These are 2 example Awakenings to the Obrimos path
Obrimos Awaken as the inevitable, logical consequence of their personal theories and esoteric research. That doesn’t mean their Awakening is itself a sober, rational thing. Thaumaturges argue themselves into bizarre, catastrophic situations that require intuitive leaps.
Obrimos don’t like to feel before they think, or seek refuge in slippery, wordless knowledge before binding it to a system; yet it happens every time, and they come out the other side aware of the flaws in their personal sciences. That’s when it’s time to refine, rebuild, and give more perfect names to cosmic energies.
Obrimos develop their Gnosis this way, expounding ever more complete theories of everything.
Before they Awakened, Obrimos usually arrayed their thoughts in ordered systems. They were physicists, philosophers, programmers, monks, priests, and linguists, or autodidacts able to blend insights from divergent fields. That doesn’t make them intelligent, but speaks to a love of structure and order.
They hate inconsistencies and begin Awakening by spotting flaws in their own thinking. They see nonsense physics and mind-bending philosophical problems that even smarter Sleepers are too Lie-blind to notice. When nascent Obrimos try to describe these problems in papers, debates, or sermons they come off sounding like cranks.
In one university, a mathematician on the verge of Awakening marshals Big Data to model the fates of nations. She tweaks simulations to map paths to Utopia, but it never works. Improve one indicator and another falls. Why?
Correlation isn’t causation, but the inexplicable connections keep coming, and the only solution is to postulate some basic field of utility using Vitalism, Platonic forms, and other concepts so far outside her wheelhouse that writing about them would rip her right off the tenure track.
Publish and be damned? No — the damnation comes first. They won’t renew her contract.
In a faux-Egyptian temple, he calls the archangels of the four directions. He belongs to the 32nd degree of an old society founded by renegade Freemasons and bored aristocrats, but he doesn’t feel enlightened or even interested. The secret grips, Kabbalah, and channelled writings of the Mahatmas seem as irrelevant as football trivia.
It’s time to shake things up and even make shit up to turn this esoteric business into something that makes real statements about how to live. Does he fake a séance, pretend to be possessed? How did the old charlatans do it?
These Obrimos-to-be see a God in the gaps, or a supreme principle made conspicuous by its absence, like a word missing from the sentence that answers life’s questions.
Awakening is the compulsion to complete the sentence, or hear something like God stake His territory.
The mathematician sneaks into her old department to steal time on a supercomputer. She evades guards, starts coding, and locks herself in when security discovers her at last. The room goes dark and quiet at the verge of completion, but her phone buzzes with a text that says: I AM. It tells her how to evade the guards and where a new Social Security number and name wait for her.
She avoids police scanners and former students until she claims her new identity. She checks her phone again. It’s blank, and she knows that she saw the camera footage, radio waves, and statistical trends that guided her here. She found her answer in the fluid Prime that governs everything, but she has no numbers or words for it. She’ll spend the rest of her life inventing them.
The “magus” composes his thoughts and pretends to channel a higher being. His audience of acolytes doubt him at once. They jeer him. He flees through the temple, which has grown so much larger than he remembers, until he enters an enormous vaulted chamber where Thoth and Sutekh regard him with sandstone eyes.
He sees a sacrificial fire and knows what he must do, and though he hesitates he feels no pain as he burns.
They’ll devour me and I’ll devour them, he thinks, and it is so.
He becomes the gods, learns their names, and feels himself vanish — and Awakens where he started, to see acolytes bow in worship, uttering the name of the new god he’s become.