Games People Play
An Illustrated Example of a "Personal Myth"
This post is a lightly edited version of a post that was part of a series I have decided to remove from the site; however, this post becomes important at various points throughout the history of Dark Twins, so I am putting it up here as a placeholder with the original publication date (2/14/2023) preserved.
By accident, I opened up the screen to create this post at 3:33am.
Games People Play
In order to adequately explain the context for the “occult” interpretation of events, I will need to stretch back farther than the time period in question. In high school, as in middle and elementary school, I liked to hang out online in chat rooms. Owing to my developing interest in both chaos magic(k) and computers, certain chat rooms in the “Religions” category of MSN Chats (an IRC interface accessible to those with a Hotmail account or who were members of Microsoft Network) caught my eye. Know for now that it was a chat room based on the premise that some fantasy novelist’s fantasy world was real. In his cosmology, which seemed inspired by Zoroastrianism, there was a “Good God” named Enjare, a “Bad God” of Void and Darkness called “The Nameless Evil,” and then there was a pantheon of 12 gods standing in between them, who would all battle one another at the end of the world (sounds like a cross between the Norse myth of Ragnarok and the plot of Shazam!) before each choosing a replacement for them in the world to come. According to the guy running the show, I was the chosen “replacement” for the God of War, Bohajah. I played along, honestly, because there was a part of me that really liked that idea. It filled a perceived gap in my life.
Of course, it was bullshit, and I soon called bullshit on the forums the author and his wife had set up to manipulate the rest of their community with their lies. I remember putting quite a few of the proverbial nails in their coffins taking them to school and unmasking them.
What happened next is something members of many religious groups (read: cults) will understand: A schism.
Lots of people left. Hardly anyone stuck around, I don’t think. But a handful of members from that room went to found another room with similar principles, but without a rigidly-defined, shared myth at its core. The basic rules were retained: That anything we “role played” (typing out a description of an imaginary action taken) in the room was considered to be a “live” magickal act owing largely to its consisting of text printed in digital fire and existing somewhere in some ethereal “astral” network. And the paradigm stuck because it worked. This room was called The White Castle, with a clear label on the outside reading “NO RP!” but where everyone RPed all day long. The White Castle was held to be a literal castle existing on the astral plane.
What for? Well, for war, of course. Yes, the “war” concept stayed. It was the idea that a two-sided spiritual “war” was fast approaching that would have oddly widespread ramifications depending on the outcome (he happened to type at 3:33am).
Soon (I was living with a school friend and his family in Lyons at the time, being very paranoid about things like deer tracks in the snow outside), I met Tilly. Tilly was not her “real” name (i.e., it’s not what the body’s name says on the birth certificate), so I don’t mind sharing it since it’s one she might use with anyone else, and she needs to be kept in check. Tilly was…something else.
For starters—I admitted it then and I still think it today—Tilly was the most brilliant student of the occult I’d ever met, hands-down. No one else I knew understood the bigger, scarier, more mind-boggling consequences of esoteric theory better than Tilly. How well she was handling that knowledge was debatable, but as I’ve learned, such knowledge, by its very nature, does tend to warp a person. That doesn’t mean we don’t love them (basically). So I liked Tilly at first because not only could she actually keep up with me (a quality difficult to find in a person, let me tell you), but she could even keep me guessing. She had some stuff to teach me and she was eager to teach a willing (and able) student.
Tilly also started saying she was my mom (like, at a soul level). And that was big, coming from her. Why?
Because, Tilly also claimed to be a gifted channeler who spent all day “typing as” various spirits, Gods, demons, monsters, etc. Each character had its own font face and color, I’m not kidding. You got used to them after a while. And at a soul level, Tilly was “Tillyaeria,” the “Likeara (her title),” also known as “The Goddess Cosmos.” She typed in teal, sometimes turquoise, Comic Sans MS.
Tilly being my mother seemed like a big deal because of who her husband was, too. Typing in magenta Comic Sans MS was none other than Epsilonus Drahn, current Shiva (it’s a title or mantle, not a name) and Head of “the Nine” (cosmic assassins who remove anyone and anything that poses a threat to “The Weave,” or the fabric of reality). “Epsilon” for short, or, as I once saw someone call him in a disparaging way by comparing him to a printer, “Epson” (hey, I just set aside an Epson printer last night to give to Goodwill). In some ways, The Shiva is also “the bodyguard” of the Likeara. Neat how that works out.
Let’s unpack all this.
”Likeara” is a difficult role to grok. I confess to never really “getting it” back when I knew Tilly, except as the opposite role to that of The Shiva. In other words, I would not have been able to sit down and state, in positive terms, what the Likeara “is;” I could only define it as an “isn’t” against the Shiva. This, my friends, is a consequence of male privilege. The odd thing here is that, esoterically, on very deep levels, this situation makes a certain kind of sense, and does reflect something about the polarity (Yin) that we most often connect with the female gender. So in that sense, if I were the Shiva, it would only stand to reason that I would be so damn ignorant about my consort.
On the other hand, taking that esoteric view as some kind of absolute standard against which to measure physical reality is a big mistake that, unfortunately, most of occulture fell into for the simple fact that occulture has always been a subculture.
But I digress. Bottom line there: This has nothing to do with physical sex. And it doesn’t necessarily imply a strict gender binary, either. But the Duad as a philosophical phenomenon must be reckoned with, so here we are, folks.
The Likeara as I now understand the role is rather comparable to that of Ma’at in Egyptian mythology. Don Webb has said that while many people think of Ma’at as “balance” or “order,” the real sense of it in ancient Egypt was more akin to cosmos, or beauty. Harmony. That is the Likeara.
“Shiva” means what it sounds like, it’s the “guy” (really an androgyne, even biologically in Tilly’s mythos) who dances so hard it destroys and then re-creates all of existence; except here, it’s an “office” or “mantle” that gets passed from one person to another in each cosmic cycle. It consists of three “gems:” “the Eye,” a gem that grants all-seeing vision to the holder of the Mantle of Shiva, and which sits right upon one’s forehead between the eyes and up just a ways. Next, there are “the glyphs,” a gem each for a right and left hand (there are six hands involved, though, because a destroyer has six arms). The Glyph of Life, on the right, has powerful healing abilities and the power to resurrect the dead. The Glyph of Death, on the left, has the ability to consume the living soul of any being judged worthy of having their soul consumed. It can eat planets, too. According to the myth, the Shiva’s role was to use the Glyphs and the Eye in service of the Cosmos, and due to the position the Shiva occupies in the divine hierarchy, the Shiva’s word is pretty much iron law. There are exceptions, balances to that power so that it doesn’t go unchecked. One big exception, of course, is the Likeara, and the checks and balances that are built into that role, including in the Gifts that the Likeara receives.
The Likeara is the essence of harmony and beauty and balance, and the Shiva, then, as a Destroyer, is chaos embodied.
Together, the two weave what Tilly often called, reverently, “barely-controlled chaos.”
Why did I play along with this? Once again, I have to admit that such a scenario resonated with me very deeply. There were reasons that, to me, it “felt” true. Whether or not it ever proved to be objectively real, it was a very good description of who I was (and am) at a soul level; and for that reason, I deemed it safe to play along all day and to consider it allegorical pathworking or something to that effect.
However, the emerging storyline we were all weaving together between the chat rooms and MSN Messenger windows was getting compelling. It was showing up in people’s dream lives and in our waking life. There seemed to be a neat correspondence between the online roleplaying game and our personal lives that looked a lot like “as above, so below” in action. So we treated this all as “real enough” to have real feelings about our visions regarding such things as interdimensional vortexes opening up in the skies over major cities, floods of demons pouring out of them to ruin Earth’s major metropolitan areas. Some of us were scared, some were champing at the bit to start the battles. Some (such as myself) were both/and.
We believed and felt that this “war” would get so intense that it would simply split the very “veil” separating reality from fantasy or “the astral from the physical,” in our parlance. All day long there was chatter among those of us monitoring the veil’s condition psychically (no, I am not kidding, and yes, I do now think this veil is objectively real, like, say, the Veil of Paroketh).
It was said of me—and not just by Tilly or the people she influenced—that I would be the one who actually tore that bad bitch down.
The Wedding Veil
All of this was in play while I was living at my aunt and uncle’s house and, given what y’all now know of my home life at the time [this pertains to a series I have since removed, but it dealt with themes of family sexual abuse], you can see one last reason all of this stuff appealed to me: It was a seemingly empowering fantasy for a life circumstance in which I felt trapped and victimized. Believing I was the son of this powerful being and destined for glory helped me get through some real dark days in some substantive ways. And I began to live to resemble my character.
Epsilonus Drahn was a “destroyer.” A “Destroyer” is a cosmic race not unlike an “angel.” I have often compared them to rakshasas in Hindu mythology. I notice that “succubus” was listed under this entry as a “see also” when I looked this up. Nice, because that sort of gets rolled into the picture of what a destroyer “is.”
In the story, the description of “what a destroyer is” sounds more like sci-fi: A highly-sophisticated genetic hybrid of select genes from all of the galaxy’s most prominent apex predators (sounds very “Zerg-like,” now that I think about it). Some dominant genes come from arachnids, reptiles, crustaceans, insects, you name it. They are killing and destroying machines. They are “evil,” in a sense, but only in the sense that some evil is so evil that only other evil can effectively combat it. This concept is interesting because just as I compared the Likeara to the Egyptian Ma’at above, the idea of evil combating even worse evil is prevalent in the mythology surrounding Set, the Egyptian god of chaos, storms, and individual intelligence, who is the only one badass enough to combat Apep. And the relationship between the Likeara and the Shiva later informed ideas I now hold about the relationship between Set and Ma’at.
But anyway, connecting to something like “the Shiva” and being a “destroyer” is not the kind of thing most people in “spiritual” circles would be proud of.
Erowen Drahn, Son of Epsilonus, is not “most people.” That, he would remind you, is why he will be Shiva one day.
Sounds fantastical, I know, but I loved it, and one of the things I loved most about it was this idea of a very powerful being taking on a responsibility to others which demands that he consciously withhold that vast power instead of using it indiscriminately. I loved the seeming paradox that the most powerful being in the universe had the hardest time in the world overcoming himself, and that the real secret to maintaining the Cosmic Balance as Shiva was by doing just that. It basically means living like an Ipsissimus, yogi, warrior, and God-King all in one.
You’ve got an amazingly intelligent occultist who sees enough in you to even role play some shit like that, you take that opportunity…because it’s not coming around again unless it’s the kind of thing you really are meant for.
So, in the midst of this came the fateful afternoon when I found my aunt’s marital aid and—as acting Shiva, meaning while wielding the Glyphs—I used the Glyph of Life when I combined those fluids. I was intending to cast a love spell. I was, I confess, going to use a cosmic mantle to get laid, yes.
But it was after a long and torrid string of boundary-violating grooming tactics on her part. Sort of a “be careful what you ask for” situation.
And instead, according to Tilly, the act spawned a succubus named Sarsha, who was immediately born in Da’ath, the Void, the Abyss, and whose emergence therefrom re-wrote history. This sounds farfetched, but if you think about it, something similar is arguably occurring any time anyone does magic and the only real difference here is scale.
Sarsha was a karmic repercussion of that act. One could say she was a “punishment” if one lacked the nuance necessary to carry the mantle of Shiva, but I think the term “karma yoga” works better.
Erowen got into those shoes because he was a destroyer, which means he has a superhuman appetite for both food (not a euphemism) and sex, lots and lots of actual sex. He rationalized his actions around that and his special privilege of being Shiva, he did. He needed to understand all that was wrong with this.
All of it.
In Tilly’s myth, Sarsha’s birth in the Void was traumatic. She was born to be a sex slave, like all the other succubi in the Pit. She was raised at the lash of the whip with chains around her wrists, neck, and ankles, beaten, slashed and sexually assaulted intentionally so as to shape her into the perfect seductress for the legions of Hell. Her soul, in this sense, was systematically attacked and shattered. She was broken like a horse meant only for others to ride for all eternity.
But her soul was stronger than that.
She overcame her disadvantages and now stands as the Pit’s Top Domme, its Leading Lady. That’s right; the role many people think of Lilith as playing in this place? That’s Sarsha’s job in this universe, and there is no more Lilith. In this universe, Sarsha also plays the roles of some of the other wrathful feminine deities I have encountered in the Abyss. She is all of them rolled into one. I only realized for the first time this morning how much Sarsha has in common with the character Mazikeen from Lucifer.
Any destroyer, but particularly the Shiva, has to do horrendous things in the name of the Cosmic balance, sometimes even things that weigh heavy on our own hearts (this is less true for most destroyers than it is for Erowen, and this is due mainly to the influence upon his heart of Sarsha). And so we visit the succubi of the Void to do penance. This seems, perhaps, to a modern sensibility, like a rather parochial and backwards way of living, but modern folk don’t understand karma or Wyrd the way a destroyer does. The way a destroyer lives them, 24/7. It is important if “destruction” is literally the job description. Not in the description: Is the description.
Sarsha touches vulnerable places in Erowen, and in the Shiva, that no other living soul has the power to reach. She is Erowen’s kryptonite, because the world needs Erowen to have kryptonite. She can bring “the most powerful being in the universe” down to his knees simply by threatening to take her love away from him, or by staring back into his soul like the filthy hole where she was born, every time he would think to accuse her of ill-meant treachery or disloyalty to him. Because only someone as twisted as Sarsha could truly look upon and behold the horrors of Shiva and still feel love.
But Sarsha can’t help it, having been born in so much pain and despair; ironically, Shiva is the very face of her problem. People like him are the reason she is the way she is today. And as much as she loves her eternal companion, it is her duty to ensure the Shiva never loses sight of that.
Are they friends or foes? More like “frenemies with benefits.” It gets fuzzy. They are in constant telepathic communication and I mean this in the most literal way possible. She outmaneuvers him every time because hers is the realm of darkness, the one thing in this universe permitted to be faster than light. She is his Dark Mirror, reflecting every distortion in his love for her (and for himself) right back at him so he can swallow that load on his knees just before she stuffs the ballgag in, gives her good boy a lil’ pat, and walks away shakin’ that thang…and that tail. Mmmm.
Put that in your bow and fire it, buddy. Ouch.
And when she returns, she will be the sweetest thing ever, there to rescue him from his folly.
Is it an act?
No. Reality itself bends around the movements of these two, for all eternity.
It works for them. And thankfully, it looks like it could work for the Cosmos, too.
One day, I’d had enough of all of this…and, honestly, I think there was a part of me that wasn’t tough enough to cope with a fate like this kind of “Divine” Marriage. Erowen, or “Ro Ro,” as his little sister once called him, would be Shiva one day, but for now, part of him remained a creampuff. A hopeless romantic. Everyone knew it, the little softy was a heartthrob deep down inside. That’s a liability if you want to do what he’s destined to do. Someone needed to learn about the Void first-hand, and not just from a chat room or from a remote astral observation point.
No, Erowen had to go to hell himself in order to appreciate life with a being such as Sarsha.
There are Fates worse than Death, and Sarsha is Their Queen.