Bloodstained Lore and Esoteric Texts

XombieMike kindly shot me that thread over on Reddit before I came over here. My paper actually includes the decryption for the Sigillum Dei.

I truly wish I had found this out earlier only to have been able to place some input on that. I used to teach English in Japan, perhaps I could have had one of my Japanese friends help me provide a simple explication of what was described in the text.

Alas.

Yeah... the Fullmetal Alchemist thing wears a bit clichéd on me as the Faustian curse for defying nature etc. etc. Opening the gates to become a truly God-like entity has a rather fresh feeling to it only explored once previous in the game Shadow Hearts, where God is the final boss (and Lovecraftian at that).

I'd quite like a take where the goals, not merely the dressing, drew on these older sources. It remains that, even if John Dee was a kindly soul, wisdom is not benign.

EDIT: The Faustian punishment for using magic is a classic trope in Western, Christian-cultured history. Even in light-hearted *The Sorcerer* (My name is John Wellington Wells, I'm a dealer in magic and spells), by the same writer of 'I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General', Johnny is consumed by his own magic and is the only character who dies.

I'd quite like to see magic treated more as a 'force of nature' moreso than a 'forbidden thing'. It's the motivations of man that really are where the horror lies.

ADDENDUM TO EDIT: And we all know what a man is...

Jul 13, 2018 15:21:24 GMT -6 yulia11 said:

I thought earth gods (sustained by mortal worship and the most powerful is the Christian God simply due to the concentrated worship on one entity and the sheer number of Abrahmic religion combined)were only on par with Lovecraft Mythos and you need universal reality warping to fight an outer god, who are worthless aginst the dreamer.
Japan was the last place untouched by Abrahamic religion at this point, and as long as you don't try to be actively malicious they will respect someone who study arcane. They also have more research in herbology compared to China. Guess the naytheistic ancestral worshipping China is just a withering memory now.

I apologize for my lack of response to your posts. Unfortunately, my focus is solely on the Mediaeval and Renaissance Western Esoteric practices and the texts, history, &tc. related to that era and that oeuvre. I branch out a touch to those concepts that relate (which is a surprising number), but when it comes to these things there is no authoritative primacy of perspective that can be stated as 'fact' over another.

We're talking about magic.

While science in the West found its beginnings there, and even moreso than 'Big Science' is wont to admit, they've napalmed every correlation and connection they possibly can.

I tend not to mince opinion the matter of belief and am a bit of an iconoclast in my field for studying what I study from a measurable perspective (science-based/physics/and citing primary sources and scholarly texts that are well-received).

Forgive me if I simply have no response to offer on your input. It is not that I don't appreciate the perspective, it's that I am not wont to make statements that can be perceived as challenging someone's personal beliefs.

I do hope you understand.

Jul 12, 2018 16:22:23 GMT -6 Cale said:

Yay! More discussions on Lore and all things esoteric! I actually see a lot of overlap with games and history, mysticism. Legends and games go hand in hand to me. Dark Souls does a great job of this, Anor Londo and Il Duomo, Domhnall and Henry VIII, Lost Izalith and Angkor Wat.

I love when a game incorporates real life. I feel Bloodstained is already doing a great job. When I heard they drew inspiration from the Laki Volcano I was excited! And what's better than ancient texts? The Liber Loagaeth and the Ars Goetia are musts for a game revolving around alchemy. I am hoping from tons of Grimoires in this game, or at the very least ancient books. We could use the Voynich Manuscript, the Heptameron, the Picatrix or Ghayat al Hikam, the Oera Linda Book, and of course we need the so-called “Grand Grimoire”, aka “The Red Dragon”, aka the “Gospel of Satan.”

Those last ones are eye-rollers.

The progression of the Liber Loagaeth is as follows:

The Corpus Hermeticum, the Asclepius, the Sefer Raziel Ha'Malakh, the Hygromanteia, the Liber Razielis, the Picatrix, the Liber Juratus, the Clavicula Salomonis, Liber Officiorum Spirituum, the Livre des Esperitz, De Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria), De occulta philosophia in libri tres, the Heptameron, the Arbatel de magia veterum.

From Dee, the author of the Liber Loagaeth proper: Libri Quinque Mysteriorum, the Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus (the Liber Loagaeth), the Compendium Heptarchiae Mysticae, the Heptarchia Mystica, the Monas Hieroglyphica, the Tuba Veneris, and then the deriding True and Faithful Relation which is like a 'sequel' to the Libri Quinque Mysteriorum delivered by 'the opposition' which colored Dee as an unwitting villain that has been argued to be the inspiration behind Faust.

This is off the back of my hand, so some other sources may be missing. Many of these are freely available to be read over at www.esotericarchives.com. Back during my time working on my Master's, I served as an admin under their Archivist, Khem Caigan, back when they used to have a chat to help folks understand the linkages. Sadly, trolls made the whole thing not worthwhile.

Perhaps also worth a look is the Orphic Hymns, which details the notion of the 'Chain of Being' used. Those magic incantations are the descending 'hierarchies' of entities that drop down to the entity one wishes to contact based on whatever sources being drawn on (to see the dizzying and conflicting attributions, see: www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/nameindx.htm).

The 'later' books aren't of relevance: The Grand Grimoire, the Grimoirium Verum, The Gospel of Satan, the Oera Linda, or any of that crap.

Anywho, there's some reading that I don't suggest doing aloud.

Jul 16, 2018 15:22:07 GMT -6 Cale said:

Here I thought the Grand Grimoire and Gospel of Satan were the same book.

I have no idea. Honestly, the sensationalism and frankly unethical concepts portrayed only have the dimmest echoes of the noble aims of the sources from whence they drew their inspiration. They claim to be Renaissance books, but were in fact written in the 1800s.

The Grimoirium Verum (18th century) is the only such grimoire I own, and even the 'symbols' used can at best be described in some cases as chaotic scribblings.

You start to see reaching claims of antiquity in these books where they claim to be written in the high Renaissance, but come from the Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution when such ideas fell to the wayside with the acceptance of Cartesian Dualism as the prevailing means of parsing reality.

Everything after that is heavily 'psychologized' and you start to see the 'reality is perception' wildness against the nobler attempt to seek for understanding of the natural world.

I regard folks who take such books seriously with some amusement, and admittedly a tinge of fear.

EDIT: A side story: My friend and (though he denies such a role) mentor, Khem Caigan, was actually the artist of the Simon Necronomicon. His feeling were mixed, it seemed, on that. He claims ownership of his work, but was always open in stating it was plainly a hoax that no one should ever have bought into. Regardless, the money he made off of it saved his life when he ended up unexpectedly homeless in New York.