Sorcery is a technique to temporarily bypass or affect the normal laws of nature. As such, they are no more immoral than using a fire to boil water "violates" the natural tendency of the water to remain liquid.
The origins of how to _use_ sorcery came via prophetic revelation, as did the original idea of writing, marriage, and the laws of man. As with these other laws, the idea of sorcery can be implemented many different ways, some very aberrant indeed. But in its basics, here is how magic operates:
SORCERY: by mental discipline, training, and hard experience, a man or woman can learn to alter, suppress, or enhance the law of nature. This is Sorcery. It takes energy to perform this, as there is no free lunch.
THEISM: the natural forces of the world are neutral or benign when viewed in the proper way. Some folk anthropomorphize these forces, and the result is terrifying -- as they project a personality upon the sky, the storm, the earth, etc., the raw force of nature _responds_ to their belief, and manifests a reflection of the worshipers' own savage morality. The primitives then are able to gain magic by enslaving themselves to this malign force, so that they are granted evil powers by it in exchange for their souls. These malign projections are known throughout the world, and primitive humans are especially prey to domination by them.
SHAMANISM: the world is filled with small spirit entities, elemental forces, gradually-decaying ghost relics, and so forth. Shamans enslave themselves to these petty forces and in return gain a measure of cooperation with them, so that they can ally or even control some of these spirits. The result is invariably insanity upon the part of the full shaman, but their spirits can sometimes prove frightening to the unlearned. In truth, they are even weaker and more powerless than the theistic slave-worshipers, for at least the theists are in bondage to a hideous version of their own selves, rather than a random psychic fragment.
MYSTICISM: they have manifested some remarkable abilities, and appear to attempt to follow natural laws in so doing. Sadly, many seem dedicate themselves to false gods in a parallel to the theistic technique, though not quite so degraded. It is even likely that their cooperative emperor-state is able to attain some kind of control over their afterlife, so that their spirits take longer to dissipate than most untrained folk.
Mr. Happy
>How do you violate a physical law?
You cannot violate a physical law. You can merely circumvent it. A bird is not violating the law of Attraction in its flight (by which all things are attracted to the materials of which they are constructed) -- the bird is attracted to the Earth as are all things born upon it, but it is also attracted to the Sky whence its spirit originated, so it is able to float between the two worlds. Upon death, its spirit fragments and returns to the sky matrix, while the corpse falls to the ground.
A sorcerer who evokes a bolt of fire is not violating physical law, he is merely spending his own energy to tap into the source of Fire and letting it through to the world.
Sandy P.
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #327
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
Powered by hypermail