Magic and Latin and other things..

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Lameth

Hello all

This is more of a general question.

I run a massive wod/horror/action/dark conspiracy game for many many years. Over the years inhale build a fairly in-depth history and mythology, but I would like to hear your ideas on a issue I am having.

My magic casters are of various types and schools, but magic is magic, basically. They all have their talents. As example ... There are those that are born with the gift of magic.....in a way the sorcerers are the basic package and street level in a way. People born with a few special natural gifts and if they can get access to incantations they can do those also my. The wizards/mages are basically the same as a sorcerer but raised in a magic rich environment and access to magic, highly educated and broken into various orders, are they are the incantation specialists and this is where power is. then I have none magical gifted ritualists, shamans, witches (born of magic and gifted with witch like natural powers), vampire magic, psionics, and so on and so on.

My question is this.... Latin. So often in movies and books, magic incantations in spoken in Latin more then anything else. I have incantations in all types of ancient and dead languages. But why in your opinion is Latin the most prominent language for magic and incantations? As example.. To those that watch trueblood... The witch/Wiccan spoke witch spells in Latin. I am thinking of why most of the spells in the world and in other movies/books are in Latin and why others are in ancient lost tongues.

So far I have thought that most of the spells made before 100 bc , where lost in the great fall of rome and the dark ages, so the ones left over are those of that time. Sp when u find a spell of sanskrit it's possible very old. But this is only a thought... I'm interested in all you learned and experience gms ideas and thoughts of anything from above, anything.

Not really needing real world knowledge, more what you would do in your game to explain.

Thanks !

Our traditions stem from the Western European Church. Latin as a living and growing language stopped when folks started distinguishing Spanish from Italian. Latin use is ritualized. Dorothy Sayers had her character Lord Peter Whimsey observe Homeric Greek worked better as magical phrasing when pretending to be a wizard in 1920s Basque country however. The locals might recognize Latin.

Further east there is no such tradition for Latin, you'd go from Greek to Japanese at various points and still need Aborigine in Australia.

So for in game purposes, the origination point of your magic should affect your words of power. Think of the 'Uncle' character from the animated series "Jackie Chan Adventures". His magic words were Chinese, not Latin.

[Polydamas]

One possibility is that old, obscure things have power. This helps explain why powerful spells are lost in dusty tomes written in obscure languages, not widely copied in major languages (if you translate them and spread the knowledge, they would lose power!) It also explains the persistence of Sanskrit and Latin as ritual languages in the modern world.

GURPS Fantasy, GURPS Cabal, and GURPS Thaumatology are good for thinking about these issues.

[quarkstomper]

In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, which was a major source of inspiration for the Technomancer world, the narrator explains that an expert in magic "has to know at least one arcane language -- Latin, Greek, classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Old Norse or the like -- for the standard reasons of sympathetic magic. Paranatural phenomena are not strongly influenced by ordinary speech."

Forunately, the hero does know a language that sort of counts as arcane; and so he kit-bashes an incantation using Pig-Latin. It's a feeble spell, he admits, and probably wouldn't have worked at all except that the items he was casting it on had been sensitized to magic.