A Course of Magical Study, Volume Four
by Lidellia
It is recommended that you read Volumes One, Two, and Three
before you attempt this treatise on Numen.
By now the aspiring magician has learned to feel magic (at least to some extent), and has delved into the philosophies of Maya and Mana. Studying these two aspects of reality has begun to open the aspirant’s mind in the manner necessary to practice magic. At this point they are ready to attempt to grasp the fundamentals of numen, and it is here that a clear idea of their future as a magician will become more apparent.
Numen, in its most simple definition, is the ‘vibration’ of mana. While much mana exists in a relatively raw state (at least to our coarse perceptions), some of it is set into motion, like water being stirred into a wave or a bell being hit with a mallet. It is this ‘ringing’, ‘vibration’, or ‘motion’ that our perceptions interpret as the ‘things’ of the world.
For most minds, this is far enough, for this definition makes sense to our humanistic thought. Raw mana is set to vibrating, and it is these vibrations that we sense as people, rainbows, dreams, and horseshoes.
This appeals to our controlling minds (as many magician’s minds tend to be), for magic then works by a very logical basis – we utilize spells to change the vibration of one thing to the vibration of another, or we give a certain vibration to raw mana, and thus our desires are made manifest.
Magic works according to this manner of thinking, and works serviceably well. Indeed, most magicians stop here, for they can attain great power without delving too deeply into the more ‘dangerous’ mindsets necessary to fully understand numen.
Dangerous? I know that I’ve chosen a powerful word, but for those who wish to seek deeper into the truth of numen, they face two common ‘ailments’ of the mind, which afflict only the most potent of practitioners. Both are named after famous magicians who succumbed to the afflictions.
The first magician was named Salara, and she was one of the first and most powerful female practitioners in Masalla. It was during the MorDuraan wars that she reigned supreme, and was famous for summoning up terrible things from Lorenai, things that wreaked havoc upon the battlefields.
Hungry for more power, Salara began to develop her own system of magical practice, and came upon barriers imposed by her own mind. She needed to ‘weaken’ reality in her mind, and to do so, she explored numen more deeply.
What happened to her is now termed ‘Salara’s Collapse’, and it is a much more common affliction today, as aspiring practitioners often revel in the exploration of deeper philosophies.
Salara began to feel deeply into numen, and the realization that nothing was solid permeated her brain. She began to see everything as naught but an illusion, and though this gave her the ability to change things even more dramatically, it began to sap the meaning from her life. She wrote in her journal –
Everything I touch, every emotion I feel – what do they matter? I saw a man the other day, a man who reminded me of Alenen. For a moment I missed Alenen with all of my heart, until it came sweeping upon me with the inevitable force of a tide – Alenen, my love, my memories – they were naught but tiny wiggles in the stream of mana, soft and ephemeral, here and gone without any meaning, any reality. How is any such emanation of numen different from any other? How is Alenen, or my memory of him, any more meaningful than the stones I tread upon on my way to the study? All are but whispers in our minds, meaningless and without soul.
She began to feel magic so well that she noted the world was only vibrations of a singular stuff, but also, that the differences in those vibrations were, when examined deeply, very subtle. Indeed, she spoke, in her later journal entries, of the world being ‘all of a grayish hue, undifferentiated, dull, and alone’.
Such conclusions rarely occur to practitioners who cannot deeply ‘feel’ magic on a profound level. But of those who aspire to more power than simply casting pre-made spells, Salara’s Collapse can be a real danger.
If the practitioner can sustain their worldview through the deeper feeling of numen, they move closer to having some ability to ‘shape’ magic. For it is said that the one who can truly understand and ‘feel’, at the most visceral level, the reality of the world, will be able to shape it to their will. Of course, part of understanding reality so purely is understanding one’s will and concept of 'self' purely, and it is theorized that if someone achieved that level of proficiency, they would no longer possess any desire to change the world.
In reality, many people attain some ability to shape magic, and thus could be called magic shapers. (A most coveted title!) The only requirement to the appellation is that one can ‘tweak’ a spell, intuitively, to create a slightly different effect, duration, or range of affect.
To do this, the arcane practitioner must immerse themselves in the emotions invoked during spell-casting. While most casters simply utilize the words of power, are flushed with the necessary emotion or feeling needed, and then release the magic, this approach does not allow for manipulation of the spell’s essence. For behind the words, gestures, and reagents, lies the ‘evocation’, the rising up of strange, deep emotions for which no language has a name. These emotions are fearful because they are so intrinsic, so reminiscent of the wonderment and purity of our misty childhoods, that to feel them is to be truly open and alive, without barriers or restraint. For most of us, who fear even to show certain sides of our personalities, this is a truly terrible fear to confront.
These mysterious, ancient emotions emerge during the evocation portion of a spell, and it is here that the practitioner must plunge in, heedless of their sense of self, and surrender to the emotions. It is only here, so deeply present within the working of magic, that the magician can ‘shape’ magic to any extent. Giving themselves to the emotion, they can then intuit how to enact subtle shifts within their heart and mind, adding a slightly different flavour to the emotion brought forth in the evocation. Often it is only a matter of ‘connecting’ with the emotion through some memory, making the emotion personal, and thus gaining the power to shift it by changing one’s perception of it.
It is in this surrendering to the evocation that the second affliction is encountered, named for a mage who died not a century past. His name was Kaelus Shore, and his malady is called ‘Shore’s Melancholy’. It is named thus because the emotion that most practitioners describe as ‘taking them’ is a deep, unutterably sweet melancholy, a sadness and longing coupled with a strange loneliness. Many of the emotions that are evoked in spell casting lean toward this 'flavour', and to lose oneself in such a feeling is to remember a way of life that once was -- to view within your mind the painful contrast between your adult mind and the clear vision and open wonder of being young.
Practitioners afflicted with Shore’s Melancholy or Salara’s Collapse have faltered in numerous ways – some have taken their own lives, others have left to the wilderness, wandering aimlessly for the rest of their days. Some lose themselves to spirits, while others flee from the magic, swearing it off forever.
But we are not done, yet, with numen. For as magical understanding has grown, so, too, has our understanding of reality. I’ve asked Lord Cowan Faol, Archmage of Aranor, to lend his words to the explaining. The true nature of numen (and indeed, of reality itself) cannot be explained in any human tongue, but perhaps Lord Faol has done as good a job as any.
The afflictions described above develop because of a singular fact – that most of us, in our view of the world, think of ourselves as viewers, and the world, outside of us, as being viewed. When someone like Salara or Lord Shore begins to feel deeply into magic, they notice that the deeper they feel, the more alike things are. To our normal perceptions, an apple and an orange are quite different things indeed. As we feel deeper and deeper into the true nature of the two fruits, however, we begin to find that they are more and more alike – at the most subtle level, in fact, they are quite indistinguishable.
When you’re thinking of yourself as separate from the apple and orange, this can break down your world view irreparably, for we rely immensely upon our belief of the world as made up of separate things – this gives us the feeling that we, too, are a separate thing, unique and individual. But when we think of ourselves as unique individuals, and then we begin to see through to what an apple or orange really is (not much of anything at all), the contrast leaves us with a frightening revelation -- we begin to suspect that we might not be much of anything at all either! For someone who relies on the feeling of being uniquely individual, this is pretty terrifying.
In most of life, our problems come from a lack of immersion. When we don’t give ourselves completely into things, we begin to set up barriers, and in the enforcement of those barriers we develop stress, melancholy, and despair. In the case of magic, it is only full immersion – allowing yourself to merge completely into the realizations and feelings of magic – that lets us truly begin to shape magic.
You see, the truth of numen is that it isn’t really a thing’s ‘vibration’ at all, but rather the relationship between mana’s vibrations and our own perceptions. Mana is like a huge nothingness that sometimes buzzes here and there. The buzzes have no color, no shape, no substance within themselves. Indeed, the buzzes themselves are so slight and insignificant that they hardly distinguish themselves from raw mana.
Things get interesting when the buzzes begin to relate to one another. In relationships, the buzzes interact, play upon each other, and manifest as the world.
To illustrate, imagine an ‘orange-fruit buzz’. In truth, it is just a little fuzzy spot in the ocean of raw mana. Then your eyes come along (which are just another little fuzzy spot in the ocean of raw mana), and the two fuzzy spots rub up against one another. In that rubbing the two fuzzy spots merge and there you have it – an orange.
So it’s only in the relation of a perceiving fuzzy spot and another fuzzy spot that ‘things’ are created. In the end, then, an orange only exists because you’re looking at it (or, if you’re lucky, tasting it!).
Of course, there are many perceiving fuzzy spots in the world (mice, people, ladybugs, birds, fish, and perhaps even things that we don’t think of as perceiving, like trees or rocks), and each of them sees the orange differently. I know, because I’ve been many things by grace of my magic. An orange doesn’t look at all the same from the eyes of a human, a beetle, or a butterfly. Its color, properties, and texture vary dramatically depending on what sort of thing is perceiving it. Of course, one needs to remember that our delineation of perceiving and non-perceiving fuzzy spots is only a delineation of convenience, and that as far as true reality is concerned, there’s no difference at all. It’s just that we happen to know that when we interact with other fuzzy spots, the relationship gives us the impression that those fuzzy spots are oranges and people and horses and coins.
Numen, then, to be fully understood, must be seen as the relationship between mana’s vibrations and our senses, rather than the vibrations themselves. This can be quite an undertaking for the arcane practitioner who wishes to truly 'feel' and live this idea as opposed to merely comprehending it!
There is only one bit of magical philosophy left – that of Manya. Then the magician is ready to move onward to beginning their actual training in spell casting.