A Brief Overview of the Spheres and Their Properties

Spheres

A Brief Overview of the Spheres and Their Properties

So what are these Spheres, and what can they do? That’s another one those things that mages can wax poetic about for months on end. The basic principles involved, however, can be summed up more or less like this:

Correspondence: The Principle of Connection

Everything’s connected in some way. Despite centuries of what’s been called discrete phenomenon perception – that is, the idea that we’re all separate objects and entities that occasionally cross paths – both physics and metaphysics remind us that all things are intrinsically interconnected. Your actions affect me, my actions affect the dog next door, a butterfly flaps his wings and stirs up the proverbial hurricane... that basic idea. Those connections aren’t immediately apparent, of course. If we saw all of the connections between us, we’d probably go insane. It’s no wonder, then, that masters of Correspondence – the Sphere originally called Connection – often seem pretty weird. They perceive unity where the rest of us see division.

Correspondence is the anti-Ayn Rand principle. When you understand this Sphere, you start to recognize connections between places, people, and things, ultimately realizing that the idea of “places, people, and things” is all an illusion anyway. A Master of this Sphere can step across distances, reach into one place and take something into another, and see into areas that appear to be far away unless you understand that all places are actually one single place. Like Papa Legba or the trickster god Hermes, a mage who deeply understands Correspondence transcends the idea of separation. He sees doorways where no one else notices them, learns to open them, and eventually becomes them.

Entropy: Fate, Fortune, and Decay

Change is an innate law of the universe. If things stopped changing, everything would freeze into eternal stasis. Even then, though, such stasis is an illusion; sooner or later, that frozen state begins to decay. The Entropy Sphere, then, works with the forces of change and decay, speeding or slowing the effects of mortality.

Entropy throws open the box that holds Schrödinger’s cat. Its principles guide probability, inevitability, and the results of both. Masters of Entropy – who often seem morbid, fatalistic, or terribly cheerful – can force the hand of Chance, boost or destroy someone’s luck, degrade substances, and even destroy thoughts. Entropic mages tend to follow either order or chaos; devotees of order examine patterns and look for ways to reinforce them, whereas students of chaos look for ways to break down those same patterns and guide their energies toward a new beginning. Like the Fates who are often associated with this Sphere, mages pursuing Entropy pick up the threads of Creation, work with them, and eventually cut them off.

Forces: The Principles of Elemental Might

Earth. Air. Fire. Water. Long before the Periodic Table of elements existed, mages realized that the natural elements held power of their own. How could they not? Even now, when we live in houses more stable and climate-controlled than anything else in history (and for that, incidentally, you can thank the Technocracy), the power of a hurricane or firestorm can turn security to ruins. And so, of course, when our forebears turned their minds and powers toward control, the first place they looked for inspiration was probably the elements.

Forces is the Sphere of elemental energies. Although Matter deals primarily in the products of Earth and Water, and Spirit and Prime deal with the Fifth Essence (which is either Spirit or Quintessence, depending on who you ask), the Forces Sphere allows a mage to understand, influence, and eventually command the powers of Air and Fire. Beyond that, this Sphere also grants power over the invisible Forces that drive all earthly elements: gravity, momentum, light, darkness, and even – at its highest levels – the titanic power of the atom. And because of all that, masters of this Sphere command the most devastating energies on Earth.

“Forces” is an appropriate name for this Sphere. Its masters and manifestations are pretty damned forceful. Given the immense powers within their reach, it’s no wonder that Hermetic wizards, Taftáni weavers, and Technocratic troopers seem both arrogant and confident. In the realm of Zeus, you live and die by lightning’s hand. To wield this Sphere, you’ve got to be proud enough to throw your weight around, yet disciplined enough to know where – and where not – to hurl it.

Life: Understanding the Living Form

The frighteningly intimate Sphere of Life is not an Art for weak stomachs or squeamish minds. This visceral discipline celebrates the messy splendors of organic life. Beneath our skins and furs and scales, we’re all pulp and bones and vile fluids. The mage who understands Life accepts our frailties and learns how to heal them, exploit them, and twist them into interesting shapes. And to do that, you’ve got to get your hands very, very dirty.

The rawest and most carnal Art, Life requires both passion and compassion. Its masters are simultaneously the most loving and the most ruthless mages you’re ever likely to meet. These folks can change shapes, heal wounds, cure sickness, rend limbs, turn people into toads, grow trees with a glance, and turn enemies into writhing protoplasm. This is the Sphere of Kali, the Dark Mother who celebrates sex and carnage in her dance, or Aphrodite, whose favors hold the cruel beauty of Life itself.

Matter: Mastery of Inert Substances

Whereas Forces deals with ephemeral elements, Matter deals with things you can hold in your hands. The elemental principles of Earth, Water, and – in the Asian sense – Metal are the dominion of this Sphere and its adepts. Things that bend, break, hold firm, or give way retain solid Patterns... or maintain at least an illusion of solidity... in the Earthly realm, so this Art depends upon taking them apart, strengthening them, or transmuting them into something else.

(An important note: certain substances, like wood or cotton, are governed by the Life Sphere while they’re alive and governed by the Matter Sphere when life has fled. Bones, flesh, fur, and so on pass from Life into Matter when their animating energies are gone. As a result, certain substances that are both alive and dead – most notably, the uncanny forms of vampires – are governed by both Spheres together. Neither Life nor Matter can affect them alone, because they belong to the realms of both at once.)

Matter is, in many respects, an associative Art. Mages often combine it with other Spheres to create greater effects. Prime combined with Matter weaves objects out of apparent nothingness; Time combined with Matter takes objects out of the normal time stream; Entropy combined with Matter causes things to erode; Spirit and Matter shift those things to spiritual ephemera. Although it’s a potent Sphere in its own right, Matter works best when its properties blend with those of other Spheres.

Matter specialists tend to be what you might call crafty, working with their hands, often gauging, tinkering, or deconstructing objects for the sake of further knowledge. Most, if not all, of these mages master arts like carpentry and stonework, and each one of them can hold forth for hours about metallic properties or different grains of wood. Like Daedalus, the godlike inventor from whom early Technocrats took their name, Matter is ingenious yet dependable. Behind apparent inflexibility, they’ll often surprise you, because experts in this field understand how mutable so-called solid materials can be.

Mind: Exploration of Consciousness

“It’s all in your head.” How often have you heard that particular dismissal? And yet, as Mind adepts will tell you, everything in existence is “all in our heads.” Each thought, each sensation, every emotional realization or abstract perception manifests through electrical impulses in the brain that get processed by consciousness. That consciousness is the playground of the Mind Sphere, and its experts can turn everything you thought you knew about reality inside out.

Certain Mind-mages see consciousness as an untouchable abstraction; others view the brain as a complex computer, to be programmed and downloaded at will. Both schools of thought appear to hold some vision of the truth. Consciousness clearly reaches beyond mere physicality, and yet it’s chained – at least for most folks – to our physical forms. In time, a Mind master learns how to uncouple his mental process from his physical state and then project his mind off on astral journeys. Even then, however, a hard blow to the head can scramble his brain and throw his mental mastery out the nearest window.

Mind is one of the fuzzier Spheres – more of an art than a science. Where Matter, Life, and Forces deal with things you can touch and measure, Mind reaches into abstract fields. Thoughts, feelings, impressions, identity – these are the tools and toys of mental magicks. And so, if Mind adepts seem somewhat... heady at times, there are good reasons for their “thought-full” state. Like Odin One-Eye, the trickster seer, such mages scan the horizon, sending out Thought and Memory as their guides.

Prime: Exploration of Quintessential Energies

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a Primal Essence that pulses within all things. Whether it’s bound up into Patterns or flowing through concepts and potential, this Quintessence forms the basis for our world. Mages who explore the mysteries of Prime understand the ebbs and flows of this sublime essence – the “Blood of the Dragon” and the seminal fluid of the gods.

Prime Arts study energies and forms, spotting traces of Quintessence in or between each Pattern and then channeling them to suit the purpose of a mage. Masters of this Sphere can follow Quintessential flows, taste the Resonance of certain energies, shift those energies in or out of Patterns, and thus bring things into being or drain them of the power to be real. Most willworkers know the basics of this Sphere, but very few manage to master it. Prime’s a slippery Art, easily obscured by esoterica.

As students of the Primal Utility Theory can tell you, Prime energies tend to ebb and flow around living things... most especially around people. When human beings invest themselves, emotionally and intellectually, in something, that something tends to gather Prime energies. Your favorite shirt has more Prime energy than one just purchased off the rack at a store because you have put more of yourself into that Pattern and its energies. Thus, certain students of the Prime principles view their magick in terms of strange math and hypereconomics, calculating the sublime energies involved in transactions between living and unliving things. By tracing those connections, they believe, you can manipulate those energies as well.

Like the energy for which it’s named, the Prime Sphere is sublime, transcending firm analysis or concrete definitions. Its adepts speak in riddles and metaphors, often blazing with charisma and robust health. Yet despite their bright personas, they have quicksilver personalities. Prime is the milk of Kuan Yin, the spit of Jesus, the blood of Tiamat – an essence both rarified and vulgar, whose properties energize all things.

Spirit: Accord with Spiritual Essence and Emanations

Despite materialistic preconceptions, any mage – even a Technocratic one – understands that matter is just part of Creation’s Tapestry. Beyond the physical mass of Matter, the consciousness of Mind, and the energies of Forces and Prime, there’s the ephemeral quality of Spirit: an element distilled from – or perhaps the originating source of – those other components. In some schools of occult thought, Spirit is the fifth element, the rarified soul-stuff of the Universe at large. To other outlooks, Spirit is the core of every living thing, the Resonance of life, or the alternate dimensions to the Earthly plane. All perspectives agree on this much: Spirit transcends the physical elements, yet it has a consciousness all its own.

One of the earliest magickal pursuits, the Spirit Sphere encompasses the Otherworlds, Umbral entities, and the principles of the human soul. Like Mind, it’s impossible to quantify with precise measurements. The word spirit comes from the Latin term for breathing, so certain mages call this Art “the Breath of the World.” This is the primal Art of the shaman and the priest, the bridge between what we feel with our hands and what we feel with our souls.

(Dimensional Science specialists have a somewhat more scientific approach to this weird Sphere. Even then, though, they often admit that many things remain beyond the reach of science... for the moment, anyway.)

Spiritual mages have an otherworldly air about them – sometimes spacey, often serene, frequently capricious, and occasionally cruel. They tend to get impatient with the importance that folks place upon material things. Spirit magicks echo with the cackle of Coyote and the throaty laugh of Baron Samedi – a mockery of the so-called real world and its denial of infinity.

Time: The Perception of Chronological Flow

The most confounding Art of all, Time skirts the strange domain of Chronos, titan of eternity. The Ecstatic Tradition once named itself after that legendary titan, and few other mages understand Time’s principles as well as the Ecstatics do. More abstract than Mind, more ephemeral than Spirit, this Art dizzies anyone who tries to understand it. Mages who manage to unravel Time’s mysteries can look forward or backward, slow or speed time’s momentum, or even step outside the passing minutes, hours, and years of our lives.

Like Correspondence, the Time Sphere confounds rational analysis. Its principles go against everything you’ve been taught to believe. Perhaps the human mind needs drugs in order to accommodate such levels of temporal dislocation. We all get those feelings that “this has happened before” or “this seems to take foreverrrr...” Only a Time mage, though, can truly comprehend the fluid nature of time and turn it to her advantage.

Like running water, time has currents, tides, and undertows. Going with its flow is far easier than going against it. Mages who work with time understand that turning back the clock is incredibly difficult, even for masters of this Sphere. If you think of time like a strong tide – pushing against you with unfathomable force, splashing you when you struggle to push back – then you’ll understand why certain feats, like time-travel, are vulgar as far as the Consensus is concerned.

Time masters tend to be either dreamily distracted or fanatically precise. They can be punctual within a split second, answer questions you haven’t asked yet, and speak in an eternal present tense. There’s no past, present, or future to the masters of Time. In the words of Janis Joplin, “It’s all the same fucking day, man”... a day they can stretch or compress at will.

Final Thoughts

Whether you view the Spheres with a Tradition’s respect, a Technocratic analysis, or some other cultural outlook, these nine principles give you a metaphysical toolkit. Combined with Awakened awareness, focused belief, and dedicated willpower, the Spheres turn the keys in Reality’s doorway and invite you in to have a look around. For those of us who understand their ways, there is no truer form of magick. Lesser sorcerers and Night-Folk have their own powers, true enough. None of them, though, can do the things we do.

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