The Totem Coin is a divination object that materialized out of nothing after the descent beneath the Malvinas in 1966. Placed on the forehead, it works as a third eye; it can also bend another’s will.
| Type | Object (divination) |
| Era | 1966–1967 |
| Location | Buenos Aires |
| Spanish entry | La moneda-tótem |
Description
The coin was not minted: it appeared from the other side of dream. Both sides bear the same profile, with no reverse, so it reads as false at a glance.
Only Antonio Portet, the broken sailor also called Alex, can attune it, as he attunes the yellow egg to the dream sphere: he is the only one in the group in contact with what sleeps beneath reality.
Properties
- Third eye: on the forehead it shows past and future and reads what hides behind the surface of the real, seeing backward and forward at once, as in time curved on itself.
- Bending wills: it can enter, persuade and open what a person keeps closed.
- Limited charge: it burns a little each day of use. It was reckoned to last about fifteen days, going out in early March of the following year; spent, it is again a false one-faced coin.
Uses
- Pointed south of Buenos Aires, it marked the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Barracas: beneath the nave lie an arsenal, a lodge, and the name from the group’s visions, Shobot, tied to what is being prepared there.
- Looking back, it brought up images of the sunken ship, bound up with events on land.
- One of the visitors used it on Armando Cabo, the old UOM unionist, touching the memory of his dead wife — mother of Dardo, killed in the 1955 bombing of the Plaza de Mayo, remembered dressed in red. He broke down in grief and reached for his revolver, and had to be calmed before blood was shed.
Relationships
The coin shares its dream substrate with the dream-crystallizer of the Blue Stone, but is a distinct object: it spies on worlds rather than enclosing them. Behind what it shows stands the Esoteric Order of Dagon, preparing the coming of Cthulhu from the water and from arsenals on land.