Circle of Sympathetic Lore

Mytherceria Rituals ☆ Kingston Sparks

“Everything the Power of the World does Is done in a circle. The sky is round, And I have heard that the earth is round Like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, For theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again In a circle. The moon does the same And both are round. Even the seasons Form a great circle in their changing, And always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, And so it is in everything where The Power moves.”

— Black Elk, Medicine Man of the Oglala Sioux Nation

Preface

The Circle of Sympathetic Lore also know as the Circle of Blood and Iron is a Kiasyd ritual, as such it is a magic eldritch in nature and result.

To understand this concept better it is important to keep in mind that such magics draw power from two radically different sources of power.

Like all vampires Kiasyd draw their power from blood, but they also draw much of their power from the Dreaming. Where these two forces meet chaos reigns and it is from this crux that the Kiasyd magician must forge an orderly working of magic.

Unlike the more stable and staid sorceries of other blood magicians Kaisyd magic can be very volatile and often unpredictable to in its manifestation.

Introduction

This is a ritual based on the symbolic power of the circle as both a symbol of summoning and multiplier of forces stemming from its perfection of form.

The ritual is a working of meta-magic that is a spell that effect and or alters other spells. Its purpose is to record the residual eminations of a formerly cast spell in order to record and understand that previous spell.

Since the ritual is eldritch in nature, drawing much of its power from the Dreaming, it fills in gaps of information or experience lost from the originally cast spell in order to make it possible for the Kiasyd to learn a version of the original spell.

The caveat here is this, as a working of eldritch meta-magic, the Ritual of Blood and Iron draws upon the darker forces of the Dreaming to fill in the gaps in a unknown and fading spell with the darker creativity of dreams.

As the ritual is also blood magic it requires sacrifice on the part of the caster to achieve this rather difficult feat in short order. The cost is this, each time the ritual is cast the caster is both physically and psychically scarred. The ritual uses iron as a binding and boundary agent and when the ritual is complete it burns a symbolic tattoo or scar into the Kiasyd. This quick and dirty approach to magic allows the Kiasyd magician to learn the spell cast or rather a reasonable and fuctional version of it.

There are inherent issues with learning spells in this way. The first issue is that this method of learning magic is reckless and intuitive rather than through careful experimentation and thoughtful study.

The second problem is that the Kiasyd may not have the proper training to cast the spell and certainly doesn't have the experience and practice to do so.

The third difficulty is that the spell isn't precisely the same spell cast by the other sorcerer, rather it is a reasonable facsimile, and a percentage of the facsimile is creative interpolation.

Lastly there are likely to be significant differences in both the power and scope of the newly learned ritual in keeping with the Kiasyds own level.of experience.

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