Seekers

Those mortals that are consumed with the sin of seeking knowledge. Seekers refuse to accept the world as it were presented to them. They suffer from an ailment of lust for knowledge. It lives on the inside of their skulls, gnawing and scratching at the bone. The imperative to discover what which does not exist drives them to seek the Dark. In the outskirts of the dark they face incomprehensible visitors and meet other seekers on their path.

They form bands in their attempts to document and figure the system which governs the dark. In their delusions of grandeur they fail to realize the dark has no system of governance. Many cults have risen and fallen, their writings preserved in tomes collected by those that cannot read nor comprehend them. Many more cults exist still. They attract new seekers to their spheres of knowledge and indoctrinate them in their delusions of some grand scheme they unnearthed which only they can understand.

Seekers invariably demand power from their art. The source of this power must come from either the realm itself or its denizens. The Dark itself is benign. In its emptiness it allows for great feats of psychic power for the learned and experienced seeker. The Third eye, Mind Rape, Dream Invasions are some of the methods mastered by experienced seekers. They require careful guidance, patience and above all, dedication. A deal with a devil, on the other hand, only requires a certain combination of stupidity, desperation and arrogance.

The four kinds

Seekers are sorted here on two axes and not one, and the second is the one that gets forgotten. inherited

The scheme is borrowed. It comes from the four species bound together at Sukkot — citron, palm, myrtle and willow — and the old reading of them by taste and fragrance, standing for what a person has learned and what a person does for others. We have taken it and changed the terms, as we take most things. Anyone who holds the original should correct what we have made of it. inherited

Translated to this field the axes are what a seeker knows and what a seeker gives:

Knows, and gives

Holds something real and transmits it. The rarest of the four and the only one that increases the total. unverified

Knows, and does not give

Holds something real and keeps it. This is not always avarice — the Elder Cults argue that the material cannot be transmitted to anyone unprepared and that handing it over would be the same as handing over nothing. That argument is unfalsifiable and may be true.

Gives, and does not know

Transmits, generously, sincerely, at cost to themselves, and is wrong. This kind does the most damage per unit of good intention of any category on this wiki, and almost never knows it. ⚠ warning

Neither knows nor gives

Most seekers, most of the time, including everyone reading this on their worst months.

They are bound together

The part of the borrowed scheme that matters is not the sorting. Anyone can sort people into four boxes. firsthand · Gershon

The rite requires all four species, held as one bundle. The willow is not discarded. A bundle missing any of them is not a lesser bundle; it is not the thing at all. Whatever else the original means, it is not a ranking dressed up as a category, and reading it as one is the characteristic error of people who have just learned it.

Applied here: a circle composed only of the first kind would not be a circle, it would be four people. The ones who know and will not say still hold what they hold. The ones who give and are wrong are the reason anything moves at all. The ones who do neither are most of us most of the time and are not thereby disposable. contested

The cults sort too

The scheme characterises bodies as readily as it does individuals, and the results are not flattering to anyone. contested

• The Vatican is the only body documented here that plausibly knows and gives — a complete theology, stated publicly, taught to anyone who asks, unchanged for centuries. Whether what it holds is true is a separate question the wiki cannot answer, but the transmission is not in doubt. inherited

• The Elder Cults know and do not give, by their own account and as their whole authority. See The Instructions, where the lineage claim cannot be inspected without ending it.
• The CIA knows, does not give, and goes further — Harnessing describes the asymmetric position: closed for the population, open for the operators. Withholding as policy rather than as pedagogy.
• This wiki gives and does not know. We transmit constantly, sincerely, at some cost, and the entire apparatus of tags and doubts and sourcing footers is an admission that we are the third kind and have chosen to act anyway. firsthand · Gershon

That last one is the reason the scheme is on this page rather than filed as an oddity. A body that has correctly identified itself as the dangerous kind, and continues, is either being honest or has found a very comfortable way to keep going. ⚠ warning

See also

Concealment is where the affliction described above is charged for: a seeker may see, or be hidden, and every one of us has made that trade in the same direction.

The two roads described above — the disciplined arts and the deal with a devil — are set out as a distinction under Harnessing.

The rarity described above may not be a rarity of the affliction. Inoculation holds that the capacity was ordinary and was removed from the population by design, and that a seeker is a gap in someone's coverage rather than a person marked out. The account on this page is older and has not been withdrawn.