A mage whose Path leads to Pandemonium. Also known as Warlocks or Psychonauts.
Bonded to the Watchtower of the Iron Gauntlet in Pandemonium
Ruling Arcana: Mind and Space
Inferior Arcanum: Matter
Favoured Resistance Attribute: Resolve
To see examples and get an idea of the Mastigos, read the stories below.
Ruling Arcana
Mind and Space.
Passions and the connections. The unknown reaches of the soul, manifest in hidden places in the world.
To understand the Mastigos approach to Mind, cast off the notion that consciousness is an inner advisor, babbling your thoughts. The true self is calm and transcendent, beyond even the debatable concept of the superego. It never strives, but is the path of a river, the layout of mind-palaces. A Psychonaut places himself above thoughts, wrangling their goetic manifestations to do her bidding, and reaches out with transcendental clarity to touch the thoughts of others.
Warlocks rattle the chains of connection: the true nature of Space, instead of what Sleepers measure with yardsticks and maps. A Master of Space shrinks them to black iron threads, finely wrought, often tangled, and easily severed.
Inferior Arcanum
Matter
Matter sticks in the conceptual gullet of the Mastigos.
It seems to populate the Lie alone, a too-solid illusion to fill the empty spaces between Sleepers. Yet “base” elements undeniably possess Supernal vibrations and have a claim to the world of truth. Mastigos find it difficult to understand Matter’s faint, unthinking hum.
Symbols and Myths
The Devil and Temperance. Demons and wrathful gods. Serenity and decadence.
In the Awakened Tarot, Mastigos map their experience to two contrasting cards. The Devil represents a Warlock’s passions. Everyone carries an annex of Pandemonium where their desires dwell, but Mastigos not only possess a strong inner menagerie, but the clarity to name and subjugate its inmates.
Their Mystery card is Temperance: the path of control and sign of the psychopomp who guides souls between worlds. Despite the initial victory of Awakening, suppressing the Goetia is a lifelong struggle, waged through raw determination, meditative calm, and occasional bribery — feeding your passions can calm them, for a time. Mastigos may take the most direct approach to magical praxes. They treat gods and demons like states of mind to be conjured, propitiated, and bound at need. Yet they do not regard these beings as illusory — as the Astral realms demonstrate, thought is as real as flesh. Warlocks make pantheons of consciousness out of Qlippothic anti-angels and wrathful Tibetan deities. They appear beautiful or fearsome based on the summoner’s state of mind or the thoughts they symbolize.
Meditative Mastigos approach with a still mind, hoping to coax bodhisattvas out of fanged, skull-bearing gods. Iron-willed Warlocks confront their Goetia at their most hideous — the more threatening they appear, the more power they offer. The Path’s chief concern is the problem of the self. Mastigos cast off the illusion that they’re nothing but urges and emotions. After sifting them out, what remains?
Psychonauts breathe and chant mantras to banish lingering biases or rebuild themselves anew, creating gods and sigils that represent who they need to be to perform a particular task. Warlocks devote themselves to antinomian struggle. They define themselves by who they are not. To conquer lust, they fuck. To defeat venality, they hoard wealth. Both approaches present risks ranging from apathy to decadence. The sorcerer erases everything that makes her vital or feeds the Goetia too well, and lets them take over.
Warlocks in the Orders
Adamantine Arrow:
After battling rogue thoughts, Mastigos enter the Adamantine Arrow understanding some of the challenges to come. They approach oaths and the chain of command with less enthusiasm. They didn’t master their urges to bend knee before some officer. They’d rather be loyal out of love or a real sense of duty than a set of ritual protocols. Nevertheless, they see into souls or secret places as spies and scouts. They plague enemies with psychic horrors and delusions.
Free Council:
Mastigos Libertines believe that everyone should be allowed to transform his or her own soul without Hierarchs and other titled fools twisting it to suit their ambitions. Sleepers follow gurus and priests in search of happy, calm minds. Mastigos play the part with an advantage: They can truly peer into your psyche. They provide the help Sleeper mystics falsely promise, though they can inflict abuse unimagined by the worst cult leaders, too.
Guardians of the Veil:
Mastigos understand how difficult it is to Awaken without submitting to the soul’s weaknesses. Give up yourself, become pure, and guard the Awakened against anyone unable to make the same commitment. Mastigos Guardians excel at interrogation, surveillance, and assuming false identities.
Mysterium:
Magic not only lives, but possesses a soul made of Awakened wants and frailties. An Imago is what magic thinks. Spells driven by blind impulses, hatred, and obsessive love corrupt the Supernal mind of sorcery. Therefore, a Mastigos serves the Order by acting as a moral gatekeeper, and examines Mysteries for ethical implications. Although this task normally drives such Mystagogues to talk to people instead of examining strange sites and artifacts, Space allows Mastigos to enter inaccessible places and examine their sympathetic connections, leaving a role for occult archaeologists.
Silver Ladder:
Rule yourself to rule others. That describes more than a best practice — it’s the right to govern, for the allegorical Cave represents more than intellectual ignorance. It’s the darkness cast by desire, cloaking unpleasant truths. Leaders need to drag the flock out by ministering to their fears, encouraging their ambitions, and suffocating their destructive urges.
Seers of the Throne:
They see your weakness and hate you for it. They know why the Throne needs to keep you ignorant, limited to sins of the Fallen flesh. Mastigos Watchers respect the Eye, the Exarch of Space and power of surveillance. People who know they’re being watched tend to behave. Channelling the Unity, Exarch of Mind, Watchers strip dissent from resistant minds to better serve the Throne.
Mastigos Stories
Magic is the soul’s journey between Temperance and the Devil, through the maze of all desires.
We Awaken to the reality of our transgressions to confront our joys and sins. Your true self is a demon, trapped in an Iron Gauntlet. Release it, and it can take you anywhere.
I know you love him. Your desire arrived before you did, along a silken connection spun the moment you saw him. It strengthened when you kissed and fucked and fought, and even when he left. Now here you are, wondering why it still hurts — shouldn’t the thread dissolve?
No, the silk’s as strong as ever, and your love’s a fat little spider now, made monstrous by resentment until you can’t call it love, but lust mixed with an inchoate sense of ownership. Fortunately, I can cut the thread and pluck the little monster out of you. I could use your creature and besides, you won’t feel a thing — in fact, that’s rather the point.
Who Are They
Mastigos master a world ruled by desire, thought, and perception. Thought is substance. Space is sentiment.
You might feel like your true love never leaves your side or that the road stretches to an unpleasant destination. You’re not imagining things, but without Awakening, you’ll always trudge a lattice of miles, imprisoned in the Lie of objective distance.
Without discipline, your thoughts are not your own — they can scarcely be said to inhabit your brain. Your passions travel invisible planes. Space is a set of chains forged by desire and associations, and they can be shaken from both ends.
The two common names for the Path reflect its individualistic, confrontational nature. The traditional title is Warlock, a name for sorcerers that also translates to “oath-breaker” in Old English. In the case of the Mastigos, the name fits not because of their untrustworthiness, but their typical disdain for taboos and impatience with social pretence.
In the latter half of the 20th century, young Mastigos borrowed the term Psychonaut from chaos magicians and human potential gurus; but where those Sleepers explore the shallows of their souls through drugs and meditation, mages map the depths and fish out the creatures they find.
How would they treat you, with your demon-haunted mind, lost in the prison of distance?
You never thought you’d follow a guru. He never called himself that of course, but he knew what you were afraid of — and at night, he knew what you liked.
It split your mind between recognizing that you were a member of a destructive cult and revelling in the pleasure of his company.
You knew you weren’t the only one to love him, or to give him your possessions, but you never met them all until you moved to the land he bought for you, three days before he disappeared.
You all still follow his instructions, delivered in the last glow of the bright, gasp-wringing dreams he gives you every night.
He needs money.
He needs a certain item seized from a museum.
He needs a killing.
You walk through a Warlock’s world with slow steps, while she dances shortcuts through the rattling maze of Pandemonium, guided by gods conjured from her soul.
Three Mastigos
She was Aasiya Ahmed, born to a good family in then-unruly Mogadishu.
From an early age, she knew where unplanned construction left shortcuts and interstitial sanctuaries. She could disappear and reappear at will; her parents gave up bringing her up in proper society once they realized they could never take her anywhere she didn’t want to go.
She found her way to the secret city, its ghuls and forgotten ifrit princes.
Now she’s Ichneumon, apprentice lictor of the Silver Ladder, and knows the secret city extends everywhere. Its predators and demons leap between bodies and shortcuts in the endless meta-city. Ichneumon follows them, stops them when she can, and looks for patterns.
The Iron Gauntlet sought Arctos out.
It dragged him into contact with amateur occultists, and made him enemy to the Scelestus called Angrboda before he truly knew what magic was. He played the unwilling prodigy, but until he entered Pandemonium he refused to admit that it was his strategy for becoming the centre of attention.
His ego is his primary focus, his confessional secret, whispered only to the arch-devils of his Watchtower. Now he’s an Adept who must decide whether to embrace his quiet demeanour as a route to mystic discipline, or use it as a strategy to stay in the centre of attention.
S/he is a mind, a mistranslation, something between ghost, archmage, and demon. Baphomet doesn’t remember her/his original gender, but such things were unimportant in a leper colony outside Jerusalem, 900 years ago.
S/he Awakened during the First Crusade, and made religious hate and misunderstanding into a devil — the Shadow Name “Baphomet” descends from an early spelling of Mohammed by Templars. S/he became a Master of Mind and Space, but her/his body began to fail him/her. S/he abandoned it to become her/his goetic demon, and live in the minds of Templars, priests, Satanists, and occultists.
Baphomet still haunts dreams and fortified domains in the Astral reaches, though s/he struggles with the archetypal Devil itself, who would reduce the bodiless dream sorcerer into a slave or appendage.