[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The trouble is that I try to ignore our royalty, so I can't help much with their lives and contacts. Following Canadian, US, and academic politics is dizzying enough :)

I knew next to nothing about the Windsors when I got this idea. Now I can't help but feel quite fond of the old girl and the idea of royalty as a whole.

Even if we count the Crown Estate as 'morally' the rightful possession of the citizenry, the cost of the monarchy still comes out as only 70p per Briton* a year; while the revenues of the Crown Estate that George III willingly passed into the control of his ministers really mean that far from costing the taxpayers anything, the Royal Family has been subsidising the cost of government by quite a bit for the past couple of centuries.

Compare this to the cost per person for having a symbolic head of state in a democracy, like our (formerly) powerless President, and I'd say that Her Majesty is an unadulterated bargain as a greeter of foreign dignitaries and tireless cheerleader for charity, schools, hospitals, etc. Not to mention that unlike a failing political infighter, like the usual run of Presidents in countries where his job is to be a symbolic head of state, many people actually enjoy meeting a living link with Great Britain's past.

Archaic and quaint survival, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad thing.

*The rest of you Commonwealth people get them entirely for free.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The Brywn Mawr Classical Review is a good place to search for recent books on ancient history. The one on that translation is here.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I have seen it suggested that the seventeen-document Corpus is the result of medieval editors purging out the more actively magical texts on theological grounds.

Hence the need for specialist scholars and academics to research the original sources before you can recover any kind of functioning magical system.* In-setting, most of what has been written on the subject and certainly nearly everything easily available in print form, is simply wrong. The real rituals are found on manuscripts that aren't widely available.

Many scholars among the Shadow Court, in fact, theorise that the act of printing many copies of a ritual serves to contaminate the specific magical pathways it relies on, in a similar fashion as employing modern technology to prepare ritual artifacts reduces their efficiency.

Others go so far as to claim that wide knowledge of a given ritual serves to disperse the focused act of will necessary to enact it with success. In a similar fashion as with languages, the conflicting thoughts and beliefs of large numbers of people, when applied to magic words or specific of ritual, appear to render them harder to use, perhaps because too many people are unconsciously half-triggering them for varying and contradictionary purposes.

In general, the scholars among the Shadow Court think that the supernatural is shaped by the beliefs of humanity, but it's not just a simple matter of reality changing to match the majority views. If too many people have contradictory beliefs about something or use a given word or gesture too much for differing purposes, the result is somewhat unpredictable. It certainly seems that the ways to manipulate the paranormal rely partially on their uniqueness, becoming less reliable if they appear in the daily lives of too many people.

*In a magical world, original sources can get a lot more interesting than parchment or calfskin. Some spirits will claim to remember historical events, even unimaginably ancient ones, and at least a part of those who do really did have useful information to contribute about the proper ways to perform magical rituals. Of course, a slightly higher proportion of those spirits who made such claims were trying to trick the researchers into wasting their time, performing rituals that were dangerous to humans or rituals that empowered the spirit in question somehow. Spirit-assisted paranormal and historical research is something like a combination of interrogating congenial criminals, sifting truth from the drunken ramblings of senile braggarts and doing research into WMDs using the learning-by-doing method.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I am told that a lot of continental libraries work on the “have I had dinner with him?” method of access control, at least for anything mis-filed or obscure (although right now the French and some German libraries are trying to digitize everything in their collections).

This method of of access control is one of the reasons why the Shadow Court recruits academic members not only based on their GURPS skills, but their prestige, status and connections. It helps, of course, that those academics known to the close circle of people around HM the Queen will tend to be one or more of well-born, tenured professors at prestigious universities or world-renowned for some reason.

If only I could find more academics who had been honoured by the Queen personally, i.e. with those honours that are in her private gift and not just formally granted by her while actually controlled by her ministers.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

And there are a lot of miscellaneous manuscripts that have been ignored since a cataloguer flipped through them a century ago. You would have to stretch to find anything much older than 300 CE that way (the people who classified those manuscripts were very eager to find ancient texts) but there is plenty of room for a cache of medieval texts to turn up.

And looking for such caches is an important job for many of the academic recruits to the conspiracy. Even if the official government is unwilling to credit the existence of magic, the Shadow Court means to ensure that when it does, Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries have a corpus of paranormal lore that is second to none, just waiting to be taught to carefully selected people who will form the new public magical services.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

One more tidbit: OCR software hates scholarly editions of complicated ancient documents like papyri or lead tablets. The combination of different scripts, different languages, and all sorts of specialized markup such as dots under the letters tends to produce gibberish.

Good, good. It gives me a plausible reason for the Shadow Court academics to have to make physical visits to places where certain old manuscripts are stored, instead of just checking them through their laptops.