Chrysos (Reformed Stripping Path)
Among the most powerful Planetary Divines, Chrysos is the god of thieves, spies, pirates, politicians, wealth, prosperity, abundance, secrecy, and calculated risk.
Chrysos is a deity of the Reformed Stripping Path, representing the planet of the same name. He is a complex and enigmatic figure who embodies the meeting of cunning, ambition, fortune, hidden knowledge, and material power.
According to myth, Chrysos was born from the whispered breath of Atos when the sun stole its light from Azos and spun its first lie. Worshippers revere him as both a generous patron and a dangerous trickster. He grants prosperity to those who understand opportunity, but humiliates those whose greed destroys the order upon which their wealth depends.
Chrysos is also understood as the sovereign of Heptapolis, the golden celestial domain promised to the most faithful departed members of the Guild of Golden Shadows. Heptapolis is not itself worshipped as a deity. It is the eternal realm over which Chrysos presides and the reward granted to those whose cunning, prosperity, secrecy, and ambition remained disciplined by wisdom.
Chrysos in the Reformed Stripping Path
Within the Reformed Stripping Path, Chrysos represents the pursuit of wealth and influence through skill, intelligence, bold action, and an accurate understanding of risk. He is both benefactor and trickster, rewarding resourcefulness while embodying the instability of fortune.
His teachings encourage followers to seize opportunities, cultivate useful knowledge, and move through the hidden structures of power with discretion. He does not condemn deception, theft, espionage, piracy, or political maneuvering merely because they operate beyond ordinary respectability. He instead judges such acts by their competence, purpose, consequences, and relationship to the wider order.
Chrysos is particularly venerated by those who operate at the margins between legality and criminality: thieves, spies, smugglers, privateers, pirates, political intermediaries, fixers, auditors, merchants, counterfeiters, diplomats, and officials whose work depends upon secrets.
His followers describe the world as a board of moving interests rather than a simple contest between honesty and dishonesty. Every law creates an opening; every market creates a shadow market; every secret gains value from the cost of revealing it. Wisdom lies in recognizing these structures without becoming trapped by them.
Chrysos therefore distinguishes between cunning and foolish greed. A successful thief takes what can be carried and escapes. A foolish thief steals so much that the road home collapses beneath the weight. A wise merchant profits while preserving the market. A foolish merchant destroys every buyer and then wonders why his treasury has become worthless.
For this reason, Chrysos is not regarded as the patron of limitless accumulation. Wealth is a tool, proof of competence, a means of influence, and a responsibility. Prosperity obtained through actions that destroy one’s community, trade routes, institutions, or future opportunities is considered spiritually defective.
The faithful believe that every profitable act creates an account that must eventually be balanced. During mortal life, this balancing may take the form of taxation, charity, repayment, loyalty, strategic restraint, or service to the wider Bassaridian order. After death, the final account is settled before the gates of Heptapolis.
Heptapolis and the Reward of the Faithful
Heptapolis is a gold-rich moon orbiting the planet Chrysos. Its surface is famous for extensive auriferous plains, electrum-bearing fractures, metallic crater fields, and thousands of naturally luminous points visible across its night side.
Astronomers explain these apparent lights as plasma glows, electrostatic discharges, and the excitation of a tenuous metal-rich exosphere above conductive fractures. Followers of Chrysos do not necessarily reject this explanation. They argue that Chrysos works through material causes and has arranged the moon’s metals, vapors, electrical fields, and orbital environment so that the dwelling places of the faithful dead may become visible to the living.
Within orthodox theology, Heptapolis is not a god, goddess, spirit, or Planetary Divine. No independent cult is properly dedicated to the moon, and prayers are not addressed to Heptapolis as though it possessed a will of its own. It is a sacred place within the dominion of Chrysos: his golden kingdom beyond mortal life.
The most faithful members of the Guild of Golden Shadows are promised eternal life within its luminous cities. This reward is not reserved for the wealthiest or most politically powerful. Chrysos judges the dead according to whether they used cunning with discipline, guarded secrets entrusted to them, sustained the systems upon which their prosperity depended, and understood when profit should yield to obligation.
The lights visible upon the moon are called the Lamps of the Departed. Each is believed to correspond to a household, market stall, counting room, harbor shrine, safehouse, watchtower, meeting chamber, or lantern maintained by a faithful soul.
The Golden Threshold
At death, followers of Chrysos are said to awaken before a locked door standing in a dark and empty market. They carry no money, office, weapon, disguise, or title. Only the record of their choices remains with them.
Chrysos approaches in disguise. He may appear as a beggar, creditor, former victim, rival merchant, imprisoned thief, dismissed servant, shipwrecked sailor, political enemy, or person whom the deceased once regarded as beneath notice.
The soul is not told that judgment has begun. Its response to the disguised god reveals whether it has learned the central mystery of Chrysos: that opportunity, obligation, and consequence frequently conceal themselves beneath unprofitable appearances.
Those who recognize wisdom beneath the disguise—or who respond with discipline and mercy even when they expect no reward—are shown the true face of Chrysos. He grants them a Golden Key with which they may open the gate of Heptapolis.
Those who attempt to bribe, rob, threaten, flatter, or deceive the disguised god without understanding the encounter are sent away. Their accumulated treasures become heavy golden masks that obscure their sight and drag them into the darkness beyond the Lamps of the Departed.
The Seven Eternal Cities
The name Heptapolis means the Seven Cities. The moon contains thousands of luminous regions, but Guild theology organizes them into seven principal spiritual cities.
The First Treasury
The First Treasury receives those who preserved wealth for future generations. Its residents include careful stewards, guardians of communal reserves, and merchants who understood that prosperity must survive its immediate possessor.
Its vaults are said to contain every useful thing that was saved from waste. Nothing stored there decays, but nothing may be hoarded without purpose.
The Veiled Market
The Veiled Market receives traders, negotiators, brokers, and intermediaries who prospered without destroying the markets upon which others depended.
Every object sold there possesses more than one value. Transactions are judged not by price alone but by timing, information, trust, and consequence.
The City of Keys
The City of Keys receives spies, messengers, code-keepers, archivists, locksmiths, and those entrusted with dangerous secrets.
Its streets contain innumerable doors. The faithful may open only those for which they possess the correct authority. Attempting to open another resident’s door causes the key to disappear until the offender has made restitution.
The Golden Anchorage
The Golden Anchorage receives pirates, privateers, navigators, smugglers, sailors, and shipmasters who remained loyal to their crews and respected the limits of profitable violence.
Its harbor is filled with ships lost in mortal waters. Every vessel is sound, every wind is favorable, and no sailor is abandoned merely because rescuing them would delay a voyage.
The Mint of Shadows
The Mint of Shadows receives counterfeiters, artisans, disguisers, mask-makers, forgers, and those who transformed imitation into useful power.
Its workshops produce objects so perfect that their makers must identify one deliberate imperfection before the work may leave the city. This rule teaches that every illusion must retain a path back to truth.
The Hall of Final Accounts
The Hall of Final Accounts receives auditors, judges, accountants, Golden Factors, and those who balanced profit against duty.
Every agreement made during mortal life is recorded there. Accounts are not balanced solely in coin, but in protection offered, risks transferred, communities sustained, trust violated, and consequences accepted.
The Crown Beyond Night
The Crown Beyond Night receives the most faithful servants of Chrysos. These include figures believed to have served as the Mask of Chrysos, as well as unknown individuals whose quiet acts preserved the guild or protected the wider order at great personal cost.
The Crown is not a palace of idleness. Its residents advise the other cities and are said to appear in dreams when the guild faces choices capable of producing either enduring prosperity or catastrophic ruin.
Life in Heptapolis
The departed do not spend eternity in passive luxury. The markets of Heptapolis never close, yet no resident suffers hunger, homelessness, or poverty.
Every bargain contains a hidden lesson. Every locked door may be opened by wisdom. Every treasure bears an obligation proportional to its value. Every disguise eventually reveals something true about the person who wears it.
The faithful continue to trade, sail, debate, investigate, create, and test one another. Their rewards consist not only of wealth but of endless opportunity exercised without the finality of mortal failure.
Chrysos is believed to wander constantly among the seven cities in changing disguises. Even in paradise, the faithful must remain alert, generous, disciplined, and capable of recognizing the god beneath appearances.
Chrysos in the Bassaridian Zodiac
Chrysos governs the Zodiac of Chrysen, the sixth sign of the Bassaridian Zodiac and the first zodiac of the month of Thalassiel.
This zodiacal period is associated with the Host Star Bulhanu, a celestial symbol of strength, courage, resilience, and the ability to endure the consequences of risk. Bulhanu appears prominently from approximately 40° north latitude.
The zodiac of Chrysen inspires followers to draw upon their strength and cunning to overcome obstacles and secure their ambitions. Under the light of Bulhanu, worshippers meditate upon the dualities of fortune and risk, seeking the courage to embrace opportunity and the wisdom to recognize dangerous excess.
During Chrysen, Chrysos’s influence is believed to reach its annual height. Merchants renegotiate contracts, political intermediaries exchange favors, guild cells review their networks, and individuals consider which ambitions deserve further investment.
The night-side lights of Heptapolis also hold particular significance during this period. Where visible, the moon is observed as the Golden Ledger of the Sky. Its lights remind worshippers that mortal choices remain visible beyond death and that every bargain eventually enters the final account.
Some temples divide Chrysen into seven devotional phases corresponding to the seven eternal cities. Each phase emphasizes a particular discipline: stewardship, trade, secrecy, navigation, craft, accountability, or selfless service.
The Guild of Golden Shadows
Many ships operating around Lake Morovia carry statues of Chrysos and compact altars at which gifts may be offered to the Planetary Divine.
The Guild of Golden Shadows is the principal clandestine order devoted to Chrysos within the Reformed Stripping Path. It operates as an underground network of thieves, spies, pirates, fixers, smugglers, auditors, counterfeiters, political intermediaries, and information brokers.
While its cells are scattered across the ports and market cities of Bassaridia Vaeringheim, the guild’s ritual and organizational heart lies in the Night Market quarter of Aurelia. Festivals such as Panegyris Chrysou (Golden Gathering) and Agavronos draw respectable merchants, pilgrims, guild operatives, and underworld figures into a carefully choreographed exchange of trade, rumor, devotion, and hidden obligation.
From the back rooms of counting houses in Vaeringheim to the holds of pirate vessels on Lake Morovia, the guild embodies Chrysos’s domains of wealth, secrecy, calculated risk, and concealed influence.
Organization
Membership in the guild is strictly tiered.
Novices, known as Candle-Bearers, begin with menial tasks in markets and harbors. They shadow caravans, memorize ledgers, observe patrol schedules, carry messages, tend shrines, and learn to distinguish useful silence from mere ignorance.
Those who demonstrate discretion, competence, and nerve may become Keyholders. Keyholders receive access to safehouses, restricted accounts, coded correspondence, hidden routes, and portions of the guild’s oral traditions.
At higher levels stand the Golden Factors, anonymous coordinators who oversee regional networks of smugglers, merchants, informants, counterfeiters, fixers, and legitimate front businesses. A Golden Factor is expected to understand both the formal economy and the shadow structures existing beside it.
Above even the Golden Factors, rumor speaks of a single Mask of Chrysos. This unseen figure arbitrates disputes between major guild factions and enforces the principle that profitable shadows must never bring ruin upon the Host Spirit’s wider order.
Some traditions claim that there is always one Mask. Others hold that several individuals collectively perform the office. A third interpretation proposes that Chrysos himself occasionally occupies the role, leaving even senior members uncertain whether a command originated from a mortal leader or the disguised god.
The Mask of Chrysos is promised a place within the Crown Beyond Night after death, but only if the office was used to preserve rather than consume the guild.
Ritual Life
Ritual practice is woven into commerce, espionage, travel, and political negotiation.
In Aurelia, the Night Market Tribute held before Panegyris Chrysou sees guild operatives mingle with ordinary pilgrims as stalls overflow with gold-tinted wares, counterfeit trinkets, encrypted charms, and genuine relics.
Offerings of coins, keys, sealed ledgers, masks, and coded messages are placed at hidden shrines. Priests recite passages from the Hymn of Chrysos and remind worshippers that fortune without foresight ends in humiliation.
On Lake Morovia, Bassarid pirates and itinerant privateers maintain compact shipboard altars. Before raids or dangerous crossings, they pour wine into the water and scatter coins, asking Chrysos to turn weather, patrol schedules, rival greed, and administrative confusion to their advantage.
Seven small lamps are commonly included upon guild altars. They represent the cities of Heptapolis and the hope that faithful service will be rewarded after death. The lamps are placed beneath the image of Chrysos, emphasizing that the golden realm remains subject to him.
Funeral Practices
Funerals of the Guild of Golden Shadows are ordinarily conducted at night or shortly before dawn.
The deceased is dressed without visible insignia of rank. This signifies that titles, wealth, and reputation cannot purchase entry into Heptapolis. A single key—often made of brass or gilded wood rather than actual gold—is placed in the hands or upon the chest.
Seven lamps are lit around the body. Six are extinguished during the funeral recitation. The seventh remains burning until sunrise, representing the hope that the soul has located the Golden Threshold.
Guild members recount not merely the deceased’s successes, but occasions on which they showed restraint, loyalty, foresight, mercy, or willingness to sacrifice profit for the survival of others.
A map of Heptapolis may be displayed during the ceremony. After the funeral, the deceased’s companions add a small point of gold ink to the province they believe best reflects the life of the departed. The mark is devotional and does not claim to identify an actual astronomical light.
The traditional final words are:
- May the Mask know you.
- May the Key answer you.
- May the seventh lamp remain.
The Guild and the State
Institutionally, the Guild of Golden Shadows operates along the blurred boundary between criminality and statecraft.
In theory, it is an illicit fraternity. In practice, its networks are repeatedly consulted—formally and informally—by the Temple Bank of the Reformed Stripping Path, the General Port of Lake Morovia, and the Hatch Ministry when questions of fraud, cartel behavior, covert financing, illicit transport, or document manipulation arise.
By comparing guild intelligence with port ledgers and audit trails maintained under the Straits Conventions of 52.06 PSSC, Bassaridian authorities have mapped shadow corridors operating parallel to lawful trade routes and distinguished opportunistic smuggling from activity threatening constitutional export controls.
In return, the guild secures a measure of tolerated existence so long as its members avoid destabilizing essential markets, endangering protected passage, compromising humanitarian corridors, or undermining the state’s wider diplomatic posture.
The theological promise of Heptapolis reinforces this uneasy accommodation. Guild doctrine teaches that acts which produce immediate profit while destroying the wider order may enrich a member in life but exclude them from the eternal cities.
Operation Somniant and Operation Leviathan
The guild’s role in internal security became especially visible, though seldom officially acknowledged, during Operation Somniant and Operation Leviathan.
During the Somniant era, as the Somniant Eidolan and associated cultists exploited contraband networks and pirate havens around Lake Morovia, Golden Shadow cells quietly traced artifacts, illicit concentrates, foreign coin, and coded correspondence through intermediaries and shell companies.
Their findings, passed through Temple Bank auditors and the Bassaridian War League, supported targeted seizures and arrests without collapsing entire coastal economies.
Under Leviathan protocols, guild informants in resort and pilgrimage cities such as Thermosalem and Tel-Amin supplied intelligence concerning schismatic broadcasters, money couriers, and foreign-linked agitators. This allowed authorities to target organizers rather than sweep indiscriminately through market and shrine districts.
Guild memorial traditions hold that operatives killed during these campaigns entered the City of Keys or the Golden Anchorage, provided that their actions protected the public order rather than serving mere personal enrichment.
The Baratar Scandal and Lawful Cunning
The Baratar Scandal of 52 PSSC and subsequent Bassaridian involvement in Corum forced the guild to confront the limits of its patron’s tolerance for reckless profit.
Investigators discovered that a Jogi-based consortium had fragmented orders, manipulated commodity codes, and routed prohibited materiel toward the Corum War in violation of constitutional export controls.
Some guild brokers were implicated in the documentation chains and subjected to harsh penalties. Others cooperated with the Haifa Compliance Exchange and General Port auditors, supplying maps of shell purchasers, bonded warehouses, financial intermediaries, and courier routes.
Within the corridor-centered posture adopted thereafter, the Guild of Golden Shadows recast itself as a specialist in lawful cunning. Selected analysts and informants supplied pattern-recognition and counter-smuggling expertise to Temple Bank compliance units and HCE risk-based audits.
Guild messengers warned diaspora communities that covert arms brokerage risked legal destruction and spiritual exclusion from Heptapolis. The teaching echoed the lesson given by Chrysos to Phaedron: fortune obtained by destroying the rules that sustain fortune will inevitably collapse.
Philosophy
The guild presents itself to initiates as a school of disciplined opportunism.
Chrysos is not the patron of mindless greed, but of those who read the board correctly—who know when to risk, when to wait, when to conceal, when to reveal, and when to abandon a profitable venture that threatens the community upon which future prosperity depends.
Training therefore combines codes, ciphers, disguise, navigation, bargaining, and covert observation with the study of law, treaty obligations, port regulation, accounting, and political institutions.
A successful Golden Factor converts knowledge of rules into advantage without triggering the full weight of those rules against the guild or the population upon which it depends.
Within the wider theology of the Reformed Stripping Path, the Guild of Golden Shadows stands as the archetypal shadow cult of Chrysos: a demonstration that espionage, piracy, secrecy, and wealth may be brought into an uneasy but functional accommodation with divine order.
Whether arranging a quiet payoff in an Aurelia alley, passing an anonymous warning to auditors in Vaeringheim, or steering smugglers away from White-Lane humanitarian convoys, guild members describe their work as worship.
The hope of Heptapolis gives this philosophy an eternal dimension. Every calculated risk is understood as an entry in the final ledger. Every averted disaster is a lamp that may one day be lit beyond the night.
Mythology: The Hymn of Chrysos
The Homeric Hymn to Chrysos, written by the Bassaridian playwright Eliyahu al-Bashir, tells the story of Phaedron, a wealthy and ambitious merchant who seeks Chrysos’s favor in order to obtain limitless wealth and power.
Chrysos approaches Phaedron disguised as a beggar. The merchant initially dismisses him, but changes his manner after noticing a golden key hanging from the beggar’s neck.
The disguised god grants Phaedron the Golden Key, warning that every door opened by the key creates an obligation and that the final door must never be forced.
Phaedron uses the key to uncover hidden treasuries, secret correspondence, forgotten contracts, political scandals, and concealed passages. His wealth and influence increase rapidly.
At first, Phaedron uses his discoveries with discipline. He rewards allies, protects trade routes, and avoids humiliating defeated rivals beyond what is necessary. During this period, he dreams repeatedly of seven golden cities shining upon the night side of a distant moon.
As his wealth grows, Phaedron becomes convinced that the key proves he is incapable of failure. He begins opening doors without considering what lies beyond them. He exposes secrets whose concealment had preserved peace, bankrupts trading partners upon whom his own businesses depend, and takes treasures whose guardians had maintained the roads carrying his goods.
At last he discovers a door of black metal surrounded by seven lamps. Believing it to conceal the greatest treasury, Phaedron forces the Golden Key into its lock.
The door opens not onto treasure, but onto Heptapolis and the assembled souls of the faithful departed. Phaedron attempts to enter, declaring that no living person has accumulated more gold than he.
The departed deny him passage. The light of the seven cities reveals that his fortune has been built upon obligations he refused to acknowledge. Every coin appears connected by a golden chain to a person, market, road, household, or institution he has damaged.
Chrysos appears in his true form and tells Phaedron that the Golden Key was never intended to open the gates of Heptapolis during mortal life. Those gates yield only when ambition has ended and the final account has been balanced.
Phaedron is stripped of his fortune and condemned to wander among the consequences of his bargains. Only after rebuilding one market without taking profit for himself does he receive forgiveness.
The hymn teaches that wealth without wisdom leads to ruin, that secrets possess weight, and that eternal life in Heptapolis cannot be purchased by material success.
It is recited during the Night Market Tribute, Panegyris Chrysou (Golden Gathering), and funerals of the Guild of Golden Shadows.
Worship and Festivals in Bassaridia Vaeringheim
Panegyris Chrysou
Panegyris Chrysou, observed on Thalassiel 6 in Aurelia, is the most significant festival dedicated to Chrysos.
The celebration transforms the city into a vast market of trade fairs, fortune-telling booths, auctions, games of calculated risk, masked performances, and gold-themed decorations.
Lavish feasts celebrate Chrysos’s dominion over abundance, while storytellers recount tales of his cleverness, generosity, disguises, and punishments of arrogant merchants.
Worshippers offer coins, jewels, keys, contracts, and sealed ledgers. Some offerings are genuine valuables, while others are skillful counterfeits whose true nature the priests must identify.
At night, seven great lamps are kindled above Aurelia’s Night Market. Each represents one city of Heptapolis. The names of respected guild members who died during the preceding year are recited beneath the lamp corresponding to the eternal city with which they are associated.
The festival ends with the Opening of the Empty Vault. A ceremonial treasury is unlocked before the crowd and revealed to contain no gold—only a mirror and the inscription:
- The final treasure is the account you can defend.
Agavronos
On Atosiel 59, Aurelia observes Agavronos, a festival aligning Chrysos’s themes of prosperity with growth, stewardship, and the natural world.
Participants plant trees and tie ribbons bearing ambitions, business plans, promises, and hopes to their branches. The growth of the tree represents prosperity cultivated over time rather than seized and exhausted immediately.
Offerings from the previous year are reviewed during the festival. Worshippers consider whether their ambitions produced lasting abundance or merely consumed the resources supporting them.
Seven golden ribbons are tied to the oldest ceremonial tree in Aurelia in remembrance of Heptapolis. Fallen leaves from this tree are sometimes placed within guild funeral ledgers.
The Vigil of the Seven Lamps
The Vigil of the Seven Lamps is the principal funerary and memorial observance associated with Heptapolis.
Guild houses extinguish their ordinary lights at sunset and illuminate seven golden or amber lamps. Stories are told of departed members whose wisdom, courage, restraint, or loyalty made them worthy of remembrance.
At midnight, the Hymn of Chrysos is recited. Six lamps are then extinguished. The seventh remains until dawn.
The surviving lamp does not signify certainty that any particular soul has entered Heptapolis. It expresses the community’s hope that the Golden Threshold has opened and that the departed has found a place among the eternal cities.
The Night Market Tribute
The Night Market Tribute is held on the eve of Panegyris Chrysou.
Guild operatives, merchants, pilgrims, spies, pirates, and ordinary residents mingle anonymously beneath masks. Coins, information, favors, and symbolic objects change hands.
Participants are expected to complete at least one exchange in which they accept less immediate profit in order to preserve a relationship, protect a vulnerable person, or prevent wider harm.
This deliberate restraint is called the Heptapolitan Bargain. It demonstrates that the worshipper understands the form of prosperity rewarded in Chrysos’s eternal domain.
Epithets
Chrysos is honored through epithets reflecting his wealth, cunning, secrecy, political influence, and rule over the faithful dead:
- Master of Coin
- Lord of Shadows
- Bearer of Plenty
- Keeper of the Golden Key
- The Masked Benefactor
- Patron of Thieves and Politicians
- Master of the Hidden Ledger
- The Beggar at the Threshold
- Lord of the Seven Cities
- Warden of Heptapolis
- Judge of the Final Account
- He Who Walks in Disguise
- Keeper of the Seventh Lamp
- The Golden Mask Beyond Night
The title Lord of the Seven Cities does not identify Heptapolis as a divine equal. It expresses Chrysos’s sovereignty over the afterlife domain and its inhabitants.
Iconography and Depictions
In art, Chrysos is commonly depicted as an elderly bearded man wearing a winged helmet and holding a spear. The spear represents his ability to identify and strike opportunities, while the winged helmet signifies speed, messages, travel, theft, and the rapid movement of information.
His expression usually bears a knowing smirk and a glint in the eye, suggesting that he possesses information unknown to the viewer.
Chrysos frequently wears or carries the Mask of Anonymity, representing disguise, espionage, political maneuvering, and the hidden identity of the Mask of Chrysos.
The Golden Key remains his most important symbol. It represents access to hidden wealth, secrets, locked routes, forbidden knowledge, and ultimately the Golden Threshold of Heptapolis.
Later iconography often places Chrysos before a dark sky containing seven clusters of golden lights. These represent the seven eternal cities. The lights remain small and distant, emphasizing that they are a promised destination rather than attributes of Chrysos’s body.
In funerary depictions, Chrysos appears disguised as a beggar standing beside a locked gate. One hand holds the Golden Key while the other remains extended toward the approaching soul.
Common symbols associated with Chrysos include:
- the Golden Key, representing opportunity, secrets, and admission to Heptapolis;
- the Mask of Anonymity, representing disguise and hidden influence;
- the Sealed Ledger, representing obligations and the final account;
- the Seven Lamps, representing the eternal cities and faithful departed;
- the Winged Coin, representing mobile wealth and unstable fortune;
- the Broken Chain of Gold, representing freedom from destructive greed;
- the Empty Vault and Mirror, representing self-judgment;
- and the Black Gate of Heptapolis, representing the threshold that cannot be forced.
Heptapolis itself is commonly represented as a golden crescent or dark disc covered in innumerable points of amber light. It is never given a human face or anthropomorphic form in orthodox iconography, reinforcing the doctrine that the moon is a sacred domain rather than a deity.
