The Chamber of Saturn

At the distant part of the covenant is a great set of double doors, twenty feet high, made of obsidian, polished to mirror fineness. Upon the doors, in large gold letters is the following:

Etherial father, mighty Titan, hear,
Great fire of Gods and men, whom all revere:
Endued with various council, pure and strong,
to whom perfection and decrease belong.
Consumed by thee all forms that hourly die,
By thee restored, their former place supply;
The world immense in everlasting chains,
Strong and ineffable thy power contains;
Father of vast eternity, divine,
O mighty Saturn, various speech is thine:
Blossom of earth and of starry skies,
Husband of Rhea, and Prometheus wise.
Obstetric Nature, venerable root,
From which the various forms of being shoot;
No parts peculiar can thy power enclose,
Diffused thro' all, from which the world arose.
O, best of beings, of a subtle mind,
Propitious hear to holy prayers inclined;
The sacred rites benevolent attend,
And grant a blameless life, a blessed end.

These doors are highly resistant to most magic. Investigations have determined that they are designed to bar magics from leaving the chamber they guard. While resistant to outside magics, they focus lies elsewhere. The doors will open to any magi who has successfully passed the fourth gauntlet.

The two plinths supporting the doors are two gigantic men, seemingly frozen as if holding up the ceiling. These statues are giant automata, charged with keeping things within the chamber. Hey will stop anyone who interferes with the magic of the doors or walls. They will also defend themselves. Other than size and strength, it is unknown what other powers they might hold. They were built by Cassius follower of Verditius, one of the original founders of the Gauntlet of the Four Quarters.

Within the Saturn Chamber is an enormous, circular chamber, 360 paces in diameter. The walls are a detailed mosaic. Each section is divided into the Zodiac, and all the night sky is imposed upon it: constellations, planets, decans, and many other items. Each is represented as a detailed iconographical figure. All heavily symbolic.

In the center of the chamber, there is a great image, whose size is immense, of terrible form. The image's head is of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of bronze. His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. The four metals stand for the four ages of man, and each of them except the gold (symbol of the Age of Innocence) is rent by a weeping crack from whence issue the rivers which carry the sins of mankind to the Nether World. They are Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. These rivers pool around the statue, before disappearing into black caverns in the floor. In an island, surrounded by all three rivers (which never intermingle) is a black stelae, three faced. One each face is writing, the first in Greek:

Take two measures of sea salt and grind it with a handmill, repeating all the while the prayer that I give you, until the god appears. If you hear while praying the heavy tread of a man and the clanking of irons, this is the god that comes with his chains, carrying a sickle. Do not be afraid, for you are covered by the protection that I give you. Be wrapped in white linen such as the priests of Isis wear [here follow a number of magic rites]. The prayer to be said while grinding is as follows: I call upon thee, great and holy One, founder of the whole world we live in, who sufferest wrong at the hands of thy own son, thee whom Helios bound with iron chains, so that All should not come to confusion. Man-Woman, father of thunder and lightning, thou who rulest also those below the earth. [There follow more rites of protection, then the formula of dismissal]: Go, Lord of the World, First Father, return to your own place, so that the All remain well guarded. Be merciful, O Lord.

The second face is in an unknown language, it contains detailed directions to a lengthy ritual, seemingly Orphic in nature. Here are some excerpts:

• Ge and Mother and Rhea and Hera are the same. The name Ge comes from custom, but Mother is named because all things come from her.
• Kronos was born by Ge from Helios, because things were caused to clash against each other by Helios. Ouranos, son of Nyx, was the first king. To Nous who strikes things against each other he has given the name Kronos and says that he committed a great deed against Ouranos. For he was robbed of his kingdom. He called him Kronos after the Nous and the other things according to the same principle.
• The Moon appears to many humans on the boundless earth. To all those who work on the land and sail the seasons when they must voyage. For if there were no moon, men would not discover the number of the seasons or of the winds.
• It contains a prayer to: Hermes, son of Maia, giver of good.
• . . . from the genital of te first-born king. To him all the immortal gods and goddesses were attached, and the rivers and lovely springs and everything else that existed then; but he came to be the only one.

The third face is written in an ancient and horrifying language. Magical attempts to decipher it have lead to madness for those involved.

Beyond the statue is an archway. Beyond this lies a destroyed laboratory.

When first discovered, the laboratory, which is filled with large and strange crystalline magical creations. It contained the following corpses:

• Fire, trapped in human form, frozen as if it had stepped outside of time into eternity: Cara Ayesha, freed this trapped fiery form, learning that it was once a mage, who warned her away from the third ritual. It indicated in its fleeting passing that it was one of the last magi of the Gauntlet of the Four Quarters, killed off in some desperate gambit that resulted in a horrifying accident.
• A Pillar of Salt in human Form
• The absence of light, in human Form
• 2 desiccated and scattered skeletons, and a third showing burn marks. None of these seem to have spirits attached to them.

The floor contains a stylized, and confusing, representation of the mountain. It also contains tiny representations of all the magi alive who have passed through the fourth gauntlet: Constantine, Cara Ayesha, Tiphys, Tobias, Stentor, and Alexios. A raven, twain in two, is taken to mean Corax. Two other unidentified representations, cloaked in shadow. The brief investigation undertaken so far has indicated that these artifacts are all associated with the art of Vim, and some of them do not even seem to be associated with a Hermetic art.

There are three passageways from this chamber. The first leads to a golden door, inscribed with the story of Ouranos' castration. The second opens up to a beautiful Byzantine Christian Church, patterned on the Hagia Sophia. It has a Divine aura, lower than average for a church, but still trong (+2). The third passageway ends two back iron gates, carved with the head of a fifty-headed dog.

A broken crystal plate has been found that has the following prayer on it, in Greek:

I sing of Cyllenian Hermes, the Slayer of Argus, lord of Cyllene and Arcadia rich in flocks, luck-bringing messenger of the deathless gods. He was born of Maia, the daughter of Atlas,when she had made with Zeus, -- a shy goddess she. Ever she avoided the throng of the blessed gods and lived in a shadowy cave, and there the Son of Kronos used to lie with the rich-tressed nymph at dead of night, while white-armed Hera lay bound in sweet sleep: and neither deathless god nor mortal man knew it.

And so hail to you, Son of Zeus and Maia; with you I have begun: now I will turn to another song!

Hail, Hermes, giver of grace, guide, and giver of good things!

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Last modified: Thurs Nov 19, 1998 / Jeremiah Genest