The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [187]
Tieryn (Dev.) An intermediate rank of the noble-born, below a gwerbret but above an ordinary lord (Dev. arcloedd.)
Wyrd (trans. of Dev. tingedd) Fate, destiny; the inescapable problems carried over from a sentient being’s last incarnation.
Ynis (Dev.) An island.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Over the past few years, readers have asked me various questions about the Deverry series. Usually these questions get themselves asked in noisy rooms at conventions where no one can really hear the answers, but now Spectra has kindly given me a chance to answer some of them in print, where it’s always quiet. The two things you all most want to have clarified, it seems, are the kind of magic the characters use and the way I’ve organized the books.
Deverry dweomer is very loosely based on the “real magic” of the Western tradition, a field of study that can be best defined, perhaps, through its history. First, though, let me define one thing that magic isn’t, popular belief and oft-repeated clichés to the contrary. Magic is most emphatically not a substitute for technology, nor is it the equivalent of technology. No more will the true magician study it only for personal gain. As a very wise man recently defined it, “Magic is the art of producing changes in consciousness at will and of using these changes to expand the consciousness of all humanity.” Notice the emphasis on consciousness here. This is not to say that magic never produces any effects in the so-called “real” or physical world. Quite the contrary. It is simply that in true magic, consciousness is always central and these physical effects secondary. In Deverry; since I’m writing adventure stories first and foremost, the physical effects are quite spectacular, but this is one reason that I say the magic is very loosely based upon the Western tradition.
What is this tradition, then? Over the past two thousand years, thanks to the invective of the various churches and more recently of the scientific community, magic has had to lie hidden in the West, practiced in secret, persecuted in public whenever the inquisitiors got wind of it, and because of that persecution what should be an organized body of philosophic thought and spiritual practice has become maimed and garbled, conflated in the popular mind with superstition, devil worship, and the tricks and silly stories of con men and hucksters. In Asia, where no one organized religion ever got the whip hand over the soul of humanity, the situation is different. Most of you know about Yoga, for instance, a truly spiritual discipline reaching back thousands of years, or have heard about the monastic life of Buddhism and the intense spiritual insights and powers that its devotees attain after years of meditation. Western magic should have been no less.
Let me say here that when I talk about Europe and Asia, I don’t mean to deny the existence of the native spiritual systems of Africa and the Americas. I simply don’t know enough about them to discuss them intelligently. The roots of all these spiritual systems, however, including what should have been the European, probably lie in some common ground, the developing shamanism of Paleolithic hunters some fifteen thousand years ago, or maybe even farther back than that. I doubt very much that anyone will ever know, and you should all be extremely skeptical of anyone who says he or she does, particularly if these claims involve flying saucers, the lost continent of Atlantis,