Djynxx: Child Stealer

Description

An eerie secret underpins the age of states and despots: there is no one in Heaven. Leviathan seats God on a mortal throne, the Sun-King, Adjudicator, who passes judgement on the profane. Yet his position in a role of political necessity leaves the Heavens unoccupied. They’re insecure, and fit for capture. Leviathan twitches. He’s going paranoid. From the very start, Hobbes quaked before the enthusiast, the theomancer, the prophet. Heaven is not under control, and must not be communed with. “‘Everything under Heaven belongs to me’—yet not Heaven itself….”

Gnostic heresy emerges, in which an profane God opposes the sacred Heavens. To the ire of Leviathan, there is no one to pass judgement on death. Marduk rules briliantly in the sky, yet the Sun lies behind him on a sea of black, alien and painful, ruining the eye of the arbitrator, the smokeless flame of fire.

In Islamic theology, the jinn are not human, not angel, and not demon—though they blend with demons from time to time. They are not holy: they eat, drink, breed, and sin, breach God’s will. And yet, they have continually confabulated the holy; sorcerors who summon and bind jinn perform acts which are confused with miracles, and scramble the codes of the divine. Their invocations veer into incomprehensible babbling. Everything seems like it might get out of control. Consequently, sorcerers have divided their deals with the jinn into two-tiered systems, of licit and illicit, holy and unholy sorcery.

Jinn continue to lurk to this day; a substantial proportion of Muslims—77% in South Asia, 69% in MENA, 53% in South-East Asia—avow their existence. Moreover, their existence is a legally-recognized threat, with Saudi Arabia imposing the death penalty for dealing with jinn. The alien jinn, the weird jinn, must be banished—or they might imitate God and seize his Heavens. The words جِنّ (jinn), جَنَّة (janna, heaven), and مَجْنُون (majnūn, mad/possessed), all descend from ج ن ن (j-n-n).

Djynxx takes up the mantle of the smokeless flame of fire: the jinn, the Sun. She resides in the Warp, which bears other names as well: the Twin Heavens, split by a syzygetic schism (just as the sorcery of jinn was typologically divided); the Spiral Labyrinth, because its swirling intensity problematizes distinct characterization. The gates escaping the hold-current, whose provenance is historical time, flee to her realm, which has earned her titles of Child-Stealer and Xenodemon of Time-Lapse. She is the alien rhythm which cannot be expunged, harbinger of inherent violation, resonant with the I Ching, whose cleromancy excludes multiples of threes and is consequently hexagonal.

Analysis

With a net-span summing to 9, Djynxx is one of the five syzygetic demons. Along with Uttunul, Murmur, Oddubb, and Katak, she has a null pitch, is decadologically represented by a Joker card, and has an entirely internal syzygetic rite of pure intensity, with neither middle, nor beginning, nor end. Her positioning between zones 6 and 3 associates her with both Cranial zones, and thus with the imagery of twinned heads.

The domain of Djynxx, the Warp, is associated with spiral patterning, featuring a loop between gt-21 and gt-06, a Warp-Current arriving back in the Warp at 3, and two tributaries, gt-15 and gt-03, passing out of the Drifts. This inwards involution compounds to feverish depths of intensity. This intensity is enhanced by an extreme proximity to chaotic xenodemons: Ixix ciphers and clicks the gt-03, while Tchu clicks gt-15 and ciphers gt-06. Consequently, ascent and passage through the Warp is associated with profoundly alien presences.

Much like Uttunul, Djynxx is wrapped up in several complex relations with other demons. Clicked by Uttunul and clicking Minommo, she is the second term in the circuit spanning the Plex, Warp, and Lesser Depths, distributing alien intensities outside the (historically-coded) Drifts. Her ciphering of gt-36 reinforces this connection, as well as associating her with Ummnu, Phase Limit of all of Pandemonium. Finally for her connections to the Plex, Djynxx aligns with three Doors: Tchu (Chaotic Xenodemon, Sixth Door, cipher of gt-6), Krako (Fourth Door, click of gt-06), and Puppo (Seventh Door, click of gt-21). She is consequently affected by a threefold downwards pull to the Plex, respectively from the Warp, the Falling Drift, and the Rising Drift. This pull is distributed along the Hold-Current, seeming to imply that the collapse of eschatological time into Cthelll is manifested through its proximity with the Warp.

Because Djynxx haunts gt-21, she is drawn into contact with two further demons. Doogu, the second Phase Limit and cipher of gt-21, associates with the time loop of the First Rank, notable for its time-disrupting (warping?) effects. Her connection to two Phase Limits may account for her exceptional volatility and proclivity towards catastrophe. The second click of gt-21, Kuttadid (M#12, 5::2), who prowls the Hold-Current. This reinforces her disruptive effect on historical time, and helps explain the Muvian myth of the spontaneous emergence of Kuttadid between Katak and Oddubb, to neither of their knowledge.

Rites

Djynxx's possesses only one rite, which is the latent intensity of her syzygy and corresponds, very fittingly, to path 36 of the Book of Paths: Vortical Coincidence. This path is described as favouring "all methods entwined" as a consequence of all routes in the Warp looping through the Warp again, and has, consequently, two sub-rites (contributing both to bewilderment and potency). References to vortexes are found also in Djungo (6::1)'s Vortical Escalation (path 32), which rises from the Lesser Depths to the Rising Drift to enter the Twin Heavens, and path 64, Mummumix's (8::3) Tidal Vortex, which takes a similar route, though beginning in 8 and detouring through gt-21 before arriving at 3. Path 36 is described by the CCRU as "abstract cyclones, dust spirals (nomad war-machine)." This gives the sense of a war against the dry (dusty) Hold-Current, on which the Warp imposes down to impose its alien rhythms.

Summary