Elder Cults

Read this before anything else

"Elder Cults" is our name for them and it is a plural because we cannot establish how many there are.

They have names. We do not have them. Everything below is what can be said about bodies that will not identify themselves and can only be distinguished by their effects.

Elder Cults were, are and will be. They exist as pillars of our understanding of the Dark. Many upstart cults claim some mythological figure as their founder to stir some interest in their pretentious book club. However these Elder Cults can trace their lineage to those very real figures and their heroic deeds. inherited

That is the inherited paragraph and it is the wiki's oldest position on them. Note what it does: it asserts the distinction between real lineage and pretended lineage, and offers no way to tell which is which. contested

On the name

We call them the Elder Cults because we needed a heading and nothing better presented itself. It is a placeholder that has hardened into use, and the wiki has decided to keep it rather than invent something that sounds more authoritative. firsthand · Gershon

The plural is doing real work and is not a stylistic choice. We cannot establish how many bodies this refers to. It may be a dozen unrelated institutions of comparable age. It may be three. It may be one thing that presents differently to different people and has been counted repeatedly by observers who could not compare notes. Every one of those is consistent with what we hold, and the difference between them would change nearly everything downstream. contested

The one name we half-possess is the Order of the Magi, attached to Zoroaster, which surfaces on this wiki in Divination and again in Psychic Energy — where a Magi named Arandashur is quoted from a surviving tablet. Whether that is one body, a lineage, a title, or three different things sharing a word, we cannot say. It is listed here as the single thread we have and not as an identification. inherited

Even the thread is unstable. The same body — if it is one body — reaches us elsewhere as the Fire Cult, and there are two or three other formulations in circulation that may or may not be the same thing under a different translator. A name that arrives in several versions is not a name. It is a description that different people arrived at separately, which is what you would expect either from a genuinely old institution whose title has drifted across languages, or from a thing that was never named because it was never one thing. contested

What can be distinguished

Not identities. Effects. unverified

• Age, or a very good imitation of it. Material arrives bearing the marks of long transmission — internal inconsistencies of the kind copying produces, terminology that has drifted, layers that disagree with each other. That is hard to fake and nobody has shown us a forgery of it.
• Refusal to be examined. The lineage claim is the whole of the authority, and as The Instructions records, it cannot be inspected without ending it. A body that showed its documents would be a body making a checkable claim, and none of them does.
• Contempt for the young. Consistent across every encounter reported to us, and directed at the agencies, the Fabians and at us. The CIA entry records their reaction to the Remote Viewing programme — recognised, and derided as primitive. That posture is the most reliable identifying mark we have. inherited

• Position on Inoculation. Opposed, and on grounds of inheritance rather than principle: a closed population produces no readers, and a lineage with nobody left to receive it is finished in one generation. They are against the programme for reasons that have nothing to do with the people it is done to. contested

They are this wiki's largest source

Recorded here because it is uncomfortable and because a recruit will not work it out unaided. ⚠ warning

Count the tags. inherited

is the second most common on this wiki after unverified

, and inherited material means material copied out of older tomes by hands that did not understand it. Those tomes are theirs. The Daemon taxonomy, the fey material, the departure readings, most of what we hold about The Dark itself — it descends, at some number of removes none of us can count, from bodies that will not talk to us and have never confirmed a word of it. firsthand · Gershon

So they are the single largest contributor to this wiki and the least verifiable, they did not consent to the arrangement, and they would regard the result with the contempt described above. A method built on naming your sources sits on a foundation whose source is a placeholder. That is not resolvable and it is written down here so that it is at least not hidden.

Competing accounts

unsigned— board archive astroturf

There are no Elder Cults. There is old material, which exists, and there is the habit of attributing old material to a keeper, because "this is very old and nobody knows where it came from" is unbearable and "the Order has held it since Zoroaster" is comfortable. You invented a custodian for an orphan.

Against it: Accounts for the entire record. It does not account for the encounters, which are few, secondhand, and consistent in tone across sources that had no contact with each other.

unsigned— correspondence, one exchange, not continued defector

You have the shape of it wrong in one respect that matters. It is not secrecy. Nobody is hiding anything from you. It is that the material cannot be transmitted to someone who has not spent twenty years being prepared to receive it, and handing it over would not be generosity, it would be the same as handing over nothing. Your wiki is what happens when it is handed over anyway.

Against it: Precisely what an institution protecting an unfalsifiable authority would say, and precisely what would be true if the claim were real. We cannot separate those and neither could you.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited paragraph above, from an unnamed hand. Board archive. One brief correspondence. Two internal mentions in Divination and Psychic Energy that may or may not refer to the same thing.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We have named a body we cannot count, characterised it from its critics and from two secondhand encounters, and built much of the wiki on material we attribute to it without evidence that it is the source. The first account above — that we invented a custodian for orphaned material — is the most likely single explanation and is not treated as such in the body of this entry.

Wanted: A name. Any name, from anyone, with anything attached to it. Evidence that two of the encounters we hold involved the same body.

See also

Concealment offers a mechanism for why this entry cannot count, name or document them: not secrecy but an art of not being noticed, which leaves no absence to find. That entry also notes how conveniently this excuses every gap in our record.