Difference and Repetition and Magic

 

There have been many interesting discussions around magic floating around the OSR spaces recently - a good opportunity to have a think about what it is, and what it means.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how magic worked in Barony, and went back and forth on things a few times. I landed on a few simple tenets, the most important being that magic is language.

This follows on from the nature of God, Chaos, and Law in this setting, so a brief bit of explication there to start with.

In the creation myth, God is the one that divides the earth into Law and Chaos, creates humans to serve and worship it, and send its angels back in time (from something it calls the Material Heaven) to bring about its own instantiation in the future.

What is most important here is not the time travel stuff - it's the division into Law and Chaos. Before God, everything was Chaos. Then God comes (from somewhere), invents (or is, in some deep sense) language, and creates Law through a process of division. The division is done via explanation, modelling, classification - naming. Chaos is simply everything that exists. It will exist without its description, without qualification, without explication. It is this process of division and abstraction that creates Law, and Law is very radically artificial. In a sense, nothing is added to the world when it is described for the first time. In another sense everything is added, or, maybe more accurately, the world comes to exist in a certain way in this process.

The church in the Barony has come to associate Law with stable and productive living conditions for humans, and Chaos with things like the molten core at the centre of the planet, the madness of the eternal storms and boiling lakes of the extreme north, illness and disease and poison and boiling chemical plumes - all that is inimical to the human body and mind. This is a misunderstanding, a naturalistic fallacy. 

It is the radical artificiality and contingency of language that makes conscious expression and the exertion of the will a possibility. Without the ordering structures of language things simply are. Once cognition and abstraction are introduced, projection and simulation become possible.

What does all of this have to do with magic? Well, magic in the Barony is produced via this process of abstraction - by intervening in the immanence of pure being experienced by all things using the profoundly weird/alien/holy technology that is linguistic description. An 'entity', which is a type of disembodied mind or will capable of producing feats that we would deem magical, is the result of a particular, and particularly ambitious, attempt to develop a new form of abstraction - a new way of seeing, or categorising, or describing things, which is a labour that very, very few people are interested in or capable of.

In the Barony, the people who do this are saints and artists. They are not priests or academics, who are the ones who develop a system, post-facto, to deal with, speak to, and collaborate with already existing entities. The saints and artists are they ones creating new systems of abstraction ex nihilo, and dealing with the consequences of that, which can be very dire. To take a straight forward example: you build yourself, through a mixture of training and intuition, a system to see one very particular thing in the world in extreme, lucid, clarity, stripping it of every preconception that has attached to it, or from as many as you are personally capable of (a saint might say that this was seeing the world as God sees it, an artist might call it seeing the world as it really is) - maybe this is hope, maybe love, maybe the flows of capital, may the way fog folds over itself in the morning in a certain valley in autumn, maybe the way sunlight hits the surface of the sea, maybe cruelty, maybe the specific cruelty of your age and city, maybe the cruelty that the mind can do to itself, maybe the cruelty of a military who starves a civilian population, maybe the hatred of the civilians so starved. You get so good at seeing this thing in its specificity that you start to need new words and concepts to begin to talk about it with yourself. These new words and concepts are a pattern language, made from a combination of words, images, repetitions, insistences, mental loops, and untranslatable states of being - the pattern language is what the 'mind' of the entity is built from, and why entities aren't really people in any meaningful way - no more than you would be if your entire brain was built around trying to describe sunlight on water, and had an entire sometimes-linguistic-sometimes-imagist vocabulary and syntax dedicated only to this. 

People who think like this are often sensitive to the extent that they are in real danger. They will create a single entity in their lifetime, as a byproduct of these efforts. Others might then make use of it, but they will never be able to relate to it in a sophisticated way.

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In slightly more prosaic terms, if you are a Baronial adventurer and something is firing a beam of killing light at you, it is far more likely to be some sort of laser gun than magic. Or perhaps you have come across something from the elder world, a scrambled, ancient, muddied, and unstable time, when there were various beings who could just do things like that.

Magic in the sense described above is always concerned with vision, description, abstraction, projection, willpower, domination, surrender, lucidity, criticality. Your entity being able to scramble someone's brain or see through walls is not the aim (unless you are an academic, and so used to making pragmatic use of these things) - it is the byproduct.

It should go without saying that neither artists nor saints are reliably good, bad, noble, ignoble, kind, callous, or any other descriptor. These processes say nothing at all about the character of a person - they are a techne and a practice, and they have results but do not spring from goodness or badness. God (in this setting) is not moral in any way that a human would make sense of; it is simply the fountainhead of a particularly potent species of sense-making. 

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This gets back to the original thrust of this weird little post. I imagine (although I have been wrong about things like this before) that most people have had the experience of being in someone else's power. This doesn't have to be terrible; it can be pleasurable, erotic, the byproduct of professional respect, any number of things. There are people who can put you in their power with something as innocuous as a particular look, or a specific phrase, or the way that they angle their face or body towards you. If this person wishes you harm, you are in serious trouble. If they really know you (know the contents of your soul, your fears and desires, what you cannot abide and what you would sacrifice to attain, your true name), then you better hope that they mean you no harm.