-- ReginaldGusto - 08 Nov 2015

There are three concepts that are going to come up a lot in this setting. The first is the Eastern concept of the Chakras, the energy nodes arrayed through the Human body. The second is the Norse myth of Ygdrasil, the World Tree. The third is the Mesopotamian creation myth, called the Enuma Elish, which details the primacy of Tiamat, and her death at the hands of Marduk.
I won’t be boring you with any doctorate level detail on the subjects, but I will give you the basic run-down of each metaphor so that, if you aren’t already familiar with them, you at least won’t be confused by them when you see them later. In this game setting, the three are intimately intertwined.

Chakras

There are seven nodes of energy in the Human body, arrayed in a straight line along our spine, pelvis, and skull. Each chakra has a color associated with it, and processes a certain kind of energy. The seven chakras are all connected by a conduit called the Prana Tube, which channels energy up and down the spine through the chakras.

First: The first chakra is located at the base of the pelvis. This chakra is red, and processes fear and raw survival instinct. Also called the “root.”
Second: The orange chakra is found at the genitals. It processes trust, basic forms of love, interpersonal connection, familial bond, pleasure, and shame.
Third: At the stomach, this chakra is yellow. It holds your sense of self, your ego, acts as a reactor vessel for your energy, and processes pride and anger. Also called the Hara.
Fourth: This chakra is green and is located in the Heart. It processes deep love, loyalty, and morality.
Fifth: The Throat chakra is blue, and converts the energy from the lower chakras (Primal energy) into energy for the higher chakras (Celestial energy). It processes projection of will, and complex communication.
Sixth: The Third Eye, the indigo chakra, is located in the center of the forehead. It processes extra-sensory perception and metaphor.
Seventh: The Violet chakra, also called the Crown, is located in the center of the top of the head. It processes Celestial energy and connects us to the universe.

There are many variations on the metaphor above, including those who posit that there is a Zero chakra where our tail would be if we had one, and an Eighth chakra above our heads, representing the collective energies of the universe and how we interact with them. Some people think of zero and eight as our connections to divine forces.
For the sake of this book, I will be calling the zero chakra “the Tail,” and its color will be infra-red. I have not thought of a name for the eighth chakra, but its color is ultraviolet.
Keep this concept in mind. I will revisit it again in both of the next two sections.

Ygdrasil

Now that you are imagining individual Humans and their chakras, imagine that the same metaphor plays out at the global level, that the world itself has chakras, and a prana tube connecting them.
The Norse believed in a giant tree with branches stretching to the heavens, and roots penetrating into lower realms unvisited by Humans. This tree, called Ygdrasil, or “the World Tree,” connected Earth to the heavenly gods, the Aesir, and the lower, Primal realms ruled by the Vanir.
It would be easy to see the trunk of Ygdrasil as Earth’s Prana Tube, holding the world’s chakras arrayed as above.
BUT!
You might be asking now, “what about the roots and the branches? Aren’t they more of the structure of the World Tree than the trunk is?”
Exactly. By a huge margin.
In the section above, you probably imagined the zero and eight chakras as just another point of energy in scale with the rest, a point hovering somewhere in space about the knees, and another maybe a foot above the head. Not too impressive or memorable. But now, you can see the Tail chakra, the roots of Ygdrasil, stretching down and spreading out, untold leagues through the aether of the Universe, reaching all the way down into the deepest depths of the world’s Primal energy, and a beautiful network of branches spreading out of the world, reaching into the center of the Universe itself. These two networks positively dwarf the trunk, the prana tube of the seven main chakras. The one pulls life-giving water up from the depths, the other channels pure sunlight from Heaven down.
And what is under and above? Well…

The Enuma Elish

The name Tiamat is often translated as “Ocean.”
Deep water, the ocean, has been historically and culturally a wild place for Humans. It was the home of unknown, bizarre, huge monsters we could not hope to tame. On a great many nautical maps, unknown spaces were labeled “Here there be dragons.” The idea that the ocean was the source of all life has been a prevalent one throughout our history. This concept is at least supported both scientifically (we now know that our oceans house 99% of all life on Earth and likely originated even land-based life-forms), and religiously (modern pagan religions frequently refer to a Goddess who gave birth to all life).
The wild depths also serve as a metaphor for the Human unconscious mind: just as the oceans house the great majority of life on earth, all but about 10% of our brain functions are concealed to our conscious mind. We just don’t know what’s “down there.” (An honest to god neurologist may take issue with these claims, and I would not argue if he or she did. Word to the wise, my friends: don’t take medical advice from an RPG sourcebook.)
The defeat of Tiamat by Marduk is one of the world’s oldest and most apt metaphors for Humans attaining conscious thought. We defeated the chaos in our own neurology and organized our information storage and intake capacity for more efficient processing. But we do still have our hardwired instincts, concealed in the 90% of the brain we don’t interact with on a conscious level.
The trunk of Ygdrasil, our seven main chakras, are only 10% of our interaction with the world. The rest either reaches down into the primal unconscious Deep Water, the home of Tiamat, or stretches up into the super-conscious realm, the Celestial domain of Marduk.

The mind of a Kaiju: Myth in the context of our setting

Kaiju refer to Tiamat and Marduk as “Mother” and “Father.” Mother’s home is in the lowest reaches of the Deep Water, and the Primal energy there flows up from Her, through the Tail chakra, into the Root chakra. A blockage at one of the chakras causes a buildup of that energy, and a buildup of pressure, until it erupts. When it erupts, a Kaiju emerges. Kaiju cannot process Father’s Celestial energy as well as they can the Primal energy, so the flow is imbalanced.
There is also a World Tree, and it exists in the Aetherial realm, connecting the Deep Water to the Celestial City.