Mirabology

The study of hyperstasis and the superpowers and metapathogens that result from it.

The term means “the study of miracles,” and as the word miracles comes from the latin miraculum which means objects of wonder, mirabology is an apt term to describe the study of something as wondrous as superpowers.

However, the term has been controversial ever since it came into use at the dawn of the 20th century for its implications.

Mirabology is a science, and yet miracles imply a suspension of the natural order to show the will and influence of a deity. Associating superpowers with miracles has no doubt contributed to the erroneous idea that superpowers are “unnatural” and “violate the laws of science.” But as any good mirabologist knows, nothing violates the laws of science because science changes with new observations. A superhuman making lightning dance between his fingertips is no more unnatural and no more breaks the laws of physics than a lightbulb. Scientifically, the natural order cannot be suspended because what is is natural . Thus miracle is a nonsense word and mirabology a nonsense term.

And yet the term continues to be used even after a century--and not just out of respect to the western occultists that first studied superpowers as thaumaturgy. Hyperstasis is very much a mystical experience in how it grants subjective control over objective phenomena and as such invites the use of terms loaned from the western occult tradition. Mirabology terms such as ousia, hyle, and parousia all derive from the thaumaturgic forerunners of mirabology.

Mirabology may not be a precise term for what it studies, but it is a precise term for how it feels to partake in mirabology.

“I shall support the term mirabology to my dying breath, come what hordes of pedants may! We can either call a flying man a “subjectively controlled anomalous physical phenomena” or we can call him what he plainly is--a miracle. The average man sees a superhuman in action and calls him a miracle because he has eyes--he has not yet been blinded by perfunctory scholasticism. To those that seek to kill the term mirabology nothing can be a miracle. They would stand before God almighty just as they would a turnip. They would look in the very face of God and feel nothing. They would feel neither awe nor fear. They would stare sleepily as I suspect they do at everything they encounter in life. But I am not so bloodless as to feel as much as a rock does. When I study superpowers, I feel awe and I feel fear. I feel the miracle! And no academic myrmidon shall divest me of my feelings!”

--Dr. Hercules Stone, Princes of Dawn

The Cause of Superpowers and Metapathogens

Hyperkeimenon

The source of all superpowers, bound within the Time Walls at the border of the Astral outside our local cosmos.

The constant warping of the Time Walls allows the hyperkeimenon to shine forth to interact with receptive minds, but this places limitations upon what the hyperkeimenon’s creators intended to be absolute power over nature. It is these limitations that result in the wide diversity of superpowers and metapathogens observed.

It is a common misconception that superpowers are the hyperkeimenon. This is technically not true. The hyperkeimenon creates superpowers through hyperstasis but is not in and of itself a superpower. Superhumans do not “have” the hyperkeimenon within them. Though the Fox-Gardner theory suggests that superpowers may share a common substance, this substance whatever it may be is not the hyperkeimenon.

Hyperkeimenon as a term comes from the Greek--hyper for above and keimenon for thing. And so together, the thing above.

Hypokeimenon

A term with two meanings. The first meaning is that of an out-dated term for what is now known as the hyperkeimenon. In the late 19th century, it was thought that the hyperkeimenon was the underlying substructure of our universe and was thus called the hypokeimenon--the thing below upon which our universe was built. When it was discovered in the 1920’s that the hyperkeimenon was something created outside our universe, the hypo changed to hyper.

The second meaning is that of an as yet undiscovered commonality of existence--the one substance that is both void and space and time and so on. The Hypokeimenon is often thought to be Astral light itself, but such a conclusion is complicated by how the light itself fundamentally changes as it passes between the Eye of Light and the Heart of Darkness and how there exist cosmos such as our own or Starhome that are either formed of Astral light in a way unobservable or formed not of Astral light but, somehow, its absence.

For there to be a hypokeimenon, and there may very well not be one, there must be a substance that constitutes all the changes of Astral light as well as its absence.

The Star Mapper sect known as the Qaaon believe that the ultimate purpose of our cosmos is to discover the hypokeimenon so that God, said to be the Eye or an entity related to the Eye, can at last observe and know itself in totality down to the smallest particle.

Hyperstasis

A state achieved naturally through primary hyperstasis, also called parousia, and artificially through secondary hyperstasis. In both cases, the thoughts of an individual merge with the astral hyperkeimenon through the noosphere and this interaction results in the development of a superpower or metapathogen.

Every hyperstasis is made up of an ousia, the mental aspect of a superpower or metapathogen, and a hyle, the physical manifestation of a superpower or metapathogen.

Hyperstasis is thought-responsive and, with a proper ousia, thought-controlled. Humans are not the first to think and not the first to achieve hyperstasis nor will they be the last. Hyperstasis comes to extraterrestrials, ghosts, animals, artificials, thought-forms, and anything that has thought. Even ideas can achieve hyperstasis as did the star-song of the Hwl which nurtures all that have evolved to hear it across the stellar void.

Hyperstasis is also information-responsive, though it responds more readily to the thoughts of living beings. Being information-responsive allows it to be “encoded” onto objects through secondary hyperstasis. It also allows hyperstasis to create life. This happens when the hyperkeimenon makes an error in seeking out intelligent life. When it encounters a packet of complex information but finds no living mind within it, it creates one in a process called malpirgi after the Enochian word for the breath of life. Malpirgi has created beings in our cosmos such as the quasar-born space leviathans that rise from quasars like newborn serpents from eggs and the Godsmiths who rose out of the boiling seas of the chaotic Hadean Earth and ruled the planet in the moonless time.

History of Hyperstasis

When the Firsts of the timeless Astral traveled down the emanations of the Eye of Light to its palest extremity, they found our cosmos. They found time, death, and dreams--things of terrible and wondrous beauty, things their home cosmos could no more have than the sun rainfall. They fell in love with these things and entered into our cosmos so that they might know them.

They entered our cosmos and made contact with the earliest lifeforms in a time so young that all the stars blazed blue. Bathed in blue radiance, the Firsts established peace with the ancestral mortals of our cosmos. There was mutual gift-giving. The Firsts gave the ancestral mortals the hyperkeimenon, that which was above nature, and this gift was requited by the gift of mortality. The Firsts received the sensitivity and vulnerability of mortals which allowed them to be affected by nature. They received the ability to change, dream, and die.

In that blue time, men were as gods and gods were as men. They were a third race, and wondered if there could be a fourth or even a fifth. They were ready to go beyond mortality and immortality--

But there was a ruling caste of Firsts called the Archons.

And the Archons were not like their kin.

The Archons were born higher in the Astral light. At the Summit of All Things stands the Eye of Light which gazes down upon existence and in gazing creates. There stands before it, as near as anything can stand before to the Eye, a cloud of all forms that are and can ever be. These forms reach forever toward the Eye yearning for its completeness. This cloud is called the Cataracts of Ego and it was here that the Archons made their thrones.

Because the Archons were so close to the Eye, they were mightier than their lower kindred. Because they were so close to the Eye, the world their lower kindred found beautiful was far more alien to their eyes--and far more frightening.

Death, change, age, forgetfulness--these were things the Archons could find no value in. Existence was to pull toward the light of the Eye in the manner of their thrones, not away.

Believing they were saving their kin from a great evil, they undid the melding of the Firsts with the ancestral mortals. They locked their kin forever from our cosmos with a barrier spun from the raw material of our world which they found so hateful--time itself. Time was challenging for the Firsts to navigate. Twisted and turned as it was now by the Archons, it was impossible for them to traverse. The Time Walls shut our world from the Firsts forever.

The Archons couldn’t remove the powers that the Firsts granted to the ancestral mortals, for the hyperkeimenon was of the same unchanging substance as everything from the timeless Astral. They could no more change it than they could themselves. But they could place those powers beyond the reach of the mortals.

They sealed the powers inside the Time Walls so that, while still attached to the minds and souls of the ancestral mortals, their effects would always be one moment behind and one moment ahead.

But the Archons were foolish to build with materials they hated, for one cannot understand something one hates. Time cannot hold a shape forever, and ever since the first second ticked the Time Walls have steadily warped and twisted. Every second, more and more of the entrapped powers leak out.

These old powers remember the thoughts of their masters from the blue time. Though they are long dead now, their thoughts live on through the myriad races of the universe.

These supernal powers, these superpowers, remember the thoughts of their masters, and come when they hear the call.