I’ve been looking through Royale’s notes. I wanted to see if he had any information about Hermetics. Which he does. I’ll get to that. I have to talk about something else first. I found journal entries that detail tracking down and defeating a blood mage. Based on when we talked, it may be the only one he encountered.
What’s disturbing is that after he chronicles the events, he writes at length that he doesn’t think that blood magic is inherently evil. He admits that it seems like blood mages are all evil but the act itself, he writes, doesn’t have to be. He talks about how in several instances, wizards sacrificed their lives to cast a spell – stopping a flood, turning back an avalanche, banishing some kind of evil force – which he says is blood magic even though no one wants to admit it.
This is may be true but I don’t like hearing it. I admit that I put Royale on a pedestal, which is never wise. But I still think he was a legitimately good person. Right or wrong it makes me ill to read him saying that blood magic is “misunderstood”. It’s like when you find out that Abraham Lincoln didn’t free all the slaves. It doesn’t sit right.
Anyway, Hermetics. Royale counted many of them as his close allies. Nothing in his writings states it’s anything that should be feared on the face of it. The basis of hermeticism is that all magic is actually done the same way even if you don’t realize it. That it can all be written down and codified. That magic is as rational a force as gravity and can be understood the same way.
I know this isn’t true. Royale wrote that this philosophy is helpful for a lot of people but ultimately stifles their potential because it tries to make everyone do magic the same way. Royale says that magic is based on creativity and mystery. The key to magic is an open mind. He told me that the rituals and the words and all that is just for show. A truly awakened caster wouldn’t need to do any of that. Their will would be done at a thought. If they had the power to back it up.
But. And there’s a big but. He goes on to say restricting creatively may be a good thing. In a world of unrestricted magic and free magic, one lunatic could be an atomic bomb. He talks about a girl in Burma who wiped out an entire village who never had any formal training. Her instinctual abilities were to destroy.
He theorizes that Hermetic mages may know exactly what they’re doing by codifying/stifling magic and are intentionally trying to build in training wheels that you can’t ever take off. He goes on to say that Hermetics and their way of doing magic may be responsible for the way magic has grown weaker and weaker. That it may be by their design. That a world without magic may be safer for everyone.
It’s a lot to think about.
Rocket Cat 