Tag: magic

Shamanism—the powerful psychological and spiritual process for re-creating the cosmos and turning death into life in all the dimensions of Reality—was the driving force behind every aspect of ancient Maya life. It always required that the shaman-creator sacrifice himself or herself, allow himself or herself to be struck by the terrible lightning of the gods, descend into the Abyss, and die in the Black Hole at its center. Death in its many forms—emotional, spiritual, and physical—was the price all creative individuals paid to become “Lords of Life.”

— The Shaman’s Secret, p. 117

The prior of Bec…waved away her honest respect. “I’m a man like any other, lady.”

She arched a brow. “Truly?”

“Truly,” he said.

“There is the matter of…” She flicked her hand. The lamps went out. In the sudden dimness she bade a light grow, shimmering over her fingers, unfolding from them like a strange flower.

He quelled her working with a gesture. That same gesture, completed, restored the lamps to their former condition. “This too is God’s gift,” he said.

“Surely,” she said, “but it’s given to few, and to precious few in such measure as yours.”

“Or yours, lady. You will be stronger than I.”

“But not yet.”

“You are young,” he said, “and while not foolish, perhaps not granted such judgment as will be yours with greater age and maturity.”

She had had enough of dancing around the point. “Yes, I made a mistake. Yes, I know what mistake I made. And what part do you play, Father Prior, in this game of arts and powers?”

“A small one,” he said, “by the grace of God.”

That was disingenuous. She swept it aside. “So. You’re a Guardian of Gaul. Have you come to impose sentence upon me for dereliction of duty?”

“If anyone is to do that, lady” he said, “it should be your father. No; I came to offer such aid as I could….”

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 10

He was all alone in the empty land, surrounded by people whose souls he could not sense at all. He was in hell, with no hope of earthly salvation.

He lashed out, still in a fit of panic—even knowing it was folly; knowing he hovered in delusion. Fire surged up out of the earth and poured down from the sky.

In the last instant he flung it away from the crowd, but he had neither the strength nor the speed to unmake it. It plummeted into the midst of the city. Blood-red flames roared to heaven, then sank down into mortal gold and blue and the black of smoke.

The crowd fled in a chorus of screams. The few with their wits about them surged toward the flames. The rest scattered in panic no less mindless than Henry’s, but far less perilous.

Only the monks were left with the king’s body, and Henry with the drawn and empty sensation of too much power expended too quickly….

— King’s Blood, Chapter 7

Emphases mine.

The Lady of the Lake had a secret. It was nothing mortifying or dangerous, but it might have caused difficulties if certain persons discovered that behind the veils was a maiden younger than Mathilda. Mortals, especially men, needed to see an aged face before they would believe in either power or wisdom.

Her name was Etaine. It was not something she shared with the world, any more than her face or her manifest youth. When she walked abroad from the lake of Avalon, she walked veiled, stately, and mantled in mystery.

Mathilda did not make the mistake of discrediting her wisdom because she had, at the most, fifteen summers on this side of the Otherworld. She remembered who she had been. Her knowledge passed from world to world, life to life, Lady to Lady, back beyond Morgaine and Rhiannon to lives so ancient that even bards had forgotten them.

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 29

Robin sank down where the shade had been sitting. With its passing the air was noticeably warmer, but Robin had begun to shudder. Even for one of his arts and powers, it was no easy thing to converse with the dead.

— King’s Blood, Chapter 12

Emphasis mine.

“…We are no friends to the prince below,” she said, “or any other force for the world’s destruction.”

“Including me?”

“You are no more or less dangerous than ignorance ever is.”

“That’s deadly.”

“It can be taught,” she said, “and will. I am bound to it….”

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 8

Emphasis mine.

“Tomorrow I will teach you how to undo what you have done.”

“That’s not possible.”

Her brow arched. He did not quite see what she did. It had something to do with a gesture of the hand, and some part of it was a slant of the eye and a turn of mind.

The charred branches stirred and cracked. Black scales fell; ash blew away in a sudden swirl of wind. Living branches unfolded, sprouting leaves as bright as the first morning of the world. They glowed in the night. Blossoms budded and bloomed, a cloud of white and palest rose. Their scent enveloped him in sweetness.

William’s mouth hung open. He could barely muster wits to shut it.

“You are meant for more and better than this,” she said, “but whatever you have done, you must know how to undo. It’s a law of our order.”

“‘Our’ order?”

“You are born to it, and reborn, for ages out of count.”

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 8

Emphasis mine.

Mathilda sat where she always sat, among the oldest students, young women who would be passing through the shadow and the fire come the dark of the year. A few would emerge as Ladies [of the Wood] of full power and learning. Many would die in the testing.

— Judith Tarr, Rite of Conquest, Chapter 17

Every year at Beltane, one or more of the young women in the acolytes’ house passed through darkness and fire. Then they were Ladies of the Isle; or they were gone.

— Judith Tarr, King’s Blood, Chapter 33

Emphases mine.

“You can’t leave me in this condition. What if I blast the king, or one of his courtiers?”

“You won’t,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Magic costs,” she said. “Go to the kitchens first, before you sleep.”

“I’m not—”

“Do it.”

She had laid a binding on him. A fugitive memory told him what it was. Then the griping in his belly bound him more tightly still.

He was ravenous—starving. He was dizzy with hunger. If the cooks were not awake, he would raid and pillage on his own. Then he would sleep like the dead.

Not the worst battle he had ever fought, on the field or in lordly hall, had taxed his mind and body as this little bit of magic had. Small wonder wizards did not rule the world, if this was what it did to them to try.

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 8

Emphasis mine.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to teach me to read? Then you could go off and do whatever you do when you’re not torturing me, and I could see this blasted nonsense laid out on a page. Writing’s like a map, isn’t it? Only it’s words instead of castles and rivers. Give me a map and I can learn this.”

“Writing would catch it on parchment,” she said. Her knuckle rapped his much-abused forehead. “You need it in there. The powers you’ve been facing, and will face, won’t wait for you to run to a library before they crack open your skull and suck out your brains.”

William realized he was gaping. He did a great deal of that when he was with Mathilda. “You are the most indelicate noblewoman I have ever met.”

“This is not a delicate art,” she said….

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 8

Emphasis mine.

It was still broad daylight, though the shadows were lengthening. The warmth of early spring was giving way to a creeping chill. Turpin shivered. Roland tossed a new log on the fire, feeding it till it swelled to a respectable blaze. He stayed there on one knee….

…Roland seemed lost in a dream, or in contemplation of something very far away from this royal assembly of the Franks. The fire cast ruddy light on his face and lost itself in his eyes. Such odd eyes, yellow as a hawk’s. Sometimes he did not look human at all.

He raised a hand idly, slipping it in among the flames. They licked his fingers. He stroked them as a woman pets her cat. They purred as a cat purrs, leaping, curling about his hand, arching under his palm.

Turpin set his lips together carefully. Equally carefully, and with an effort, he turned his eyes away. Roland was not as other men were. All the Companions knew it; and none of them said a word. Roland was their brother, their comrade in arms. They would not betray him….

— Kingdom of the Grail, Chapter 1

Emphasis mine.

[In The Hobbit, Bilbo] has two other qualities besides [the Ring]. One is luck. The dwarves notice this more than once, with Thorin for instance saying, as he sends Bilbo down the tunnel to the dragon, that Bilbo is ‘full of courage and resource far beyond his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance’ (chapter 12). Earlier on, after Bilbo had rescued them from the spiders, ‘[the dwarves] saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions’ (chapter 8). This belief that luck is a possession, which one can own, and perhaps even give away or pass on, may seem to be characteristically dwarvish, i.e. old-fashioned, pre-modern: it is a commonplace of Norse saga, for instance, where there are many lucky and unlucky cloaks, weapons, and people.

— J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, p. 27

Author’s emphasis.

From the shaman’s point of view, water contains universal knowledge because its journey takes it to every corner of the physical universe; rain from the sky soaks deep into underground wells and springs, eventually feeding rivers and lakes, finally leaving the earth as mist and fog and rising to the sky, completing the circle. The fountain expresses this wholeness and completeness for its water is continually recycled. The circular dynamic of fountains (and all springs or rivers) symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites; since water flows through all arcs of the circle, it unites all polarities.

— Fire in the Head, p. 127

The old timers tell stories of swords that were finely wrought and yet cruel: setsuninto, killing swords. They were weapons whose inmost essence drove their owners mad. Other blades were as cruelly beautiful, but imbued with a spirit that inclined to do good. They sang in their scabbards to warn of danger; they were bright and clear and miraculous things and, in the right hands, could be katsujinken, life-giving swords.

— Kage, prologue

Early inhabitants of Crete may have believed that the kingdom of snakes enjoyed a special affinity with the gods; they seem to have known, for instance, that snakes, when called upon by the gods, carried out demands. Snakes came to people with messages; they stood as portents, executed miscreants, or indicated actions to be taken or avoided. In due time, gods were known to take the form of snakes in order to inflict good or evil upon mortals, and mortals were careful in dealing with snakes.

— Athena: A Biography, pp. 27-28

As ‘masters of fire’, shamans and sorcerers swallow burning coal, handle red-hot iron and walk on fire. On the other hand, they have great resistance to cold; shamans in the Arctic regions as well as the ascetics in the Himalayas, thanks to their magic heat, show an incredible resistance. The true significance of this magic heat and of the ‘mastery over fire’ is not difficult to divine. These powers indicate access to a certain ecstatic state or, on another cultural plane (in India, for example), to an unconditioned state of perfect spiritual freedom. The mastery over fire and insensibility both to extreme cold and to the temperature of burning coals, translated into ordinary terms, signify that the shaman or yogi have gone beyond the human condition and have achieved the level of spirits.

— The Forge and the Crucible, p. 81

Let’s begin by looking at the most widespread and celebrated of all mythic monsters—the dragon. This creature, in one guise or another, appears in almost every mythology and has been the subject of many books and countless articles. Perhaps the most intriguing of these examinations is An Instinct for Dragons by anthropologist David E. Jones. Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years. The three predators are the leopard, the python, and the eagle.

— Deadly Powers, pp. 162-63

Regardless of their different sizes, features, and forms, monsters have one trait in common—they eat humans. Whatever else they may do for us psychologically, monsters express—and ex-press—our dread of being torn apart, eviscerated, chewed, swallowed, and then shit out. This shameful fate of those who are eaten is confronted in an African myth in which a giant predatory bird swallows the hero whole day after day and then excretes him. Myth after myth confronts the stark facts of being consumed by a larger creature, obsessively depicting in graphic detail what both monsters and animal predators naturally do—turn humans into excrement. The stories express “the most basic anxiety of every living being”: “being swallowed and eaten.” One sees this anxiety throughout world myth.

— Deadly Powers, p. 158

Author’s emphasis.

As anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) observes, “[W]e find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.” In The Golden Bough, James George Frazer identifies two basic principles, or techniques, underlying the practice of magic. The first is the law of similarity, which assumes that like produces like, and that the effect resembles its cause. The second is the law of contact or contagion, which assumes that things that once were in contact with each other continue to influence each other at a distance after the contact is over. Frazer calls magic that is based on the law of similarity “imitative,” or “mimetic,” magic.

In mimetic magic, the created image is thought to somehow capture the essence of the object it represents, so that what is done to the image is thought to be done to the object (immediately or in the future).

When an act of symbolizing, whether through drawing or mimetic enactment, “represents” what is absent, it gives the object a sort of life and reality. The more realistic the image or enactment, the more vivid and powerful the impression that the object has been summoned and is thus under control. Again, it is not the actual thing itself that is invoked through mimesis but the essence or spirit of the thing that it made to appear before us “through the metaphors and symbols that ‘give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.'”

Hunting peoples have long used imitative magic to “summon” and “control” the animals they hunt. Typically, an image of the prey animal is drawn so that it can be pierced by spears or arrows in the belief that this mimetic enactment will influence future events. Ojibwa hunters, for example, chant the following words over a drawn depiction of the prey animal, “I shoot you in the heart, I shoot you in the heart, O beast! I hit your heart.”

— Deadly Powers, pp. 123-24

Author’s emphasis.

The alchemist, like the smith, and like the potter before him, is a ‘master of fire’. It is with fire that he controls the passage of matter from one state to another. The first potter who, with the aid of live embers, was successful in hardening those shapes which he had given to his clay, must have felt the intoxication of the demiurge: he had discovered a transmuting agent. That which natural heat—from the sun or the bowels of the earth—took so long to ripen, was transformed by fire at a speed hitherto undreamed of. This demiurgic enthusiasm springs from that obscure presentiment that the great secret lay in discovering how to ‘perform’ faster than Nature, in other words (since it is always necessary to talk in terms of the spiritual experience of primitive man) how, without peril, to interfere in the processes of the cosmic forces. Fire turned out to be the means by which man could ‘execute’ faster, but it could also do something other than what already existed in Nature. It was therefore the manifestation of a magico-religious power which could modify the world and which, consequently, did not belong to this world. This is why the most primitive cultures look upon the specialist in the sacred—the shaman, the medicine-man, the magician—as a ‘master of fire’….

— The Forge and the Crucible, pp. 79-80