the tellurian, and there's now another copy of the mage, identical up to that point but potentially changed after then, somewhere in the world. The Mage divides any Avatar background they have in two and gains the Shattered Avatar flaw (Book of Secrets, p.78). If they can physically find the copy, persuade them to accept re-integration, and spend XP to buy off the flaw and buy back the lost points in the Background, they can merge with them, potentially gaining any additional benefits the copy has... but also any new negative traits, traumas, injuries etc.
• Whiplash (any level): As causality unravels, the Mage hurtles across the landscape to the point they now always-should-have-been, a shell of chronal change shielding them from most, but not all, of the obstacles in the way. (This is the Burn, in this case). They are teleported as per the Teleportation Distance chart (M20, p.504), one 'success' per 5 Backlash successes, to a location of the ST's choice. Thus, they are more likely to end up somewhere they know, but it will not necessarily be somewhere safe, or helpful for their present situation.

Magnes Daemonium (Spirit 2/(Prime 2 or Mind 2), optional Correspondence 2)

Evil lusts after goodness, for it feels a wholeness to it which its dark vacuum cannot ever possess. This is known. Thus, a mage of pure heart and faith may lie in submission near a sick, vulnerable or possessed person, attracting evil spirits to themselves and thereby preserving their otherwise-victim. 

Faith is the necessary Practice for this effect, in all its varying forms. Bodywork, in the sense of perfect supine stillness, is also technically part of the process, and Meditation (prayer) may be included. Possession of the True Faith or Innocence merits counts as a mythic thread, reducing difficulty appropriately.

The effect is coincidental. By default, it requires four successes at Difficulty 5 to deploy, and affects any spirit that can sense the Mage for one scene. The effect may be expanded into a beacon with more successes and Correspondence 2. Otherwise, additional successes simply increase the strength of the compulsion, or the duration. The Mage's spiritual power becomes enormously enhanced without appearing threatening, making them far more likely to appear as a desirable target for spirits than anybody else in the scene who doesn't also have an exaggerated aura. In game terms, spirits are drawn to enact their intents, whatever they may be, upon the Mage; a spirit with a specific reason to target another creature may make a Willpower test at Difficulty 8, overcoming the effect if they score more successes than its surplus. 
This effect is often deployed alongside an anti-spirit ward. If this takes place, spirits without the capacity to resist will walk through (and be damaged by) or bump against the ward, depending on its nature, rather than target anybody else. They may however choose instead to leave the situation entirely. 
Botches on this effect tend to attract other spirits of greater power or malice than the caster bargained for.

The One Good Line

'I often joke that if an entity from the sky lands in your backyard and engages you in supersexual intercourse, this is obviously hallucination or pathology, or just a wish (there is the psychoanalytic theory of the fantastic.) If, however, this takes place in an ancient manuscript, preferably one in a difficult language, then it is "religion" or "history" and can be analyzed endlessly (but never really taken truly seriously; never taken as actually having happened). When we put these two events together and refuse to privilege one over the other, all hell breaks loose.'

Not sure if true, but certainly a contention that could in theory undergird a good book.

Anyway, that's it for this one. More soon, I hope!

Also finished reading for pleasure in February: Patrick Stuart, Silent Titans; Erica LaGalisse, Occult Aspects of Anarchism
Also reading for pleasure in February: Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant; 'Satyros' Phil Brucato and Jacqueline Bryk, Book of the Fallen