Derek told me about this series at one of our parties this weekend, and so I decided to take his place for Part III. He's got some janitor-ing to do today anyway. So I figured I'd talk to you about...the Abbey of Serpentis.
Hopefully, that name's got you hooked already! Because holy shit, it's the best over-the-top cult name you could possibly imagine. A.S. and Derek jumped on its ridiculousness right away when we heard of it. I'm sure one of us has already mentioned the long afternoons we spent in the elementary school library, reading up on old stories. What old stories? All of them. All of the weird, fantastic true tales of the occult, of madness and monsters, of ghosts and goblins. We discovered our Loveland frogs, our kongamato and mokele-mbembe, our LGMs and BEKs. For an elementary school, the library was strangely equipped for these sorts of studies. Whoever donated these books deserves to be canonized. They had Frank Jenkins' UFO paperbacks. And that led us into The Life of Mocata.
We definitely loved fiction: Lovecraft, Bierce, Poe. Being a flowering pagan, I was a fan of anything that depicted wizards, mages, ghost-hunters. I was especially obsessed with William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories for awhile. I loved the nonsense names of the spells from those stories: the Incantation of Raaaee, the Unknown Last Line of the Saamaa Ritual. So cool.
We looked for what we called "fantasy breaches" as well. Signs that the fiction world was bleeding over into ours. We discovered, through Harry Ashton-Wolfe, that Fu Manchu may have been real, as the Parisian criminal Hanoi Shan. Some obscure printings of W.B. Seabrook's The Magic Island contained references to Bela Lugosi's Murder Legendre. Of course, there were dozens of people who were all James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, and Eugene Francois Vidocq was both Jean Valjean and Javert.
But yeah! I was gonna talk about the Abbey of Serpentis.
One of the books we found contained some of the weirdest stories we'd ever heard. Stories about the hungry ghosts or jikininki, something called Tzaa, and, finally, the Serpentis cult. The most stereotypically amazing cult of all time. They were said to live in the sewers of several major cities, including Saint Paul during its "Saint Mudd" years. Let me say that again: a cult called "Serpentis" operated out of the sewers. A lot of folks apparently believed that the Abbey worshipped Satan, and to tell you the truth, I'm disappointed that they didn't. But they did worship some sort of snake-being--naturally, given the name. This creature was sometimes called Ophiuchus, or Abraxas, or Damballa. He seemed similar to Gekkos from The Life of Mocata, really, but this being was far beyond a Cthulhoid serpent-demon. Abraxas was said to embody the entire cosmos, and as such was the "Emperor" of all existence. Pretty intense.
Anyway. The Abbey would do the usual. Sacrifice people to their god. Have weird sex. Live in the effing sewers. They seemed pretty cool.
This is where it gets weird.
According to one of A.S.'s relatives, who lives just over in Morris, there's been talk about an "Order of Serpentis" that's been leaving floppy disks around campus, and making posts about them on the Morris Confessions Facebook page for the U Campus. I'd post pictures of these posts, but that requires traveling through the unrepentant filth that is that page. Presumably whoever's responsible is just someone who's also read that book. Given how close Morris is to Alberta, it could well be that they went to the same elementary school as all of us. Still, it's kinda weird.
Maybe I'll email A.S.'s cousin and see if I can get any updates on that. Sadly, just Googling Order/Abbey of Serpentis doesn't yield anything about the Ophiuchus cult that I'm talking about. If it'll help anyone who wants to do research on such a topic, here's a poem from that original book that I copied down. I think it was called "Snake Skin".
Ophiuchus
OΦ⛎CH⛎S
Lost
snake-god,
He
calls upon his minions to spread
His
snake-skin across the mountainside.
His
invocation is two crossed elbows
Across
a scissors-sliced body.
The elbows are from severed arms and
cross like this:
~
See?
Perhaps once his name was Marfik.
That means elbow.
That would be very funny, wouldn't it?
His body is red.
The last thing he saw was a glint of
light;
not from the blade but from the camera.
He is one of the many reflections
Glimmering in the Great Snake's scales.
The skin is dead, but it is still
everywhere.
It clothes the side of the mountain
where the altar fires burn.
I should try to find another copy of that book. I don't know if it's still at the old school or not.
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