“For even when we are not revolving these things in mind the sacred emblems themselves are accomplishing their own work, and the ineffable power of the gods to whom these emblems belong, recognizes of itself its own likenesses.”

— Iamblichus

First there is the Wood.

Cultist Simulator is not unique in this aspect: it is a common enough starting point. Dante begins his Divine Comedy trapped in a forest. Of course, that forest is not an actual forest—it is a symbol for the confused and fraught state the poet finds himself in at the middle of the journey of his life. Nor are the animals that he encounters merely animals: the leopard is his lust, the lion his pride, and the wolf his avarice. Nor is his cosmography the only one to use arboreal imagery in this regard. For instance, the Kaballa—a structured system of Jewish mysticism—uses the image of a tree to describe its own map of enlightenment: its roots lie in Malkuth, the Kingdom or earthly world, and travelling up the trunk—through the emanations—takes the aspirant to Keter, or the Crown.

But we are not talking about a literal tree any more than we are a literal forest, for allegory is the defining feature of occult literature. The forest is not an actual forest, but spiritual tumult; roots do not represent roots, but the material world. More fundamentally, occult literature denies the very usefulness of surface appearances. It is not merely that the rose is never just a rose—the rose is never a rose at all.

It is not merely that the rose is never just a rose—the rose is never a rose at all

We can even jettison the idea of allegory entirely, as surface appearances are not to be enjoyed for their own sake; the surface is effectively immaterial, a cypher to disguise meaning from the profane while ensuring the initiated will know what is being said. Reading, say, the seventeenth-century alchemist George Starkey’s notes and believing that his discussion of the Doves of Diana is some Roman myth is foolishness. Only fools believe a rose is a rose; we know that it means something else. To that end, there is a lengthy tradition of expressing secret knowledge in spatial terms. The fourth-century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis describes one vision where the number of steps leading up to the altar represent hidden alchemical truths. The Rosicrucians (a modern occult society in the vein of the Illuminati) claimed that the wisdom hidden in the crypt of Christian Rosenkreutz lay in the true understanding of its architecture. “As above, so below,” goes the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.

All occult literature is subject to this kind of layering, where real meaning is found like the stratified layers of rock below the surface of the earth. And yet, as Reza Negarestani notes, to excavate this meaning is to deform the experience of it: “Instead of layers and levels, Hidden Writing populates subways, sunken colonies, a social commotion teeming underneath.” The trick to true understanding, then, is to find and descend into old books, abandoned mines, empty tombs, and all other chthonic spaces.

The real draw of Cultist Simulator is its occult topography. The Mansus—the game’s occult centre—is another name for a feudal unit of land measurement and so expectedly, progress through the Mansus is framed as spatial, as the player moves from The Wood to the White Gate and so on. Similarly, the player has to mount expeditions to increasingly far-flung and obscure locations to find the materials they need to progress their knowledge of the occult: from a local abandoned factory, to the ruins of Dracula’s castle (of course), to places that are not recognizably part of our history, but nevertheless wait to be found.

The rite is a mirror that catches the image of the divine

Granted, Cultist Simulator does not allegorize some great truth about the nature of reality—unlike Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory, there is no outside meaning to be drawn from the shape of the Mansus. But any lesson would be beside the point: it is not primarily the content of an occult system that the game seeks to emulate, but the experience of the occult process. By situating the player in the familiar both professionally (the player starts as either a custodian, doctor, detective, or dilettante) and geographically (the city, the Wood) before sending them further afield into increasingly outré locales, the game mimics the transformation of the initiate into the master and the mundane into the supernatural. On a material level, the names used by the game—Port Noon, the Peacock Gate, the Museum of Worms—do not really matter, just as the colour of Zosimos’ steps or the Green Lion do not really matter. What matters is the hidden—the occult—meaning of these images. The surface of Cultist Simulator is the bespoke mythology of the Hours, but this fiction is simply a cover for the experience itself. The Watchman and the Witch-and-Sister are just names that disguise what is essentially a process of going further, going deeper, of leaving behind the mundane and becoming more and more familiar with traversing this occult space.

But what about the game’s actual space?

Depiction is not an empty signifier; ritual is not weightless

For the most part, the game is just a clear, flat, indigo workspace. This space is occupied by cards and ‘stones’ or verbs that can be shuffled around, allowing the player to create a space that suits them. Cards can be clustered around the stone they are most commonly used with or arranged according to colour and type—it does not matter. Usually, but not always, cards will snap back into their original position once the appropriate verb has digested them. This creates a dynamic and customizable—but ephemeral and fluid—sense of space. And, because the player starts with nothing but a dark blue tabula rasa, there is a genuine sense of growth and accomplishment.

None of which matters when the Mansus is revealed. In contrast to a plain indigo board is the map of a mountain, with place names like “The Worm Museum” and “The Ascent of Knives” marked out. The landscape makes no earthly sense—above the forest is a moat, while the outline of the mountain itself is drawn by flights of stairs. And cresting the peak of the mountain is the Glory, whose solar quality connotes the numinous, ineffable sublime. Partly by way of contrast with the board and partly by way of its totalizing effect, it is impossible to ignore this map. Elsewhere, through sheer repetition, it is easy for the player to become blind to most elements of the game—most cultists become just names at a certain point, most repeatable events are rote—but it is impossible to become blind to the coming of the Mansus.

When the player dreams of the appropriate area, they are given the option of choosing three cards. After the card has been selected, the player must drag the card to the gate they entered the dream from. But—importantly—once the Mansus disappears, the card selected does not appear in the “default” center position on the table, as almost every other new card does. Rather, cards drawn from the Mansus appear according to its place in the Mansus, often erupting onto the table and upsetting your careful arrangement. The world is mutable, changeable according to the whims of the player—the Mansus is the opposite; it cannot be moved or re-arranged. The player’s space is altered by the Mansus’ appearance precisely because the latter is more real than the world the player arranges for themselves.

The stones progress of their own accord, counting down the seconds as they do their own work

The game admits this much. In addition to the secret knowledge of various divinities are secret histories—works like Jean D’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire—that outline divergent narratives. Not merely “what ifs?” (e.g., what if Classical Greece had been conquered by the Persian Empire? What if Caesar had not been assassinated?) but radically different worlds altogether. The War of the Roads, the Kingdom of the Perseids—all names ripe with the poetic allure of our Bactria or the Wars of the Roses. Yet neither history is real in the sense that it has the hard facticity of reality that the others lack—or, to put it more vulgarly, in the sense that it is canon. Regardless of their narrative differences, these histories are united by their subordination to the Mansus.

Again, the Mansus and the Glory could be named anything else, but, so long as they bear the hard and hidden facticity of the secret truth, they work as signifiers of the ultimate point of occultism. They are signposts for the familiar, the worldly, and even the world itself—so that the player may disregard it—and the representative of the numinous real that the player must ascend towards. They are the shell around an occult space, meant only to delineate a sense of descent, of ascent, of progress.

And yet. And yet.

A process of going further, going deeper, of leaving behind

Depiction is not an empty signifier; ritual is not weightless. The late-third-century neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus noted as much when he argued for the use of ritual: “the sacred emblems”—i.e., statues, rites, incense, the like—“themselves are accomplishing their own work, and the ineffable power of the gods to whom these emblems belong, recognizes of itself its own likenesses.” Paraphernalia has its own power insofar as it draws the attention of whatever divinity it symbolizes or whose image it reflects. In making this point, however, Iamblichus is clear that whatever energy or power these rites have is solely from the gods, and not any innate quality of the ritual: “Thus the activities of the gods are set in motion by themselves and do not receive into themselves from an inferior source any principle of their characteristic energy.” The rite is a mirror that catches the image of the divine, but only because the latter is casting its image about.

I only bring this point up because Cultist Simulator is a game that lends itself to repetition, to cadence and repeated practice. The player will learn by trial and error what works and what does not—will fall into madness or rapturous frenzy over and over before learning the safe and prudent path to the Mansus. Once they have accomplished this feat, maybe they will do so again. How often the player retreads that path through the Wood, the White Gate, the Stag Door, and so on—always upwards, reaching further outwards. Over and again, while the stones progress of their own accord, counting down the seconds as they do their own work.

And perhaps I am wrong that the game’s content does not, strictly speaking, matter, and that the mere space or form or process of occult practice is what Cultist Simulator offers. Because merely going through motions, however pleasing the motion, is not enough to keep our attention fixed.

One then wonders what divinity looks at Cultist Simulator, its Mansus and its Hours, and sees its own reflection.

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