Path of Death and the Soul
A Path on the Road of Bones
Nickname: Necronomists
The dead do not walk. The dead rot. Sometimes their sould linger in a tormented in-between state. But eventually even they pass, to Heaven or Hell or to whatever fate lies beyond earthly experience. And yet, vampires walk and vampires are dead. Their organs are rotted, vestigal things. The Embrace purges out every bodily fluid but one. Vampires are dead, but they walk. How can this be?
The simple, glib anser is that vampires are cursed by Caine's legacy. But a mere curse cannot defy the order of things.
Vampires are therefore something else, something not perfectly understood. Various undead have tried to solve this mystery. A few have made it an obsession. The necronomists are among them. Death, the afterlife, the strange anatomy of vampirism, the scinece of the soul - these are believed to be the Enochian keys to opening the secrets of the universe.
If only they could be understood.
Basic Beliefs: Vampires are dead things. They are cursed, animated corpses, but they are dead, cold and unliving. A vampire's soul is trapped, cut off from the mortal world in life, but unalbe to move on. This morbid state has been the subject of discussion by Cainite philosophers since the nights of the First City. Fascination with the issue has never wavered and Kindred of these Final Nights still pursue the secrets of their exisence and the knowledge of death.
Vampire existence is a key to all knowledge. Straddling two worlds - the land of the living and the land of the dead - a vampire must claw the secrets of Creation from the night. To attempt to unravel such mysteries, a necronomist must first understand her own state and know what it means ot be undead. Necronomists do not speak of a "living world" and a "dead world." They sepak of the rational universe and the irrational realm of secrets, spirits and pain. Students of this path must develop a deep comprehension of the soul, that spark of irrational divinity that exists in the rational universe. A necronomist must discover how the soul interacts with the body, and how the soul migrates from its clay shell to what lies beyond.
Necronoists may project a demeanor of cold rationality, but they believe that powerful emotions - hate, love, despair - are expressions of the spirit bubbling up from within. These powerful eruptions are to be treasured and explored. Followers believe the heart of the human romantic, and the physical, dead heart of the vampire. When a wooden stake is driven through an undead heart, a vampire is paralyzed. Thus, when the soul is violated, a vampire cannot move. The soul drives a vampire's corpse. Like the ghosts that necronomists study, vampires are driven by emotion, by the heart. Blood flowing from the vampire's heart gives power to his dead limbs. Blood transubstantiated from base liquid and iron becomes magical and fuels a vampire's powers. The blood literally is the life, and the fountain of all magic and might.
Like several other faiths, the Path of Death and the soul seeks to repress the Beast by denying it, and by pursuing knowledge and understanding against all else. But the knowledge these vampires seek is scientific comprehension of the vampiric state and the Beast that sleeps within. Necronomists repress the Beast and study death so they may at last confront and destroy their inner creature. The Beast is believed a viceral, animalistic ting and is diametrically opposed to the soul.
So, the soul is the key to a vampire's existence. If the soul can be understood, a scientist has a key to understanding the irrational universe. It is then his duty to pass that information along, into the rational world. Necronomists are therefore a group of academics. Though they are obsessed with death and the world beyond mortal perception, their interests are not the scrabblings of the occultist or the ritualism of the necromancer. They seek to categorize, dissect and experiment.
Avenues of Research: Two very promising lines of investigation into the soul have provide to involve the Asian ("Cathayan") vampires and the thin-blooded. Stories claim that the souls of both of these vampire "species" spend a little time in the Underworld before returning to life. Some followers of this path work on a "unified theory of vampirism" and seek knowledge from Noddists and others to establish the exact nature of the relationship between Cathayans and Cainites. Some necronomists suggest that Cathayans are actually childer of one of the so-called Second Generation whose curse has changed over the ages and miles. Instead of the "blood" being passed down from sire to childe, the Curse has become an expression of some predetermined destiny. Necronomists have recorded ghosts speak of things known as "death signs." Perhaps these marks designate all Cainites. Perhaps no vampire is ever Embraced randomly, but some other force of death or predestination leads sire to childe. Many vampires dismiss such possibilities, but to necronomists they remain tantalizing possibilties. Perhaps a fated Embrace is all part of an Antediluvian plan.
Another issue that the path faces but cannot seem to resolve is that few ghosts persist as long as ancient vampires. Spirits ultimately "move on" to some other plane or state, apparently transcending the in-between realm of the land of the dead. Do they merely cease to be, subject to some special case of thermodynamics or do they move beyond science? Is there a Heaven or Hell? Is there a God? Other path philosophies delcare and define such tings, but the necronomists know what they don't know. Some path followers claim that the in-between state is a borderland between life and Hell, and that Hell is close, but heaven is eternally distant. Some adherents fear that their rational invstigations and their perfectly categorized understanding is terribly incomplete and perhaps utterly flawed. Necronomists, despite their incredible array of sources and in-depth records, usually work from partial records and second- or third-hand sources. The power of Necromancy is greatly reduced from ancient times, if the tales are to be believed.
Scientists also apply thier philosophy and research to the souls of diablerized vampires. The necronomists have spent decades debating and studying the fate of thse spirits. They have followed Caitiff diablerists and roamed with Sabbat war parties. The Sabbat tolerats - encourages - diablerie, but researchers, who are unwilling to taint their objectivity by committing diablerie on their own, wait until a subject runs afoul of Sabbat justice. Sect leaders have found that condemning traitors to necronomist laboratories is a useful way of maiintaining discipline. The offender is experimented on, and investagators have developed ways of tormenting souls to see which is capable of the most response. No results have been released yet, but rumors and leaks abound. It is said that a powerful diablerie victim might overwhelm its murderer and make the attacker's body and mind its own. If this proves true, then the sect itself could be in danger. How many Sabbat leaders - the great heroes of the Anarch Revolt and the wars with the Camarilla - have powerful spirits inside them, consuming them from within?
By seeking the mysteries of the soul and the afterlife, students of death explore an array of secrets. There is far more to the mysteries of the irrational universe than any one vampire can understand. By obsessively seeking these mysteries, followers of this path distract the Beast, but few ever discover enough to conquer it. Some speculate that the Beast can never be overcome completely. As a result, some investigators perceive destruction as an escape, the only salvation from the ravages of the Beast. But until they can lay down that burden, they seek to understand as much of the road ahead as possible. Forewarned and forearmed, they can move on.
Necromancy and the Giovanni: The Giovanni despise the necronomists. The study of vampiric Necromancy may be older than the Giovanni, but the clan claims proprietary rights to it. The Giovanni do not tolerate family members either contacting followers of or studdying the Path of Death and the Soul. The necronomists, for their part, would dearly love to gain access to Giovanni libraries. The scientists are at the forefront of the search for any lore left by the slain Cappodocians. Their intricate theories on the nature of the afterlife derive from what few Cappodocian texts remain.
Though family policy prohibits contact wtih necronomists, the Giovanni would be very interested in gaining access to the investigators' discoveries, too. Some clan members have attempted to infiltrate the Sabbat and the Path of Death and the Soul, but it is unlikely that any have survived.
History: The Path of Death and the Soul was teh first faith codified by the Sabbat at the Black Monastery. It is an offshoot of older moralities - one followed by the Cappodocians and another (or possibly several "gnostic" or vampiric "mystery cult" philosophies all concerned with the nature of th vampiric condition) now lost to history. (For all their scientific bent, the Necronomists are clearly nto historians.) The Tzimisce believe that this path has always been theirs and that Tzimisce and his childer from the earliest nights were obsessed with these philosophies. There have always been Fiends who study death and the limits of pain.
During the Age of Enlightenment, the path adopted many mortal scientific methods - experimentation, documentation and emperical discussion - and used them as a bulwark against the sheer insanity of their investigation. The irrational universe is not easily understood in rational terms, they know, but ther has to be a series of rules that can be mapped and understood. By recording their studies, by obsessively calibrating and re-checking each experiment, and constantly refining their knowledge, the necronomists seek to distill the formulae and theorems needed to codify that other world.
Current Practices:This path has many elaborate rituals. Human and vampire sacrifices are common. Most necronomist experimentation has a ritualistic quality. Such ceremony and research seeks to bring the soul clower to the forte, where it can be examined, understood and dissected.
By testing willing volunteers and human and vampiric victims, scientists can better understand the spirit as it suffers. Such "tests" allow one first-hand experience with the nature of human mortality and suffering. Is there, as some claim, a state of clarity beyond pain? does every soul have access to that rarified state? Is there a final limit to pain or can a mortal shell be made to suffer endlessly in an infinite crecendo of exposure? These are crucial questions. While mortals make interesting subjects for further studies, vampires are infinetly more malleable and repairable. Vampires, with their heightened senses and brittle emotions, are perfect test subjects.
Necronomists are not just sadistic scientists - they also subject themselves to the same rigorous intellectual and experimental scrutiny. Researchers frequently volunteer for experimentation by other interested parties. Indeed, a teacher may fulfill his role by submitting to the inquiries of those below him on the path.
Below these explorations of the physical world, necronomists study the afterlife. Of particular interest are the circumstances by which ghosts are formed. these wraithly presences seem to be remnants of strong individuals, or the last of people who perished with so much passion or frusteration that something remained. Soem scientists play games with chosen subjects before death, by interfering in the mortals' lives, taking away things that were loved, hurting them and then arranging one final accident. Others kidnap mortal test subjects and use them for experiments and then, when the time is right, torture them to death to enhance subjects' suffering. These efforts have proven effective in creating ghosts, but many seem possessed of a terrible inner darkness - perhaps otherworldly expressions of the Beast - and need to be destroyed. Necronomists also study ways to destroy ghosts and some explore necromancy for this purpose.
