What is the psychology of a Nephilim?

A key point of contention in the US fandom was how to handle incarnation. Even in the French fandom, some people pointed out that the Nephilim were really quite monstrous and the Major Arcana were totes evil! (The US version dramatically toned them down, and still players couldn't handle it!) One of my inspirations for revising Nephilim was Andrew Montgomery's series of articles on the game: part one, part two, part three, session zero and session one. 

Rather than elemental spirits possessing hapless human hosts for which they feel only contempt, I interpret Nephilim as composite entities composed of an elemental pentacle orbiting a human soul (Sol) in a microcosm of the Solar System. The elemental spirit is driven by instinct no differently than other elemental beasts, but through incarnation it benefits from the human soul's identity, will and awareness. The human host benefits from a feeling of completeness, a new purpose and meaning in life. From this alchemical marriage emerges a higher self or Super-Ego that always had the potential to exist, but only now wrestles control of the self away from the human's Ego and the elemental's Id. The Nephilim call their physical form a "simulacrum" not because they're racists that contemptuously see humans as tools and slaves, but because the rotation of Elemental Pentacle around Solar Axle is a simulacrum of the Solar System, the Metamorphosis transforming the body is a simulacrum of the elemental, and the whole thing is a simulacrum of Agartha.

When a Nephilim enters Shouit, it's not a case of a hapless human host regaining control of his body and being surprised by all the lost time. The Nephilim's psyche shoves his memory and understanding of the occult world into his subconscious, then subsumes himself into mundane life. He doesn't act as though he lost time: if confronted about the occult and his whereabouts, he rationalizes it away or simply refuses to acknowledge it.

Likewise, the Nephilim doesn't have an Immortal identity that overcomes his mortal identity every incarnation. While Nephilim take an Enochian name, this is only done to identify each other and doesn't indicate that the same personality is continuous across incarnations. Every incarnation is effectively a new person with a different personality, and whenever the Nephilim dies then that person dies tragically and reincarnation creates a new person who can recall the experiences of his dead predecessors. That said, certain mental conditions can cause the Nephilim to identify more with their immortality than their mortality: he goes from thinking "Woah, I was Horus in a past life!" to "I am Horus reborn!" Aside from the standard difference in values of past eras (newsflash: people in ancient times were evil racist misogynistic assholes!), this mental illness is what explains the inhumane behavior practiced by the Major Arcana's directors and famous figures.

That's all well and good, but how does the Nephilim actually perceive themselves on a day-to-day basis? How do they relate to mortal muggles, to their families and societies? How does access to real magic and the experiences of past lives affect their psychology?

Long story short, it alters their perception of reality. Having recall of past lives, the ability to cast real spells, knowledge of the occult history of the world, and primed for seeking Agartha would radically alter the perceptions of any normal person. After becoming Nephilim, it's impossible to go back to normal unless you join the Hanged Man. You may not want to go back to normal. This is why the secret societies believe that Nephilim are body snatchers and have no problem performing horrific experiments on them... although to be fair, most secret societies have no problem using muggles for human sacrifices either. 

The Nephilim setting is not one where secret societies of heroic monster hunters exist: most secret societies with any degree of power are evil assholes with dreams of world domination, a minority are peaceful hippies who seek true enlightenment, and the rest are ignorant rubes who have no clue what they're walking into.

Anyway, secret societies like the Carbonari have tried to incarnate Nephilim under the control of the human personality and consistently failed because they don't understand that the Nephilim isn't a body snatcher. A Nephilim in Shouit isn't being controlled by the otherwise suppressed human personality, it's the human personality actively rejecting the occult. (This is why the Hanged Man don't practice magic. The whole point is to play house.) So the incarnated Carbonari agents refuse to enter Shouit because they're trying to exploit the magic, and from there they gain a new perspective due to their past life memories and come to disagree with the Carbonari's aims. Then they either flee or their former friends murder them and try again.

My advice is that groups should approach Nephilim differently than they do something like a White Wolf game. The Nephilim are not monsters that prey on the innocent, they are not evil assholes, they are not a metaphor for the human condition, they are not tied into the 90s zeitgeist of competing boomers and gen Xers, etc. This game is not about playing evil hypocritical self-righteous assholes trying vainly to tear down the system in a dystopian nihilistic hellscape. I see Nephilim as a fundamentally optimistic game where the PCs can, nay, are expected to reach Agartha at the culmination of their Quests. Agartha is real, everyone knows about it, and even if it takes millennia and innumerable incarnations of study and questing it is possible for any Immortal to achieve it. Nephilim is a game about transcendence and revelation, inspired by real life occult traditions, and having weird adventures inspired by The X-Files, Foucault's Pendulum, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, etc.

Sanity and insanity

The unfinished Ex Oculis fanbook couldn't commit and opened with a wishy-washy explanation of three perspectives on Nephilim: invading parasite, awakened human, and symbiotic fusion. Since the text didn't commit, this leaves a number of holes in the worldbuilding. I take the third perspective and commit to it, which makes my worldbuilding stronger.

The ExO rules introduced a sanity mechanic copied from Unknown Armies to cover the various psychological afflictions like Khaiba, Shouit and new ones like Sekhat (a dementia or fugue state in which a past life personality takes over and reinterprets the current circumstances through the lens of the era they lived in). Additional afflictions were introduced, such as characters becoming hardened and behaving like callous psychopaths. For example, a sufficiently hardened character might behave as though their various incarnations are continuations of the same immortal being and be completely uninterested in the mundane (as I mentioned above).

I really like those ideas! So expect to see more posts about that in the future...