Appendix B: The Phenomenology of the Ancient Mind

Cognitive scientists now theorize that over 90% of brain activity is subconscious, happening beneath the threshold of subjective awareness, and half of all conscious activity is actually governed by the default mode network (DMN), the neural regions in charge of behaviors so ingrained in body-memory they can be performed automatically. In fact, self-consciousness can actually inhibit the fluidity of such actions. The DMN takes over when one is, for example, driving a car. Experienced drivers can easily maneuver a thousand-plus-pounds of steel, glass, and gas at high rates of speed without having to contemplate all the subtle movements and calculations—the complex physics involved in steering, accelerating, and braking. The subconscious executes these tasks, freeing up the driver's mind to introspect, to daydream and fantasize. It is only when problems arise—situations habits cannot automatically handle—that the default mode is overridden by self-conscious attention, which comes back online in time to make decisions.

It is important to keep the DMN in mind when considering a crucial phenomenological fact: typically speaking, ancient psychology was much more externalized. 'Know thyself' meant knowing your place in the social hierarchy, know your duty. That was essentially who you were. One's sense of identity and purpose were defined by concepts like dharma, systematic beliefs that governed behavior in an algorithmic, almost robotic way. Passions were experienced passively, not as autonomous products of one's own brain, but as external, heteronomous forces penetrating the body and moving the soul.

In other words, the subjective self was not 'Master of the House of Introspection.' Instead, one felt like an empty vase, opened to the world, life pouring in, filling the mind with voices and images. Cultural conditioning had populated the subconscious with spirits and gods, and in complicated, stressful situations—when the behavioral repertoire encoded in traditional beliefs failed to resolve dilemmas automatically—epiphanic images appeared and divine commands echoed through the head, inspiring and directing action. As a result, Mortals could hear Uroboros' orders—could feel us watching and judging them—even in the daylight...

 

Fragment IV

Chandraketugarh, India. ca. 3 BCE.

 

...Kali carefully instructed me in the Uroboric Way—the nature of our freedom and the rational imperatives constraining our choices. Once I grasped the basic logic, the formulations were self-evident: the more Mortals we transformed, the more the potential blood supply was depleted, so, according the principles of geometric progression, we could only transform one Mortal and only if that person was physically mature, understood what was at stake, and consented to the change. We had to be selective and committed to seeing this process through—to teaching the fledgling how to use their powers properly. Mentoring an Uroboros wasn't a sentimental duty, though. It was a purely rational one. An ill-informed, undisciplined Uroboros was a threat to us all.

“Choose wisely,” Kali told me one night, staring into the periscope, spying on the sanctuary above. “You have time now. Take it.” She slid her fingers across the lever beside the scope. If she pulled it, great iron gears would jostle the sanctuary floor, and a blast of hot air would rush through a horn, issuing a blood-curdling moan.

As I mulled over her words, I noticed the raga playing upstairs and registered another interesting change in my perceptual system: music sounded different now. The melody and rhythm seemed to have lost its flavor, its salt. I could still appreciate the abstract, mathematical structure of what I heard, but I no longer felt it inside of me. It was no more moving to me than birdsong typically was to Mortal ears.

“Do as I did,” Kali continued, “choose someone who doesn't submit to custom, who hears the voice of resistance. They have the potential for self-possession, to experience eternity in time.”

She taught me about the vast network of temples—from the Kingdom of the Han to the Roman land of Britannia—each one staffed with highly-trained priests, interconnected through tightly-guarded underground passages and fleets of customized ships with sun-proofed chambers. Mortals flocked to our sanctuaries searching for answers to the questions that haunted and crippled their minds, the very questions that had drawn me: why are we here? What is the point of living and suffering if we all die? Is there anything afterward or does it just dissolve into a meaningless nothing?

The perception that Uroboros had mastered 'Death' was the ultimate source of our power, and we used it to position ourselves as rulers of a cosmos that bewitched Mortals' anxious imaginations. We perpetrated 'the Great Myth,' the idea that, although the flesh was frail and destined for the pyre or grave, the soul endured, the spirit transcended.

Eventually it came time for my mentor, the one who embodied this iteration of Kali, to journey to a new temple, to take on a new divine role. One night, I was handed the garland of skulls and the Khatuanga staff. I slid on the breastplate, donned the tiger-skin gown, and eased back onto the gilded throne, robed attendant to my left and to my right.

The body that had been a curse had become my boon. That's how I first grasped a principle fundamental to all Uroboric wisdom: in time, things tend toward their opposite...

 

Fragment V.

[Location and time not specified]

 

...With thousands upon thousands of Mortals crammed together with all those domesticated animals, streets teeming with piles of waste, ancient cities were an ideal breeding ground for pestilences, a paradise for pathogens. This had inspired Uroboros to move beyond the old way of extracting blood, human sacrifice having become too messy and heavy-handed for large-scale civilizations. Long before my rebirth, Uroboros had devised a materialist theory of the cosmos based on four fundamental elements—earth, water, air, and fire—conceiving of the body as a microcosm of corresponding humors: yellow bile (the substance associated with anger and other intense passions), black bile (a dark, earthy sap related to sadness), and phlegm (the cool juice that calmed the body). Diseases were the result of humoral imbalances, and restoring a body to health meant controlling the fourth and most vital humor.

Life, after all, was in the blood.

There were many variations: some systems had three substances, others six, but the basic principle was universal, and blood was always the key. To ancient Mortals, the shiny red juice was magical, full of transcendent power, capable of transmuting into semen, breast milk, and other vital fluids. It came to symbolize loyalty as well, commitment to one's family, tribe, and nation. To us, though, it was energy—salty, sweet with a calming, mildly euphoric effect—and our great joy in life, besides consuming it, was finding clever and efficient methods of extraction.

Historians now attribute humoralism to ancient physicians like Hippocrates and Galen, but its true origin was our temple system. Uroboros taught their priests that the body was hierarchical. 'King Heart,' as it was sometimes called, was the central organ where 'natural spirits' in the air fused with blood, becoming 'vital spirits.' If the heart produced too much, however, the blood stagnated, the body clogged, and the excess had to be removed. Our priests became the first phlebotomists, masters in the art of bloodletting.

Of course, the theory had to framed in mythological terms, so priests spoke of health as a matter of honoring the gods: make the proper sacrifices and we cured the illness. The priests kept the libations and offerings—beer, meat, grains, coins, and so on—and Uroboros took the blood, which was mixed with an anti-coagulant retrieved from leeches and stored in air-tight iron containers. Each night I awoke to a supply so immense, I couldn't have finished it all if I tried. A lot—I'm now ashamed to admit—was simply thrown away.

While phlebotomy had some somatic benefits—lowering blood pressure and body temperature, for example—its true power lied in the placebo effect. After bloodletting, patients grew faint, often falling into a deep sleep where they dreamed of divine encounters. The idea that the gods were directly involved lowered a patient's stress levels, allowing the body's natural defenses to overcome or cope with many ailments.

Humoralism, of course, was powerless when it came to infectious diseases, but, for us, the outbreaks had an upside: population control. Temple medicine never really advanced beyond this stage because there wasn't much incentive to improve it. After all, we weren't interested in having the most accurate understanding of the body possible.

We just wanted the blood...

 

Fragment VI

Meroe, Africa. 324 CE.

...Sekhmet, the divine lioness, daughter of the sun god Amun, an expression of his nurturing warmth and searing heat. When pleased, she was a sympathetic mother—when angered, a wrathful beast. Mortals called her both the Beloved One and Queen Blood. I embodied her son, Apedemak, the One Who Stands with Her. Together, we were 'The Hidden Ones.' During the day, as Father Amun traveled across the sky, we slept. At night, we protected cosmic order while Amun plunged into the Underworld and defeated the Serpent of Chaos before rising again the next morning.

Life in the Nile Valley revolved around this quest, the rhythm of the sun and the rain, the orderly flow of the seasons. We monitored the sky, keeping track of celestial patterns, maintaining the calendar for planting and harvesting. We could even predict eclipses and comets, prognosticating them with an accuracy that awed our followers. Mortals assumed we came from the stars, and we did very little to dissuade them of this belief.

Sekhmet lifted her gilded cup and proposed a toast to the Nile, bracelets dangling from her wrists, golden serpents nibbling their own tails. I hoisted mine, but before I could sip, Zaduq, the High Priest and only Mortal allowed in our private quarters, knocked. It was time for the nightly assessment. Tugging the silk chord, Sekhmet opened the chamber doors and told him to enter. The fit, middle-aged man rose from his knees and approached, a bundle of scrolls nestled in the crook of his arm. Unfurling one of them, he began reading off the totals of grain, beer, meat, and precious metals collected that day.

“So what has been the new device's impact?” Sekhmet interrupted.

“It has been considerable, Domina,” Zaduq replied. “A marvelously efficient machine.”

I said I wanted to see it.

“Certainly, Dominus,” he said, rolling up the scroll.

Once the temple had been cleared of underlings, Sekhmet and I crossed the column-lined courtyard, entering the antechamber where Zaduq had already lit the wall-mounted torches and, with a proud smile, was examining the new contraption: an iron cylinder forged in the shape of a Greek amphora. I took a cup from the tray beside the machine and placed it beneath the spout.

“You’ll need a coin, Dominus,” Zaduq said, digging into the pocket of his tunic and handing me a gold piece. I dropped into the slot above the spout. After a few clicks and snaps, a stream poured out, filling the cup with holy water, the precise amount needed for devotees to cleanse themselves before entering the sanctuary (this reinforced a sense of sacredness and helped keep our priests healthy).

“Well done,” Sekhmet added as I handed her the cup.

Utilizing basic thermodynamic principles, we had created an array of such mechanisms, contraptions designed to heighten our devotees’ 'otherworldly' experience. The temple doors were our masterpiece. When the fire pits flanking the sanctuary were lit, the heat warmed a large iron water-vessel beneath the front steps. The temple doors faced eastward, so if the pits were lit just before dawn, by the time the sun’s rays had risen past the steps, enough steam had built up in the vessel to activate a series of gears, weights, and pulleys that opened the massive cedar doors.

To the citizens of Meroe, the gods were inviting them to enter and worship.

“Another excellent concept, Domina,” Zaduq said. “The time and resources it saves will allow us to train more scribes and physicians. In time, this temple could rival anything found in Alexandria or Rome.”

Sekhmet and I exchanged satisfied glances. Meroe had become a thriving city where men from India, Arabia, and the Mediterranean peddled their wares, its streets lined with textile shops and blast furnaces, the barges in the river-port bulging with metals, fabrics, spices, and grains. It was now the richest African city south of Alexandria.

“We are very pleased,” Sekhmet said.

The High Priest bowed. As Sekhmet and I began to leave the antechamber, though, I noticed that Zaduq's head was still lowered, his brow furrowed.

I stopped. “Is there something else?”

“Yes, Dominus,” he said, fidgeting nervously with his tunic, his face flush.

Zaduq had been acting a little odd lately, out of sorts. Sekhmet believed he was trying to summon the courage to ask if he could be transformed. He was certainly a spirited Mortal and a dutiful, capable servant, but Sekhmet thought he lacked the inner strengthen—that defiant, self-possessed quality—necessary to joining our ranks. At any rate, she had already transformed someone centuries ago, so ultimately it was my decision, and one which I needed to make soon. He was on the verge of being physically too old for a proper Metamorphosis.

“Get on with it,” I told him.

“This was discovered in our coffers yesterday.”

He retrieved another coin and handed it over: a silver piece minted by Axum, the rival kingdom to the east. The image it bore disturbed me. Etched upon its face, at four, evenly-spaced points along its circumference, were intersecting lines...

 

Fragment VII

Meroe, Africa. 345 CE.

 

...From a portal in the upper room of our chambers, we watched the ceremony unfold. The royal family, their courtiers, and our priests had all gathered in the torch-lit courtyard. Beneath the somber air of ritual formality, there was a palpable restlessness. A shadow now slanted across our once prosperous city-state, an uncertainty even Sekhmet and I found troubling.

For years now, the Sudanese scrub forests had been receding; rain was rare; crop failures were on the rise, and the desert had been creeping closer. Meroe had become a victim of its own success: too many trees had been felled to fuel iron production, leading to increased erosion and drought. We'd ordered the royal family to limit deforestation and give the land a few seasons to rejuvenate. But that meant less iron production and a drop in employment and tax revenue. This wasn't what Sekhmet and I found troubling, however. Economic downturns were nothing new to us. Something strange and unprecedented was on the horizon.

In the middle of the courtyard, dancers with kohl-darkened eyes and billowy, yellow costumes spun like coins, twirling to the drums and whistling reed flutes, their movements signifying disorder, a world gone mad. At the far end of the courtyard, Queen Amanikama stood in her lion-skin robe, awaiting her cue, ostrich feathers and a uraeus, the double-serpent insignia of royal power, arching from her crown. The king handed her the jewel-encrusted scepter, and she approached our statues, dancers clearing a path as she sauntered across the courtyard.

In ancient Ethiopia, females had power that startled many foreigners. Here, kings served at the behest of their queens, the Kandakes, whose armies had once conquered Egypt; had halted the progress of Alexander the Great; had thwarted Rome’s attempt to control the Upper Nile. But this queen faced a more immediate and profound threat than Mediterranean imperialism. The Kingdom of Axum was coming, and if this Kandake failed to protect 'her' city, not only would a dynasty perish, but a way of life—a whole worldview—would come to an end.

Regime changes rarely impacted our operations in significant ways. The rise and fall of conquering empires were usually negotiated ahead of time by their Uroboric masters. Sekhmet and I had even engineered a coup de ta or two in our time. Mortals rulers knew better than to interfere with us. We represented the land and the forces governing it, keeping the people who lived there obedient and productive. So, when in Rome, you sacrificed to Jupiter and Juno. In Meroe, you honored us. But this enemy was different. If Axum prevailed, our temple would be the first building razed to the ground.

Looking back now, I'm struck by how long it took to realize what was happening. At first it seemed like another fringe cult, destined to fade like so many before it. There had been strange movements before—from the awful Akhenaten heresy in Egypt to the weird teachings of the so-called Buddha—but Uroboros always found ways to neutralize them. When Buddhists said nothing was permanent—not even the gods—and therefore honoring them was pointless, Uroboros simply redefined Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu. In time, most Indians lost interest in the truly radical aspects of his teachings and returned to traditional beliefs.

At first, it seemed like an aberrant form of Judaism. The Jews were unique in that they didn't honor a pantheon of gods who represented the land and abstract principles. For much of their history, they didn't have a land, only 'the promise' of one, so they imagined a transcendent god, a portable deity who ruled through the written word. This god was remote, mysterious, so intangible it couldn't be represented with idols—a god not of statues, but of statutes. The idea of an unrepresentable deity was, of course, an anathema to Uroboros.

How do you embody an invisible god?

Our response was nuanced, complex. Since persecution only seemed to strengthen Jewish resolve, Uroboros decided to tolerate their beliefs—a hospitable policy considering their hostility to bloodletting, a direct affront to our livelihood. Still the Jews had to be kept in line. They were expected to respect our rituals, and when they didn't—when they, for example, revolted against the Roman system that supported us—their temple was destroyed, their promised land snatched away. Although Judaism still received legal protection under Roman law, the culture itself was fragmented, and business went on as usual, or so we thought.

Every eye in the courtyard narrowed on the queen as she reached our statues. Zaduq stood in front of the inner sanctum, holding a gilded bowl filled with beer, the liquid quaking slightly in his frail, withered hands. The queen knelt before our idols, set the scepter aside, and held out her hands. Zaduq placed the bowl in her grasp, dropping a nugget of ochre into the beer, stirring it with a silver rod. When the liquid reddened, the gray-headed High Priest slipped into the shadows of the inner sanctum, and Amanikama held the bowl aloft as an offering to us.

According to the myth, Amun once grew sick of humanity’s arrogance and sent Sekhmet to punish them. When her rage turned to bloodlust, however, Amun regretted sending her. Taking pity on Mortals, he commanded a priest to disguise beer as blood and pour it over the ground. When Sekhmet lapped it up, she fell into a deep stupor, thus sparing Mortals from total annihilation. As Sekhmet’s son, I helped keep her wrath in check, a reminder of her nurturing, caring side.

“Powerful One and the One Who Stands with Her,” Amanikama intoned, “please support our cause. Guide our hearts to wisdom and glory. Give us the power to prevail.”

At this point, what could we actually do, though?

The Diocletian purges had failed, and, in hopes of stabilizing his crumbling kingdom, the Emperor Constantine had decided to tolerate this disturbing faith. Sekhmet and I just couldn't wrap our minds around it. In our defense, though, there really wasn't one 'Christianity' to see coming. For centuries, there were only small gatherings of people who shared some of the same silly beliefs and rituals. It was a sordid movement: a cult of incestuous cannibals, calling each other 'brother' and 'sister,' kissing one another on the cheek, meeting in secret to 'eat the body' and 'drink the blood' of their savior in order to receive ‘the gift’ of eternal life. You can imagine how Uroboros interpreted that. Groups were actually infiltrated by temple priests to make sure some rogue Uroboros wasn't behind it all.

The more we learned about Christianity, the more it mystified us. The Roman world was full of cults to regional deities that had been franchised throughout the empire—cults to Isis and to Mithras, for example. They flourished because of the traditional values the deities symbolized: duty, obedience, honor. So it was easy to dismiss a cult dedicated to a Jewish peasant preaching self-reflection, universal equality, and non-violence. How could Mortals ever believe an executed criminal from a backwater province was the son of a god? At least, Gautama Siddhartha, the so-called Buddha, had been from the kingly caste!

Not only was the Nazarene considered the son of ‘a’ god, but 'the one true god.’ Up until then, monotheism had been peculiar to the Jews, their numbers held in check by the exclusivity of their doctrines. It was a rigid lifestyle, forbidding intermarriage with 'gentiles' and requiring male circumcision. As you can imagine, not many men were lining up to be converted.

Christianity didn’t require circumcision, though. Christians claimed the invisible god had lived, died, and been resurrected in order to save all Mortals, sacrificing himself so each believer could live in 'the Kingdom of God.' This was the height of subversion, impiety personified. The last thing we wanted Mortals to believe was that they had their own innerspace and private access to the divine realm. Long ago, Uroboros had taught them to interpret the voices and images in their heads as ours. That was why idols were so important—they were crucial to reinforcing this illusion—and why monotheists abhorred them so.

Jesus had taught his followers to speak directly to ‘the one true god' because what mattered most, he claimed, was what happened 'on the inside' and how that influenced the treatment of others. The invisible god actually cared about what each person—whether man or woman, slave or king—felt in his or her heart.

The Nazarene wasn’t the first to emphasize private thoughts over public rituals. Socrates, for example, had been executed for dishonoring the gods, consulting an inner voice, and, worst of all, encouraging others to do so. But his teachings—and the myriad philosophies they spawned—had little immediate impact beyond a small, intellectual elite—men who never really posed an imminent, existential threat to us. Ultimately, ancient philosophers pursued the most pretentious, ineffectual fantasy of all: the idea that discovering eternal, objective 'Truth' would somehow liberate them from their bodies—from their rotting vessels.

Jesus preached embodied salvation, though, explaining his vision with agricultural and culinary metaphors commoners could grasp. Christianity was tailor-made for peasants, slaves, and outcasts: a religion for the weak, by the weak. Furthermore, the idea of a universal human nature undermined our attempt to promote local identity, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance. So when we learned Christians considered all other deities to be demons—minions of the 'Evil One'—Sekhmet and I banned their pesky missionaries from entering Meroe on pain of death.

Now a Christian army was camped outside our walls. The apocalypse was at our doorstep.

The drums quickened, the melody rising as everybody waited to see if we would accept the queen’s offering. Finally a puff of red steam erupted from our statues’ mouths, and the crowd dropped to their knees. Zaduq emerged from the shadows of the inner sanctum. Amanikama placed the bowl in his hands and bowed to our statues. She then returned to the other side of the courtyard, the dancers moving in straight, orderly lines now, spectators applauding ecstatically. As word of the ritual’s success spread to the crowd outside, the streets of Meroe erupted in joy. Our only hope was that this confidence would carry over to the battlefield, and the Kandake would once again crush her foe.

I looked to Sekhmet for reassurance, but she was just staring at the crowd, nervously twisting her golden bracelets...

 

Fragment VIII

Meroe, Africa. 345 CE

 

...We believed the temple complex itself was impenetrable—that we had time to gather our things and plan our escape, but the fire-pits outside had been lit, activating the pulleys and gears, opening the great cedar doors. The citizens of Meroe took it as a sign: the Christian god, the invisible deity, had won.

During the whole ordeal, Zaduq was nowhere to be found. When Axumite soldiers flooded the courtyard, the temple guards surrendered their arms and were spared. Then we knew Zaduq had brokered a deal. Sekhmet and I, along with a few loyal servants, grabbed as much blood and gold as possible, hurrying into the tunnels beneath the shrine. We rushed to the river-dock and boarded our escape vessel, the currents sweeping us away as a hail of flaming arrows fell just short of our ship.

As the mighty Nile carried us northward, I turned away from our burning temple, unable to bear the sight any longer. I looked to the western bank instead, to the rows of Nubian pyramids, tombs of all the royals who’d served us, poking up from the sand like haystacks in a freshly-harvested field—finally grasping just how oblivious we'd been. Zaduq wasn't the blindly obedient Mortal we'd assumed. He possessed a defiant streak, after all. Perhaps he was angry his service never earned him the honor of becoming an Uroboros, and, facing his own mortality, he found comfort in Christianity's promise of everlasting life.

He saw the benefits of serving an invisible god.

“The sun will be up soon,” she said, leaning against the coils of mast rigging, forlornly looking to the east. She wasn't wearing any jewelry now. It was locked away, ready to be sold in the Alexandrian market, funding our journey north to lands that were still ‘pagan.’ I told her I’d be along shortly, and she left the deck, descending into the sun-proofed chamber below.

As orange light started to simmer along the horizon, my heart raced. My body knew it was time to seek shelter, but the faint glow enchanted me. It’d been over three centuries since I’d seen the sun—felt its warmth on my face, its rays in my squinting eyes. Part of me wanted to watch it rise—to see the Nile glisten like a bed of gems.

Did I doubt what I’d been taught about the sun? I’d never seen an Uroboros die.

At the time, I didn't understand how the sun’s UV rays caused fatal tissue damage—how the melanin in my skin, while keeping the properties that maintained color, no longer absorbed the radiation. I didn't know the Elixir had switched my circadian cycle from diurnal to nocturnal so my pineal gland could secrete more melatonin, the 'hormone of darkness,’ source of the anti-oxidants that made my immune system so impervious. How could I have fathomed such things?

After all, I didn't have the most accurate understanding of the body possible.

Mortals instinctively fear the dark; sunlight is their symbol for knowledge, truth, and hope. But to us, it is terrifying. The mere thought of it can agitate our nervous system, flooding our bodies with cortisol and adrenaline, gearing us up for a flight response, which was exactly what I felt that morning as I scurried like a rat into the sun-proofed chamber below...

 

Fragment IX

Caucasus Mountains. ca. 900 CE.

 

...We wore bear-skin parkas, not to keep warm, but to look like shepherds, in case we were being watched. These little meetings, although necessary to coordinating our survival, increased the odds of being spotted by the knights who roamed these mountains hunting 'demons.'

Leana took her place by the fire, orange flames brightening her face. I’d never seen skin as pale or hair as red as hers. She was the oldest Uroboros hiding in the Caucasus, coming from the land of the Celts where she had embodied Danu, goddess of war. She pointed to the Russian steppes, stretching out beyond the foothills like an endless, woolly rug. “A few nights ago, I overheard some shepherds down in the alley. They said the Prince of Alania has converted. As we speak, Byzantine missionaries are rebuilding the church in the glen by the river.”

“Exterminate them,” Baldir snorted, glowering at the fire. ‘Baldir’ was the name of the last god this Uroboros had embodied, a revered Norse deity. Of all the exiles hiding in these mountains, he was the only one still clinging to his old name.

“I might head north of Hyperborea,” I said, poking the embers with a stick, “to the Sleeping Land. They say it's so cold and dark even missionaries refuse to go there.”

“I come from a cold land,” Baldir reminded me. “It didn't keep the monotheists out.”

His eyes lingered on the flames, as if lost in some inner pain. Whether reflecting on past injuries or imagining the harm he wished to inflict, I couldn't tell, but there was always a brooding, seething quality about him that troubled me. Moodiness was a Mortal weakness.

“I'm tired of running,” Leana said. “These mountains, this cave, they are home now.” She glanced at the dark ridges and white-capped peaks to the west. “Let them have the cities.” She crossed her arms and gazed at the fire again. “My mentor told me about how cities came to be—told me they wouldn't last, that they were a mistake. Others disagreed. Each side had its argument.”

Troubling times often inspire the spinning of yarns, stories that restore meaning and order to chaotic events. During my years in the Caucasus, I spent many nights around a campfire, listening to Leana speak about the Descent—about the rise and fall of the urban temple system. Occasionally, she would use strange tonal variations and clicking sounds, fragments of the original Uroboric tongue, the first language ever. It'd fallen into disuse over the centuries and was all but lost. Otherwise, she spoke in koine Greek, the only language we all understood.

Tens of thousands of years ago, she said, each Mortal tribe had an emissary to the 'spirit world,' an expert at hallucinogenic and auto-hypnotic rituals. They were called Ekistaki, our word for shaman. In the deep, dark chambers of the world's caves, shamans visited their Uroboric masters to learn how to keep their tribes healthy and content. This system endured until about 10,000 B.C. when the climate warmed and the ice sheets receded. The moist, temperate seasons produced abundant vegetation and larger animal herds, ideal conditions for hunters and gatherers. Of course, Mortals attributed these changes to our powers, their gratefulness growing so intense, caves were no longer adequate venues for expressing it. Free-standing shrines were built, artificial caves, the world's first temples.

The edifices quickly evolved into vast circular complexes centered around megaliths, some made of limestone slabs weighing fifty or more tons, cut with flint tools from quarries many miles away. These projects demanded more labor—sometimes up to five hundred people—and the workers had to be fed. This was the impetus for the agricultural revolution: the domestication of the Mortal food supply. Some Uroboros believed farming was dangerous and needed to be squelched. Others argued it was a great advance because now the land could support a larger blood supply. There was a general agreement, Leana said, to let it unfold and, under close, cautious scrutiny, see what happened.

The changes were profound. In animistic metaphysical systems, animals were usually a kind of people, people a kind of animal. With the rise of agriculture, however, fauna became less sacred; animal dances and hunting rituals faded, and we became primarily gods of the sun and moon, the wind and rain. Myriad cults emerged dedicated to the mysteries of the heavens and seeded earth. Farming required us to track solar and lunar cycles in order to mark seasonal variations. Of course, where we saw objective patterns of celestial movement, Mortals perceived fantastical beings engaged in epic adventures. The stone shrines were aligned with the heavens, anchoring this sedentary lifestyle to the cosmic drama, harmonizing Mortals with the land, a stable spot in the starry swirl of time.

As it progressed, the experiment started to accelerate non-linearly: population sizes mushroomed, labor specialized, food surpluses surged, and the first true cities emerged. Many Uroboros decided to leave their rural caves and live in the temples, so they could oversee their urban herds. The workers produced enough food to free up a small cadre of loyal elites who were trained to manage daylight operations.

These early riverside cities became more massive than anticipated, though, with priests and royals, merchants and craftsmen, scores of laborers working the fields and constructing buildings. Uroboros had to jettison hunter-gatherer ethics, based on taboos and clan-based retribution, and implement new institutions and moral codes. The trick was getting strangers to bond and cherish the city as much as kin and clan, channeling Mortals' capacity for obedience and loyalty into a more abstract notion of family—the nation, the empire—reinforced by a new emotion: patriotism.

But these achievements were always tenuous; constant climate shifts and crop failures undermined long-term stability. Many of the early cities failed. Conflicts arose and, for the first time in Uroboric history, ideologically-opposed camps formed. Leana called these groups the Haveleva and the Qayniqi. The Haveleva argued that cities were unsustainable, spawning excessive warfare and pestilences, throwing the natural elements out of balance. The Haveleva were the source of all those stories about agriculture being a curse and hunting-gathering a lost paradise, myths I'd once dismissed but now took seriously. The Haveleva believed ecological balance, a principle called Maodoam in the old language, demanded small populations and low-tech culture.

“Why build a temple,” Leana said, dispensing some old Haveleva wisdom with a grim sense of irony, “when a cave will do?”

The Qayniqi believed that urban centers were still the best way to withstand environmental volatility and maintain an adequate blood supply. Although their way initially prevailed, cities were too complex, inspiring technologies whose powers were underestimated, innovations like literacy. Writing emerged as a way of tracking commercial transactions, growing more and more sophisticated as city-to-city trade flourished. Uroboros restricted the proliferation of writing, limiting its use to temple scribes and royal bureaucrats. Over time, though, writing evolved into a means of chronicling history and systematizing knowledge, fueling ever more abstract and imaginative thinking in the Mortals who were allowed to use it.

I'd never questioned writing itself. In a world of countless papyrus scrolls, wall after wall, column after column, of hieroglyphic tales, I took the technology itself for granted. Leana argued that writing eventually led to the rise of monotheism. How else could an invisible, transcendent god prevail except through the 'authority' of the 'revealed' word? For all our insight, we failed to anticipate this, and the mental restlessness we had exploited so effortlessly eventually bit back.

“We were like a charioteer,” Leana explained, “whose reins had come undone long before he realized it, and when the chariot flipped, the horses kept on galloping until they realized they were free—free to circle around and stampede the charioteer.”

 

Fragment X

Caucasus Mountains. ca. 900 CE.

 

...When the knights finally rode away, we crept down the grassy mountainside, crouched behind a rock above the road, and watched the little stone church in the moonlit valley below. I saw the priest’s lantern move past the windows. “He’s still in there.”

“Alone?” Baldir asked, leaning against the rock, knee bouncing eagerly.

'Baldir' might have been a self-disciplined deity in his day, but centuries of stalking the countryside had turned this Uroboros into the very thing monotheists claimed him to be: a ferocious beast, a vicious demon. When I nodded, he bounded from the rock like a wolf. I gave chase, crossing the road, leaping the stream, scurrying through the misty grass, trying to keep up.

Throwing open the church doors, Baldir burst into the sanctuary. I made it inside in time to see the priest turn and scream. The brown-robed man jutted his arms out as Baldir slammed him into the altar, shattering his skull, blood spraying onto the golden cross on the wall above the altar. I rushed over, ripped the hem of the robe, and wrapped the oozing head to staunch the bleeding.

Stepping over the man’s jerking body, Baldir grabbed the cross from the wall and ran his finger through the blood. He held it up to the light before licking it clean; then he gazed at me with shiny black eyes.

“Strange,” he said with a sarcastic grin. “The blood of the saved tastes no different from the blood of the damned.”

“We have to go,” I told him, grabbing the priest's body and hoisting it over my shoulder.

I was halfway to the door when I realized he wasn’t following me. He was still at the altar, drawing bloody shapes on the wall: an upside down cross, an inverted pentagram.

“Baldir!”

It was too late. Ten or so Alanian knights were galloping across the foggy meadow, unsheathed swords glinting in the moonlight.

Had they heard the priest’s cries and turned around? Or was this a trap? Was the holy man merely bait? Was this even the missionary who’d been converting the peasants, or had the knights dressed up a prisoner as a decoy?

They ordered us outside, calling us 'uburs,' their word for bloodthirsty demons. I'd heard other vile epithets before—vetālas, bhūta, impundulu, lamia, vrykolakas, strigoi, draugr—but it was the first time I’d heard this one. It wouldn't be the last. In the Slavic tongue, 'ubur' becomes 'opir' and eventually 'vampire.'

I asked Baldir if he was ready. He nodded sharply, panting in anticipation of the violence to come...

 

Fragment XI

Caucasus Mountains. ca. 900 CE.

 

“We were almost to the river,” I told Leana, “when Baldir turned and confronted them. It was as if he couldn't stop himself. The knights circled, their rage feeding his rage, like wind to a fire.”

“Mortals,” Leana snorted, shaking her head, “unruly, petulant children.”

She put her lips to the crack in the priest’s skull and slurped, sucking it like a piece of fruit. When she had finished, she leaned against the cave wall, her jaws and chin soaked.

“They pray to the face they've given to their own powerlessness,” she said, “worshiping a figment of their imagination, like a spider bowing before its own web.” A painful chuckle seized her moist face. “When we lost control of the Great Myth, we lost control of them.”

I didn't want to be in Leana's cave, but it was closer to the river than mine, and she had told me about the church in the first place. So I felt obligated to share. It was a purely logical calculation: in the future, she'd be more likely to reciprocate.

Pulling the priest's body close, I told her about how the knights managed to corner and pin Baldir down. “When they put their swords to his throat,” I said, dipping my fingers into the skull and scooping out a clot, “they seemed certain that, in order to save him, I’d surrender.” I gulped the sour gob. “It must have mystified them when I jumped off the cliff instead.” I licked my fingers clean, trying to ignore the stale flavor, the lumpiness—trying not to think about all the sweet juice that had once been at my disposal.

“They’ll die to protect one of their own,” Leana said. “They think it's honorable.”

I took one last repugnant drink before shoving the corpse aside. A cross dangled from the priest's neck. I jerked the leather strap free and held it in my hand.

“They lay down their lives for each other,” I said. “Baldir is dead, and I feel nothing.”

“The herd instinct.” She rubbed her belly, a slight bulge to it now, like a half-filled wineskin. “What was once a weakness is now a power. Strength in numbers.”

“In time, everything becomes its opposite.”

She shot me a quick, wry look. “They say only gods and beasts can live alone.”

Uroboros never lived in large groups. Even in sprawling cities, you would rarely catch more than a few of us together at a time. When necessary, we formed small, loose affiliations based on rational self-interest and pragmatic compromises, the kind of agreements that Mortals, with their tribal commitments and irrational needs, could rarely make. It was hard to recall what it was like to be a truly social creature—to feel the sting of loneliness, the ache of being ostracized.

Mortal infants come into this world weak and vulnerable precisely because their key survival skills are post-natal, their soft skulls sheltering the over-sized brains needed to learn to speak and become a member of the group. In order to raise their fragile offspring, Mortals must band together with an intensity unparalleled in the rest of the animal kingdom. Scientists now say that high oxytocin levels account for their capacity for enduring love and trust, for duty and self-sacrifice. Uroboros have significantly lower oxytocin levels. The Elixir rewires our brains so that all feelings of pleasure center around extracting and consuming blood. Since we reproduce by viral means, we stop craving sex. We no longer seek the comfort of belonging to a group.

I often wonder if Mortals' deep social instincts are the ultimate source of their overactive imaginations. Perhaps superstitious beliefs are part of the same neurological soil as the ability to empathize with another person's pain so intensely. Maybe that's what inspires some to sacrifice themselves in order to save others—the very reaction those Alanian knights expected from me the night I jumped from that rough Caucasian cliff, leaving Baldir behind to be hacked to pieces...

 

Fragment XII

Siberia. [Time unknown]

 

...When the midnight sun had finally gone down, I left my cave and set out across the featureless tundra, leaving a steamy cloud in my wake as I warmed my body to a more comfortable temperature.

Journeying to the same spot I’d camped in for who knows how long, I pitched my yaranga, my spacious seal-skin tent, and sat down beside the opening, taking in the vast, rime-crusted view. I had one hundred and eighty nights ahead of me: hour upon hour of sweet, unbroken darkness, except for the moon, the stars, and the Northern Lights—hour upon hour of peaceful solitude, except for the Chukchi shaman who believed I was the Sun. Judging from the tracks I’d noticed along the way, the reindeer had begun their migration.

The shaman would be visiting me soon.

I’d traveled here centuries ago in search of tranquility, believing this was the edge of the world. I had gone back in time, so to speak, to a simpler epoch when Uroboros firmly controlled their Mortal herds. I had gained a sense of what that world was like from the Elders tales I'd heard during my nights in the Caucasus (See Appendix C for a detailed, scientific discussion of...