A mage whose Path leads to the Primal Wild. Also known as Shamans or Ecstatics.
Bonded to the Watchtower of the Stone Book in the Primal Wild
Ruling Arcana: Life and Spirit
Inferior Arcanum: Mind
Favoured Resistance Attribute: Composure
To see examples and get an idea of the Thyrsus, read the stories below.
Ruling Arcana
Life and Spirit.
The Primal Wild’s cosmic Moon leaves its reflection in the material realm’s Life and casts The Shadow that Spirit commands. Thyrsus consider them to be two halves of the same dominion. Change one, and the other reacts.
Life’s the seat of sex, hunger, and the fight or flight response. It’s everything we eat and the worms that devour us when we die, resurrect our flesh as theirs, and make us immortal.
The Ecstatic honours Life’s primal sensations and celebrates its lesson: We’re not individuals, but colonies of tissue and bacteria that divide, are broken, and are reborn in ecological miracles.
The world lives and speaks. Before the Fall, anyone could gaze into The Shadow. The Lie blinds Spirit-senses, and even Awakened souls must practice to reclaim them, but Thyrsus see with fully open eyes, and their hands easily caress the gods beyond The Gauntlet. They know what we’ve forgotten: Material light and The Shadow are one realm.
Inferior Arcanum
Mind
To imagine Mind as a coherent Arcana asks Thyrsus to deny the holistic nature of existence.
To a Shaman, human consciousness is an adaptation, like a thumb or biped’s gait. That people can imagine themselves as individual minds is no more relevant than a lion’s jaws. They’re functions, not truths of the soul.
Symbols and Myths
The Hermit and the Moon. Culture heroes and totems. Nature, the living earth, love, and lust. Rough archetypes and personal gods.
The Awakened Tarot calls the Thyrsus the Path of the Hermit. She’s journeyed into an apparent wasteland and returned, filled with stories of the lush places hidden in the barrens. The savage paradise left wounds but gave her power. Her Mystery card’s The Moon, symbol of primordial spirituality. The Moon shines through a thin skin of rational excuses, revealing the veins of pain, pleasure, fear, and rage that really motivate us. Just as our organs and tissues grow as our genes command, our imagination ripens around archetypes that exist before we call them Beast, Hunter, Lover, Gatherer, Leader, Death, and the rest.
Neither cleric nor heretic, the Shaman walks the edges of orthodoxy. Experience trumps faith. Her magic invokes gods the way we might pluck favours from friends and family. She learns how they love to be flattered and fear to be threatened.
Thyrsus call upon local legends, spirits of places, and particular culture heroes not as rulers of small places, but as representatives of primal principles. Gods belong to families and all families stretch back to Creation’s dawn.
There are many horned gods with individual legends, but they belong to the tribe of the Horned God who represents masculinity and sacral kings. Thyrsus truck with wood nymphs, naiads and hearth gods, and emulate maenads and mythic hermits. They forge bonds with animal and god-ancestor totems.
Thyrsus invoke conventional pantheons as well, but speak to the gods’ archetypes, not the masks priests love. They prefer gods who represent basic desires, concrete phenomena, and the epitome of ecstatic practice. They honor Shiva who dwelled in the woods, Aphrodite, goddess of love, and even Weyland the smith — they know humans make things as naturally as wolves hunt in packs.
Thyrsus Shamans are more likely to call upon traditional gods and heroes. \Followers of the Ecstatic way seek the Mysteries without attempting to explain them to anyone else, and build personal mythologies based on spirits and phenomena they’ve personally experienced. Their lives are mythic epics punctuated by wordless instances of sublime sensation. Nowadays Thyrsus from both sides of the Path use biology, psychology, and other contemporary ideas.
Shamans in the Orders
Adamantine Arrow:
Look past the niceties of military culture to ask why the Arrow’s enemies need to die, and how to do it without self-indulgent posturing or inefficiency. Fools say animals don’t fight wars, but baboon troops slaughter each other and predators mark their territories with piss and claw marks. Thyrsus Arrows aren’t afraid to bloody their hands in direct combat (and those skilled in Life tend to be extremely good at it), but never for some pretentious point of honour.
Free Council:
Shamanism is humanity’s first heritage. Ecstasy is its universal spiritual path. These twin truths tell the Free Council that Sleepers never forgot about the Supernal. They know the oldest ways to touch it, and soar so close to it in moments of pain and pleasure. It’s time to help ordinary people take up the tools they already know and call to the hidden realm that beckons, demanding to rekindle old loves and obligations.
Guardians of the Veil:
Who is worthy of the Veil except those willing to endure any pain? Who should defile themselves but those who can see corruption manifest in The Shadow? Guardian Thyrsus aren’t emotionless operatives, but ascetics and living sacrifices to the cause. They remind the Order that beyond its practical functions it represents a spiritual calling. They test Guardian dedication with ritual ordeals and show every assassin how painful blows from their own knives will be.
Mysterium:
Magic is alive. Magic feels pain. Magic is a realm of predators, prey, and scavengers, of sex and offspring. Magic acts on lust and hunger, not sterile metaphysical rules. These insights help Mystagogues from the Path to deal with cryptids, genius loci, and other living and lifelike supernatural phenomena. Anyone can identify the stones of an ancient temple, but it takes Ecstatic awareness to detect an ecosystem that bears traces of Atlantean meddling.
Silver Ladder:
Don’t cower in the knowledge that you’re an animal. Don’t despair in a world where gods manage every blade of grass from The Shadow. Every species adapts to a niche. Humanity’s purpose is to rise and fertilize the Supernal with new symbols. That’s how the cosmos gives birth to new ages, but the Exarchs have sterilized it by putting us to Sleep, and The Abyss represents senescence without renewal. The Silver Ladder will help humanity reclaim its ecological role not to rule the universe, but revitalize it.
Seers of the Throne:
If the Lie’s a prison (such a biased term — call it a habitat) then it ought to be a controlled environment. The Seers’ Stewards keep Sleepers semi-domesticated. It’s a complex job utilizing a thousand delicate tactics. Make the environment too safe, and Sleepers unite, share their knowledge, and replace the survival urge with the drive for enlightenment. Threaten them to excess, and they might Awaken out of pure desperation. They need a little hunger and fear of the dark to keep them home, safe, and confined to little dreams. Two Exarchs help them preserve the balance of fear and comfort: the Nemesis of Spirit, which maintains fear of the unknown, and the Raptor of Life who tempts Sleepers to trust instinct over free will.
Thyrsus Stories
Magic’s the flesh of the universe. We eat its meat, drink its blood, and caress it under the Moon. We are Hermits, but never alone.
We Awaken between gods and beasts and, peering into their realms, see that they’re masks on the same face, rooms in a common lodge. We walk the Singing Stone between; we’re the singers and the song.
We don’t matter to them except as prey, or because we bring cars that hit them and cats they snatch. That’s where it ends, usually. Look into my eyes. You’re thinking of a little man lurking in there, wondering if he wants to fuck, if he’s lying to you, if he’s happy or sad.
My thoughts matter to you.
But they don’t give a shit about our thoughts; they operate according to older laws.
Ecologies.
Hungers.
Basic fears.
Those work just fine.
Before they took your partner you assumed they can’t think at all, but you know better now, don’t you? They just don’t bother with our motives, the little people inside, unless somebody gives them the idea.
Unless I give them the idea.
That’s the difference between a hunter and a murderer. That’s the difference between you having an accident and me getting revenge.
Who Are They
He’s a Shaman who crawls the World Tree, climbs Kunlun and follows a song from world to world. Lonely but never isolated, he’s set apart by his duty: to speak to humans and spirits; tell each side what the other wants; and, when necessary, bring angry gods to heel.
The last part breaks his life’s symmetry. He’s from a world of flesh, not ephemera, and that’s where his final loyalties lie. Nevertheless, he sees the shared pulse of mortal and ephemeral life.
He sings its music.
He could even get lost in it to be reborn an Ecstatic, a living example of simple, forgotten truths. Followers of the Path often tread between these extremes along the living axis mundi that binds diverse realms and states of being.
His soul erases the divisions that cut others in two. Others aren’t so lucky. The border makes them bleed. A Thyrsus heals or buries them as his conscience demands.
They say all kinds of nonsense about stone circles, but you never cared. Farmers drag rocks from their fields, pile them in one place and leave a spot to build a fire. Everything else is superstitious bullshit.
You had one of them out near the soybeans, with eight pretty black stones and the fire pit you’d use for parties. You found a ninth when you bought the adjoining plot — it made sense to add them to the rest.
Then your crops died.
Your cattle vanished.
Insurance wouldn’t cover it because, like you, they didn’t know what the hell was going on.
But farmers help each other. They knew a woman who’d find the best spots for wells and warn them when a bad batch of feed came in.
You paid cash; she went right to the stones.
After that it got hazy for you.
You woke from dreams of teeth and screaming cattle in your own bed, but she was there. Her first words were “Get a wheelbarrow,” and she told you where to put the stones back.
That’s the terror of only knowing half the world, but when you see the rest your fear turns to ecstasy, even though it never gets any less dangerous.
Three Thyrsus
Born Amy Wu, Nine Fox Thunder Awakened within the Heavenly Masters Taoist sect. After training as an exorcist, ascetic, and martial artist at Wudang, she joined the Guardians of the Veil, but only completed its immoral initiations out of respect for a grandfather who’d served that Order.
She never forgot that she had Awakened to serve Xi Wangmu, Queen of the West: a goddess of vitality who ancient oracle bones also called the tiger-fanged spirit of pestilence. She’s left that Order behind to concentrate on Taoist sorcery: a so-called “Nameless Order”.
Two pupils study under her, and her fox familiar serves as Xi Wangmu’s emissary.
Despite exercising Guardian subtlety in other arenas, Marple indulges a bit of Anglophilia in her appearance and Shadow Name while she investigates murders for her Order and her Legacy, the Eleventh Question.
The thirty-something Marple was born to Chinese immigrants in Seattle, but dresses like a spinster aunt from the 1930s. She visualizes the Primal Wild through the lens of antique British Imperialism: polite relationships that hide vicious predation.
Marple is especially good at rousing the spirits of manufactured things to bear witness. To honour her ephemeral allies she takes her tea with them, sharing fine conversation and occasionally, very rare meat.
He implied he was a cannibal, but most of Boston’s Awakened were content to think of the Nemean as the son of a bitch who held Boston’s Hierarchy, and bullied unity out of that city of rivals.
His own Silver Ladder imprisoned him in Astral dreams for unspecified “moral crimes,” but he escaped before they could pry his motives and secrets from him.
The Nemean Awakened after being beaten half to death by outlaw bikers. The Primal Wild taught him he was an apex predator in the making. He’s the lion who eats his rivals’ cubs, the king with the bloody sceptre. But a lion needs his pride, and he finds himself a fugitive from those he ruled.
He forms and abandons cults around himself as something in him whispers of a need to evolve further, and at last synthesize his humanity with his pure, Ecstatic desire to dominate.