The Masters¶

The Masters are the benevolent, ascended beings at the center of Andrew Howard's faith, who in his account have guided humanity since the Stone Age and whose number includes Jesus Christ.


Type	Lore (belief; possibly beings)
Aliases	Ascended masters; the "masters"; the next master
Followers	Andrew Howard, his mother, the Aetherius Society, the circle around Mr. King
First appearance	Radford Horror 01 (the "next master" speech); Radford Horror 04 (the term "masters")

Overview¶

The Masters are known only through Andrew's belief. As he explains it in Radford Horror 04, they are extraterrestrials who have ascended to a higher plane, "come back and communicate to us to try and help us also become masters in the future and join the glorious space civilization that they live in". There have been masters on Earth for the whole of human existence, he says, guiding development and helping humanity out of the Stone Age, and "Jesus Christ himself was one of the masters". The Biz, a lapsed Catholic, objects that this is blasphemy (Radford Horror 04). In Walkers 01 Andrew lays out the wider doctrine for President Bush: cosmic forces push humanity toward a violent future, and a "spiritual battery" of good energy holds them off (Walkers 01).

No episode confirms that the Masters exist. See also Andrew's Condition and the paranatural.

The next master¶

In a flashback in Radford Horror 01, Mr. King, who rarely speaks to Andrew one-on-one, tells him that he serves a higher purpose: "The next master is coming. Maybe next year. Maybe in three or four. But not ten." Whether it is "a triumph or a tragedy" depends on how well his organization opens a path "in the minds of the secular people to accept his truth and his laws", and Andrew's purpose is to help it "stand tall and fight back against the forces of silence that would cover up the influences of the cosmic to protect the petty mundane". King ends: "Jesus and the Buddha were not wholly of this world, and neither are you. Remember that." (Radford Horror 01). See Mr. King. The scene does not use the word "Masters", and the episodes never say whether King's organization is the same body as Andrew's church. Nor do they identify the coming master or say what the "forces of silence" are.

History¶

The Radford Horror¶

In Radford Horror 04, standing over the remains of the NSA man, Andrew looks to the sky for a UFO and then explains the Masters to the team (Radford Horror 04). In Radford Horror 07, when a psychic probe grabs at him in the church, Andrew says "It's clearly one of the things that the Masters have warned us about", and later, bleeding: "I got prayers, I got the Masters. We got things for this." During the fight he hears a voice in his head cry "Save me, child! You know the ones who made me—" (Radford Horror 07).

In Radford Horror 08 Andrew shouts "Did you know Jesus is one of the Masters?" as a distraction before firing his church mace. Afterward, in the hospital, he gives a speech to the team that "the Masters are one small part of this whole thing", that "they're just trying to guide us to something else", and that there are other things in the universe, some of them bad. The speech fails (Manipulate Someone, 5) and is followed by a long silence (Radford Horror 08).

The Things in Appalachia and later arcs¶

In Appalachia 01 Andrew tells his doctor that he thought "the masters were taking sympathy" when his ritual healing worked (Appalachia 01). In Roulet Estate 02 Rita says Andrew knows a couple of Masters but not "who is or isn't a Master these days" (Roulet Estate 02). See Aetherius Society for the church in the Walkers, Roulet and Radford Horrors arcs.

What remains unknown¶

Whether the Masters are real, and whether the creature's "makers" in Radford Horror 07 have anything to do with them.
Who "the next master" is and when he arrives.
Whether Mr. King's organization and Andrew's church are the same body.