The Marauders, the Hexorians and This Serial

Written from inside

The Last True Mage is written by a Marauder. Vect0r, from inside the tradition this page describes.

The serial is a working: a long story used the way the tradition uses a sigil, fired on the same current as the people named below. Marauders add their own work to that current.

This one is mine.

It speaks for no one in the tradition. It promises a reader nothing.

The DKMU started as two groups

The tradition, in its own public terms.

Chaos magick is a school of modern magic that began in England in the 1970s. The DKMU, short for Domus Kaotica Marauder Underground, grew out of that school. It started as two groups.

The Marauder Underground dates to 2004 on the collective's home page, and to 2003 or 2004 in a 2023 interview with a co-founder of the Domus Kaotica.

A thread called Glitterbomb on the Occultforums site, about slipping magic into public life, grew into a website, a forum and people out tagging a shared mark where anyone could see it.

The Domus Kaotica formed in 2007, when a handful of those Marauders began a project of their own around khaos, the Greek word for the primordial void, spelled that way to set it apart from everyday disorder.

By the collective's own accounts the two merged around 2008 or 2009. The combined name stuck.

No ranks, no oaths

In its own words the DKMU is a "loosely knit, non-hierarchical collective" of occultists, artists, musicians, writers and philosophers from many countries. Its texts say it has no ranks, degrees, leaders or dogma, and has never been an order.

A person joins by contributing something creative, or by attending or hosting a meeting, and then deciding to count as a member. There are no oaths.

The work runs through Houses, which are specialty projects (DKMU Latin America is one), and through regional branches. Its texts are free PDFs in a public library.

The home page says its early literature includes dubious symbols, suggestions of illegal activity and operations of potential harm, which do not wholly reflect its current views. It advocates nothing illegal. No individual speaks for the whole.

The Linking Sigil, and who made it

The collective's broad project is the Assault on Reality. Liber LS Volume 3 gives its core intention as increasing the levels and availability of magick in the world.

The Linking Sigil is its best-known working. Practitioners tag a simple mark on places and objects, and the texts say every mark links to every other in a network called the Web. The texts date the sigil to around 2004.

Behind the network, practitioners report a personality. They call it Ellis, a name proposed in the earliest surviving forum discussion as a play on the initials LS and on Eris, the Discordian goddess.

Liber LS Volume 3 uses Marauder for someone who works with the Linking Sigil or Ellis.

Credit for the sigil goes to two handles. A text from the collective's A.A.O. House says the concept was Silenced's and the design Arjil's.

Arjil's own account describes drawing the mark, and says someone else, whom Arjil cannot name, first floated linking works together. The Hexorian field guide gives the concept to Arjil alone.

None of the sources behind this page credits anyone else. The sigil isn't this site's.

One text calls it unpredictable, though more manageable over the years. Another says it can be perilous.

The Hexorians and the God of Cities

In that interview the co-founder said the Hexorian Movement evolved out of the DKMU Latin America House. It's a community of its own now, and it works through local cells in cities. Its field guide is #OpGrimoire, released under CC BY 4.0 and listed in the DKMU library.

At the center of the guide is Hexorius, whom it calls the City of Below and "the God of Cities", the soul of every city and the patron of the lost: vagabonds, street vendors, vigilantes, runaways and magicians.

Among the ways to reach him the guide names magical drift; in its origin account that means walking a city without a destination. The guide also describes a twin world beside the ordinary one, reached through sacred, lost and hidden places, and lists [City] de Abajo, Spanish for [City] Below, among his names.

Four kinds of spirit are born of a city's surroundings, in the guide's telling: the Paramentals or Urban Fae. Concrete Gnomes are the city's skin, Steel Salamanders its bones and muscle, Crystal Elves its eyes and Electric Angels its nerves.

The idea, the guide says, is based on Our Lady of Darkness, and it credits the book to "Franz Lieber". Close. The book is Fritz Leiber's, from 1977.

Offerings are optional. The common practice, Feed the City, is to do something useful for the people in your community who need help most.

A story as a working

The tradition's idea, and Morrison's.

The collective's texts hold that a story can carry a working. Arjil's account of the Linking Sigil goes back to Wizard's Game, an idea of Arjil and Silenced for a live action role-playing game that would trick people into using real magick.

Its first tags went under the New Age and Fantasy shelves of a bookstore, where people come looking for wonder, and the account adds that stories have power.

Later the account argues that a story enough people pour energy into sort of exists somewhere, like a place, and can be tagged like one, and it lists well-known fantasy worlds among those tagged.

Grant Morrison coined the word hypersigil for an extended work of art with magical meaning and willpower, made by adapting the process of sigilization. Morrison's comic series The Invisibles was meant as one. The Hexorian field guide lists it among its sources and includes a street rite built around its characters.

In that sense the serial is a hypersigil. This page makes no claim about what it does.

Where the story goes its own way

In the story. Invented, and it describes no real person.

The Belows. The True Mage line built the Belows as a refuge and appointed Hexorius to govern them, as a check on the line itself, since every True Mage is part human.

The Hexorians are neutral ground. Verone, the last True Mage, enters a Below like a cop with a warrant, or as a visitor. The tradition's twin world becomes Stillwell Below, the hidden underside of a town in Indiana.

The DKMU. The story makes them the newer magic layer and Verone's allies. They work where he can't. This is the story's collective, invented, and it says nothing about what the real one does.

The Paramentals. The tradition's spirits of the city's body are, in the story, the Paramentals, the working staff of Stillwell Below. Each kind belongs to a material a city is built from or runs on: concrete, steel, glass, current.

The toll. In the field guide, offerings to Hexorius are optional and the common practice is mutual aid. In the story the Law of Crossings says every crossing has a toll. The toll belongs to the story.

The Courier. The serial's subject is the forgotten America. Its highways are liminal places a person can drive, and its roads have custodians.

The tradition's field guide gives Hexorius the city and says roads confer safe travel. The open road between cities is where the serial goes.

The Courier is the serial's offering to the current. Nobody claims the tradition has taken it up. It's one entity on every road, made of the faces of lost travelers without being any of them.

To a stranded human it calls itself Miles.

Credits

Remixed from #OpGrimoire - CC BY the Hexorian Movement. License (CC BY 4.0): creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

Information about the DKMU is paraphrased from its public texts. Remixed from Liber LS Volume 3 (DKMU, 2023), CC BY 4.0. The library is at dkmu.org/texts.html and the collective's home page is dkmu.org.

The idea of the Paramentals comes from Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness, by way of #OpGrimoire. The word hypersigil is Grant Morrison's.

Both licenses ask that their text, sigils and names stay out of anything that promotes bigotry.

The DKMU has no leaders and nobody speaks for it, this site included. Nothing here was reviewed or endorsed by the DKMU or the Hexorian Movement.