The Mundane Council
People automatically assume that something called ‘the Mundane Council’ is, well, ‘mundane’ as we understand the term now: boring, unexceptional, not unusual at all. Which is why the Council keeps the name; it’s helpful to be underestimated. Particularly when you’re a member of a self-selected group dedicated to keep everything, well, operational.
The Mundane Council is one of those groups that claims a history that stretches back over a thousand years. It’s also — much more rarely — one of those groups that can do so credibly. The Council was founded by Gallo-Roman nobles seeking to regain power after the Frankish conquest in the fifth century AD; by the eighth century their group was secretly ruled by Charlemagne himself, which leads to an interesting question as to whether or not they ultimately succeeded, or failed. Certainly the Council has had a lot of fingers in a lot of European pies since then.
However, they are not currently actively engaged in schemes of conquest, or indeed in direct political control at all (those of the Council who were inclined towards such things typically didn’t survive the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). The Mundane Council shifted its interests in the seventeenth century, during the Satanism/witchcraft scandal of the Affair of the Poisons. The problem was actually much worse than it appeared, particularly at the social levels below the aristocracy; cleaning that up shifted the Council’s focus permanently towards a desire to keep everything operating if not smoothly, then at least not disastrously. They are the ultimate advocates of the status quo; their ideology seems to be not much more than ‘whatever you do, keep things from going completely to the Devil.’
The Council will argue that they have succeeded, at least in terms of things that could have happened. The supernatural is admittedly to this day weak in Europe, although that may simply be a by-product of industrial and technological development. Certainly every organization that attempted to weaponize occultism on the Continent ended poorly. And of course the Council is rich. But how significant are they, really? Then again, the Council has no active enemies, which is itself perhaps diagnostic.
In person, agents for the Council are thankfully easy enough to get along with. They consider ‘mundane’ to mean ‘cosmopolitan,’ and the Council tries to live up to that. Agents are expected to be tolerant of eccentricities, broadminded about cultures, and disinclined to meddle with things that are already working well enough; they also have an enviable knowledge of the finer things in life, including the ones that are not typically enjoyed by the upper classes.
But if the Council has one flaw, it’s that they are remarkably blase about killing people. Not innocent people, of course. Not even people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time (this includes policemen trying to enforce the law). But if you shoot at a Council agent and you’re not officially allowed to do so, he or she will shoot you back, then kill every member of your organization who sanctioned the shooting, then blow up your HQ — and sleep like a baby afterwards. It’s even more alarming to witness first-hand than it sounds; very possibly the most terrifying thing about the Mundane Council and its agents is that they simply do not hesitate, once they’ve decided to kill a human being.
What? Oh, yes. Ian Fleming was almost certainly involved with the Mundane Council. Why do you ask?