The Language of Adam

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought [them] unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that [was] the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This [is] now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

— Genesis 2:19–23

And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.

— Genesis 3:20

According to traditional legends about the beginning of the world, the very first man was named Adam, and lived in a fantastic garden called Eden created for him by God, where his every need was served. God brought all the animals before him, and Adam gave them their names. These were specific words that best described them, terms that meant "horse" or "lion" or "crow" or "salmon," that

each encompassed the entirety of the beast's essential nature in a few specific sounds and the concept in Adam's mind. It might even be said that the name defined the beast, that each name had mystic significance that determined the qualities of the particular animal's species.

Yet though they all had fine qualities, none of the animals was found to be the perfect companion for Adam. And so God created another like Adam, a person to live the garden as he did. As Adam called himself "Man," his companion was called "Woman," and both she and he inherited all the traits that these names represent. And in time, just as Adam was called Adam and not just "Man," he also gave the "Woman" a name for her own: Eve, meaning "mother of all living." From this, Eve developed other unique traits, not just the traits of a woman, but qualities particular to her own identity, and together she and Adam had mastery and dominion over the land.

Many medieval scholars believe that there is great power in the language that Adam spoke, as it is the original language of all things, perhaps the language spoken by God himself to bring about the creation of the universe. The power of naming, of assigning a being a name that truly and succinctly describes it, might be considered to be the very first form of magic, the most ancient magic in the whole world. Uncovering this lost tongue, known as Adamic, is the focus of this chapter, an epic quest that will surely earn the magus who does so a place in Hermetic history and legend.

The power of the first language is simple, but direct. A character who is fluent in Adamic — that is, who has at least a score of 5 in the Dead Language (Adamic) Ability — can give anything within range of his voice a new name, which he may use as a permanent and lasting Arcane Connection to that target from then on. He also has an Arcane Connection to any mundane thing he knows the name of (anything without a Might Score). For Penetration, this second connection is valued as if it lasted "hours," though it is effectively permanent.

A character with some knowledge of Adamic receives a +1 bonus to his Penetration multiplier whenever he uses his magic on a target with Magic Resistance, as a form of sympathetic magic. To do this, he must name the target while it is within range of his voice, working this name into whatever ritual he performs to produce the magical effect, and if he is not fluent in Adamic he must have an Arcane Connection to the target, just as with other sympathetic bonuses. For example, a character with Adamic 1 and an Arcane Connection that lasts hours (+1) would have a Penetration multiplier of +2 when naming his target within Voice Range. A char-

A few ancient and contemporary theologians have theorized that the first language of man is that of pure innocence, of a mind unsullied by sin, and have sought to recreate the first language through experimentation, reasoning that if a child were to never hear any other words, what he would develop would be a language based in instinct, a reasonable facsimile of the language of Adam. Roman historians wrote legends of an Egyptian pharaoh who had two children raised in the wilderness, and who, when summoned, pointed to their mouths and said "becos," the Egyptian word for bread, which supposedly proved that Egyptian was the oldest language in the world. Frederick II, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor in 1220, is said to have conducted a similar experiment, but the results were inconclusive as the children disappeared after being left in the wilderness and were never heard from again.

In Mythic Europe, an imaginative child who has The Gift and is raised without any other linguistic influences develops a special language of his own in the first few years of his life, and this language is very similar to Adamic. However, as he grows older and learns to communicate with others he necessarily loses much of the innocence that mimics Adam's state before he was cast out of the garden, making it impossible for him to develop his vocabulary beyond the primitive ideas associated with his childhood.

To represent this in the game, instead of beginning with a Living Language score of 5 during character creation, a child with The Gift and a positive Intelligence who was raised in controlled conditions or the wild may begin with a score of 2 in Dead Language (Adamic). Unfortunately, he is unable to develop this language any further than this, as by age 5 he has lost the innocence that allows him to create this knowledge. Like with other Dead Languages, he may increase his understanding of Adamic through formal instruction, if he can find a teacher. He can also teach the basics of his made-up language to others once he learns to communicate with them. In this way, other characters may acquire this rudimentary knowledge of Adamic if they wish.

This method is a good hook for a storyguide to draw a character with an interest in ancient magic into the quest, and one way to do this is by having him discover and adopt a child who intuitively speaks Adamic, perhaps one of the children used in King Frederick's experiment. From this child, the character may learn the basics of the original language, and thus gain a slight increase to his Penetration Ability, though to gain the full benefits he must eventually become fluent in it through one of the other means described in this chapter.

acter with Adamic 5 would have a total Penetration multiplier of +5, since because he is fluent in the language, he always has a lasting Arcane Connection to his target.

Whenever a character fluent in Adamic names something for the first time, such as a newborn baby, a piece of art, or a newly discovered land, the name he gives it subtly influences its destiny, causing its true nature to change and conform to his image of it. This birthright is something the storyguide should eventually integrate into the story in a subtle way that makes the name meaningful, as if it were a divine prophecy or an inheritance of some sort. Aside from choosing the concept associated with the name, however, the character has no direct control over this effect; this capability is simply to allow the player to use his character's powers to help create new stories.

Adamic does not need to be integrated into Hermetic magic, because learning it gives the character the power to make use of it immediately. The Adamic language is extremely difficult to study, however, because it is truly a dead language. There are no humans still living who speak it, and there are no written records to suggest how it would have sounded. How, then, are interested characters to recover the secret? The sections below contain three suggested means of learning the language, any of which characters might come up with on their own or have suggested to them by others who hypothesize that the original language of man has arcane significance. Each path follows a different route to this knowledge, but they all overlap in various ways.

The first method is to reconstruct the language from contemporary sources. Much like the qualities of a person's ancestors may be divined by studying their effect on the descendant, so too can Adamic be learned by studying the different languages into which it has transformed over the years. This quest begins with the story of the Tower of Babel, the monumental structure built to touch Heaven itself, thwarted by God's intervention and the invention of a babble of many different tongues.

A second method is to seek out the Garden of Eden, the idyllic and timeless place that was the origin of humanity and from which Adam and Eve were exiled forever. The inhabitants of the garden may still speak the original language, and a character who can find his way there may be able to learn to speak it from them. Tracking down this place requires that the characters travel to Mesopotamia, seeking out the place where four mighty rivers once converged, and somehow convincing the angelic guardians to let them pass.

Finally, there is one being remaining on earth who lived before the fragmenting of the language and who thus still speaks Adamic: Cain, the firstborn son of Adam, who killed his brother and whom God cursed, giving him a mark that signified his crime and doomed him to wander forever. The third method of learning Adamic is to find Cain and convince, trick, or force him into teaching the characters the lost language of his father.