Malachai Ben-Yeshua

Background
Malachai Ben-Yeshua, bani Bonisagus, disappeared from the Order of Hermes in the early days of the 1970s. He was renowned among the Scattered as a great binder of Umbrood and as a man most conversant with their bizarre and alien psychologies. His treatises on coercing service out of various “breeds” of astral beings became standard reference in the Order almost as soon as they were published.

Malachai was born to emigrants in Poland in the early 1930s. His parents were hard-working and unexceptional people and they tried to instill in the boy an ethic of humble persistence and a respect for the work of his own hands. Unfortunately, the overarching lesson of his youth came not from loving parents, but from Hitler’s war machine, and young Malachai watched his parents’ bodies burn in the furnaces of the death-camps before being freed by Allied forces at the close of the Second World War. The terrible sense of powerlessness that Malachai felt even after his liberation scarred him deeply, and sowed in him dormant seeds of resentment and bitterness that would flower and transform him from a weak, rail-thin, psychologically ruined boy, to a man in pursuit of the power to ensure that no one could ever hurt him again.

With no surviving family that he knew of, an orphanage in Prague took in Malachai. It was there that Malachai first heard the story of the golem built to protect the Jews of the city hundreds of years before. Perhaps simply to answer his own questions about the truth of the world and to address his terribly deep-seated feelings of vulnerability, Malachai, at the age of 13, defied tradition and began to seek out the mysteries of Kabbalah. His initial crude fumblings drew the attentions of Rudolph Berkowitz, bani Bonisagus, who, impressed with Malachai’s initiative, quickly brought the boy under his wing. Berkowitz became Malachai’s adoptive father and began his time of Hermetic tutelage in the Prague Chantry. Malachai took to the Great Work as though born to it.

He studied in the small hours of the morning, working twice as hard as any other assistant in the chantry, so as to be able to find a spare moment here or there to page through the ancient texts and dusty scrolls. He quickly learned that he had a facility for languages and turned this to his advantage, needing only minimal schooling in a tongue before he could draw the connections on his own and decipher unfamiliar words. Mastering the goetia by the age of 15, Malachai moved on to the theurgia, inducing his own Awakening by the age of 17 through a rigorous regimen of Hermetic study. Most of the rest of his life in the Order would be marked by a similarly astonishing progression in studious endeavors, with almost any subject coming to him quickly and naturally.

Malachai, despite (or perhaps because of) his parents’ devoutness, was not one for religion. In order to demonstrate man’s preeminent place in the Great Chain of Being, to exert control over what he considered to be the fundamentally unjust hierarchy of Creation, and out of a desire to control the forces to which he felt his parents had bent knee like slaves, he turned to the summoning and binding of Umbrood. Never interested in friends or allies, he devoted himself instead to his work, allowing years to slip by with only an occasional foray out into the mi’as to acquire a rare ingredient for a particularly exotic or dangerous enchantment. Eventually, however, Malachai’s great drive began to run thin. He had alienated many Astral Umbrood through his experiments and summonings and, at the end of the 1960s, Malachai turned to the Ars Potentiae, seeking to subvert by raw force that which finesse would no longer suffice to control. Still, there seemed to be something more, just beyond his reach. Malachai spent a few years traversing the Earth and the Otherworlds, making contact with many noted sages of the Order, seeking clues to a more perfect and absolute control over the myriad realms of Creation, but he could find no theory that sufficed.

In the end, Malachai disappeared into the depths of the Umbra, with a few muttered words to associates that he would return eventually with the knowledge he sought — knowledge that would enable him to traffick with the primordial spirits responsible for the order of reality itself. Mages of the Order at Mus last saw Malachai Ben-Yeshua surrounded by a tempest of books and papyri. Riding on the wings of an ensorcelled djinn of the winds, he seeks the mysteries at the heart of the Universe itself. Though no one actually expects Malachai to return anytime soon (or ever, really), learned ones say that his is an example of the intense focus a mage of the Order must cultivate in the pursuit of one’s Word and in the pursuit of control over the very powers of nature.