Memo by a religious studies scholar belonging to the Foundation: "the Broken Cargo" - SCP Foundation

Logically, only one of the following two propositions for "Mekhane" is true.

Mekhane exists.

Mekhane does not exist, and Mekhane is a consequence of purely artificial constitution.1

There is a scholar who is famous in the mundane world. Being a self-proclaimed militant atheist and a high-ranking cabal of a certain group of interest, he said in his book that “the messiah of Christianity did not exist.”[1]: 122 After being criticized by many people, religious and non-religious, he reluctantly withdrew his remarks and revised his opinion, saying, “It is true that he existed.”

However, even if the proposition that the Messiah of Christianity existed is (tentatively) true, this proposition does not mean that all the mythical records describing his birth, life, and even afterlife are also true. Let's take a simple analogy. George Washington, the first president of the United States of America, exists, but that doesn't mean that the proposition “George Washington accidentally cut down his cherry tree as a child, but he confidently confessed without hiding it” is true.

If so, in the binary choice above, even if the proposition “Mekhane exists” is true, it does not immediately prove that “the goddess Mekhane claimed by the cults of the Broken God, and the historical descriptions written in their catechisms, are true."

Let's move on for a moment. At least, in the mundane “history of normalcy,” the development of mechanical civilization was a splendid feat of the instrumental reason of human beings and the result of Entzauberung. Information technology, symbolizing modern society, is also an extension of this mechanical civilization. With the development of natural science, — or the rediscovering of what paranormal civilizations of the past had discovered — some scholars have even compared nature to machines. However, in their argument, the metaphor of machines only meant complex regularity and sophistication, not that machines themselves were superior and transcendent to humans. As the Middle Ages ended and Modern Times dawned, through machine development, vast amounts of energy could be easily transferred from one side to the other and converted. But machines were only human-made tools and still obeyed human control. Optimists prospected that technology would develop rapidly and all mankind would be able to enjoy the benefits, while pessimists talked about rapidly developing technology ‘suppressing human freedom,’ ‘making people one-dimensional,’ and ‘leading to rapid polarization.’ However, even from these pessimists' view, the product of technological civilization is presumed to be used as a tool. They just insist that those who dominate advanced technology will use it for their self-interest and evil purposes. Finally, a view widely spread by a particular movie series: machines and artificial intelligence will soon get out of human control and become a serious threat to humanity. However, in all three viewpoints about technological advancement: optimism, pessimism, and perilism, machines are not transcendental beings, nor are they objects to be worshipped by humankind.

Thus, the point is that the cults of the Broken God have a feeling of worship for the machine (considered the symbol of Entzauberung and instrumental reason), with a pre-modern way of Magisches Denken.

Let's return to the previous choice: “Mekhane exists.” ／ “Mekhane does not exist, and Mekhane is a consequence of purely artificial composition.” Personally, I think the former proposition is close to true. At least, I cannot think that Mekhane is a some pataphysical anomalous narrative that popped into our world. And if Mekhane does not exist, we cannot explain the archaeological findings of the Foundation, nor can we explain the existence of their primeval World Ultra-hyper-war, and above all, why the cults exist.

Based on the pieces of information from their catechisms, or the fragments of catechisms at least, seized by we Foundation,[4]: 23-54, 221-257, 651-703 and their doctrines and dogmas obtained from their detained devotees by the enhanced interrogation, they believe that the goddess Mekhane, or “WAN” by Maxwellism, certainly exists, and that their faith existed literally before the mundanely known origin of the humankind, and that what is written in their scriptures is the literal truth.[2]: 23-26, 44-50, 53-58, 72-73 Yet, by the Church to which these people belong, the scriptures themselves are different, and merely silly question remains: which scripture is true among them? If one or more of the conflicting scriptures, whether the Cogwork or Maxwellians, are false or not literal truths, it is quite possible to infer that the contents of all the scriptures of the Cults of the Broken God as a whole are not literal truths either.

For example, though I agree that the ruins we discovered and secured in Greece are from the ancient Mekhanite civilization, there is no direct content indicating worship or adoration. Interpreting these ruins as a sign of their worship of goddess Mekhane is merely an inference based on the testimony of devotees of the churches of the Broken God. According to the Foundation's official document, in the place where it was presumed to be a temple, we found only the word “Κύθηραkythera,” but there were no words “ΘεόςTheós”2 or “δαίμωνdaimon”,3 or any other terms whose grammatical roots are them.[5]: 33-69 It is possible that the place we have interpreted as a temple may be something far from religious practice, e.g., a manufacturing mill, a research institute, a weapon hangar-like facility, etc. I think we should also keep that possibility in mind.

Think of it this way: They could build and handle machines that were awestriking, trembling, and terrible, even for someone like me with a foot in this anomalous world. A certain writer once said: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” However, whether it is technology or magic, it is not so awestriking that it should be worshipped for those who can familiarize, handle, and improve it. People who live with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all countries on Earth are afraid of nuclear war. But what they are afraid of is some crazy U.S. president's sudden nuclear war declaration or inability to repair a malfunctioning nuclear launch system, not the elements of uranium or plutonium, not the physical phenomena of nuclear fission or fusion. If we think about it from this point of view, should we really think that the ancient Mekhanite Empire had worshipped the machine as their God?

What I tentatively think about these Cults of the Broken God is based on the following premises.

The ancient Mekhanite civilization existed, and this civilization collapsed because of the great war. The remnants of the collapsed Mekhanite civilization lead to the current sects and cults of the churches of the Broken God.

The scriptures and catechisms of the churches of the Broken God did not exist in the days of the ancient Mekhanite civilization and were recorded later. And they do not contain the literal truth.

There are many inferences about how religion is born. Among them, I would like to think of a totemistic perspective. Any human life is an extremely humble life compared to nonexistence. Both the life of the ‘barbaric primitive’ and the life of the ‘most civilized modern humankind’ cannot escape the tragedy of recognizing themselves as a solitary being by recognizing themselves as isolated beings from nature. The primeval people, who would have lived a humble life just like us, had animals and plants as their totems. This may sound ridiculous, but in fact, modern civilization is also a kind of totemistic worldview. The totems were created for such humble humans to heal the scar between themselves and nature. The environment faced by modern people is not a natural environment but a technological environment, where the technological civilization is full everywhere; thus, technologies become the totems for modern people. Even for the primeval Mekhanite civilization, their environment was the paratechnological environment, so it can be inferred that they were also people who lived in the worldview of technology totems.[6]

The ancient Mekhanite civilization must have had tremendous technologies. But in my opinion, the Mekhane was just a literal ‘machine,’ or 'software,' or 'technology,' and these were merely tools used by the ancient Mekhanite people, not their Theós.4 However, even with the powerful mechanical troops, the great civilization could not stop the hordes of the Flesh, and their country eventually collapsed.

In the process of their collapse, numerous scholars they admired must have been dead, factories that made various artifacts must have been demolished, and many documents and computer servers that recorded their research outcomes and history must have been destroyed. Even in the case of the Xia dynasty, which existed in modern-day East Asia, their existence was anomalously erased. The only things that remained must have been the artifacts that remained few compared to their heyday, a handful of survivors, and ‘primitive people’ who might have been assimilated by some survivors of the Mekhanite civilization. Some of the Mekhanite civilization survivors may have been engineers or scientists. Still, not all of the survivors could be masters of their science, and the majority of the refugees must be laypeople of science, who only consumed the products of civilization. The refugees who were laypeople must not have known the specific principles and knowledge to operate their remaining artifacts, and it must have been the same for people in the world of normalcy outside of Mekhanite civilization. For these people, remaining artifacts must have been like legendary treasures, that could not be restored once damaged or lost. The people who owned them must have had an attitude to cherish their technologies or parts of them as ‘regalia’ or ‘halidoms.’ As this attitude continued through generations, the practice of worshipping the tools would have emerged. Consequently, only a few remaining documents and oral traditions on the history of the ancient Mekhanite civilization and crude eyewitness accounts of foreigners were mixed over time and made into scriptures. Let's assume the initial Broken God faith is a totemism. Compared to animals and plants that other ethnic groups used as their totems, the technology is visible and tangible like other totems. But at the same time, it also has invisible parts full of incomprehensible mysteries. Thus, the worshipers must have come to regard themselves as something special that distinguishes them from others.

Although I use the term ‘technological civilization’ to refer to the current mundane world, it can be divisible into several periods. From the Middle Ages to Contemporary times, from an epistemological perspective on machines, four mechanical devices have appeared sequentially: the clock, the balance, the engine, and the computer. In the question of ‘work’ and ‘energy’ of machines, The clock was a symbol of mechanical and elaborate laws reaching even to the fine points, and the balance was a symbol of nature with harmonious movements created by an equilibrium of attraction and repulsion. The engine introduced a new concept of ‘energy — the ability to work’ instead of the ambiguous concept of 'force.' In addition, new phenomena such as the conversion of coal chemical energy into heat and work were considered to be studied as key elements of nature; thus, the ‘natural philosophy’ was expelled by ‘physics.’ Finally, in the era of computers where I live now, a new perspective emerged that understands the concept of information as equally crucial as mass and energy and the real world itself as a device that processes information. Even the human brain is compared and understood as a parallel supercomputer that processes information.[3]

This story was intended to explain the history of the mundane world, but it can be applied to Mekhanites. As far as we can tell, Mekhanite civilization was an anomalous civilization, in a way, close to the ‘perfect archetype’ of human technological civilization, in which all “the clocks, the balances, the engines, and the computers” were developed to extremes. Ancient Mekhanite civilization had highly sophisticated automata, artificial intelligence that has been operated by itself for thousands of years, and — even though it's my own argument — some kinda factory. The sects schismatized from the Broken God faith have these symbols of technological civilization one by one. The sects can be likened to the old ritualists following Bumaro to the clocks, the Cogwork Orthodoxy to the engines, and the Maxwellian Church to the computers.5

Bumaro, the charismatic leader of ‘the Broken Church,’ calls himself ‘the Builder,’ or at least called such by his devotees. As the Builder, his goals are to rebuild his God and restore her body, thus building a Broken God into a sophisticated totality that can move again. It is also worth considering that Bumaro's cult is the most “basic” one, in the sense of not being obsessed with mechanically augmenting the body, contrary to what some people misunderstand. The Cogwork Orthodoxy believes in mass production, and their patriarchs are like the anomalous iteration of factory owners in the Industrial Revolution. They are so fascinated by the amazing power and energy of the engines and the unity of standards endlessly replicated by the machinery that they seek to standardize their own body to get closer to God. Thus, they are the admirers of the engines. Lastly, the Maxwellian Church finds its God, WAN, in the network. Unlike past technological civilizations, their God does not have a ‘material’ form. They also augment their bodies, but here, the augmentation is to turn their bodies into network devices, that is, terminals that can produce, transmit, and receive information.

What does it mean that God is Broken? When they say that their God is Broken, the word may mean that she is physically broken and shattered and damaged, but it may also mean that she has a breakdown and does not work properly. It doesn't matter either way. The modern cults of the Broken God have capabilities that cannot be taken lightly, even for the Foundation, but as long as they express themselves that their God is Broken, they believe that their machine or software — Maxwellians insist that their God is not a physical machine, so it is very annoying to have to mention it one by one — is incomplete. That is a matter of course. Compared to what the Mekhanite civilization, a civilization with near-perfect technologies, enjoyed, they are far behind and can be seen only as having a few fragments of the shattered technologies. According to the inference above, they are also broken. Mekhanite civilization had a quaternity of clocks, balances, engines, and computers. As long as they serve only one of them as the form of God, they are broken, and they have their God broken.

Among the middle of the Pacific islands, some cults worship the cargoplane. The cultists believe that if you carve a tree branch to make guns, clear forests to make a runway, and build a control tower by stacking logs, then one day, a U.S. military cargoplane will land there, and John Frum the Great brings them infinite cargo. What those cultists have seen is clearly true. Indeed, a plane landed on a runway built by the U.S. military and dumped a lot of cargo, and even some of the cargo was given to the indigenous people on the island. That is, what they observed and what their descendants remember are true. However, their interpretation has a critical error. I believe that the cults of the Broken God are the paranormal iteration of the cargo cults: believing that if they worship her, work hard to restore her, and do some rituals corresponding to building a control tower by stacking logs, then ‘the Broken God’ that has never existed will be reassembled.

For now, my opinion is merely an unverified speculation. Still, if this is true, the cults of the Broken God are in stark contrast to the Sarkic cults, the cultists of flesh. Even though Nälkä cults perform the barbaric and primitive ritual of flesh, they do not worship the deities, while acknowledging their existence. Instead, they want humans (at least, Sarkic cultists) to transcend beyond the deities and become as powerful as them. Even though Sarkic cultists are twisted, they still believe in the potential for human development and strive, while those who believe in the Broken God submit themselves to sophisticated and advanced machines and claim to be devotees of what does not exist.

Notes

1. Of course, in the world of anomalies we belong to, a consequence of purely artificial constitution can also be seen as “existing.”

2. In ancient Greek, meaning “deity, a god, God.”

3. In ancient Greek, meaning “demon, soul, spirit”.

4. Of course, if you work for the Foundation and have sufficient security clearance, you can see the ‘existence’ of anomalies that make it difficult not to use the word ‘deity”. However, that does not prove the proposition ‘the goddess Mekhane exists as a divine being.’

5. “The balance” is missing. I wonder if any sects can be linked to the balance.

References

1. R. D██████, T██ ███ ████████, R██████████ 2006

2. F. Habermas et al., Differences in Interpretation of the Doctrines and Doctrinal Refutation between the Devotees of the Churches of the Broken God: a Focus on SCP Foundation's Interrogation Record, Parareligion Studies Division, Department of Anthropology, SCP Foundation, 2006.

3. Frans van Lunteren, "Clocks to Computers: A Machine-Based ‘Big Picture’ of the History of Modern Science," Isis 107 (2016) 762-776.

4. U. Matteotti & V. Kryuger, Translation and Annotation of the Scriptures and Catechisms of Mekhanite Cults, Parareligion Studies Division, Department of Anthropology, SCP Foundation, 2000.

5. G. ████████ and W. ████, Exploration Report on Parahistoric Sites in ██████, Department of Archaeology, SCP Foundation, 1984.

6. James W. Quirk and John J. Carey, "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution," American Scholar 39 (1969-70), pp. 219-241 and pp. 395-424.

To make my thoughts more than just speculation, it must take enormous research. It is necessary to discover more ruins of Mekhanite civilization around the world, rake remaining records in, and even invade the cores of the cults of the Broken God to expropriate everything they have. However, the third is impossible, at least. The Council would not want the Foundation to declare a de facto war declaration on the CotBG simply because of the desire to investigate the primeval history of the paranormal world. The first and second do not appear to be possible either. The Foundation is unlikely to fund me simply because I want to know the history of the CotBG, with the tight budget to contain Keter-class anomalies.

And who knows? Any of the O5 Council members might have actually seen Mekhane. Those oldsters of that Council may have seen everything, including nothing.

> shutdown

| SCPiNET: There is currently a temporarily saved file. If you do not save and exit, the file will be deleted. Do you want to save the file to the server? Y/N

> N

| SCPiNET: SYSTEM shutting down…. Any operation of this terminal is recorded and may be subject to an audit by the Security Division.

| SCPiNET: G o o d B y e, Researcher Rosa Marcuse (Clearance Level: 2).