Talk:Necromantic Mnemonic Rituals
While I understand that Phineus Niger created these rituals, and I understand that some of you have cast them from time to time...are they written down? How does memory of an exacting ritual stay so firmly entrenched in the minds of Bolverk and such? I am having problems with rituals, while I get that they can be learned...there is a reason magic users are known bibliophiles...you need a book to read to keep them. I am questioning this usage in the Dark ages...because Phineus and all his works are in the far future. Can someone help me on this? Keith 22:37 MST 10/01/2018
Keith - A ritual is a complicated and more powerful version of a spell. What is a spell? Damn good question. I would like to reference Aleister Crowley in this regard, but he is quite long winded and it isn't truly necessary to know what a spell is in the real world or what Crowley thought it was in any case.
Rather I would like to go with a more appropriate source: Blood Magic - Secrets of Thaumaturgy, page 16. In hedge magic, also known as sorcery, magic is divided into paths and rituals. Paths are codified schools of magic that combine a progression of effects united by a common concept. A path may concentrate on a given effect (like Lure of Flames), a component (the Path of Blood) or any other ideal.
A ritual on the other hand is: "A set of behaviors that produce a reliable effect, most similar to the fabled "Spells" of wizards. A ritual often requires time to cast as well as some sort of physical component that serves to focus the blood magic on the task at hand.
What does all that mean? In essence, the magician is a cook in the kitchen. He or she has a special work space, ingredients and tools for producing a meal. Virtually any cook can boil an egg or make Ramen. People at home either throw food together from recipes or cook from memory. Sorcerers (hedge magicians) including vampiric thaumaturges and necromancers to name only a few, their magic is static and pretty much unchanging. Initially they do need books of recipes and it helps to have good books. It also helps to have innate talent. But after a while, after you have made the same recipe dozens, hundreds or thousands of times, the act of making a specific meal becomes habit. But sorcery is static magic, so every ritual is a recipe, and once you have mastered a recipe its kinda hard to forget.
The books come in when you want to record what you have memorized for posterity, so others can learn your rituals or as works of reference. Reference works are a godsend, they give the sorcerer research material to move forward on paths and rituals, and to create something new. Is there a practical limit to how many rituals a sorcerer can know, not really. How many cook books have you read? Lots right? Of course you probably didn't memorize each recipe verbatim, but you still know how to make a vast variety of recipes - am I correct? If I put you down in a kitchen with all the recipes you know, but no cook books, I am sure you could figure out how to make a lot of things and many of them would essentially be the recipes you had read all those years ago.
So what I am getting at is this, sorcerers are cooks in a kitchen. Some are very skilled and some can barely follow the instructions in a cook book. The characters you are dealing with are all amateur chefs with decades of practice. Unlike the Tremere they aren't professionally trained and certified, but they know their business and they have picked up a lot of recipes (rituals & paths) over the years.
However, I think the question you should be asking is this: does the current paradigm support much of the magic they are using? That is an entirely different question and one that would affect which magics work and which did not and most importantly, how reliably that magic might work. For all intents and purposes, the coterie has been using magic regularly that is decades or centuries from being discovered by the historically appropriate figures. That very fact could have far reaching consequences on the current paradigm and could conceivably shift it in one direction or another.
I hope I answered at least part of your question and gave you some food for thought. -- "The Magister 01:08, 2 October 2018 (MDT)"
