Ibis was Spectro’s main teacher, but he learned from all the Circled Square. After Ibis, he learned the most from the man who first held the trump of the Hanged Man--a man known only as Dr. Styx.

Spectro and Dr. Styx bonded almost immediately. Spectro was interested in how people thought and Dr. Styx was one of the world’s foremost experts in the young field of manesology. He was an advocate for ghosts and had many insights to share with Spectro on how they thought. He told Spectro about Pangean princesses and Hyperborean philosophers. He told him about having Christmas dinner aboard a tattered airship crewed by the dead of the Great War in the Air and helping Coleridge finish Kubla Khan.

In terms of thaumaturgical fundamentals, no one could teach Spectro more than Ibis, but Dr. Styx taught Spectro the most by far about people.

Like Spectro, Dr. Styx also erased his name from the face of the universe and Spectro bonded with him over the weight of their sacrifices. But Dr. Styx sacrificed far more than his name for the thaumaturgical arts.

Though he was a man in his thirties, Dr. Styx appeared far, far older with his stringy white hair and wrinkled skin He was always cold--deathly cold, and his eyes were always watery. He cast no shadow. He had no pulse.

These things were the least of his sacrifice.

He had undoubtedly made a greater than Spectro and the youth respected him greatly for it.

Had he only known what would come he would have instead pitied Dr. Styx--and feared him.

Like the ancient hero Achilles, Dr. Styx was submerged in the Hadean river Styx and surfaced invulnerable to harm. Unlike Achilles, he was not exposed in infancy. As a manesologist in the later years of the 19th century, he endeavored to understand the afterlife--the entire afterlife from the frozen center of Hell to the flower filled fields of Elysium. He wanted to know the entire spectrum between life and oblivion not as a detached observer but as ghosts knew it--instinctively. He wanted to see as a ghost and feel as a ghost. To that end, he exposed himself to the river Styx as well as the other rivers of Hades-- Acheon, Cocytus, Lethe, and Phlegethon.

These five rivers existed at the border of every afterlife in different forms. In Izanami’s Yomi, they were combined as the river Sanzu. In Osiris’ Aaru they were combined into the Eternal Nile which snaked around islands of reeds. In some afterlifes they weren’t waters at all but instead rings of fire or walls of ice. But regardless of what form the rivers took, their function was always the same. They broke down singular souls into several component souls. The Carnacki Foundation combined Greek and Egyptian terminology to explain the process.

The Phlegethon burned away the sh, or physical soul. It burned away the physical matter that composed what were commonly thought of as ghosts--wads of ectoplasm and clouds of phlogiston.

The Styx, upon which the gods swore, was hatred incarnate. It’s antipathy toward human warmth drove out the jb, or emotional soul.

The Lethe, which was forgetfulness and oblivion, could not be crossed by the ba which was the personality soul. Without memories, the personality simply could not be.

The Cocytus, the wailing river, drowned the rn in its cacophonous depths. The rn was the named soul. It was more than a simple string of letters. It was the ghost that lived outside the person. It was the ghost that other people remembered and the force that drew and held composite earth-bound ghosts to rituals of remembrance and objects of sentimentality. Without the rn, a ghost was an unknown force.

Spectro, Dr. Styx, and other thaumaturgists submerged their rn in the Cocytus in order to protect themselves from curses, for the universe cannot hear the rn over the cries of the Cocytus. But they took great care not not to submerge their rn too deep in the waters of the Cocytus. For if their rn sank too far, their very identity will be lost to the universe. No one would remember them. No one would be able to perceive them. They would be nameless ghosts, the most pitiful ghosts of all.

And the Acheon, the river of misery, repelled the ka which was the double soul. The ka was an astral double of the human body and gave ghosts the ability to think and feel as if they were human. The ka was why ghosts appeared human and had human senses like sight and hearing. With a malfunctioning or absent ka, ghosts took on inhuman forms that often caused them distress as they could remember a human shape they no longer possessed. The Acheon repelled the ka by being a river of pure pain. It was like a raw, twisted nerve in the form of a river. Anything receptive to pain like a human body drew away from it on instinct.

The Greco-Egyptian afterlife schema served the Carnacki Foundation, but it had room for improvement. It was a schema made by applying terminology the western occultists of the Carnacki Foundation were familiar with to observations they made from outside the afterlife system. But what did they call a soul that exhibited characteristics between for instance the ba and the ka? Was it more than the sum of its parts?

The Carnacki Foundation needed to observe the afterlife from an “insider’s” perspective in order to have a complete picture of the afterlife.

Dr. Styx hoped he could gain that perspective by exposing himself to all the waters of death.But it wasn’t just for manesological advancement that Dr Styx risked himself. It was reckless in the extreme for a living being to embrace the pulse of death itself. Dying was the least of what could have happened to Dr. Styx. But Dr. Styx believed that if he could use the eyes of a ghost to prove a theory of his thats he could improve the treatment of ghosts around the world.

A common theory of the time, as put forth by theosophists, was that the rivers of the afterlife existed to purify a “true” soul that the other component souls clung to like barnacles. Taking from Egytpian religion like the Carnacki Foundation, they called this true soul the shm, though their conception of the shm was much different from that of the ancient Egyptians.

Dr. Styx’s theory of the shm was more in line with the Egyptians than the theosophists. He believed that souls were meant to divide but not to seperate. Rather, the component parts of a soul were meant to work together to create a hyper-awareness of an individual’s existence. This awareness was what he called the shm.

Dr. Styx thought of the afterlife as a growth, not a winnowing, of the soul. In life, the soul was like a newborn. All the component parts of the soul were close together and underdeveloped. But in the afterlife, the composite soul grew even as the organs moved further apart.

The soul did not soul did not “lose” parts of itself as component parts divided drifted away. The soul simply grew to the point that from the perspective of humans a single component could compose the entirety of a soul. For ghosts that crossed all the rivers and divided as much as possible they became something beautiful in its mystery and complexity. Shm were unknowable to man. They could barely be observed by thaumaturgists let alone communicated with. But they were fundamentally the same being they had always been only vastly larger and more complex. Shm were unknowable, but this also made them peaceful. They drifted through the afterlife like nebulae through space untouched and unafraid.

Ghosts didn’t have to fear becoming shm if they understood and accepted all that it meant.

But by the same token, ghosts should never be forced to become shm as the theosophists believed .

It was important that Dr. Styx proved his theory so as to discredit theosophical views on ghosts. Ghosts were subjected to horrific treatment by theosophists under the belief that in forcing ghost to “move on” they were serving the natural order. They sought to “liberate” the true shm of ghosts from their ba and rn, their memories and the memories others had of them. They set keepsakes and mementos on fire. They smashed tombstones. Some even went so far as to try and destroy all historical records. They also forced ghosts into the afterlife. Theosophists had a low opinion of the mundane world and the thought of spirit mingling with matter was to them pbscene. And ghosts already in the afterlife were to be pushed further into the afterlife until they crossed all rivers and became pure.

If Dr. Styx found someway to prove that component souls remained in “contact” with each other after dividing then it would prove that there was no such thing as a “pure” soul. Some ghosts reported sensing “something” between component souls. They felt it like warm rain. They heard it like soft piano keys. They saw it as silvery cobweb like clouds.

This “something” needed to be observed by someone with the eyes of a ghost and the mind of a thaumaturge.

And so, for the sake of all lost souls, he plunged into the waters of death in the hopes of becoming the world’s first living ghost.

Miraculously, Dr. Styx’s willpower proved great enough for him to survive every river. And when he emerged from the rivers, he took some of the waters with him. These waters burned his blood away and flowed through his veins. Each of his veins became like one of the rivers of the underworld. His heart ceased to beat, but the waters still pulsed through his body. When in the presence of ghosts, his stilled organ would beat again as the waters surged.

With eyes like a ghost, Dr. Styx confirmed his theory and the condition of earthbound ghosts improved substantially. Theosophical methods of dealing with ghosts were replaced by the better methods of the Carnacki Foundation. Ghosts were allowed to stay on Earth and it became the duty of manesologists to negotiate their coexistence with the living. Ghosts were not to be told that the afterlife was an easy and instant cure for their regrets. They would always be bound to their humanity to some extent. And if they did not come to terms with their humanity as humans did then they would be haunted by it forever.

Dr. Styx also gave support to an earlier theory by occultist Emmanuel Swedenborg by being a human afterlife. Ghosts dissolved or congealed at his touch. He could draw ghosts into his body and combine and separate the component parts of their soul. His body digested and incubated souls, and this bizarre metabolism gave support to the Swedenborg hypothesis that afterlifes were bodies in which souls existed like germs and blood cells. The hypothesis today remains a matter of debate among manesologists. Many afterlifes do indeed support the hypothesis like the Sommerland where souls live inside humanoid heavens, but some have structures that can’t be observed or actively resist observation like the Silent Vaults. Still, it remains a popular hypothesis to this day and owes some of its lasting popularity to Dr. Styx being a living model for it.

With his phantasmal biology, Dr. Styx became one of the most prestigious members of the Carnacki Foundation. He was an ideal man to deal with ghosts. Not only was he a powerful “ghost breaker” who could overpower the most destructive spirit with but a glance, he was capable of an empathic rapport with ghosts impossible for any living man to have. He felt what they felt. He understood the world as they understood it. For harmful di manes larvae, he was a prison stronger than any of Thomas Carnacki’s electric pentacles. For lost and confused di manes lemures, he was a church where they could find rest and healing.

When the Circled Square first formed in 1900, Thomas Carnacki was one of the original trump holders. As the world’s leading manesologist, Crowley could think of no better person to have the trump of Death. It was Carnacki who suggested Dr. Styx be given the trump of the Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man was the trump of one who sought a unique perspective. While each trump carried a unique perspective that strengthened the whole of the Circled Square, the Hanged Man was the only trump that specifically sought a perspective. The Hanged Man was a watcher, a learner, or a sentry. His art was the art of observation.

For a man who sacrificed so much in order to see with the eyes of a ghost, there was no better trump.

Spectro learned much from the Hanged Man. He wasn’t always available to be his teacher given the multitude of souls he aided, but when he was able to speak Spectro hung on his every word. When Dr. Styx spoke of what it felt like to have ghosts flowing in his veins--to see through the eyes of a Renaissance painter, to hear with the ears of a Babylonian musician, to feel the heartbeat of a Greek athlete--Spectro was inspired in a way he hadn’t been since he saw Ibis’ performance as a child.

But in 1937, Spectro started to notice something was very wrong with Dr. Styx. Only someone who was as determined to pay attention to small human details as Spectro would have noticed the small, slight changes that were nothing on their own but taken together were telling. Dr. Styx talked to Spectro with less enthusiasm. The fire died down in his eyes when he talked of his adventures among the dead. He acted distracted. He would rarely be the one to initiate conversation..

When Spectro brought his concerns to the Circled Square he was told it was probably the emotional weight of his work finally getting to Dr. Styx. They had Carnacki talk to Dr. Styx and tell him to take it easy. He did, and they considered the matter settled.

But Spectro had an intuition that it was something far more than stress--something dangerous. He couldn’t name or describe that something and because he couldn’t convince the Circled Square of its danger. But it was a real danger. It felt real. It felt like the sensation a man has when standing at the edge of a pit.

Often, Spectro would sit awake at night and wonder about Dr. Styx. And in wondering, he began to fear. And in fearing, he began to plan.