09-24-2017, 05:41 PM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: foci in MtA
Quote:
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
09-25-2017, 03:35 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
|
Re: foci in MtA
Quote:
If you want an old-fashioned theory of mental process from the real world, well, there's no real distinction between mind and soul until the 1700s, and it took a while to catch on. But from what I remember of the WW system it makes a very definite distinction between Spirit and Mind. So you're a bit stuffed, really.
__________________
Podcast: Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice Gaming stuff here: Tekeli-li! Blog; Webcomic Laager and Limehouse Buy things by me on Warehouse 23 |
|
09-25-2017, 05:18 AM | #23 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
|
Re: foci in MtA
How about the products of disciplined thinking as foci for Mind? Dictionaries, books on mathematics and formal logic, collections of poetry, and so on. Euclid's Elements seems especially appropriate.
__________________
The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
09-25-2017, 09:55 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: foci in MtA
Quote:
Looking at Benedek Lang's Unlocked Books, I see that he talks about five varieties of magic—natural magic, which relies on the occult powers of natural substances; image magic, which uses signs to focus magical power into objects; alchemy; divination; and ritual magic, which involves calling up spirits and bargaining for their aid. (Ritual magic includes divination by crystal balls, mirrors, reflecting pools, and the like, and probably also talking with mediums, because there's thought to be an element of "bargaining with the devil" in this.) Divination in turn seems to have three subtypes: looking for natural signs, as in physiognomy; manipulating humanly created signs, as in sortilege, or casting lots to seek a sign (in a sense, dice-based RPGs are a form of this!); and an intermediate case, numerology, where you treat names (humanly created, but not primarily for magical purposes) as if they were natural signs. Magic as defined in Ars Magica, one of the ancestral sources of Mage, seems not to be about "ritual magic" in this sense. Oh, you could call up spirits using Mentem, and perhaps command them, and send them on errands. But AM mages who want to start a fire don't usually seem to call on fire elementals to do it. A lot of their magic seems to be just directly acting on fire, or animals, or the human senses and their impressions. And I think that in the same way, while an OoH mage could call up a spirit that has the power to set things on fire, they could also just put together natural correspondences that increase the potential for fire, based perhaps on the affinities of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, and not involve spirits at all. Anyway, gaining knowledge of other people's thoughts would seem to involve things like physiognomy, or numerology, or oneiromancy. In fact, just yesterday, C was talking about her art history course, which includes discussion of the canon, a scheme of ratios that's said to define the ideal human form for artists; and that made me think that this would fit in very well with numerology, on one hand, and with divination by facial features and bodily proportions, on the other. So physiognomy could be a basis for gaining knowledge of people's characters. The thing that's problematic is that physiognomy doesn't seem to be a good way to cast spells on people. Short of plastic surgery, that is! But the cognitive use of signs, where X is a sign of A and you know A by seeing X, is hard to reconcile with the conative use of signs, where X is a sign of A and you bring about X to bring about A. it might be that a Hermetic mage needs one set of signs for divination, and a different set for thaumaturgy.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
09-25-2017, 11:13 AM | #25 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
|
Re: foci in MtA
Questionable. I'm not sure either group welcomed the idea of the subconscious. But for inspiration for the OOH I'm totally down with Jungian Archetypes.
|
09-25-2017, 11:30 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
|
Re: foci in MtA
Quote:
What I'm mainly thinking of about Freud is his lack of interest in the occult and his attempt at biological explanations for human behavior (flawed though it was). He classified religion as an "illusion," founded on wish fulfillment. That would definitely not put him on the side of the Traditions. And Bernays, one of the pioneers in psychologically based mass advertising in the 1920s (he put together the "torches of freedom" march of women smoking cigarettes), was a follower of Freud. That's exactly the sort of thing the NWO would go for, I think. But most of that is in the future.
__________________
Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
|
09-26-2017, 03:48 PM | #27 |
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Atlanta GA
|
Re: foci in MtA
I found https://i.pinimg.com/236x/21/d8/0a/2...rs-number-.jpg Dont know the history, but is numerology relating to mind
|
10-01-2017, 10:35 AM | #28 |
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Sacramento metro, California
|
Re: foci in MtA
There are a lot of good foci, which they call instruments, in Mage 20th Anniversary. While there's a ton of material on magical practices there, I do like the overall tiers of paradigm (how you believe the world is and how it works) practice (how you work the world and the mythic threads you pull on) and instruments (the memes or items you use to do what you do).
Any Order of Hermes mage should have picked up social domination tricks like eye contact and name-dropping through their apprenticeship. For Mind, the key to controlling one's own is focus and poetry and other ways to get people to work a certain way work well for affecting others. For the numerically inclined, keep a stack of numbers and cards around and you can start getting people to think about the connections between them. Keep showing the same number and then ask someone to pick a number and they are more likely to pick it.
__________________
Currently Running: Without Number family games which use a lot of GURPS material for details when the players start asking(online, sporadically) Waiting For: Schedule Sanity to Play Car Wars and my Fnordcon special alt Car Wars cards! |
Tags |
mage the ascension |
|
|