A Beginner's Guide to the Fundamentals of Magic:

What is, “Magic?” The term, “magic,” is used as a sorta metonym for the greater scientific and philosophic fields, arts, and studies of the forces of creation, destruction and reconstruction in much the same way that the catchall word, “love,” has become a kind of metonym or synecdoche for the myriad of emotions and concepts that the ancients would classify as constituting the different types of, “love.” According to Imperial tradition, the study of magic began not long after the creation of the world, when man first questioned the circumstances of both his own birth and the world’s and achieved the first state of jijnasa and, as a result, it was revealed unto him by the residual echoes of Isvara the exact nature of the creation of all the worlds.

In the beginning it is said that the supreme Isvara, the omnipotent and omniscient God of all gods, and the source of all things material, immaterial and emotional grew bored one day of his perfect eternity, as being the source of all thought and emotion means to share and encompass all realms of potentcies of possible thought and emotion, both familiar and foreign to the mind of man, including our own familiar desires for growth risk and disgust of stagnation, as well as the opposite comforts of absolute certainty. As the primordial monad, the supreme Isvara encompassed these dueling desires just as man does now, however, just as man is afflicted now, so was the supreme Isvara unable to find a harmony between these dueling desires in his void of perfect entropy as it is common knowledge that the sensations of, “true-risk,” and, “true-growth,” are now and have ever been and always will be the only two things truly capable of elluding the grasp of any being so, “perfect,” it subsumes the critiques of mortal death and transcends the restrictions of resources and the bell-curve of progress, knowing only perfect birth and limitless potentcies.

And so, the supreme Isvara resolved to reconcile the rift in his heart of hearts torn asunder by the dueling desires within by laying down to rest, and undertaking the imagining of a great dream. A dream, not unlike certain dreams of mortal men, where the mind flies free of the physical body and might all at once look down at oneself as if seeing a mirror image, moving their limbs and pulling faces while they stare into their own eyes, and even begin to see through the eyes of others and themselves and no-one all at once, like holding one eye open and the other up to a kaleidoscope to behold two worlds at once. So began the cycle of mortal creation, destruction and reincarnation for the first time ever, as the myriad of the supreme Isvara’s mind’s-eyes began to partition themselves among the minds of the first men and their descendants as they rose from the clay of the supreme Isvara’s body within the dream like how a balding man sheds hair, while the body became liberated from its free-roaming mind and settled down to form all the worlds of Prakriti and Pruhasa. And the limbs of the primordial monad’s dream-body that wished to liberate themselves from the earth, but did not wish to undergo henosis and reform with the supreme Isvara’s mind undertook upon themselves a second kenosis and became the ancient gods of old; the ancestral guardian spirits and deva-kings and ecological-egregores of legend!

And soon, as the new minor isvaras, those “ancient gods of old,” began disseminating the plemora of the nature of creation to man there began a war amongst the heavens, as certain isvaras became conceited and ostentatious, covetting all who would listen as disciples and maid-servants of their own prerogatives, and began to wish for even greater kenotic autonomy so as to style themselves as new true-gods among the realms of Prakriti and Pruhasa, whilst other isvaras began instead to long for a reunion with their mind’s-eyes and sought to melt back into the primordial monad. Before long, the henotic-minded gods began to transform themselves into runic eucharists to be consumed and consummated by their human so that they may join together and be lost once more to the greater “life” of the supreme monad as outside the dream, while the kenotic-minded isvaras retaliated by taking their own followers as concubines and consorts, and twisting them instead in their own images to use consummated shock-troops against the forces of henosis in the arms race for the hearts and minds of men. The war raged on, long and bloody, scarring the Earth and scouring the Mind, and claiming the lives of many men and gods alike for the unintended collateral sake of the cycle of reincarnation that was now spinning out of control, until enough gods had died and enough lives been lost so as to clog up the queues of reincarnation and usher in an era of a great power vacuum, albeit temporary, yet still just long enough for the power of the gods to begin to wane under the shadow of the power men-kings as the new, remaining races of man began to assert their own prerogatives upon the world and begin to carve out fiefdoms and kingdoms for theirselves, until eventually the world was dominated by the empires of men, those creatures descended from the first act of divine kenosis by the supreme Isvara, and their own myriad of descendants.

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Today, throughout the realms of the Eastern Tetrarchy of Daqin, and the lose confederation of provinces and lands belonging to the former Western Tetrarchy of Daqin, now colloquially known as the Fulin Federation, the fields of magic fall on a spectrum between the mystic schools descended from the thaumaturgic teachings of the kenotic-minded gods of old, and those mystic schools descended from the theurgic teachings of the henotic-minded isvaras of old. WIth thaumaturgy being known as the divine art of intercessing the power of qi from the material realms of Prakriti, it is primarily practiced in those regions historically inhabited by the descendants of those human concubines taken by the kenotic-minded isvaras, many of whom identify ethnically as alp-men or, “elves,” colloquially. On the other side of the coin, those descended from the acolytes of the henotic-minded isvaras and their eucharists, most commonly referred to as idle-men or, “plebeians,” are usually practitioners of the theurgic arts instead, and have become masters of contorting and twisting their body’s meridian veins into terrific knot-shaped sigil-circuits so as to intercess qi directly from their more dominant link to Pruhasa and the mind of the supreme Isvara via their shared mind’s-eye. Although plenty of plebeians have been known to both practice and even become quite skilled to the point of mastery in thaumaturgy, and vice-versa with elves in the theurgic arts as well, as not only must one have a firm grasp of the basics of Wuxing elemental relationships in order to practice magic on either ends of the spectrum, but various minor and even specialty schools of magic are known to require knowledge of both thaumaturgy and theurgy in order to study, such as the primarily theurgic schools of offensive pyromancy spells requiring at the very least basic knowledge of thaumaturgy in order to ensure that the shot isn’t harmessy dissipated by a basic warding spell, or the traditionally thaumaturgic college of mycolomancers with their recent forrays into the art of cultivating mycorrhizal networks through magical means and twisting the roots of the network into sigil-circuits much like a theurgic cultivator would bend and contort their meridian veins in order to allow the major and minor elements to flow through qi transistors and dantian batteries.

Of course, most innovations in human technology usually has the potential for misuse as well as good, and magic has never been any different. For examples, one need look no further than so-called, “consecrated kobolds,” usually found within the deep glades of rural regions that were traditionally majority ruled by Thaumaturgic monastic protectorates and their orders. Extremely insular, and seldom found outside of their ethnic enclaves, kobolds are the descendants of degenerated elvish-men who were stripped of their spiritual and cognitive powers of jijnasa, usually as a sacred rite of passing into some hollowed social caste. As a result their descendants are more animal than man, often completely feral and un-housebroken. Although surgeries do exist to re-induce the apotheosis of jijnasa within them again, the procedure is still as of yet highly experimental, and even many a theurgic apothecary would hesitate to prescribe it. Just as well, unbalanced study of the theurgic arts have been known to produce many an abjuration as well, beyond a doubt most notably those calling themselves the, “kaizo-kin.” As it was discovered that, through divine apheresis, the human body could conduct such elements through its meridian lines in much the same way the mycolomancers found their first model mychorrzial-networks were capable of conducting electricity through earthern circuits, and most other elements as well. However, even using dantians as transistors and meridians in place of copper traces, the average human body can only conduct so much electricity, water, fire, earth and whatever-else-have-you before the act of cultivating these elements in the body in excess of what the usual levels of them present in the body’s natural qi cycles are would eventually prove fatal eventually without stopping to perform an elemental purge through the art of misogi. And so, in order to keep pace in their arms race with the mycolomancers’ own advancements in the field of the study and cultivation of mychorzzial-network mandalas, many theurgic masters begin to look into the potentcies of lab-cultivated limbs and philter-grown muscles and meridians, resulting in mages who were more prosthetic mail and metal than men.

Of course, proponents of such carnal abjurations abound regardless, often defending the claims to their positions with the justifications of such lineage-martyrdom being necessary for the sake of progress, as the development of consecrated kobolds and other such beastmen juujin has produced in many areas, a steady supply base for those looking to file their regular rank and file with disposable guardsmen or for those unable or even unwilling to hire foederati and sellswords. Just as well, advancements within the kaizo-kin cults have led to many a theurgic mage finally being capable of competing once more on level footing with thaumaturgic wizards and their fossil fueled mychorrzial-staves and yi-wo-feng gourd blunderbusses.