Darkmanse and the Cult of Death

This image first appeared in the Cosmographia, a humanist treatise published in 1524 by the German mathematician and astronomer Peter Apian. It is often pointed to as an example of the pre-Copernican model of the universe that conceived of the Sun, planets, and stars orbiting around Earth. In fact, this image is a rather crude misinterpretation of a much older drawing, one depicting what was once among the church's most closely guarded secrets—that of the multiverse.

What Apian has unwittingly depicted here at the center of the spheres is not Earth but the earthly—that is, the material plane of the multiverse. It is said that this plane contains worlds of infinite diversity. To the Incunabula Builders—those ancients who carried on the work begun by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation—such talk is blasphemy.

To the builders, there is only the Darkmanse. As it is written: The Darkmanse was, is, and ever shall be.

Even in Isaac Newton's day, alchemy was still viewed as a legitimate avenue for the investigation of the natural order. So perhaps Apian can be forgiven if his conception of the cosmos—published more than a century before Newton's laws of motion—should be mistaken for an astrological chart depicting the celestial influences on the affairs of men.

As it happens, there may be some truth to Apian's astrological chart. According to some planetouched, there are spheres of existence beyond the material plane that influence the destinies of all mortal creatures. There are those who talk of the Feywild and the Shadowfell, echo planes that surround the material plane like a cocoon, mirroring it, occupying the same cosmological space. One is said to be a realm of the faerie, the other a place of toxic darkness, decay, and nonbeing.   

There are offworlders who claim that other planes lay beyond our material realm and its echoes, realms such as the ethereal, the elemental, and the astral. And beyond these? Apian postulated an outermost bounding sphere beyond all manifestation, one he called the "Habitation of God and All the Elected."

Scripture tells us that this outermost heaven is the kingdom of the maker. But there are those who believe that the maker—who bestowed on his creatures the most gracious sacrament of Megadeath, whose Holy of Holies lies hidden deep in the well of shadow that is the Darkmanse—some say this divinity comes from an altogether different place.

Ancient of Days

There are seven depths to the Darkmanse, just as there are seven kings and seven stars in the celestial diadem. What can it mean? And why the perverse veneration of death? Why does every inhabitant of this place, regardless of wealth or status, undertake the costly pilgrimage to enshrine their dead in the labyrinth?

What is a labyrinth if not a metaphor for the hero's quest? Is it not a symbol of the winding journey to the heart of the enigma? Does not the mystery of resurrection require a passage through the realm of the dead in search of the attainment of new life?

The Incunabula or "Cradle" Builders preached the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Until that glorious day arrives, the priests walk day and night in somber processions down the stone passages and through the sunless crypts of the Darkmanse, swinging their censers before them in clouds of incense as they recite from their chapbooks by guttering candlelight, their meaningless prayers echoing through the dead halls. Their unceasing prayer is a ritual cleansing of the dead, which lay silently in their ossuaries in the darkness, interred inside the Darkmanse to await a resurrection that will never come—but nobody ever said anything about reanimation.

The entrance to the catacombs is known only to the elect, but the Plough will point the way.