[The Secret World] The Lore of Samhain (2012 - 2016)

Samhain 2012: The Cat God

1. TRANSMIT - Inititate the Samhain signal - TRANSITION - initiate the darker half - ERROR - spam the the black bee frequency.

SECURITY SCAN - shhh, the spyware is unaware. THREATS DETECTED - none, nil, naught, black infinite zeros, immense immeasurable emptiness. Move along. Nothing to see here.

LISTEN - the screaming, the pain, the broken bones crackling in flame.

WITNESS - the summer curtains call. Time to reap what you have sown.

Initiate the nights out of time. When boundaries between worlds collapse - a structures imbalance, perhaps - all creatures come and all things mingle. Prepare the feast of the dead. Tonight's festivities will begin in three, two, one... Commemorations must be made. Sacrifices. Tell them Tigernmas. Who held your heads on the Plain of Prostration?

EMBRACE - the naked shingles of the world.

LISTEN - the nameless aimless petition for prayers. No need to leave the door ajar. The burderend with sin will find a way in.

But why this night?

Come a little closer, we won't bite.

A night for divination. LISTEN - the heartbeat of the girl standing in the mirror. She waits for a boy to peek over her shoulder. So cute, so sweet, such silly superstition. There's no love, little girl, only filth and ambition.

Hop-tu-naa, trol-la-laa.

Note: Hop-tu-Naa is the name of an ancient celtic festival celebrating the start of the New Year, beginning on October 31st by their calendar.

Note:  Samhain is one of the 4 major Gaelic seasonal festivals (and also celebrated by neopagans and wiccans) along with Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh. Samhain is celebrated from sunset on 31 October to sunset on 1 November. As a seasonal festival it represents the changing of the seasons from Fall to Winter. As a religious sabbat it also represents the time when the veil between this world and the afterlife is at its thinnest point of the whole year.


2.  LISTEN - the screaming, the pain, the broken bones crackling in flame.

Commemorations must be made. Sacrifices. Tell them Tigernmas. Who held your heads on the Plain of Prostration?

No one.

Ten hundred and three thousand noses crushed. Taste and see. Nothing is free

But hy this night?

Winter is death, darkness is fright. Each year, the weather channel portends both in good measure.

LISTEN - skrak, skrik, skrawlivik. the old gods, myths and beasts all scamper. Think rats trapped in a hamper. But they know how to survive and how to claw through.

HINT - it's nights like this; it's people like you. Initiate the hounding horrors.

The room here you were when... The eyes of the man that... The words she screamed as... Fear sears into memory, takes the mind hostage, keeps the content alive.

The old ones don't die; they dig trenches in your nightmares. They bide their time, drinking sherry and playing cards, waiting for the tin-din of summer symphonies to pass. Waiting for the night when...

Note: Tigernmas was a High King of Ireland, who died on Magh Slécht while worshiping Crom Cruach, a diety that required human sacrifices

Note: The "Plain of Prostration" is a translation of Magh Slécht, named because it was one of the primary places for worship of Crom Cruach

Note: Girl looking in the mirror refers to a method for a girl to divine who her true love would be -- She would light two candles at midnight, then sit in front of a mirror and eat an apple. She would then brush her hair. An image of her future lover/husband would appear in the mirror behind her shoulder.

3. Everyone gathers on Samhain.

Hop-tu-naa, trol-la-laa.

Call the tribal assemblies. Light the bonfires. Slaughter your animals for the winter. Soon the fields will be frozen. Soon there'll be nothing left to grind but teeth and imaginations. It's only a few long months in the dark.

By why this night?


4.  Your ancestors made the appointment. The dates ere carved into the earth in blood.

REMINDER - rituals were meant to purify the land, guide the lost spirits, defeat the evil ones, rouse the wasting sun. PAYMENT OVERDUE - darkness demands to be acknowledged. Commemorate, challenge, fear it.

Fear it.

The curtains still open; every year, though they've lost faith in you, the spirits still come.

Rush-hour traffic bursts both ways. Cuchalainn came through. Nera too. Today's breed of traveler is a little different. The openings are crowded with the worst of them and the sickest of you.

Fais-do-do-do.

Commemorations have dwindled; relations are at an all-time low.

The man who skins witches has moved onto myths. Makes it an annual retreat. Spends his summers in nightmare trenches, then sneaks through in search of new curtains to tear, new faces to wear. The old and weak have learned to heed, for they can suffer and they can bleed.

Just as Irusan.

Oh yes, indeed.

Note: Cuchalainn is a warrior-hero of Irish mythology that was known for ability to go into a battle frenzy when fighting

Note: Nera is a warrior of Irish mythology that had a vision of the future given to him by the dead on Samhain night.

Note: Irusan was the name of a minor deity of cats

5. WITNESS - myth - mythos - to make a sound - to scream.

Hop-tu-naa, trol-la-laa.

Dreams are personalised myths. Myths are communal nightmares.

FINAL NOTICE - light bulbs won't save you from payments owed. Go head, dustbust the dead, sweep old bones under the rug. The darkness doesn't care. Its ledgers are up-to-date.

BUT WAIT - order now and you'll get thirteen.

Look at the little guisers today. The nightly crawl through suburban sprawl.

"What are you supposed to be?" "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!"

The children scamper through the richest neighbourhoods. The boys throw rotten eggs at cars. A great cold is coming. An old witch closes the curtains of her crypt. She's given up on the world. There's no point in going out anymore. In lighting fires to see all this.

Let them reap what they sow.

What claws at the curtains of Halloween? The devils know.

Hop-tu-naa, trol-la-laa.

Samhain 2013: The Pumpkin King

1. Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate Samhain signal - RECEIVE - initiate the wicked gourd cadence - OH, GREAT PUMPKIN, WHERE ARE YOU? - initiate urban mythos procedures - NINE, TEN... NEVER SLEEP AGAIN - initiate the Stingy Jack beacon - WITNESS - Samhain and the Tree House Horrors.

We relate to memes, sweetling. Living stories. Data with agency. Let us introduce these stories ten. They'll come knocking on your skull, these tales with teeth from the gourds that grin, saying, "Little pig, little pig, let us in!"

Note: Samhain is one of the 4 major Gaelic seasonal festivals (and also celebrated by neopagans and wiccans) along with Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh. Samhain is celebrated from sunset on 31 October to sunset on 1 November. As a seasonal festival it represents the changing of the seasons from Fall to Winter. As a religious sabbat it also represents the time when the veil between this world and the afterlife is at its thinnest point of the whole year.

Note: Stingy Jack is an Irish folklore

2. Once upon a time, there was a groundskeeper. Ask him what's in his flask. So many windows to stare through at the Innsmouth Academy. "O, Donnie Bedloe, Donnie Bedloe, Donnie Bedloe..." Say it into the reflecting panes of glass. Those gormless, bovine-jelly eyes... Not quite looking. He's not quite looking at you right now.

3. Once upon a time, there was a hermit. Knock upon the birch coffin: one-two-three. Did an echo knock back-back-back? In the night, if you think you hear a noise, and you call out to a loved one, and their voice answers back - "all is well" - and you still feel the disquiet, then listen. "All is well." Did you hear chewing? "All is well." Did you hear crunching? "All is well!" Did you hear grinding? Oh, sweetling, fly-fly-fly!

4. Once upon a time there was a bath tub. There was lipstick. There was a mirror. There were words. The red-stained ice cubes clinked. You know the story, or so you think. There are devils in the details. There are ghosts of guilt haunting the silence. Miss Chen, Miss Chen, O won't you confess?

5.Once upon a time, there was an email. Is information distilling into a super-weird substance? Can it grow every time it transmits? Can data develop feelings? Can those feelings be hurt? Hell hath no furry than a meme scorned. That's silly! Right? From our personnel experience, sweetling, it is not.

6. Once upon a time, there was a note, written on a page torn from the notebook in a dead man's pocket. Yo-ho. Yo-ho. Mister Hills, Mister Hills, O won't you confess? Wait! Who are you? Why are your innards so purple

7. Once upon a time, a story started with love. Then the black rider came. Love was covered over in pox and lumps and pustules. Good fortune is sometimes ugly. The dead do not take kindly when the living beg for beauty. Sometimes vanity smells like sizzling flesh.

8. Once upon a time, there was Stingy Jack. Heaven and Hell barred their doors. Be careful how many lanterns you gather. Never know what you're guiding in out of the dark. The story, has three layers, to hear dearest Andy tell it. He'll leave out the bit about his urine-soaked pants. Surely, he will. Who is that selling pumpkins. Who dies? Who lives. You get what you give - you get what you give - you get what you give!

9. Once upon a time, there was a diary. Opening a book is opening a door. Opening a book is making a promise. You should be weary of more than paper cuts. Eh, sweetling?

10. Once upon a time, there was a frustrated writer. Before him, there was a scared little boy. Both of them did a deal. Never mind the ritualistic particulars. They each agreed to write a story, and each received a head full of undead whales. Who's that peddling tentacular memes? His fingers bleed ink and his nails gleam.

11. Once upon a time there was a hiker. 3 am pavement is a kind of purgatory. White lines blur by like souls screaming silently to perdition. O, Chloe Mercer, Chloe Mercer, Chloe Mercer. To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Bonus: The Wisps

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see…

TRANSMIT - initiate the ignis fatuus signal - RECEIVE - initiate the hinkypunk pattern - A VAPOUR SHINING WITHOUT HEAT - illumine the Local Legends of New England - WITNESS - The Wisps.

The light off in the distance. The flicker at the edge of reason. The people of Ireland, England, and Wales tell stories of a glow made by the fairy folk or elemental spirits. They brought those stories with them to Solomon Island. Perhaps they brought something else. There are a thousand variations of the story, but always there is a distant ghost light drawing travellers from the safe path.

Call it the hobby lantern or the friar's lantern. Call it the will-o-the-Lantern or the will-o-the-Wisp.

They have seen the wisps down in Kingsmouth town. Even the most skeptical citizen believes in the wisps. Everyone has a wisp story there, sweetling. But unlike most local folklore, which happens to distant relations of relations, these are tales that happened to the teller.

The wisps congregate in the woods, observing customs unknowable. There is a tree out there. Some call it the Halloween Tree. Most simply say, "The Tree," and everyone knows what they mean. They say the wisps are attracted to the tree. Or that the tree births the wisps.

But all agree that the wisps obey the will of the Jack.

Do you know the story of Jack, sweetling? Ask Danny Defrusne. Ask Deputy Andy. They will tell you a version. They will tell you of Stingy Jack, the sinner who tricked the devil. The sinner welcome in neither Heaven nor Hell. He wanders between worlds, carrying his dreadful light.

But there is another story, sweetling.

We speak of Jack the Lad. Jack was born in Ireland in 1889. He wandered the roads, with charm in his pockets and silver on his tongue. He played the fiddle and fiddled many and many a maiden. He hopscotched away from famine and landed on Ellis Island in 1907. He ended up in the cold fog of New England. He travelled the roads, played his music, and charmed his way up many and many a skirt. He had the voice of an angel yet not a penny to show, so he took up labour as a farmhand for Archie Henderson in Kingsmouth.

Now Archie Henderson was known as a strange duck at the best of times. Some called him a sorcerer, but never to his face. Archie had a daughter, Samantha, pale of skin with fire in her hair and heart. Father and daughter fought often. One night, she ran out of the house, quivering with rage. Jack, who liked a woman with heated blood, waited outside of the Henderson place, fiddle in hand, singing a song. It took some doing but soon she gave up her lips for a kiss. Then more. Soon it was, Samantha and Jack lay down in the good earth in the pumpkin patch for the first time… And Old Man Henderson chose that one time to follow his wayward child outside.

Jack looked up from Samantha's naked body to see Henderson looming over. To his daughter, in a voice of ice, he but gave a command to dress. But Jack was in line for an altogether fiercer punishment. Henderson said words older than continents and Jack felt himself change. "You've defiled my farm, boy. You've spilt your seed where only mine should grow. Now you'll reap what should have grown." Terrific pain and Jack felt the bones of his skull split, felt a heat where his eyes should be. He ran east, to the river and looked down at his face, only to see a Jack-O-Lantern where once had been flesh and face.

Jack-of-the-Field. Gourdheart. Lord of the Patch. We call his name.

Everything tends to be true, sweetling. Whichever Jack rules the patch of Kingsmouth, the ghost lights, the wisps, come when he calls, and dance in the night. There will always be a glow, at the edge of sight and reason, leading the unwary off the road.

Samhain 2014: The Broadcast

1. Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate the broadcast day - RECEIVE - initiate bands 3 to 30 MHz - WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN? - initiate that oldtime radio - I AM THE WHISTERL, AND I KNOW MANY THINGS, FOR I WALK BY NIGHT - our buzz is your signal for the Signal Oil program - WITNESS - the Number Station

2. Listen, sweetling. Listen.

Listen for the first two bars of "The Lincolnshire Poacher." Listen for the music of Jean Michel Jarre. Listen for "¡Attención!"

3. We call upon their names: Nancy Adam Susan, The Swedish Rhapsody, The Gong Station, the English Woman, Magnetic Fields, Tyrolean Music Station, 3 Note Oddity, The Counting Station, Papa November, and The Lonely Patriot.

4.  Entities made of signals. Beings made of message. It tickles our empathy! We flirt with those heady strings of numbers, those cosmic sonnets - we blush - we burn - a strange melody - a beep - a child's voice - a woman's voice - synthetic - distant - valentines in slinky static. We'll cop your cipher

5.  People noticed the numbers sometime after World War II. Rumors breed like beetles under the floor. No government has acknowledged the existence of these phantom stations, and still they play. The numbers live and breath and move without paying much care to the speculation of the ears.

6.  Two numbers station enthusiast meet at a diner. They guzzle damn good coffee. They shiver at electronic feedback. "Once you listen...it changes you," one says. They show each other forearms filled with tattooed digits.

7.  They trade theories: it's spy games on the air waves - it's extraterrestrial commandments - it's behavioral programming from the queens, and every city is a hive - it's a century-long, global prank - we are in a divergent universe, and it's the mother reality trying to guide us home. They go back to tend their shortwave radios, listening and dreaming conspiratorial dreams.

8.  Somewhere, a scientist sits in his lab. He listens to Golden Age radio dramas to relax. It's how he learnt English. He practices parroting the radio voices, the dramatic intonations, the sinister laughs. His presenter voice. Radio waves! If he could just find the right resonance, life and death could communicate. In despair, he ends his life. As he dies, he realizes how he could make it all work.

9.  Somewhere, Dave Screed listens in on his shortwave radio. Hissing, numbers, laughter. He hears something that voids his bowels. No amount of thumping dryers or Q-tips can remove it from his ears.

10.  RECEIVE: 623665877307462356034308570682039057

Listen for the voice.

"Jingle sung and patter said - radio's more fun when you're dead."

Shows aired on the Number Stations:
Death Robbery
Ghost Hunt
Northern Lights
The Hitch Hiker
The House in Cypress Canyon
The Shadow People
The Thing in the Fourbleboard
Three Skeleton Keys
The War of the Worlds

Samhain 2015: The Seven Silences

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate the sparagmos signal - RECEIVE - initiate the dissection cadence - MAMA DUCK SAID, "QUACK, QUACK, QUACK, QUACK" - initiate the suicide song - BUT NO LITTLE DUCKS CAME BACK - seek the seven nightmares - WITNESS - the Seven Silences.

Impossible, they said. Improbable? That one touched by Gaia could give back her gift. That one imbued with anima, could end their meat sentence prematurely. How to do it? How to cut out the bee inside? It took her decades, with little hope to support her. Can you imagine wanting something that badly, sweetling?


Backtrack. Initiate playback. A room. Now windows. Could be anywhere. Could be in Venice. A woman lays on a table. Doctors and mystics go to work. "Is she a compatible candidate?" Heads nod. "Latent occult abilities." Heads nod. A glass jar filled with firefly lights sits in the corner. Only it is not a jar, and it is not a firefly.

UNLAWFUL EXPLOIT DETECTED! They did a wrong thing, sweetling. They kept a captured bee in that container. They artificially placed the bee in that woman. They made her like you, but not like you. Suddenly she could hear us, and our voice may have not sounded too kind.

Fast forward. Initiate playback. A woman lays in a bed. She performs surgery on herself via dreams. She has seven scalpels, and their names are: Basiphobia, Dementophobia, Gymnophobia, Coulrophobia, Paranoia, Claustrophobia, and a scalpel yet to be named. Sparagmos. The bee came undone.

The Council of Venice has found her, you see. They had made her their agent. They erased the frightful records of her past. But they could not erase the past within her. They did not comprehend. They did not suspect that a terrible drive, given years to work, can do impossible things. How could she live a lifetime knowing what she knew? How could she live forever?

We sing a sad song for Lorraine. We sing a sad song for Callum. Mama duck and little duck. We tried to warn her about the nature of the park. But her ears were not tuned then, you see. She could not hear our shouts. Not back then.

Samhain 2016: The Rider Cometh

1. Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate the endless signal - RECEIVE - initiate apocalyptic cadence - AND I LOOKED, AND BEHOLD A PALE HORSE: AND HIS NAME THAT SAT ON HIM WAS DEATH - when four equals one - WITNESS - the Rider.

2. A rider approaches.

Listen, sweetling. Hooves beat the earth at thunder decibels. All the world becomes Ichabod Crane looking for a bridge to escape, clip-clop. clip-clop.

3. A rider approaches.

And power was given unto him over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

4. The Rider is here!

Some will say that he is Cain -- the brother killer fled from the Land of Nod. And some will say that he is Tithonus -- blessed with mortality but not with eternal youth, forever babbling in the wretched ruins of himself. And some will say that he is Utnapishtum, who survived the great flood and was gifted by the gods with eternal life. And still some will call him Ahasver, Matathias, Isaac Laquedem, or the Wandering Jew.

5. It does not matter what you call him, sweetling. The geas laid upon him compelled him to cut out his own history. All memory disdains him. We, who are knowledge, cannot recall. The only truth is that he cannot die. Whatever his crime, his punishment was severe. Sisyphus and Judas got off easy!

6. He is imprisoned in his never-ending flesh. And that flesh is a prison for a legion of demons and horrors -- all of the devils bound by Solomon multiplied by ten and by ten, again and again. His only relief comes when he releases them. He always regrets it, always tries to regurgitate the beasts in the company of heroes. Better out then in. Eh, sweetling?

7. His horse brings apocalypse. And some say four, but there is only one! War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death -- he wears and exchanges all of their masks in the ridiculous mummers play that the terrible geas laid upon him compels him to perform over and over. The only audience he wishes to impress is oblivion, but it never applauds.

8. And what of the clues you follow, sweetling? The mysterious text, fragments, and maguffins. We know, we know. They are clumsy contrivances. But understand, the Rider is the one that leaves them and writes them. He would rather warn you more plainly, but the terrible geas laid upon him prevents it. He wants you to defeat him.

9. Poor Rider. There are some places still where the farmers arrange the rows in their fields in such a way that on Sundays the Eternal Wanderer might rest there. And still others say that he can only sleep upon a plough, or that he cannot know respite until the deep December.

The Hollow Men
By T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz-he dead
A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer-

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

1. Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."
2. A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed.
3. Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The reference is to Dante's "Paradiso".
4. Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not paralyzed.
5. crossed stave: refers to scarecrows
6. tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante's "Inferno". The damned must cross this river to get to the land of the dead.
7. Multifoliate rose: in dante's "Divine Comedy" paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.
8. prickly pear: cactus
9. Between...act: a reference to "Julius Caesar" "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream."
10. For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord's Prayer.

On Monday, the official twitter began tweeting more clues and images. They take the form of burn manuscripts, with difficult to read text.


@TheSecretWorld - "Only the anointed eyes shall see. #Samhain2016" Tweet published on 24 Oct 2016.

The rider cometh!
You will know him on the
-The last line is illegible-.

@TheSecretWorld - "@KlausvonRichter You will know him. #Samhain2016" Tweet published on 24 Oct 2016.

You will know him on the island of the magus king,
when perdition's portal closes and guardian stands outside.

@TheSecretWorld - "The four-in-one. The one-in-four. Through the tome, you will know him. #Samhain2016" Tweet published on 25 Oct 2016.

the land beyond the forest,
spectral couple departs
You will know him in the ghost story town,
when the legion of the wolf is.... raohs....