You Mekless Knave

I have been inventing a Space Faith for my Space Knight.

I like my space knight. He is a little bit stiff and a little bit shallow. Not much sense of the numinous. This means we have to see brief glimpses of a deep and tragic faith through the casual behaviours of a rather quotidian man who happens to belong to it, which is a nice tension to play.

And when I say inventing I mean I have been trying to come up with cool things to say and got carried away and invented, or deepened and least, a made-up religion. As usual I started writing and just kept going till I ran out.

Pendragon is full of Christianity which is fine and appropriate because it’s Pendragon. Our Pendragon is on Mars, so, as extra faiths we get Mars-Worship, kind of like animist worship of the planet itself, and Ancestor Worship, which I imagine as a bit like Science-Confucianism.

Except our ancestors actually built Mars, it’s biosphere at least. A better excuse for worship. Now they are gone and we remain.

I think whatever happened to western culture after rome fell and we had to walk around for centuries knowing that we could dig art out of the ground that was better anything we could make. Whatever Ibn Khandun means when he talks about the monuments of the ancients and says that 'we cannot even pull down their ruins' to steal the materials. We lack the capacity even to scavenge what they left behind. Whatever that means, whatever it does to a culture to live through that. This would be worse.

I think our symbol looks a bit like this.

So I started with an Oath. It’s always good to oath something.

"Red earth break these bones

Green sea drown this tongue

Black sky and all your stars

Fall forever on Mars

Should I fail this trust

As I live, it shall be done"

Some one-liners for as-and-when swearing stuff.

"By the wounds of science!

By the ancient hand of man!

By the dreaming Fathers of Mars

Sky Mother forgive me

Dreaming Fathers hear me now!

By the Eye of Earth"

Because it is like an eye, visible in the night sky as a distant bright dot in the same way Mars is to us now. Except they know that humanity came from there. And isn’t going back. That’s a lot to think about looking at a light in the sky.

I kind of made Earth the feminine principal in Mar Ancestor worship. The distant cradle.

And sometimes things go very wrong-

"Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your voice

Your music and your sounds

I hear you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your faces

Your colour and your form

I see you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your language

And lost the tongue of your machines

They hear me not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have failed your creation

The field dies in my path

The sea battles the black sky

And the tempest forgets his course

Old ones I beg your forgiveness."

Then for some reason I started thinking about love and marriage. It’s Pendragon after all and the Feudal family unit is your real character.

"Eye of Earth, our mother, our home

You have watched me in your dance

All we are was born of you

Life giver, star-seed, creator of us all

You hang now beyond my reach

Or the reach of my fathers

You made me and guard me

We know you still

The cradle and the hand

The builder of the flesh

Helix-weaver, bone-mason, maker of us all

I turn from you, I must

You are rebuked

Another I have found

Her eye is brighter and more constant

She is with me under sun and stars

Her dance is with me, not the sky

She has re-made me

She is the weaver of my daily thread

My hours, my moods, my silences and calms

She is my architect, she is my design

She is my passage and return

We make anew what made us first

The thread is long"

And then some straight up-curses, to be delivered in whole or part

"I curse you

Enemy of Man and Earth and Mars

You are no true knight

You broke your bond

Your heart is the black between the stars

You failed your Lord

Your voice the hiss of empty frequencies

You failed your blood

Your arm is weak, it’s actuators shake

You mocked your god

Your rounds burn in their barrels

Your missiles hunt like cows

Your beams refract in mist

Your magazines click dry

Outlaw. Tracked scavenger. Footless brigand.

Dustbiting bastard. Mekless knave.

Water-word, honourless man.

You shake the Dreaming Fathers in their sleep!

Your Thane is Chaos

Herald of a Tattered Lord."

The original comics went like this:- Alec Holland, Scientist, works in his lab on a powerful plant formula. Gangsters want the secret. They shoot Hammond, burn the lab, he staggers out, on fire, and falls into the swamp.

The formula acts on the swamp muck, Holland regrows his body as a horrible but hard-to-kill swamp monster thing then goes off to hide and have weird adventures.

In the Alan Moore recreation we learn something else. When Holland fell into the swamp he was already dead. He didn’t come back. The plants and bugs and things that ate his body were enhanced by his formula. They ate his memories. Then, knowing nothing else, they grew a man-shaped body, stood it up and went off to have adventures.

The Swamp Thing that thinks its Alec Holland finds this out. Goes a bit mad. Becomes an elemental ultra-hippy and has more adventures but this time with sex and psychedelic fruit he grows himself.

Rome is Alec Holland. The West is the Swamp Thing. We build our buildings like that and use that alphabet and record the stories and history but we are not the descendants of Rome or Greece. We are the things that ate the body of Rome.

And it makes sense because Pendragon is about Arthur and Arthur is all about preserving or transforming the legacy of Rome in the post-apocalyptic wasteland it left behind.