An abhorrent ritual of self-reincarnation despised by most avatars of the Mother.

Outside of those who revere the Devouring Mother aspect of the archetype, this ritual, either discovered or originally formulated three hundred years ago by the leader of the Rangda cult of Bali, is absolutely abhorrent to avatars normally channeling the Mother. It is the ultimate in self-cannibalism and self-absorption, after all.

A typical Mother’s reaction to Parthenogenesis is similar to the emotion felt by avatars of the Masterless Man in regard to the Dark Stalker, i.e., instant hatred. This hasn’t prevented its use, however. Rangda, the 18th century adept and high-ranking avatar of the Mother in her role as the Devourer – she named and fashioned herself after the widow-witch of Balinese theology, a figure similar in many ways to the goddess Kali in her attitude toward children – used the ritual to give birth to herself at least three times between the years 1720 and 1760 before she and her followers were massacred by agents of the then godwalker of the Mother.

Remnants of the original Rangda cult still know the ritual, but over the two hundred years since the massacre only a handful of women have ever successfully performed it, and only one – Rangda’s spiritual granddaughter but her literal, physical great-great-great, etc. granddaughter – is still around to actually talk about it.

It is rumored the current Mother godwalker, like her predecessor, has organized her children to search for the Parthenogenesis ritual, not to employ it themselves but to ensure that it is once and for all eradicated.

Naturally, their purge would include any woman disturbed enough to attempt it or even have knowledge of it.

Cost: Four significant charges

Ritual Action: Over a period of three nights either arrange and supervise or personally perform the sacrificial slaughter of seventy-nine pregnant animals, each of a distinct species indigenous to the land in which you were born. Each of the sacrifices must be performed with the same silver-alloy knife, and the blood of each animal must be collected and stored separately. Then, on the night following the next new moon, you must paint your entire body with the collected blood samples while watching yourself in a reflective surface (mirror, a still pool of water, etc.). You must be naked, and all of the collected blood must be utilized, though it is not necessary to entirely coat your body with each sample. After the seventy-ninth application, wrap a belt around your waist made from any red cloth. The belt must be long enough to completely encircle your waist three times. Lastly, while still watching your reflection, perform an unspeakable sexual act upon yourself.

Effect: This ritual can only be performed successfully by a woman who is currently not pregnant but nonetheless biologically capable of having children. If successful, the caster becomes pregnant – one of her eggs is fertilized without any actual union from the opposite sex. Because there is no male partner, though, the developing child will be an exact genetic match with the expecting mother, i.e., same sex, same color eyes, same birthmarks, same everything (in practice, the caster will be carrying a clone of herself inside her womb).

The Parthenogenesis ritual is not a normal fertility ceremony, obviously. Neither is it solely meant as a means to have children without men. Rather, Parthenogenesis is intended to provide a kind of immortality to its users. The developing child created by the ritual has no soul. She is a complete tabula rasa, even more so than under ordinary circumstances. In a normal pregnancy such a child would more than likely be stillborn, if born at all. Instead, in this case, as the pregnancy develops, the fetus created by the Parthenogenesis ritual absorbs the caster’s own spirit so that after nine months the mother – by then reduced to a mere soulless, mindless vehicle – essentially gives birth to herself. The ritual is really a form of self-reincarnation.

Each month of the pregnancy the caster will lose 10% of her original Mind and Soul stats, rounded up. That portion of the mother’s psyche will be transferred entirely to her unconscious fetus, including her memories, skills, personality, and so on. The mother will suffer rank-7 Helplessness and Self checks as the GM judges appropriate as she feels herself becoming a nobody: losing recollections of her childhood, her knowledge of common activities, even her capacity to feel emotion. The effect is akin to a severe, progressive case of Alzheimers. The mother will instinctively feel that she is dying inside, slowly, step by step. After a few months, as this parasitic pregnancy reaches term, the mother will require outside assistance and around the clock care-giving. If the pregnancy should be terminated at any point during this process, those portions of the caster’s Mind and Soul previously drained off and stored inside her fetus will be permanently lost.

Example: Rangda performs the Parthenogenesis ritual and becomes pregnant. At the time she performed the ceremony, her Mind and Soul stats were respectively 60 and 85. Each month of her pregnancy, therefore, she will lose 6 points from her Mind and 9 points from her Soul. The loss of these points may be allocated progressively if the GM or player needs to keep a running score or altogether simply at the end of each month. In any case, Rangda’s Mind will drop from 60 to 6 over a period of nine months, with all appropriate reductions to her Mind-based skills occurring as a result. Similarly, Rangda‘s Soul will drop from 85 to 76, 67, 58, 49, 40, 31, 22, 13, and 4 over the same time span.

Those who might observe a woman pregnant via the Parthenogenesis ritual through Aura Sight will see a constant stream of spiritual energy passing out of the mother’s body and into her developing child, an energy flow much more pronounced than can be seen in any ordinary pregnancy. Upon labor, the last vestiges of the mother’s consciousness – her remaining Mind and Soul – will pass into the child as she is given birth, i.e., the mother will end up with zeroes in both stats. The mother will still be alive, technically, but she will be little more than a shell, breathing, eating, and eliminating solely through her remaining involuntary bodily systems.

Such a vacant body is ripe for demonic possession.

As for the newborn child, the caster’s personality is stored in her latent memory. She will have no immediate awareness of who she is, nor any capacity to do much about it even if she were so aware. The reborn child will grow up more or less normally, save that over the years of her repeated upbringing she will receive flashes from her previous life – names, places, feelings, etc. These recollections will increase in frequency and intensity through early childhood, such that by the time the child approaches her 8th or 9th birthday she will instinctively know she has had a previous existence. By the time she begins menstruating, all of the child’s past life memories should be awakened, and she will essentially become again the original caster of the ritual, the only differences in her character being those understandable changes in personality which might arise from having lived an alternate childhood and the fact that she is now in a young and newly adolescent body.

Self checks naturally apply. Repeated users of Parthenogenesis are rarely, if ever, in their right minds.