Capeworld Comics

The Sacrifice of Odin

The birth name of the thaumaturgist known as Spectro is unknown–and can never be known. As he grew in power in wisdom, he reached a point where he thought it prudent to erase his name from the face of the universe.

To those that travel outside the local comos into astral realms where thought is form, birth names are a vulnerability. They are a man’s life and destiny compressed into a couple of syllables. In mystical places, to have a man’s name on your lips is like having his throat in your hands.

Spectro had plans to do great things, and doing great things meant earning powerful enemies. To protect himself, he used his cosmic powers and secret ways to erase his name. All mention of his name vanished from the pages of history and the memories of man. His very parents forgot the name they called him in his crib. It was even erased from his own mind. He knew he had a name, and he knew that name carried tender feelings when spoken by those that loved him. But he couldn’t remember what his name was. It was a blank, a suggestion, and he made the name Spectro to fill that blank.

Some think “Spectro” is a reference to the spectrum of red colors in the cloak of stars he often wears. It’s a good guess. Spectro is very fond of his cloak. He made it himself when he was struck by the beauty of the red rectangle nebula in the monoceros constellation. It was a naturally formed bit of symmetry and an ideal focus for the order of his magic. And so he compressed the nebula into a cloak of stars and wore it.

But that was not why he was called Spectro. He took the name from the general meaning of spectrum–that of a scale between two extremes.

He named himself what he hoped he would become. It was the oldest trick of magic–simple but woefully unreliable.

He didn’t think erasing his name would hurt himself like it did. When he worked the spell that erased his name, he believed he was doing a simple thing for the greater good. He would be able to work miracles without worrying about the retaliation of evil powers. Those that shared his name, for it was a common name, would not be targeted. But it was not a simple thing. The cost was greater than he imagined. And he understood just how great it was when his mother with tears in her eyes asked him why she couldn’t remember her baby’s name.

In that moment, Spectro understood the highest meaning of the thaumaturgical saying the “sacrifice of Odin,” also called the “blinding of Tiresias.” The saying at face value meant making a great and irreversible loss for the sake of mystical knowledge. But there was a deeper meaning to the saying. Odin was blind in one eye and Tiresias in both. The sacrifice of Odin makes one blind to the mundane. To open the third eye is to become blind in two. Spectro understood this when his mother confronted him about the loss of his name. So engrossed was he in the life of a thaumaturge that he didn’t realize that his sacrifice could have affected anyone besides himself. He didn’t consider how his parents would have felt forgetting his name. The thought never crossed his mind.

When Spectro realized how blind he had been he wept like a child.

He vowed never again to be so unaware of the mundane world around himself. This vow would serve him well as a student of the Circled Square for it was his attentiveness that led him to anticipate the miraculous sin of Dr. Styx and guard the world against it.

But the sacrifice of Odin is irreversible. Once blinded, one can never again see like a mundane man. Despite Spectro’s best attempts to keep aware of the mundane world there would always be a blindness to his vision.

In the late 1930’s, his blindness took an insidious form. His blindness was that he was unaware of his blindness. His success during the Dr. Styx crisis made him feel as if he was the member of the Circled Square most intune with the world and most responsible for the Circled Square’s dealings with it.

When the Worlds War of the 1940’s erupted under the watch of the Circled Square, Spectro felt uniquely responsible. His guilt would gnaw at his sanity all the days of the war.

And the Stardust incident would snap it.

Ibis the Entertainer

Spectro was born in 1914. Though born during the Great War in the Air, he was fortunate that his earliest memories were of a time of fresh peace. Horrified by the bloodshed of the Great War, the industrialized powers looked to exploration and science as ways to gain dominance over marital aggression. The fathers of the current generation were soldiers, but vowed that their sons would be scientists and explorers.

Spectro had good memories of his boyhood. For an inquisitive boy such as he was, the early 20th century was a fascinating time. Dr. Wilbur Link, the world’s leading roboticist, developed “Link dolls” to educate boys on the mechanical actions of robots. Spectro kept a collection as a boy and to this day keeps them tucked away in a corner of his house broken parts and all. Jason Gridley’s discovery of the Gridley wave allowed communication across the astral realm bypassing the limitations of physical distance. Every night, America could tune into the Jason Gridley Hour and listen to reports on faraway lands like chivalrous Barsoom and savage Pellucidar. And every night, Spectro listened wrapped in a blanket next to his family’s radio in the kitchen. Words crackling on electric static sparked his imagination into fiery daydreams of jeweled cities and dark jungles.

In the present, Spectro listens to recordings of the Jason Gridley Hour. He no longer finds them adventurous in the face of what he sees in his daily life, but now they have a nostalgic magic that he finds irresistible. They remind him of better times.

But the most inspiring thing of all to a young Spectro was Ibis the Invincible. He was an immortal. He was older than the Earth. He was older than the sun. In his aeons-long existence he had been Perkun of Pangea, Cadmus of Thebes, Pharaoh Akenhaten, and Apollonius of Tyana. In the late 19th century, he emerged from an amber-colored sarcophagus called the Creche of Hausus. He arose from stone marked with the oldest inscriptions on Earth–their meaning forgotten even by the one that chiseled them. He stood in the electric light of a modern museum like a mummy without bandages–his body unmarred and perfectly healthy.

He took the name Aiwass and joined the side of Aleister Crowley’s Hermetics against Annie Besant’s Theosophists in the Shadow War of 1899. Afterwards, he joined Crowley’s Circled Square under the trump of the Sun and worked to repair the fractured tradition of thaumaturgy and spread it to all mankind.

Putting the Shadow War behind him, Aiwass took the name Ibis after spending time in Egypt and remembering his life as Akhenaten. He always liked the bird and the Ibis-headed god of knowledge Thoth. He kept a pond of them as pets as Akhenaten–a fact lost to history until he remembered it.

As Ibis, he wanted to be an entertainer. He wanted to sell the idea of thaumaturgy to the masses.

One of the causes of the Great War in the Air was that the powerful nations of Earth felt unsure of their standing against the Circled Square and the rise in thaumaturgy they represented. They indoctrinated their subjects into believing that a population with individuals capable of working miracles was an anarchic and self-destructive society. The only way to prevent this mass anarchy was with a powerful state. And a state could only be powerful if it dominated its neighbors. Thus the fuse was set for an explosion that would go off when Germany, erroneously believing itself to be the only power with a fleet of airships, launched an attack on the United States in 1914.

Ibis hoped to dispel the world’s fear of thaumaturgy through mass entertainment. He would take thaumaturgy out of occult circles and put it on public display. Thought-forms and magic spells would leave the shadows and be put on bright stages.

In the form of a kindly gentleman in a suit and turban, he toured the world putting on displays of thaumaturgy. What Wilbur Link was to robotics and Jason Gridley was to distant cultures, Ibis was to thaumaturgy. He de-mystified mysticism until thaumaturgy was no more frightening to mankind than electricity or automobiles.

Compared to other superhumans of the time, Ibis lacked a certain popular appeal. He wasn’t as reassuringly mighty as Gold Star, invincible man of light and power. Nor was he as personable and charismatic as superhuman police sergeant Dan Garret aka the Blue Beetle. Ibis was like a living history book. Ibis was half-translated texts and barely-recalled memories. He was history incarnate, and history will always be somewhat alienating to those that have to live in the here-and-now.

But that was what Spectro loved about him. Spectro loved that Ibis had forgotten more than he would ever remember. He loved how he made his identity out of palimpsest personalities. He loved how he spent his free time meditating on ancient texts and writing what he remembered about them in a journal called Tablets.

Tablets was a journal read by anthropologists, psychologists, historians–and a young Spectro who read copies at the library while his friends read Sultans of Gold and Dream Diaries of Randolph Carter at the local drugstore. Tablets has often been described as psychologically interesting but of dubious historical value. Ibis freely admits to having a fluid memory and his stance on a text can change issue by issue. He can go from believing he wrote a 14th century BCE text on the Egyptian afterlife as pharaoh Akhenaten, to believing that the text was written by another man using his name for the prestige it carried, to believing that the text was misdated by centuries and that he in fact wrote it in the 1st century CE as Apollonius in an attempt to remember being Akhenaten, and then back to believing that he wrote text as Akhenaten–all in the span of a few journals. Such was his memory that he often misremembered more than he remembered.

But Spectro found Tablets irresistibly interesting even as his friends teased him for reading something even their parents found dry and academic. He found the journals human in a way Jason Gridley’s reports and Wilbur Link’s toys weren’t. He collected every one with his allowance and to this day keeps them in his library yellow and faded though they might be.

Spectro’s interest in how people thought and behaved didn’t start with the vow he made after regretting erasing his name. He neve cared much to talk to people, but he always tried to know them as much as possible.

When Ibis came to put on a show in Spectro’s hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, Spectro saved his meager allowance to buy a ticket. The show was full of vanishings and materializations and telepathy–things that the Spectro of today would have found quaint. But what Ibis told the audience that night set Spectro on the path he would follow for the rest of his life.

That night, Ibis decided to work in a speech during his performance about the often misunderstood subject of science and thaumaturgy.

Some of Spectro’s friends rolled their eyes and sighed as Ibis announced his speech at the end of his famous “moving painting” act where he tried to paint a portrait that fought him every brushstroke of the way, but Spectro was thrilled. He had questions about science and thaumaturgy, but being a child in a small southern town he didn’t know who to ask or how to phrase his questions.

Ibis began his speech by saying that that though attitudes on thaumaturgy had thawed considerably since the Great War in the Air (and here was where Ibis paused and pulled a rabbit with a tiny pickelhaube out of his turban–much to the relief of Spectro’s friends who feared the entertainment was over), people still clung to the erroneous dichotomy of science vs thaumaturgy. They believed that science was rational and static while thaumaturgy was irrational and ever-changing.

Spectro remembered some of his neighbors that believed in the dichotomy and for the first time in his life felt superior to adults. He remembered Ms. Grady, who ran the flower shop his mother worked at, who said that thaumaturgists changed their shape every hour–just because that was how thaumaturgists were. They couldn’t keep a single shape for long if they tried. And Mr. Sinclair who ran the neighborhood drugstore that Spectro bought candy from, said that thaumaturgists all had memories as spotty as Ibis because people weren’t made to plumb supernal realities. It was like staring at the sun or listening to gunfire. It eroded their minds starting with their memory and likely ending with their sanity.

It never seemed right to Spectro that people were so quick to condemn thaumaturgy as pure chaos. It couldn’t have been that chaotic. They had schools and teachers and books on thaumaturgy just like they had for every subject traditionally called science. There had to be some kind of structure to it, otherwise what would be the point of people talking about it at all? If it was all so chaotic then how come one name was all it took to describe it?

Ibis said that thaumaturgy was as valid science as chemistry or physics. It was true that compared to traditional sciences thaumaturgy had a unique subjective dimension. No single person observed and interacted with supernal realities the same way. A thought-form that rested as comfortably as a bird in a nest in one mind was a raging thunderstorm in another. A spell performed by this person had this effect but when performed by that person had that effect.

But thaumaturgy still followed the same scientific methodology of making hypotheses based on observations and testing those hypotheses to form theories based on replicable outcomes. Thaumaturgy was still a science.

Ibis gently levitated the audience in their seats and revolved them around the stage in a merry-go-round pattern. He said that this is what many thought the world was becoming with the spread of thaumaturgy–a world where no one could see eye-to-eye and no one stood on the same ground.

He spun the seats a little faster. All the children in the audience shouted as if they were on a carnival ride except for Spectro who like the adults understood what Ibis was saying and how important it was to the world.

Ibis said that many feared the world would become a world without truth. They feared that thaumaturgy would suck meaning and purpose out of the world and leave a shell called the post-rational world, postmodern world, or premodern world–for it would be one where man could no more be sure of his world or his place in it than when he sacrificed crops to the stars in the faint hope that the weather would be merciful.

Ibis then slowed the seats and brought them brought them closer around the stage in a circle that rotated slowly and orderly like the orbits of stars.

Science, he explained, was never about knowing a single, static truth. It was never about knowing to begin with. It was about seeing. Science never claimed to know what was absolutely true. Such claims were only made by ill-informed men drunk on the rush of power 20th century technology gave the human race. Science only ever claimed replicable and demonstrable outcomes to variable-based experiments. New observations changed scientific conclusions all the time.

To make his point, Ibis asked the audience what color the auditorium was. When the audience answered red because of the curtains and walls, Ibis snapped his fingers and caused the auditorium from its floor to its ceiling to turn bright clover green. Even the audience, to their amusement, turned green from their skin to their clothes.

Ever the showman, Ibis asked the audience to please withhold their envy at his phenomenal cosmic powers.

Ibis repeated his question and when the audience answered that the auditorium was green he snapped his fingers again and turned it a chilly frost blue. He repeated his question, and when the audience answered blue he repeated their exchange with a sunny daffodil yellow, then a warm sunset red, and a royal purple.

Ibis said that this was how traditional scientists conducted observations. They observed something changing out in the world and tried to draw conclusions. When observations changed, so did conclusions.

He asked the audience to engage in a little science with him. He asked the audience what they thought they could do to change the variable out in the world causing the colors to change.

After a moment, a man in the audience shouted “Hey Ibis! Change the color so it’s like a movie!” And then in a moment, added “…Please?”

Ibis smiled and in an instant the auditorium became black and white like a film. The audience’s skin became silvery grey and their clothes inky black.

Spectro felt a little jealous of the man that answered. He knew the answer but he didn’t answer. He overthought the question. He thought there was a trick to it.

Ibis snapped his fingers again and asked the audience what color the auditorium was now. The audience members were amazed to hear their neighbors shout out colors they didn’t see. Spectro himself saw a powder blue–his favorite color– but heard green, blue, light-gray, and all kinds of colors.

Ibis snapped his fingers and brought the auditorium’s natural color back. He explained that what the audience saw was how the science of thaumaturgy conducted observations. Thaumaturgists observed something changing in their own subjective world and tried to draw conclusions. Again, when observations changed, so did conclusions.

Ibis invited the audience to participate in a thaumaturgical experiment. Everyone could do science–thaumaturgy was no exception. First they were to note the color of the auditorium as it appeared to them. This was their control. Then they were to change a variable and see what happened–the variable in this case being their will.

He told them to put forth a mental effort and paint the auditorium whatever colors they wished.

The auditorium erupted in cheers and laughter and surprised gasps. No one could see how his neighbor painted the world around him but no one seemed to mind. They made shapes in the air. They painted their friends like clowns. They did nothing and took amusement in watching everyone else make faces at the walls of a normal auditorium.

Spectro was puzzled to find that the auditorium didn’t change for him. It remained the same powder blue it was before. He figured he must have had a very strong will to passively exert a degree of control over Ibis’ spell–his mother always said he was a willful child.

Spectro had no idea how strong his will really was. He had no idea what he had the potential to do if he only understood how to apply his will.

Unconsciously cast or not, Spectro worked his first spell in that auditorium.

Ibis repeated his original point. Science was the art of seeing. Traditional scientists saw the color of the auditorium change objectively and speculated on a variable out in the world causing it to change–in this case a very well dressed and handsome variable. Thaumaturgists saw the color of the auditorium change subjectively and speculated on a variable within themselves.

But both traditional scientists and thaumaturgists saw the world in all its vibrant, changing colors.

To finish his speech, Ibis said that Thaumaturgy was not chaos, or a gift from the gods, or anything of that sort. It wasn’t something out in the supernal cosmos. It was something inside the heart of every man. It was something man brought to the supernal cosmos from out of himself.

When thaumaturgists gazed into the unknown depths of humanity they did not see a black pit of meaninglessness. They saw a storm of colors.

And in a storm of colors, Ibis took his leave.

Spectro was inspired.

In that moment, his destiny had been set. He knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

In 1933, a teenaged Spectro enrolled in America’s leading thaumaturgical college–William Quan Judge college in Pasadena California. He proved incredibly gifted, particularly in the fields of clairvoyance and unconscious observation. Within a year, he was able to teach his teachers. The Circled Square then took on his education. He got to personally meet and talk to Ibis, a man he had only known through books and stage. He got to walk the halls of the Rock of Eternity.

For a teenage thaumaturgist, it was all so intoxicatingly dreamlike.

It was then that overcome as he was with fervor from his meteoric rise in the occult world that he decided to erase his name from the universe.

When his heart filled with regret for that action, he resolved to pay more attention to the people around him. Given that the Circled Square composed the majority of his social circle, he began to look at his teachers more as people and less as textbooks.

When the time came, this habit allowed Spectro to see that something was terribly wrong with the venerable Dr. Styx.

Dr. Styx the Ghost-Man

Ibis was Spectro’s main teacher, but he learned from all the Circled Square. After Ibis, he learned the most from the man who first held the trump of the Hanged Man–a man known only as Dr. Styx.

Spectro and Dr. Styx bonded almost immediately. Spectro was interested in how people thought and Dr. Styx was one of the world’s foremost experts in the young field of manesology. He was an advocate for ghosts and had many insights to share with Spectro on how they thought. He told Spectro about Pangean princesses and Hyperborean philosophers. He told him about having Christmas dinner aboard a tattered airship crewed by the dead of the Great War in the Air and helping Coleridge finish Kubla Khan.

In terms of thaumaturgical fundamentals, no one could teach Spectro more than Ibis, but Dr. Styx taught Spectro the most by far about people.

Like Spectro, Dr. Styx also erased his name from the face of the universe and Spectro bonded with him over the weight of their sacrifices. But Dr. Styx sacrificed far more than his name for the thaumaturgical arts.

Though he was a man in his thirties, Dr. Styx appeared far, far older with his stringy white hair and wrinkled skin He was always cold–deathly cold, and his eyes were always watery. He cast no shadow. He had no pulse.

These things were the least of his sacrifice.

He had undoubtedly made a greater than Spectro and the youth respected him greatly for it.

Had he only known what would come he would have instead pitied Dr. Styx–and feared him.

Like the ancient hero Achilles, Dr. Styx was submerged in the Hadean river Styx and surfaced invulnerable to harm. Unlike Achilles, he was not exposed in infancy. As a manesologist in the later years of the 19th century, he endeavored to understand the afterlife–the entire afterlife from the frozen center of Hell to the flower filled fields of Elysium. He wanted to know the entire spectrum between life and oblivion not as a detached observer but as ghosts knew it–instinctively. He wanted to see as a ghost and feel as a ghost. To that end, he exposed himself to the river Styx as well as the other rivers of Hades– Acheon, Cocytus, Lethe, and Phlegethon.

These five rivers existed at the border of every afterlife in different forms. In Izanami’s Yomi, they were combined as the river Sanzu. In Osiris’ Aaru they were combined into the Eternal Nile which snaked around islands of reeds. In some afterlifes they weren’t waters at all but instead rings of fire or walls of ice. But regardless of what form the rivers took, their function was always the same. They broke down singular souls into several component souls. The Carnacki Foundation combined Greek and Egyptian terminology to explain the process.

The Phlegethon burned away the sh, or physical soul. It burned away the physical matter that composed what were commonly thought of as ghosts–wads of ectoplasm and clouds of phlogiston.

The Styx, upon which the gods swore, was hatred incarnate. It’s antipathy toward human warmth drove out the jb, or emotional soul.

The Lethe, which was forgetfulness and oblivion, could not be crossed by the ba which was the personality soul. Without memories, the personality simply could not be.

The Cocytus, the wailing river, drowned the rn in its cacophonous depths. The rn was the named soul. It was more than a simple string of letters. It was the ghost that lived outside the person. It was the ghost that other people remembered and the force that drew and held composite earth-bound ghosts to rituals of remembrance and objects of sentimentality. Without the rn, a ghost was an unknown force.

Spectro, Dr. Styx, and other thaumaturgists submerged their rn in the Cocytus in order to protect themselves from curses, for the universe cannot hear the rn over the cries of the Cocytus. But they took great care not not to submerge their rn too deep in the waters of the Cocytus. For if their rn sank too far, their very identity will be lost to the universe. No one would remember them. No one would be able to perceive them. They would be nameless ghosts, the most pitiful ghosts of all.

And the Acheon, the river of misery, repelled the ka which was the double soul. The ka was an astral double of the human body and gave ghosts the ability to think and feel as if they were human. The ka was why ghosts appeared human and had human senses like sight and hearing. With a malfunctioning or absent ka, ghosts took on inhuman forms that often caused them distress as they could remember a human shape they no longer possessed. The Acheon repelled the ka by being a river of pure pain. It was like a raw, twisted nerve in the form of a river. Anything receptive to pain like a human body drew away from it on instinct.

The Greco-Egyptian afterlife schema served the Carnacki Foundation, but it had room for improvement. It was a schema made by applying terminology the western occultists of the Carnacki Foundation were familiar with to observations they made from outside the afterlife system. But what did they call a soul that exhibited characteristics between for instance the ba and the ka? Was it more than the sum of its parts?

The Carnacki Foundation needed to observe the afterlife from an “insider’s” perspective in order to have a complete picture of the afterlife.

Dr. Styx hoped he could gain that perspective by exposing himself to all the waters of death. But it wasn’t just for manesological advancement that Dr Styx risked himself. It was reckless in the extreme for a living being to embrace the pulse of death itself. Dying was the least of what could have happened to Dr. Styx. But Dr. Styx believed that if he could use the eyes of a ghost to prove a theory of his thats he could improve the treatment of ghosts around the world.

A common theory of the time, as put forth by theosophists, was that the rivers of the afterlife existed to purify a “true” soul that the other component souls clung to like barnacles. Taking from Egyptian religion like the Carnacki Foundation, they called this true soul the shm, though their conception of the shm was much different from that of the ancient Egyptians.

Dr. Styx’s theory of the shm was more in line with the Egyptians than the theosophists. He believed that souls were meant to divide but not to seperate. Rather, the component parts of a soul were meant to work together to create a hyper-awareness of an individual’s existence. This awareness was what he called the shm.

Dr. Styx thought of the afterlife as a growth, not a winnowing, of the soul. In life, the soul was like a newborn. All the component parts of the soul were close together and underdeveloped. But in the afterlife, the composite soul grew even as the organs moved further apart.

The soul did not soul did not “lose” parts of itself as component parts divided drifted away. The soul simply grew to the point that from the perspective of humans a single component could compose the entirety of a soul. For ghosts that crossed all the rivers and divided as much as possible they became something beautiful in its mystery and complexity. Shm were unknowable to man. They could barely be observed by thaumaturgists let alone communicated with. But they were fundamentally the same being they had always been only vastly larger and more complex. Shm were unknowable, but this also made them peaceful. They drifted through the afterlife like nebulae through space untouched and unafraid.

Ghosts didn’t have to fear becoming shm if they understood and accepted all that it meant.

But by the same token, ghosts should never be forced to become shm as the theosophists believed .

It was important that Dr. Styx proved his theory so as to discredit theosophical views on ghosts. Ghosts were subjected to horrific treatment by theosophists under the belief that in forcing ghost to “move on” they were serving the natural order. They sought to “liberate” the true shm of ghosts from their ba and rn, their memories and the memories others had of them. They set keepsakes and mementos on fire. They smashed tombstones. Some even went so far as to try and destroy all historical records. They also forced ghosts into the afterlife. Theosophists had a low opinion of the mundane world and the thought of spirit mingling with matter was to them pbscene. And ghosts already in the afterlife were to be pushed further into the afterlife until they crossed all rivers and became pure.

If Dr. Styx found someway to prove that component souls remained in “contact” with each other after dividing then it would prove that there was no such thing as a “pure” soul. Some ghosts reported sensing “something” between component souls. They felt it like warm rain. They heard it like soft piano keys. They saw it as silvery cobweb like clouds.

This “something” needed to be observed by someone with the eyes of a ghost and the mind of a thaumaturge.

And so, for the sake of all lost souls, he plunged into the waters of death in the hopes of becoming the world’s first living ghost.

Miraculously, Dr. Styx’s willpower proved great enough for him to survive every river. And when he emerged from the rivers, he took some of the waters with him. These waters burned his blood away and flowed through his veins. Each of his veins became like one of the rivers of the underworld. His heart ceased to beat, but the waters still pulsed through his body. When in the presence of ghosts, his stilled organ would beat again as the waters surged.

With eyes like a ghost, Dr. Styx confirmed his theory and the condition of earthbound ghosts improved substantially. Theosophical methods of dealing with ghosts were replaced by the better methods of the Carnacki Foundation. Ghosts were allowed to stay on Earth and it became the duty of manesologists to negotiate their coexistence with the living. Ghosts were not to be told that the afterlife was an easy and instant cure for their regrets. They would always be bound to their humanity to some extent. And if they did not come to terms with their humanity as humans did then they would be haunted by it forever.

Dr. Styx also gave support to an earlier theory by occultist Emmanuel Swedenborg by being a human afterlife. Ghosts dissolved or congealed at his touch. He could draw ghosts into his body and combine and separate the component parts of their soul. His body digested and incubated souls, and this bizarre metabolism gave support to the Swedenborg hypothesis that afterlives were bodies in which souls existed like germs and blood cells. The hypothesis today remains a matter of debate among manesologists. Many afterlives do indeed support the hypothesis like the Sommerland where souls live inside humanoid heavens, but some have structures that can’t be observed or actively resist observation like the Silent Vaults. Still, it remains a popular hypothesis to this day and owes some of its lasting popularity to Dr. Styx being a living model for it.

With his phantasmal biology, Dr. Styx became one of the most prestigious members of the Carnacki Foundation. He was an ideal man to deal with ghosts. Not only was he a powerful “ghost breaker” who could overpower the most destructive spirit with but a glance, he was capable of an empathic rapport with ghosts impossible for any living man to have. He felt what they felt. He understood the world as they understood it. For harmful di manes larvae, he was a prison stronger than any of Thomas Carnacki’s electric pentacles. For lost and confused di manes lemures, he was a church where they could find rest and healing.

When the Circled Square first formed in 1900, Thomas Carnacki was one of the original trump holders. As the world’s leading manesologist, Crowley could think of no better person to have the trump of Death. It was Carnacki who suggested Dr. Styx be given the trump of the Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man was the trump of one who sought a unique perspective. While each trump carried a unique perspective that strengthened the whole of the Circled Square, the Hanged Man was the only trump that specifically sought a perspective. The Hanged Man was a watcher, a learner, or a sentry. His art was the art of observation.

For a man who sacrificed so much in order to see with the eyes of a ghost, there was no better trump.

Spectro learned much from the Hanged Man. He wasn’t always available to be his teacher given the multitude of souls he aided, but when he was able to speak Spectro hung on his every word. When Dr. Styx spoke of what it felt like to have ghosts flowing in his veins–to see through the eyes of a Renaissance painter, to hear with the ears of a Babylonian musician, to feel the heartbeat of a Greek athlete–Spectro was inspired in a way he hadn’t been since he saw Ibis’ performance as a child.

But in 1937, Spectro started to notice something was very wrong with Dr. Styx. Only someone who was as determined to pay attention to small human details as Spectro would have noticed the small, slight changes that were nothing on their own but taken together were telling. Dr. Styx talked to Spectro with less enthusiasm. The fire died down in his eyes when he talked of his adventures among the dead. He acted distracted. He would rarely be the one to initiate conversation..

When Spectro brought his concerns to the Circled Square he was told it was probably the emotional weight of his work finally getting to Dr. Styx. They had Carnacki talk to Dr. Styx and tell him to take it easy. He did, and they considered the matter settled.

But Spectro had an intuition that it was something far more than stress–something dangerous. He couldn’t name or describe that something and because he couldn’t convince the Circled Square of its danger. But it was a real danger. It felt real. It felt like the sensation a man has when standing at the edge of a pit.

Often, Spectro would sit awake at night and wonder about Dr. Styx. And in wondering, he began to fear. And in fearing, he began to plan.

The Miraculous Sin of Dr. Styx

Dr. Styx stood outside time and space. All that was our universe, all that ever was and could ever be for mankind, was a single star at his fingertips. He warmed his wrinkled hands against the small ember as he reflected on what he had done and what he intended to do.

To become this, to do this, required a great deal of planning. He had to act slowly and quietly. He had to keep secrets. Part of it was easy. He was a confidant of ghosts. His fellow members of the Circled Square would never demand that he divulge what all he talked about with di manes. He was able to talk to ghosts about things he never would have with the Circled Square.

He talked to ghosts about how ashamed he was that mankind pitied them and judged them as palimpsests of humans. The ghost was truly the superior being. Man, blind in his ego, had no idea how sand and painful his fleeting existence was compared to the glorious eternity of the ghost.

Ghosts had a purity to their existence man would not and could not understand. What a man was in his dreams they were all the time. They could go anywhere and be anything. Nothing could hold them. Nothing could harm them. They drifted down the currents of the afterlife dividing and growing, dividing and growing, until they became something so vast and complex that man could only interact with

It was as if the purpose of life was to develop the perfection that was the ghost. It was as if life was just a temporary shell for something that was beautiful and forever.

The ghosts in turn shared things with Dr. Styx they never would have shared with any other living being.

They shared with him secrets–including one that very few beings in all existence living or dead knew.

The physical universe was not equal to the waters of death.

The ancients had grasped this fact through intuition and dreams and this was why the Babylonians spoke of a firmament holding back the waters of the sky and the Quechan spoke of twin creator gods rising into the universe from out of water. The entire physical universe was so small compared to the waters of death that it could be fully submerged within it. The universe would be submerged if not for the time walls of the First-to-Dream.

The time walls separated the universe from the waters just as it separated the universe from the astral consciousness and unconsciousness. They were a cosmic levee.

Because the time walls were made of time and time cannot hold a shape forever, it was theorized that one day aeons upon aeons from now Earth and the afterlife would be one and the same.

But why wait? Why prolong a torturous existence?

The ghosts told Dr. Styx that if the cosmic levee was chipped in just the right way from both sides, then…

“Fear death by water,” T.S. Elliot wrote.

The poet was almost right. The 20th century would end in water. But it was not to be feared.

Planning was the easy part. It was even reassuring. When Dr. Styx talked to his ghosts about the plan he was comforted to hear how they pitied the living. They stood on the other side of the levee like angels waiting with open arms for those trapped on Earth. When he gave the word, they would help him do what had to be done. It was easy to plan and easy to do.

But there was a hard part–Spectro. He made it hard by being such a good student. He was always asking questions. How did it feel to have this ghost swim in your veins? What did you dream last night? Do you think this ghost will chose this afterlife or this one? Without intending to, Spectro broached upon his designs. But Spectro was a young man, and he had a young man’s faith in his teachers. He never sensed the truth. Spectro, poor innocent boy, only worried that he wasn’t feeling well. He only worried that he had become emotionally overwhelmed by the complaints of the dead. He would ask “Can I help you Doc? I can handle some of your ghosts if they’re giving you a hard time. You don’t need to take them all on yourself. Let me help you.”

Spectro was a good boy. He would be an even better ghost.

Dr. Styx waded in the waters of death. All the waters of the afterlife pooled around him–the Eternal Nile, the Styx, the Sanzu, and all the rivers and barriers of cultures alien and human, past and present.

His allies on the other side had done their part of the work. Now he would do his.

He placed his hands on the warm star that was all the universe. It’s warmth was dull. That was all it ever was to him, a persistent dullness. It was the light on in the room that wouldn’t let him go peacefully into eternal sleep–an eternal sleep filled with dreams too beautiful for the world.

He pulled.

The star reflected on the dark waters–it was so close now. It’s glow broke and scattered on the rippling skin of the water. All the stars in heaven were just a patch of light against a greater infinity, just a pale white eye with tired eyelids.

His friends appeared.

He had hoped that the army of ghosts he sent to distract them would have delayed them long enough, but here they stood. They had followed him to the no-place outside the universe. Ibis and Jaival and Dubnotal and all the rest stood around him. They had weapons with them–powerful spells and thought-forms that sparkled on the waters and crackled like fire in the void.

Having his friends appear before him with weapons didn’t hurt Dr. Styx. He had anticipated resistance to his plan. His friends, be they human like Dubnotal, immortals like Ibis, were all alive. And he knew that living things had an instinctual drive to live at all costs.

They would surely thank him later for releasing them all from the malignant trap that was life.

But what did hurt him were their expressions and words. They couldn’t believe he was doing this. They didn’t want to believe he was doing this. They said he had to be possessed, that the ghosts that swam in his blood were controlling him like a puppet.

They begged him to stop. They did not want to hurt him.

And that hurt him. That made him pause.

What did they think he was doing? What did they think it would be like when he pulled down the universe? Did they think it would be like plunging a candle into water? Did they think there would be a whimpering sizzle and trailing wisps of gray smoke that unravel into eternal blackness? That was not how it would be. That was not how it would be at all.

The star he held in his hands was a warm, spiny chrysalis entrapping something that had long outgrown a need for it. He would wash that useless bit of tissue away and let the thing inside shine freely. And it would be so vibrant that what came before it would no longer be properly called life.

That was the way the world would end–and the afterlife would begin.

Then suddenly, from a worldtunnel Dr. Styx did not guard, from a dimension he did not suspect, Spectro emerged and obliterated Dr. Styx’s body and soul without a word.

It was like putting a candle out. He was there, and then he was gone forever.

Spectro had set a trap against his friend and teacher. To his horror, it became necessary to spring it.

But the world was safe. All it cost was a confused old man’s life.

Spectro refused to cry over that. It was such a small thing to sacrifice compared to the world.

The ghosts that remained after Dr. Styx dissolved explained what had happened. Dr. Styx hadn’t been possessed. Possession would have been too obvious. Instead what happened was that Dr. Styx, feeling overwhelmed by all the ghosts that relied on him for guidance, began to appoint trusted ghosts as “angels” to guide spirits in his name. He dared not ask the Circled Square for help. Many ghosts looked on him as a kind of god. Dr. Styx feared that to ask for help would have destroyed their faith in him.

But he made the mistake of being too trusting. With his attention stretched to the limit treating so many ghosts, he did not vet his angels like he should have. All it took were a couple of angels to take advantage of the trust Dr. Styx placed within them to make him their puppet.

Three angels filled with venomous hatred, contempt, and pity for humanity went to work on his brain. The mundane had always proved a blindspot for thaumaturgists, so they were careful to only work on the physical part of his brain. But it was enough. They flooded his mind with emotions as they whispered in his ear and gradually won him to their plan.

The Circled Square turned the three angels over to Dr. Styx patients, for no one loved the doctor like the lost souls he helped. The ghosts imprisoned the three angels at Dr. Styx’s grave to keep them from endangering humanity ever again but did not harm them. Dr. Styx had taught them to be kind to ghosts, even wicked ones, for ghosts often carry great pain and anguish and adding to that suffering improves nothing.

Later, there was arguing within the Circled Square over whether or not Spectro had acted appropriately. Emotions were high. Dr. Styx was loved by the Circled Square. Many wanted to believe that he could have been talked down. But none could deny that Spectro saved the world. No one knew what would have happened if he hadn’t appeared. But now because of his actions no one had to know.

Even those that thought he acted ruthlessly had to admit that he had acted decisively with a foresight none of the Circled Square had. Maybe he was wrong in thinking that Dr. Styx couldn’t have been talked down. But he wasn’t wrong in planning for him going over the edge.

He had seen something the others had not. And now the Circled Square had an opening for someone that could see things they could not.

His appointment to the trump of the Hanged Man was, to say the least, controversial. It wasn’t a good look in the history books to have it written that the second Hanged Man killed the first. But though Spectro narrowly won the vote, he still won it.

He promised his peers that he would surpass his predecessor. What happened to Dr. Styx would never happen again. As Dr. Styx watched over ghosts, Spectro would watch over the Circled Square and keep everyone safe, sane, and healthy. Someone needed to look at the members of the Circled Square as people and care for them as people. Dr. Styx proved that they had a blindspot when it came to their human vulnerability. He didn’t dare show vulnerability to his ghosts or to his peers and it had destroyed him. Spectro vowed that he would watch the vulnerabilities of the Circled Square.

Spectro proved his worth as the Hanged Man. He kept all 22 members healthy in mind and body and soon the Circled Square wondered how they ever functioned without him. He helped the Tower, a man who fell into our world from a world of endless apocalyptic night named Michael Mirdath, acknowledge and overcome his depression. He helped the Hierophant Randolph Carter lay to rest his prejudice against the Andrianoid “Newts” that inhabited the Sunda islands. He helped the World, King Justice the First and Last, organize his undersea kingdom Pax. King Justice the First and Last was a ghost who like many ghosts couldn’t remember anything about his life. He was a living blank and the fact distressed him until he had an epiphany–being a living blank meant he could be anything he wanted to be–absolutely anything.

He chose to be a king of ghosts and created an earth-bound afterlife for ghosts–an aquatic kingdom made of coral and shipwrecks he called Pax. He believed that ghosts needed a place where they could set aside reminders of their past and live anew. Pax attracted ghosts from all corners of the globe, but King Justice knew as much about statecraft as he did anything else–very little. It was Spectro who helped get his kingdom organized. He found King Justice tutors in statecraft and oratory, recommended advisors, and helped Pax set up its first embassies around the world. For all he had done for Pax, King Justice named his kingdom’s first library after Spectro.

Spectro remembered all the members’ birthdays, even for those that thought birthdays were too meaningless and mundane.

Spectro got along with everyone, even those that were initially leery about his appointment. The one exception was the Hermit Jaival Anand. Jaival, true to his trump, was the least social of the Circled Square given to roaming the paths between worlds and ignoring mandatory meetings. Spectro kept on him like a parole officer and Jaival did not appreciate being chased. But even Jaival recognized and respected that Spectro had a way with people. His success in monitoring the Circled Square could not be denied.

When political tensions started to heat up around the world, the Circled Square naturally looked to Spectro for a solution.

The Worlds War

In the later half of the 1930’s, peace began eroding around the world. Authoritarian socialist governments entered into an alliance and drove those that did not fit into their collectives from their soil–the minority, the free-thinker, and the superhuman. They dared the superhumans of the world to violently oppose them and prove their position that superhumans were innate tyrants willing to overthrow elected governments and force weaker basics to bend to their will. The socialists rattled their sabers, built up their armies, and tapped powers like the ancient thought-form Vril and the collective dream Dazrazum –but they still appeared far weaker than superhumans like the Circled Square, and that appearance was their greatest weapon.

The Circled Square did not want to be tyrants. Many of its members remembered the Great War in the Air and how through shows of intimidation they drove the Central Powers to desperation and contributed to the outbreak of the war. But the situation grew more dire by the day. Something had to be done.

Spectro directed his vision to solving the crisis. He promised that just as he saved the world from Dr. Styx he would save the world from the Axis.

Spectro promised that he would not use violence. The death of Dr. Styx weighed heavy on his heart and he vowed to do better. No one would die this time. He wasn’t dealing with a man whose mind was twisted by ghosts. He was dealing with states supported by loyal majorities. They had brutish aims, but any ideology supported by so many people had to have some kind of rational undercurrent. If he could appeal to their reason, he knew he could resolve the crisis peacefully.

Spectro, along with other influential superhuman like Gold Star, came to the Axis powers as a diplomat and worked to establish what history would call the “containment compromise.” The Axis would stick to their borders and develop their culture and armies however they liked, but in exchange the superhumans of the world would create homes for their undesirables and rootless cosmopolitans.

Earth’s superhumans raised the earth and parted the waters to create a string of island nations. These islands were small Edens. Their coasts were bountiful, their soil fertile. But they were not the homes of those forced to settle there. Their homes were in Russia and Italy and Germany. And often, they resisted being removed from their homes. It was a sad fact that superhumans like Spectro had to assist the Axis states in rounding up and removing dissidents. They had no other choice. Superhumans removed entire neighborhoods, houses and all, to the islands. The Axis states simply made them disappear.

Justified or not, Spectro still had to do the work of tyrants. It made Spectro wonder. He had put the authority of the Hanged Man, the member of the Circled Square who saved the universe from a threat all the other members didn’t see coming, behind the containment compromise because he didn’t want to use his powers tyrannically. But now he was using his powers to do the dirty work of tyrants.

Was there any way to avoid using power when one had power? Or was it like the sacrifice of Odin? Did power demand its continual use?

And so he wondered–if he could not help but use his power, why not use it to be the master rather than the servant of despots?

But Spectro knew, deep within his heart, that the containment compromise would be for the best. It was better than war. It was better than mass graves and six digit death totals.

Then the Vril walls went up in 1940 and divided up the planet like a glowing spider web.

Then the Worlds War began.

Then Spectro was broken.

He had failed. He had failed horrifically. He had failed so badly that the world was now trapped in a war the likes of which made the Great War in the Air appear a trifle. German energy dragons snaked their way through the worldtunnels to devour golden dream-world cities and the clouds they stood on. Japanese oni clashed with four-armed Martians and made the jeweled streets of Helium run green with blood. Russian Dazrarazum-extensions hollowed out gods with sickly light and puppeted them on telepathic strings.

Other worlds began to view the Earth as deadly if not doomed and shunned it as they would a raging fire.

The Circled Square told Spectro that it was not his fault. There was simply not just one cause for the war. Countless calculations and miscalculations brought it about. It was too big for any one man, even a man of magic, to have stopped.

But it was not their job to see what others could not.

It was Spectro’s, and deep in his heart he knew that he had failed. He failed to see what others could not and war was the consequence.

Spectro cast off his gentle diplomacy like a weight and prepared himself to be a soldier. He remembered killing Dr. Styx. He had hoped that it would have been the only time he would have had to take a life. The despair he felt in understanding that he would have to kill again and again and again fueled the merciless rage he brought to the battlefield. He threw himself into combat. He killed dragons and kami and men–many, many men. He killed so many men that he felt ill trying to recall the number.

He did not learn thaumaturgy to use it to kill. He never saw himself being a soldier.

But he failed to foresee so many things.

Spectro became a fearsome, unstoppable warrior. He did not sleep. He rarely rested. Battle after battle after battle wore Spectro down. He was a man in his twenties but appeared much, much older older. His skin sagged. His hair thinned. He skipped meals and grew thin. His powers kept his tired flesh going regardless of his appearance. But it was more than his body that suffered. His mind encountered death and suffering until it became numb to the horror.

He had promised that no one would die.

And now, the world was depopulating.

Every single death he saw with his eyes was a reminder of his failure. And every global fatality estimate was like acid upon his soul.

Between the stress and endless engagements with cosmic foes, his soul began to unravel. He kept it together as he did his body–as fragments strung together by his will.

He made his life the agony he believed he deserved.

The other members of the Circled Square feared for their friend. They begged him to stop and let the other members fight in his place. But he would not stop. And they could not make him stop. And pragmatically, they understood that his power was of great benefit to their side.

But eventually, they had to hold an intervention and speak to Spectro as their trumps and not as his friends. After a harrowing battle with a Vril-spawned energy dragon that cost the ARGO superhuman American Crusader his arms, Spectro appeared before the Circled Square to speak about an unknown threat he encountered while grappling with the energy dragon in the worldtunnels. Spectro could not name the threat. He could not even describe it. But he felt it. He felt it like a shadow large enough to swallow all the stars in heaven fell on his shoulders. It chilled him to the bone.

Spectro urged the Circled Square to prepare for the threat by increasing their forces in the worldtunnels. But the Circled Square would not pull forces fighting the known threat of the Axis to fight a threat that had no name and no form–a threat that given Spectro’s battered mental state and fractured soul likely didn’t exist.

They spoke as their trumps, and ordered Spectro to at long last take a rest.

Alone in his chamber, surrounded by his things which had grown layers of dust through years of inattention, Spectro’s mind was a bitter storm of speculation.

He remembered his mistake that started the war–he did not strike first.

He remembered his action that saved the universe from Dr. Styx–he struck first

They should have struck first. They should have obliterated the Axis in an instant. But they hesitated. They showed mercy. And now the population of Earth was in decline.

Incalculable death tolls. A generation of fatherless children and widows. Those were the virtues of mercy.

He would not hesitate again. He would not have mercy again. He would prepare for the threat alone if he had to.

He persisted in the blindness of the sacrifice of Odin.

And it is sad to say, but Spectro would once again act without understanding the repercussions of his actions until it was far too late.

The Hanged Man represents seeing. But the Hanged Man inverted represents blindness.