Ave Baphomet.
I felt like my blood twisted in its veins when I first mouthed that prayer. Tonight I feared a terrible error for the last time: that the old false image — horns, cloven hooves and all — would come and cut me open with its sharp, garish pentacle.
But they were only words. True words recalling true deeds, worn into insane legendry by propaganda and the warp of ages. It wasn’t easy to serve God. The masters of the world made it so.
Ave Baphomet.
“Oh, it’s all true.” I remember my sergeant grinning as he said it, right before he locked me away for the vigil. “Or true at the roots. If you lived in an era when one man loving another inspired vicious hatred, wouldn’t you gladly shed some secrecy when you found us, living for a higher Law, beyond that prejudice?
“When our Law intruded on a life enslaved to empty rituals, the Masters administered a ritual to set the soul right — trampling the Cross, or spitting upon the Host to assert one’s power over restrictive symbols. And when the Law revealed that God was truly One there was no need to hate the Saracen, or anyone else a prince or bishop might order us against on bloody adventures. To save them and ourselves, we struck alliances.
“We are perpetually baptized by the flames of martyrdom not because we were falsely accused, but that we were virtuous in a sin-blinded world. Remember that.”
Ave Baphomet.
I didn’t care about dogma per se. My two years at the seminary had been a disaster because I could talk myself out of doctrine, not into it. Oh, I always believed in God, and feared him because I found theology so unconvincing. No man could know what that inscrutable Creator wanted of us. He, She, It was the rogue-ruler of the universe.
Yet I believed in evil and feared it, too. There were too many dark possibilities, from Satans to hellish rebirths. And as far as most mundane faiths were concerned, the Templars wore evil proudly, calling it as unblemished as the white of their ritual cloaks. What if those religions were right?
But no; this doubt is a last induglence, a memory of what was sincere. It’s nostalgia. I no longer fear the name.
Ave Baphomet.
glad to see you’ve started these back up again
nMage needs more of this.
just cus this is actually challenging, interesting stuff.
nMage has some of that. It doesn’t have quite as much as I want in spots. Unfortunately, the level of nuance this requires is not commercially viable, and some of the in-your-face elements I’d prefer don’t mesh with some basic problems in the loud-gamer worldview. (I mean, don’t you agree that Mexica and Mestizo people everywhere now live like kings because of violent colonialism and that science isn’t linked to culture, and could you ignore that oil hole in the ocean and the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and Phillipe Rushton plzkthx?)