If we didn't exist, we'd have to invent ourselves.
Two explosions created everything in the Tapestry. The first was the explosion of the Cosmic All, the fiat lux that brought Creation into being and made the Supernal and Fallen Worlds, back before the Abyss separated them and they were all a part of one Creation, one true world. But that explosion only made space and time, matter and energy. The second explosion came from the human mind, and it created everything else: language, tools, mathematics, art, dance, cities, laws, literature, science, technology, religion, poetry, war, history. It created magic. Everything in the world made by human hands, and human ideas came out of the human mind and soul, the human imagination.
After all, what is magic except the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist and make it real? The Awakened can do so directly, but Sleepers have to do it the hard way, and some Imagineers wonder who gets the better part of that deal; they admire fine craftsmanship, after all, and there’s a great deal to be said for having to work for something rather than having it given to you. Still, the mages of this Legacy believe in using what you are given to its fullest extent, and in the magic of creation and imagination.
Although there have always been crafters with a touch of the arcane to them, the Imagineers trace their origins to the development of the science of psychology and the study of the mind. In particular, they owe many of their ideas to theories about dreaming, imagination and the uni- versal unconscious. Young willworkers in the 19th century studied these ideas, and placed the mind at the summit of the mystic hierarchy. The Temenos, they claimed, was the source of all things that could be imagined, thus the entire contents of the mind was born there, and all creations of the mind had their roots deep in that realm.
If all things of the mind ultimately came from the Temenos, they reasoned, then that realm was a treasure trove of all that could ever possibly be imagined. It was simply a matter of exploring deeply enough to find what the dream consciousness of Creation had to offer, and to bring those nuggets of inspiration back and manifest them in the Fallen World, like divers plumbing the ocean depths for pearls and sunken treasure. The Imagineers swore not only to explore hitherto unknown realms of thought, but to bring them to the people.
While they earned praise for their bold willingness to explore the astral planes, the proto-Imagineers bought the scorn of the Atlantean orders with the coin of skepticism. For all the Imagineers’ love of imagination and its wonders, they were materialists and dualists, dividing all Creation into things of the First Creation (that of the formation of the Tapestry) and things of the Second Creation (the fruits of the imagination). More importantly, they placed most, if not all, occult and spiritual lore in the second category. Gods, spirits, eidolons, eikones, powers and principalities were all the offspring of human genius, the Imagineers said. Real and independent entities they might be (with an emphasis on might), but they originated in the womb of dreams, born out of human consciousness.
Such attitudes earned the Imagineers no friends within the Atlantean orders (the gods, for their part, largely remained silent on the matter). This suited the Dreamsmiths well enough, as they were more interested in exploring the potential of Creation, not cataloging and endlessly re-reading its past like the hidebound Atlantean orders. They joined the ranks of the new generation of willworkers in repudiating the orders, leading to the Nameless War. For their part, the Imagineers had little to do with the war, apart from providing aid and comfort to their allies.
Once the conflict ended, however, the Idealists were quick to surface from their explorations of the Astral depths to put forth some o
