The Skoptsi

The Skoptsi are an ancient cult to Shub-Niggurath that lasted for hundreds of years in the Caucasus Mountains. The main feature of the group is that its members sacrifice their reproductive organs to the goddess. Then the member bonds with the goddess and gains longevity and power.

The cult was persecuted under the Tsars, but it managed to survive. When the Communists took over, things changed. The new regime wouldn't tolerate anything that smacked of religion, or fanaticism to something other than the Party. Technology was permitting ever greater oppression of deviants. As a result, many Skoptsi were forced to flee their homelands.

Some of them traveled to America, where they a colony in Maryland, on the east coast of the Chesapeake Bay. There are some 360 members of the cult living there, and have many jobs in the community. One of their main organizations is an orphanage, called Families Without Frontiers, which serves as a source for new recruits.

One of the group's current goals is to recover the Black Icons, which tell the story of the founding of the Skoptsi. They went missing in 1919, during the Communist Revolution.

## The Black Icons of the Skoptsi

The Black Icons tell the story of Semyon, a Christianized Rus monk who was proselytizing along the southern Volga River circa 1220 A.D., during the decline of the Kievian state.

Brother Semyon found himself in front of a Mongol expeditionary force scouting for places to ford the Volga. The Mongols cruelly massacred the village Brother Semyon was preaching in; the women (and not a few of the men) were raped, the animals slain, all the food and buildings put to the torch, and a tower of skulls built. The Mongols crucified Semyon as a great joke on his crucified god. Semyon hung in the rotting, smoldering village for two days before he was visited by a 'black monk' who sat at the foot of Semyon's X-shaped crucifix and engaged him in a religious debate. "Now all of the Rus lands lay open to the Tartar host because your timid god will not help you," taunted the Black Monk. "Apparently your god does not love his flock enough to protect them." After another day of listening to the Black Monk, Semyon cursed the name of Christ and spat upon the Bible the Black Monk placed at his feet. He accepted the Black Monk's invitation to accept another god (or more properly, goddess) into his heart.

The Black Monk taught Semyon how to summon Shub-Niggurath and once the Magna Mater appeared, she devoured the insanely screaming Semyon and the re-birthed him as one of the Gof'nn Hupadgh Shub-Niggurath, the Blessed of Shub-Niggurath. Reborn, rejuvenated, and twisted by the Goddess's womb, Semyon went looking for the Mongol expeditionary force. With the assistance of the Goddess's Dark Young, the reborn Semyon saw to it that the Mongol warriors suffered deaths beyond the imaginings of sane men.

But the Goddess did not want death; she wanted life. She wanted Semyon to feed more sacrifices into her maw/vagina to produce more blessed offspring. Mad with lust and devotion to his Magna Mater, Semyon wandered into the southern steppes of Russia, south of the Volga River and along the shores of the Caspian Sea. He turned inland into the Caucasus Mountains. There, in what is now known as southern Dagestan, the mad monk established his temple to the Magna Mater in the ruins of the Scythian Kurgan (burial mound). There the Black Icons end their story.