[Mage: The Awakening v1.9] The Time Before

((In Character (IC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen

Venue: Chronicles of Darkness - Mage: The Awakening (Fallen World Chronicle)

Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Borrowed & Edited from Original Posting on October 28th 2014 by Dave Brookshaw of Onyx Path Publishing.))

The Fate of Atlantis

Notes and Entries by Lorekeeper Casstiel

Atlantis, The Time Before, The 3rd Age.  The first city.  The Awakened Nation.  

Whatever you all the Gnostic myth it ends with the stupid and hubris of mankind setting up false gods.  Archons, deimgues of control and subjugation.  But what do we really know about the Atlantean myth?

Afterwards the world broke.  The establishment of the Lie.  The Fall, the Sundering, the Sinking of Atlantis, the fall of the Tower of Babel..  The Fallen World is where we live now.

Legends of the Fall

“Where Humanity gets it wrong, by your time, is in imagining Atlantis as having any kind of quantifiable existence. Which of course it hasn’t; not in the way they imagine, anyway. There have been an awful lot of Atlantises, will be quite a few more.

“It’s just a symbol. A symbol of the art.

“The True Atlantis is inside you, just as it’s inside all of us. The sunken land beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds. Atlantis is the Shadow-land. The birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the west that is lost to us, but remains forever, true birthplace and true goal.”

- Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

Atlantis was the greatest city that ever existed. Atlantis was the height of Awakened potential. Atlantis was the place where every mage could be her best self, reach for and attain her brightest dreams, make the stars themselves gasp in delight at the wonders performed below.

Atlantis is a Truth ringing deep within a mage’s bones: the reverberation that thrilled through him the day his palm slapped against the base of the Watchtower; the flow of the ink or blood or tears he used to write his name — his Name — on its walls; the scrape of chisel on stone as he carved the letters deep.

Atlantis is a Lie the Awakened tell themselves.

Atlantis was, and then was not.

The Time Before

Mages have passed the story of Atlantis from mentor to eager student for as long as anyone can recall. Tales of the Golden City have simply always been told, though no definitive evidence of its existence have yet been uncovered. Sages speak of towers spiraling up and up, grazing the sky itself. We were priests and viziers, say the Silver Ladder. We were the guards and peacekeepers, say the Adamantine Arrow. And perhaps they would be, if it were more than a symbol. No consistent records survived the City’s catastrophic destruction. No one has yet found the evidence that proves, beyond a doubt, that Atlantis existed.

What the mages have, what makes them cling so tightly to the idea of Atlantis-that-fell, are pieces that simply don’t fit anywhere in this world. The Mysterium have a library full of explorers’ journals, their pages filled with sketches of ruins whose civilizations never existed. In far-flung corners of the world, mages have visited the graves of kings who were never crowned on this Earth, dug up the bones of impossible creatures, spelunked into caves whose painted walls couldn’t have been touched by human hands. Not according to the histories we know.

Sleeper technology is useless on these artifacts. Attempts at scientific dating yield unreliable results: this piece is from the Mezozoic Era, from 50 B.C., from the 13thcentury. It is a scant few seconds young and millions of years old. Should the machine be making that noise?

Time mages fare no better at tracing the origins of their colleagues’ finds. Most are left with skull-splitting headaches for their efforts, and days or weeks of temporal confusion afterwards. The Earth is far older than humanity; no matter how far back a mage looks, within human history or far before it, Atlantis is nowhere.

The evidence from these ruins and artifacts can’t be shaped into a single, consistent history. Tales of glorious cities and empires that existed in the time before time are sprinkled throughout world mythology. The Aztecs referred to Aztlán; the Mahabharata opens with the history of the Naga Kingdom; ancient Buddhist texts mention Shambhala. Call it Hyperborea or Brittia or Paititi. Name its people Pelasgians or inhabitants of the Dreamtime. “Atlantis” is a catch-all term, suggested for its familiarity to the Diamond Orders whose origins lay in ancient Greece.

Over the last four millennia, the Awakened have chased these conflicting-yet-similar stories to tease out one larger truth: a world existed before this one. Little and less is known about the inhabitants of the Time Before, but the Orders do agree on a few key points.

The Awakened existed in the Time Before.

Stories about these mythical cities center around characters who were something more. Many of them mention feats performed by wizards, magicians, the god-blooded. Others focus on men and women who were faster, stronger, cleverer than their adversaries. Whether those superlatives were granted by the gods or the sheer force of the heroes’ wills, there is no doubt they were more than simply human.
The inhabitants of the Time Before dwelt within, or Ascended to, the Supernal Realms.

It’s there in the cave paintings, if you know what to look for. It’s in a line of hieroglyphs whose revelations the Guardians of the Veil were reluctant to divulge once they’d been deciphered. It’s in a snatch of song sung in the High Speech, recorded in a lonely ruin by a Libertine. The Awakened of the Time Before shed their mortal skins and returned to the Supernal Realm that birthed us all, becoming beings of pure magic.

Their actions drastically changed the universe.

Their Ascension broke the world. The how of it is — at first blush — not as important as the conclusion drawn: the damage done by those original Awakened caused the Supernal Realms to drift out of our reach. It left us here in the Fallen World, with the Quiescence settling over the Sleepers and no easy way to reach across the Abyss and return to what once was. The effects of the predecessors’ actions were so devastating, they erased themselves from existence. The world that is now is the world that always has been: one where Atlantis is little more than a fairy tale. A myth. A legend. A Lie.

Atlantis and the Occult: Editorial by Casstiel

Here’s something you might not be aware of, the 19th Century societies that produced most of the western modern occult were chock-full of Atlantis-Seekers

Some call the Diamond Orders’ pursuit of Atlantis: “Neo-Platonism by way of Theosophy,” and part of Theosophy’s baggage is the belief in ancient civilizations who were more enlightened. Plato’s story was a minor curiosity for centuries, limited only to the few people who’d ever heard of him (although it informed things like the Arabic legends of what happened to Irem) but became popularized when 19th Century occultists got hold of it. Mediums claimed to have Atlantean spirit-guides. Proto-Archaeologists looked for it about as often as they looked for Troy. Over the last century, it’s gone from the province of secretive societies and cultural imperialists to the stuff of cheap paperback “popular science” books. Enter any new age shop, and you’ll find a book about Atlantis.

Atlantis as used by the Theosophists was a hell of a racist idea. The reason these fringe groups went around co-opting 3000-year old Greek parables and inventing places like Lemuria, Mu, and Ultima Thule was to explain how “savage” cultures could have produced their own ancient civilizations. It’s the same thing that only a few decades ago led to “the Pyramids of South America must have been built by aliens, because brown people certainly wouldn’t have been able to”. It’s offensive on many levels. How draw upon and use modern occult without being colossal racists ourselves? How can we claim that the Fall was caused by a particular myth, especially one as White as Atlantis, without alienating anyone who isn’t of European descent?  Atlantis is just the catchall term for the Time Before, or cryptically referred to as the 3rd Age, used to describe these ancient and strange artifacts.

First, to clarify and make it clear… that Atlanteans didn’t build Machu Pichu. Human history stands on its own merits – no one is “descended” from Atlantis or “barbarian kingdoms”. Atlantis never existed in the Fallen World; it’s a symbol, nothing more concrete. Most of Awakened society know that the stories about it aren’t literally true, even that it wasn’t called “Atlantis”, but use them because they’re good Yantras; they’re symbolically true, which is the foundation of magic.

Second, we confront the uglier side of occultism head on with open eyes. Mysterium travelers have documented meeting a tribe of of Rmoahals.  Rmoahals aren’t real and the very concept of them is offensively racist. Factions like the Daksha play up the nastier elements of theosophy. The Mysterium, with their globetrotting Mystery-seeking ways, sometimes have trouble with “culturally appropriate stuff” and sometimes that is the means for which they fall to hubris.

We’ve all heard the “official story” about Atlantis and what supposedly happened.  Hopefully you’re not that naïve.  I’ve read a dozen other books which introduce doubt after doubt about Diamond Orders’ doctrine. 

But… I don’t think “Atlantis” doesn’t exist either, perhaps whatever it was longer exists.  There are too many ancient temples, ancient curses, and vanished histories. Things like the Dethroned Queen, bloody monuments to vanished sacrifices in the Astral Realms, barely-understood defenses built around tombs containing unimaginable horrors.

“Atlantean” sites are impossible to date or connect to one another and gone for “they still exist despite having no origin after the Fall, and what’s more they all seem to be from different Atlantises.” Artifacts from peoples who never were without the super-Paradoxes of universal retcons, temporal and existential continuity.

Again… I don’t think “Atlantis” is just merely a symbolic name slapped on a theoretical (and inherently, utterly unknowable) civilization before the Fall to give Mages something to call it. Why do the Diamond and Seers claim to be descended from it?

I’m beginning to suspect they don’t.

Perhaps Diamond Orders deliberately ape what they see as the Supernal sympathy of “Atlantean society” in order to become closer to the Supernal. It’s a role they’re playing, a vast communal Shadow Name. “The Atlantean Paradigm” you could call it.  Much like how the full name of the “Diamond” is based on it – “The Diamond Precept” is named after the Silver Ladder concept of “the Awakened are One Nation.” That before the Fall, magic was glorious and we were all together in it.
So that leaves another mystery. What are the historic origins of the Orders themselves? What reason did they decided on “Atlantis” as a name for their shared spiritual one.  Perhaps Greek, Indian, and Persian mages met and realized their cultural myths of a broken universe and a vanished people had something in common, and when the first Seers of the Throne split off from them. Seers and Diamond mages sometimes claim that their cold war goes all the way “back to Atlantis,” that they’ve always been enemies.

They’re lying. The first Seers were factions in what would eventually be the Diamond.

As for why Atlantis didn’t enter popular occultism until the 19th century; blame it on the Nameless.
All of this comes together into a particular view of the Awakened City that draws on modern occultism while acknowledging and working around its baggage.

All that leaves you is: there was once a civilization, who achieved mastery of magic and broke the universe. The Orders, thanks to their Greco-Indian origins only a generation after Plato, call it “Atlantis.”