The Book of Sheyd | GLOGtober Cryptic Lorepost

Vast and trunk-less legs of stone found here (GLOGtober 23')

In the beginning, there was nothing but The Deep.

Before there was The Deep, there were MONSTERS. As the infinite created Itself - God the Most High creating Himself and making Himself Known - the anti-spark of the first Creation rang out. With the first Light came the first Shadows. The beginning warranted its own antithesis.

With no world yet pulled from The Deep to contain themselves, they were souls without bodies.

They were The Sheydim. They had souls, and The Most High made them bodies - leaving them unfinished - to rest on the final and seventh day. Some made due without bodies, some took their unfinished bodies and were grateful, others destroyed God's work meant for them.

Even to this day they live, and they are numerous. If a mortal were to peer into Al-Ghayb (The Unseen Realm) they would see 1000 sheydim to their left and 10,000 to their right.
They outnumber humankind one million times one million fold.

In three ways, they are like angels: that they have wings, can travel from one end of the world to another, and can see past the curtain of Heaven to That Which Will Pass. In three ways they are also like humans: in that they must eat and drink, procreate new generations, and they all come to know Death.

After the beginning and before The Now, all Sheyd were one and yet none.

Then The Most High fashioned the first humans from clay, and the walls of The Garden went up.

Many yet know the Lore of Kadmon & Evona, the first humans made by God. Many still whisper the lore of how all of Hashem's angels bowed in heaven save one - The First Shaytan - and the war that followed. Today we will not stray from our purpose, we will focus on echoes and anti-spark today.
We will learn how the sheydim were changed out of The Garden.

Kadmon & Evona's banishment from The Garden was a kind of creation, and with it came a new generation of Sheydim. In exile, the first mortals laid with the anti-spark of Knowledge Claimed, siring the divergent tribes of Sheydim we know today.

MAZIQIN

Kadmon laid with Lilitu the Seductress, and from their copulation came abominations undreamed of. Their offspring became the Tribe of Maziqin, called The Harmers and Devils. Their demonic offspring sought to continue the war against Heaven that the shaytan abandoned, turning the farthest corners of Sheol into a foul mockery of The Garden as revenge against The Most High.

Some say the burning purifies their souls, while others conjecture that the Maziqin burn and flay the souls of sinners into the Imps that comprise their legions. 

The Maziqin are ruled by the King of Hell, called Asmodai.

Asmodai entered the world when he was summoned and bound by the great King Iban Dawud, one of the great sorcerer-kings of Myr Regath. Needing his lore to build his tower, Asmodai and Iban came to know one another greatly in the devil's captivity. Deceiving Iban into releasing him, Asmodai took the king's place and banished him to a wilderness halfway across the world. 

Taking the king's place, Asmodai ruled as The False Dawud for the next 99 years. During The False Dawud's reign, Myr Regath was led astray into idol worship. For 99 years God's chosen people were deceived into taking on the worship of saints, rejecting The Most High and closing the curtain of heaven.

Asmodai was dethroned (back to Gehennom) when he cast aside The Tzohar. The waves carried the light-carrying gemstone right to the real Iban-in-exile - who lived as a fisherman all that time - and restored the rightful line of Kings to Myr Regath. 

Even with victory, the damage was done. The seeds of Myr Regath's destruction were sewn, and would sprout a generation later. 

All the Maziqin cannot stand prayer. They see it as chants or calls to The God that abandoned them, to the tyrant who decided to create perfection in The Garden and then denied it to them. For the same logic, water blessed by Men of Letters & God - frequently called Holy Water - is anathema to them. It is uncertain if it disrupts their bodies, or if they simply revile it to such an extent it causes them physical harm, but the results are certain: smoking flesh and cries of agony from the agonizers.

SE'IRIM

Evona laid with Samael, the Venom Angel. Some say that Samael took the guise of a serpent to lead her astray, damning mankind just to know the taste of her flesh. Others say that The Deceiver's love for the first woman was his only virtue, and this is why Samael is said to guide lost souls down The River Abaddon to Sheol. Regardless-

Their offspring became the Tribe of the Se'Irim. Known sometimes as The Seelie Tribe or The Bestial Sheydim, they desire to recreate the majesty of The Garden through dance, merriment and raucous sex. They are a paradox; their angelic descent gives them a love of both mankind and God, yet their use of mortals as playthings makes a mockery of Malkhut.

They delight in slipping in and out of their unfinished bodies. They add plant matter to it all the while - mulched leaves, moss, worm-strewn logs - which condense into a fur like that of a mountain goat. When the Se'Irim travel in Al-Ghayb, their gaiety and whimsy cut tears in Creation:

Milk spoils, flowers bloom, music is carried on a nonexistent wind.

They are known to send songs and messages to one another through the roots of mushrooms. Should one find a ring of mushrooms in the wilderness, the Se'Irim are sure to be close at hand. Some say that in the darkest corners of The Unseen, ancient Se'Irim took Evona's skeleton and invested her in The Mycelium Heart of The World, so that she and Samael could still converse across the vast gulf of Death.

Such a thought does not bear repeating.

The Se'Irim are ruled by Agrat bat Mahlat, the Dancer. Her ascension to leadership of her tribe is quite recent. For millennia, the tribe was ruled by Na'amah. 

When Na'amah played her symbols, whole villages of mortals would enter a dance from which they could not stop. Their skeletons would cleave themselves from their flesh to keep the revelry going past the point of exhaustion. Her supremacy among the Se'Irim went unquestioned for an age, and many even speculated that she was the mother to Asmodai, a Queen-Regent of Hell in secret.

Agrat bat Mahlat - daughter of Na'amah and a human - was a priestess of sacred sex. She was struck with a vision of the future: of a revelry so great and powerful that would finally bring The Garden back into existence. She need only defeat her Mother to do so.

To acquire the power necessary, she bed 99 demons in rites dedicated (mockingly) to The Most High. She then made love to the night sky, forever giving-up her ability to walk in the world under the night of day.

Now she rules the Se'Irim, having cast down her mother Na'amah into dark corners of Sheol forgotten by all but the sages. To keep her ascension, she goes out with her bedfellows - the Succubi, Estrie and the like - to copulate with men and produce offspring.

1000 offspring are fed into the fires each night to keep her power.

Every night she hopes the orgy will be enough to fill her vision, yet it is never enough. With each sunrise, she retreats back into The Unseen to try and achieve a Final Victory Over God on the next Sabbath.

As the natural world fascinates them so, the Se'Irim can be led astray by disguises. Disguising oneself as a beast may make the spirits continue looking for mortals to play with. Salt thrown over the shoulder may cause them to hyper-focus upon the grains, rather than worry where the iron blade is being pointed. Their hyperfixation with perfection, revelry and art is their eternal downfall.

SHEYDIM

Even as the tribes have branched out, the roots remain strong in unseen places.

If one speaks of the anti-spark, they may yet mean the sheyd of soul without body. The sheydim that are neither Maziqin nor Se'Irim retain the old ways, living primarily in Al-Ghayb. They are The Unseelie Tribe, Those Who Lay Waste. They are numberless, and from them the horrors of plague, disaster and sacrifice follow in their wake.

Their differences are many. They are eyes and teeth, seen and unseen. Sick nausea and calamity follow in their wake like a finger drawn over water's surface. Even still, they share some traits:

• They cannot abide Iron. A great spell was worked over Sheyd-kind by the blacksmith Tubal-Cain, one with lasting effects. Worked metal does great harm to them, just as blessings of Hashem do.
• It is rumored that Asmodai - knowledgeable in scripture and Lore - cast a Counterspell on this effect to the Maziqin. This may explain why iron weapons have no effect upon demonkind, unless they are splashed with holy water. 
• They take many shapes - intangible or physical - but cannot change their feet, which are like that of a rooster. 
• Words of Man and God may reach them, and talismans may yet bind them.

Art by sheydgarden