The Relationships Between the Dread Powers: The Eye- Knowledge is Fear and Ignorance is Bliss
*Content warning: This article is about a horror podcast with Entities embodying fears. So it will go over and portray common fears and scary imagery such as violence, being watched, body horror, etc..
I love Magic the Gathering, but MTG isn’t the only thing I want to make articles about. At the end of the day I prefer to make articles about whatever I find interesting to help prevent artblock and appeal to a wider variety of people. While I’ve written a decent handful of MTG articles, at the time of writing this, I have only written one article about the Magnus Archives and the Extinction. Which you could read on Tumblr here(https://douglysium.tumblr.com/post/717929126195003392/what-would-avatars-of-the-extinction-be-like-a) and on Google Docs here(What would Avatars of the Extinction be like?: A TMA Speculation). The lack of TMA articles isn’t due to lack of trying though. Originally, I was going to make a series talking about the fears the powers embody and how that relates to each of their artifacts and imagery. The only problem is that it didn’t feel special. I have a personal rule that if I am writing about something it usually needs at least one aspect that makes it different and more appealing than just listening to someone read out a Wikipedia article.
Luckily for us, I have found that thing. For I have been struck by a bolt of inspiration from videos of one by the name of Afton G. Kier(The Eye Explained (The Magnus Archives Entities)) in which he mentions some of the notable relationships between the entities. One thing I think is rarely talked about in regards to the Dread Powers is how they are all connected, and all their similarities. Some fans have a habit of trying to see each entity as wholly distinct and separate from each other but the TMA podcast itself goes through great lengths to show us that this is not the case.
In MAG 80 (The Librarian) Leitner compares the Entities as being but pieces of a larger body: “Imagine, you are an ant, and you have never before seen a human. Then one day, into your colony, a huge fingernail is thrust, scraping and digging. You flee to another entrance, only to be confronted by a staring eye gazing at you. You climb to the top, trying to find escape and, above you, can see the vast dark shadow of a boot falling upon you. Would that ant be able to construct these things into the form of a single human being? Or would it believe itself to be under attack by three different, equally terrible, but very distinct assailants?” Meanwhile in MAG 111 Gerard compares them to colors: “I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works. And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour.”
If I were to make my own analogy by bouncing off Gerard’s, I’d compare the entities to the electromagnetic spectrum and light. Each entity is essentially a “wavelength” or “color” but they are all part of the wider spectrum. If we were to use visible light as an example each Dread Power is but one or more colors of light that make up white light, and white light is every color of light mixed together. The point here is that each fear is in truth but a piece of something larger. Not to mention that they often overlap or are fed by similar fears or actions It is important to mention that Gerard and Jon also go on to state “O-Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like –An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.” So while I would personally argue the Dread Powers still sit on a sort of spectrum, the spectrum in question is a lot more soupy and amorphous than a simple color wheel. I myself have made a graph detailing which Dread Powers I think are closer or more synergistic with each other than others but technically every power is connected to each other in some way, and I figured the best way to get my point across is by looking at how each fear overlaps. But in order to properly do that we must fully understand each Entity and all their nuances starting with the great all-seeing Beholding itself.
Also, each individual article will focus on one Dread Power and their relationship with each entity. This article will focus on the Eye, and each entity will get their own article in the future.
The Eye
Before we can dive into some of the comparisons and contrasts between the Eye and the other Entities, we must first define the Eye by understanding the fear it embodies and some of the imagery associated with it.
The Eye is an entity that is stated to have been born from, and feed off of, the fear of being watched, exposed, followed, of having secrets known, but also the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you. Getrude also mentions it feeds off the fear of being judged in MAG 161(Dwelling). With entities such as this, some of the fears may seem random or not quite connected to each other so I thought it would help to try to find not only what connects all these together but boil them down to their core essence. This is surprisingly easy since the fears of most Entities can usually be connected by very basic words or phrases.
Basically, it appears that the Eye revolves around fears that have to do with knowledge. Whether that be the fear of someone knowing about you, someone attempting to understand something about you, or the fear of coming across a piece of knowledge you would rather not know. One way this can manifest is by something trying to reveal or gather knowledge about you. Which can be done in ways such as watching someone, exposing their secrets, listening to private conversations, etc. This is also where I think the whole following aspect of the Eye comes from. It’s the idea that someone is observing you, which is a form of gathering information, for any sort of purposes. When we think of why someone would be following someone / something else it is usually connected to information. Maybe they are trying to follow you to your house, maybe they are trying to see if you go to a place where they KNOW you’re alone, or maybe they are just trying to spy on you. Typically, when someone is following you they are either gathering information or waiting for the right moment to strike (which also involves getting information.
The Eye’s theme of being exposed also connects to what Gertrude said in regards to it and the fear of being judged. If you are being judged then something is not only watching and / or paying attention to you but they are also trying to understand you or expose who / what you are. A lot of the time, when we are being judged, people are looking for faults and shortcomings or something they can exploit. Which is something that many find scary. There is also the fact that if someone is judging you then they could come across some fact about you that you don’t want them to know about (Imagine if someone went through your house to appraise how clean it was just to point out how dirty it is or if they found something you hid). Someone judging you may also be looking for something bad to do to you. Maybe they noticed how valuable your jewelry is and are thinking about stealing it now.
Something that I feel many miss is that the Eye not only focuses on the fear of someone / something gaining / exposing knowledge and secrets about you but also the idea of forbidden or cursed knowledge. In essence, there are some things that people don’t want to know about, something that the TMA wiki lists as “horrible knowledge.” This kind of fear also feeds the Eye, it’s the reason why Jonah Magnus can shove information into people’s minds. Has anyone ever told you some weird disgusting fun fact that you didn’t need or want to know? Have you ever heard the phrase “ignorance is bliss,” “out of sight out of mind,” or “what you don’t know can’t hurt you?” Have you ever seen something that you wish you didn’t and just want to forget about, or maybe you just walked in on your naked grandma? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/752Tb059OH8
There is also the stereotypical setup where someone witnesses a murder and immediately realizes that they weren’t supposed to see that and by merely knowing what they just saw a target has been put on their head. There are people who really don’t want you to know stuff and if they realize you know it you might be in trouble. These are all things that connect to aspects of the Eye.
What I’m trying to get across with all these examples is that knowledge in and of itself can be scary and a burden. Something that in turn feeds the Eye. This is also why we have weird Eye related statements like the one in MAG 23 where one by the name of Albrecht von Closen sees a man with missing eyes. To some of the more astute viewers this seems pretty weird. Usually, the lack of eyes or missing eyes is associated with the Dark because it has to do with blindness and being unable to see. However, while it is stated that the man in question could seemingly still see clearly (which is what made it weird), I believe that when the Eye takes away someone’s eyes it has to do with the idea that the person in question saw something that they weren’t supposed to or didn’t want to know. That whatever they saw and knew led to them getting put in danger either physically or mentally. Either that or the idea that someone would rather go blind and remain in ignorance than see / know something.
Imagine witnessing something so terrible it makes you want to claw your own eyes out. I think many can also relate to the idea of wanting to ignore a problem or not even think about it instead of addressing it. There’s also the idea of some sort of forbidden knowledge that can drive you mad as a common trope in horror.
Connected to this point is the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you. What this basically refers to is sometimes we want to know something even if we know it might hurt us. Think of wanting to know what happened to a loved one or friend even if you know what you are about to hear is going to be terrible, or being unable to look away from a horrific accident or brutal violence uploaded onto the internet even though it traumatizes you. The Eye has a big “curiosity killed the cat” and “ignorance is bliss” theme that I think a lot of people overlook. Something that is also reflected in what we learn in regards to the Eye’s creation in MAG 200(Last Words). When we learn in what order the Fears were born and the fears that led to their creation we get this: “and struggle at learning, so too did they learn to fear that their eyes might deceive them, or show them too much.” Here the “fear that their eyes might deceive them” is the Spiral while the fear of being shown too much is the Eye since none of the other fears mentioned in that statement match up with the Eye and clearly correspond with the other Entities.
