Clear Cosmology: Prima Materia - Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur (and Chaos)

Alchemical terminology is...a problem. 

Its meaning can vary between texts or hold several meanings in the same document. Alchemical jargon is murky at the best of times because it rests on the spectrum from a hyper-technical term of art to a secret code to out-and-out sacred babble. For this and other reasons, we will exercise some editorial authority to present what we think is the most coherent interpretation of the relevant ideas.

For this article, the offending term is Prima Materia, or “First Matter.”

What is Prima Materia?
Answering categorically, Prima Materia refers to one of two things:

Singular: undifferentiated source matter; Chaos.

Plural: the constituent parts of matter: salt, mercury, and sulfur. 

The latter category is called the Tria Prima, or sometimes the “prime elements.” These are distinct from the four elements previously explored in that the Tria Prima describes the constituency of matter rather than the behavior of matter.

First Matter - Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury

Matter displays three qualities that operate along two axes of consideration. 

The first two qualities are Philosophical Sulfur and Philosophical Mercury, which correspond to the matter’s animate qualities, the Masculine/Feminine axis. Paracelsus referred to these as their combustibility and changeability, respectively. In this context, combustibility refers to a material’s reactivity of form and its chemical action. Changeability is a material’s impressionability or its receptivity to change of form.

The third quality is Philosophical Salt, which is the physical substance or permanence of the material. Between the salt and the animating attributes, the second axis reveals itself as Abstract/Concrete. 

Paracelsus’s model for demonstration was the burning of wood. The fire was the intrinsic sulfur of the wood revealing itself in reaction, releasing the wood’s mercury in the form of changeable smoke, leaving the salt of the wood as ash.

To the alchemists, the admixture of these constituents explains all matter. Proportional and generational variance account for the more subtle distinctions of particular instance. This is why basalt, granite, and clay are different, though all three materials are phenomenologically earth. 

The interaction of the Tria Prima was the framing device for the whole of the alchemical project, the “chemical wedding” of Queen Albedo (mercury) and King Rubedo (sulfur). The first generation of this wedding was supposed to be the seven classical metals, all materials composed of the Tria Prima in different proportions. These proportions could be adjusted by chemical process, such that lead (or even feces) could be brought into perfect balance and made gold.

Employing the Three
How you implement this knowledge in your story may not be immediately apparent. We’ll attack from the distinction between philosophical and material to jump-start the reader's imagination.

The Tria Prima are understood via analogy, meaning that the mercury of the wood that manifests in the smoke is not literal mercury. If the mercury is philosophical (read: abstract), it can be reinterpreted as a variable category. If the smoke of amber differs from that of a virgin’s hair, perhaps their mercuries are also different.

Let’s explore that idea.

Sample Scenario - The Lair of Oroglec the Unconscionable
Oroglec, a ruthless wizard, professional evildoer, and proud dungeon owner, has a security problem. There is a portcullis between his inner laboratory and the outer dungeon. Do-gooder heroes and rival villains drop by often enough that he needs to keep the portcullis closed to preserve his arcane secrets. Still, he passes into the outer dungeon often enough that constantly opening and closing the portcullis is a pain.

Oroglec could hire a goblin to man the portcullis, but the goblin could be bought off, coerced, or killed. He could bind a spirit to the door mechanism, but that could be unbound or banished. Installing a more advanced automatic mechanism would require clearing out more of the earth around the portcullis, which would threaten the structural integrity of the dungeon (not to mention the hassle of managing keyfobs).

He needs something with the qualities of a loyal sentience, with the upkeep convenience of an automatic mechanism. He requires the portcullis to be like…a guard dog.

Oroglec removes the portcullis and subjects it to a chemical bath of mercury of puppies, infusing the iron gate with the trainability and loyalty of man’s best friend. The result is the most ferocious and disciplined guard-door an adventuring party has ever had the misfortune to step through.

And you wondered why dungeons were so weird.

The First Matter - Singular
Despite splitting the term Prima Materia in two and dispensing with one, we still have two Prima Materias! We are burdened again with vague, interchangeable alchemist-speak because the singular form of Prima Materia can refer to both the substance of Chaos and the Philosopher’s Stone!

This is the second time this article that the Philosopher’s Stone has come up, and it will be touched on only so far as is relevant to the matter at hand, which is its relationship to/role as “First Matter.” For a more exhaustive exploration of the Philosopher’s Stone and its properties, see our article on the subject [article forthcoming].

Chaos as Stuff
We discussed Chaos and Order before as principles, but we should have delved into Chaos as a substance in great detail. We fill that gap here:

Chaos (Material) - that which is undifferentiated.

This Chaos goes by many names, almost all of which are interchangeable with the Philosopher’s Stone, but the most important has to be Hyle.

Robert Fludd's [1574-1637] diagram of the universe,
being the intersection of God and the Hyle.

Hyle was the term used by Aristotle when he started examining the notion of physical matter in general. At the time, the Greek language did not have a word that meant “matter” in the abstract; it only had words referring to raw materials. Aristotle chose the word hyle, or “wood” (Lat. silva), to refer to that-which-accepted-shape. 

Aristotle conceived that all four elements comprised this hyle in proportion, using his formulation of dry/moist and hot/cold. The universal quality of Aristotle’s hyle notion readily adapted into a Platonic abstraction (which we’re sure would have annoyed him greatly). 

Aristotle’s four-elements conception was adopted and reiterated by the early Hermeticists. The third book of the Corpus Hermetica, “The Holy Sermon,” describes the four elements* emerging from the primordial mud, which was adopted as one of the universal images of the Platonic Hyle. 

The Hyle, containing all substances without differentiation, merely awaits a shaping Will to impose itself and separate the substances from each other. Where the Cosmic Will differentiates the undifferentiated, Order is established.

*This compiler has separated the four elements and the Tria Prima into the respective categories of phenomena and substance for convenience’s sake. These terms of art were used inconsistently historically, continuing the tradition. Our research indicates that the Tria Prima is an innovation that post-dates both Aristotle and the early Hermeticists by several centuries.

Chaos and the Philosopher’s Stone
Material Chaos is all matter without differentiation. It is, as its name clearly states, Chaos. The Philosopher’s Stone, in contrast, is an ordered, purposed thing. You use it to turn lead into gold! Why, then, do the alchemists use their names interchangeably?

This is because of an essential dogma of alchemy: the Philosopher’s Stone is a revelation of the divine through base matter, and no matter is as base as Chaos. To the alchemist, primordial Chaos is the Philosopher’s Stone, and the only thing preventing the operator from observing this is their own ignorance.

On realizing the Philosopher’s Stone, the Chaos ceases to be undifferentiated, but instead the revealed every-thing in hypostasis! The particulars of what that hypostasis means will be discussed in our Philosopher’s Stone article [article forthcoming].

This allows us to address why both are called the “first matter”:  perspective. One is first in sequence, the other first in hierarchy. In Christian analogy, Chaos is the first matter in the way that Adam is the first man, and the Philosopher’s Stone is the first matter in how Christ is the first man. In another frame, Chaos is Romulus as Rome’s first king, and the Philosopher’s Stone is the Emperor as the first citizen of Rome.

Material Chaos in Popular Fiction
Taking an educated guess, this compiler is sure that most readership will find these ideas familiar in form if not frame. Notions of “material chaos” abound in fantasy fiction, sometimes as an antagonistic force or a source for magical action. It is pretty often wild, destructive, and unpredictable.

We’re sure most of this readership is familiar with at least one derivative, but we’ll share a few of our examples:

Example 1: Brust’s Amorphia
In his Vlad Taltos novels, author Steven Brust sources magic from a literal sea (two, actually) of physical chaos. This stuff, called amorphia, writhes about as a formless, colorless substance that contains all forms and colors within it. It reacts to contact with more stable matter by catalyzing it into more amorphia. 

In-setting, this chaotic energy source is utilized through two forms of magic: "imperial" and "pre-imperial" sorcery. In pre-imperial sorcery, the caster draws directly from a source of material chaos and imposes their will directly and in combination with constructed will proxies (magical devices and arrangements). This is an unstable, high-risk practice. On the other hand, Imperial sorcery draws this chaotic energy through a stabilized conduit called trellanstone, a composite material of amorphia and necrophia, a crystalline analog for the will of an intelligent being. This magic is significantly lower risk, and instances of amorphia mishap don't result in continent-spanning oceans of the stuff.

Chaos Theory by Daniel "Tempest" Emmerling, (2004)

Keep it Simple
Example 1 above might be the cleanest implementation of material chaos this Compiler has encountered. Its relationship to magic is directly articulated. The danger posed by contact with amorphia is demonstrated plainly in the narrative. It’s the most straightforward implementation of material chaos I’ve seen and used effectively. 

There is nothing wrong with simple, straight-forward engagement with storytelling devices.

Example 2: Pratchett’s Octarine
In the Discworld novels of Sir Terry Pratchett, the world is held together by something called the Elemental Magic Force, which takes the place of the electromagnetic force and is responsible for all magical action. Powerful fields of this EMF are marked by the magical eighth color octarine, the color of imagination. Octarine contains all the other colors and is thought to be their source. It’s a sort of fluorescent greenish yellow-purple, and the only people who can see it are those insufferable wizards (and you, when you close your eyes; it's those splotches of color).

Novelty and Sustainability
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a parody of fantasy fiction and many other things besides. The formulation of octarine is a novel way to bridge ancient magical thinking with the incomprehensible jargon of advanced physics, riffing on the systematization of nonsense that abounds in fantasy fiction.

Knowledge of the primordial Chaos inspired Sir Pratchett to stretch one joke through hundreds of permutations across 41 novels. Don’t be afraid to reframe old ideas with new systems and theories, even if only for a laugh.

Example 3: Warhammer’s Warp
The Warp, or Immaterium, of Games Workshop’s Warhammer franchise is an entire universe of psychoreactive immatter. In the Immaterium, space and time are fashions rather than constants, and its unstuff possesses no form while containing all forms. Magic, demons, and unfathomable horror roil in this realm beyond.

Machina ex Opācitās
Often, “chaos” is interpreted as or employed as an excuse for randomness. Introducing “chaos” into the world causes havoc, mutation, disfiguration, or absurdity. This is true in Warhammer, where Chaos and the Warp are a universal justification for everything strange. Warp stuff influences ordinary matter to meta-reaction and psycho-reaction. While the resulting horror tends to be motif-bound or otherwise thematically relevant, the absurd is now on the table. 

Suppose one reaches too profoundly into the Immaterium and loses control. In that case, they might turn into a living garden sprinkler of purple fire, become possessed by a demon, or turn everyone around them into a feral cannibal. They might also replace their vocabulary with precisely what everyone wants to hear, make time run perpendicular, or transmute their bones to children’s toys and bad ideas. 

As explained in our Chaos and Order article, this sort of Chaos tends towards conceptual gags.

Prima Materia-derived all-nothing like the Warp introduces a broad mechanical principle that glosses over physical, chemical, and rational cause-and-effect concerns in your story. If you can sell the audience on this machine-from-opacity, you’re free to indulge the priorities of this kind of story: aesthetic and character.

*    *    *    *    *

See Also:

Clear Cosmology

Introduction to the Elements

Elements - Earth [Pending]

Elements - Water [Pending]

Elements - Air [Pending]

Elements - Fire [Pending]

Elements - Quintessence

Chaos and Order

Magical Materials

Tria Prima - Salt

Tria Prima - Mercury

Tria Prima - Sulfur

*    *    *    *    *

Bibliography

-Drury, N. (2004). The Dictionary of the Esoteric: 3000 entries on the mystical and occult traditions. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. 

-Drury, N. (2005). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic: 3000 entries on the magical traditions. Watkins. 

-Tresidder, J. (2008). The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols. Watkins. 

Clear Cosmology: Chaos and Order

To advance in our investigation of magical thought, we must tackle another duality that needs to be better understood by modern audiences: Chaos and Order.

Chaos and Order, in Abstract

Chaos - that which is not purposed

Order - that which is purposed

Chaos encompasses all non-/un-purposed states, from pre-purpose to perversion of purpose, to that which cannot be purposed. Order is all that is purposed through being shaped or categorized as suitable for shaping. 

These principles can be understood through material examples. Through the categorical notion of Earth, we can recognize the distinction between dust, sand, and clay. 

Fine particulate dust was a material that the ancients could not purpose. It was good for no thing, and, therefore, an un-thing, a chaos that could not be shaped into something useful.

Sand (of larger grain than dust) is employed in producing bricks, concrete, glass, as an abrasive, etc. Clay, quite obviously, is the principal ingredient in the production of ceramics (especially with sand as an additive!). These materials are categorized by usefulness to human artifice, and because they are readily employed for a purposed end, they are ordered substances.

Progressive states exist between the two principles as well, especially in the production of materials and goods. We can see the transition from order to chaos in the previously mentioned bricks as they weather. As they lose their form to the predation of exposure, they transition from function to constituent materials.

This brings us to changing states and the inevitable trajectory of chaos and order when subject to time.

Time and Trajectory
Consider the airplane.

Yes, we know this is technically a jet.

An aircraft is a highly ordered system, a maze of tens of thousands of small, simple devices that run in parallel, layered, strung, and chained together, housed inside other devices, many of which serve multiple, simple functions to the point that by quantity and density, its ordered operations become opaque, and require trained specialists to properly service and maintain any number of the aircraft’s subsystems. 

So how does this start?

The aircraft begins as raw materials, a chaos that must be mined from the earth or recycled from scrap and divided into what is useful and what is to be discarded. This is ordering.

Next, the raw materials are turned into parts. This is ordering.

Following that, the parts are separated out and set aside to construct the particular aircraft. This is ordering.

Next, the craft is assembled. This is ordering.

The entire process is repeated sequences of separating and directly shaping material, transforming base matter into the expressed idea, and from an expressed idea into the particular instance. The end result is the individual aircraft.

While the aircraft is employed in its ordered function, it must be maintained to retain that function, as it is constantly subject to chaotic forces that work to disorder the entire system.

Parts wear down from use. That is chaos.

Parts are stressed by the environment, and the material fatigues. That is chaos.

The vehicle falls into disuse and is unmonitored. That is chaos.

The manufacturer terminates support of the model and halts production of replacement parts. That is chaos.

In the best-case scenario, the aircraft will be decommissioned and set aside for non-function. That is chaos.

If a retired aircraft is not immediately recycled, it may spend decades in a decommission lot. Here, it is left to decay and is subject to being torn apart for salvage.

In this state, the aircraft is not an aircraft but a rigid chaos, a highly shaped un-purpose. Such an un-aircraft serves no end other than to house its still functional parts, which now persist in a state of quasi-purpose waiting on an interested salvager to re-purpose them.

In the meantime, the aircraft's materials are left to the elements to behave in an unmonitored fashion. Metal expands, contracts, rusts, stresses, and fatigues. Rivets pop, mechanisms lock, parts fall out of housings, rubber rots. The metals within it that corrode develop rust or some other oxide and are generated apart. The aircraft collapses out of shape and back into raw material.

Whatever mechanisms and parts aren’t salvaged are either left to return to the earth or torn apart and smelt down into usable raw materials to be recycled and re-ordered into another device.

What is the Relevance?
These principles and their vibrant dynamic are understood primarily through dramatic vagaries that rely on contrasting extremes to convey the idea. A film may describe the social turmoil expressed through rioting, looting, and arson as chaos or focus on a character as an “agent of chaos” who disrupts the status quo.

This is an issue for understanding the ideas because neither framework defines the boundaries between order and chaos. The riot is obviously chaotic, but it does nothing to tell us how chaos works. The agent of chaos disrupts the status quo, but that does nothing to define the boundaries of the disrupted order. Relative to understanding the principles, it’s much the same as asking your teachers, “How does flight work?” and receiving a picture of a bird so many times you realize none of your teachers have the faintest understanding of physics.

To crack this topic, we shall separate the principles from popular media conventions, explore the relationship between scale and relativism, the character and cultural consequences of their inevitability, and dig into how they intersect with Shaping/Generating duality.

Disentangling Principle from Aesthetic
We’ve touched on popular representation in media in a somewhat grounded sense through riots and individual disruptors. We see both in movies like Batman: The Dark Knight (2008) or Joker (2019), and they’re equally at home with less comic book-y fare like the Deathwish or Dirty Harry movies. These films, however, are more concerned with the particular theme of urban decay, to which chaos and order are subordinated.

There are two literary genres where these principles are prioritized in seemingly independent exploration: mythology and fantasy.

When dealing with chaos and order, Mythology can be both explicit and pre-articulate. These notions are understood through comprehensible symbols to describe the essential operation of the universe. The father/warrior/king/deity conquers the dangerous potentiality of the dragon/giant and acquires treasure or builds a new home/universe from its body. Here, the narrative is that the purposing of matter is good while recognizing that the matter is still imbued with the destructive, degrading danger of the great chaos monster.

This is all well and good, but more recent writers have been caught up in the aesthetic of the symbols. As our culture has developed away from commonly shared narratives to works of commercialized fiction-as-entertainment, creatures like dragons move away from symbols of dangerous potentiality to sophisticated intelligences with their own culture, customs, and character journeys. The result is the loss of much of the foundational symbolism.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these sorts of stories. This compiler is a fan of many such stories in prose, television, cinema, video games, and TTRPGs. However, this does coincide with a trajectory of increasing symbolic illiteracy, which is abundantly clear when one examines the Chaos/Order aesthetic of some of the largest pop-fantasy IPs.

Aesthetic of Chaos

Dungeons & Dragons demons (top), Warhammer daemons (bottom). 
Really, the more you know about either of these things, the more they're the same.

Our exhibits are the Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer IPs. We’re comfortable pointing to these as the pop-fantasy standards as they are the most prominent institutions of commercialized plagiarism in the genre. Further, their aesthetic sensibilities regarding Chaos are nearly identical.

A DnD Vrock (left) and a WH Lord of Change (right).
If it's blue and a vulture, it's a Skeksis.

In DnD, both order and chaos have cosmic, planar dimension. Whole sub-universes of the IP multiverse are oriented towards one principle or the other. The lawful universe of Mechanus stands in opposition to the chaotic universe of Limbo, the chaotic-evil Abyss opposes the lawful-good heaven of Mount Celestia, etc.

Map of the Outer Planes from Planescape.

The Abyss, home of demons, shares a near identical attitude about what constitutes “chaotic” as Warhammer and that IP’s realm of chaos, The Warp.

The commonality relevant to the narrative is that the actions of Chaos are reactionary to the emergence of Order, constantly clawing away at it through overt destruction or subtle subversion. This reactionary force is obliged to manifest in as extreme a manner as possible and on the most dramatic scale. This lends the “Forces of Chaos” a visual identity and motive but retains all the same problems as the more “grounded” fiction: the principles are marginalized in favor of spectacle.

Many of the stories told this way are perfectly competent in exploring the themes they’re actually interested in, which are always more particular. This still poses a problem, as for many people these works of fiction are how they first wrestle with the principles. As such, they’re alienated from how the principles actually play out in their own lives.

Chaos and Order are cosmic principles and play out at all levels of reality. Alienation from the principle curtails the elevation of the dramatic escalation of the mundane, which is an indispensable tool in the employ of a competent storyteller.

Determining Relation, Scale, and Polarity
Coming off from fiction where the polarity of Chaos and Order are consequential, we’re going to break down how scale and relationship affect the interpretation of polarity in the absence of an overpowering visual identity.

First, we must recognize that any reality, be it the Reality we live in or constructed, comprises multiple ordered systems (people/characters, groups, nations). Each ordered system has its own interests that scale. This means that chaos and order often play out relative to the perspective of any ordered system.

The Undeveloped Wood
Suppose you have a small mountain community that minds some woodland. The wilderness is typically characterized in narrative as chaotic. This community, however, has developed a relationship with the woodland, coming to depend on it for food, fuel, and medicine. They have put the land to use as it already was, so the land's wild state is part of the community’s ordered status quo.

Relative to the government of the nearest city, such land serves no purpose; as the land benefits them in no way, it is chaos. 

Suppose this city decided to acquire the land by some means and turn it into housing developments. Relative to the city, this is an ordering of wasted land, but this is chaos to the community that depends on the land.

Which of these two perspectives is correct? Is there an objective way to assess the cosmic chaos/order polarity of the city’s move on the undeveloped land?

This is similar to many moral conundrums I have been presented with through the years by any number of role-playing games, just with a coat of fantasy or sci-fi paint. We have observed a tendency among authors to favor preservation of the small community. 

The reader might think this compiler would hold a different position based on how we have discussed the principles and scaling. The city is the more extensive ordered system; therefore, its chaos/order assessment must trump the evaluation of individuals in a lower-scale community.

This might be true if the mountain community were regarded as internal to the ordered system of the city. If the mountain community were internal to City A while the attempted land appropriation was being conducted by City B, this is likely the case. However, in the scenario as written, the mountain community is an ordered system being subordinated non-consensually to the needs of the larger foreign system. The relationship is oppositional and antagonistic, in the same way a wrongly accused man’s relationship to the prosecution of the state is antagonistic. On the level of their conflict, the size of one system relative to another does not indicate morality/conformity to the greater essential structure of the universe.

This compels us to touch on something worthy of its own (forthcoming) article: the essential Order. The highest ordered structure, whether in a fictional universe or our universe, is the essential Order (or “God”) * that all other systems must navigate. This essential order constitutes the rules of reality. The reality structure is never subordinate to the ordered system beneath it. The individual and the state are both similarly incapable of changing the fundamentals of the universe; neither system can make the direction “up” the color between seven and popcorn smell. Directionality still plays out in the category of directionality, even if one tries to alter it through fantastical power. All use to the contrary in fiction is a gag.

A lower-level system, such as an individual, can easily be in closer compliance with the rules of reality than a system that is supposed to operate at a higher level, if only because there is less to bring into compliance. The individual who understands that a direction is not a color navigates better than a larger system tyrannically imposing nonsense.

The only essential measure of net Chaos/Order polarity is relative to the essential Order. If the state builds the housing development against the wishes of the mountain community, whatever follows reveals the quality of the state’s navigation of the higher Order. If the subsequent loss of vegetation leads to flooding, landslides, and destruction of the city's works, the “wrath of God” has revealed that the city’s actions were a net chaos, no matter their orderly intentions.

*The matter of “God” will be discussed in a future article.

The Aesthetic of "Too Much Order"
In contrast to the cartoonish depiction of Chaos in fantasy fiction, another aesthetic plays out in the opposite direction: the government order of the dystopian future. This is oft described as an overburdening of order, as though freedom and liberty are some kind of unipolar chaos. We intend to disabuse the reader of this notion.

In the dystopian satire Brazil (1985), filmmaker Terry Guilliam paints a terrifying vision of the future. It is a world where people are crammed into hellish cubicles, dependent on marginally functional machinery as their life is (poorly) micromanaged by disconnected bureaucrats, and life or death can be decided by the malfunctioning of a teleprinter.

Any system's function is what it does, not what it says it does or is supposed to do. Bureaucracies, like all things in the Universe, behave. The behavior of bureaucracies is to expand. They expand because of population growth, organizational influence, mission creep, and budget in all directions beyond the organization’s stated founding purpose. This expansion may be into valid management domains with a significant relation to the founding purpose, but to believe this is the normative case is wishful thinking. The bureaucracy will expand into new domains simply to have a new domain to manage without regard to its efficacy in any prior domains.

Management for the sake of management is purposeless. Management for the sake of management is Chaos. Rules for the sake of having rules is Chaos. Dependence on broken machines is Chaos. Pollution is Chaos. Being trapped in a dead-end job is Chaos.

Dystopian social orders are not orders at all but oppressive burdens that sap purpose from their prisoners. They are rigid chaos. Any author wrestling with these subjects would do well to not mistake the superficial structure of a system for its orientation toward the principles.

This is not to say that characters cannot make that mistake. It's reasonable that someone sick of the life-sapping prison of a corpo-fascist world would embrace the vitality-rich chaos of anarchy. It's likewise reasonable that they would soon become disillusioned with the purposelessness of sustained anarchy, too. A capable writer should be eager to explore all the possibilities that entails.

The Inescapable Cycle
Degradation is the fate of all ordered systems subject to time. The same principled processes govern everything from the lowest bacterium to galaxy-spanning empires. Systems built around member persons may be more dynamic and possess great longevity by being able to replace persons in ordered positions. Still, every unit, from the family to the nation, will eventually collapse and be replaced by other families and nations.

All that Man orders is doomed to collapse back into chaos.

This observation is at the root of the material dualists’ contention that the material world is fundamentally evil, as no good thing may last under such conditions. Wrestling with this dynamic, which overlaps heavily with the question of “suffering,” is core to many religions and philosophies.

Tackling the philosophical responses characters, groups, and cultures develop in response to the Chaos/Order dynamic is as important as understanding the functional definitions of Chaos and Order.

Gnostics embrace material dualism by rejecting the material for the wholly spiritual or, more annoyingly, denying the material as being of spiritual consequence. The Taoists engage in principled non-attachment and non-action. The Hindus conform themselves to the cosmic cycle of Samsara. The Abrahamic faiths regard this cycle as a subordinate feature of the ordering cosmic Will and frame the cycle as a deliberate feature of an Order operating on a scale beyond human comprehension.

These options and more are worthy of exploration by the interested storyteller, whether for world-building, thematic guidance, or a source of inspiration. Always be mindful of where principle and character can meet, as it’s the stuff great stories are made of.

Chaos/Order and Masculine/Feminine
The reader may have noticed allusions to shaping and generating in previous examples. The airplane's trajectory is simple and straightforward, with shaping/generating equating 1:1 with masculine/feminine. Conversely, the mountain community ordered themselves around the natural generation of resources, while the shaping actions of the state created chaos. This may run counter to common notions of chaos being feminine and order being masculine.

This is the normative interpretation, but somewhat incomplete. Chaos, especially cosmic chaos, is generative, just as the undeveloped woodland, the ocean, or the womb: anything can come out of it. The ordered systems we surround ourselves with are the product of a masculine spirit, men and women going out into the world and shaping things to productive ends.

However, this relationship is different from 1-to-1, as we have already seen. The significant overlap between the shaping/generating and order/chaos we prioritize respectively is governed by what is most beneficial to us, individually and up to the species level. However, counterexamples abound to the point they cannot be regarded as outliers. 

The masculine chaos of vandalism and murder (shaping out of function or counter to function) is easy to grasp. The feminine order has already been discussed via the mountain community organizing themselves around the generating wilderness. In light of this, a dominant trend emerges, wherein active chaos takes on a masculine character, and passive order takes on a feminine (another parallel observed by the ancients).

These masculine chaoses and feminine orders serve as an excellent highlight for the dynamism of the principles. 

Takeaway for Writers
Chaos and Order are important principles with greater dynamism and presence than most explicit presentations would suggest. Not having a firm grasp on the definition, relativistic qualities, inevitability, and interaction with other principles denies the storyteller tools for more sophisticated thematic exploration or aesthetic invention. Feel free to toy around with them on either level.

Clear Cosmology: The Elements - Quintessence

Spirit. Soul. Aether. Azoth. Prana. Quintessence, the fifth element.

Due to the nature of our research, we find ourselves obliged to start our exploration of the elements with this most misunderstood feature of ancient phenomenology.

Obligatory "Leeloo multipass" reference.

Because this topic is the subject of so many jokes, we’ll have to get them all out of the way.

What isn’t Quintessence?
Quintessence is not love. Quintessence is not family. Quintessence is undoubtedly not the friends we made along the way.

The talking horse program lied to you.

What are the Qualities of Quintessence?
Unlike the other four elements, Quintessence is not easy to relate because it does not have a discrete material correlate. 

This presents a contradiction because quintessence is both the non-material element and is present in all matter.

What is Quintessence?

Quintessence - the element of animation.

There is no standardized image for quintessence, though it is often represented
with a circle, an eight-spoked wheel (indicating motion), a spiral, and the
Seal of Light created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

What does that even mean?
All matter in the universe is potentially animate in the minds of the ancients. That is, it has an essence that governs its actions. Any material that acts in the world has animation.

In Pythagorean thought, this element was a fluidic substance, an etheric field that filled all things in the universe, not unlike the Force in Star Wars.

All four material elements are regarded as having more or less animation relative to their densities, as seen in the vertical model described in our Four Elements article.

Earth has little to no animation,* but it cannot be denied that water flows and the sea tosses, nor that the wind blows, and that fire consumes and dances and casts light and imparts its animation to substances subject to its heat.

Animation, however, is a more sophisticated concept than more movement/less movement. It has two dimensions of consideration that are relevant to our research. These are the anima/animata (particular/general) axis and the masculine/feminine (shaping/generating) axis.

*Compiler's Note: The subject of animated earth will be covered in the *Earth* article.

Anima/Animus
You, dear reader, may already have some of your own ideas about what a “soul” is. Perhaps you think of it as the mind of a person that survives past death, the origin of ghosts and demons, and all manner of supernatural things. Perhaps you’re an atheist who thinks that souls are made-up nonsense.

Well, you’re wrong in both cases.

Both of these positions come from a misunderstanding of what a soul is. Even since antiquity, so much has been hitched to the term that a very simple, easy-to-grasp idea has been buried in ambiguities and associations.

Let’s tackle the disbelief in souls:

    1) Go outside. 

    2) Find a bug. 

Does the bug move? If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

If it isn’t moving, it doesn’t have a soul. Because it’s dead.

Let's do another:

    1) Find a houseplant. 

    2) Does it photosynthesize? 

    3) Does it grow? 

If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

Yes, even this thing. Unless it's plastic.

A soul, or animus, is simply the animating force of a discrete thing. You have a soul. Your dog has a soul. Your ficus plant has a soul.

Does a thing act under its own power? Does it respond to forces acting upon it? Does it move, grow, or shrink?  Then it has an animus. The soul is the animating principle of the particular, simple as.

What about-
The notions of disembodied souls, immortal souls, and things like moral charge are secondary developments. They are personal/religious beliefs beyond the scope of this article. Our concern here is the baseline, lowest-common-denominator understanding.  These innovations in the notion of animus will be explored in future articles, as will the soul/spirit distinction (or lack thereof).

Can one thing have more than one soul?
Many cultures believe in multiple souls or the soul in numerous distinct components, where the loss of one lead to illness or death. This includes the dualistic notion of souls found in the Platonic/Homeric tradition, 19th-century Spiritualist belief, and ancient Chinese thought (Hun and Po).

Other traditions had even more complex notions of the human soul, including the Norse and, most famously, the Egyptians (whose soul could have anywhere from 3-8 facets, depending on source). The traditional beliefs of the Hmong of Southeast Asia hold that chronic conditions may be caused by the loss of the soul of a particular body part, which must be called back to the body.

Don’t be afraid to play with poly-animate thinking in your own storytelling!

Animata
In anthropology, animism is the belief in individualized animating forces. In the same discipline, animatism is the belief in impersonal animating forces.

Is there a cosmic force that you regard as being impersonal, which is to say, without individuality or persona? Do you view luck as a force rather than a willful actor (like "Lady Luck")? Then luck is an animatistic force. 

Charms like this attract luck as a force rather than signifying
devotion to a person or persona of luck.

You can readily find other animata elsewhere. Lightning is regarded as an animatistic force in many cultures, as are miasmas. Hell, you could consider the radiation coming off of uranium ore to be animata.

Radiation knows no reason; it cannot be negotiated with; it simply is.

An incredibly influential animatistic notion in modern fantasy fiction is mana. Mana is a supernatural concept from the cultures of Oceania and Polynesia. Mana is as definitionally diverse as the cultures that believe it, but the through-line is that it is a potent supernatural force that can be invested in deities, persons, places, and things. In some places, the mana held by tribal chieftains was thought to pollute the very ground they walked on with supernatural potency, causing people to become ill if it wasn’t ritually dispersed.*

*Anecdotal: This compiler cannot find old education materials from the anthropology lectures this compiler attended more than a decade ago.

A derived form of this concept is endemic to fantasy, especially in video games, where it is a manageable resource that fuels the abilities of spellcasting player characters.

90% of our memory of Diablo II consists of staring at this thing.

Animatistic forces such as mana provide many opportunities for storytellers, not just because they serve as a convenient resource for “fueling” magical action but because of their potential side effects!

Suppose magic can be engaged as an impersonal substance with predictable behaviors and lingering effects. In that case, it encourages the storyteller to consider the long-term consequences of magic that don’t stem from the retribution of an intelligent supernatural actor.

Paizo’s Golarion setting has a region known as the Mana Wastes, full of magical dead zones and pockets of unpredictable wild magic due to a conflict between two powerful magical empires in the distant past.

Masculine and Feminine
These are terms with a lot of baggage, especially in the current political climate, so we’ll cut to the chase and use the Hermetic definitions:

Masculine - That which shapes but does not generate.

Feminine - That which generates but does not shape.

Observe that the upward-oriented triangle (masculine) and the downward-oriented triangle (feminine) find union in the hexagrammatic Seal of Solomon. This will be explored further in our article on the [Pentagram].

Masculine and feminine are the binary characteristics of universal animation, the shaping and generating principles, respectively. All observable animation shapes, generates, or demonstrates some admixture of the two. They can either be creative or destructive. The actions of the sculptor and the vandal show the opposite polarities of shaping, while the soil of the field and the rust of the plow reveal the creative/destructive dimensions of the generating principle, nurturing the plants of the field or breaking a tool down from purposed shape to its constituent matter.

These ideas of masculine and feminine as principles are damn-near universal, finding clear articulation in the West in Neoplatonic/Hermetic thought and in the East in Taoism (Yin/Yang). These definitions cut through the formal magical traditions, such as alchemy and Solomonic sorcery, and are an essential feature of many conceptions of enlightenment. 

In alchemy, the state of enlightenment is communicated through the Philosopher’s Stone and its anthropomorphic icon, the Rebis. The Rebis is a bicephalic man/woman figure that expresses the hypostasis (transcendent unification) of these cosmic animating principles and, thus, a wholly liberated creative will. 

This has global parallels, as can be seen in the androgynous bissu shamans of the Bugis culture in Thailand, as well as in the Maya-region shaman priests known as mother-fathers (Quiche: s. Chuchkahaw, pl. Chuchkahawib.)

The bissu Puang Matoa Saidi.

The universality of these definitions will become more apparent throughout this archive’s development as we explore both cosmological structuring and magical practice. Additionally, we’ll review the numerous other associations wrapped up in “masculine” and “feminine” in our article on the Tria Prima of alchemy.

What about the sexes?
The sexes, male and female, are downstream of these animating forces. Sex is subordinate to masculine and feminine; masculine and feminine are not subordinate to sex.

Alternative Expression?
Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” This might be for personal reasons, or these words won’t play well with your target audience. Are there other framing devices available?

Yes. Many.

Let's look at just one.

Wyrd: Fire and Ice
According to Nevill Drury in The Watkins Dictionary of Magic, the concept of wyrd (Norse urd) is the notion in Anglo-Saxon sorcery that the universe is a complex interplay of the conflicting forces of fire and ice.

A quick internet search shows that…this may not be the normative case, as wyrd is usually used to describe fate, and the symbol for wyrd is a web describing the interplay of forces governing destiny.

This might not represent fire and ice.

The Neopagan movement may have influenced Drury’s definition, and unfortunately that movement is not always accurate in recreating ancient beliefs.

However, the ancestral mythology of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse share Germanic origins. Norse mythology tells us that the universe was created by the violent meeting of fire and ice in the Ginnungagap (“yawning void”). 

If fire and ice are the primordial duality in Germanic folklore, that’s a perfectly acceptable framing to exploit! If all animation in the universe is a consequential result of the clash of ice and fire, thinking of wyrd in terms of the interplay of fire and ice is valid, even if that may not have been how the Anglo-Saxons would frame it.

Sidenote: If anyone is interested in correcting us, feel free to namedrop a source.

Would we substitute?
While forces like fire and ice are rich in texture, they’re limiting as both refer to tangibles and come from people living in harsh northern environments. Such a framing would be unsuitable for a story set in a world primarily influenced by Egypt or Mesoamerica, as in both regions, ice would be a sufficiently uncommon phenomenon to prevent it from being thought coequal with fire (sun, stars, volcanic activity, etc.).

One of the significant advantages of the shaping/generating dichotomy is that it’s abstract enough to avoid these sorts of hiccups. It allows enough room for characters and cultures to make their own culturally relevant (if cosmically imperfect) interpretations without leading to logical inconsistencies in the fundamentals of your story's systems.

In Summary
Quintessence, or soul, is a much simpler concept than its cultural baggage might suggest. A firm grasp of the simplest, most basic definitions will serve you well as you develop into more complex subject matter.

Bibliography

-Drury, N. (2007). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic (First South Asian). Watkins Publishing. 

-Freidel, D. A., Schele, L., & Parker, J. (2001). Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. Perennial. 

-Mythology & Fiction Explained. (2017a, October 17). The creation of the Universe - Norse mythology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9h08JOcSY 

-National Geographic. (2017b, January 15). Shaman performs rite to protect a man’s soul from the underworld | national geographic. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxIXIi1kR0 

-Paizo, Inc. (n.d.). Mana Wastes. PathfinderWiki. https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Mana_Wastes

-Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, April 25). Bissu. Wikipedia. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bissu 

Edit History:

-5/15/2023: I briefly expanded the section on the multi-part human soul to provide some better starting points for research for readers. Also added some piping.

Magical Practice: What is Magic?

There’s a significant problem in tackling this question because nearly any definition I have found in my research has mistakenly emphasized only one dimension of magic.

Aleister Crowley, in his 1929 work Magick in Theory and Practice, presented this formulation (original formatting preserved):

“MAGICK

is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the Will."

The late Nevill Drury, who penned The Watkins Dictionary of Magic and The Watkins Dictionary of the Esoteric, gives this definition:

“Magic The overarching name given to the body of techniques and ritual practices used to harness the secret powers of nature and to influence events for one’s own purpose.”

We could provide other examples of definitions for the word from other sources, but they’re all in the same direction: They are all concerned with magic as a craft.

The Problem with Craft
Alright, they’re all concerned with craft. This archive is concerned primarily with assisting fantasy storytellers with understanding historical inspiration. Aren’t a lot of fantasy writers obsessed with their magic systems? How do these definitions run against that grain?

We here at Damigeron's Dungeon believe this approach is counterproductive because magic refers to a quality and an action. The craft falls under action but fails to communicate anything about quality. 

Let’s look at a few examples of magic as quality.

Jack and the Beanstalk
We all know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk: boy sells his starving family’s most valuable possession and gets magic beans instead of what he was supposed to buy. His mother furiously throws them out the window, and the following day, they’ve grown into a giant beanstalk that reaches up into the clouds, with a giant and a goose that lays golden eggs, a golden harp, or something of that nature.

Art by Walter Crane (1845-1915)

Where, in this story, is the “Science” (knowledge) and “Art” (trade/craft/skill) of magic? Where is the “technique” or “ritual practice?” What secret powers were “harnessed?” Who “influenced events for their own purposes?”

The story hinges on Jack’s mother not appreciating the value of the beans because she thought her son was scammed. There is no intentionality to the end of the road, to the giant’s home or to the golden goose. There is no craft in the story; the beans are simply magic because. 

If the growth properties of the beans qualify as magic and the narrative conveys no magical craft, then a craft-exclusive definition of magic is unsuitable in the generic.

Magical Magnets
The attractive power of magnets is now well-understood by science, and proper magnets no longer fall under the domain of the mystical, but that doesn’t mean they weren't considered magic in the past. Further, there are other kinds of magnets in the magical record.

Lecouteux’s source on this appears to be Aristoteles de lapidibus. Unfortunately, we cannot verify this, as the only English work we’ve found that might go over a translation of that text looks to be behind a paywall. (We’re not paying $58.00 for access to one paper.)

Our example from that source text is what Lecouteux calls the “magnet of fingernails.” 

The magnet of fingernails has a few bizarre properties. First is that it’s incredibly soft, yet impervious to being scratched by iron or diamond. Despite this imperviousness, it will crack when in contact with blood. 

Second, and more importantly, it will rip your fingernails off.

Why? No clue. What we know is that it pulls nail clippings to itself like iron filings to a regular magnet, and if it gets in contact with the nails still on your fingers, they’re coming off.

Say goodbye to these!

This particular magnet does not appear to be a manufactured material (as some of the others), meaning that the stone's fingernail-tearing field is intrinsic. That also means that intrinsic magical properties extend beyond the genre of fairytales!

Mount Zimurc’s Burning Stone
According to the European legends of the great Oriental Christian patriarch-king, Prester John, the zimur stones of Mount Zimurc burn continuously, so hot that they must be picked up with iron tongs. This legend likewise tells of a freezing stone with the opposite effects. The northern threshold of Prester John’s palace is made of freezing stone, and you must bear a burning stone to survive passage through it, while the southern entrance was created with the burning zimur, and one had to carry a freezing stone to survive the intense heat.

Image taken from Maddy's blogspot, information taken from Lecouteux.
Actual source unknown to this compiler.

The same stories claim that the zimur stone could be crafted into vessels that could cook food without fire.

One might be inclined to argue that these properties are “natural” because they are intrinsic, like the magnet of fingernails. However, we cannot back up that assessment; modern science has not observed and verified such things. They contradict scientific understanding, not just because they are clearly fictional, but because they are irrationalities that defy normal rules of cause and effect.

This finally brings us to our definition of magic.

What is Magic?
For our definition to be useful, we need to be all-inclusive of everything magical while being entirely exclusive of everything else. To this end we cannot define magic as a science in the modern sense, nor would parascience be a sufficient descriptor.

The word demands two distinct definitions:

Magic (Generic) - That which circumvents the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

Magic (Craft) - The art and science of circumventing the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

These definitions include everything described under magic as a craft and all irrational, parascientific, and inexplicable supernatural phenomena.

This excludes the body of modern science, which (relevant to this discussion) refers to implementing novel means to determine normal cause and effect, which is not magic.

This also excludes implementing knowledge of normal cause and effect to enact change in the world to alter the outcome of events or manifest one’s will, which would qualify as engineering.

Extracting Value
These definitions of magic are all-inclusive, leaving room for the high-minded, systematized parascientific approach observed in some practices and employed by many a fantasy author while also allowing for recognition of the unique qualities and blunders that fall outside of intentional action.

Storytellers with this in mind can make more deliberate decisions about how they go about systematizing or deconstructing magic in their own stories.

When we next return to this topic, we’ll go over the broad strokes of how people practice and think of magic.

Bibliography

-Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. 1929. 

-Drury, Nevill. The Watkins Dictionary of Magic. First South Asian ed., Watkins Publishing, 2007. 

-Lecouteux, Claude. A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: Their Magical and Medicinal Powers Based on the Earliest Sources. Inner Traditions, 2012. 

-Maddy. “The Legend of Prester John.” The Legend of Prester John ~, 5 Mar. 2016, https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-legend-of-prester-john.html.