Diodati

>>>shadowland/s.magic By User: NuVu

*So late last night your auntie/uncle Vu was paging through the latest edition of the DIMR’s ‘Catalog of World Magical Traditions’ (2074) as one does of a stormy autumn evening (what, do you not?) and noticed a glaring omission that isn’t likely to be corrected unless yours truly does the correcting, so sit yourself down and I will spin you a spooky story or at least a story about people who enjoy spooky stories, oh, yes, that’s right, it's time to talk about…*

## **The Diodati**

Can’t say precisely when THIS became a Thing, but I started to hear about it back in the early ‘60’s, when new traditions were popping up all over the place. Gothy young mages with a particular gory look started appearing among the dispossessed. And, being pretty dispossessed moiself at the time, the Vu got pretty chummy with some of that crowd (although the Vu’s personal style has always been more Glam than Goth) and can now pass on the savings to you, my little shadowettes.

The ‘Dispossessed’ thing was a joke by the by, *naturalmente*, my own clever way of introducing the fact that this is a Possession tradition.

While there is some solid theory behind the weird little warlocks of the Diodati, the important thing to understand here is their aesthetics, because that is the root that this twisted little tree sprouted from. Basically it answers the question (that nobody asked), “What kind of black magick would you get if somebody loved Horror enough to warp reality”? These are the aficionados of old black-and-white Universal thrillers, loves of Giallo and Grindhouse exploitation, fans of Shelley and Byron and King, and technophiles with a love all that is morbid. This is what happens when Goths stop posing and start walking the walk.

This even shows in the name applied to this morbid, jump scare sort of approach, the ‘Diodati’, named after the Villa Diodati where Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Doctor Polidori and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly basically sat around one dark and dreary weekend in 1816 and invented the modern Horror genre, with Mary winning the day with a little tome you might have heard of called “Frankenstein”. And yeah, by the way, don’t bring up THAT story with the Diodati unless you have some real time on your hands…

Some mages of my acquaintance have said that the Diodati way seems similar to Chaos Magick. Chaos magicians treat belief as a tool, often creating their own idiosyncratic magical systems and frequently borrowing from other magical traditions, religious movements, popular culture and various strands of philosophy.

The Diodati of my acquaintance on the other hand, would dismiss that as academic, ivory tower nonsense. To the Diodati, fear is the key to primal truths, awakening primal memories latent in all metahumanity since its origins. It’s all very ‘Forever Jung’, and they have drawn from old Goetic traditions, old Witchcraft Manuals, superstition, Blake’s occultism, 19th Century romanticism, and Things They Saw In Movies, they’ve created a cosmology where Halloween is every day. This is how the same tradition can contain a wan, Byron and Poe-quoting aesthete who hangs around graveyards at midnight, listening to the children of the night and the music they make and a tattoo-covered, chainsaw-wielding meat packing plant employee with a love of hockey masks.

* **Casting:** The casting of spells is deeply personal, since fear is a deeply personal emotion. But the thing that unites most, if not all, of the Diodati, is a certain, shall we say ‘theatricality’ in their approach. After all, who’s going to be terrified of a spell that they can’t see you cast? Ancient runes, bone fetishes (not like THOSE kind of fetishes, you sick little monkey… well, OK, sometimes it is… but not necessarily), bloody implements of mayhem and more arcane accouterments (such as the Lament Configuration or a sphere with blades) make their appearance. When casting, Diodati often show what they call their ‘Third Act Reveal’, a ‘form of terror’ similar to a Shamanic Mask, a visual effect that usually enhances their creepy vibe, deepening shadows, the look of dripping blood, crazed eyes, shapes flickering in the corners of observers vision, dark and terrible whispers, distorting of proportions etc.
* **Summoning:** The most important thing to remember about the relationship of the Diodati to their spirits is that this is, without a doubt, a Possession tradition, and the Diodati love the terror and body horror that a good Possession bring on, with some of the more extreme practitioners submitting to it for recreational purposes. And like everything else about the Diodati, their spirits are highly customized to fit their whole oeuvre, often modeled on famous monsters and demons of horror fiction, from the Boogie Man to the Slenderman, from Freddie to IT (or clowns in general, there’s a general agreement among them that clowns are definitely horrifying) and all of them seem to be able to induce magical Fear. One common ritual among them is to summon by speaking a spirit’s name anywhere from 3-5 times while looking into a mirror with the lights off. This is especially true for spirits they mean to Possess with. While not all do, they can take on Mentor Spirits, often reskinned versions of Dark King or Adversary totems.
* **Adepts:** Horror movie slashers, traditional zombies and the Final Girls that survive them often survive (for narrative convenience) things that really, really ought not be survived. In this tradition, the Adepts who follow this tradition have invested their magic into enhancing their own survivability. Remember that if you feel like beating the drek out of a velvet-clad, heroin-chic gothic poet that they likely have friends who can come after you and keep coming after you… No… Matter… WHAT… You… Throw… At… Them!
* **In Society:** Like the source material that it draws on, the Diodati tradition appeals most to those who feel least accepted by the ‘normal’ daylight world, who appreciate the odd, the morbid, the things that horrifies the ‘mundanes’. This keeps them largely confined to the margins of society. By my (deeply informal) reckoning at least half of them are SINless, a good number of them are low-magic and possess only minor powers. There are also mundane enthusiasts/believers who still appreciate the culture and theory behind the tradition. This all makes it very difficult to get hard numbers on how many actual Awakened there are following this tradition, complicated by the fact that they rarely gather in large groups and, when they do, it's often something deniable as mundane, such as a movie screening in an abandoned building.

Needless to say, this theatrical and somewhat reckless use of Possession magic has not endeared them to other Possession traditions. Vodounistes especially find their treatment of Possession to be dangerous and irresponsible and the tension between the local Hounforts and the Diodati has grown with every mess that they’ve had to clean up.

Locally, probably the biggest concentration of Diodati to be found in the upper midwest is, to nobody’s surprise, up in the Zone. Specifically in Winnipeg where the local horror and goth scenes were attracted to the aesthetic of the Diodati and there’s probably a couple of hundred practitioners. And old Vu has heard rumors of some kind of gathering place (Physical? Astral? Matrix? Who knows?) for the Diodati scene up there called the ‘Lyceum’, named after a no-longer extant movie theater that long, long ago was known for showing horror movies… but if you find it, don’t tell them the Vu told you...

**RETURN TO: MAGIC**