BoM/TWS/SB Wiki

Characters: -V-

Vasquez, Maria (senior)
A member of the cheerleading squad and largely considered the sexiest girl in school. However she's also considered something of a dim bulb and cloud cuckoo lander as she wears a constantly vacant expression and seems to often be in her own world, only occasionally coming down to say something that sounds completely nonsensical to almost everyone else. Yet somehow she's also in many advanced classes and does very well in them, something most people believe is in deference to her father who's a well known businessman in town and a member of the school board.

In reality Maria is incredibly intelligent and far from being empty headed she feels like there's too many thoughts that grab her attention leading her down a road that, while making sense to her, leads only to confusion when she blurts something out as nobody else possesses the chain of thought leading to the outburst; she likely has some form of ADHD. She's very self-conscious of it and so tends to keep quiet despite being well aware of the way people think about her. In a way she's grown to believe it herself as she dreams of being a veterinarian or physician but doesn't see herself as being smart enough for it.

Is best friends friends with Chelsea Cooper in a relationship that is, despite what most think, very genuine on both sides. In Maria Chelsea feels like she has someone she can confide in and be honest with without having to worry about judgment while Maria sees Chelsea as a kindred spirit, someone forced into playing up a part of themselves that deep down she may not be all that comfortable with.

Because of her looks, association with Chelsea and in the past being more open with her intelligence guys are often intimidated by her so she's never actually had a boyfriend. In reality Maria is attracted to those she perceives as being intelligent or sincere more than she is looks. She's been friendly with Parker Stott since sophomore year, but her latest crush is Sean Mitchell.

Von Gersdorff, Hieronymus
Hieronymus von Gersdorff (14 February,1530 - c. 1590) was a German physician, surgeon, alchemist, and astrologer. He was for a time court physician to Rudolf II of Austria, and his name is linked to John Dee and Edward Kelley through their alchemical and spiritual experiments. He was in addition a member of the Stellae Errantes, a pan-European secret society whose adepts possessed astrologically-linked prodigies and who organized themselves in the defense of all "Children of Adam" from various occult horrors. At the time of his disappearance, he was suspected by his fellow adepts of having gone "retrograde," meaning that he had fallen away from the society's ideals and become the kind of danger which their society had been founded to combat.

[Born: 14 February, 1530, Lüben, Silesia, Germany. Disappeared: c. 1590 (aged 60). Alma mater: University of Wittenberg. Known for: Court physician to Rudolf II; member of the Stellae Errantes; author of the {Summa Persona. Ousiarchs: Catilindria, Kenandandra.]

Biography
Early life.
Von Gersdorff was born in Lüben, Silesia, to Johann von Gersdorff, a member of the minor nobility, and his wife, Frieda. He was in addition a distant relation of Hans von Gersdorff, a noted surgeon and the author of the "Feldtbüch der Wunartzney" (Fieldbook of Surgery). Von Gersdorff was educated from an early age, and according to a character sketch composed by one of his colleagues, he was briefly apprenticed to the organist at the local church on account of his mechanical skills.

After graduating from the University of Wittenberg in 1550, von Gersdorff traveled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, studying with a variety of physicians and surgeons. His medical fame became such that, after a series of public lectures in Cracow, he was invited to attend the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and became attached to the Imperial court. By 1571 he was the Emperor's court physician.

Alchemy
Unlike most of his Stellae colleagues, von Gersdorff did not dissemble his interest in alchemy, astrology, or related occult sciences, and his acknowledged interest in these matters was probably a further recommendation to the Emperor Rudolf, though court testimonials indicate that in the Imperial presence he confined his practice of alchemy to lectures on theory. Nevertheless, von Gersdorff openly possessed a workroom wherein he practiced research and experiments.

It was during his time with the court that he became acquainted with John Dee and Edward Kelley during their travels in Central Europe. Von Gersdorff's influence upon Dee was strong enough that he (directly or accidentally) contributed to Dee metaphysics by giving him the "Dee glyph"; it is unknown whether von Gersdorff also contributed anything to Dee's Enochian alphabet. It is unlikely that von Gersdorff contributed to Dee's practice of scrying, and it seems more likely that the influence ran in the opposite direction, for in 1584, in a letter to his colleague Sunduk Zilli (Eldibria-Malacandra) that he asked to be forwarded to the Court of Heavenly Sages, von Gersdorff claimed that it was through scrying that he had come to discern the impending approach of the "Eater of the Stars."

Though he shared their interests and like them relied on aristocratic patronage, von Gersdorff notably differed from Dee and Kelley in that he disdained the attention of the nobility, and confined himself to the Imperial court. But despite his presence there, the Emperor's own researches seem not to have advanced beyond any negligible degree, and it has been suggested that von Gersdorff deliberately used his influence to limit the Emperor's exposure both to charlatanry and to any real knowledge of the alchemical and astrological sciences, while still maintaining his own plausible claims to expertise. His disappearance in 1590 caused considerable consternation at court, and may have indirectly contributed to the arrest of Kelley in 1591 as a shaken Emperor became more cautious and skeptical of alchemy and its adherents.

Stellae Errantes.
Von Gersdorff was identified as a Stellae in 1535 by Jozef Hospod (Malacandra-Glundandra], the then-head of the Stellae Errantes. Hospod, who was serving as a cavalry officer in the Polish army, was unable to steal or secrete him away (as was and is often the Stellae custom) on account of the prominence of the von Gersdorff family, but he arranged for another Stellae, Estienne Barbier [Arbol-Kenandandra], to establish himself in Lüben as a mentor and influence on the young von Gersdorff. Von Gersdorff's association with the Stellae was also unusual in that he was not inducted into its mysteries until he was thirteen years old, a fact which (it was suggested by some, including von Gersdorff himself) contributed to his often turbulent relations with his colleagues. However, von Gersdorff seems to have quickly flowered under Barbier's training, and at sixteen he entered the University of Wittenberg, both to receive an education for its own sake and as a cover for further training in the Stellae arts.

Von Gersdorff was held in exceptional esteem by his colleagues, both for his innovative insights and his practical skill at realizing them. (Nikola Tesla remarked in a study of Von Gersdorff's work that he had never seen such intricate sigils realized with such elegance.) He was particularly recognized for his creation of what has come to be known as the "Dee glyph," a multi-variable sigilistic element that could simplify otherwise complicated expressions by collapsing sigilistic commands common to multiple subordinate imperatives into one expression capable of application in multiple contexts within the completed sigil. It is the opinion of many researchers that most of von Gersdorff's subsequent creations, and almost all modern sigilistic work, could not have been possible to realize within any practical time or space without use of the glyph.

In parallel with his public profile as a physician and surgeon, von Gersdorff was mostly known among his colleagues for his studies in the metaphysical structures of living beings, and particularly in the relationships between imago, essentia, anima, and substantia. It was von Gersdorff, for instance, who finally refuted various long-standing theories that attempted to explain mentalia as a property solely of either imago or anima, and demonstrated that it in fact participates in both. He also performed the first successful separation of imago from substantia and its alteration in an isolated receptacle before reuniting the modified originals. (Previously, it had only been possible to alter imago—as, for instance, in transmuting lead into gold—within an instantiated object, and even then only within a laboriously realized alchemical apparatus.) Though the Stellae officially frowned on any researches that smacked of necromancy, von Gersdorff was also the first to provide both a theoretical and practical grounding for the hypothesis that ghostly manifestations might be the result of multiple and unrelated kinds of distortions at the metaphysical level rathe than reflecting a single phenomenon.

Von Gersdorff's relationships with the other members of his order were often fraught, and had been from the earliest days of his career. Federigo Crivelli [Arbol-Sulva], in a character sketch of his colleague, relates that von Gersdorff often expressed resentment at his late induction into the Stellae, saying that it had robbed him of many fruitful years of study and accomplishment. Von Gersdorff was also sometimes criticized by his peers for his willingness to bend or even violate long-established ethical norms in pursuit of his researches. It was also feared that he had become too brazen in advertising his skills to non-initiates. Most controversially, in 1584 he exhibited an extraordinarily exact and life-like sculpture of Philip Lang, one of the the Emperor's valets. Though von Gersdorff was publicly reticent about the technique he used to execute the sculpture, to his Stellae colleagues he confessed that it was a reproduction of Lang's imago executed in a neutral, inanimate substrate. His colleagues were further disquieted when they learned that von Gersdorff had, in a private audience with the Emperor, claimed that he was investigating methods by which sculptures like that of Lang might be imbued with animation. It was later suspected, but never proved, that von Gersdorff eventually succeeded in creating an animated counterfeit of Lang or some other member of the Imperial court and substituted it for the original. An investigation after his death also turned up evidence of at least one death, of a court page, that could be laid to occult means.

By 1585 his relations with the other members of his order had deteriorated badly. The Stellae Errantes had been falling into eclipse through most of the sixteenth century, as most adepts of the ousiarchs during that century were being found in the Far East and India; with the death of Barbier in 1578, the order comprised only six members, and after the death of Hospod the following year, the Glundandran-based kingship passed into the hands of the Court of Heavenly Sages. Von Gersdorff, as the senior member of the Stellae Errantes, claimed the leadership position in his own depopulated order. But Sunduk Zilli, who operated in the Balkans as an Ottoman merchant, transferred his allegiance to the Sages; and Crivelli, who traveled Europe in the guise of a sometime-actor and sometime barber, reputedly ignored him. The other two members of the order at his time, Dagmar and Ellinor Holm (Viritrilbia-Perelandra; Viritrilbia-Sulva) were children living under Crivelli's guardianship.

Disappearance
In 1590, Sunduk journeyed to Prague with a summons for von Gersdorff to present himself in the Persian city of Isfahan for examination by a deputation of the Sages, but he had disappeared by then. A fire, meanwhile, had swept through his apartments, destroying most of his library and instruments. Of his master work, the Summa Persona., only rumors remained.

Reputation and Significance
Von Gersdorff, even unto his final correspondence, claimed that he had always respected and followed the traditions and practices of the Stellae Errantes; and yet he at times bluntly and even vituperatively criticized the society and his colleagues for timidity and a conservatism that he himself decried as "retrograde": in a cryptic letter to Sunduk Zilli he went so far as to warn his colleague that the Stellae's reluctance to extend their knowledge more deeply would leave them vulnerable to the depredations of the "Eater of the Stars." (The nature and identity of this threat he did not elaborate on.) Like most Catilindrians he was known for possessing a rancorous personality, which may have led his colleagues to take an excessively dark view of his practices and researches. He was particularly criticized for his willingness to experiment upon ignorant test subjects. This occasioned a scornful letter from von Gersdorff to Crivelli in 1580, in which he noted that prohibitions on necromancy prevented him from experimenting upon corpses, and prohibitions on revealing Stellae secrets prevented him from getting informed consent from living test subjects, so that if he were also prohibited from experimenting upon the ignorant but willing he would be unable to continue his researches at all. He ended by pleading that he practiced such experiments only where it seemed possible to exercise a philanthropic purpose, and it was in such terms that he justified the cure he practiced upon a blind Bohemian mendicant. In that circumstance, his colleagues reluctantly acceded, but in 1587 Crivelli pointedly declined a request from von Gersdorff that he transfer guardianship of the Holm sisters to himself, stating that he did not trust von Gersdorff with their well-being, and particularly citing a 1586 claim by von Gersdorff that he had discovered a method by which essentia could be separated from the other metaphysical elements of sapient beings, and all but accused his colleague of wanting to experiment upon the sisters.

Far from being a relief to the Stellae, von Gersdorff's disappearance in 1590 further alarmed them. Though he had always claimed to have kept them completely informed as to the extent of his researches, his colleagues were perhaps justified in their skepticism of his candor, and his contemporaries and those that came after were convinced that he had used some secret technique to escape by hiding himself, perhaps (as his researches suggested was plausible) under a stolen and feigned persona. Nor could they be sure that he had not attained a longevity beyond the usual. Von Gersdorff's reputation was such that his notoriety did not fade across time, and from the end of the 17th century onward he was regarded by the Stellae as the greatest and most dangerous renegade of their order.

Despite his scandalous reputation, von Gersdorff and his craft were and are held in high esteem by the Stellae, to the point that he is regarded as something of a savant even amongst the Stellae. Though subsequent failures to reproduce the breakthroughs he claimed to have achieved, or to decipher and complete the sketches he left behind for the Summa Persona., have led some to doubt he achieved as much as he boasted, the general opinion is that he did succeed at most of his goals, and this is taken as evidence for the depth and profundity of his skill and knowledge. Nonetheless, von Gersdorff's career is regarded widely as a cautionary lesson in hubris and the dangers of transgressing certain lines, and the areas of his deepest studies have mostly been left fallow.

The Summa Persona.
Von Gersdorff's most famous treatise, the Summa Persona., has for centuries been lost, and at some points in time regarded even by the Stellae as merely a legend. Reputedly a summation of all its author's learning related to the metaphysical constituents of living bodies (and specifically those of sapient beings), rumors concerning its contents made it possibly the most highly sought after "lost text" in the history of the occult. Extrapolations from von Gersdorff's known researches, and inferences made from his known experiments, suggested that he had not only discovered methods for safely disassembling and reconstituting living beings, but had specifically constructed methods for creating and controlling artificial beings, and for altering to any degree possible the bodies and minds of real persons, even to the point of duplicating them either in the form of artificial creatures or in the persons of others.

It is not known when von Gersdorff began to compose the Summa Persona., or if he ever finished it. In correspondence with Crivelli in 1586 he mentioned that he had begun work on a text intended as a summation of all that he had learned concerning the metaphysical constituents of sapient beings, but how far he had gotten by that point, and when he had begun its composition, cannot be definitively ascertained. But a manuscript he sent to Barbier in 1577 sketches (in incomplete detail) a method by which he claimed to have detached the imago of blind man from his substantia, altering it so as to cure his disability, then reassembling him; and his four manuscripts of 1569-71 (De Essentia; De Imago; De Mentalia; and De Anima) clearly show that he was anticipating the means by which he might effect the practical separation of those metaphysical elements whose theoretical distinctions he described in those treatises.

The closest the Summa Persona came to recovery was in 1913, when a manuscript purporting to be the Summa was purchased at auction by Dr. Ravindra Goswami (Arbol-Eldibria) of the Stellae. The handwriting in the black-leather-bound manuscript was confirmed to be von Gersdorff's; however, despite the title page identifying it as the Summa Persona., a closer examination showed that the sigil-work in the manuscript was rudimentary—sketches for a final realization rather than the realization itself. The conclusion that the item was a notebook of draft work rather than a final text was further supported by another sketched design it contained, for a sigil that would have "locked" the contents of the Summa in a way that would prevent their being copied into another medium, save by a reader who had so mastered its contents that he could reproduce them from his own knowledge rather than by copying the contents of the Summa itself. This sigil too was incomplete, so much so that it proved impossible even after close study to complete in a way that would execute as intended. Curiously, though sigil designs for such "locks" have been known since antiquity, von Gersdorff's design was markedly different, and, according to those who have studied it, is also of a markedly inferior design, leading to speculation that it was intended to have a function quite different from the one sketched in its description.