Magic. How we all wish we could wield it. Just look at what a mage or majae can do – shape the world around them to their very desires! What power!

What is often not understood is that anyone able to cast a spell has undergone years of intense training – training that challenges their mental capacities to the utmost. Indeed, if you wish riches, you would more quickly earn gold by getting a good job rather than becoming a magician and learning to turn mud into gold. I hope, in these volumes, to impart a small understanding of what sort of training the magician must endure – it is a coursework that, if undertaken by ten people, will see eight of them drop out within the first year without even learning a single spell, one of them learn some minor magic and go quite mad as a result of experiencing ‘the impossible’, and one going on to become a spell-caster of at least minor potency.

When an aspiring magician first decides to give it a try, it is usually for one of two reasons. Either they are simply drawn to magical practice, or they seem to have inborn potential, which usually displays itself as the ability to ‘feel’ magic. Those with the ability to feel magic will be able to sense the presence of concentrated or recently manipulated magical energies. But these people don’t always have the devotion found in those who simply pursue magic out of passion. Those who don’t have the ability to feel magic must take extra time, before they even begin the studies below, in order to train themselves to sense magical energies. Anyone can do it, but your natural abilities will dictate how much energy you must devote to learning this ‘feeling’. Various exercises are used to develop this awareness, the most common of which is to place objects of magical and non-magical nature before the aspirant and allow them to choose which possess magic and which don’t. An intuition will swiftly develop that hopefully will, with continued practice, form itself into an actual sensation, often described as a tingle or even a faint taste in the mouth, when they focus on a magical object. In keenly developed individuals, this sense can become so fine that they can immediately feel the presence of a magical object within a room, or can tell when someone begins to draw up magic to cast a spell.

When the aspirant can sense magical energy, they are ready to begin their learning, which starts with a basic understanding of what magic is. And this understanding is best imparted by teaching the student four basic definitions. These four principles, when properly understood, make clear in the aspirant’s mind what, exactly, it is that they are manipulating when they eventually cast a spell.

These four basic principles, the four elements behind what we call ‘magic’, are Maya, Mana, Numen, and Manya. I will do my best to describe them simply, but it must be understood that they are very simple concepts, and as such, difficult to explain in words. What is written below may take some re-reading and thought if you are to grasp what lies behind these four concepts.

Maya -- The first that must be understood is maya. It is no coincidence that the goddess of natural things is called Maya, for maya is, in essence, the natural world. In fact, all worldly things, from objects to clouds to rainbows to emotions to people – all these are the principle of maya. But to understand the principle, we must come from two perspectives – to the non-magician, maya is solid, unchangeable reality. To the magician, maya is illusion. To understand maya, we must fix it in our minds that nothing about us is, in fact, reality. Indeed, via the practice of magic, any aspect of maya can be shifted to another aspect of maya. ‘Reality’ is only a veil laid over ‘true’ reality, a veil which derives most of its potency from our belief in the reality of our perceptions. If I touch a stone and my mind is convinced it is solid, it will be. If I truly believe it is not, it won’t be.

This is easy enough to say in words, but in practice it is much more difficult. Only the mythical ‘magic shapers’ were so attuned to maya’s reality that they could put their hand through objects at will, or shape any other aspect of maya with merely a thought. For the rest of us, our innermost minds must be ‘convinced’ that maya is shapeable. To convince our minds, we practice magic. In effect, then, magic is nothing but a tool to convince us, or give us a rational excuse to change the world around us in ‘impossible’ ways.

Understanding the true nature of maya and overcoming our mind’s desire to uphold maya’s illusions are the biggest hurdles the aspiring magician must face, and it is to this end that the various philosophies of magic are taught. (We will visit these in upcoming volumes.)

Mana -- The word ‘Mana’ is commonly used as a word for the force of magic – the energy behind a spell. And such a description is correct, if overly simplistic. Mana is much more than that, for mana is true reality – the essence behind the veil of maya. In truth, all of maya is composed of mana which resonates in different ways to form the different ‘things’ of the world. The ‘things’ we call maya.

Mana is undifferentiated in its pure form – it is also called pure magic. Like a bell, mana stays the same thing whether rung or not, but can manifest vastly different qualities (a sound or no sound) depending on if it is resonating. The world, then, can be visualized as a pool or ocean of this mana, much of it resonating at different levels. Combined with our perceptions, these resonations take on different forms, becoming the people around us, the objects with which we interact, and the very world we call Carador.

As a magician, we learn to focus on the mana behind maya’s apparent reality, and to change the resonance of a certain area of mana in order to ‘change’ the object, person, or emotion that the mana is manifesting as. If this sounds confusing, simply imagine that the apple you pick up (the favorite object example of Old World magicians) is actually formed of the same substance that the orange over there is. The only difference is how they are ‘ringing’ (using the bell example). By using a spell to change the apple’s ringing, you can make it ring the same as the orange, and suddenly you’re holding an orange! Mana can also be gathered in its pure form and shaped to the magician’s will.

When people speak of a magician ‘gathering’ mana, the magician is doing one of two things – either gathering raw mana, or else attuning themselves to the mana of the thing they are about to change (sort of picking up the mana and getting ready to shape it). When the mana of an object (an object is called an ‘apparency’ by this point in your magical training) is fully gathered by a magician, it is ready to be changed by the magician’s spell.

Numen – Numen refers to an apparency’s resonance. Alright. Let’s say that again. There is maya, which we all see, which is made up of an undifferentiated substance called mana. Numen is the bridge between ourselves and mana – it can be thought of as the force of resonance which makes mana take apparent form. It is like the ringing of the bell, and is what the magician specifically focuses on during the moment of change. It is what makes an object an object, to us at least (or to our perceptions, to be more exact).

Thus numen takes on a very important role for the magician – it is the actual ‘magic feel’ of a thing which serves as the practical focal point for their magical attention. But the tricky part about numen is that although it manifests as the most ‘touchable’ part of magic (it’s what we ‘feel’ when we learn to ‘feel magic’), it is, perhaps, the least ‘real’ of all magic’s aspects, for it is not a substance at all, but a relationship between ourselves and mana’s resonance. The magician must learn to divorce themselves from the thought of simply taking numen and shaping it, like clay, to a ‘new’ numen (from an apple to an orange, say), for it doesn’t respond to the idea of forced manipulations. Instead, the magician must come to understand the nature of relationships, and by that key access the mana behind the numen. Since all of our reality is only what we are able to perceive, a thing’s numen must change within our own perception before it can change in the world’s.

Every thing in the world, then, is a numen, or resonance, of mana, manifesting, when all those things are put together, as maya. On a deeper level of understanding, numen is not a thing at all, but the relationship between our perceptions (made up not only of our senses but of our ideas and biases about the world) and mana’s resonances.

Manya -- Manya may be the most esoteric concept of all, for it is the force which shapes the mana into various numen. Remember that numen is the relationship between mana’s resonance and our perception of it. Manya is the actual force of resonance – the ‘shape’ of the world. Manya exerts a varying influence on various aspects of the world – in our normal, physical lives we see this by the fact that some numen, such as an emotion, are much easier to change or affect than others, like a mountain. It is the manya of an object which prevents a spell from affecting its state – and it is this prevention which must be overcome (or more aptly put, worked in conjunction with) in order to change its numen. For reasons we don’t fully understand, some objects are simply more difficult to affect magically – erthynsilver, for instance. An object’s size and density seem to affect the amount of force manya exerts, making it more difficult to work with very large objects or very dense ones, such as gemstones.

Some practitioners argue that manya is too vague a concept, and that dense or large objects are more difficult to affect simply because we think they should be. But no one seems to argue the fact that there must be some natural force behind the world, shaping it into the forms we are so familiar with. Some would call it the will of the deities, others manya. Probably there is no difference. But in the end, we do have direct evidence of manya, and it comes into play as magicians achieve higher levels of power. Not only can a more powerful wizard shape things a lesser magician could never hope to affect, but they can urge the force of manya to hold their changes in the changed state. In simpler words, a young magician could easily change an apple into an orange. But now let’s have a powerful wizard pick up an acorn, turn it into an apple, and hand it to the young magician. If the young mage tried to change this apple (the acorn-apple) into an orange, he’d probably find that his magic couldn’t make it change at all. The powerful wizard learns to urge the manya to hold his workings solidly, so that only a more potent magician can usually undo the magics done by a lesser wizard. Thus it is in a wizard’s ability to manipulate manya that the higher levels of wizardry gain one of their most potent powers.

By all hopes, I haven’t lost you to these concepts already. Perhaps you’re beginning to see why there is such a high level of drop-outs in the magical schools. Day one tends to boggle one’s mind as you confront concepts that either don’t make much sense or else make the mind dizzy with realizations. Probably this is done on purpose, to cull out, early on, those who don’t have the mental stamina to understand magic’s intricacies. And it does take stamina – patient mulling over of strange new ideas.

These, then, are the four basic concepts of magic. Put the four together, and you have an understanding of the world as it can be affected by ‘magic’, which is simply the manner in which we change the world by thought.

After this, things only get worse. Volume Two will go into the philosophy of maya. Then we’ll go onto the philosophies behind the other concepts. These philosophies forge the mind-sets necessary to get enough of a feel for the concepts so that we can work with them on a practical basis. After that we’ll go on to actual spell-casting, which deals with the gathering, shaping, and directing of numens and raw mana.

To those of you who made it this far, congratulations! You’re well on your way to a deeper understanding of magical practice.

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