Merits & Flaws

Your magick, perhaps your very soul, resides outside of your physical self. Maybe you’ve placed your soul within a ring, a jar, or a wooden doll in order to protect yourself from possession and control. Or perhaps you believe that your wand, not your Will,

is the source of your mystic powers. You could have built a robot as an extension of your Genius, or crafted a jacket into which you’ve instilled the very essence of who you are. The receptacle itself is not important except with regards to its portability. This Flaw reflects the fact that you must have the receptacle before you can employ your Arts. Without it, you’re just another Sleeper.

Linguistically, phylactery comes from a Greek root meaning “to guard.” In many forms of classical magick, practitioners would place their souls or life-force within amulets, either as protection for their souls or as portable vessels for spellwork. Orthodox Jews sometimes employ tefillin – often referred to as phylacteries – as reminders of their covenant with God. As a Mage Trait, your Phylactery serves as a container for the “inner god” that allows a mage to change reality: the Awakened Avatar.

How your character views this relationship between the container, his Awakened self, and the ability to perform magick depends on the character’s paradigm. A Slavic witch could believe that she has taken her heart and placed it into a hardboiled egg; a mad scientist may use consciousness-transposing co-location theory in order to secure his brilliance in a vat-held brain. The shapechanging shaman invests her soul into a wolf-skin, while a Hermetic magus employs Roman rituals to lock his immortal essence into a golden staff. Your phylactery is probably an item, but it could conceivably be a location (a grove, a garden, a house, etc.) or living being (a child, a bird, a tree, a manufactured in­ telligence housed within a mainframe, and so forth). The key is this: Your mage must be able to physically access the phylactery in order to employ Sphere magick. And therein lays the Flaw.

All told, a phylactery offers a few powerful benefits in ex­ change for some pretty significant drawbacks. On the plus side:

• A phylactery allows you to preserve a part of your con­ sciousness outside your mortal body. That body may be destroyed, but your soul and consciousness live on until or unless the phylactery is destroyed. With Mind 4, you can project that consciousness into another body or an astral form, while a character with Mind 5 /Spirit 5 can place your Awakened consciousness into a new body for you.

• If the phylactery is taken from you, or you’re taken away from it, you can retrieve it, or return to it, with a successful application of the Correspondence Sphere. The difficulty for this return Effect is 4 if the return would seem coinci­ dental to a witness, 5 if it’s vulgar without witnesses, and 6 if it’s vulgar with witnesses. (Yes, the usual Paradox applies.)

• A living phylactery retains a psychic bond with you, as if you’re in constant empathic and telepathic contact with that character. (No roll necessary.) If the phylactery is a place, then you retain an awareness of that place, and can check in with it by using Perception + Awareness, difficulty 6. (For very large areas, the check-in difficulty may range from 7 to 10.)

• With the addition of the Merit: “Immortal” at the seven-point level, your physical body may continue to survive until the phylactery is destroyed… which, if you don’t mind going without your magick for a while, could render you more or less immune to death if you then hide your phylactery away in a safe location. Traditionally speaking, that’s why many mages make phylacteries in the first place: to preserve their mortal lives indefinitely.

• So long as your phylactery remains safe and undamaged, you remain immune to Gilgul and other soul-trapping attacks. Your body may be possessed, but your soul cannot be stolen or destroyed unless someone attacks your phylactery instead… in which case you’re screwed, as described below. For details about Gilgul, see that

entry in Chapter Four, pp. 218-220.

• And if you invest your soul into a place, you literally carry the essence of that place within yourself, while a part of you always remains there. For practitioners of certain an­ cestral forms of magic (or simply for hardcore romantics), that’s a very powerful reason to do such a thing.

Those are the good points. The downsides are as follows:

• If the phylactery gets destroyed, your ability to use magick in this life gets destroyed along with it.

• You cannot perform magick or recharge your Avatar unless you have some form of physical connection to your phylactery. That form could involve a physical gateway to virtual contact, as with a computer that accesses a mainframe, but you still need that gateway in order to reach a distant phylactery. (Yes, you may use Correspondence Sphere magick to reach the phylactery, and you are always counted as being one success away from your phylactery when you use Correspondence to reach out to it.)

• If your phylactery is a place, you must be in that place in order to employ the Spheres. If it’s a living thing, then that character has got to be within touching range before you can use the Spheres. (Explains a lot about Blofeld and his cat, doesn’t it?)

• If you’re using your phylactery to cast magick, you need to be rather obvious about it – shouting commands to your hypertech robot pal, holding your mystic crown aloft, hewing your demonic sword through enemies as you shout invocations to your patron god, that sort of thing.

• If your Avatar communicates to you through an embod­ ied phylactery character, then you need to purchase the Merit: Manifest Avatar (p. 71) to represent the Avatar’s physical form.

• If your phylactery is an item, then it’s considered a unique personalized instrument, as per the rules in Mage 20, pp. 587-588. It can be broken, stolen or repaired, but cannot be replaced if it’s totally destroyed.

Creating a phylactery of this sort demands high-level magick – Correspondence 5 /Prime 5 /Spirit 5 /Mind 4 to be exact, plus Matter 4 to invest one’s self into a material item, Life 5 to invest it into a living thing, and Life 5 /Matter 4 in order to instill it into a place with an active biosphere – a forest or lake, as opposed to a bare room or large metal box.

(A previous description of the phylactery investment ritual, given in the sourcebook Dead Magic, p. 112, stated that only Spirit 3 was necessary for investment; by the rules, however, this claim is incorrect. You need Correspondence 5 to forge so powerful a connection, Prime 5 to invest that intimate a degree of vital energy, Spirit 5 to bind the Awakened Avatar spirit into a separate place or being, and Mind 4 to project an aspect of consciousness out of the body and into a separate vessel. Spirit 3 alone does none of these things.)

Unless your mage is already a Master of the appropriate Spheres, this Flaw assumes that some stronger power invested (or trapped) your Avatar and consciousness into that phylactery for you. According to some practices, a magical practitioner must create a phylactery in order to use their most potent Arts; although that’s not true in the greater scheme of Mage, that doesn’t mean people don’t still believe that it is.