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Magic: The Metaphysics of Magic in BoM

There are lots of forms of magic in "The Book of Masks," but most of the spells associated with the Libra Personae are grounded in the categories discussed in this section. These rules need not be mastered, but they can be consulted when questions on magical behaviors arise, and corollaries and deductions can be drawn from them.

I. Existentia and Qualia

In principle, most of the magic that can appear in "The Book of Masks" does not rely on the categories of substantia and imago and essentia and anima that have been introduced in the story. These two new categories, however, are absolutely central to all forms of magic in BoM, and should be understood so as to explain how magic in general can be reconciled with science.

The two new categories are "existentia" and "qualia." In the philosophical analysis business, they would call these "ontological/logical" categories. What does that mean?

The terrible thing about these explanations is that often you have to start off at quite a distance from where you want to end up. In this case, we have to start, briefly, with math.

Consider this expression: "5+3". That expression contains two numbers and an operator. It refers to two specific numbers, in fact. But as anyone who has taken algebra knows, you can replace the numbers with variables, as in "x+y". That expression does not actually add two numbers together; rather, it is an abstract form into which particular values for "x" and "y" can be plugged. The expression doesn't do any math; instead, it's a grammatical structure that tells you what a meaningful expression using the "+" operator should look like.

So, hang on to that distinction between "specific number" and "variable," and the difference between a specific mathematical expression and the abstract form that describes how to construct a meaningful expression.

Now, turn to language. Here is an ordinary sentence: "Snow is white." What is the grammatical structure of that sentence? There is a subject ("snow") and a predicate ("is white"). That is true for any sentence: any complete, meaningful sentence has both a subject and a predicate. This means we can make an abstract form for the sentence "snow is white" just like we could for "5+3." In the logic biz, that abstract form looks something like this: "Ax", where "x" stands for "subject" and "A" stands for "predicate." (Yeah, I know, it's backwards, but that's the way they do it.) You can plug in any subject for x and any predicate for A and get a meaningful (but not necessarily true) sentence. Examples:

Subjects: Snow, Mr. Thomas, my dog, the tallest tree in Africa.
Predicates: is white, has a good job, eats his own crap, was chopped up for firewood.

Possible sentences: Snow is white. Snow has a good job. Mr. Thomas is white. Mr. Thomas eats his own crap. My dog was chopped up for firewood. My dog has a good job. The tallest tree in Africa is white. Etc. See how it works?

And just as "x+y" does not do any math, the abstract form "subject-predicate" (to read "Ax" in regular English) does not say anything about the world. "Snow is white" at least pretends to point to an object (snow) and a quality of snow (whiteness). But what does the word "subject" point to in "Subject-predicate"? Nothing. "Snow" refers to snow, but "Subject" does not refer to anything. It doesn't refer to matter or mass or substance or stuffness. It's a variable, like x in "x+y", and just as x doesn't refer to a particular number, "subject" doesn't refer to anything particular either.

So "subject" and "predicate" are not physical concepts or categories. They are logical concepts and categories; they are part of the structure of language, part of what makes language work the way it does. And they go together to structure subjects and predicates into specific, meaningful expressions, in the same way that "x" and "y" and "+" go together to craft specific, meaningful mathematical expressions.

They are also core machinery of thought. When you think, you don't have vague words floating around: "Ungh. White. Ungh. Cold. Ungh. Wet. Ungh. Good job. Ungh. Mr. Thomas. Ungh. Standing."

If that's what you had in your head, no actual thoughts would cohere. Look at what I wrote just above. Does that say "Mr. Thomas is white and wet and has a good job"? Or does it say "Snow is cold and has a good job?" or does it say "Mr. Thomas, who has a good job, is made of snow"? It could say any of these. Particular thoughts only come into being when predicates and subjects are attached to each other in a particular way, as in "Mr. Thomas, who has a good job, is standing in the snow."

So, up at the start I referred to "ontological/logical" categories. Here we've just seen example of what I mean by "logical": the terms "subject" and "predicate" don't refer to things; they are categories of logic, used to analyze and explain how language and thought work.

But what about "ontological"? That's a fancy word that means "related to existence." Ontology is the study of existence, what it means to exist. (It's a less fruity synonym for "metaphysics," which was once an honorable philosophical term that has since been debased by associations with crystals and auras and pyramid power.) The "subject-predicate" structure seems to be a feature not only of language, but of the world, so that it also has an ontological dimension.

"Snow is white" isn't universally true, but it makes a claim about snow that purports to hold universally: anytime you find snow, you find something that is white. And that isn't an accident. Snow and whiteness do not drift apart. It's not like the way a smoggy haze imparts a color to the landscape. Snow and whiteness are bound up with each other. The color can change, but it's a change of color, not the loss of all colors.

Subjects and predicates always appear together in the world. You never see the predicate "has a good job" go drifting along just by itself. By the same token, every time you see an object, you see certain properties it has. The properties may be hard to describe, but you never see anything that hasn't got shape or color or mass or volume or anything like that. So subjects and predicates also seem to be part of the structure of the world, and not just of language.

One final thing to notice: In the expression "x + y" both x and y take numbers as values; you can plug "5" into either slot, or into both. But in the expression "subject-predicate," "subject" and "predicate" take different values. You cannot plug a predicate into the "subject" slot, or a subject into the "predicate" plot. "White is snow" makes no sense; neither does "Has a good job eats its own crap" or "Mr. Thomas the tallest tree in Africa." Subjects and predicates are different things, playing different roles in language and in the world.

[Yes, it's true that you can turn a predicate into a subject and vice versa, but you have to recast them. "Having a good job is a desirable trait in a spouse" recasts "has a good job" as a subject, but notice how the predicate changes its form as it moves into the subject space. Weirder is when a subject becomes a predicate; when that happens, we typically add the suffixes "-izes" or "-ates" as in "dramatizes" or "precipitates." An imposter like Will, I guess we might say, "-izes" or "-ates" when he replaces someone. "Will Chelseated all day yesterday" or "Will Cindy-ized after school."]

All of this has been a very long way of explaining what "ontological/logical" categories are. "Subject" and "predicate" are ontological/logical concepts, and the difference between them is an ontological/logical distinction. They are distinct but complementary categories that appear in any statement about the world and its contents.

Now, back to "existentia" and "qualia."

Best place to start is to say that existentia and qualia (terms I've invented for BoM) are variant names for "subject" and "predicate." Existentia is a variable that gets to have properties and qualities; qualia are the properties and qualities that objects have. But it's a bit different than "Snow is white," which can be translated directly into "subject-predicate." "Snow" is not existentia. Rather, you would translate the sentence first as "This stuff is snow and that same stuff is white"; then to "This existentia is snow and that same existentia is white"; then into "This existentia is this qualia and that same existentia is that qualia."

[Strictly speaking, you can do the same thing with "Snow is white", which turns into "This x is A and that same x is B" where A="is snow" and B="is white".]

So far, everything I've said has been straight up philosophical logic, of the kind you'll find either described or presumed in most philosophy books. It goes back to Aristotle, and unlike Aristotelian physics it has never been repudiated, only refined and evolved. Now, here is where BoM magic starts.

I said above that subjects and predicates don't come unglued; you can't have a subject without properties, and you can't have properties that don't inhere in a subject. The relationship between an object and its properties is like that between an object and its surface. Every object has a surface; if you laquer it over or peel it off, you just get a new surface. Removing all the surfaces is like removing all the layers from an onion; it leaves nothing behind. Similarly, removing all the properties from an object—all the predicates from a subject—leaves nothing behind. Subjects and predicates are distinct, but they always go together, and to remove one removes the other.

That's the way it seems to work in the real world. In BoM world, though, you can separate them: existentia and qualia can come apart and be manipulated separately. That separation is what magic can do: it's a way of piercing and manipulating reality at this very core level, back behind and below even the physical level. The separation is never permanent; there's just a way of separating them out so you can do manipulations on one before bringing them back together again.

That doesn't mean that you can describe the process, that you can describe what the magician or an onlooker would see when it happens. You wouldn't see the qualia floating away from the existentia; the mind just can't apprehend such a thing. An onlooker would only see the object "before" the operation and then instantly see it "after." The magician wouldn't see anything either; in his concentrated state, he would experience the manipulation as something like what you experience when you solve a difficult mathematical problem. The magician is manipulating something abstract in his mind; reality then changes to resemble what he has mentally constructed.

So, suppose you wanted to do a simple transformation: say, change the color of a billiard ball from white to black. You would concentrate on it—probably while holding it—and use techniques of concentration and meditation to bring up its abstract form in your head. You would separate out the qualia from the existentia, disentangle the qualia for "white" and change it or swap it out for the qualia for "black", then put them back together again. You, and everyone else, would see the white ball instantly turn black at some point in this process.

That would be a simple spell. Something more complex, like turning a bird into a rabbit, would be too hard to do mentally. That's what sigils are for. A sigil is like a software program, a written out form of the mental manipulations that have been arranged in a form that can "run". Put the bird inside the sigil, push "start", and after a very brief moment of confusion there would be a rabbit sitting where the bird had been.

So that's the simplest way to imagine how magic works in BoM. You pull a quality off of a thing and substitute a different quality, like the way you can change your pants. That's the change to the universe I've made in order to explain how just about any kind of magic can work in BoM.

* * * * *

II. Substantia and Imago

Now we start making some further distinctions.

Existentia and qualia apply to both abstract objects and concrete objects. Think of the number 2. That is not a physical thing. You can't pick up the number 2, or kick it, or paint it. (You can pluck up or kick or paint a symbol for it, but that symbol is not the number itself.) "Two" is an abstract object. But it has qualities, and you can attach predicates to it. "Two is an even number." "Two is half of four." "Two is twice one." In all those sentence, "two" is a subject and various predicates are attached to it, just like "is white" and "is wet" can be attached to "snow." So existentia and qualia are also features of abstract objects.

[We'll ignore the fetching possibilities that a good magician could alter the qualia of numbers, thus opening up realms for occult accounting and occult financing. (Insert your own joke about the subprime mortgage crisis here.)]

When talking about physical objects, though, BoM uses narrower terms: substantia and imago.

Substantia is "stuffness"; it's the focal point of the onion around which the qualities adhere. Examine a ball: its color, its shape, its weight, its mass, its volume. They are all attached to each other, as though there were some infinitesimal point that's at the center of each. That infinitesimal point is the substantia of the thing, and like an infinitesimal point, it cannot be studied or experienced directly, independent of the properties that it joins together. But substantia is the special stuff that allows physical qualities to bind together.

Note that substantia is not what physicists call "matter." It is not atoms and molecules, which are just another qualia or imago. It is part of a billiard ball's qualia that it is composed of atoms and molecules; it is part of the number two's qualia that it is not so composed.

At bottom, there is only one substantia in the universe, the substantia of the physical universe, and what look like different objects are only differing aspects of the universe's single imago. Think of a house that has a stone foundation, wooden walls painted white with green trim around the windows and spots of mold along its east wall. There is only one house, and it manifests different properties in different places: stone here, wood here, white here, green here, mold here. It's similar with the universe: there is only one substantia, but as you move through it, its one imago shifts aspects: a star here, vacuum here, a planet here, an ocean here, an island here, a city here, a lonesome cottage here, a girl in the garden here, a mole on her cheek here and a scar on her leg here. Alternately, think of the canvas of a painting. The canvas is the substantia—one canvas, one substantia—and one imago—the single smear of paint that shows different colors as your eye glances over it, colors that resolve in the eye as plants and animals and figures and clothes and blades of grass and drops of dew. When you change imago, as with a mask, you are not changing the imago of a discrete and isolated bit of substantia; you are altering the imago of the universe at a point, as when a painter dabs at his canvas to change a face on one of the people.

When copying or altering imago, one must draw a border around where you want to work; but in BoM we'll presume that magic spell is already drawing that border, so you don't have to make explicit mention of it when writing about a spell performance.

Substantia is the staple that keeps the physical properties from floating away. Imago is physical properties themselves: mass, height, weight, volume, density; color, shape; texture; and so on. Physical science is the study of imago, and so far as even the magicians of BoM can tell, imago follows physical laws. If you give something a certain mass and shape and composition, it will always behave in regular and predictable ways; and the only way to change its behavior is to change its imago, either through physical means (cutting it up or reshaping it; melting and reconstituting it) or occult means (swapping one imago for another). There is little to say about imago, except that in BoM there are occult ways of altering or swapping imago, in ways that seem to defy even the laws of thermodynamics. But imago is a category that precedes all physical laws.

* * * * *

III. Essentia

Alas, here again we have to jump back into real-world philosophy before taking a running leap into BoM magic.

Classical and medieval philosophers distinguished between "essences" and "accidents." It's a hard distinction that they often weren't clear about, and lots of modern-day historians of philosophy have a hard time really explaining it. So don't push at it, just try to glimpse the contours.

An "essence" is a property that a thing must have if it is to be the kind of thing that it is; if it loses that essence, then it ceases to be that kind of thing, and probably ceases even to be the thing that it was. An "accident" on the other hand, is a contingent kind of property, which can be picked up or cast aside without fundamentally altering the thing.

Easy examples of accidents in a human being: hair length; eye color; tan lines; having two legs as opposed to one leg and a stump. "Has never written a book" or "lives in Des Moines" are also accidental features a thing can have. All of these can change, but you're still talking about a human being, and will be talking about a particular human being both before and after the change. It is, in a sense, only an accident that you have some of these properties and not others.

"Was born out of a womb by a human mother," though, is a necessary feature of being human; if it hatches from an egg, it's not human. If its body is composed solely of photons, it's not a human. If it has the torso of a man but the legs of a goat, it's not human. Qualities such as being born from a womb, being composed of atoms and molecules, and having a certain physical structure are essential aspects of being human; these properties are "essences."

Now, there are lots of gray areas, which is why it's hard to push at these concepts. If you systematically replaced all the carbon atoms in a person with iron atoms, would it still be a human? You might say it's still human, just a dead human made out of iron. But what if you replaced the carbon with helium atoms? They'd disperse, I assume. It seems hard to say that a human being would be left around, only scattered to the four winds.

But, anyway, the core idea of "essence" is "property that a thing needs in order to be a certain kind of thing." "Human being" is a property, but when you've got that property you've also got other properties (like, "is an animal"), because those properties are essential to the property "is a human being." Those essential properties are called "essences."

In BoM, essentia is kind of like essence. It's a substance (not a form of imago) that makes a thing into the peculiar kind of thing that it is.

There are fewer essentia in BoM than there are essences in classical philosophy, and they are built differently. Essences are abstract objects—they are properties or predicates—but essentia is not an abstract object. It is an occult object, and like substantia it is not capable of being directly apprehended or grasped. But it is not a simple, irreducible substance either. Think of it as an incorporeal molecule: a thing that in some sense can be bigger or smaller, simpler or more complex, and can be modified by adding or subtracting bits.

The simplest essentia would be those associated with raw matter: the essentia of solids, liquid, gas, plasma. More complex essentia would yield the chemical elements, which behave according to their kind, and then the biological elements. Once these have attained a certain level of complexity (similar to the way organic compounds attain a chemical complexity) they become the kind of essentia found in living, animate objects like plants and animals. (Hence, the "vegetative essentia" that is sometimes referred to in BoM.) Some forms of essentia (animate or not) have the capacity to resonate with other substances: with metals, with animals, with the planets, etc. Or they acquire a heritability property, and can be passed down from parent to child. Again, essentia is not a physical thing, it does not have a shape, but you might imagine it as like the way complex molecules change their behavior if you plug new atoms onto them, or if you change their shape by binding them into loops.

The most complex essentia known to magicians is the essentia of human beings. It has two peculiar features that, to the best of their knowledge, is particular only to them.

The first is that "rationality" is part of it. Animals show a crude ability to cogitate and to communicate, and some also show self-awareness. But humans take these ability to a level so far beyond the animals that it is spooky. The thesis of BoM is that human rationality and consciousness really is spooky; it is literally occult in that it is a feature of essentia and not of the physical nervous system.

The second is that there is no generalized "human" essentia that all humans have in common. Instead, each person has their own unique essentia that is nevertheless very similar to the essentia that all other humans have. It's like there is a "human essentia" that all people have, but each person has a unique ringlet attached to it, a ringlet that does nothing but distinguish that person's essentia from everyone else's.

Points of difference between essentia and substantia and imago: Substantia cannot be created, destroyed, divided or multiplied; nor can it be altered. Imago cannot be created, destroyed or divided, but it can be altered and multiplied. Essentia cannot be created or multiplied, but it can divided, destroyed and altered.

The division, I must point out, is not like the physical division of a molecule or atom, which will destroy the molecule or atom by changing it into some other molecular or atomic substance. Rather, the division of essentia is actually a mathematical kind of division, in that you get two of them, but each loses a proportional amount of its "reality." Thus, dividing a bit of essentia by two will result in two bits of essentia that are only half as real as the first. (Destroying one of the clones will restore full reality to the survivor.) As it is divided, the essentia becomes less stable; it will not suddenly collapse, but a further division can instantly result in a collapse and the destruction of all the clones. For most people, the safe number is five clones; anything beyond risks a fatal rupture, a rupture that always occurs by the time you've made eight divisions (and usually by the time you've made seven). For Stellae (with one exception), the safe number is twelve, and that's a hard limit: the thirteenth leads to disintegration. The exception are Glundandrans: they get twenty.

Essentia that has been divided will resonate with itself. That is why a golem must obey the person whose essentia went into its making: the essentia it contains is resonating with the essentia inside the master. No bit of essentia is superior to any other bit; neither result after a division is the "original." Rather, it is the presence of anima inside one person that gives that person the ability to dictate to a golem. If the golem had anima, it would be completely independent.

* * * * *

IV. Anima

Anima is the core of a person: their sense of identity, sense of unity, sense of self. It's what makes you say "I am [me]" and not "I am [that other person]".

It's your mental states that give you that sense: your current experiences and impressions; your memories of experiences and impressions; the habits, dispositions and talents that those experiences have formed in you.

But anima is not identical to the set of mental states.

Instead, the relationship between anima and mental states is like that between substantia and imago, but with the polarity reversed. Substantia is the dimensionless core where imago overlaps, so that they belong to one thing and not another. Anima is the dimensionless core where mental states overlap, so that they belong to one person and not another. Substantia isn't just the location for overlapping imago; it's what holds imago together. But it's the reverse with anima: the mental states collide and cohere together, and that creates anima. As anima develops, though, with more experiences bombarding it, it comes to have a kind of independence, but it cannot exist independently of mental states. Though the mental states can be modified by outside forces, and some of them can lost or deleted, there still must be a lot of them; if too many of the memories and dispositions are lost, then the anima disappears. In principle, you can have substantia without imago; but you cannot have anima without mental states. "Amnesiac anima" is a contradiction in terms, like "dry water."

Anima is also a unique attribute of human beings, in that it can only be created in a thing that has human essentia. Roughly, this is what happens: The world bombards a human being with stimuli. The human being, having the "rational" essentia, sorts the stimuli out, creating mental states and representations and patterns. These then generate anima. Human essentia, then, is the filter that turns raw stimulus into the mental representations that create anima. Animals and other beings that lack human essentia do not acquire the kinds of mental representations that create anima, and so do not have anima.

Each person has a unique anima, but that isn't because each human has a unique essentia. It's because the anima is created at a unique location, the place where the world's stimuli come together and focus to create mental states. Your experiences made you; mine made me; we differ because we were standing at different places in the world, and were hence at the focal points of different waves of stimulations.

Anima, like essentia and substantia, is an occult object, not observable or manipulable by physical means. It does have a physical correlate, though. The mental states that compose it are features of the brain, and hence are physical objects; this makes those psycho-physical states part of imago, and being a kind of imago they can be copied by imago-copying spells. This is why it is in principle possible to copy memories, talents, dispositions, etc., as with mind bands. Those mental states, being imago, are infinitely copyable, but they lack the "sense of self" that goes with them. Though it is possible to lose yourself in another's "mental imago," it's only an evolution of habit in the imposter, not a substitution of selves.

But anima, along with the "sense of self," is also copyable, and like essentia it degrades with multiplication. Let's have no more than six running around at a time.