#golconda

[tilbageidanmark]

Magritte, 1964, painting in a suit

[gorbalsvampire]

on Golconda, Roads and Paths

Here's the thing about Golconda.

In the Dark Ages, it was understood that there was a Beast, and that many Roads led away from the Beast, and that at the end of every Road there was a state of being in which one was a paragon of one's virtues, as far from the Beast as any Cainite could ever be, and that state was called Golconda. A Paragon of the Road of Sin would look like a shame, a caution and a horror to a follower of the Road of Heaven or Kings, but their Beast would be mastered nonetheless.

Much that was once known was lost, in the War of Princes and the Inquisition and the Revolt and the rise of the Sabbat.

A Path is not a Road, built and tended with the authority of mind over soul. A Path is simply a route trodden by many, through a wilderness poorly understood by all.

The Sabbat is permanently struggling, and its Enlightenment begins with a breaking of the self and a submission to the Beast. Its Paths are framed by an eternal war that defines everything the sect thinks and does, against everything it can reach, against enemies vast and abstract. It is not interested in Golconda any more than it is capable of winning.

The Camarilla? They have maintained but one Road – Humanity – to the detriment of all the others. Theirs is the struggle between Beast and Man, and when a Kindred wishes to be neither, they fold their arms and say "nevertheless: choose, or be damned." The Camarilla does not believe in many things that happen to be true; it believes in you believing what you're told, and if you don't, well, you must be lost to the Beast already, mustn't you?

In the modern nights, Golconda is an accident. The Roads, well kept and maintained, are lost, and all that remains is to blunder along the Path and hope.

This is a very long winded way of saying "check out Dark Ages if you want to see what an authoritarian (Kings) or indulgent (Sin) or harmonious (Beasts) or pious (Heaven) relationship with the Beast looks like, all of those are forms of Golconda, same mechanical effects but very different behaviours to maintain them."

During the War of Princes, i.e. before the formation of the Camarilla, you have five major Roads and at least as many minor ones. None of them are presented as necessarily more important, more widely followed, or more "true" than the others. And, crucially, in the Revised era - that's Dark Ages Vampire, not Vampire: the Dark Ages - all of those Roads have an Aura attached. At a high Road rating, that is to say really living up to their personal ideals, a character radiates a palpable sense of something - authority, temptation, compassion - suggesting that they are approaching a different order of being.

After the formation of the Camarilla, on the other hand, you have Humanity presented as the default state of being for vampires. Their central moral struggle is to preserve their Humanity from the ravages of the Beast - there are very clear consequences for letting your Humanity drop, but the Aura corresponding to the Dark Ages' Via Humanitas is no longer present. Something has changed. Something about the way vampires work is not as it used to be.

Dark Ages was always a backformation - a prequel created after the core operations and tenets of Vampire were established. And those core operations and tenets have always included a sense of Humanity as "The Downward Spiral," of vampires as risking "degeneration" should they engage in behaviours presented by a "Hierarchy of Sins." The journey toward the Beast has always been more explicitly mapped out than any journey away from it. Spend XP to restore Humanity. You may reach Golconda, I guess.

This is fine, it's a solid bit of Gothic theming, core to the game, love it. Except... it doesn't gel with the Paths of Enlightenment, many of which are transhumanist in nature, and which - again, in Revised, this is where I came in - are built from a start of actively running down your Humanity and then adopting your Path and then needing to build your Path rating back up again, i.e. climbing a moral ladder away from the Beast. This doesn't really work when the Paths' morality is written, like Humanity, as a series of failure points - Sins by which you degenerate and risk the Beast. The Paths, as written, are a kind of square peg/round hole situation where you have to turn prohibitions into opportunities to progress. And there isn't as clear a mechanical reward or incentive for maintaining a high Path rating as there is for a high Road rating. No Auras here either.

So, what I arrived at, once I'd run my first successful Dark Ages Vampire game and had this distinction really brought to my attention, was a sense that vampire morality had changed between one side of the transformative events in the early modern period. And that's when I started thinking about what it meant that your characters in Dark Ages and Victorian Age occupied the same band of generations, and thought about how the Camarilla can get away with claiming there are no such things as Antediluvians when some of its founding figures have a personal memory of Antediluvians being actively involved in the War of Princes.

That's when I started taking the Inquisition seriously, as an effectively genocidal event that wiped out almost all playable vampire characters. Higher than sixth generation? Yeah, you probably didn't make it through the War and the Revolt and the Inquisition, and repopulation took a while, Tradition of Progeny and all that. The surviving elders are the ones who deliberately fabricated new social orders for vampirism - the aggressive, militant transhumanism of the Sabbat and the centralised "we hide amongst humans and Humanity is the best way to do that" principles of the Camarilla.

And that's how I arrive at my model of vampire morality.

[unteriors]

Route 146, Golconda, Illinois.

[pmamtraveller]

GOLCONDA (1953) by RENÉ MAGRITTE

The painting shows a group of men wearing black coats and wearing bowler hats. Behind them is an azure sky and a row of buildings with typical BELGIAN architecture.

He paints men as monolithic, as if they are the alter-egos of the painter or the typical bourgeois man of the 20th century. They are 2D and motionless, but they appear to be floating, falling from the heavens, or floating upwards. They are equally spaced and appear to be the same.

MAGRITTE’S work is characterized by ambiguity. These are images that challenge the conventional notion of reality by introducing surreal and irrational elements that we can intuitively understand.

MAGRITTE himself emphasized several times that it is not necessary to question the precise meaning of his works, which are often intended to create visual suggestions and give voice to the inexplicable, rather than to expressly communicate something.

One possible explanation for GOLCONDA can be found in the standardization of characters wearing bowler hats, a symbol of the standardization of modern society. Men, all dressed in the same way, are replicated like raindrops and projected their image through the shadows. The uniqueness of each person disappears.

MAGRITTE’S work can be interpreted as a critique of the isolating nature of contemporary metropolitan life and the anonymous nature of mass society. It can be seen as a metaphor for the loss of individuality that occurs when people become part of the mass consumerist culture and become isolated.

[dymdrimluga]

Golconda

This is a short story about a spiritual search, about the truth that only a ready mind can grasp, and about the self-sacrifice that only a sire can make for a child…

[lemuseum]

[galejro]

Made this one during the 2020 Covid, there's a build up to it, but I'll post later, I am running out of drawings and I kinda didn't drew anything more... Ever since their embrace Lizzie knew her bite could kill with so much as a scratch, while Hania as a Tremere was... out of friends and disliked. Y'know it may be a dumb idea for the naive, but every night we can make a small Golconda for ourselves.

[uliversum]

René Magritte | Golconda | 1953

Jack London | Men in park | 1902

[viscountess1705]

Have a nice and wonderful week everyone...) ☕️

A sudden photo in the light of the merciless sun, because on the way to Golconda it is no longer fatal))

[onegentlemansescapades]

52 Carat D Flawless Golconda Diamond earrings

[writinginnorthnorfolk]

Golconda

City gents without umbrellasfall from the sky like rain;I feel sorry for those fellas,bowler-hatted, dressed in grey, early for work in the morning,late home at the end of the day. Disenchanted gents are fallingpast suburban windows where their perfect wives are waiting,aprons on, scent behind ears, in their hands a glass of something,a peck on the cheek – cheers. Kim M. Russell, 19th March…

[jayshrisitaram108]

[dymdrimluga]

almost no one really knows what Golconda is. It is only known that you can go all the way to it and lose in the end. Maybe this is a very painful experience. It may be necessary to go through the realization of a painful past in order to be able to receive a brighter future. those who know are unlikely to want to tell

[area1789]

[haribabuseo]

Golconda Bonalu Festival, Golconda Fort View During Bonalu Festival, Golconda bonalu

[antedilfuvian]

truckstop revelations