Who says occult secrets have to be hard to find?
You ever seen that episode of the Twilight Zone, Kick the Can? Long story short, a bunch of old folks figure out that the secret of eternal youth is the titular kid’s game. The weird part is, one of them mentions that other games have power too.
I did a little follow-up on that. Y’see, I know this guy, he’s got this thing, he knows how to make deals so nobody can double-cross him. If he agrees to pay you for something, and he does, you have to come through, no matter what. Even if you haven’t got it, even if you don’t know what it is, even if it doesn’t exist.
So, one day he goes up to this little kid, like five years old, not clued-in at all, and offers the kid $200 and a 55 gallon drum full of candy corn in exchange for the instructions and materials for the most powerful ritual in existence. A week later, he comes back with the goods, and the kid’s there, but empty-handed. My buddy says the magic words, compels the kid to come through on the other end of the deal.
The kid takes the money and says “Candy corn sucks. I’m gonna go play tag.”And then leaves. Naturally, this apparent break from the script kind of freaked out the merchant, but once he calmed down, he tried to figure out what the kid had actually given him.
Of course, buddy’s got a tape recorder. Some clockworker, three years back, sold him a universal translator that she couldn’t remember what she buiit it for. Turns out, when the kid said tag, it was an acronym. Transcendent Affective somethingIcan’tremember.
Y’see, normal tag is a game played by societies. Somebody gets to be It, gets to be the monster, gets to chase and hunt and be unstoppable. Until somebody stands up to them, and then they aren’t It anymore, the new guy is. There’s always exactly one enemy, and when someone stops being afraid of the enemy, the old enemy turns into just another victim and the brave one is the new enemy. The only way to really win at tag is to stop playing.
The kind of tag that kid was talking about is a game people play inside themselves. Like solitaire, not every initial state is winnable, but unlike regular tag, there is a way to win, so long as you’re willing to keep reshuffling (reincarnating? 101ing?) until you get it right. Assuming, of course, you’ve got all the parts you need.
Have you ever met someone who isn’t a few cards short of a deck? Would you really want to?
Sounds a little like the rising Kundalini. In solitaire the cards have to be arranged in some way, usually by number and in corresponding suits. It’s a pattern that lets you uncover the face down cards, and in most variants the more you uncover, the more you CAN uncover. In the Kundalini, the energy gets stronger, or more pure, or something as it jumps from one chakra to another. This ritual probably does something like that, sending the mind or soul or something through more and more powerful and complex internal states, faster and faster, until it surpasses the corporeal form. To steal a term from Half-Life, a resonance cascade scenario.
I’d buy that for a dollar.
The tricky part is, since the kid effectively gave the candy corn barrel back, it must be required somehow. The really tricky part is, all the necessary instructions must be somehow contained in the kid’s statement and what it did immidiately afterwards (which is, unfortunately, unknown to us).