Awakening

Awakening
Coined by	unknown
Wherecoined	unknown
Status	Current
Date coined	unknown; in print in the elven community by Summer 1986; in community use by April 1996
Alternative forms	Awakened
Part of Speech	* Noun: "My awakening happened when..." * Verb: "I'm awakening to memories of another life..."
Community used by	otherkin, vampires, therians
Antonyms	Going back to sleep

Awakening is a term used by the otherkin, therian, and vampire communities to describe the process of becoming aware of the fact that they are in some way other than human. Due both to the association with roleplaying games, and the metaphysical tone of the word, some therians and otherkin prefer not to use the term, or simply dislike it but use it anyway.

Etymology

Two derivations are documented. The word was in print in the elven community in 1986, seven years before Mage: The Ascension gave it a prominent gaming sense; but the contemporaneous evidence for how it reached the communities that use it today points to the game, and nothing yet connects the earlier elven usage to them.

The gaming derivation

Mage: The Ascension was published by White Wolf in 1993, and is the source most often credited for the word's spread in the therian and vampire communities. No source documents the borrowing directly, but the surrounding evidence is contemporaneous and independent of the communities' own later histories.

The clearest single piece is a passing remark. Writing on the newsgroup alt.horror.werewolves on March 5, 1997, Debi Girard described a formative experience as occurring "midway through my seventh grade year -to coin a White Wolf term you might say an 'awakening'". The phrasing marks the word as borrowed from outside at the moment of borrowing, which is the point at which such a loan is normally visible at all. It is not the earliest use. The newsgroup's "werecard" self-description forms carry the word earlier: on April 18, 1996, Spyder Everhunger — later posting as Spyder Witiko — recounted that during a night of severe pain he "pleaded with the Goddess", asking "that I be Awakened so that my spirit could give me the instinct and drive to make it through the next few weeks." White Wolf appears twice elsewhere in the same document: his hobbies include "LARPing with White Wolf groups", and his favourite "Were Art" is an illustrator's work for White Wolf's Rage card game. He used the word again, still capitalised and unglossed, on August 1, 1996.

The co-occurrence is suggestive rather than conclusive. It places a self-described White Wolf player using the term in something close to its community sense inside a single document, at the earliest date so far attested, in the fields of a standardised form that gave him no occasion to be arguing about where the word came from. Against that, the passage is religious in framing — he "pleaded with the Goddess" as the moon "arced into sight through a window" — and a lunar Goddess is ordinary neopagan vocabulary rather than anything specific to a game. No proper noun from Werewolf: The Apocalypse appears anywhere in the werecard, and its author describes his wendigo self as "a facet of my own mind, spirit, and soul", explicitly not a spirit guide. The likeliest reading is that the two derivations discussed here are less rivals than one path: an occult vocabulary that a game had recently sharpened, in the hands of someone fluent in both.

Within White Wolf's World of Darkness setting, "the Awakening" is specific to Mage. Its lexicon defines Awakening, The as "the moment in which one realizes, mind, body, heart and soul, the reality of magic and one's own destiny", and Awakened, The as "Mages; also applied to other supernatural creatures – werecreatures, ghosts, changelings, mummies and vampires." The other game lines use their own terms for the equivalent moment — the Embrace in Vampire: The Masquerade, the First Change in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and the Chrysalis in Changeling: The Dreaming — and the Changeling lexicon has no entry for "Awakening" at all.

Two things follow. The categories to which Mage extends the term — werecreatures, changelings, and vampires — correspond to the therian, otherkin, and real vampire communities respectively, so a reader would not have needed to reach past their own subject matter to find the word already applied to it. And of the four terms, only Mage's describes an internal realisation rather than a physical or externally caused transformation, which is what all three communities in fact describe.

White Wolf material was demonstrably present in these communities during the relevant period. The third revision of the alt.vampyres FAQ, dated July 1995, asserted that "most, if not all" of that newsgroup's participants had played Vampire: The Masquerade. Rich Dansky, who worked on Changeling: The Dreaming, encountered otherkin through the darkfae-l mailing list in the mid-1990s — though he and other authors have said the game was not inspired by them.

Earlier use in an adjacent tradition

The word was in use in the elven community before Mage existed. In the Summer 1986 issue of the Neo-Pagan periodical Circle Network News, the Silver Elves — Zardoa Silverstar and Silver Flame — described the people they hoped would join their inner circle as "the elfin who are committed to the long haul, who share the vision we do of inspiring and awakening the elf in all who are open and ready". The subject is the elf latent in a person, rather than enlightenment in the general religious sense. The group bonding ritual printed with the article uses the verb throughout, including "Awaken with creative energy, (name), for within you lives the spirit of elfland... Awaken now", "awakening justice in Faerie", "Healers awaken!", and, at its close, "Awaken, (name), and welcome home!"

The usage is not quite the communities'. The 1986 prose and the ritual both use the verb transitively or in the imperative — awakening the elf in someone, or calling on someone to awaken — where the communities' characteristic form is a noun for a personal event, "my Awakening". The underlying concept is recognisably the same; the nominal form is not attested in the article.

The Silver Elves have since claimed the term as their own, dating their use of it to their mid-1970s contact with the Elf Queen's Daughters. The claim is retrospective by more than forty years, comes from an interested party, and is inconsistent with itself, dating the start of the practice variously to the mid-1970s and to "the early 1980's".

Whether any of this reached the communities that later adopted the word is a separate question, and the available evidence is against it. The Silver Elves predate the otherkin community by roughly two decades but joined it only after it was established, and longstanding participants describe their influence on it as slight: their ideas "were not necessarily embraced when they were even heard of at all", many regarded them as "fringe or too fluffy", and their influence on otherkin online is "pretty dilute in the specifics". The community's own early recollection is similar, describing them as regarded on the darkfae-l mailing list as fluffy and difficult to take seriously.

Assessment

A third account is recorded within the community itself. Version 4.0.1 of the Crisses' Otherkin FAQ, dated February 8, 2001, glosses the word without any reference to gaming: "'Awakening' is a term used in some spiritual practices to denote coming to a new frame of reference, or state of mind." The word is long established in Buddhist, Theosophical, Jungian and Western esoteric writing, and these communities had substantial neopagan overlap, so a shared background usage cannot be excluded.

That gloss is late, however, and the FAQ's own earlier versions do not support it. The document began as the "Otherkin & Awakening FAQ", compiled from answers volunteered on two mailing lists, and it devoted a numbered section to Awakening from the start. Version 3.0 Beta — dated September 27, 1999 and last revised January 13, 2000 — answers "What is an Awakening?" purely descriptively, as "the process of becoming aware of your non-human origins", and offers no account of where the word came from; neither do the sub-questions added around it in that revision. The derivation appears for the first time in the version 4 rewrite of early 2001. It is therefore not a contemporaneous report of where the community got the word but a later explanation, offered five years after the earliest attestations by editors who had twice previously described the same term without one.

The 1986 article establishes that the word was in use in an adjacent tradition before Mage was published. It does not establish that the communities took it from there, and the balance of evidence is that they did not: the earliest community attestations are on alt.horror.werewolves rather than in elven venues, one of them names White Wolf outright, and the elven group with the prior claim is reported to have had little currency in the relevant spaces. The likeliest account is parallel usage — a word long established in occult writing, in independent use in the elven print tradition, and separately sharpened and popularised by a game — with the communities of the 1990s taking it from whichever source was nearer to hand.

Description

Awakening often takes place during the teen years, though it can occur earlier or later, and may involve experiences such as an awareness of one's astral form being nonhuman, the development of a need to feed on blood or energy, the development of metaphysical gifts such as empathy, or even the recovery of memories from nonhuman past lives.

Some groups, such as the Lostkin Project use the term awakening more narrowly, to refer to "the process of reclaiming memories of other lives, and/or powers generally attributed to the Fae."