" and, as all of learning are aware, that which we call sentience, consciousness that which the fools of the Celestial Church dub the "soul" is in reality as fluid and amorphous as the cytoplasm of the Ravennian Writher. A plethora of methods all of them quite physical, I assure the good reader exist whereby those qualities the fanatics dub "unchanging" and "Pancreator- inspired" can in truth be molded, imbued and erased at the implementer's whim.
"Herein I shall list an array of formulae whereby the seat of intelligence may be loosed from its mooring; whereby eternal love and unholy fear wait at the end of a needle; whereby the soul may be plunged, a passive spectator, amid a thousand hells, a million heavens, and a host of earthly, psychic and astral vistas besides.
"Yea, with a pinprick, a dollop of fluid, a pinch of powder, I have made men love me and children run screaming one from the other; I have goaded sons and daughters to slash apart the very breasts on which they suckled; I have turned the most prideful of noblewomen into my fawning slaves."
from the grimoire of the warlock Xiphius, preserved in the Archivum Interdictum on the Cathedral at Pentateuch
