A mage whose Path leads to the Aether. Also known as Theurgists and Thaumaturges.
Bonded to the Watchtower of the Golden Key in Aether
Ruling Arcana: Forces and Prime
Inferior Arcanum: Death
Favoured Resistance Attribute: Resolve
To see examples and get an idea of the Obrimos, read the stories below.
Ruling Arcana
Forces and Prime.
The universe moves by will. Unseen powers issue commands writ in Mana, and worlds spin in obedience.
Don’t believe that Prime is power alone. It’s language. The gods named the universe into being, and when they gave humanity the power of speech, that included the power of creation. To make a thing you must do more than imagine it. You must name it, giving your dreams a symbol that escapes the confines of individual minds.
Forces moves creation through cycles of creation and destruction. Without Forces, Time would be irrelevant; nothing would move or change. Seasons rely on a world careening through space. Fire burns away the rot and debris that would otherwise suffocate Life.
Inferior Arcanum
Death
Death is an interruption, not an end.
Souls should be dispatched to their destinies in heavens, hells, and diverse incarnations instead of imprisoned by worldly obsessions, trapped in mystic receptacles, or subjected to the corruptions of Death. Obrimos represent the power that cleanses, and have little talent for the Arcanum of rot, stagnation, and bound ghosts.
Symbols and Myths
Strength, the High Priestess and the Hierophant. Gods and angels. Thunderers and fire-bringers. Science and secret names.
The Awakened Tarot’s symmetry breaks against the Obrimos, for they possess two significators: the Hierophant, who translates celestial patterns into laws and scriptures, in an ordered, disciplined system; and the High Priestess, ruler of the elusive, intuitive forms of power. The former writes Grimoires and inscribes mystic circles. The latter meditates upon the Shekinah within, or feels the pulse of surging Kundalini Shakti after yogic concentration. In the past, Western Obrimos conceived of these roles as highly gendered, but contemporary followers of the Path see them as approaches to practice, and leave further dogma to Legacies and cults. Both significators represent types of Strength, the Path’s Mystery card.
By intellectual or intuitive means, an Obrimos wrestles the thrashing beast of the cosmos into submission. Like any skilled wrestler an Obrimos avoids pitting force against force. She uses technique, yielding gestures, and a calm spirit to tame arcane power.
Obrimos develop magical systems around celestial hierarchies. The stereotypical Theurgist invokes the God of Abraham and choirs of angels. Obrimos call upon the twelve Olympians and the Egyptian Ennead. They chant Kabbalistic names or entreat the Celestial Bureaucracy.
They give particular reverence to sky and fire deities, aspects of the Creator, and culture heroes who bring enlightenment and civilization to the Sleeping flock. But not all Thaumaturges give magic divine forms. To them, “angels” are the names of natural laws, essential flavours of Prime. Many dispense with religious language completely, treating magic as a high science. All are manifestations of the Golden Key: knowledge that unlocks power.
Path members encompass some of the most diverse ritual praxes. Awakened physicists, hymn singers, and Hermetic sorcerers find their way to the Aether. With experiments and cultic rites they name the Law that rules all. Some Obrimos grow dogmatic and intolerant when their thinking excludes incompatible theories, but evidence usually trumps doctrine — even fools Awaken, and summon power through their own understanding.
Thaumaturges in the Orders
Adamantine Arrow:
Booming storms and colliding ley lines demonstrate the truth of cosmic struggle. Warriors embody celestial conflict but guide it with will and moral purpose. The Arrow provides a refuge for Thaumaturges who might otherwise abuse their tempestuous Arts. The Order teaches them to calm their inner storms.
Free Council:
Reason’s furnace melts gods into their intellectual components: physics, anthropology and the rest. The Path’s tendency to seek out fundamental patterns draws Libertines to science and technology, but also theology, psychology, and Masonic doctrine. Obrimos practice techné based on electrical engineering and mechanical principles, or Freemasonry and Jungian archetypes. They describe the path to power, teach it to Sleepers, and hope a few will Awaken to continue the process.
Guardians of the Veil:
Morality follows from natural law, but a Sleeper’s ignorance pits her against the true order of things, triggering the original moral paradox: You can’t save some without punishing others, even if they aren’t aware of their crimes. In a principled universe your only solution is to limit the damage, do your work in the dark, and beg for forgiveness, even though you know that while the Creator might possess limitless compassion his angels are merciless.
Mysterium:
Magic lives in Prime’s pulse. Its thoughts give Resonance to Mana. Its metabolism generates motion, heat, and light. Obrimos track ley lines and uncover Hallows to expand upon these facts, like an anatomist tracing veins and listening to blood’s hum. Religious Theurgists characterize it as quest to comprehend God, but many Obrimos search for ultimate patterns in the Prime, or a storm that breeds all others.
Silver Ladder:
Obrimos come to the Order with a plan written by God and natural law. They’re natural théarchs, attracted to priestly duties and the urge to impose order on a broken world. The Aether’s angels reveal that logic and revelation work hand in hand. Obrimos join the Ladder to bring Earth in accord with Heaven because its ruling angels would themselves be ruled by us, if we would rise to claim the right.
Seers of the Throne:
As soldier-priests of the Lie, Seer Templars punish rebel souls according to the battle doctrines of the General, Exarch of Forces and cold-blooded violence. The Exarch of Prime called the Father enforces the Lie through oppressive scriptures and religious zeal. Templars keep to the true faith, while imposing the false religions Sleepers have been condemned to follow.
Obrimos Stories
Magic is an invisible kingdom ruled by the Strength of sacred discipline.
We grasped the Golden Key of authority and Awakened before principalities and powers, to worship with the Priestess’ song and rule with the Hierophant’s sceptre. Fly, angels — we know your names.
The world moves as God wills, through a procession of laws and signs.
He knows I tried to just watch and listen for them. I followed radio waves, magnified whispers, vortices of power, and failing spells to this unspeakable place. Corruption stains the altar here — it’s a spike in the protective shell of the world. I remember names in ancient books and contemplate the sigils burned on my soul.
I borrow His authority, repurpose proclamations and call the name of an invisible servant. And as it gazes upon me with a hundred blazing eyes, I invoke His authority and command it:
“Burn.”
Who Are They
Supernal or Fallen, the cosmos follows elaborate laws, complex and mighty as the Arcana. They’re sigils and hymns, ritual instructions, and the ephemeral beings that obey.
To an Obrimos, magic is the academic discipline that studies these laws or an act of faith that appeals to the God that made them.
Call them Thaumaturges, Greek for “wonder-workers,” because they follow in the footsteps of Hermes Trismegistus, read the Emerald Tablet, and sing Thoth’s hymn.
Label them Theurgists when they call magic the hidden hand of the Creator, and appeal to Heaven’s aristocracy in Her name.
If you broke into their sancta you might find the stereotypical marks of wizardry: robes, circles of salt, and the rest. Magic has a structure, and it’s often easier to express it through traditional tools than hold it all in the imago.
Others approach magic as a science and engineering feat. They prefer labs and workshops to walls carved with the names of God.
Speak God’s name and it can deafen your soul. Manipulate cosmic laws, but beware — they’ll snap back to equilibrium with the force of a falling star.
The storms used to happen once or twice a generation, but now they hit town every year. It’s just a sandbar on the sea, where the rich build summer homes. They’re leaving now, writing off the wreckage and leaving the natives to their own devices.
One man remains.
The storms never touch his estate, even though his mansion sits on stilts halfway to the ocean. That luck seems to rub off on every local building and business he buys.
He fixes his investments and pays townies to run them as long as they sign ironclad non-disclosure agreements.
His people run the government now. They’ve approved a ring of sculptures that hurt your eyes to look at, and they’ve cut funding for roads and the ferry service.
You were going to attend a meeting about taking the town back but your car wouldn’t start — sand in the engine from the last storm, the mechanic said — and it was a lucky thing. Another small, intense typhoon hit the meeting place and only there.
Maybe it’s time to leave but these natural disasters feel a lot like murder now, and against all reason you know where to point the finger.
They’re earth-shakers and storm-makers who listen to celestial music. The Supernal never stops shaking the Lie, rattling the cage to wake up its prisoners.
Listen!
Three Obrimos
Glorianna calls magic a secret science, accessible through a mixture of reason and intuition.
She always loved making things, and exposure to the Aether only supplemented her prodigious knowledge of physics and engineering. A techné specialist in the Free Council, Glorianna builds upon the efforts of Sleeper scientists, mechanics, and engineers.
She sees Hermes stir in wheels and engines, wakes him up, and makes him run his paces in everything from automata to directed energy weapons.
Khonsu’s the Eight-Fingered Man: beaten but unbowed, driven by the ceaseless gaze of the gods. As an archaeologist, he learned that not a grain of dust exists that hasn’t been moved by human will, to build, destroy, and conceal the most sublime human accomplishments — and the most horrific.
Hunted by tomb robbers, he took refuge in an Atlantean ruin, and walked into the presence of his namesake: the moon god who protects travellers. Now he serves the Mysterium as its Censor, protecting mages from the secrets they uncover, so that they might travel in peace.
Sometimes that means burying dangerous knowledge once again, until the Awakened have use for it.
His job’s an unpopular one, and he’s learned to take beatings from sorcerers who resent Mysterium interference.
He was Boston’s most feared Banisher, but Weapon’s getting old in spite of the cursed power crackling through him and the exercise regimen that’s given him an ageless physique from the neck down.
He still has the face of the 66-year-old man he is, and the long stare of someone long deprived of the illusion of a just world.
Weapon Awakened 35 years ago to see a world of vampires and other secret monsters, but no God to make it right. Magic’s a soulless machine that manufactures disasters and feeds abusers. He could only be Weapon: a tool to cut and smash the machine.
In spite of everything he’s suffered he wants a successor, but the next Weapon needs to be broken as he was, to be reforged for the task.