The Lecharusian Tomes

By: Lecharus Posted on: December 21, 2008

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The Lecharusian Tomes:

An Exploration of Chaos

In the Context of the

Game of Blackjack

Written By Lecharus

For the House of the Occultists

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The Lecharusian Tomes were first inscribed on Daedalan 5th, 497 AF, by myself, Lecharus.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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1. Title

2. Table of Contents

3. Blackjack

4. Order

5. Pre-determination

6. Limitations & Review

7. Corruption

8. Regards to Lord Babel

9. Conclusion

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I like games. Regrettably, many of my colleagues do not enjoy games as I do; they find games petty, shallow, simplistic, or merely a waste of time. But this is not about them. It's about the Word.

Specifically, I enjoy a game of Blackjack now and again. Chess is so horridly predictable. The objective of the game is to be as empyrical as possible. It is a post-reactionary game, where the winner is not he who reacts properly, but reacts to his or her opponent's reaction properly. I am good at Chess, but that, like my colleagues, is beside the point. This is about the Word.

In Blackjack, one is dealt two cards, face-up, and the dealer is dealt two cards, one face-up, one face-down. The objective of the game is to draw cards from the dealer - numbered cards being worth their numbers, face cards being worth ten, with the exception of the Ace, which may be worth either one or eleven at the player's discretion - until the sum of their values is as close to twenty-one as possible without surpassing that value. If the sum of your cards is greater than the dealer's cards, but still under twenty-two, you win.

Theoretically, my dealer has the advantage in this game, for two reasons; first, the dealer begins with one card face-down. I do not know exactly how close to twenty-one I must be to beat the dealer; as such, there is a rather great stress on my shoulders. How close is close enough? The face-up card gives me a hint, but only half of the truth. Interestingly, even half of the truth can be useful. Second, the dealer plays after I do. If I surpass twenty-one and "bust," the dealer automatically wins. If I stop drawing cards at a low sum, my dealer knows exactly how many points he or she needs to beat my sum. This gives the dealer a slight, but significant, advantage.

Why would I play, and perhaps more importantly, wager my money on such a game if I am not the dealer?

The Word is the answer.

A common deck, as you surely know, consists of fifty-two cards, which includes four copies of cards labeled 2 through 10, and four copies of Jack, Queen, King, and Ace. These cards are shuffled by the dealer, such that they are "randomly" distributed throughout the deck. Empyricism would state that, if they are truly distributed randomly, the odds of me drawing an Ace are equal to the odds of me drawing a two, or a five, or any other card. But should I draw an Ace, and then a second card, my odds of drawing another Ace are reduced by twenty-five percent; should I draw a second Ace, my odds of finding another Ace are again reduced for a cumulative chance of fifty percent. One must also consider that, as the number of Aces in the deck decreases, the relative frequency of all other cards increases. My interaction with the deck, as a system, changes the game, whether it be in my favor or not.

Further, by interacting with the system, and with the knowledge of not only the fact that it is changing but also how it is changing, the deck is demystified; finally, should the game of Blackjack be played with a single deck, should cards in play be discarded after each round, and should the deck not be re-shuffled until an insufficient number of cards remain in the deck for another round, I could calculate with reasonable certainty what card or cards I would draw.

But no matter how carefully I play the game, no matter how well my odds appear to be calculated, I will always be trumped by the dealer's face-down card. A card has been removed from the system - but which one? Was it the card I needed? Or the card I didn't want? Certainly, I can estimate that my odds of getting a certain card are good or bad, high or low, but in the end, they are estimates. They guarantee nothing. The dealer holds the key, that little bit of information that would bring my understanding of the deck to completion.

The game of Blackjack, though relatively simplistic, quite accurately represents our own Universe; the Divine play as the dealer, and we are the players. But what of the deck? And more importantly, the face-down card? Most would claim that the deck itself is Chaos. This is untrue, because we know exactly what to expect of the deck; it behaves in an empyrical way. Five Aces will never be drawn from a single deck, just as two Aces of the same suite will never be drawn. The deck is the source of our knowledge, for as we play the game, the construction and constitution of the deck becomes more and more apparent, and we begin to approach certainty of outcome. The deck is Creation. What kind of game would Blackjack be without a deck?

The face-down card. The unknown, the liability, simultaneous salvation and damnation. Uncertainty. And though the face-down card is the product of the deck, our metaphor for Creation, it transforms the deck as well; is the final Ace still sitting in the deck? Or has it already been drawn in the face-down card? Through excruciating means, the Blackjack player has deconstructed the deck, only to find that there is still an element of mystery and subterfuge. And though the dealer holds the face-down card, not even he or she knows its value until the players have made their moves, and then, in that holy moment, the card is turned, removing all doubt; the truth behind the card revealed, the players face their respective destinies.

There is much truth to be found in the study of the face-down card, as there is in the study of the Word. And the Word is, for all intrinsic purposes, Chaos.

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The preface of a Karmic work is usually the preferred space for a definition or history of Chaos, but I prefer that you, my student, do not have a working definition of the Word. You can feel what it means, though it may not come to you in words, much less a coherent sentence. Images, sounds, emotions - let these guide you for now. But I will give you a few more tidbits to guide those ideas towards something fruitful.

Chaos can be chaotic and orderly. It can be both simultaneously, and it can be neither. But what is chaotic? And what is orderly? Perhaps that should be addressed first.

When you want to reach a book quickly, you put it on a bookshelf. And when you have many books on this bookshelf, rather than searching for this book for an extended period of time, one typically puts these books in alphabetical order. So this order allows us to spend less time searching through a bookshelf and more time reading. On a practical level, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this; followers of Chaos do not desire to live in a disorderly fashion to spite order.

But the concept of efficiency is one which is troubling for the Karmic Scholar. Efficiency is a personal measurement of work divided by the time required to do said work; technically, if less time is used, more work is done. And, unfortunately, travel is the number one waste of time. Empyricists (those "scholars" who push the perfection of Order) would solve this problem by placing everything very close together and in an organized, orderly fashion. This way, one can reach the armory, the library, the post office, and the market without breaking a sweat. Simply put, the best way to streamline travel is to compress space, and thereby improve efficiency.

What Empyricists don't seem to realize is that their civilizations are built thin ice. Efficiency and order easily become fetishes, games played in the pursuit of figures. And how high can you push that figure of work over time? Is there a limit? Perhaps not. But efficiency is established my moving objects into order, and if those objects do not comply, they are forced into order. Combine the ethos of efficiency with a Divine mandate of Good, and you have a system which not only arranges its components into the most efficient arrangement (for whom this arrangement is efficient - well, perhaps you should ask the Sultan), but forces outside components into compliance and order as well. The system expands, regardless of the will of its components. And the system chugs along, getting larger and larger, efficiency slowly creeping up higher and higher.

What lies beneath the grinding gears is a system of Chaos. The individual components, unhappy with their place in the machine, displeased with serving beneath a heavy Codex, begin exploring the unknown. What possibilities lie outside of the system? And at a certain point, components come to the realization that they are cards in a giant game (do I even have to name it?) and they have been dealt to a player with only little promise in the long run. When the game is over, they will be discarded, forgotten, counted and discounted. They were part of a value, a single number, of only minor relevance in the long run.

They envy that face-down card that both the players and dealers scornfully despise; games won and loss as its true value is revealed. The Empyricists, those self-styled Templars who tried to destroy us during the Burning Times, want to change the game. They don't want a face-down card. They want to know every card that will be dealt, every card that is left, every card that has ever been dealt, so that all power will lie with the players. We mortals only rarely become players; we are more commonly cards, drawn, used, then discarded. But we also have freedom. Our power lies in deciding our own value, and then, deciding how we are drawn. To the dealer, or to the player? Face-up, or face-down? Empyricists would say that even that does not matter. There are enough cards on their side that our collective exercise of free will does not change anything.

The dealer, however, does make a bit of difference.

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We have established our universe in the context of a game of Blackjack; the players, the cards, the deck, the dealer, and the most relevant detail to our studies, the face-down card. But let's not mystify this card game to the point of disillusionment. There is Order to this Chaos.

Beneath the surface, the back side of the face-down card which obscures the truth, is a card like any other card. It is a product of the deck, Creation; it will be revealed by the dealer, and it will bring a paradigm shift to the game itself, revealing the winners and losers. But when the card is drawn and placed on the table, face-down, it has identity; as the players make their moves, it retains its identity; when it is revealed, it retains the identity. It is not changed.

The shuffling of the deck before every game places the cards in an order which is, by definition of the game, chaotic. It is unknown to the dealer, who shuffled the cards, and also to the players, who observed the shuffling. But once the deck is shuffled and placed on the table, ready to be drawn from, the cards are in an order. Nobody knows exactly what this order is, though assumptions can be made from transformations to the deck which occur over the course of the game. However, if everybody is playing the game with the assumptions of the deck's construction in mind, it can be said that the game is pre-determined.

Thus, the only movement of the game which really matters at all is that which places the cards in a determined order, the shuffling. Blackjack would not be much of a game if shuffling were not practiced; every player would know every card to be drawn, every card their opponents will draw, and the identity of the face-down card. As such, Blackjack would become more of a lottery than a game, the order of players determining winners and losers. But now you might ask, if Blackjack is pre-determined by the act of shuffling, how would this be any different? Doesn't the order of players determine who draws what card? An excellent question, though entirely ignoring the central facet of the prior chapters.

The face-down card is pre-determined by shuffling, true, but it is still unknown to either the players or the dealer. This creates an element of risk; even if your odds of getting the card you need, or something similar to it, may be greater than fifty percent, you also have a good chance of drawing a card that will not bust your hand but will not bring you close enough to twenty-one, either, and thus make the next drawing a greater risk to you. It is still the best move, but you just made a move which could've busted your hand and brought you only a trivial bit closer to your goal. And you only know half of your goal, and can't even account for the dealer's moves. The risk is paralyzing. Yet you made your move, for you are the player; it is your job to move, regardless of the outcome. So, if decks were not shuffled, Blackjack would be a very fast game with no risks involved; nobody would bust, there would still be losers, but they would know they were going to lose before even drawing a card. It would become an elegant lottery, no different than flipping a coin, spinning a wheel, or throwing dice.

Nevertheless, it may frighten the reader to know that Empyricists want nothing more than to not only determine the shuffle, but the order of players as well.

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So far, I believe I have drawn the abstraction of the Blackjack game to its limits. While it is a complex game, one with elements of both Order and Chaos, it does not account for the peculiarities of the Universe; fifty-two cards, four copies of thirteen unique cards, do not exactly encompass the possibilities of Creation. The concept of "winning" versus "losing" a game is rather simplistic when compared to the complex agendas and goals of leaders. There is not just one Dealer; there are several dozen, and they all have individual agendas. There is not just one face-down card. In fact, we don't know how many face-down cards there are. We can, at best, know when they are drawn, and when they are revealed, but there is still plenty of room for error.

Blackjack still retains itself as a relatively accurate model of our Universe; however, it accounts for but a single deck, from which the dealer and players draw. While the possibilities of this deck may be endless, limited, or in some incomprehensible way, both, the dealer and the players share it. What is possible for the dealer is also possible for the players, though the game does play to the advantage of the dealer. It is a comfortable, simple, closed bubble that we may choose to call the Universe.

However, history shows that our small, tightly-knit collection of Planes which were created by Ayar-now-Sarapis are not alone. There is a great deal of planar space known as Primal Chaos. And we know, or at least believe, that the demon prince Pazuzu hails from a Plane and answers to masters as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the Elder Gods Themselves. These masters were unknown to Ayar-now-Sarapis. So Ayar created the game which we play, but it is not the only game which is playing right now; in fact, sometimes the elements of other games bleed into each other.

Pazuzu is merely one example. Lady Eris manipulated the exiled Lord Babel's essence to propel herself deep into Primal Chaos with the objective of reaching the very moment in time when the Rape of Maya occurred. She may very well have found Pazuzu's origins, or a set of Planes completely unrelated to Pazuzu's masters. In the context of Blackjack, it would be unfair to insist that a single deck from which both dealers and players draw can alone justify the workings of this very complex, multi-Planar, multiversal system (assuming that Pazuzu originated from a Universe unrelated to Ayar's Creation).

So let's reconstruct the Multiverse, in the spirit of the game:

Our Universe functions on the rules of Blackjack, which contains elements of both Chaos and Order.

There are multiple decks, dealers, and certainly a great number of players existing simultaneously and frequently bleeding into each others' games.

On top of this collection of Blackjack games being played simultaneously, there is another game, or collection of games, being played a very great distance (perhaps in time as well as space) away. These games are perhaps similar, but most probably unrelated to, the rules of Blackjack.

For the most part, these two "greater games" exist independently from each other; however, on occasion, elements from either game can bleed into the other, introducing new rules or breaking existing ones.

There may very well be more than two "greater games" in existence, for if Ayar cannot account for one entity beyond His Creation, it is possible that there are many others.

In the next chapter, we shall explore the ramifications of such a hypothesis.

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So our little game of Blackjack on the Prime Material Plane is not the only game of Blackjack being played. In fact, Blackjack is not the only game being played in the Multiverse, and though we may have only rare, limited contact with the elements of those other games, we now know enough about Blackjack and its relevance to our Universe to toy with the possibility of corruption.

Let us assume we have a normal game of Blackjack. One dealer, several players, normal rules. Now let us assume that, by some act of deviance, a special card is placed into this deck. Along with the numbered cards, and the face cards, there is a new card placed into the deck, and its value is thirteen.

Any decent Blackjack player will tell you to always hit on eleven, for there is no way you can lose by hitting on eleven. It is, of course, possible to draw an Ace, but its value is one or eleven, so even then, one is safe. To win, however, one must take risks by hitting when it is possible to bust. It is considered foolish to hit at or above seventeen.

However, if a thirteen card were introduced, these rules would shift. Now, when one is on eleven, it is very possible to draw a card which would bust one's hand; in fact, only hitting on eight or less could be truly safe. The margin of risk is increased significantly for both dealer and player. But this is only one card. It is a risk everybody plays with, and once the card is drawn, the rest of the players can breathe easily, for the card will not re-emerge until the shuffling occurs.

The demon prince Pazuzu is an example of a lone thirteen. Powerful, deadly, threatening to dealer and player alike, but a single card, and once drawn and played, he was discarded, and the game rolled on.

Now let us assume there is some serious deviation to the game. A thirteen card is introduced to the deck, as before; however, in addition to this thirteen card, two additional two, three, four, and five cards are added to the deck as well. The outcome is not quite as simple; while the risk of drawing a thirteen still exists, there is also a greater chance of drawing a relatively small card which may close the gap to twenty-one. There is, of course, still the chance of busting on nine, as well as busting on sixteen, but the chance of busting on sixteen is significantly decreased. Additional risk, but additional security, are both added to the game.

As the construction of the game shifts, so does the strategy of the players. The dealer may, of course, elect to remove the deviant cards from play. But the additional cards pose equal threat to dealer and player, as well as equal benefit. As such, it seems that only a very meticulous dealer would stop a game to search a deck for every instance of deviance and excise it.

Consider this: The deviant cards were added to a single deck. But what if the deviance, for whatever reason, went unnoticed or was forgotten? In our model, there are many decks playing simultaneously. A player from one game, playing a "normal" game of Blackjack, joins the table of our corrupted game and begins playing. Upon being dealt his cards, he cannot help but gasp, for he has been dealt a King and a Thirteen, instantly busting his hand.

"Dealer! What is the meaning of this?"

"Terrible luck, sir. I'll have to collect your bet."

"But that's not fair!"

"Not fair to whom? Why, I had just as great a chance of drawing the Thirteen as you did. Surely, you would not have complained if I had busted my hand."

The player is confounded, but settles down; he and the dealer are indeed playing the same game, which, although unusual, offers the same advantages to both dealer and player so long as they know that they are playing the same game. But the dealer had the clear advantage, for he knew the game better than the player. Perhaps the player couldn't have done anything about busting his hand, but he also had no knowledge of the additional cards, should he have drawn a hand which did not bust immediately. He would have played his hand with "normal" strategies in mind, bestowing a sharp disadvantage.

My colleagues may insist that "deviance" is a bad analogy for Chaos, but by understanding how deviance affects the game of Blackjack, you may also understand how Chaos affects Creation.

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During Lord Babel's charge on the border of Creation and Primal Chaos, He watched Primal Chaos quite carefully. On one side of His border, one game was in play, perfectly within the comprehension of Gods and mortals alike. But on the other side, a completely different game was being played.

Lord Babel was not a player in this game, only an observer, but as an observer, He attempted to understand its rules.

In my imagination, I see a game being played by many entities. They play not with a deck, as our previous analogies have used, for that would imply an organization of possible elements to Primal Chaos as a Universe; a better understanding would indicate that there were infinitely many decks with infinitely many possible cards. The entities in play were still players and dealers, but not on a permanent basis. Their roles switched with frequency which confounded even the Divine mind of Lord Babel; sometimes, players suddenly became dealers, dealers became players, without warning. The identities of cards spontaneously changed. No expectations could be made of the game's construction, and yet the players and dealers continued playing as if a structure did exist. Not even the rules of the game held permanence.

Lord Babel attempted to understand the structure and the powers which influenced its frequent, spontaneous shifting, for certainly, there must be a power at work who decides the rules. But Lord Babel observed this game with the assumption that Somebody made the rules at all. Though Primal Chaos was Ayar's creation, it seemed that He only created it with the limitations of possibility; this antithesis fed upon itself to create what we know as true Chaos.

As Lord Babel attempted to wrap His rational, structured mind around a system which held neither rationality nor structure, He was driven mad. He observed this game for centuries (though it is not clear that even time is structured in Primal Chaos; to Him, the exile on Primal Chaos' border may have been a few minutes long or entire millennia).

Though Lord Babel was driven insane, He was driven insane in the context of Creation, not the Universe. Perhaps His insanity is a reflection of His understanding of Primal Chaos; it is very possible that, with the great intelligence of a Divine, Lord Babel was able to comprehend a system (though not an order or structure) to Primal Chaos. It is akin to understanding a game of Blackjack played entirely with cards in a completely different numerical system. As His understanding of Primal Chaos grew, it transformed (or transcended?) His understanding of Creation as well.

We are quick to call Lord Babel's observations insanity when an increasing degree of Chaos is entering Creation; a more accurate assumption would state that we are simply buffoons in comparison to the deeper, far more complex understanding of Chaos which Lord Babel holds over all mortals (and most Divine as well). As for myself, I can only describe Chaos in the context of a product of Creation. If Lord Babel Himself read this text, I am sure He would either laugh or be thoroughly insulted by my shallow, overly simplistic assertions regarding Chaos.

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Reality is of our own construction. I do not intend to impose upon you, the reader, that reality should be observed as a game of Blackjack, for although it may be an accurate comparison in the context of Order and Chaos, as well as in regards to existing political entities, it hardly, excuse the pun, holds all the cards. If, through my analysis, your comprehension of Chaos has improved, then my work is done. If Chaos for you is no longer a feeling of uncertainty, or a splatter of paint, or the sound of dishes breaking, but an element both independent of Creation and also constantly influencing and changing it, that is fine; but I would hardly insist that my analysis of Chaos can be any deeper than your first impression of Chaos. See what you must, write what comes to mind, explore what others would call nonsense. May your answers be as abstract, as structured, and ultimately, as trivial as a card game. All glory to Lords Babel and Pandemonium, and also to Ladies Eris and Pandora; may we praise Their names, Their knowledge, and the questions to Their confounding answers