Chapter 1: Prologue: Amaranth’s Confessional

Author's Note: I originally created Analogue Ruins to be an audio-only podcast. But after I learned that a lot of beings just plain prefer to read the transcripts, I've transitioned it to an intentional hybrid. I still record these episodes as audio, which is why you'll see that they're written like scripts, but since Episode 7 I try to make sure they work equally as well for reading as for listening.

If you want to listen to the audio for each episode, you can find each episode here: Analogue Ruins is also on Spotify!

(Amaranth)

Right, let's give this little bastard a whirl... maybe try a self-pitying parody of that old song about a modern major general?--no. Let's not. I know I'm a joke, but it doesn't help to treat myself like it. Have to keep seeking.

Right. Wait one.

(Pause)

For better or worse, that worked. This is what I wanted, right? A captive audience? Someone to placidly parrot my own monologues back to me? Yes, Carrie-that-wails-in-my-nightmares. I hear you. I know self-pity isn't remorse. Still... you lived your life. You drank and went to parties and broke the rules and had all the sex you wanted without worrying about your image or the family legacy. Doing all that was its own reward.

"The joy you sacrifice today is an investment in tomorrow." You know what, mom? You go fuck yourself too.

Enough. If I'm doing this, I'd like to maintain some shred of dignity. In the likely event that I die somewhere in the line of my morally-ambiguous duties, these tapes will be the sole surviving record of one Amaranth "Moonsilver" Dawson... or... that doesn't really feel like me anymore.

Just call me Amaranth. Last I heard, that's the only name that still belongs to me.

This recorder's going to work wonders for me, at least. I think it's some kind of extremely early digital? I'm not sure how the memory works. It has a timer, a track list, but I can't figure out how to put new discs or memory cards or whatever in or out. There's got to be some sort of weird glitch or a scratch in the... the part that records sound. I'm standing next to the highway right now. A subway feels more fitting and atmospheric. But... Detroit doesn't have one of those.

I fished this 80s-chic emblem of my disgrace out of the dumpster after, um... after my... after my latest client... asked me to leave his apartment at 5AM before his girlfriend got home from her night shift.

Anyway, uh... It came with these nice meaty headphones, so that's pretty cool. Makes it easier to confirm this: for some reason, this thing only picks up the sound of my voice. The sound quality isn't very good by modern standards, but I mean... it came from a dumpster. So, yeah. It records only my voice. And occasional bits of other things, but I'm increasingly certain they don't have any relationship to the sounds happening around me at the time of recording.

That's probably not a natural effect, is it? Not planning to look to deep into it. I've already got about as much as I can take.

Uh, let's see, should I use this as a journal during my downtime? Maybe talking to myself will help me put things in perspective. Though, I'm not sure how much perspective I can get on my life being over at 25. Sometimes I feel like a vampire bit me in Westhavelland Park back in 2022, and all the living people around me can sense the change waiting. Like it's just taking me a hell of a long time to turn.

My mother used to call me the Child of the Millennium. Born at midnight on January 1st of the year 2000. Publicly, she said my birth was her greatest act of witchcraft.

Privately, she... well, I don't give a shit about my mother.

Okay, fine, I give many a shit about my mother. There's something so strangely dehumanizing about my age lining up exactly with the calendar date. Everyone I've ever met takes it for granted that the numbers of their age, these mathematical tools we use in everything from grading to job performance to physics itself to test how real something or someone is... they send this very simple message that we are different from the passage of time. We are something more than the day we wake up on.

So, yeah. Given that she was the one who tore my eyes open to that, to how the tiniest thing can undermine my entire sense of self, making me feel all the weaker precisely because it's so small and petty and fucking stupid...there's a kind of warped satisfaction to being broken down by big things. Career failure. Violence. Poverty, or... or other things.

If the smallest thing in the world, this tiny detail I should be able to just ignore, can break me... what am I if I am smaller than the smallest of things, if not nothing at all?

So of course I give a shit about my mother. I don't want to. I want to think of her and feel nothing but numbness, bitter frozen acidic hatred. Much better than this toxic, pining, disbelieving love still half-entranced by denial. How could she do this to me? How?

I was her daughter. She was supposed to see the best in me when everyone else had given up. She was supposed to be stern and angry, and yeah, disappointed, but... she was still supposed to give me another chance. To push me to be better.

She just pushed me further down. Into the filth. Into the dark, where I can't sully her reputation again. She never loved me. My own mother never actually loved me. She performed the loving mother so I would do what she wanted. And I fell for it.

And then my friends, my... the girls who joined my stupid, fake, charlatan's coven... they fell for my pretend witchcraft. Chasing a lie born of a lie born of a lie. Why did I do that, anyway? Try to fake it 'til I made it. How did I expect to be able to do something for real if I never really tried until the critical moment? How was I going to grow into the person who can do what it takes to succeed if I was too busy claiming I'd already arrived?

I guess I thought, when that moment came, I would fill in the hollowness of all my performances, and then it would be pretty much the same as if it was all real from the start. But the foundation was hollow too. I never became someone who could carry the weight of the person I wanted to become. When I tried to grow into the ideal of myself, it broke me.

I know what I did was wrong. I knew while I was doing it. And that knowing... somehow, it just made me dig in deeper. Trying to push through as fast as I could so by the time my momentum ran out and I faced facts, it was too late to go back. I imagined the closure I'd get after the fact, saying 'what's done is done' with this aura of tragic poise. Projected myself into the future to avoid free will in the present.

Like Hannah was just a story I told to myself. Like all I had to do was write up a little thesis statement post-mortem, and it would justify erasing who she was. I guess my mother taught me that. But still... I don't want to be that woman anymore.

I think that's all stubbornness is, really. Hoping that if you just push off admitting how you've fucked up, somehow, your mistake will wear itself out instead of multiplying.

In other words, I panicked and I tried to make a scapegoat of someone who came to my "coven"--yeah, some coven--in good faith. And... and choosing the person I chose... choosing Hannah... that revealed some things about me I'm still not ready to deal with.

I guess that's the one tiny upside to being cast out of polite society. No reason to rush.

The people who pay to use my body don't care about the drama I got into on a college trip two years ago. It's strange. For some reason, I guess narcissism or conditioning or both, I thought everyone in the world would recognize me on sight. Hate me. Drive me out.

All that posturing, all our blunt-force idealism and panicky screeching about how our performative morality was life or death and we would never give up because we weren't going to let some faceless, nameless Them tear us down... and turns out, here in the real world, nobody cares. Bills to pay. Mouths to feed. No rest for the wicked.

I finally understand Aunt Susie's taste in music.

I smoke now. A lot. Terrible habit, but what's a girl to do? And the logistics of payment are a pain in the ass, but I'm finding sex work itself... fun. Often terrifying as well, though I guess as a pretty white girl I've got the least right to complain about that part. Either way, it's fun. Not so much in the way I... I fantasized about, secretly, when I was a teenager. But it's stimulating in a professional sense I hadn't expected. Figuring out how to take care of my clients. Seeing what makes them tick, growing my skill at catering to it.

I do wish I got off more, but maybe it's not the worst thing that I don't. Helps keep the boundary between sex for work and sex for my own pleasure more clearly defined. A lot of my clients are surprisingly sweet, and... and that's dangerous. It's tempting to get codependent. The problem isn't some idiotic, closet-sexist trope of "saving things for the person I fall in love with." It's that it feels so, so easy to fall in love with anyone.

Connections like that always feel like a good idea in the moment. But in the end...

Being adrift, seeing how fast one bad deed can tear your whole life part and unravel everything you were planning on calling a future... I guess once you give up on living fearlessly, that's when horror really starts to click. I burned through the Magnus Archives in a couple of weeks recently. Fun stuff.

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I did read the Malleus Maleficarum and the Lesser Key of Solomon since those both came up, and I'd heard about them once or twice in the past. Got tired of wondering whether there was anything to them.

I guess I'm not dealing with the super-special non-redacted original versions that fictional characters in a horror podcast get to have--assuming they're fictional characters. Anyway, moving back in time from podcasts to distant cultural ancestors. These old staples of demonology. Just based on what's there... I don't see why they get so much hype.

Here, an excerpt from the Ars Goetia: "The Tenth Spirit is Buer, a Great President. He appeareth in Sagittary, and that is his shape when the Sun is there. He teaches Philosophy, both Moral and Natural, and the Logic Art, and also the Virtues of all Herbs and Plants. He healeth all distempers in man, and giveth good Familiars. He governeth 50 Legions of Spirits, and his Character of obedience is this, which thou must wear when thou callest him forth unto appearance."

The character of obedience is a symbol, I should add. I mean... I know what my words mean, but if I'm doing this whole experiment to try and understand the psychological power of voices, I also need to be mindful of the limits of words and speaking.

But yeah. That's it. The infamous Lesser Key of Solomon. The whole thing is just... kind of... like that. Oh, yeah, also, there's more than one book in the Lesser Key. Only one actually deals with demonology. The others focus on astrological magic, there's invoking of angels as well, and generally, it's all very... tame. Draw the circle this way. Here's a list of all these demons you can summon to do things for you. Here's the specific boon they're supposed to grant. Here's how many legions of spirits they... ha... governeth.

It's just a simple structure that repeats over, and over, and over. None of the mess I'd have expected from real magic. I do find it fun that according to one definition of magic given in a preface to the compilation I used, one translated and compiled by S.L. "MacGregor" Mathers with additional material by Aleister Crowley, all ritual magic is real because it "affects unusual changes in the brain." Oh, and supposedly, assembling the pieces of the ritual constitutes a real change in the world. That's why it's supposed to be magic.

The effect is the act of setting things up, and that is the magic. Pathetic.

Rearranging objects that already existed into a different order isn't a state-change. Lighting a candle isn't magic, for fuck's sake, it's just applying the existing properties of the material universe to create a sustained thermal reaction! Potential energy becomes thermal energy. Using the muscles I already have, to distribute things that already exist, to play out a story in my head about summoning a spirit, is just roleplay. C.G. Jung called this kind of thing active imagination. I'm very familiar with it. Used it a lot as a kid. You can do lots of fun things to your brain by choosing to treat your imagination literally.

Only difference with Jung's approach was a kind of double thinking--taking it literally, yet also treating all the manifestations of his own mind as, well, the manifestations of his mind instead of their own beings. Like, just because they had their origins in him, he owned them. Like they weren't people in their own right, so he could just scream and berate and accuse them of whatever he wanted. He'd be friends with them in one meeting, and breaking them with psychic symbols in the next.

And he wrote about himself doing this as if it was heroic. He invented monsters to represent parts of himself, and then talked about destroying them as if it was anything other than a strange psychic form of self-harm.

Oh, yeah, I also read the Liber Novus recently. It... it made me very uncomfortable.

It's no great insight to start doing that kind of shit again. Going back to the mindset of a child with more advanced language, but you're an adult now, so you apply your imagination to other living, breathing people so as to avoid admitting that it's just your imagination... I'm so tired of it all.

And yes, those kinds of mental effects are very real, but they're just extensions of underlying psychology. There's no change in the world compositionally speaking, no rules altered or broken. There's certainly nothing added or manifested. There's no more magic here than there was when mom would drag dad into playing the role of the Horned God for "fertility rites." I'll bet you anything she just couldn't get meaningful arousal except through her special favorite fetish. That's not magic. Not a miracle. It's just a personality quirk.

Can't imagine why, in my own approach to Wicca, I just embraced the fakeness and stuck to a single nameless Goddess we could all project ourselves onto. I wish... I wish I'd asked Carrie about her old-school witchcraft. I have to wonder now--had she read things I haven't? Did she know something I didn't, meet true demons in her sleep?

She felt strong. Powerful, even, whatever it is that makes power more than mere strength.

Or, is it just easier to believe that than to accept I just sat there, frozen and frightened, while another completely ordinary woman monologued at me about how pathetic I was? We could've jumped her. I don't know that we should have, but we could have.

Personally, I've found that thinking to myself about how I want something is enough to start my brain growing towards it. It doesn't have to be a ritual. Don't need to invoke a demon. Just frame questions and requests to your own mind. That's all the Lesser Key is, really: a way for people who don't believe in their power over their own minds and personalities to tap that power indirectly, through the mirror of an imaginary friend.

Me? I recognized within myself that I wanted to know how to read people. Once I learned to rest easy in that desire, I started to get good at reading people. I wanted to appear confident, so... and this was my mistake. I did learn how to appear confident. Never more than that. I was too insecure to believe that I could be truly confident. So I got very good at drawing folks in, getting them to believe in me, but I could never deliver.

My confidence wasn't born naturally out of my growth as a woman, a would-be politician or... or as a witch. I just copied the movements of confidence, of skill, of genuine learning and power of will from older women without any of the substance that made those movements potent. Like a rifle firing blanks, or... or the sharpest sword in the universe held by someone who can't even swing it right.

Now that I think about it, I don't think most of the women I was copying ever learned true confidence, either.

Is this all magic ever was? A bunch of mental games and pieces of anti-logic acting as a screen, ensuring anyone who took them seriously had low enough standards that literally anything would seem magical to them?

I think I understand Carrie's frustrations better now. Like... this is it? These are the dark, forbidden tomes we were told to fear and hate? People died for studying cheap garbage like this? This kind of magic wouldn't have helped me heal Aunt Susie's liver or stop grandma from dying in the Pandemic. It's just a way for sad, isolated nerds to make themselves feel powerful by psyching out gullible people. Vulnerable people, desperate for answers.

People like the girls I lured into the Sisters of the Boundless Cycle.

I have to admit that, having looked into it and found "succubus" goes back to the Latin succuba, itself from succubare, meaning to lie under, while succuba basically means, well, a prostitute... I have to admit that suddenly the idea of a powerful, morally-ambiguous sex-demoness feels a lot less regressive than I used to think.

Just for a laugh I snuck into an abandoned storage shed near this run-down strip mall. I selected some ritual objects from the trash my fellow street scum tossed in there--a discarded vodka bottle to represent the emptiness that comes of relying on sensory escape, an old condom for wasted passion, and a skull I excavated from the ant-covered corpse of a rat behind some rotting wooden pallets to... well, admittedly, I didn't know what I was doing with that until I arranged my three items in a triangular formation at the shed's center and pushed the rest of the trash away to clear a rough circle.

Then? Then I decided that the skull represented not death, but threshold. The divide whose crossing is the transmutation of the one who crosses. The transcendence of one world at its apex only to arrive at the lowest level of another.

Of course, nothing happened, but I had fun with it and it changed my brain. I believe that's just called "experiencing something new." Maybe I shouldn't be too snide. I'm starved enough for experience, and a sense of agency over my ability to create it for myself, that maybe just playing out the rituals can be enough. As long as I can make money with my material body, I don't need magic to go further than a little extra stirring in flesh and blood.

On a related note to thresholds and transformation, Alighieri's Divine Comedy was wild for its time. Somehow this catty Italian man writing self-insert fanfic of the biblical Hell carries, for me, a greater sense of mythic potency and occult revelation than self-proclaimed, would-be practitioners of true magic. The ever-burning city of Dis... if I close my eyes and feel the rhythms of the streets, the buildings, the cars and the people as energy's interchange, Detroit and Dis could almost be the same place.

Anyway... I don't have anything better to do, so I guess I'm going to start looking for accounts of supposed supernatural activity. Yeah, I'm just copying something someone else already did, and better. I hope that maybe, since I'm at least able to admit that this time, that'll open up the way for me to want to step off the path when the opportunity arrives, and make my own way at last. Claim my desire to be my own person.

Maybe then I'll finally achieve it.

Not sure who that person's going to be yet, so... so for now, I'll invoke the spirit of my past self. Amaranth "Moonsilver" Dawson: an obedient girl who followed instructions, and felt cheated every time she didn't get the reward she was told the universe owed her for going through the motions. She played out all the steps, hit all the right notes, rehearsed all the moral lessons she could to spout at the key moment to defeat the monsters in her own mind.

I remember she got pretty good at seeing those monsters in the people around her, and imagining that she broke them for their own good. Did she win a destiny, the applause of the rippling crowds, overthrow the great evil by her symbolic actions?

Of course not. World doesn't work that way. And thank fuck for that. People like... like the woman I am now... it's easy enough for the world treat us lightly as it is.

Enough. I'll raise the little copycat from the dead for this one purpose. Let the fake witch play her game one last time. Maybe, that way, I can finally teach her how to change herself.

(End)

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