Penantellus’s Thaumaturgies – Book I: The Schools of Magic

Translated from Eldercommon by Grixie Anklespark (University of Mournwall)

EPIPHANES

I went down to the forum yesterday with my friend Anonymus, who is not important to the story, that I might listen upon the rhetoric of Oligarcates the Senator, who was again arguing for a stricter control on magic usage within the city, when a funny thing happened. I was walking down the path along Footindidora’s Massage Emporium when Pakinkrates the Grocer, who was coming up the path the other way, tripped and upended his produce cart. As passersby stopped to help Pakinkrates pick up his vegetables, and hopefully liberate a cucumber or two to reward themselves for their good deed, I noticed that Pakinkrates was directing the helpful persons to put his produce back in the baskets by colour.

“You can put all the red peppers and tomatoes in the same basket,” he was saying, “and everything green goes in here. No, no no, you can’t put the puceberries with the eggplants, they’re different— hey, come back here with that aquamelon!”

By and by, Pakinkrates managed to retrieve most of the perishables that make up his livelihood, and continued wheeling his cart away. But my mind, still dwelling upon the rhetoric of Oligarcates, interpreted this moment of street theatre in a different way. And thus I began pondering about the colour of magic.

I made my apologies to Anonymus and headed home, my head brimming with ideas. Thus I summoned my maidservant Corridora, and sent her along with invitations to my regular companions, and requested my kitchen staff prepare a feast for five guests.

EPIPHANES – FULLMARCHUS – CLEOPATIO – FATALDOSIA – THEOSAURUS

And so it was that in the evening my guests arrived for dinner. The first guest to arrive was Fataldosia, who works as a herbalist in the town square. She was followed by Fullmarchus the Schoolteacher and his wife Cleopatio, who makes furniture. Last was my good friend and colleague Theosaurus, who had finished a late class in ancient religious linguistics at the University.

After we had made small talk¹ in the lounging room, we proceeded to the dining area for dinner. My cook Periperikles had prepared a delicious appetiser of garlic bread and soup of mushrooms, and I instructed Corridora to serve everyone the wine I had received as a gift from a previous dinner party. Everyone had begun eating, and I intended to bring up my episode with Pakinkrates, when Theosaurus brought it up first.

¹ dictum inanus, lit. “pointless conversation”

“So how was Oligarcates’s speech at the forum today?” he asked. “I hear he’s trying to push for banning the use of magic within the city walls again.”

“Alas, I failed to listen to his oratory, for I was waylaid on my way to the event,” I confessed.

“Oh dear, what happened?” asked Cleopatio.

I recounted the incident of Pakinkrates’s overturned fruit-cart, and regaled my companions with the account of the aquamelon theft, to much general amusement. I was about to mention my theories on the nature of magic, when Fataldosia interjected.

“Oligarcates can ban arcane magic if he wants, as long as he doesn’t lay a finger on the divine magicks that make up my livelihood,” she said. “It’s hard enough curing my patients of bloodgrout and spackleskin without a little healing spell, let alone bad cases of Seventh Day blight fever.”

“What’s blight fever?” asked Fullmarchus curiously. “I’ve never heard of that one. Is it another new thing we have to worry about?”

Fataldosia’s expression darkened. “It’s a particularly novel strain of magical sexually-transmitted disease,” she said. “The symptoms are high fevers, minor levitation, and a tendency to glow luminously at night. Patients go through a delusional phase where they hear hallucinatory noises from beneath their feet, and believe that the ground is perpetually moving. This continues until the terminal phase where patients have their mind and soul eradicated and controlled by an external entity; we’re not quite sure who or what yet. The physicians believe it started out as a misapplied curse, possibly from a succubus.”

“A succubus? Here in Honoramonthebes?!” exclaimed Theosaurus. “I best ask the Archimendrite to perform an exorcism ritual next service.”

“Imagine that, a succubus, hiding somewhere in the city!” said Cleopatio. “She’s disguised herself as a city woman, I expect, going around spreading that curse to the unwitting young sailors down at the harbour.”

“It may not be a succubus, it may not be a succubus,” Fataldosia said quickly. “It’s just speculation at this point. I see no need to go around spreading rumours and scaring the populace!”

“Why is it called ‘Seventh Day’, though?” asked Fullmarchus, who is naturally curious.

“We — the healers and I — we get the bulk of cases at the end of the week,” explained Fataldosia. “Quite regularly, in fact. If it is a succubus — and I’m not saying that it is! But if turns out that it’s a soul-sucking demon from hell preying on the souls of men, we’re guessing it has to come out and feed once a week.”

“How intriguing,” Cleopatio remarked. “But why not just magic the whole curse away?” she asked innocently, turning to Theosaurus. “Can’t you just pray to the Deity to smite the victims with His holy sunbeams?”

“Divine magic does not work that way,” Theosaurus said. “What we call ‘divine magic’ is an intercession from the Deity. We cannot order Him to cleanse this curse, only request it of Him and hope that He intervenes.”

Fataldosia huffed angrily. “The Deity — may He shine brightly — is not the only source of divine magic. As a herbalist”—and here Fataldosia acquired a grin of pride—“we pay homage to the divinity of nature. We utilise the wonderful fruits of the earth to heal wounds and to cure sickness.”

“My dear Fataldosia,” Theosaurus began, “I have complete and total respect for you and your profession, but I cannot in good faith consider your so-called ‘hedge-magicks’ — if you’ll pardon the droll pun — being ‘divine magic’. That is the jurisdiction of the priests and paladins, the holy knights, and while your herbology is certainly useful in the grand scheme of things, I’d hesitate before calling it ‘divine intervention’. It’s just plants, after all.”

Fataldosia was incensed. “That is preposterous! Who are you to say that the magic of the druids, some of the most powerful natural spellcasters, is not divine! It is miraculous what some of these plants do, and I won’t have you saying a bad word against it!”

“Who am I?” said Theosaurus. “I am a Sacred Lensbearer of the Hagioscopia, madam, and I would know better than any of us here!”

“You’re just a fuddy old bookworm of dead languages,” scoffed Fataldosia. “You’ve only seen plants when they’re bound into tomes; you don’t have any idea of the complexity of herbalism—”

“But Theosaurus,” Fullmarchus interrupted, “don’t plants grow because they are touched by His holy light? We teach this in school, and I remember our principal Meritocrates getting complaints from parents who insisted that this was just ‘theory’ and that schools should, in fairness, also teach that plants are the hairs of the Earthmother emerging out of her skin of soil.”

“While it is true that plants are blessed by the Deity’s light and sustained by it,” explained Theosaurus, “it does not mean that the plants themselves are holy. Plants need continuous blessing by the Deity; if left in the dark too long, they wither and droop. If plants were holy, they would be able to bless themselves with life, wouldn’t they?”

“And we arrive at the question at the heart of it all,” I spoke at last. “Oligarcartes wishes to ban the use of magic to prevent random accidents; for instance, last year debacle when that novice pyromancer, Fernus, burnt down half the city. But his is a blanket policy which threatens also to limit different useful subtypes of magic, like that of healing, or other beneficial spellcasting. This argument between Fataldosia and Theosaurus is indicative that our current, loose definition of the arcane/divine distinction is inadequate. Perhaps we need a more robust classification system for thaumaturgy…?”

There is silence for a moment while each of my companions ponders over my proposition. Eventually, Cleopatio speaks. “You mean… like Pakincrates’s vegetables? Arrange them by colour, something of that sort?”

“Nice pun, darling.”

“Indeed!” I said. “No, not the play on words — the analogy of Pakincrates’s produce cart. I have been ruminating on this question: how should we categorise magical effects in a useful manner?”

There is another round of silent chewing, both of the bread and of my ideas. “That would be quite tough, Epiphanus,” said Theosaurus at last. “There are just too many magical effects. Invocations, charms, rituals, blessings… there would be too many to sort them reliably.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Tell me, Theosaurus, are there not many different types of fruits and vegetables?”

“There certainly are,” he replied.

“More types than there are magical incantations?” I asked.

“I only know of maybe a few dozen; if you asked all the inhabitants of the city you might get up to a couple hundred, tops. Certainly not as many as the number of spells I am aware of.”

“But there might be fruits and vegetables that we don’t know of, that nobody in the city knows of,” said Fataldosia. “I once met a trader from Khai-rhotep up north, and remember buying a strange, bulbous fruit with a pungent smell and blue flesh. I had never seen anything like it. It might only grow in the cold.”

“So?” replied Theosaurus. “Just because you’ve seen one new fruit, doesn’t mean that there’s millions of undiscovered fruit types over on the other continent. Maybe there was just one new type, and you discovered it. We now know all couple hundred and one types of fruit.”

“Yes, perhaps that was not the most illustrative example,” I said.

“What about music, eh?” Fullmarchus said. “All my students these days are listening to that new musician, the one who wears sandals everywhere? What was his name, what was his name…”

“Mixtapedemos,” said Cleopatio. “You were complaining about him last week.”

“Oh yes, that’s right.”

“What’s music got to do with this?” asked Fataldosia.

“Well, there’s got to be more songs written than there are magic spells,” said Fullmarchus. “We’ve got so many songs right now, written by all kinds of musicians and their newfangled instruments. But we can still sort them, can’t we? Like, Mixtapedemos makes music that the youngsters these days are calling Flip Flop, and — Theosaurus, wasn’t there that whole movement a couple of years back? The one that your priests believed was corrupting the youth and stealing them away from the lighthouse?”

“Frock n’ Stole, I remember,” said Theosaurus. “The Archimendrite was sure it would invite the Darkness into the land.”

“Thank the Deity nothing much came of it,” said Fullmarchus. “But what I’m saying is, we’ve got so many songs, haven’t we? But we can still sort them into their different genres. Some of them sound the same, and we group them up like so.”

“You are as eloquent as you are insightful, Fullmarchus,” I said. “Like sorting vegetables by colour, or music by genre, magic spells have similar properties that allow us to group them into categories, based on those selfsame similarities – or differences – among those properties.”

There was a pause. “So how do we do it?” asked Cleopatio.

“Yes, what is the colour of magic?” asked Fullmarchus.

“Or, perhaps, the sound of magic?” said Fataldosia.

“It’s hills,” said Theosaurus.

“What?”

“It’s hills. That’s what the sound of magic is. Hills. It animates them into earth golems or something like that. If I recall, it brings them to life, but only if they have small white flowers in them. I read it somewhere.”

“Would this be in one of your old books?” asked Fullmarchus.

“Maybe we don’t have to sort them by colour,” interrupted Cleopatio. “Maybe you can sort them by how you make magic happen? If you want to join two pieces of wood, for example, you can nail them together, or wedge them together with a joint, or glue them together. You can make all kinds of different things with different methods. And there are many different ways of invoking magic too, aren’t there? You can prepare rituals, you can inscribe runes, you can use sex magic like the succubus…”

“Well, that might be true, my dear,” I said, “but I foresee a problem with your system: multiple means of achieving the same effect. Consider an example from your own profession: the nature of wood joints.”

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“I don’t,” said Fataldosia.

“I shall let Cleopatio explain. My dear, if you would be so kind.”

“There are different ways of creating the same sort of joint, you see. You can simply glue the two pieces of wood together; that’s a butt joint. You can reinforce it by making the edges have short stubby fingers; that’s a finger joint. There are many others; bridle, mortise, biscuit, pocket-hole… but at the end of the day what you have is two joined pieces of wood.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Magic is quite similar. One can perform a lyrical melody; one can make somatic gestures with a wand; one can call upon an elemental or invoke a ritual, but ultimately they all result in a similar outcome: a conjured fireball. They are many means to get the same magical effect; or to use another analogy, all roads lead to Honoramonthebes.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Fullmarchus.

“Hang on,” said Fataldosia. “That doesn’t quite make sense to me. You just mentioned different types of joints, didn’t you? Biscuit and pocket-shaped and whatever… those are different types of groups of joints, aren’t they? Just because different means achieve the same effect does not mean that we abandon means as a method of sorting.”

“Please elaborate, Fataldosia.”

“Well, I treated that famous athlete Weakathenes last month; he had torn a ligament. While I was chatting with him, he told me about all the exercises he does to stay fit. He runs, he swims, he lifts weights, he throws javelins… at the end of the day, these all result in a fit, toned body. And a person doesn’t have to do all of these exercises to achieve a fit body; you can still become fit if you exclusively run, for example. But grouping these different exercises is still a meaningful, well, exercise.”

“Fine words, Fataldosia,” I said, “but let us consider this scenario of bodily fitness more carefully. If one exercises one’s own body, they get fit, is it not?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“And can there be other outcomes of exercise? Intentional outcomes, I mean, not accidental ones like injuries or a sudden predilection for protein-based beverages.”

“Well, if you’re doing it right, exercise can only make you fitter.”

“So there is but one outcome of exercise: a fit body. It is inconceivable that more exercise makes one’s body weaker, yes?”

“That is true.”

“And if magic were so, then categorising spells by their casting methods would be an effective solution to our problem. But alas, magic in its varied forms boggles the imagination. I mentioned earlier that there are many ways to create a fireball; but each of the methods I mentioned are also valid means to creating different effects. For instance, there are rituals to send messages across great distances, rituals to grant protection to travellers, rituals to sanctify a meal and purify water so that is safe to consume, and so on.”

I turned to Fullmarchus. “If I was to tell you that one of your mischievous students was performing a banned ritual in the lavatories, what would be your first response?”

Fullmarchus replied, “I’d probably ask what kind of ritual the miscreant was performing.”

“Precisely! Describing a spell by its casting method provides no useful information about the spell in and of itself, and therefore is not an optimal method of categorisation.”

“Ah, you speak truth again, Epiphanes,” said Fataldosia.

“But that is not to say that knowing the different groups of casting methods is meaningless,” I said. “Knowledge about the casting of the spell is essential, and perhaps in a different context it would be the answer to our problem.”

“Fair enough,” said Theosaurus. “Should we categorise spells by their effects then, or their uses?”

“That sounds like what we do at the apothecary,” said Fataldosia. “We sort our cures by application first: potions, pills, poultices, parchments. Each has their own separate cupboard. And in each cupboard, they’re arranged such that similar cures go on the same shelves. Head and hair tonics go on the top shelf, face and skin on the second, nose and throat on the third, and so on.”

“Oh, I can think of one!” said Cleopatio. “Remember that time Amorphus the Shapechanger came to my shop to pick up his new dining table set? He was driving his rented cart up the street when he had one of his accidents, and he turned into a street sign. Remember, Fullmarchus?”

“I remember,” said Fullmarchus. “The fellow had no idea how turn himself back. Couldn’t tell if he was coming or going. I had to send to the university to get one of the archmages; when the archmage came around, he —Amorphus — asked if the archmage knew how to change him back. The archmage said, ‘I’ll keep you posted.’ I couldn’t stop laughing for a week!”

“It’s not nice to laugh at him, dear,” said Cleopatio. “The poor chap’s got a condition. Anyway, that’s my first suggestion: transforming magic.”

“An excellent idea!” I said. “Transmogrification is a fine first foray into our system. There are multiple spells that turn one object — or people, or animals — into another. What else can we possibly think of?”

“What about spells that create things from thin air?” asked Theosaurus. “Like Jonkeles the Jester, who used to entertain children in the city square. He would juggle colourful balls for them, and he would start with just three, but soon he would have six, seven! He would conjure them from thin air, I’ve always said.”

“Wasn’t he arrested last week for blasphemy?” asked Fullmarchus. “I heard something about him worshipping a dead cockatrice.”

“Yes, unfortunately,” said Theosaurus. “Nobody expects the Deity’s Inquisition.”

“An interesting proposition, Theosaurus,” I said. “But answer me this: the Deity shines upon all, and all that He shines upon is all there is; it is inconceivable that there exists something upon which He does not shine, yes?

“This is true,” replied Theosaurus. “Even in the night He sends us the moon to reflect His glorious rays unto us.”

“If everything is all that there is, it cannot be that objects are ‘conjured’ out of nothing; for that would imply that there was some place where the Deity does not shine to conjure it from.”

“I guess,” said Theosaurus.

“And such a place cannot exist, for we have previously established that that nothing exists upon which the Deity does not not shine.”

“True, true.”

“Thus, it cannot be that Jonkeles’s juggling balls are ‘conjured’; he must be using some kind of transmogrifying spell to coalesce the very air itself into a solid object.”

“Why, you must be right, Epiphanes.”

“So, the aforementioned ‘conjuring’ spells are really a kind of transmogrifying magic, and thus by default fall into our first category,” I explain. “Does anybody have any other suggestions?”

“What about spells that don’t transform objects, but change some other property of the object?” asked Fullmarchus. “Like the colour-changing dyes of that ruffian Permanenmarkus they caught painting graffiti on the amphitheatre walls a few weeks ago.”

“Oh yes, I remember that,” said Fataldosia. “The news-criers couldn’t stop talking about that one for days.”

“An excellent suggestion, Fullmarchus,” I said. “Spells that enchant an object to have different properties than it originally had, like a different colour, or perhaps a different size, or perhaps cause it to levitate, like poor Fataldosia’s blight fever victims. Let us call these spells ‘bewitchments’, after the enchantresses who perform it best.”

“I think we are all missing out on an important category,” said Fataldosia. “The magic of nature, and the study of plants; my humble profession: herbalism.”

“Quite right,” I said. “Herbalism, or curative magic, is an essential group of magicks. Pestilence would be much more rampant if it were not for you and your colleagues’ conscientiousness.”

“I have another one,” said Cleopatio. “My cousin Quikmarchus is a soldier on the south garrison, and he knows their battle-mage, who has to take courses at your university, Epiphanes, to learn to protect himself from the nightmare spells. Oh, I suppose I have two more then: nightmare magicks, and anti-nightmare magicks.”

“What about potions?” asked Fataldosia. “They’re also curative magic, but they’re not all made with plants. And some of them have different effects too.”

“Let us call it alchemy,” I said.  “We have six categories now — does that encompass the entirety of magic?”

There was a pause.

“My brother-in-law works as a owlbear keeper at the zoo,” suggested Theosaurus.

“I cannot see us adding thaumozoology to the list,” I said. “Magic might be able to affect magical creatures, but the creatures are not the outcome of the spells themselves.”

“What about predicting the future?” asked Fullmarchus. “My neighbour, Specktakles, offers two prophecies for the price of one on Thursday nights. Gives you a discount if you bring your own tea leaves.”

“Ah, of course: divination, spells which lend divine sight into the future. Well said, Fullmarchus.”

“I’ll be happy if Ogliarcates bans those spells,” said Theosaurus. “Or at least, those which involve methods that have not been sanctioned by the lighthouse. I mean, whoever heard of the Deity revealing his wisdom through the leftovers of a beverage?”

“Does anyone have anything other categories to offer?” I asked. “If not, we seem to have a robust system of sorting magic. Transmogrification, bewitchment, herbalism, alchemy, nightmare arts, and anti-nightmare arts, and divination. Quite fitting, that there are seven categories.”

“What do you mean?” asked Fullmarchus. “What would it be significant that there are seven categories?”

I was about to answer, when Corridora appeared our table to clear away the remnants of the appetisers. While my guests complimented my cook’s culinary skill, I marshalled my thoughs as I prepared for the next course of dinner.

—–

Commentary by Ar. Lyrissa Quillhand, Th.D.

In the first book of his Thaumaturgies, Penantellus presents a bold, sweeping proposal to classify all known magic into various classes, or schools. While other scholars might examine Penantellus’s penultimate work through the lenses of historiography or ethnohistory, this commentary will focus on Penantellus’s groundbreaking ideas as an early philosopher of magic.

The modern understanding of thaumodynamics is vastly different from that of Penantellus’s time, and we now know that Penantellus’s magic classification system, while revolutionary, was flawed. The Gygaxian school of thought is the current prevailing system in use, which sorts magic into eight distinct categories: abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, transmutation, and biomancy (or necromancy).

Some of the seven “Categories” of magic, as Penantellus called them, align quite serendipitously with those of the Gygaxian schools: he does correctly identify divination, and his category of “transmogrification” and “bewitchment” largely translates to the modern schools of transmutation and enchantment, respectively. He also correctly excludes thaumozoology from the list. That is where most of the similarity ends, however.

Penantellus’s categories of “alchemy” and “herbalism” seem shoehorned into the system, especially because they seem to contradict his earlier criterion that the categories should not be related to how magic is made, but only to its results. Alchemical potions, whether made with herbs or other exotic ingredients, are still only conduits for magical spells and not the effect of the spell itself. Scholars have long debated over the inclusion of these categories, with some giving Penantellus the benefit of the doubt, arguing that the categories overlap with modern-day schools of biomancy (though they fail to take into account that most modern healing spells are either transmutation- or abjuration-based). Others, like Ancient Sharonic scholar Larth Torquechain, believe that Penantellus had to include those categories to please the Healer factions of Honoramonthebian society, which had strong political pull and were not people to cross.

Nightmare arts possibly share some similarities with the modern schools of necromancy; but again, the similarities are perhaps limited to curses, hexes, and other forms of “harmful” spellcasting. Likewise, anti-nightmare arts seems prototypical of modern-day abjuration. When viewed in the context of Sharonic theology of the Deity, which worshipped light as divinity, it is not difficult to see why some magic would be considered “nightmare”, synonymous with the fears of the nighttime hours.

Penantellus’s argument against conjuration is similarly blinkered by the prevailing religious doctrine of the time. Modern arcanists have been well aware of the existence of other planes of existence outside our material plane, and that magic can allow us to summon entities from these external planes; our physical plane does not include the totality of “all that there is”.

Furthermore, Penantellus’s account shows no recognition of the schools of evocation or illusion. Scholars speculate that he must have thought of evocation as “transmogrification”; i.e. the transformation of air into energy. Similarly, illusion would be taken as a transformation of invisible air into visible images. As there are no surviving copies of books two through four, it is unclear if Penantellus ever addresses these glaring omissions; Book V continues the discussion by reasoning about the particulate nature of magic.

Nevertheless, Penantellus’s Criterion — that magic should be sorted on the basis of its effect — survives to this day, where it is the basis for many academic systems of magic, and the ancestor of the modern day Gygaxian system. Far from criticising his mistakes, we should laud him for his bold ideas in the complicated field of early thaumodynamics.

Submitted July 08, 2018 at 10:26AM by ProjectStellaris https://ift.tt/2J3zEro