Mages and Humanity
Now that you’ve seen more of what mages are capable of, the question arises: Are mages human? This is a question that’s kind of interesting to look at, and it isn’t as simple to answer as it might seem. There are a number of elements that have to be considered to really assess it. The first, and probably the most intractable, part is: At what point does someone stop being human?
Certainly they started out human. But Kyoko thinks of vanilla humans and mages as being very distinct categories, and in some ways she has a point. How much humanity can someone shed and still be reasonably called human?
Werewolves are demonstrably not human. It’s not just Kyoko who feels like there’s no human left in their fundamental nature. They do not exhibit human magic, do not interact with it like humans do; they do not resemble humans under close biochemical analysis; they are not able to reproduce effectively with humans. By almost any reasonable definition, they are not human. But they were human, and they’re still fundamentally the same person, changed certainly but they’re themselves. Clearly, then, it’s possible for magic to transition someone out of humanity and into something else.
Mages, by default, are still biologically human (though I’ll cover some of the exceptions shortly). They can reproduce as readily as any other human. They exhibit many of the same traits as other humans. But they’re having experiences wildly outside the usual realm of human experience, and that has an impact on them.
Most people do not have the ability to read another person’s thoughts or manipulate their emotions with magic. Someone who can perceive these things is having a sensory perception that other humans, even other mages, cannot. Someone who can adjust them is almost inescapably going to find that this impacts how they interact with their society, their friends. And while this is an extreme example, to some extent any given specialty is going to encounter things like this. They are experiencing things other humans don’t, and it changes them.
There is also a more direct impact in this way. Magic is being channeled by the mind; it isn’t always in the same way but it’s always happening by the mage performing a mental action to make energy fall into the patterns they want. This action changes the mind in turn; it is inevitable, when you’re putting that much power through a brain that wasn’t made for that. You spend too long working with too much power in the cold, analytical methods associated with wizards and you’re going to find it impacts your experience of emotions and connection with others. Some of them end up with alexithymia as bad as Melissa’s, so used to suppressing emotion to keep it from interfering with magic that they no longer know how to stop.
Rates of mental illness are high; I would go so far as to say that the overwhelming majority of people who would be considered mages rather than minor talents are going to meet diagnostic criteria for at least one mental illness. In some cases it’s arguable whether it even counts as mental illness. When you can throw a car at someone with your mind, the classic narcissistic personality trait of feeling that you’re special and superior to others doesn’t seem so delusional anymore. When you have other sets of perceptions to manage, many of which are providing far more information than simple bodily senses, a certain degree of attention deficit and executive dysfunction is inevitable. These could be considered less mental illness, and more a mentally normal reaction to a very abnormal life. Others are the product of trauma, because this is not a lifestyle that gets away without eating some of that.
But there are plenty that are genuine mental illness, at a rate significantly higher than general population, and the gap is particularly pronounced for some specific conditions. Dissociative and psychotic conditions are prevalent. Personality disorders show up, particularly narcissistic and schizotypal. Obsessive-compulsive spectrum traits sometimes land in the previous category, since when a mage says that their life depends on performing a highly specific, ritualized action, they might be entirely correct. But it does also have a tendency to show through in maladaptive ways for people that do resemble OCD or OCPD.
And so the question arises, how much does a person have to change before they stop being the human they once were? Mages have a different experience of life, different abilities, altered mental functions, altered perceptions, and this is hereditary to a degree, not in consistent or predictable ways but it’s a trend. I think there’s an argument to be made here that they could at minimum be considered a distinct subspecies of human.
Which leads into the other element, namely biological changes. This is a complicated one, in part because it varies so widely. Some kinds of magic involve distinct biological adjustments; shapeshifters are an obvious example, but not at all the only one. Mostly, they will revert fully, but there are exceptions. Especially over time, these magics will tend to alter someone’s body in much the same way that I’ve described magic changing someone’s mind. Mages with a lot of power tend to find that their most natural, instinctive specialty starts to happen without conscious awareness. The fire will burn brighter when the pyromancer stands close to it, without them having to even think about it. When that magic is more biological, this will start to gradually adjust someone’s body, and given time these tiny changes add up.
There’s also a key thing to observe here, which is that mages age naturally. They are not ageless or biologically immortal, and will grow old in the same ways that other humans do. But they have access to a lot more ways to do something about that. Lots of people would rather not get old. Given the ability to make that happen, some of those people would take it, and there are a lot of means by which mages actually can. Some are perfectly reasonable and ethical, others much less so.
Many of them will involve taking other power into themselves, admixtures as Kyoko puts it; many others will involve the application of magic to their own body or mind. Sometimes that causes direct, tangible physical effects for them. The body is being changed in the process, in some cases so much that basic physiology isn’t there anymore. For those mages, I think, there’s an extremely strong argument to be made that they have left humanity behind. When you have all the mental and social effects mentioned above, and you also bleed oil instead of blood or get shot in the heart without caring, and you’re effectively immortal and have been alive for several hundred years, calling you human is a stretch. It doesn’t matter that you started out that way, that your magic might still be human, that your body might look human from the outside. You are not human in any way that matters. From the perspective of the average person on the street, you’re as alien as the Sidhe.
The problem is that there’s no clear point where that change happens. There’s not a single moment in which someone takes the step across this line, in which they become something other than human. There’s not even a clear point where someone becomes a mage rather than a minor talent; the general attitude is that it’s usually easy to tell, but it’s not rigorously defined. This messy definition set, along with Kyoko’s own awareness of numerous ways in which someone can be altered from human into something else and her perception of the differences in people’s energy signatures, is why she thinks of them in this way. Mages and humans are two different classes of people in her mind in a lot of ways. She has a point in thinking this, even if it’s not quite that simple in reality.
Briar
I love getting these behind-the-curtain looks at setting elements that wouldn’t make sense to go in as much depth with in the main text.
I think the most interesting points here for me are the contrast notes for how they differ from werewolves. (Maybe it says something about me that even in this essay designed to give us the worldbuilding details we crave, I still focus in on the hints and asides about a separate topic.)
Hearing that werewolves are biochemically overtly inhuman and that they can’t easily breed with humans… but also that they *did* start out as humans raises interesting questions about what their dynamics are like across generations. Though I suppose extreme longevity and durability might make those questions less constant for them than for a human population. Hearing in this most recent chapter that they’re usually resistant to external magics that would alter their bodies and minds is an interesting detail, too.
The idea of human magic as something that starts with supernatural power being pushed through the same channels as thought helps give an intuitive feel, I think, for how different practitioners or traditions might end up with very different quirks or “rules” to the magic they use.
I’m still very intrigued to learn about the broad categories and specific traditions of human magic in this world.
The example we get the most feel for is a powerful “Urban Druid,” who gives me the impression that druids as a category use magic powered and shaped by a particular kind of landscape or terrain. I wonder how intertwined that relationship could become if the mage stuck closely enough to a single locale- could the path of gaining power and stepping further from humanity over time make a druid like that eventually more similar to a genius loci than a human?
We get some insight here and with the skirmishes in recent chapters to how wizards function, managing magic through scholarly discipline first and foremost. It’s kind of interesting that this doesn’t make their relationship to magic any more “neutral” or less psychologically significant than other kinds, even if I would imagine it keeps the types of power they can draw on flexible.
I think the helpful pyromancer who joined the siege (Can you “besiege” a forest?) was described as a “sorcerer,” though I wasn’t sure if that was meant as a specific category in the same way as “druid” and “wizard.” If it is, it sounds like it might describe someone who makes themselves a conduit for some particular natural force or energy? Of course, I’m making guesses from a single example that we don’t have a clear window to.
Cherry
Werewolves already have a lot of magic spreading into their body and mental functions. Most werewolves have very little conscious magic, but forcing their body to change in ways they don’t want it to is much harder than doing the same to a human.
The categorization system is…difficult. There are some, but it’s a very difficult task in a setting where magic is defined by identity and thought. There’s so much individual variation in those things that edge cases are going to be abundant. That said, I can definitely do a note focusing more on what these terms are. The basic category set I work with is wizard, sorcerer, witch, druid, and shaman. All of them have specific traits, and all of them have personality traits. You can’t totally predict someone’s behavior based on them, but there are stereotypes that hold true a lot of the time.
In many ways, though, the categorization isn’t how people’s behavior can be predicted most easily. That comes much more from looking at their characteristic, central magic. A pyromancer is going to be using fire, whether they count as a wizard, sorcerer, or druid. Fire is associated with impulsivity, with passion, with aggression. It’s the element of chaos and change. It’s not a defensive magic by nature, and it’s hard to turn it that direction. If you see someone throwing fireballs as their favorite go-to magic, you can guess that they’re a person who identifies strongly with that passionate and labile nature. It’s why Capinera knew to target her with emotional magic. She was a particularly easy target. Someone who focuses on mental magic is always going to be strongly invested in people, in their thoughts and behaviors.
Now, that does highlight an important detail: This isn’t something with intrinsic moral standing. Some mentalists will be manipulative megalomaniacs. Some are analytical and endlessly curious about people, which in extreme cases can produce situations like Melissa’s. Some see value in people and want to help them, like the therapists Kyoko has heard of who use low-intensity, controlled workings to help augment therapy. These are vastly different in their effect on people around them, and if all you know is that a mage does some kind of mental magic, drawing conclusions about their personality or their power is dicey. You can, however, confidently predict that they will not be disinterested in other people. Their investment runs deep enough to be a significant part of who they are.
Briar
I like the mage categories being a way to broadly describe how a person connects to and approaches magic, rather than names for specific traditions or “schools” of magic.
I’d assume those exist to some extent as culture and tradition interacts with someone’s perspective on magic, but it sounds like if there *are* lines of masters-and-teachers passing down very specific techniques and philosophies of magic, there’s still a lot of room for individuals to diverge and bend the approaches they were taught in different directions, even unintentionally or unknowingly.
Makes me wonder how dogmatic or “color within the lines” a specific tradition of magic could be in that regard before it has to become actively brutal toward students to remain coherent.
Cherry
It depends on what kinds of techniques and philosophies you mean. Certainly those exist; there are people who will teach specific ways to do things. There are details that have less to do with the person doing the magic and more to do with underlying natural laws about how magic works, in ways that will be explored in more depth later on. Some techniques aren’t universal constants but are basic enough that a given person can adapt them. Philosophies will be highly variable and often do get taught in much the same way as, for example, different schools of thought within a science, or different fields of philosophy. In all of these cases, being dogmatic is pretty easy, though it risks poor efficacy.
The place where strict doctrines actually break down is usually analysis. Whether someone is or is not a wizard has no bearing on whether they can teach someone who thinks a lot like they do, but is pivotal if you’re trying to produce an objective measure, and there’s no clear definition point for who is or isn’t. Another critical detail is mentioned in Magical Mechanics, where there’s a comment about how the further magic changes something from its nature the harder it becomes to do. If two people both have a specialty in fire, you could call them pyromancers, and they could expand from the concept of fire into other ideas and areas of study. If one can most easily change their magic into kinetic force instead of fire, and another can change their magic into passion and emotions, it’s easy to see the progression in either case. But they’ll end up very different both in what they can do and the implications about the pyromancer in question. And that’s without even considering the sheer variety of concepts someone actually can specialize in. Fire is a very common and traditional one but, as Jack’s example shows, plenty of people are focused in ways that don’t fit into tidy and straightforward molds.