Beth-El

An installation art piece created by West German artist Sebastian Keiner. It resembles a 10’ by 10’ box with a door on one side, illuminated on the outside with decorative spotlights. The interior is decorated with psychedelic murals, dizzying mosaics, and strategically placed mirrored panels. For a time, it was displayed at the de Young.

Beth-El operates as a means of interfacing directly with History B. Keiner said that he used it to commune with the angels who were his inspiration, and to send young women to his masters in History B. Jocasta entered it and was subject to intense psychic bombardment. Mitch sabotaged it with his pyrokinesis, after which Marshall arranged for its transportation to Livermore for containment and study.

When repaired and all its panels are functioning normally, the structure can be activated by one who has studied its (hyper)geometry sufficiently; this activation is done by force of will. The activator rolls their Will against the target’s Will-3 in a Regular Contest; if the target wins, they were able to withstand the pull of History B on their soul and can leave Beth-El normally. If they fail, something happens to their soul and vitality. Sebastian Keiner believed that his victims’ souls were sent to History B but functionally, to the perspective of everyone in History A, the target is now a soulless husk. They will go through the motions of their everyday life but lose all volition and vitality.

Activators will find themselves dealing with the usual double Corruption cost of using major pragmaclasts, developing Disadvantages that will lead them to want to send more souls to History B (in Keiner’s case, this exhibited as Lecherousness and Callousness, among other Disadvantages).

Specific Study: In his interrogation session with Marshall Redgrave, Sebastian Keiner admitted that the creative process around Beth-El and the Ikenga artwork was at least partially set into motion by the East German agents who trained him to come to America, and most importantly the kulullû who sat on the shoulders of his lover, the “Tutor.” This is not to say that Keiner was not a preternaturally talented artist and evoker of History B before this training! Charley senses deep History B roots in the structure and design of the Beth-El art installation. The critics were right in finding that Keiner was influenced by North African and Middle Eastern art; it seems like in crafting Beth-El, Keiner managed to instinctively find all the flourishes of the larger Muslim art tradition that had the power to evoke History B: a precise mix of pre-Muslim, pre-Ontoclysm cult material (the god Hubal to whom the Kaaba was originally dedicated, just as one example) combined with elements of Muslim, post-Ontoclysm abstract non-figurative art (geometric mosaics, calligraphy, etc.).

As analyzed previously with Shard Sense, something about the interplay of figures, colors, light, and the specific physical design and architecture of the piece will allow someone to “send away” a victim’s consciousness, ostensibly to History B, leaving them a husk. And while Keiner’s artistic impulses were sufficient to help create all the physical prerequisites for Beth-El to function as a reality shard, Charley also now knows from her Specific Study that Keiner did need a little something extra to manifest Beth-El as a reality shard. Charley would bet that it has something to do with how Beth-El exists in other dimensions than the standard three of physical space. In terms of the higher dimensions of time and probability, the shard’s functioning is likely dependent upon how the lights within the artwork project onto those people inside. The coming of the lights were when Jocasta started feeling disoriented, like she was “going away.” (Odd how flashing lights of many different colors figure into another reality shard of great concern to URIEL that could change a witness’s consciousness: the Urim and Thummim as wielded by Anthony Reinhardt.) Beth-El could function thanks to a quantum ocular-cerebral photonic source code trigger, like the blue lights in Mount Shasta or the lights on the underside of the Anunnaki UFO.

As such, Beth-El is a reality shard not specifically in its physical origin. Like other shards URIEL is in possession of that take the form of records on media (the ZEBULUN Tapes, the Houdini Cassette, the Redgrave Cassette), Beth-El’s pragmaclastic identity is derived from the data/information encoded upon the physical medium which then projects into the world of History A. (Proviso: the temblor event at the Stanley Hotel did also change the physical structure of the magnetic tape on Houdini’s Cassette, making it able to hold much more data than a standard magnetic cassette.) This nature means that Beth-El is vulnerable to that data being scrambled. In other words, one burnt-out bank of fluorescent light bulbs in Beth-El, thanks to Mitch’s pyrokinesis, was enough to disable the entire shard’s functioning.