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youngwizards_dwThere's been an idea running around my head for a couple of weeks now that's given me some questions about how the Manual works in forms other than the book/technology forms that we mostly see it in the books. AWAB mentions how some wizards get the manual as a subconscious "knowledge" type thing, and have to memorize parts of it, but how do the wizards with oral Manuals start off?
Second, I know that the Speech registers as one's native language when spoken, but does this happen when the Speech is written? I think this may have been mentioned in Wizard's Holiday, but I can't remember.
And last thing: How exactly did wizardry work in premodern times with the smaller amount of scientific knowledge than we have today? I'm curious how much the Manual grows, if at all, with human knowledge. It may be that people in previous times just had a lot more to learn in basics from the Manual, but I have no idea, really.
Any thoughts on this stuff? Kind of theoretical, but I figured this was the best place to ask. :)
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Date: 2010-03-18 12:00 am (UTC)as to the rest, I'm not sure. sorry! =)
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Date: 2010-03-18 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 01:22 am (UTC)Oooh. My initial guess is that the premodern wizards (but not before our species' Choice) probably worked in a very different paradigm from the modern wizards, but to achieve similar results (or the results that needed to be achieved back then). I mean, there are fundamental things like precision of naming, volumes, and such that don't change...perhaps the Manual/peridexis took care of the math, whenever it was needed? And as human knowledge grew, the Manual would endeavour to present knowledge in a way that could be comprehended and utilized by the culture of the time. (And anyways, mysterious things can obey predictable laws and be manipulated and still seem miraculous in nature.)
Hm, is there any indication in canon as to when the humans' Choice actually occurred? because an interesting AU could be where our Choice was much more recent than we're thinking, and thus wizards would need more knowledge and understanding to keep up with the ramifications.
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Date: 2010-03-19 10:22 pm (UTC)Personally I think that the human could fall anywhere in between whenever humans started using language to express abstract ideas and the start of recorded history - written history. Which could set off an enormous amount of dithering over what amounts to written language, which is an incredibly daunting prospect.
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Date: 2010-03-18 05:25 am (UTC)As to how humans dealt with all the advanced scientific knowledge in pre-history, my guess is that sort of like how if you are a Wizard, you can speak to anyone in any language, they just suddenly /understood/ the science. I think the Powers probably encouraged those people to learn it, and sped up their ability to understand by a great deal while also making it seem like they weren't. After all, cats and dolphins don't (to our knowledge) know quantum mechanics, and yet the cat wizards and dolphin wizards clearly do.
The reason I say that is because there are apparently WorldGates anywhere there's a big enough sentient population to support one. Presumably some human wizards were using them for transit. It would be kind of weird to be a cave person who hopped into an intergalactic airport, but like the cats traveling out, it's apparently no big deal.
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Date: 2010-03-19 10:18 pm (UTC)My guess is that since the ability to do wizardry is limited to what the wizard believes is possible, wizards were able to do less. Certainly there are always new spells being invented.
Also, with the world gates - I got the impression that while they normally need a large sentient base, occasionally they just randomly show up, like the one in the cave that started the Rirhath B world gate complex.
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Date: 2010-03-19 10:53 pm (UTC)And we see cat wizards using computers, and involved with the computerized Manual. Yet cat culture is definitely not technological.
No, I definitely think that if you're a wizard, you get selected by the Powers to be privy to a lot of knowledge that may still be beyond your local culture. The Powers would rather trust you to make the right decision with the full amount of knowledge needed, than withhold it for cultural reasons and have you fuck up a spell.
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Date: 2010-03-19 10:58 pm (UTC)Look look I wrote a treatise
Date: 2010-03-19 10:04 pm (UTC)Wizards can only do the spells that their worldview allows. If a wizard doesn't believe a spell will work, it won't. This is referred to over and over; it's part of why wizards loose their effectiveness as they grow old.
An example of what this means: in Europe up until the Renaissance the image of the cosmos held Earth in the centre and the planets and stars suspended in crystal layers; I doubt wizards in that time would have had any more the idea of how to deal with other images than that; therefore they would not be able to properly define objects in the sky and would not be capable of performing wizardry on them.
This argument becomes invalid if the knowledge of the cosmos elsewhere in the world is larger (even in that time I think wizards would have had faster ways of transmitting information than non-wizards). If, for example, at the same time in Asia the knowledge of the movements of planets and stars that allowed astronomers to pedict eclipses and such things meant that the wizards there could perform wizardries on the planets etc. But I doubt the manual (or the oral/mnemonic equivalent) would have been able to convey ideas about the set-up of the universe that humans had not though of or at least imagined first (Diane Duane is capable of imagining the things that happen in her books, therefore her characters are able to experience, influence and believe them. Science fiction authors in the middle ages...? Well, I'll leave that to your imagination).
Who knows when human wizards first traveled to the moon, and beyond?
I think that Wizardry before whatever it is we think of as advanced science would have been closer to our perception of magic. Physical objects would be used (the whole eye of newt toe of frog thing gets touched on in So You Want To Be A Wizard, but has gradually disappeared), the other worlds (faerie and etc) would be traveled to and deals struck. These days magic is more like science fiction. Other planets are traveled to as often as other worlds, and words and mathematics and advanced scientific ideas are used to define and redefine the universe.
So wizardry would be used on different things, in different ways.
Science as the pursuit of knowledge has existed for a long time, but at times (such as the dark ages in Europe) it has been frowned on and organisations and people in general have made every attempt to stamp it out. I suspect that during the dark ages wizards had to be enormously circumspect and could not always intervene; it must have been heart-breaking to know that an attempt of theirs to fix things could get the people they were trying to help ostracised.
I don't believe that Wizards suddenly and miraculously understood modern scientific ideas. They would have had more understanding of the world than the average human, but they still would have been working in a very different paradigm to today's wizards.
And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-19 10:10 pm (UTC)These are three tools of wizardry:
a) words
- those accurate descriptions. The Inuit forty words for snow spring to mind; the speech has a higher level of intricacy. That level of intricacy wouldn't have been different before modern science; only the vocabulary has changed. Words would have been used to describe what wizards wanted to do and how they wanted it to happen much as they do today; but the interventions would have been different. They would have been limited to the worldview of the wizards, which would have been limited compared to today's. I doubt the manual spent long periods of time teaching wizards any more than it does today. Wizards learn the basics and then come back for more knowledge when they need it. I could easily imagine Leonardo da Vinci, say, as a research wizard, spending a lot of time consulting the manual AND adding to it, the way research wizards do today.
b) maths
- this follows since maths have been around in relatively modern forms since the ancient Greeks, and a lot of wizardry has always struck as being based more on geometry and algebra rather than quantum mechanics or rocket science. I don't know how maths advanced in Asia, but I suspect that their form of wizardry would have been a combined numero-linguo- school of wizardry. Not all cultures have, use, or need mathematics; therefore some wizards would base their use of magic on words and some on numbers and some on both.
But science can't be viewed as separate from words and maths. With the words and the maths, the science was already there; only the ideas weren't.
c) ideas
- new spells are being created all the time. Nita invents on in Wizards At War, Rhiow has one putting itself together in her head in The Book Of Night With Moon. New spells, new ideas, all of those would be invented and added to the manual. The style of magic would be different, as would the scope. Compare modern art or literature to ancient. Progress is always being made. I think interventions would have smaller in scale, and more delicate, because you couldn't always be certain you were aiming your brute force at the right spot.
Hope this is useful/interesting. And not too much tl;dr.
Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-20 03:20 am (UTC)I think your analysis here and in the comments about how wizard's worldviews would have affected their wizardry sounds about right. I didn't think about the fact that the basics of geometry and algebra have been pretty well-known since a long time, so it wouldn't be way out of left field. I suspect that earlier magic probably focused a lot more on the language aspects of the Speech, like Kit convincing the door to unlock itself, rather than detail-intense interventions that we see in the more science-fictiony parts of wizardry.
There were two separate things I was thinking of when I posted this: One is wizardry in 16th century Europe, and the other is among mid-19th century American slaves. The first comes with a certain amount of detail in the Errantry Wiki, which gives the impression that wizards had a significant heads up with regards to scientific understanding. Sadly I have pretty much no starting point for the second in canon, but I'm curious how wizardry would have intertwined with society and culture in it.
Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-23 07:52 pm (UTC)I think I'll need to check out the entry on the wiki... It's an interesting topic for speculation.
Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-23 10:45 pm (UTC)Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-24 02:26 am (UTC)Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-27 09:40 am (UTC)Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-28 03:40 pm (UTC)Re: And some thoughts on medium
Date: 2010-03-29 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 11:06 pm (UTC)I've always wondered how the Speech can be so descriptive with ONLY 418 (right?) symbols. Just look at modern Chinese! Thousands of characters, one for each word. We see some evidence of that in So You Want to be a Wizard--character for a word, rather than for each letter--when Nita adds the symbol at the end of the Lone Power's name...an arrow pointing up and out, if I recall. That doesn't sounds like Arabic to me...more like astrological symbols, and old alchemical short-hand. And think about the way S'reee "writes" the Speech in Deep Wizardry. She "swims" the symbols, which to me implies that there are actually far more than the 418 symbols human wizards use. ^_____^ I mean, Filif doesn't even have hands, right, so how would he write? Same with any number of non-humanoid wizardly species. I think that the written form of the speech probably looks different to each species, and then non-wizardly people might "interpret" it in a way that makes sense to their mind, rather like how they "hear" it as their own language.
Pre-modern wizardry was, I think, probably ahead of local science, but maybe restricted to on-planet types of assignments. I mean, I suspect that if a wizard in the 1300's had been needed on Titan, their knowledge of the Universe may have been expanded via-the-Manual so that they could understand. Just think of how many things you don't know at this very moment. How many scientists, on the other hand, could be studying those things you don't know? Just because a thing isn't general knowledge, doesn't mean you have to remain ignorant. We have the World Wide Web...pre-modern wizards had the Manual (probably not in a physical form, however, as books would have been FAR too precious, and not to mention odd, if seen in the possession of a peasant), which would function in a very similar way. If I want to know the exact degree to which we can measure light (we can now slow it down far enough to see just exactly where light skips if I understand correctly!), then a medieval wizard could certainly find out which solar body is at the center of the system. But they'd probably also be smart enough not to talk about their knowledge. Who was it who said, "It's getting easier," to tell people about wizardry? I wanna say Tom or Carl, but it may have been Aunt Annie... Anyway, that implies that it's a very recent occurrence, that openness. ^..^
Those are just my thoughts on it. Take 'em as you will.
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Date: 2010-03-24 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 03:45 pm (UTC)Written Chinese uses radicals, which drastically change the meanings. ^___^ If one can learn the radicals, reading Chinese becomes a lot easier, quite suddenly. Now, if only I had realized that six months earlier, rather than at the end of my foreign exchange...! D:
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Date: 2010-03-29 04:13 am (UTC)That must have been infuriating! I'm so glad German uses the same alphabet as English.
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Date: 2010-03-29 04:14 am (UTC)