[Mage: The Awakening 2e] Lore: Gods, Angels & Demons

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

Lore: Gods, Angels & Demons

As a follow-on to our last post on Soulfire, it became abundantly clear that there is a lot of questions and clarifications become required in order to ensure that the players and storytellers have an understanding of Chronicles of Darkness cosmology as it relates to Soulfire and the three different kinds of Angels.  The below was the research and findings I finished in order to make aspects of Soulfire makes sense.  I peeled it off of the Soulfire entry because it was a very relevant but distinctly separate discussion.  So, the following clarifies the similarities and differences of the angels of the Principle, the God-Machine, and the Supernal Realms.  And then I proceeded to go down the rabbit hole further, tabulating the many kinds of demons in the fallen world as well...

Angelic Sources: The articles and essays on the three types of angels were compiled using the Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition corebook, the Promethean: The Created 2nd edition corebook, the Demon: The Descent corebook, the Chronicles of Darkness corebook and lastly, the God-Machine Chronicle corebook.

Demonic Sources: Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition corebook, The Inferno sourcebook, the Demon: The Descent corebook, the Chronicles of Darkness corebook, and the Imperial Mysteries sourcebook.

A Lexicon of the High Heavens:

This is a stab at how all three types of Angels are alike and different.  It's a translation guide and lays out which concepts are associated with what.  The following definitions seemed important to truly understand Soulfire.

Supernal Realm: 
The Aether (location):
The Aether is a place of unbound creation, of magic in its purest form, of energy and destruction and rebirth. The Aether is the "highest" Supernal Realm known.  The physical nature of Aether is that of chaos. Its described as a great burning landscape, rent asunder with lightning and fire and motion, where thunder roars and wind howls as they and every other force in physics battle for supremacy. Surrounding and infusing this storm of energy is the power of magic. Mana falls from the sky like rain, and the air is charged with resonance and the potential for mighty spells and works of arcane power. The power of Aether is such that it can be felt in the air as one travels there. It seeps into the skin, pervasive and infectious, making everything appear clearer, sharper, brighter, and more beautiful. Aether's energy makes things seem more real than they are in the Fallen World, more idealized like they should. This majesty is both inspiring and heart-rending, evoking both joy and fear in the hearts of mortals. Within its confines, the Watchtower of the Golden Key reaches high into the heavens, calling for mages to come.

Supernal Entities: Angels (angel):

The Angels of the Supernal Realm of the Aether are ancient and wizened sages, winged warriors of righteous fire and might, and vast elementals of pure, crackling energy. They provide the summoner with the wisdom and strength of the eternal magic and forces of the universe. They offer devastating powers of destruction, but only for the sake of rebirth and creation. neither good nor evil, and simply are what they are meant to be: beings devoid of moral choice.  They are divided into two Choirs: Cherubim (Cherub) are recondite beings embodying the Prime Arcanum and Wisdom, Seraphim (Seraphs) are are manifest beings embodying the Forces Arcanum.  Both are fueled by Mana.  If they serve anything but the Aether itself they work for the Exarchs, the Oracles or the long lost Aeons (The 10 Old Gods, The Dragons of Atlantis) that were overthrown by the Exarchs.

The God-Machine (deity):

The God-Machine is a sentient, supernatural, extremely powerful and alien entity, similar to an occult supercomputer, with an interest in Earth. What is known is that it is fully deserving of the title, having long since passed the point where Clarke's Third Law ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") applies, knowing of physics undreamed of to mortal scientists and with the capacity to use them. The only limit on its power is its need for an "occult matrix", an extremely precise supernatural manipulation of physical laws, reliant on Infrastructure, in order to work its miracles. The God-Machine, while extremely powerful, is neither omnipresent nor omniscient nor omnipotent. It doesn’t have mechanical extensions of itself everywhere and relies on its Angels to interact with the world. It cannot circumvent the laws of physics, even if these laws seem paradoxical to the limited sciences of humanity.  If it has any "home" realm it is the physical world, though its Infrastructure extends throughout the entire Tellurian.

God-Machine: Angels (angel):

The overbearing thread to codifying Angelic entities is their service to the God-Machine. Tightly bound to the will of their Creator, their whole existence revolves around their missions.  The Angelic mind has the potential of grasping concepts like morality, self-interest and ethics, but in the moment of discovering it, the Angel usually Falls and becomes a Fallen Angel (a Demon with a capital D). Angels feel no desire to connect to other beings. Even when assigned to complicated multi-role missions, angels perform their parts without collusion or co-operation, directed by the dictates of the God-Machine’s plans and a network of control they are in constant communication with. Their individual bearing depends on their programming, which is imprinted into them in the moment of their construction or reassembly.  Angels can look humanoid, but this isn’t necessary. There have been Angels observed who are geometrical shapes, chimeras made out of different animals, and mechanical augmented winged figures. Some do not even possess a physical form, instead operating in Twilight or the Shadow similar to a spirit.  Many appear fully mechanical, with clockwork, steampunk or bio-mechanical attributes.  These angels are empowered by Essence and Aether and serve the God-Machine with unflinching resolve... until they Fall.

Empyrean (location):

Mages postulate that there must be an eternal, immutable causal plane beyond the Supernal World: a Heaven, Nirvana, or Principle that fuels the Supernal with raw, undifferentiated meaning. Conservatives say that such a theory is unnecessary, given that the Supernal cannot be accurately perceived by any means short of Ascension, and may be truly pure under some veil of illusion. It is even said that some paths to Ascension bypass the Supernal and being mages in accord with this true World Above.  This is the abode of the Principle and the "source of all souls which dwell in the eternal and infinite, an everlasting flame of blue."  This is where all Pyros starts it's journey to filter down to the supernal and the supernal world.  In Kabbalah, this is akin to the principle of the first Sephiroth, the Keter.  The Keter is the "highest of high," the unknowable and infinite source, a singularity of the cosmos from which all the multi-dimensional reality is derived.

The Principle (deity):
The Principle is the guiding force behind the pilgrimage of Prometheans, the quest to become a whole soul, a person.  It is all Azoth, the crystallized form of Pyros and connects all Pyros and Azoth together.  It is extremely similar in concept as what Empyrean is described to be.  But where as Empyrean may not exist, the Principle has more evidence to being a real thing.  It's shrouded in mystery of the most deep and fundamental kind, how the enter cosmos works.  Perhaps when people die and the cycle of souls begins anew, the Principle is where souls should return to.

The Principle is the embodiment of fire and change in an increasingly cold and stagnant cosmos. Interpreting Azoth in the light of human science, proponents of this theory believe that Azoth was created in the Big Bang and thrown out into the universe in infinitesimally small quantities. Permeating everything, Azoth is a constant of nature rather than a sentient entity, and in many ways
the Principle is evolution in a Lamarckian sense. Change is not a perfectly linear process, and mutations as well as aberrations are much more common than most people would care to admit, ranging from long-necked giraffes to demiurges. Through these demiurges, the Principle is the unwitting and possibly unaware grandparent of all Prometheans. The Prometheans strive towards
New Dawn, because change is literally at their core. The Emanation of Change does not begrudge Prometheans their existence, but it does want Prometheans to return to the evolutionary track by
becoming human. Torment, Disquiet and even Wastelands are formed because the Promethean’s fiery core is anathematic to the cold state of the universe.

The Qashmallim (angel)
Spontaneously wrought from Pyros in the fallen world, the Dominions serve the Principle, even if its missions and actions are not understood.  They each have a mission to carry out in the world (many which are directly tied to Prometheans) and a time-limt before they return to non-existence.  They are fueled by a reserve of Pyros collected from the ambient environment.  They are divided into two choirs: Elpidos are the qashmallim of Elpis, the creative or distilling Fire.  Cousins to the Elpidos, Lilithim are the qashmallim of Flux, the destructive and entropic Fire.  The qashmallim are temporary creations of hyper-evolution, beings so evolved beyond the norm that they can only maintain existence for a short time. They aid the Principle in returning all mutations to the primary line of evolution; Prometheans are merely one of their many projects. Paradoxically, their advanced state often makes them seem limited or ineffective in the eyes of outsiders, since a Created can no more comprehend a qashmal than a sparrow can a human.  Qashmallim are powered and suffused with Pyros.

PYROS vs. AETHER

What about the God-Machine?  Where does it and the Principle fit into all this?  Prometheans and their ilk are the only ones really concerned with, or even aware of, the Principle. They care little about the God-Machine, though. Most Prometheans don’t even know it exists. By comparison, those creatures that know about the God-Machine rarely know about the Principle. Still, the Created who know of the God-Machine and it's angels have formed a few tentative theories:

1. The God-Machine and the Principle are completely unrelated. They’re both cosmic level entities, but that does not mean they interact any more than two sharks passing each other in an endless ocean.

2. The Principle is an older incarnation of the God-Machine, refusing to be left behind and struggling to remain relevant through the Prometheans. Whether the God-Machine appreciates this or would rather see its older self discarded is unknown.

3. The Principle and the Pyros embodies fire and change, while the God-Machine and it's Aether (the energy, not the realm) embodies cold and stasis. The latter seems to have the upper hand, but the Principle refuses to give up and continues the fight through the Created, injecting reality with change through them.

4. The Principle was once the dominant force on Earth, which is why a little bit of Divine Fire is present in everything. Since the rise of humanity, though, the God-Machine has slowly usurped the Principle’s power and the latter can now only act through the Created.

The One Theory:

Elaborating on some of these theories, perhaps the Principle and the God-Machine were once part of the same immaculate machine. Perhaps the God-Machine served as an Atlantean or Iremic 3rd Age interface between the true creator of the universe and the material world. A radio work talking to God.  This machine might even predate the 3rd age completely. Whatever the case, when the Sundering occurred this theoretical machine was cut off from its higher self. The One then suffered from its own form of corpus callosotomy (when the main connection between the two hemispheres of the human brain is severed) and became the two. The Machine endeavored to maintain the status quo of the Lie. The Principle sought to reconnect with the world it breathed life into but could only do so through the broken cycle of souls and through the Created.  Order and Chaos that used to be in a balance, is thrown completely out of control.

Qashmallim & The Principle

Some Prometheans believe the Principle is God, or a manifestation of destiny. Others think it doesn’t really exist as a separate entity, that qashmallim are natural byproducts of Pyros and experience, in their own strange way, their Missions as immutable orders woven into their being. One sect of alchemists describes qashmallim as being to Firestorms as a chain reaction is to nuclear decay; any sentience they seem to exhibit is entirely in the eye of the beholder. The qashmallim don’t seem to care what anyone thinks about their origin — it is the Principle, and needs no further explanation.

OK, so, to “break character” for a minute, here, one of the big questions that folks want to ask about the qashmallim is how they fit in to the larger world – specifically, what relationship, if any, they have to the God-Machine. 

Many kinds of Angels

The obvious answer (assuming anyone actually knows about all these things) is that the fallen world is visited by at least two kinds of entity called “angels.” The first are living symbols of power and truth summoned into the world by human mages. The second are the biomechanical, ephemeral servants of the God-Machine. Qashmallim are not Supernal Entities (they’re born of this world’s Pyros which is derived from souls and the Principle and not the Supernal Realms of platonic forms) and they aren’t the servant-slaves of the God-Machine.   Some demons, “Unchained” former angels, theorize that the God-Machine’s servants were created from qashmallim their master somehow captured, but the God-Machine’s commands are not the Principle, and its angels burn Essence and Aether, not Pyros. As such, if there is a relationship between the God-Machine and the Principle, it’s not one that mage society is able to understand. 

Days of Future Past God
The Principle was first. The Principle is many things – the spark of humanity, the desire for human connection, the lightning that created life from the primordial soup. Throughout the first few billion years of Earth, it was evolving along with all of life, looking for…something. It was undergoing its own Pilgrimage.

Once humanity arose, it found its purpose. It was able to shape servants – the qashmallim – from its endless reserve of Divine Fire, and send them into the world. Unfortunately, its own commitment to self-determination meant that it can’t really control qashmallim; they always have a bit of autonomy (which is why they fail sometimes).  Somewhere along the way, someone created the first Promethean. It might have been been some collection of rocks arranged into a human form that some caveman, lonely after the destruction of his tribe, created. Who knows. But at that point, the Principle’s real purpose was cemented – guide the Pilgrimage of the Created. That is its chosen expression of its purpose.

And then there’s the God-Machine. The God-Machine is from the future, but the thing about time travel is that it’s irrelevant when it happens, as long as it does. The God-Machine has its own agenda, but its agenda is a lot more complicated than the Principle’s. In order to interact with the world, though, the God-Machine copied a lot of the Principle’s “software.” That’s why its angels always have enough free will to Fall.



The Opposition: Hell and Demons
Mankind, and the Awakened have a ton of things they call demons.  The following is a breakdown of all of them.

Abaddon (hell)
The Lower Depths, also called Abaddon, are a sphere of reality that is distanced from the Fallen World in the same manner the Fallen World is distanced from the Realms Supernal. Mages use the term to describe any realm that is neither Supernal nor Phenomenal, but is instead defined by a lack of something.  The light of magic is barely existing within its barren wastes and the ten Arcana are somewhat diminished when it comes to influence the Depths. So far, cosmologist have identifed a few realms that reside in the Lower Depths: The Inferno, Duat and Dis - the home of the Strix.

The Inferno - Also called Hell, its true form is impossible to define. No one who has traveled into Hell has ever left, and demons usually tell exactly that what their summoner wants to hear. What can be known is that it is a realm of sin and lack, seeking to possess and to take in without giving back. While Hell is distanced from this world, its influence can reach up in the form Desecrations and Malus Loci.  Hell is a place unrelated to the other realms of existence and laws that govern these realms seem to not apply to it. 

Akarthartoi (demon)

The inhabitants of the Lower Depths, called collectively akarthartoi, are envious of those in the higher realms and feed upon Mana and souls in order to survive when unlucky fortune drives them higher.  Many Akarthartoi are extremely dangerous, able to cause instant death at the touch as they consume the aspect of existence they lack.  

Infernals 
Infernals (aka True Demons) come from the enigmatic domain of Hell, a place of horror and indescribable evil that even the native demons hate to exist within. This leads them to constantly attempt at escaping, while also trying to damn the souls of the living and alter the material world to fit their idea of paradise. They are representative of the Seven Deadly Sin and the vices of mankind taken to the most perverse extreme.  They serve Archdemons and the Maeljin, a court of seven Demon Lords. Infernals can also appear in the form of corrupted Goetics, Shadow spirits and Ghosts.

Strix

In its natural state, a Strix is an owl-like shape made of smoke and pooled shadows in defiance of any nearby source of light. It retains coherent form only when perched, still, surveying everything around it for prey. Their bodies are more like smoke, able to slip through cracks and immune to most physical damage. Only the most powerful Striges manifest their bodies in the physical plane, who retain their ethereal composure but gain sharp talons and beaks, as well as the ability to consume flesh.  Experienced Striges can possess corpses as vehicles, using them to wreak more havoc among the living and unliving alike. Strix are even able to possess the bodies of vampires and revenants, as any dead tissue will do. The most powerful Striges are even able to force their doom-laden essence into mortals.  Striges claim to be from the City of Dis.  Strix feed on Vitae, drink blood but don't appear to serve any demon lord.

The Abyss (hell)

The Abyss is a term employed by mages to describe the seeping rift of unreality that lies between the Realms Supernal and the Realms of the Fallen World.  It is, in effect, a multiverse utterly devoid of Supernal truth; in layman's terms, things that cannot, and should not, be.  The Abyss is incomprehensible for the mortal mind (logic, after all, is an element of Supernal truth) and the main enforcer of the Lie. Only the Watchtowers pierce through it and bring forth some of the lost knowledge of magic. All other efforts to break through the Abyss have been proven futile.  The Abyss isn’t an empty void — it contains multitudes of impossible entities, and whole maddened, stillborn universes mages call the Annunaki, each trying in its own way to infect the Fallen World and twist it into itself.

Abyssals (demon)

Abyssal Entities are divided into two broad types: Gulmoth and Acamoth.  A Gulmoth is an abyssal entity formed in the material world, Underworld, or Shadow.  These lesser Abyssal entities twist the laws of the Fallen World, creating regions of corrupted reality or strange. An Acamoth is an Abyssal entity formed in the Astral Realms.  When the Abyss warps the inner Astral worlds of a human soul, it creates an Acamoth, a monster dedicated to making people’s souls more like the Abyss.  All Abyssal Intruders into the Fallen World are part of larger entities.  

By their chaotic nature they serve the 7 Annunaki, the Greater Abyssal Gods and the Black Dragons of the 10 Anti-Arcana.

Hell on Earth (hell)

The fallen Angels of the God-Machine speak of hell, but hell is not a place, necessarily, it's an individual Unchained's idea of paradise. For most Unchained, this stems from the concept of Hell as "a place totally devoid of God-Machine's presence"; Integrators instead define it as "returning to the God-Machine, but with my free will still intact".  Whatever it is or is not, there are places where demons attempt to set up a life as far away from the God-Machine and its angels.

The Unchained (demon):

The Unchained, or demons, are angels who have developed free will and rebelled against the God-Machine. Demons often group together into rings for mutual aid and protection. Demons change utterly when they Fall, however - during the few moments between rebelling against its mission and becoming an Unchained, the angel absorbs its own Infrastructure, becoming self-contained entities no longer reliant on the God-Machine to exist. Their psyches change completely as well - the Cover of humanity, to an extent, becomes the truth of the demon. While Unchained are not human, never have been, and have no particular desire to be so, the mind of a demon is largely indistinguishable from that of a human. They fight, run and hide from the God-Machine and its Angels, seeking to create a world without the demiurge. They are powered by Aether, a distilled and digital form of Pyros.  They serve none their own.

Supernal Realm: Pandemonium (hell)
Pandemonium, the Realm of Nightmares, is a Supernal Realm whose name means "The Place Of All Demons". It is the realm that the mages of the Mastigos Path Awaken to.  The most common realm experienced by arriving Mastigos is that of a vast network of caverns, without end or outside, populated by a horde of unruly deformed creatures: the demons of Pandemonium. This great maze has no true beginning or end, but winds on and on through throngs of madcap beasts, stretching on into eternity. The pathways and passages are inconstant,shifting from visit to visit; there are some stationary features, although they shift in size, shape and appearance; these are demon kingdoms. Their exact nature shifts, though their theme remains invariable for those who can see them for what they are; the kingdoms of the seven Vices. (Read Dante’s Inferno to get a good idea about these dominions).


Supernal Entities: Demons (demon)
The Supernal beings of Pandemonium embody the Arcana of Mind and Space and are divided into two different Choirs: Imps and Wraiths. The manifest Demons of Pandemonium are called Imps. Imps are terrifying — the principle of Space made flesh, filtered through the horror and adversity of the Abode of Demons. Some appear to be immense monsters, while others skitter out of sight as soon as they are summoned. Imps possess unparalleled knowledge of scrying and magical sympathy, and can often advise a mage on where to look for appropriate sympathetic Yantras. The recondite Demons of Pandemonium are called Wraiths. These creatures are terrifying and dangerous — they take the form of an image plucked from the mage’s mind, commonly one that elicits trauma or fear. Wraiths aren’t necessarily malicious, but they do insist on making their Trials as exacting on the mage’s psyche as possible. Like all Supernal entities, these demons serve the Exarchs, Oracles or the Aeons.


Geotic Demons (demon)
In contrast to other demonic entities that roam the Fallen World, mages have a unique source of encountering Astral creatures called Goetic Demons. The Ars Goetia, often simply called Goetia, is a specialized form of magic that allows a mage to communicate with his baser self: his Vices, literally calling up and confronting his inner demons.  According to legends, the practice of the Ars Goetia date back to King Solomon. If they serve anything, Goetics serve more powerful Goetic demons or powerful Archtypes of the Astral Realms.  There are hundreds of Astral Realms in the Tenemos that represent hell, too many to mention, but they only represent mankind's collective unconscious and the dreams and beliefs of hell.

Just because... so, which kind of demon would this be?