Assamite Sorcery

The distant viziers of the Assamite clan survey the fresh carnage wrought by their juniors with intoxicated detachment. They have withdrawn to Mount Alamut to pursue the mystical revelations provoked by their exposure to kalif. Kali/derives from the leaves and resins of a plant grown through sorcerous means; its consciousness-altering properties make its mundane cousin, the cannabis plant, seem tame by comparison. Because vampire blood doesn't circulate, the viziers must go to unusual lengths to enjoy the effects of their favored drug. They ply mortal minions with the smoke of the drug, and then drink their blood, flooding their circulatory systems with the desired intoxicants. Viziers find no shortage of willing minions eager to spend the rest of their lives puffing the all-powerful weed. The users don't care that prolonged use shortens their lives by decades. In fact, some Assamites have hinted that a few pre-Embrace apprenticeships to the clan involve serving as vessels for the kalif-sorcerers.

Roots

Assamite sorcerers regard themselves as above petty concerns of cultural loyalty or purity of tradition. As human creations, magical traditions warrant no more respect than any other potentially useful invention. They should and must be adapted to suit the viziers' goals. Still, their experience and scholarship remains largely limited to the ancient traditions of the Middle East. Their efforts to expand their syncretic approach to incorporate useful techniques from cultures further afield has mired itself in the usual slowness of thought that afflicts vampires when they attempt to innovate. Only three traditions truly feed Assamite practice in the modern nights.

High and Low Magics of Mesopotamia

The high magic of Mesopotamia, wielded by Babylonian priests and priest-kings, concerned itself with the maintenance of agricultural fertility and a hierarchical social order. These two things were interconnected; the specialized roles of many members of Babylonian society wouldn't have been possible without abundant crops. In the primal Mesopotamian myth, the god-king Marduk faces Tiamat, Dragon of Chaos, and is slain, but then achieves resurrection and defeats the dragon, returning order and fertility to the land. Mortal kings performed ceremonies to recount the deeds of Marduk and share his power. Each year, the holy king would accept a blow in the face from a priest; if the blow brought tears, fertility was assured. Further fertility rites followed, including an annual wedding to a sacred priestess representing the goddess of female potency. Assamites now repeat the forms of these rituals to their own ends. The fearsome ritual of diablerie, Rite of Marduk Slain and Risen, parodies these ancient forms here, the tears shed by the stricken high priest are tears of blood, and they signal doom for the victim. Lesser Mesopotamian magics included divination, which determined auspicious and inauspicious days for action using a lunar calendar and an astrological ephem-eris predicting the cyclic fortunes of the subsequent 473,000 years. Magicians interpreted dreams, and performed haruspications, auguries read in the spilled entrails of slaughtered sheep. The common people suffered from the ever-present fear of ghosts and demons; wizard-priests warded off such malign influence by consulting exorcists and donning protective amulets and talismans. Amulets were ready-made magical objects designed to fend off common curses, whereas magicians constructed talismans as one-time aids in the performance of specific magical feats. Actions that upset the social order attracted not only bad luck, but the attention of malign supernatural creatures who dwelt in the desert, in graveyards and in corners. Black magicians harmed their victims through curses, which could be performed from a distance. Spittle, a bodily substance considered more potent than blood, powered their curses. They also laid curses by fashioning an image of the victim and then destroying it.

Persia: Rites of Mithra

In ancient Persia, early followers of the sun-god, Mithra, communed with their deity through rites of ritual intoxication. Priests called magi promulgated his worship, giving us the root for the word "magic." Persian religion underwent a revolution in the seventh century B.C., when the prophet Zoroaster (sometimes referred to as Zarathrustra) revealed, in the sacred text Zend' Avesta, that the world's many conflicts were but a manifestation of a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. The supreme deity Ahura Mazda headed the armies of good; the destructive god Ahriman led the minions of evil. Zoroaster revealed that Mithra was Ahura Mazda's son, and incorporated him into ceremonies in which ritualists achieved ecstatic communion with the divine by drinking the fermented juice of the haoma plant. As Mithras, the sun god continued to attract the worship of the magically minded, and in late Roman times enjoyed a resurgence of worship as a pagan alternative to Christ. Roman cultists, including many soldiers and the Emperor Julian, added bull sacrifice to the ecstatic ceremonies; the intended beneficiary of Mithras' favor sat in a trench and allowed the blood of the slaughtered bull to run down over his head and shoulders. Several factions of vampires among the Roman ruling class promoted his worship Mithras' hunger for blood made him one sun god they could enthusiastically support. They also favored Mithras in the hope that his popularity might stem the growth of the troubling thing called faith; his worship was conducted through experience, not belief. They lost the gamble, and Mithras was forgotten except by the Assamites, who found elements worth copying in his rites.

Fusion of Traditions

The Assamite viziers took the ecstatic Persian rites of haoma as the basis of their magic, replacing its fermented beverage with the stronger smoke of the kalif. They spend months at a time in drug-assisted trance; if they went out hunting themselves, their entire program of inquiry could be stopped or even reversed. The viziers rely on their juniors to bring them the blood they still need to survive, and they understand that they must offer something of great value in return for a service they so thoroughly depend on. Accordingly, they've stolen precious time from their pure mystical inquiries to develop magical means of aiding their clanmates without leaving the confines of their mountain retreat. The viziers combine the Mesopotamian 473,000-year calendar of augury and practice of entrails-reading with Arabic kinanah to pick ideally auspicious moments for the staging of attacks. They use shir to cloak those who feed them with the concealment abilities of mighty djinn. With blood-spittle, with broken effigies, and with the names of ghosts and demons, they curse the targets of a hunt. They draw on alchemy to invest their incantations in potions and amulets, so that they can be triggered when needed. In a parody of the highest rites of Mithras, they strengthen favored hunters through blood baptism. The viziers twist the fertility rites of old Babylon to infuse the entire clan with luck and power, a use of Mesopotamia's high magic which carries with it a useful side effect: it binds all who benefit from it into a social order, cementing the loyalty of other Assamites to their viziers. For example, in a recent attempt to reestablish their influence over increasingly errant lessers, the viziers invited a cadre of the clan's most feared assassins to Mount Alamut to participate in the largely social ritual. While the long-term effects of the rite remain to be seen, it has enhanced cooperation between top assassins and viziers.
Although their rites may make reference to Marduk or Mithra and may draw upon the narratives of their myths as inspiration for the ritual actions, Assamites do not worship these entities; they do not revere gods they seek to become them.

Quest for Godhead

Drawing on traditions even further afield than the Middle Eastern ones to which they owe their magic, Assamite viziers believe they can one night transform themselves into entities of vast power, capable of remaking the world in their image. The secret of this transformative power can be found in a higher reality separated from the physical world by a barrier they call the veil. The viziers use kalif to pierce that veil. The kalif plant must be watered in blood to reach its full hallucinatory potential; naturally, the blood of other vampires grows plants that achieve the greatest potency. The viziers therefore need quantities of blood to sustain their greenhouses in addition to the stocks they themselves feed on.
Each vizier's experience of the quest to pierce the veil differs. They share their visions in hopes of agreeing on a base reality behind these varying perceptions. As they achieve consensus, their visions grow more similar. Many viziers now experience a vision as described below. Those who do not try to force their minds to perceive a vision that conforms to the accepted model.
The experience begins after ingesting large quantities of kalif blood in the midst of Mithraic mystery rites. The individual first sees the false world's details the tiles and columns of ritual chamber, the water pipes, the carpets and wall hangings separate and dissolve into tiny pinpricks that eventually grow so small that nothing is left to be seen. The celebrant sees nothing for a while. Then everything goes red. Finally a series of geometric forms, whirling spirals and bottomless cones that seem ready to swallow the visionary whole appears. The celebrant must walk into a spiral or fall into a cone. Then he finds himself at the bottom of a staircase, leading upstairs to an archway. As he tries to ascend the stairway, he faces fierce opposition. Visions of his life assail him. First come negative visions: memories of secret shames, past wrongdoings and traumatic failures. He must dismiss these visions and focus only on the stairway. If he succeeds, he can move up a step, then another, and another. The task requires fierce concentration. At some point, positive visions come: sensual experiences, recollections of love and comfort, feelings of power and mastery.
For centuries, the viziers treated this condition of blissful hallucination as the whole point of the experience. They lingered in a palace of pleasure, cooled by soft breezes, breathing ambrosial air, able to indulge any whim without consequence. They tasted vitae so sublime that it made them tremble with pleasure. With the stunningly beautiful, perpetually willing servants of this paradisiacal realm, they experienced dimensions of erotic pleasure far removed from the gruntings and pantings and biological imperatives of mortal sexuality. These couplings seemed to bring the participants into direct contact with the divine.
As they spent more and more time in the exploration of this realm, the viziers' grip on Assamite affairs slipped. Their indifference to nightly business trans-formed them from iron-willed, attentive advisors to withdrawn and distant figures of little relevance to the average clan member.
Finally the viziers concluded that in the state of bliss lay a spiritual trap. Constant pleasure, no matter how intense, could only serve as a dead end on the quest for true understanding. It drained the soul of energy, stole one's individual sense of purpose, and dulled the sharpness of the mind. There had to be more to their magic than this. That's when the viziers realized that the Station of Ultimate Rapture, as they dubbed it, hid something even more desirable: the way to become blood-gods.
The Station of Ultimate Rapture continues to interpose itself enticingly in the vizier's path each time he tries to ascend the stairs toward the ultimate truth. Each vizier must struggle to resist its blandishments every time he enters into the ritual. These temptations present themselves more tenaciously than the negative visions experienced earlier in the vision; no vizier can put them aside consistently. If the mystic succeeds in pushing them away, he again faces an arduous journey up the stairs, as the number of steps seems to increase infinitely. If he does reach the top of the stairs, he parts the veil and looks beyond it....

Reading What the Sky is Thinking

Manipulation of distance stands as the hallmark of Assamite sorcery; the sorcerer grants benefits to hunters he may never have met face-to-face. He seeks out targets from thousands of miles away, providing information on their weaknesses. The viziers see the 20th century, the era in which global communications shrunk the world into a single confused and fractious community, as the long-prophesied golden era of their kind. To their surprise and initial dismay, they've discovered a puzzling link between their long-sought state of transcendental consciousness and the ultra-modern miasma of radio waves, satellite transmissions and television broadcasts that now wreathes the world. As they traverse upward through the many stairways to ecstatic, kalif-fuelled bliss, they can tune their minds into CNN or tap
into data from the Global Positioning Satellite system. They call this process "reading what the sky is thinking." When the sorcerer sends curses to plague clan enemies on other continents, he now bounces his malign magic off the upper atmosphere, or piggybacks it on radio waves. At least, this is how their drug-altered minds now visualize the working of their magic. The sorcerer can listen in on a victim's cellular phone call, substitute the words of his interlocutor with a misleading message of his own, open a permanent window into the target's soul, or dispatch a dj inn to ride those signals to their source and vex the enemy. One vizier recently tracked an elusive Setite with a price on his head by following his purchases of Egyptian antiquities on an Internet auction site.
Although most of the viziers now enthusiastically explore their newfound connection between heightened consciousness and the global communications grid, a few fear that their colleagues may be throwing away centuries of inquiry on a seductive distraction. Others see distraction as the least of their worries. They fear the implications of a growing sensation that the communications grid they're so blithely involving themselves with possesses a transcendent consciousness of its own, one that is coalescing, with their unwitting help, into something much mightier than themselves. One vizier now lies restrained and gibbering in an Assamite private hospice in Beirut, after monitoring satellite transmissions while in a trance state. He concluded from them that the satellites were talking to one another, and that it was the global communications system that started and stopped the recent war in Kosovo.
Are they unwittingly giving it the powers of godhead they mean to seize for themselves? Unfortunately for them, recent events within their clan leave them little choice but to step further along this dangerous path. Apprentice Assamites no longer tithe blood to their sires as a matter of course; out in the world, it's every hashishayin for himself. Viziers must now offer good value for the blood they receive on every transaction. Their increasingly demanding lessers insist on guarantees, and aren't shy about dictating terms. Once they show that they can do something useful, the viziers must keep doing it, or starve.