Well, if a sorcerer is supposed to understand his magic, then it’s not magic anymore. It should become a mechanistic process.
Of course, historic ‘sorcerers’ or alchemists were simply confused about their subjects – which is why they were called mysteries.
It’s unclear how the Emerald Tablet or the Lemegeton actually works. But the implication is that they know. They don’t know.
Like, imagine having the knowledge to draw a symbol to summon the demon Buer.
Well, how does it work? The only way to answer this is to draw a mechanism.
So the sorcerer is supposed to understand this, but obviously they don’t, since they never explain it.
I mean sure, but I’m not sure I understand your point here. My general belief is that there are things that exist that betray their true nature once they are named, or categorized, or explained. Obviously mechanistic processes are useful, but they have a place.
Of course, historic ‘sorcerers’ or alchemists were simply confused about their subjects – which is why they were called mysteries.
This seems like a pretty post-enlightenment understanding and not really an honest portrayal of how a Graeco- Egyptian magician perceived reality.
Also, on the sigils in the Lemegeton. Most of them have no underlying structure. They were understood to have been transmitted from the spirits themselves (hence their efficacy) and any attempts by a person to find out the root logic of the construction of those sigils is going to be unfruitful. The logic for the construction of those sigils is from another plane of existence incomprehensible to us.
We are post-Enlightenment, but we’re not atheists. Atheists are only a little bit more ‘materialist’ than traditional theists. We reject all three positions: theism, atheism, and agnosticism. And we also reject mathematical physics: we do classical mechanics with a pull mechanism.
Basically, we think that all phenomena can be understood simply in physical terms. So creative processes can be reduced, explained, visualized, etc. Taking the magic out of art – but in the process, giving the user magical abilities.
I mean I could pick apart why I personally disagree with a lot of these sentiments, but that would be off-topic. I am an Orthodox Christian so safe to say I cannot accept a lot of Gaedean explanations as outright truth although I see a lot of utility in using that world-model to come up with novel approaches to things.
[in reference to image you sent]
Like, I find this very very appealing and elegant, it appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities and taste, Gaede is definitely a genius, like a really high level one. Its not that I don’t like/respect him at all.
I see
I used to think that flow was when your brain had a lot of ideas “stored up.” But it actually seems to be a state where creativity requires little effort.
Your brain doesn’t need you to come up with ideas all the time. It prefers that you keep to a mindless routine. This is why cognitive dissonance occurs: it is less effort to be stubborn than to re-categorize experience.
So, it’s possible that we can be creative all the time, we just don’t use this capacity.
However, if you already have an awesome idea, and you decide to expand it, then creativity becomes more economical. It is likely to produce results, and already has limiting parameters that make finding the solution easy.
Like think about Minecraft. When you’re playing the game, you are always creative. You have an idea to get porkchops, which gives you the idea to build a farm, which gives you the idea to get fences, which gives you the idea to cut down trees. And all of this is fun and exciting. You problem-solve and you problem-solve and you problem-solve.
So let’s talk about dialogue. John Gardner taught his students to “convey the gesture, the reader will understand the emotion.”
She pursed her lips, and looked down at a bottle of ketchup, picking the label. “That’s fine I suppose.”
Good dialogue relies on kinesics ie body language. Obviously, what characters do in a setting reveals their inner thoughts and feelings.
But what about instances where the behavior reveals nothing? Ex: A man is washing dishes while discussing his divorce. Take away the revealing body language, and we do not learn anything new about our characters.
The park was shiny with rain.
“Mark?”
“Yeah?” Mark was licking an ice cream cone.
“Do you ever wonder why the third tower went down?”
“Because the Jews wanted it to?”
David looked both ways, and they walked down a scrappy trail."
These kinesics tell us nothing in and of themselves. And yet it still works.
Ideas are physical objects. They are arrangements of matter that get copied and mailed via sound waves, text, Braille, hand signs etc. The ideas are then reconstructed in the recipient’s mind.
So, this is a physical process. Dialogue is often compared to tennis, but you know that analogy is more accurate than it would initially appear.
Now imagine that you’re shooting a tennis match. You get to choose all the shots. It would only be natural to get shots of their shoes scraping against the court, the players reaching for their water bottles, someone sweating. These actions communicate hardly anything, but they serve as the physical windup / rebound.
Because imagine you shoot this scene and all you show us is the strikes. Hit, counter-hit, hit, on and on. It’s a bit abstract, and we don’t feel the transfer of energy as each player recovers.
“Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever wonder why the third tower went down?”
“Because the Jews wanted it to?”
Not as interesting.
I never understood the notion that magic has to be mysterious or incomprehensible to be ‘magic’.
Because if you see how the trick is done, it’s just a slight of hand. Not real magic
Ohhh, I thought you were saying in, like, a fantasy setting
Because that is how magic would be from the point of view of 99% of humans.
Because some dislike the way magic is portrayed as being a very tame, controlled, videogame like thing in most RPGs that might as well be cast by pressing a button to cause an effect with 0 percent chance of failure or mishap.
Because as magic is currently portrayed, it is less like magic, and more like a science system.
“You cast a spell and you know what it does beforehand and it does exactly that.”
I think I solved writer’s block yesterday. It’s kind of hard to sink in that I figured it out, but I think this is it. George Polya was the key.