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I did not kill your children, Mandus. You sacrificed them on the temple steps knowing what the coming century would do to them... You wanted to save them from the horror to come.

Mandus and the Engineer having a brief conversation, before approaching the core of the Temple.

The Temple of the Stone Moon is mentioned location in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. It was the ancient Aztec temple visited by Oswald Mandus on his trip to Mexico, and a version of it is possibly glimpsed by Mandus before his sacrifice to shut down the Machine.

Information[]

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History[]

The Temple of the Stone Moon was dated back to the Aztec Empire, and it seems to have been preserved in the jungles of Mexico at least until Oswald Mandus visited it on a desperate expedition to save his family fortunes.[1] As part of their religion, the Aztecs practiced annual human sacrifice, allegedly to stave off the end of the world.[2]

Mandus's expedition[]

In the late 1890s, Oswald Mandus intended to expand and modernise his factories in London with new machinery.[3] His goal was to make his product-lines more efficient and to improve its safety for his workers.[citation needed] However, he invested too greatly in the machines, with no immediate returns; by late 1898, the bank had refused him new credit, condemning him for "squandering" the family fortune.[4] Mandus faced financial ruin and feared it was only a matter of time before the bailiffs would repossess his home for the bank.[5]

Desperate, he began to look through his "great uncle's" paperwork and made startling revelations of Vitae from Castle Brennenburg and the mystical Orbs.[6][7] Not understanding their function or origin fully, Mandus saw these as business opportunities, miraculous power sources that would quicken the development of his business and save him from bankruptcy.[1][8][9]

In early 1899, Mandus left for Mexico and brought along his children, the twin boys Edwin and Enoch Mandus.[9] From his great uncle's notes, he had learned the whereabouts of an Aztec temple, the Temple of the Stone Moon, that housed an Orb, though the native people he met were confused and baffled as to how he came upon such knowledge.[8] In February 1899, Mandus arrived at the temple and a while later recovered the Orb by the help of his children, who referred to the Orb as a "stone egg."[9][10][11][12]

The Orb, containing impossible knowledge, reveal the future to Mandus.[13] He saw what doom his beloved children would face and he would be powerless to stop it. They would die sixteen years into the future, at the Battle of the Somme during the First World War.[citation needed] Driven insane by this vision, Mandus decides to spare his children this horrid future by sacrificing them on the temple steps.[14][15] Mourning and cursing the world, he took the boy's skulls back to Britain, returning to London by mid-March, as a fever, contracted while there in Mexico, overtook him.[12][13][15][16][17][18][19] Returning to his work with feverish intensity, Mandus was haunted by his visions and his memories from the Temple of the Stone Moon, losing himself in laudanum and drink, even imagining the temple looming above the London city skyline.[20][21][22]

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs[]

At the end of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Mandus climbs the stairs to a large temple structure. It bears similarities to real-life ruins of El Castillo at Chichen Itza but made of tubes, wires, and machinery instead of stone. The temple was most likely modeled on the Aztec Temple of the Stone Moon, which Mandus encountered in Mexico and reproduced in the construction of his Machine.

Speculation[]

It is unknown if Mandus actually built and maintained the area only to end up there at the end of the game, and it is highly possible that the level was a mere hallucination. These are a couple of reasons why:

  • Before this point, Mandus's psyche has already begun to deteriorate because of his illness, causing hallucinations in the latter part of the game to increase in frequency and intensity. Attic walls with the nursery behind showing the Manpigs within, or children's toys along the catwalk, even the church windows near the Tripery. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to believe the last segment is one as well.
  • The numerous instances Mandus sees the twins along the conveyor belt, along with their supposed bodies at the end, would not make sense in context (which were decomposed by now, as mentioned their rib cages were still in Mexico and their skulls in London).
  • It would not make sense to have an entire temple below London, nor would it have been feasible to make. Mandus didn't have the time, money, material, or manpower to empty all the room beneath London for this structure to even be built. It is more likely a metaphor for the Machine itself: a mechanized Aztec Temple, performing automated sacrifices to keep itself going strong.
  • Perhaps brought on by electrifying the heart in the previous area, this could be seen as Mandus confronting himself and coming to terms with who he is and what he has done in his final moments. As the heart suspended by wires in the South Tower is presumably Mandus's. The twins' hearts would have decomposed by now (they were not brought back after Mexico, and there is only one there). So, it would not make sense for Mandus to lose his heart a second time. Perhaps it is a symbolic end, for the machine to pull out his heart visually as his real heart is electrified, to show that the Machine is the cause of Mandus' downfall.

References[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 Cut Document: November 29th 1898 (AMP) – "My mind is made up. Damn the creditors. I shall leave my work unfinished and I shall take to the Americas, and I will return with my soul richer and my pockets bulging."
  2. Loading Screen: "The Aztecs believed they could..." (AMP)
  3. Loading Screen: "He obsessively scans..." (AMP)
  4. November 7th 1898 (AMP) – "The bank is refusing credit, the ignorant swine.... They say I have squandered my fortune, that my investment in these latest machines has ruined the family name... But, if the bank has its way, it will all come to nothing."
  5. November 7th 1898 (AMP)– "But, if the bank has its way, it will all come to nothing. If they come for the house I swear I will kill them, I will kill them all."
  6. Cut Document: November 29th 1898 (AMP) – "Of the few books to survive after those degenerate peasants fired my Great Uncle's castle were his travel diaries. He talks of archaeological digs in Siam, Arabia, which yielded treasures of quite extraordinary worth. And, most interestingly, he hints at those yet to be found, in the Americas where civilisations were consumed by the jungles... "Find the Temple of the Stone Moon", he writes..."
  7. April 30th 1899 (AMP)
  8. 8.0 8.1 Cut Document: November 29th 1898 (AMP) – "'Find the Temple of the Stone Moon', he writes, 'and the world will never more be hungry, and neither shall you.'"
  9. 9.0 9.1 9.2 February 14th 1899 (AMP) – "I have told the children, truly, this will be an extraordinary adventure. If those old stones hold the financial benefits I predict, it will be merely the first of many."
  10. Flashback: "Taking The Stone Egg Home" (AMP) – Child: "This way, Papa, come and see! Will it hatch? Can we take it home?"
  11. Flashback: "A Child's Innocence" (AMP) – Child: "Listen, Papa - hold the egg to your ear, you can hear the sea!"
  12. 12.0 12.1 Flashback: "Farewell" (AMP) – Mandus: "Cradling a stone egg in my jacket, I kissed my children farewell and I crawled my way home."
  13. 13.0 13.1 March 15th 1899 (AMP)
  14. Flashback: "Jaguar-faced Man" (AMP)
  15. 15.0 15.1 December 2nd 1899 (AMP)
  16. June 3rd 1899 (AMP) – "I realise now that my fear of dirt stems from the disease I contracted climbing those lost jungle temples... I am sickened, I am ruined, but I will build such machines to contain this plague and heal us all."
  17. Loading Screen: "Curled into his cabin, he barely noticed..." (AMP)
  18. Loading Screen: "It is cradled in his sweating hands..." (AMP)
  19. Phonograph: "In the Parlour" (AMP) – Mandus: "Yes, I seem to have picked up something rather nasty in Mexico."
  20. Loading Screen: "The bottle of gin..." (AMP)
  21. Phonograph: In the Sewers (AMP) – Professor A: "And so you set about things immediately upon your return."
  22. Phonograph: In the Bilge Pumps (AMP) – Professor A: "You seem to have undergone quite a profound conversion in Mexico, Mr Mandus."
    Mandus: "You could not have seen it yourself and not, Professor. As we disembarked, even through my fever I saw the detritus of this so-called progress."

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