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Old 07-15-2018, 10:06 PM   #941
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Well, the Caribbean traditions are a synthesis of European, African, and Native American beliefs, meaning that they do not evolve if the Native American Nations kick the Europeans out during the 16th century (Pennsylvania Dutch traditions are also a synthesis of European, African, and Native American magical practices). European shamanism was a closely guarded secret by the 16th century, the Burning Times of the 14th through 16th century had made sure that no European would admit to having any magical knowledge, as they would not want to end up burned at the stake (or otherwise executed), and only reemerged in the folk traditions of the New World. European ceremonial magic was in its infancy, and it was focused on angels and demons anyway, not ghosts and natural spirits. In short, the Europeans had destroyed their indigenous magical traditions through their own religious intolerance, the same religious intolerance that would rip apart the continent in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Old 07-16-2018, 06:20 AM   #942
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by DocRailgun View Post
Why do the Europeans not have a knowledge of shamanism? .
It's a genre convention. Seriously. Magic (or psi or whatever) works but white guys can't use it is a story genre, it doesn't have to make any sense. It works just like any other "strengthening the marginal" alternate, the whole point of the magic is it lets the oppressed races or women to break from their historically disadvantageous position.

It will also fail to alter the history of the non-white people before the contact - they will still all unaccountably occupy the "same" lands and have the "same" cultures on first contact - same getting the quotes because they'll often include details that in fact developed later but are set in the modern stereotype.
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Old 07-16-2018, 08:03 AM   #943
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It also fits the historical facts. In the period between the beginning of the 14th century to the end of the 18th century, anyone who publicly practiced magic would have been tried and executed as a witch. By the end of the 15th century, when the Vatican officially approved the wholesale slaughter of anyone suspected of practicing magic with the Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484, the hysteria against magic use reached a high point and people turned against the practitioners of folk magic.

Depending on which estimates are used, the number of people annually who were tried and execute as practitioners of witchcraft may have been as high as 10,000 people per year throughout Europe, though the average was probably 5,000 per year. Any shamanic tradition that survived the madness that surged through Europe during that period of time would have been very well hidden and would have not had sufficient practitioners to be anything more than a curiosity. It would not be until the early 19th century, when the persecution of suspected practitioners of witchcraft died down, that you would have had a minor resurgence, though it was not really until the late 20th century when it was somewhat safe to be a practitioner of magic in the West. Even so, I witnessed people being physically attacked by fundamentalist Christians for publicly practicing magic in the Southern USA (fortunately, I was there to prevent things from getting out of hand, but it was a really nasty episode that frightened one of my female pagan friends into hiding her religion to this day).
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Old 07-16-2018, 08:24 AM   #944
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Depending on which estimates are used, the number of people annually who were tried and execute as practitioners of witchcraft may have been as high as 10,000 people per year throughout Europe, though the average was probably 5,000 per year.
This is one of those things that's an axiom of religious faith with no actual evidence. Essentially no non-Wiccan historians would agree with anything even close to that number - *high* end estimates run 50-100,000 for the entire period. I'm not sure there are even 1000 cases for which there are actual records.

It's also worth considering that if magic actually works, particularly to the point one could use it to summon enough spirits to repel enemy *armies*, catching and burning magicians is a lot more difficult that it would have been historically. If European inquisitions were able to carry that out successfully, whatever defenses they had that protected them from the Satanic powers of their native targets ought to work against the foreigners too.
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Old 07-16-2018, 11:47 AM   #945
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You presume the defenses work the same way. Maybe European magic actually did rely on demonic forces, so the divine protection of the Church could overcome it. But ancestral spirits, trickster gods, and other deities are not the same thing as European Demons....

Even if the defenses were fully interchangeable, if the Church successfully purged the native magic users, maintaining a working understanding of countermagic protections for centuries of disuse would be quite difficult.

Last edited by PTTG; 07-16-2018 at 12:57 PM.
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Old 08-03-2018, 01:37 PM   #946
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Rothbard is the worldline where total free-market capitalism somehow works. There is a government, many, in fact, but they exist only to enforce contract law.

Corporations are inexplicably prevented from merging, and somehow investors and customers know intrinsically if a given company takes actions which violate their personal ethics. Thus, even though slavery is legal, it's very uncommon as companies which have slaves are universally shunned (except by other slaveholding organizations).

There is a theory that humans from this world are psionic to some degree, or are otherwise modified in order to make this system practable.

Those who won't work go hungry until they change their minds. Those who can't work apparently don't exist here, with the exception of children. Childbearing is a form of paid labor (ha) here, and couples usually have childcare contracts that stipulate who will contribute to the children's wellbeing and training, and what portion of a given child's future income will be received by each parent. In some cases elderly people receive money from their great-grandchildren's wages.

The world is a late TL8 even though the current date is 1926. It looks much more like the modern world than that period in homeline history. For one thing, all nations are neoliberal republics ever since a series of revolutions starting in the 1500s. Clearly technology advances quickly in this world, and nowhere is this more clear than the robotics industry, where new technologies show promise in unemploying a large segment of the workforce. Homeline is curious how this worldline will react. Is it simply fortunate enough that things will just work out somehow, or will millions of people poof out of existence when they are no longer employable?
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Old 08-03-2018, 02:06 PM   #947
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Merry England is a trope with its own Wikipedia page here. And it is a parallel as well. This weirdly jolly but slightly creepy parallel where oppression and feudalism creates happiness for all. The parallel seems to exert a form of mind control. The ignorant and certain reactionaries feel comfortable, and in fact become addicted. Those who are neither ignorant nor hyper-reactionary monarchists are slowly driven mad and hunted down by the mind controlled masses. All of whom have a jolly good time eh wot?
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Old 08-03-2018, 03:20 PM   #948
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So THAT'S where that England always is.
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Old 08-04-2018, 07:48 AM   #949
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Steellife 1

In this parallel lifeforms are based on elements we'd recognize as inorganic such as iron, copper and silicon. Organics are only used in trace amounts much like we use trace minerals in our bodies.

Despite this massive biological shift, the metal-humans living there have a history identical to OTL for the most part. Organics are used where we invented metallurgy, such as superbone dug up out of the earth.

The most recent inventions in BI, Biological Intelligence threaten to oust workers out of their jobs at the factories with their ability to maintain themselves with just fuel and a lack of need for pay.

Their sci-fi has it's own set of BI cliches, much like OTL has it's own set of AI cliches.

This gets the essential idea of this timeline down.
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Old 08-04-2018, 09:41 AM   #950
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In Codex-3 words have magical power depending on how often they are read, with words losing their magical power the more that they are read. Before the invention of the printing press, the words of each book contained sufficient power to make anyone who knew how to read into a magician, meaning that every government was run by magician-nobles and their servants, the magician-priests and the magician-scribes. The common folk created the printing press to break the monopoly of the government over magic and, instead, destroyed functional magic.

It is now the 19th century and civilization is recovering from the consequences of the printing press, as technology is replacing magic. The surviving magicians use texts from dead languages to perform their magic, but technological scholars seek to discover and promote the dead languages in order to destroy their magical power. The surviving magicians also seek to give languages without a writing system a writing system, as a language with only a few thousand people reading produces the magical effects seen before the creation of the printing press.

The invention of the publishing press occurred just when the Europeans were about to discover the Americas, so they found themselves lacking the magic required to counter the magic of the Mesoamerican writing systems. Even the symbol drawing of the Caribbean natives were sufficiently powerful to defeat the weakened magic of the Europeans. In the centuries that have passed, the Europeans have attempted to convince the natives of America to adopt a literate society, but the natives have resisted any attempts to publish and spread their languages.
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