Editing Degenesis (section)

===Anubians===
The Anubians come across to everyone, including the lower half of their own ranks, as mystical and supernatural, their abilities founded in their bizarre religion. They believe in the Ka, the wave of life that ebbs and flows in all living things, a gift and a curse given by Anubis himself.

They poison their initiates with rotten meat and toxins, then send them to wander the catacombs of the Anubians until they see visions of Anubis himself. These initiates are brought back from the brink of death, embalmed with oils and bandages that draw out the water. After four days, the initiate returns to life, with seven white circles painted on his body.

As the new Anubian comes closer to Anubis, he will be invited to drink from canopic jars by the cult's highest ranks. The poisons contained within will kill him and grant him new visions once again, and when he awakens, the outermost circle painted on his skin will be gone. The number of missing circles represents the number of aspects of his own wave that the Anubian has overcome, and his rank in the cult.

This mastery over life and death is something that the Anubians can offer to others as well. They can seal people that are close to death in cocoons of dog skin that they fill with foul substances and after seven days, that person will claw free from the cocoon with their wave renewed, all skin and bone but living, with their wounds healed. They eat the Duat fruit, the fruit of the poisonous, alien Psychovore jungles of Africa and fall into comas, only to awake days later. Then they drain their own blood and mix it with earth and herbs to form strange medicines that they use to tend to others. Some among their ranks are even attuned to the noosphere of the Psychonauts and are able to detect the webs of Chakra that they weave, and sever them with their sickles.

With all of their mysticism and strange abilities, Anubians have cemented themselves as the spiritual heart of African culture.

Except the deeper an Anubian delves into the secrets of their cult, the more they shed this mysticism as they realize the true meanings behind the words they utter and the acts that they perform.

Oils that were once sacred tinctures blessed by Anubis become little more than catalysts. Every time the Anubian comes closer to death after ingesting something new and strange isn't a spiritual journey, it's just the bioreactor that their body has been turned into catalyzing the substances within it. The disappearing of the circles on their flesh when they drink from the canopic jars and ascend the ranks is not a spiritual journey, it is a chemical reaction. And what do all of these jars contain, what are these mysterious substances that the Anubians imbibe? Bygone technology created by a cabal of scientists that took a stand against the Recombination Group, known as the Anubis Syndicate, who sought mastery over life and death. The Anubians simply continue their work.

They still use words like 'Ka' and 'wave.' They still cast the bones, they still perform the silly displays of mysticism and fulfill their religious obligations for the African community. But the truth is that behind all of the dog skin cocoons and canopic jars, the Anubians are a cult of empirical scientists that have transformed their bodies into laboratories, that have become something other than human through endless experimentation.

So Anubians are two things. To their lower ranks and to uneducated outsiders, they are strange shaman to be respected and feared, with bizarre rituals that grant them some limited control over life and death. To those with the right knowledge and to their inner circle, the Anubians are devout scientists that have turned themselves into walking bioreactors, flipping-flopping between life and death whenever it's convenient, possessing knowledge and abilities that are quite possibly the key (or at least a part of the key) to defeating the Primer.