Everything

Known in the Renaissance as Ars Cupiditae, the Art of Desire focuses upon achieving your desires through finding out what other people desire and then using that knowledge to enact your Will. Like alchemy (and most other forms of magick, art, and science), this discipline involves plenty of self-perfection: athletic exercise, meditation, mental gymnastics, self-reflection, etiquette, and other social graces. Fashionable clothes, subtle yet influential cosmetics, poise and grace, martial arts, seduction, intimidation, and the trappings of wealth and refinement provide essential tools for this practice. Although it’s most readily associated with the Syndicate and its original form as the High Guild, the Art of Desire has adherents throughout the mortal and Awakened worlds.

Essentially, Ars Cupiditae converts desire to reality. What you want, you make happen. A devotee nurtures her desires and the desires of other people, then uses them to advance her agenda for Reality as a whole. An Art of value, this practice draws connections between people and places, reads emotions and influences thoughts, manipulates the physical and mental states of both the mage and her subjects, and directs probability and material toward a greater goal. As a result, this Art favors the Spheres of Correspondence, Entropy, Life, Matter, Mind, and Prime, using them as parts of a useful, interlocking whole.

An eminently cultured practice, Ars Cupiditae draws upon a mixture of Asian, European, and Middle Eastern social and philosophical technologies. A practitioner of Desire rarely comes across as a mage at all – she’s more Nikita than Hermione. Although certain Ecstatics and Hermetic wizards favor this approach, and modern Ngoma and Taftani use it to command urban commerce and culture, a devotee of this Art employs social influence, economic wizardry, and sheer personal excellence in order to get what she wants. Such mages rarely use violence themselves, leaving the dirty work to paid enforcers. If and when a practitioner needs to get her hands messy, though, her athletic prowess and advanced technology prove that she’s no corner-office pushover.

A related practice, hypereconomics, refines the Art of Desire into social and global control. By exploring and exploiting desires and values within a given group, a hypereconomist can sense the Primal Energies of want and need within that group and then turn them to her advantage. An arcane practice understood mostly by Syndicate reps and the occasional Virtual Adept, hypereconomics provides an excellent vehicle for Entropy, Mind, and Prime Effects, channeled through social and mathematical activities so subtle that few people even recognize that their lives are being altered. Almost always coincidental (gross violations of Consensus Reality are considered cheap), hypereconomics remains a closely guarded secret in the 21st-century reality wars.

Associated Paradigms: A Mechanistic Cosmos; Bring Back the Golden Age; Divine Order and Earthly Chaos; Everything is Chaos; Everything is Data; Everything’s an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake; Might is Right; One-Way Trip to Oblivion; Tech Holds All Answers

Associated Abilities: Academics (culture, philosophy, psychology), Athletics, Awareness, Carousing, Etiquette, Expression, Finance, Intimidation, Leadership, Martial Arts, Media, Politics, Seduction, Subterfuge

Common Instruments: Cards and dice, cosmetics, (very refined) dance and gestures, eye contact, fashion, gadgets, mass media, money and wealth, sex, social domination, vehicles, voice, weapons