The Book of Walls

A Sourcebook for KULT

Introduction
The Book of Walls contains an in-depth look at the metaphysics of the Illusion and their
counterpart in Reality as they pertain to the cosmology of the role-playing game KULT.
As a disclaimer, the following text is in no way meant to be a philosophical system for
the real world (as opposed to the game setting) and should not be read as such.

This sourcebook is not intended to be a collection of what player characters know. There
should not even be non-player characters (apart from the Demiurge and some other
Awakened) with such knowledge. Instead, this text is supposed to give game masters of
KULT a concise philosophical approach to the KULT cosmology for the preparation of
their own scenarios and plots. Therefore the sourcebook is not written in-character and
does not contain any in-character sequences.

Terms like Illusion and Reality, when capitalized, refer to the terms as used in KULT.

The Nature of the Illusion

The five walls share a common theme: tools which should be at the behest of the
Awakened (or rather, the Wakeful) have been made independent, they have been put
above their former masters who are now their slaves. The means of our power have been
given power over us instead. All five walls are inherent parts of ourselves which the
Demiurge has separated from us and turned upon us.

It is important to note how far the Illusion goes - how much of what we take for granted
is really only part of our prison. Malkuth's attempts to free humanity often seem very
strange - she seems to have no regard for the bodies or minds of humans, their lives or
their loves. The reason for that is that all of these things are part of the Illusion, part of
what must be stripped away if humanity is ever to re-Awaken. Only if you understand
this first can Malkuth's actions (or the actions of many other players in the KULT
universe) be understood.

If you choose to follow the viewpoints presented in this text when designing your KULT
campaigns you can reach an inner consistency and continuity apart from what is logical
or reasonable. The KULT universe follows rules - but they are not rules which were
meant for humans (that is, players and their characters) to fully understand. Game
masters, on the other hand, need to have a good grasp of the concepts underlying the
game world in order to present a structure of game reality which is horrid in its
consequence.

The philosophical options presented in this text are by no means the only, and definitely
not the 'correct' interpretation of KULT cosmology. In some cases I deviate from what is
included in the official rules. If you feel that things should be different, by all means
devise your own game logic. If this text inspires you to do so it has already served its
purpose. It doesn't matter which cosmology you choose to work into your KULT games -
but I am sure it will improve your games if in the end you have a clear idea of the nature
of Kult Reality and the Illusion.

Death
Death looms above the heads of imprisoned humanity at all times. It is absolutely
inescapable and it will be the final thing we experience. Right? Wrong!

Within the Illusion, death appears to be the antithesis of life, the absence of it. But it
would be more correct to say that death is the antithesis of birth, while 'life' as a term
does not have any real meaning. Death is not the end of existence but merely a
transition.

In Reality death means that the soul leaves its material anchor, the body. It must be
noted that there are three component parts to a human: body, mind, and soul. The
mind, not the soul, is the seat of personality. The mind is usually obliterated in death
(that's what Purgatory or the Memory Banks are for), while the body decomposes. The
soul however remains intact; normally in life the soul would be imprinted with the
experiences it makes in its body and with its mind, but the death-related mechanisms of
the Illusion make sure that such imprints are completely lost.

The Illusion includes the myth that the personal self, the mind, is the most important
part of this tripartite human nature: Faust may sell his soul to the devil. This implies
that he    as a person, a mind, has got some capacity of control over the soul. The body is
the second most important component of a human being because without a living body,
it is said, existence of the mind and the soul is impossible. No mind and no soul can
keep the body from failing at long last, and it is the body which suffers death in the first
place. The soul, as a third component, if it is at all recognized, comes in only as some
sort of fueling device, a divine spark, but its importance is so diminutive that some
philosophical systems work well without including the soul at all.

This again is a perversion of the actual facts. Both the body and the mind are only
vehicles and tools for the soul in a wakeful state - the soul's clothing itself in a body can
be likened to choosing a car to get to one's destination; the mind and spirit are the
interface used to relate to the world. If the soul somehow leaves the cycle of rebirth as
controlled by the devices of the Demiurge it may retain some memory of the mind(s)
and forms (bodies) it had in life and make them part of its final being at Awakening.

Note that the soul does not learn something new when Awakening. Its task, opposed by
the Demiurge and the Illusion, is to rediscover its divine nature. Some philosophies hold
it that the experiences of a life give shape to the soul; but in fact the soul had a shape to
start with which was erased by the Demiurge when he first subjugated the souls of
humans. Bodies and minds may remind the soul of what it once had as its birthright.
Souls are palimpsests of the Illusion - erased every time their bodies die and they get
recycled in the truest possible sense.

But death is not always the end for body or mind. Bodies and minds have been known to
'survive' the loss of their soul, sometimes even as a team. Bodies without souls and
minds are zombies; minds without bodies and souls are spirits. If minds retain a grip on
their bodies in death and manage to remain inside they become borderlanders;
depending on how well their minds and bodies intertwine after the loss of their souls
they may or may not decompose, they may or may not breathe etc. Theoretically a mind
in a body could survive forever without its soul, becoming immortal (though not
invulnerable) - the Illusion is a device for keeping souls in line, therefore soulless beings
are of secondary importance. 'Selling one's soul' - in the sense of getting rid of it - could
actually prolong your life. Of course Awakening, escaping the Illusion, is completely
impossible without a soul as it is only the soul which has the capacity to awaken in the
first place.

But what is the Real nature of death? Four Archons are said to be dead - Lictors die
hard, but they do - three sepulchres in Metropolis hold the remains of dead gods - the
City of the Dead itself is a monument to the factuality of death.

Yet Real death is not the end of existence as it is within the Illusion. In the Illusion,
mind and soul vanish without a trace at death, and the body finally decomposes and its
matter becomes part of something else. In Reality, death is a state of dormancy, of
inactivity - but existence does not stop. Many of the inhabitants of the City of the Dead
may seem torpid, but still they may move or mumble arcane things. Still the dead gods
feed on those they can lure into their lairs. Death may reduce your options; it may
subject you to a set of strict rules to follow; it may strip you of your power; but it cannot
completely annihilate you. Death sounds much like our captivity in the Illusion, doesn't
it?

In a sense, life within the Illusion can be described as the state of death of the soul -
another perversion sprung from the mind of the Demiurge. In Reality, (re-)birth means
the return into an active state, the end of death - within the Illusion birth is, to all
effects, death. But death isn't birth - instead the soul at death is fed into the Demiurge's
machinery of erasure and returned into the Illusion as quickly as possible.

Real death lacks finality. You may be able to kill the lictor who is after you but there is
almost nothing you can do to completely bar his return. Death magic may be able to call
the dead lictor (or any other dead being for that matter) back into life. Four Archons
have died or disappeared - but if an effort of astounding proportions is made even they
may be able to return. Only Achlys is able to completely erase an existence - but this
cannot rightly be termed death (see the chapter on Dimensions for more information on
Achlys).

Real death may be a means of change - like the caterpillar undergoing chrysalis death
my transform the existence of the dead into a different -though not necessarily more
colourful or empowered- state. Maybe the Demiurge is actually dead -the guard at his
sepulchre in the City of the Dead may imply this- and will return to life eventually to
radically change Reality and the Illusion. For the better? - Who knows?

Madness
Madness is actually a misnomer. Madness is not what keeps us imprisoned; sanity is.

Sanity is a term for the mindset that humans of a given period within the Illusion find
acceptable. Today and in the Western civilization sanity expresses itself through logic
and reason, but that was not always so. Before the Cataclysm of Science (see the chapter
on Dimensions for more on that) mythology took the place of logic and reason.

The majority of people are 'sane' - sanity is actually defined by the majority. If almost
everyone was a serial killer then this behaviour would be sane. Sanity tells us that causes
have effects; that the world follows a strict set of laws and rules which we can decipher;
that there are no voices in our heads apart from our own thoughts, and that our
thoughts are, in fact, our own; now add everything you know to be true to this list. In the
end you will have a very exhaustive list of features of the Illusion; but you will not have
anything which even remotely resembles Reality.
In earlier days mythology provided the basis of sanity. Gods and fairies existed, they had
created the world and humanity, they had a plan for them, and humans were but minor
pieces in a game of celestial chess. Lictors may have had different features back then,
but they were our jailers all along.

From mythology came religion. With religion our jailers hoped to influence humanity
more directly. Death Angels, Archons, lictors, envoys, incarnations all established cults
to follow them; with the rise of monotheism even the Demiurge himself entered this
game. But too much was revealed as time passed within the Illusion. Combining
teachings from different systems of faith (unearthing the occasional gem in a mound of
propagandistic rubbish) men and women began to formulate systems of thought which
came close to deciphering parts of the Illusion; the Illusion had to be accommodated.

With the Cataclysm of Science the gods and mythic creatures left the world. It was as if
they never had existed. Yesterday's religious truth quickly became today's mild insanity.
The world no longer followed a plan, instead it began to follow laws and rules. While the
human self-appreciation rose and man crowned himself the epitome of existence the
human world was moved to the outskirts of one of millions of galaxies and the sheer
extent of the universe utterly dwarved humanity and the individual human at the same
time.

But ultimately mythology, religion, science, reason all serve the same purpose:
enforcement of the Illusion. It does not matter what you believe to be true about the
Illusion - it is sufficient that you believe the Illusion to be true. There is room even for
some sort of madness within the Illusion: even if you follow outdated or unique personal
mindsets to explain the reality of the Illusion, even if you believe in a vast spiritual
conspiracy which governs the world, you are still trying to make sense of the Illusion.
And sense is what the Illusion lacks. Real madness, therefore, is Real sanity: seeing that
there is no sense within the Illusion and transcending into a Reality where philosophies,
religions and science have no more meaning.

The world is what the Awakened being makes of it. All of Reality is defined by the
entirety of Awakened or Wakeful beings. In theory every such being, and that includes
every human soul free of the bondage of the Illusion, is capable of omnipotence; yet as
far as we know no being, not even the Demiurge, fully realizes this potential. The reason
for that is that each Wakeful being makes its own rules of existence, often even without
consciously thinking of them; or it has such rules made for it. Death makes rules; the
Demiurge made rules for the Archons who in turn made rules for the lictors and so on.
The entirety of Wakeful beings makes the rules of Reality. Maybe the subjugation of
human souls is an attempt to reduce the number of influences on Reality; maybe the
Illusion is even geared towards strengthening a reality the Demiurge wishes to
accomplish.

Yet in the end every Wakeful being is responsible for its own Reality as far as it creates
it. The Demiurge has created the Archons and is responsible for them; each Archon is
responsible not for the fact of its existence but for all the decisions it makes, the
influences it chooses to extend or withdraw and so on. A human soul which Awakens to
Reality begins to perceive it and simultaneously begins to influence it. Madness, as we
would term it within the Illusion, has the power to manifest itself and imprint its will on
Reality - and even more so on the Illusion. Madness is nothing but the realization of
one's own insane Reality.

Passions
Passions are often equated with sexuality and its urges but that is only part of the
picture. Passions are what drives us; but to a one those passions are encoded into the
Illusion which binds us and instead of being expressions of ourselves they are moulds
into which we are impressed.

Every Wakeful being has passions: Kether's passion is to rule, Golab's passion is to
torture, Pazuzu's passion is insects etc. No Wakeful being is by necessity reduced to a
single passion, but usually one passion emerges as the driving force of such a being. The
enforcement of the Illusion might well have become the driving passion of the
Demiurge; it may even have replaced the Demiurge' original passion(s), and the
realization of that finally made him leave.

But the Illusion has us struggle with a set of basic passions which are so deeply rooted in
our illusory existence that they govern our very lives. Freud identified a sexual urge and
a destructive urge. The urges to breathe, feed and to stay alive are in us as well as the
urge to excel, to see ourselves as being better than the others. Our passions all have
become urges which drive us. Passions are powerful, a wealth of untapped energy, but
our illusory configuration makes us playthings of these powers instead of putting them
at our behest. Instead of using our human capacity for sexuality as a means of glorious
communication and communion with each other we let it make us debase ourselves and
others, use and abuse, search eternally for weak and fleeting pleasures which serve no
purpose. Instead of using our human capacity for wild, unchecked destruction as a
means of change and creation we only destroy for destruction's sake and neither learn
anything from it nor do we create better things in place of what falls before us. We could
be builders and destroyers of worlds but instead we let the mere shadow of the powers
which are our birthright govern our every deed.

In Reality passions define one's being; or rather, one's being expresses itself through
passions. Everything a Wakeful being does is somehow geared toward his or her
passions. All efforts of Geburah both inside and outside of the Illusion are at least
indirectly concerned with the imposition of judgement. Tiphareth's very being is
suffused with coordination of events, things, and information; art is also among her
passions. The various incarnations of Astaroth each express a single passion of his; the
Antichrist as the opponent, the seducer as perverter, the beast as hate.

Each human soul, even in its captivity, has access to passions. Apart from the perverted
passions which govern our lives as the aforementioned primal urges we may have other,
subtler passions: the creation of art, collecting certain things, love for a certain area or
person(s), something that makes our lives worthwhile. It is possible to glean some
information about one's Real nature from the passions one develops in life, weak and
shadowy as they may be if compared to the Real thing. Through the study of the magical
art of Passions we may be able to help ourselves along on the path to Awakening.
However, our primal urges remain strong, and almost all magicians on this path fail to
see the significance of the 'weaker' passions. They lose themselves in sexual or
destructive powergames and thus fall into another of the Demiurge's devious traps
which only serves to enforce the Illusion.

Dreams
Dreams are more than just figments of our sleeping minds. They may contain traces of
memories of the soul, harking back to the time before the imprisonment. They may be
sources of immense power. They are always expressions of our Real nature, and as such
they may, if a certain magical control is exercised, be considered real worlds - no less
real than the Illusion. The Illusion itself might have started out as a dream the Demiurge
had.

Within the Illusion nightly dreams are said to be a means of our subconscious to deal
with the experiences of the day. Their value is recognized, but still underestimated. In
dreams we can open our eyes to Reality. In dreams we may return to a state of
omnipotence - but knowledge and training are needed to achieve any control over our
dreams.

The Illusion warps our dreams - instead of our dreams being our playground and our
empire dreams engulf us and make us their powerless slaves. It doesn't matter if your
dreams are nightmares or blissful fantasies; without control you remain their slave.
Dreams thus mimic the Illusion: as in the Illusion our dreams seem to have their own
rules which we usually cannot break. Once again the Demiurge has taken something
from us and turned it against us.

The dreams of Awakened beings, even of only partly Awakened beings, hold power.
Dreams can connect to Reality and to the Illusion and influence them. Dreams and
passions are of a similar nature: maybe passions even start as dreams which become
manifest in the actions and the person of the dreamer.

Dreams are more than just the often weird mind-movies we experience at night. The art
of dreaming also encompasses daydreams, fantasies, the imagination, and creativity - all
things which the Illusion often makes us label as 'idle'. In the end these manifestations
of dreams have little power within the Illusion, but outside of it, in Reality, they do make
a difference. Time and space, events and encounters, your very nature will depend on
your dreams. Your nightmares and fearful fantasies forge your purgatory; likewise, you
can manifest a dream realm in the continuum of Reality which is totally under your
control, and which is an extension of yourself much as the citadels of the Archons are
extensions, maybe even the real corporeal form of their owners.

Dreams within the Illusion also serve to taunt us. Whatever glimpses of our true nature
or of Reality we have within our dreams, we are forced to forget them at awakening.
There often is a moment of clarity after we awake, in which we seem to remember what
we have just dreamt, and in which it actually makes sense, more sense even than any
other aspect of our existence - but this feeling fades quickly and what remains are the
shattered and useless fragments of jumbled scenes that we cannot make head or tail of.

Dream realms can be another pitfall on the road to Awakening. As ruler of such an
empire at your beck and call you may lose sight of your goal and catch yourself in an
Illusion of your own making. Only by merging your dream with Reality can you
transcend the Illusion completely.

Dimensions
The dimensions of time and space within the Illusion work as absolutes. Humans
understand space to be the distance between themselves and things or persons outside
themselves, and they believe this distance to be absolute in the case of immobile things:
the distance between New Delhi and New York is immutable. You can move from one or
the other, but you have to spend time to do it and you have to transverse every point in
space that is supposed to be between those two cities. It is generally believed that the
closest connection between two things is a straight line; no matter what other way you
choose you can never find a quicker route than the straight one.

Time is also perceived as absolute. Even though you may feel that this hour flies or that
hour crawls your watch will always insist that exactly the same amount of time has
passed. There is always a moment of 'now': there is a future and there is a past, but
neither can be directly experienced. All you will ever really experience is 'now'.
Of course all of this is wrong. Space and time are means to categorize the illusory reality,
and the human senses are equipped to perceive some parts of illusory reality as space,
and other aspects of it as time. Let's look at a hypothetical example:

Let the world be n-dimensional. Within this world of unknown dimensions exists a
single mathematical dot (with no spatial extension, therefore 0-dimensional). Let's
further say this dot has a sense of self; as there are no reference points within its 0-
dimensional world outside of itself it does not have a sense of location, even though it
moves through the n-dimensional continuum. But let's say it may perceive different n-
dimensional locations it passes by different flavours. Every single point in the n-
dimensional continuum that it passes has a different taste. The dot perceives a sequence
of different tastes, and this sequence it calls time.
All of these individual points are elements of a single line. Were we to perceive all
stations of the path of the dot at once, we would see this line. Lets say this one-
dimensional line is also aware of itself moving through the n-dimensional continuum.
The line perceives all of its length at once and calls the individual dots which constitute
the line 'space' because their relation to each other is spatial. But all of these dots move
through the n-dimensional continuum, and the different stages of this movement will
again be perceived as time. Yet they also constitute, if perceived at once, a two-
dimensional construct, and its movement creates a three-dimensional construct in turn.
In all cases, spatial information is that which is perceived at once, while temporal
information is that which is perceived in sequence. But in all cases, only the sensory
equipment determines which dimensional information is spatial, and which is temporal.
In Reality there may be a way to perceive four dimensions as space and a fifth as time,
and so on. But we will get to that later.

It has been determined that 'space' is dimensional information we can take in at once:
look around you, and you will find a wealth of information, your distance to certain
objects or other people, the size of things etc. You can take all of this in at a glance, and
if you turn around you can soak up all the spatial information available to you at your
current position. But you can, try as you might otherwise, only perceive one moment at
a time.

Now consider a movie. The movie consists of thousands of images. They all have the
same width and breadth (space) and they are shown to us in sequence (time). They
make sense only if shown in sequence; though they could be projected into the same
space all at once we could not take any meaning out them. Time helps us to categorize
sequences of events which, if perceived simultaneously or in the wrong order, would not
make any sense to us.

And here lies the lie: space and time are not absolute. In Reality, distances are mutable;
events can be perceived differently than in the order the dictate of time imposes on
them.

Lets first take a look at Real space. An Awakened being ('subject') perceives spatial
relations of objects to itself. All spatial information is dependent on the relation of the
subject to the object perceived; as with the other domains, time and space do not
determine the relation of subject and object, but the subject's stance towards the object
determines its temporal and spatial relation to the subject.

Kether perceives certain areas of Metropolis to be his domain. Within these areas, his
majestic influence can be felt, and his citadel can quickly be reached. Areas Kether is not
interested in lie further away. If Kether's interest in, say, a specific part of the Machine
City were aroused, this area would instantly be closer to his citadel, and his influence
would extend itself there; if Kether's interest wanes, the distance between this area and
his citadel increases. There is no movement involved; Reality simply adjusts itself to the
different status quo.

All Awakened beings have this control (or rather, attitude) towards space. If an
Awakened being were to live in a flat in New Delhi, and its closest (but unawakened)
friend lived in New York, then the Awakened one need only stroll across the hall to visit
its friend, while the unawakened one, trapped as he is in the Illusion, would have to
travel all the way to India. If the Illusion breaks down, distance becomes as relative to
those within the breach as it is to the Awakened, but usually they cannot control the
effect without sound instruction in the domain of time and space.

Real time is also dependent on the attitude of the Awakened. There is no absolute time
which can be measured by clocks, but there is still a sequence of events. Such events are
called Cataclysms, and the periods before and after the Cataclysm are called Aeons.

Every Awakened being is able to create Cataclysms. In fact they do so all the time (no
pun intended), but only important Cataclysms are noticed. Were Shiva Nataraja to
destroy a certain aspect of Reality with his dance, this would constitute a Cataclysm and
there would be an Aeon before and an Aeon after the destruction. Cataclysms of
noticeable importance are usually only created by very powerful beings; the more
powerful a being, the greater its capacity for world-shaking Cataclysms.

The biggest Cataclysm of all is of course the disappearance of the Demiurge. With the
Cataclysmic decision to do whatever the Demiurge decided to do (die, walk away, be a
normal human, whatever) everything that went before became part of the Aeon of the
Demiurge's Reign, while everything that came after became part of the Aeon of the
Demiurge's Disappearance. The latter Aeon is further subdivided by the Cataclysm of
Astaroth's Search; by the Cataclysms of the Destructions of Hod, Yesod, Chesed and
Chokmah; and so on.

It is important to note that Cataclysms and Aeons are not necessarily related in any way
to the passing of time within the Illusion. One could say they often are at right angles to
Illusory time. Therefore the Disappearance can be linked to a certain time; this
Cataclysm just happens to be related to a certain period of time (the 19th / 20th
century) and the Illusory time before is quite close to the Aeon of the Demiurge's Reign,
while the time after that, such as the present, is close to the Aeon of the Demiurge's
Disappearance. However, within an Aeon there is no time; therefore for instance, angels
falling from the disintegrating Elysium (see the Elysium sourcebook also on this site)
can drop into the Illusion at any time after the Cataclysm, even though they feel the
Demiurge has just left the building a minute ago.

Other Cataclysms may influence the Illusion as a whole: for instance, when the powers
that control the Illusion allowed the main philosophical mindset within the Illusion to
change from mythical to scientific, the nature of the world as perceived within the
Illusion changed along with it. Before the Cataclysm, tales of creation were true, even
different tales told by different people; but increasing contact between peoples made a
single truth more desirable, and the scientific mindset (although slow to evolve) finally
changed the Illusion so far as to accomodate evolution, a prehistory without humans
and a physical, rational, and logical explanation of existence (refer to the chapter about
Madness for additional insights into reason and logic). Now, all of the Illusion, no
matter how far back in time you might travel using your abilities in the domain of time
and space, will be aligned to the Aeon of Science. The Aeon of Myth is completely lost to
us. Magicians starting in the Aeon of Myth and traveling into the future will never reach
the Aeon of Science; they will, however, reach futures of Myth that never existed in our
time frame.

The most important source of Cataclysms which change all of the Illusion can even
change all of Reality. There is only one such source: it is the abyss of Achlys. If anything
is thrown into this abyss it disappears from existence and thus from Reality. It will not
only cease to exist, it will never have existed. Both Reality and the Illusion will
accomodate themselves so as to never have contained that which is thrown into Achlys.
If for instance a group of people who are linked to each other only by some obscure
heirloom were to travel there and throw that heirloom into Achlys, they would all
immediately return into the Illusion where they were before the heirloom entered their
lives, they would not meet (or have met) and they would have no memories of their
journey to Achlys and what they did there. No-one who throws anything into Achlys
returns to tell of the experience because they never made it in the first place! Now
imagine what would happen if the Demiurge decided to jump right in...
There is yet another secret to time and space in the Illusion: everyone carries their own
perception of time and space with them, and thus their own world.

If someone manages to perceive time and space differently, if they manage to travel
through time and / or space, they create some sort of Cataclysm which they cannot
control. Therefore it may be possible to travel backwards in time and kill one's parents
before they even meet. This should create a paradox (if you approach this with reason
and logic, but you should know better by now): the killer should not be born, therefore
should not be able to ever travel back in time to kill his parents, therefore they will stay
alive and eventually meet and give birth to their later killer, who travels back in time...
etc. etc. ad nauseam. But it doesn't work this way. If you manage to travel back in time
you do so. If you kill your parents you do so. They are dead. You live in a time which
does not have an explanation for your existence. If you return to the time when you
started the persons you call your parents will have died before your birth and there still
is no explanation for your existence. The Illusion simply does not care.

If you return back in time after you made a wrong decision and meet your other self and
tell your other self to decide differently, your other self might do so. Yet that doesn't
change your history. You don't remember having met yourself and having been told to
decide differently. If you stay in that past time frame you exist twice, though at different
physical ages. People you may have made enemies by your decision may not be your
enemies anymore because your other self decided differently - but your memory doesn't
change, you just become an anachronism. It may even be possible to travel forward in
time again, but you will still remember having made your decision and your other self
will still exist (if nothing untoward happened). You could even return to kill your other
self and come back to your present and visit your own grave. And it gets worse: a friend
could go back in time and keep you from killing your other self; he could then return
and you could still meet him at your grave because your present doesn't change; yet in a
sense he would also return into a present in which he has succeeded, you hadn't killed
yourself, and you existed twice. This is the stuff of insanity.

How does this work? Think of any irrational time-travelling event as a Cataclysm which
splinters Reality into myriad personal options. Within the new version of the Illusion
time travel and subsequent paradoxes are allowed. Logic and reason end, cause and
effect become disjointed - everything becomes possible. But the Cataclysm is personal
and does not extend to others - people who entered that state will be perceived as
completely insane by others.

In the light of this, let's return to the initial example of n-dimensional space: the Illusion
is a system with three distinct spatial dimensions (experienced at once) and one
temporal dimension (experienced in sequence). Keeping our movie analogy, if you made
a still photograph of each increment of time and projected all of those images onto the
same screen at once you could see the formerly sequential, temporal information all at
once. Reduced to one object, you could see the car as its parts, the assembled brand new
state and the wrecked state after the final crash all at once. Somehow, eqipped with
proper sensory organs, this information, taken in at once, would become a fourth spatial
dimension. But what is the fifth dimension which consists of the movement through the
n-dimensional continuum? The answer is, possibility. The spatial information regarding
the car contains its measurements and its life cycle, the latter of which our human
perception cannot understand as spatial; the new sequential (that is, temporal)
information consists of the different possible fates of the car. To a being knowing four
spatial and one temporal dimension, time is a sequence of different fates. This is where
what we have to perceive as temporal paradoxes comes in. Reality is multi-faceted and
contains any number of alternative fates. And that's not the end yet: if possibilities are
merely a fifth dimension of space to a six-dimensional being, what is the sixth
dimension, perceived as time by this being? Impossibilities? And what then? The mind
boggles - I for sure can't follow there, so maybe that is where the Demiurge has gone.

So, let's review: within the Illusion, time and space are absolute as perceived by our
senses and we cannot change them. In Reality, time and space are relative to the
attitude the Awakened being takes to them. Space is an expression of emotional or
intellectual closeness, and time moves in wild, Cataclysmic jumps from static state to
static state - these are called Aeons. Time travel is possible even to the partly
enlightened (or victims of accidents); but paradoxes simply refuse to solve themselves
and happily go about destroying your mind. In essence, whatever you as game master
feel you should introduce in the context of time / space perception inside or outside the
Illusion, go with it. Don't fear that you might contradict yourself, pay no mind to
continuity, gleefully embrace paradoxes. Done with confidence, there is more horror to
be gained from that than from the slow and painstakingly described disembowelment of
player characters at the hands of Nepharites...

Conclusion
The jail which is the Illusion has five walls; let its symbol be the pentagon. The five walls
must be projected outward, must be made extensions of ourselves in order to reconcile
us with Reality; let the symbol of Reality therefore be the pentagram which includes the
pentagon of the Illusion and the outward pointing forces of death, dreams, passions,
madness and the dimensions.

In order to truly Awaken one must study all five paths of magic, at least in theory; only
when mastership of all five paths is regained can we realize the nature of Reality, and by
that the nature of ourselves. Each path, if studied alone, serves only to catch you in an
Illusion of your own design.

I hope that this text gave you something useful for your KULT campaigns. If you have
any suggestions for improvement or any other comments, feel free to email me under
bitpicker@compuserve.de.