Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm taking a momentary break from chasing down photos of my lineage. Today is the spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere, one of the holy days of the Druid calendar, and this is a photo of the spring equinox sunrise as seen from an ancient stone chamber at South Royalton, Vermont -- one of many astronomically oriented megalithic sites here in New England. The photo's courtesy of New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), which was gracious enough to send it around yesterday morning.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I have a question about a troubling possibility that has occurred to me about a video game, namely Undertale. The game is a deconstruction of RPG games, and ones of the endings is reached by murdering everyone in the game. This ending, called the genocide run, is truly difficult to achieve, due to the way that many of the character beg and plead for the lives; not just with the character, but with the player as well. There’s another weird thing which happens in this route, where your character mentions that the character's soul does not exist, and explicitly makes it clear it is the player’s soul driving things.

After killing everyone, the game world is destroyed, and the game displays a blank screen rather than any kind of menu. This remains even after resetting the game.

There is no way to replay it, as everything is gone; however, if you wait for ten minutes on the blank screen, the game will offer to restore the world in exchange for your soul. You have no character (since the entire world is gone, character included); and the game repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, and has some weird lines where your character says they don’t have a soul but the player does, all of which raises a very troubling question: when people accept the game’s offer to restore the world in exchange for their soul, what happens? Is it possible for people to actually accidentally sell their souls by doing this?

Given the game was released in September of 2015 and was an immediate success, shortly before things started getting really creepy and weird, it seems like it could explain a lot if even just a small fraction of the people who played it did in fact accidentally sell their souls.....

[(Anonymous)]

Eerk! This scenario would make a good horror movie.

//Princess Cutekitten

[ecosophia]

It is possible that the game was demonically inspired and the contract is real; those who sell their souls don't do it "accidentally" -- they agree, however cluelessly, to a contract. Never, ever, ever treat something like this as a joke.

[(Anonymous)]

a) According to the steam charts, there were a million sales on steam by 2016. If even just a quarter of the people who bought the game completed it, then that's a quarter million people who unwittingly sold their soul. That seems like a huge number, and it seems to me it could easily explain why things went so weird so quickly.

b) I wonder if this explains why I found the game so creepy when it first came out. I might have sensed the link to the demonic and reacted accordingly.

c) What would it look like if someone had actually unwittingly sold their souls, beyond a sudden creepy and unpleasant vibe to them? I ask because quite a few people I knew were into the game when it came out, and all of them changed quite dramatically around then....

[fraterquidam]

For what it's worth, it's pretty hard to get the "genocide" ending, so I suspect a quarter is a large overestimate. I played and finished the game, but like most people I chose peace when possible and got one of the normal endings.

[jruss]

I am given to understand the creators of Undertale are what we would call woke now as well as being well as Satanists who yes practice the occult, particularly Chaos Magic and called the game a spell for change, cannot track down that quote now however.

[(Anonymous)]

Undertale had a single creator, Toby Fox. For what it's worth, I can't seem to find anything that relates him to any kind of occultism. Or much about his political views for that matter. His stated inspiration for the game include an older video game series called Earthbound, which as I understand Undertale superficially resembles in it's artstyle, and internet culture in general. His twitter page seems to be mostly just him posting updates on his current projects as well as artworks and the like made by fans of his games. If he's an occultist he's hidden it pretty well...

[(Anonymous)]

I’m gonna have to strongly disagree with you on this one JMG. I understand that such things in media, especially an interactive medium such as this, can raise eyebrows among the occult community, especially those of the older generation who are unfamiliar with video games. But I think the OP is possibly blaming the for something else, this weird phenomenon he has not clarified yet. I have known many others who played the game and had nothing paranormal happen to them because of it. I also want to comment that to claim a video game is “demonically inspired” echoes the paranoia and fear repeated in the satanic panic era, which I really don’t want to see repeated in this community I respect. I would recommend playing the game itself (a JMG lets play series would be quite amazing in my opinion), and judge it for yourself. Also, I want the OP to clarify the weird phenomenon they experienced after playing the game. - LM

[liamq]

I’m not sure why anyone would disagree with the idea that it’s POSSIBLE that a particular video game was inspired by the demonic to achieve whatever ends the demon had in mind.

Games in general are complete time vampires that often overtake the entire personality of the victim.

The egregores behind games are clearly powerful enough to shape and morph individuals and their social traits.

But nope… no dark spirit would ever think of utilising this powerful medium.

[ecosophia]

By all means disagree with me, but my opinion remains what it is. There will never be a "JMG lets play series," because I don't play video games -- I've never had much interest in visual media and the only games that ever interested me were tabletop RPGs, which I haven't played since my teen years.

[(Anonymous)]

OP here: I never played the game. I found it weird and creepy enough I did not want to engage with it. As for what I meant by things getting weird and creepy, well, the entirety of the Trump campaign and presidency were just bizarre, both for what Trump did and what other people did in response to it.

[(Anonymous)]

How many of the people who played the game finished the Geocide Run and sold their souls?

Also, there are a lot of accusations here, several of which seem incredibly defensive...

[(Anonymous)]

If someone did unwittingly sell their soul, what would they experience? I'm wondering if the reason that there seems to be so much discomfort around this topic in certain Undertale forums is some sort of general fear/suspicion that this may be the case...

[ecosophia]

They probably wouldn't notice anything at all, but the people around them would notice that they became weirdly unbalanced, as though some kind of basic guidance had been shut off. They would behave in ways that would seem, to everyone who hadn't made the same bargain, irrational and ultimately self-destructive, but they themselves would insist that nothing was wrong, everything is fine, and what do you mean it doesn't make sense? Of course it makes perfect sense!

[(Anonymous)]

This is a very weird question, but in high school one of my friends forgot his lunch, and jokingly offered his soul in exchange for some of mine. I gave it to him, and it became a weird inside joke. We were both atheists, although I'm not one anymore. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of owning someone's soul, especially someone I haven't talked to in many years. Is there a way to return this soul?

[ecosophia]

Yes, you can do this. If you're comfortable invoking a deity, the thing to do is to offer the soul as a gift to the deity and ask the deity to put it back where it belongs. Do this in prayer. That should take care of it.

[(Anonymous)]

For what it's worth, this is treated as a bad thing in the game.

So the player-or-their-notional-proxy-or-something isn't making the exchange with "the game"; they're making an exchange with a character in the game -- the disembodied ghost of another human child from the backstory, a sociopathic one (having a close resemblance to the player character runaway child, which is used for a lot of narrative misdirection before the reveal; possibly the ghost is supposed to be a residue from the player character's past life). The ghost is ambiguously the narrator, but is not enough of a psychopath to actively push for wanton slaughter independently, in a normal playthrough just going with the flow narrating neutrally. However, in a genocide playthrough, the ghost is gradually strengthened in cruelty and in usurping the player-or-something's powers over the game world, as the player actively looks for fights with misguided spareable monsters to kill them and accumulate "EXP" and "LV", which are revealed in a twist to stand not for the usual "experience" and "levels", but for "EXecution Points" and "Level of Violence". (It's not direct genocide, it's just killing everything that can engage you in the battle interface where there's an option to kill it, and also a snowman monster. There's a shopkeeper monster who makes fun of the fact that you can't attack him through the shop interface, and how his holding you in conversation is giving the other monsters time to evacuate.) The ghost is the one who uses the player-or-whatever's power over the game world to nullify it entirely.

After agreeing to the exchange of their "SOUL" (after being harangued about thinking that they are above consequences), the player regains access to the main menu where they can make "full resets" and start a playthrough over. Normally a full reset is supposed to clear the entire game state, overriding the ways in which the usual save/load mechanics are subject to leakage via the rewind-immune memories of another character (a monster antagonist who, in the backstory, was accidentally resurrected by an infusion of the same reality-bending power of determination possessed by the player character, but lacking their own prior "SOUL" or its compassion). From there, it's possible to play for the "good" true-pacifist ending. Normally this ending has a scene at the end, either a cheerful group photo of the player character with the monsters who emigrated from the underworld, or a heartwarming domestic scene with the player character and their new monster adoptive mother. But after the genocide ending, both these scenes are irreversibly tainted; the player character's stoic expression is replaced by the merciless smile and red avid eyes of the ghost, and the faces in the group photo are crossed out in blood-red, implying that after the ending the formerly player-character hunted down and slew each of them.

There's a lot of ambiguity about what exactly is supposed to be what. I'm not sure the actual word "soul" is ever used with lowercase letters, but if "SOUL" is an acronym it's never explained. There's only a vague introduction of "your SOUL, the very culmination of your being", in reference to a little heart (a third the scale of the player character's body), which the player moves around to make selections from menus, and also to evade monsters' inherent magical attacks (and/or unwittingly hazardous magical self-expressions) in a "bullet-hell"-genre-inspired dodging arena that appears during enemy combat turns. (The last enemy on the genocide route has a number of fourth-wall-heavily-straining gimmicks, and one of them is that he uses the same attacks he uses inside the dodge arena against the the SOUL, while it's the player's turn, directly targeting the spaces next to the combat menu where the SOUL goes.) (In the much earlier game Afterlife, an afterlife city-management game by the unrelated company LucasArts, "SOUL" refers to "Stuff Of Unending Life", but that's probably not an intended reference.) It appears to have something to do with the player's access to the game world. In the sequel game it seems that the player's SOUL is in conflict with the new game's sometime player character, who at the end of chapter 1 beats themselves up to extract it and forces it into a golden cage; this might be because the SOUL is actually a moderating influence on them.

I wrote this before skimming the other comments, and it's weird that the other comments up as of this posting reference the idea of "player characters" in connection with incarnation, monsters, things not existing when a superior power isn't invested in them, the afterlife, and lingering ghosts.

[(Anonymous)]

Except, you need to keep in mind that when the exchange happens there is no game world because it has been obliterated, and there is no player character either, for the same reason, and the ghost has left for somewhere else. Additionally, this is one of the only times you can change your name without using a hack; suggesting, to me at least, that this your character is already gone.

Finally, the game breaks the fourth wall a lot, especially on the genocide run. So, it seems at least possible that this is intended that way; and that depending on who, or what, inspired this game, it may very well have the effect it claims....

[(Anonymous)]

It's at least implied that the ghost is the one who has taken control and is conducting the negotiations. It's the same ghost that shows up in the later corrupted pacifist endings, after all.

This is a little bit of a sore spot for me because I come from a Christian background, where the idea of "action X constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell, and trying to rationalize how this idea might be pathological and wrong also constitutes knowing consent to be deceived into refusing rescue by grace and coming to fully deserve Hell" behaved like a malignant cancer, that tried to attach itself to anything related to a different view of the supernatural than the Christian one. It's tied in with the whole binary internalization-projection self-hatred complex that critical theorists talk about: if you consent to the influence of anything your cultural authorities have labeled as the encroachments of the devil anywhere, it supposedly erodes your bright lines everywhere, and eventually blows up your whole moral practice and you start deserving the fates of the artificially-beat-upon outcast reprobates who are the projection-targets and internalization-sources for your repressed badself. For example, I think the mother of a family that was friends of ours banned her kids from playing any video games that had magic in them. This was not particularly uncommon in America thirty years ago.

However, of course that soreness wouldn't overrule hypothetical good epidemiological data about correlations between demonic-flavored derangements and playing the Undertale genocide route. And anecdotes are just a weaker form of epidemiological data, that are confounded by unknown latent cultural and individual degrees of propensity for data cherry-picking.

If Undertale were interpreted as a mundane artifact, there would be a quite coherent story in which Toby Fox was just trying to use the fourth wall as an additional medium of producing an artistic effect, presenting the player with the idea of potentially not having either moral or practical immunity from the consequences of using save/reload to try all the contingencies in the game to see what happens. This is literally the reasoning criticized by the last-ditch enemy on the genocide route: "and just because you 'can', you 'have to'". It's also the motive cited by the antagonist with the determination powers, for their descent into a horrific version of Groundhog Day (already undone before the game begins) and eventually ennui. The character who's the last-ditch enemy in the genocide route also, in the normal route, makes a number of pointed comments about whether you have a responsibility to go back and be more pacifist, since you're the only one who can control whether the underworld's problems get solved in a way that doesn't add to the pre-existing tally of tragedies. I suspect that the above story does, in fact, contain Toby Fox's actual conscious reasons for why to design the game that way.

That "moral of the story" is, of course, somewhat confounded by the fact that the final battle on the genocide route has arguably the best and certainly most iconic music in the game, though the final battle on the pacifist route has the second or third best.

It seems strange that "who or what inspired this game" should have bearing on how consent is construed here, if it wouldn't particularly be knowable to the person ostensibly doing the consenting.

[(Anonymous)]

Even if people aren't actually selling their souls, it doesn't say much for the nihilistic cynics who created this horrid 'game' or the directionless youths who actually thought there was anything productive or worthwhile about playing it. To me it seems more like a symptom of the cultural ennui plaguing us during the Long Descent.

JLfromNH/Orange Waggish Gorgon

[illyria2001]

This game sounds incredibly creepy; I wouldn't play it even if I knew for sure there were no demonic links to it.

[(Anonymous)]

[taps sign reading "Please don't feed the animals information cascades"]

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds like a prequel to my favourite creepypasta, NES Godzilla - https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/NES_Godzilla_Creepypasta.

[brendhelm]

Considerations, after having done a bit of research and watching a YouTube video of this scene (I don't own Undertale myself):

- This eventuality is apparently ONLY reachable if the player chooses to do the genocide run of the game and then desires to restart it. If the player plays through "normally", even if they do occasionally kill, it will never come up.

- There are, apparently, no achievements or other quasi-tangible rewards granted on any platform for doing the genocide run. The only reason you would do this would be to satisfy your own curiosity. In short, you have to be willing to do the genocide run, knowing that the only reward from doing so is your own satisfaction, and sincerely believing that hey, they're just bundles of code, it doesn't really matter.

- Playing the game requires agreeing to a third-party license agreement; however, this license agreement (readable through Steam without downloading the game) is short, has nothing whatsoever to do with souls, and explicitly mentions that the agreement is made under English/UK law and jurisdiction.

- Is it possible, through any means (including playing two separate copies of the game), to do the genocide run multiple times and reach the sell-your-soul scene multiple times? If so, wouldn't this complicate matters if indeed it is a real exchange of your soul (as you no longer actually have a soul to sell, but would still be able to make the agreement anyway)?

- If this is a real soul sale, who exactly is the "me" the soul is being given to? The...game? The developer who made it?

[(Anonymous)]

Ugh. I never understood why that game was so popular.

I played it in 2016 because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and it just left me cold. It was boring and depressing and I hated the graphics and the gameplay and the plot and the script. The music was ok though, in an 8-bit kind of way.

However, I got the same weird creepy vibe from it that I got from a load of pop musicians who have since started doing weird stuff like drink each other's blood and praise (and in some cases, dress like) Satan, so perhaps this just means my demonometer is functioning normally.

I did notice how the people who liked the game *really* liked it, to a (possibly literally) obsessive degree. In late 2015, I got mildly harassed by a game store 'assistant' for 10 minutes trying to get me to play it and going on about how good it was and then I had to lie that I was going to spend the credit voucher I'd just bought on Undertale and not the game I actually wanted. I then had to avoid the shop afterwards in case he asked me what I thought if it.

Also, I've said it before, but after I started banishing, I lost all interest in video games, which I'd been playing for almost *20 years* at that point. That must say something about them.

Mr Crow