BoM/TWS Message Forum

I'm on BoM hiatus, but I got up early and will spend the extra hours answering questions that I hadn't got around to answering before. Deep breath, and:

>> if Will, with the level of mastery he has over the Libra after returning from Cuthbert in that branch, could adapt that modify sigil to modify anima. And if he can, would it therefore be possible for him to extract somebody’s anima and modify it so that it resembles his own exactly?

This is another of those questions whose answer is not forced by the logic of the system but would be answered by the needs of the story. So it doesn't really have an answer.

If you forced me to invent one, my answer would be ... No. The intuitions that have guided my invention of this stuff do not incline that way. In my mind, "anima" is the alchemical equivalent of the "soul," and since so much of BoM's metaphysics are influenced by ancient Greek metaphysics, then "anima" doesn't resemble an organ that can be removed, but is more like a relation between parts. In Greek metaphysics, the soul stood to the body the way the sound pitch stood to a string. Pluck a string, and it produces a tone. But you can't remove the tone from a string. You can only change the tone within the string.

So what is going on when you copy anima? To my mind, that isn't really copying the tone, that is cutting off bits of the string that ring with that tone and inserting them into another person. (And here the metaphor breaks down. If you cut off a bit of a string, you will change its pitch. You have to imagine anima as a string that retains its pitch even if you cut off pieces of it.) But you can only cut out so much of the string before there's no more length to be cut out.

Now, could you get an effect like you propose? Say, by harmonizing another person's anima to "ring" with the same "tone" as the magician's? Or by creating an artificial "string" and harmonizing it to the magician's anima, and inserting that instead? Story needs would definitely be what dictates the answer to that, but my inclination is to treat anima as something that is actually much more complex than a simple harmonic pitch and so is impossible to replicate or closely copy. I think the closest you could get would be to replace one person's anima with an artificial anima that is quite different, but there would be no way to know if the new anima would be any more, um, "friendly" to the magician than the original's anima.

>> Essentia is divisible only so many ways before it collapses, so that made me wonder if the Libra could be used to kill somebody like that.

Oh, this one's easy. Yes. Exactly as you describe.

>> But what would happen if only the sigil to extract substantia was activated? Considering that from my understanding, substantia holds everything else together, would a person just completely unravel if it was extracted?

If you watched the process in real time, it would simply look like the person had vanished. Poof. And there would be no way to extract or store the other stuff because, as you note, substantia is what holds the stuff together.

Think of it this way: Imagine holding a rock. It has color, weight, texture. Now imagine you waved a magic wand and made all the atoms disappear. What would happen to the color, weight, and texture? They'd just disappear. They wouldn't be anywhere after the operation, either.

>> I guess if a brain band is placed on someone with an anima band, does it copy the whole thing or just the mental imago of the original body?

I think Prussian has the right answer, and has the receipts to back it up.