Two-World Minimum: Bisociation And The Art Of High

Weirdness
by Kenneth Hite

"I have tried to save from oblivion a minor horror: the vast, contradictory library,
whose vertical deserts of books run the incessant risk of metamorphosis, which
affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything -- like a raving god."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library

In my library I have a copy of a book called The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation.
I bought it not because I love old maps and traveller's tales (which I do), but
because of its almost Borgesian existence in two worlds. In one world, it's the most
important cartographic document of the millennium. In another, it's a shameless
forgery. Which world the book rests in depends on when you look at it and on where
you stand when you look at it. To elaborate: in 1957 a Yale map curator bought a
handwritten tome entitled The Tartar Relation together with a world map showing
what very much looks like the east coast of Canada, labeled "Vinlanda Insula." By
the position of wormholes in the two, the collector determined that both had been
part of a medieval binding of yet a third book, which needn't concern us now. The
undeniably genuine Tartar Relation dates to 1440: the Vinland Map, therefore,
predated Columbus by fifty years. In 1965, Yale University Press published the two
documents with commentary and a lot of bragging.

Even at the time, some experts denounced it as a forgery, but in 1972 microanalysis
by Walter McCrone discovered large quantities of titanium dioxide in the map ink --
a compound that did not exist in ink before the 1920s. Bang, zoom, the map is a
forgery. But in 1985, Yale secretly arranged for UC Davis chemist Thomas Cahill to
reexamine the map with a proton accelerator: Cahill found only traces of titanium,
which can be found in Gutenberg Bibles and other medieval documents. Yale
republished the book in 1996, once more proclaiming it genuine. Walter McCrone
remains unconvinced, as, frankly, do I.

But the dual nature of the Vinland Map is the sort of thing games dealing with
Uncertainty (such as games of conspiracy, magic, horror, mystery, and even
alternate history) thrive on. Something is two things at once, or to two different
sides. Believing them both is the key to keeping the game realistically unreal. This
"perceiving of a situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but fundamentally
incompatible frames of reference," is what Arthur Koestler called bisociation.
(Koestler was sort of bisociative himself, one of those combination brilliant artist-
pathbreaking philosopher-dodgy eccentric types that usually get left back in the
Renaissance.) Koestler thought bisociation was the source of the jolt we get from
humor, from scientific theory, and from art. Jokes, theories, and art: sounds like the
ingredients of any good roleplaying campaign.

"He praised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image that represented
several things no longer represented anything. Which -- you'll forgive me -- runs
counter to the whole hermetic tradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a
symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of
Hermes, god of a thousand faces?"
-- Conte Aglie, in Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

Although things can have more than two sides, of course, especially in the world of
High Weirdness. Keep in mind that the more sides you can see (and eventually let
your players see) to an object, the more powerfully bisociative it becomes. You
don't need to choose one or the other, at least not at first. Think of them all at once;
hold all the angles in your mind. Bisociation is a concept; a tool to use to think
about impossibilities (like men who fly and fearless vampire killers). Then write a
game that drives the players as crazy as thinking of all these things at once drives
you.

The Holy Grail

Let's start with something everyone knows about, and nobody agrees on. The first
sources describe the Grail as a "dish," not as a cup. In others, it's a green, glowing
Stone From Heaven (Kryptonite? Alien drive core? Philosopher's Stone? All three?).
In still others, the Grail is a child and a maiden -- which causes some theorists to
think the Grail is a bloodline or a family. Different theorists say that the Grail is
nothing more than a Celtic resurrection cauldron (Horn of plenty? Nanotech
containment unit?) or a poetic symbol (Of secret knowledge? Celtic poetry was a
magical spell; could the Grail be a Word of Power?) or the severed head of a god.
SS Colonel Otto Rahn thought the Grail would redeem him and save Germany just as
King Arthur thought it would redeem him and save Britain. What single Grail could
the ultimate, predatory evil of the SS and the ultimate, defensive good of the Round
Table both honestly seek? In GURPS Warehouse 23, S. John Ross rings further
bisociative changes on the Grail, as well as the Spear of Destiny, the Ark of the
Covenant, the Crystal Skull, and a lot of other things I was going to use as examples
here until I realized he'd done it better than I could. Look at all the "Notes and
Crossovers" given for these numinous artifacts -- their nature, their reality and their
powers determine if the world is Mundane, Fortean, Occult, Conspiratorial, or (all of
the above) Illuminated in true bisociative (quintosociative?) glory.

The Tarot

78 cards, 22 archetypal images. Recreations of a Renaissance street festival? Pages

from the lost Book of Thoth? Tools of Gypsy magic and fortunetelling? Shards of
Atlantean lore passed down to the Maya and to the Egyptians in pyramidal houses of
wisdom? The first gambling game to number the trumps, and therefore outcompete
the hundreds of lost trionfi decks of the 15th century? Communication devices for
summoning or contacting primal gods and entities beneath civilization? A symbolic
alphabet descended from the Word of God to Moses? Psychic daggers aimed at a
mad king of France? Think of the Tarot as all these things at once, and imagine the
uses you can put it to in a game.

What if the Tarot and the Grail are the same? Bisociate them: the Tarot becomes the
encoded Grail Quest of the Foolish Knight (the Wise Fool, safe in innocence) past
the Magician (Merlin), the High Priestess (Vivien), the Empress (Morgan le Fay), the
Emperor (the Fisher King), and so forth. Seeking the Grail means understanding the
Tarot. Using the Tarot for divination is invocation of prophetic powers. The soldiers
gambled for Christ's robes; contrary to Gospel they did not dice, they used Tarot
cards which caught His holy blood. Or, which recapitulated the Words of Power he
used to work his miracles. Or, which serve to train psionics to access a
transdimensional nexus where resurrection is possible, time runs backwards, and
history stands revealed.

"A crystal lens had been found in the treasure-house at Nineveh . . . in ruins of an
old civilization upon this earth, has been found an accursed thing that was,
acceptably, not a product of any old civilization indigenous to this earth."
-- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

One kind of bisociative campaign might center on a Fortean thing with many, many
explanations for its existence. Take Fort's crystal lens (which, he reports, is a true
optical lens, not simply an ornament). Did the Assyrians actually have advanced
optics, kept a military secret just as they kept iron smelting? Did time-travelers leave
a telescope behind? Did a Cyclops lose a contact lens? Is the lens a holy relic of
Atlantis? Is it a clever forgery from 1853? The Eye of Nergal? A holographic storage
unit for alien UFO computers? The pineal gland of the Crystal Skull? A fairy stone for
seeing into Dom-Daniel? For each explanation, there exists a parallel world where
that explanation is true; those worlds all overlap our world, where the Nineveh Lens
rests in the British Museum and focuses all realities into one fist-sized piece of
silicon. Now, the dimensions struggle in their sleep -- whoever controls the Lens
controls Reality. Whether the PCs should seek to reunite the worlds into One Truth or
keep them from uniting in Total Annihilation is up to the GM.

"Who were the Templars? At first you made them sound like sergeants in a John
Ford movie, then like a bunch of bums, then like knights in an illuminated miniature,
then like bankers of God carrying on their dirty deals, then like a routed army, then
like devotees of a Satanic sect, and finally like martyrs to free thought. What were
they in the end?" "Probably they were all those things."
-- Belbo and Casaubon, in Foucault's Pendulum

Once you've bisociated yourself into a tizzy, you have one of two options:
everything is true in parallel, or everything is true in series. The Nineveh Lens
campaign above is an example of "parallel truth": all those explanations for the Lens
are true in some overlapping world. "Series truth" can be compared to unwrapping
the layers of an onion (as Nigel Findley does on p. 11 of GURPS Illuminati); each
"truth" hides a "deeper truth" inside it. For an example of "series truth," let's take the
Templars (God, how I loves the Templars) as the onion, and all of the Illuminati
cards from INWO as our layered, bisociated truths.

Pranks that seem to have no purpose: emailing spam, spreading virus rumors,
painting over license plates, counterfeiting Soviet money -- but these Discordian
actions work to alter reality itself into a new paradigm, one that overthrows all
existing, oppressive hierarchies. Unbeknownst to these chaos guerrillas, they do the
dirty work of the Bavarian Illuminati, founded to avenge the death of Jacques de
Molay, 23rd Grand Master of the Templars, by destroying all religion and all nations.
Or so the Illuminati think; actually, the custodians of the Templar treasure bought
their escape from King Philip of France and fled to Switzerland. Using the Templar
stranglehold on medieval commerce, these Gnomes of Zurich have been covertly
manipulating economies and currencies for centuries: the Illuminati's revolutions and
wars just serve to make the Gnomes richer. Or so the Gnomes think. In actuality,
theQ Gnomes' every action is easily predicted by (and greatly profits) the Network,
descended from the Templar masters of lost Indian, Arabic and Greek works of
political economy, chaos mathematics and sociological models. The Network has
reduced all of mankind to numbers. These numerical values are the key to kabbalah,
the ancient Jewish magickal art that the inner core of the Temple never revealed to
anyone but their own Adepts of Hermes. Magick predicts, magick controls, and
thanks to magick the Adepts' inner circle itself has retreated to Shangri-La, where
as the Nine Unknown Masters, they guide the very currents of the world. Or so they
think. What the masters of Shangri-La consider magick is merely hyperphysical law
to the UFOs, piloted by saurian beings possessing mighty eons-old sciences. But
the UFOs do not come from the stars -- or if they do, it is because they were sent
there by the saurian rulers of the dark ocean trenches beneath the Bermuda
Triangle. In their sunken cities, the saurians dream of power -- and their dreams
flow from the ancient Deep One blood in their veins, making them truly Servants of
Cthulhu.

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
-- The Red Queen, in Alice Through The Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

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Article publication date: July 23, 1998

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