Zyto, the court sorceror of King Wenceslas of Bohemia (not "good King Wenceslas", but a rather nastier monarch), cemented his reputation as a mysterious wonder-worker, so solidly in the imagination of the Bohemian aristocracy, that he was, as contemporary accounts put it, 'carried off by the devil' in a blaze of white light. This ascension may have been the impetus for the rapid growth of magic; it certainly helped it along. The emphasis upon individual power of this archetype also meant that individual magicians were much more common than organised cabals, although they often corresponded, occasionally co-operated, and frequently quarrelled. Zyto, while an adept magician, was not an expert self-publicist like Faust, who was, in fact, only attempting a bid at becoming Godwalker, but managed to leave a reputation behind that substantially exceeded his gifts. He failed his bid, and died a lonely, poor, unrecorded death. At that point, however, other magi were just beginning to catch onto the fact that there was somebody up there who liked them, and, with Faust's disappearance and all the stories about him going round, most people in the know simply assumed it was him who'd managed to ascend. Numerous other schools of magick were created around this time, and some of them contained the seeds of today's postmodern practitioners. Helotomancy, where adepts submitted themselves to a set of arbitrary and iron-set rules in order to gain the power to enslave others, was popular throughout the Americas, as was Sucromancy, which drew on the massive popularity of sugar, sweets, and spices to create a form of addiction-based magick; drawing upon ghosts' traditional fondness for sweets and treats, it was particularly good at summoning and bargaining with demons. Sucromancy and Helotomancy, both popular among slave-traders, were eventually imitated by the slaves and their descendants and incorporated with African magickal traditions to create the various forms of voudoun. The Triangle, a Liverpool based cabal of sucromancers and helotomancers, used its magicks to enforce the control of the Liverpool cartels over the sugar and slave trades, and to influence politicians against the abolitionists, until a sudden wave of popular anti-slavery feeling completely destroyed their efforts. The Underground began to really take off in America around this time, too. There had been magickal cabals there as far back as the 1740s, but the explosion of new ideas, religions, and pseudo-sciences throughout America, from numerology through to intimate massage through to Dr. Kellogg's health regime (which inspired a fitness-obsessed adept called Bran the Blessed to create a short-lived school, an Epideromantic forerunner, that combined intense purging with supernatural bodily ability), gave a peculiar boost to the Underground, which became centred in two important American cities, New York and San Francisco. The Mormons, in particular, set aside from mainstream American society until their abolition of polygamy and with strong elements of occultism and Freemasonry already incorporated into their religious practices, produced a surprising amount of adepts, including the group known as Stones of the Temple, which made several pioneering excursions into South America for both missionary and magickal purposes.
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