The Second Apocalypse
Earwa => The Aspect-Emperor => The White-Luck Warrior => Topic started by: What Came Before on May 29, 2013, 05:08:59 pm
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This is just a random thought i had....
From 'The Judging Eye' and 'The White Luck Warrior', the idea I've gotten is that nonmen magi are extremely powerful and therefore extremely feared, especially among sorcerers who, as opposed to the masses, are still aware of the terrible might of their nonmen counterparts.
I was wondering whether the sheer power of nonman magic (which from what I've understood is generally more powerful than the magic of any of the schools) should be associated with the power of the nonmen themselves or the power of their form of magic.
Also, do you think nonman magic is exclusively compatible with nonmen or could a human, through proper instruction, learn the Quyan theorems?
I don't know why but the thought of one man in the whole world using nonman magic seems pretty cool to me.
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Welcome pappu :)
The gnosis (wielded in modern times by the Consult, the Mandate and the Swayal sisterhood) is the human version of quyan sorcery.
There is a human sorcerer (practitioner of the gnosis) in this short story (http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/stories/the-false-sun/) who is reckoned to be the most powerful sorcerer - even by the quya.
Of course Kellhus, who has mastered and then improved on the gnosis, would probably be more powerful than him.
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Welcome to the Second Apocalypse, pappu.
I would hazard that the labyrinth of sorcery is poorly explored. Both the Nonmen and Scarlet Spires have found ways to harness Ciphrang, or agencies, as the Nonmen called the entities summoned by their outlawed practices. Then there is the Aporos, which may or may not be connected to that practice of summoning - though, I believe, Bakker, on old Three-Seas, directly attributes the summon of agencies by the Nonmen to the Quyan Gnosis.
I'm not sure what borders we can sketch or the distinctions we can make.
+1 for thoughts.
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Yeah the gnosis = nonman magic.
Also, I do believe Achamian uses the "seventh Quyan theorem" during a few of his battles, so not only do men use the nonmen magic but they do also still explicitly use some of the old spells.
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Yeh, the Seventh Quyan Theorom is listed in the Glossary under the Gnosis. Also;
The Gnosis was first developed by the Nonmen Quya, who imparted it to the early Norasai Anagogic sorcerers during the Nonman Tutelage, 555-825.
It's probable that the Gnosis doesn't cover all of Quyan sorcery, notably the banned stuff, like the Aporos and their versions of Diamotic sorcery.
K-"Tell me, how can some words work miracles while others can't?"
A-"The Nonmen once believed it was the language that made sorcery possible. But when Men began reproducing their Cants in bastard tongues, it became clear that this wasn't so ... It's the meanings, the meanings are different somehow. No one knows why."
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That's a bold question...
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Thanks everyone... :D
Every style of magic may be based upon the same root concept but don't the styles differ?
I always got the vibe that while nonmen view sorcery as a science, men view it as an art??
Is that just me or...?
Welcome pappu :)
The gnosis (wielded in modern times by the Consult, the Mandate and the Swayal sisterhood) is the human version of quyan sorcery.
There is a human sorcerer (practitioner of the gnosis) in this short story (http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/stories/the-false-sun/) who is reckoned to be the most powerful sorcerer - even by the quya.
Of course Kellhus, who has mastered and then improved on the gnosis, would probably be more powerful than him.
I know that Kellhus is extremely powerful ( His feats are unparalleled in the series ) but is he really the greatest sorcerer of all time?
I always thought that Kellhus was so dangerous because he was both Dunyain and a sorcerer.
He could see through men, understand the inner workings of their mind, and then influence them accordingly, using feats of sorcery to strengthen that influence. We know very little about the nonmen before the inchiroi invasion and I get the feeling that they've been around for a long time.
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Even if for some reason Kell was pretty mediocre at wielding the meta-gnosis, it would be like the grandmaster of the SS taking on one of the lower ranked Mandati. Sure the grandmaster kicks ass in his little pond, but the gnosis just far outclasses his abilities. The meta-gnosis just doesn't have a comparison as far as I can tell. Any sorcerers battler against Kell would end quickly.
Remember that Kell destroys nearly all of the most powerful Cish by himself, who where themselves decimating the SS.
In my mind the puske could have been close to the power of the gnosis, but it was a new school and not as well studied. At any rate, pretty much all of them are dead and the meta-gnosis has no comparison.
Now maybe some of the old Quya that are still wondering around, who have all but perfected the gnosis after thousands of years of practice, might stand a chance. It would basically be an inversion of the above scenario, where the Quya have far more experience and while the MG may be more powerful once fully mastered, at such a young age maybe it isn't all powerful.
Though I doubt it. At the rate the Kellhus can learn, improvise, and generate the meta-gnosis, I'd imagine that his power would have quickly far surpassed any other kind of sorcery that we know of... It would take at least a chorus of several Quya to take him down.
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I'm not sure what Titirga wields but the Metagnosis seems a strictly new advent as of the Second Apocalypse, as opposed to the First.
It makes me wonder what other novel sorcerous innovations await us.
The Metagnostic Daimos is very likely in our futures.
What might have the Intact of Ishterebinth accomplished in millennia?
The Mangaeccan Consult?
More sorcerous objects of Kellian invention?
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The Gnosis is best performed by someone who can obtain purity of mathematical meaning?
The Nonmen seem to posses more intelligence that mere humans, possibly due to their longevity.
But I suspect there natural abilities exceed ours (in general).
Kellhus on the other hand is a Mentat, that’s a whole other league.
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Kelhus is in the other league. Rememeber he won a sword duel, while being level 0 :-), with Nonman of old at the begining of TDTCB.
Buth then Incariol carried the whole team through the halls of Moria, upps sorry, the Nonmen Mansion all by himself. Killed trolls, sranc and the mighty Wracu at the end, giving up to Akka I feel.
Those like him have been as so far hidden from the pages of the books. If they made a pact with Consult - the Great Ordeal has much more to fear from quayan powers than from Sranc.
I feel that maybe Akka's mission would be to turn the Nonmen back to Great Ordeal.
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The Gnosis is best performed by someone who can obtain purity of mathematical meaning?
The Nonmen seem to posses more intelligence that mere humans, possibly due to their longevity.
But I suspect there natural abilities exceed ours (in general).
Kellhus on the other hand is a Mentat, that’s a whole other league.
Why stop at mentat :P. He's like Teg post agony (the cirumfixtion taking place of probe), and hell why not the kwisatz haderach (lets say a high dose of qirri taking place of the spice).
I feel that maybe Akka's mission would be to turn the Nonmen back to Great Ordeal.
Completely agree. What would be worth sacrificing his daughter (not to mention probably the most powerful schoolmen outside of Kellhus himself)? I'd say her life would certainly worth not fighting the Quya, and if a chorus of them join the Ordeal then its a definite win.
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coobek, long time. Cheers. It jarred to see your moniker among the membership.
+1 and I think that Achamian wears Nil'giccas' armour will going to be instrumental in polarizing Ishterebinth immediately.
I figure Serwa, Moenghus, and Sorweel will be welcomed at Ishterebinth under the auspices of Nil'giccas - who we know is dead. Achamian and Mimara will probably arrive shortly, being motivated after finding something or nothing at Ishual (in either case, after Ishual, they are without direction barring Dunyain intervention - either Achamian wants to see the Nonmen and tell them of Nil'giccas' fate or he wants to drag Mimara to the Ordeal and subject Kellhus to the Judging Eye).
Now I'm assuming that a certain number of Nonmen have turned to the Consult and perpetuated a lie that Nil'giccas advocates and is unavailable (in other words, someone is ruling in Nil'giccas' stead). If Achamian arrives at Ishterebinth wearing Nil'giccas armour then those who are being decieved, likely Intact, will revolt.
It all sounds like safe bets to me - I certainly think that Achamian wearing Nil'giccas armour is too obvious a plot device, not to use - though it is also poetic.
Wrenches: Dunyain at Ishual, Dunyain at Ishterebinth, Consult at Ishual, Consult at Ishterebinth.
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coobek, long time. Cheers. It jarred to see your moniker among the membership.
Long time indeed. I stopped looking in the abyss of internet after a while since the old forum was practicaly dead.
Cheers for remembering me though! Feel welcome already!
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Cheers indeed. Welcome to the Second Apocalypse.
Sometimes I feel like this place is a powder-keg awaiting the spark of TUC.
The path is too long, Father...
Golgotterath is too far.
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I'm not sure what Titirga wields but the Metagnosis seems a strictly new advent as of the Second Apocalypse, as opposed to the First.
It makes me wonder what other novel sorcerous innovations await us.
The Metagnostic Daimos is very likely in our futures.
What might have the Intact of Ishterebinth accomplished in millennia?
The Mangaeccan Consult?
More sorcerous objects of Kellian invention?
The Mangaeccan Consult are probably all just Shaeononra. I think there might be some kind of body-slave-mind-controlled sorcery, where Shae and the Consult place souls in other vessels and run around terrorizing the battle. They could kill the bodies, but the souls just flee to another, effectively making an infinite supply of sorcerers for the Consult to wield.
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Lol, buddy. Just wait. One of the latter threads from Misc./Unholy Consult to bring over is Synthese/V. Bird where I suggested that we don't know what forms of Synthese the Consult might have created; such as, and not limited to, Tekne/Iron Man suits?!
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lol thinking of a giant synthase bird and flying around and Black Sabbath singing:
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
...
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After Shauriatas' Ten-Soul Hover-Shield in the Ch. 1 excerpt, I figure the Consult might simply have constructed war-machines (pun-intended) avatars for combat like the Bird-Synthese for surveillance.
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Our topic strayed but it has been ported :): The Synthese/V. Bird (http://second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=829.0)
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The Gnosis is best performed by someone who can obtain purity of mathematical meaning?
The Nonmen seem to posses more intelligence that mere humans, possibly due to their longevity.
But I suspect there natural abilities exceed ours (in general).
I dont really think this is true in all cases. At the very least Shae was the one that broke the Barricades that none of the Nonmen could. They may be better at thinking through certain tasks, like a computer is better at solving algebra than a human, but they seem to suffer from this as well. Not a lot of problem solving going on for the race of Cuniori. Men, I think, were always doomed to surpass them.
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The Gnosis derives from the Quya but the Gnosis has been filtered through thousands of years of human scholarship. I think that the Gnosis practiced in the time of the books is probably very different from the Quya.
Quyan magic is suited to the minds of the Nonmen and Nonmen are weird by human standards. The Gnosis was developed and honed by men. There are probably many Gnostic incantations that are based on earlier Quyan formulas and that accomplish the same thing but the logic of spell has been changed to make it more accessible. Pieces of Quyan knowledge may have been lost and abandoned over the years. Also, humans have expanded on the Quya. They've improved old formulas and developed new ones.
In the end I'd bet that the Gnosis is slightly more powerful than the Quya. The Quya has become stagnant as the Nonmen have declined, whereas humans continue to tinker with the Gnosis.
Now maybe some of the old Quya that are still wondering around, who have all but perfected the gnosis after thousands of years of practice, might stand a chance.
The Nonmen magi who are still around aren't more powerful than human sorcerers due to the superiority of their incantations. They are more powerful than human sorcerers because they are themselves physically and mentally superior. They have inhuman stamina, inhuman intelligence, and many lifetimes worth of practice. They're almost always win, but the Quya is the inferior weapon.
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The Nonmen magi who are still around aren't more powerful than human sorcerers due to the superiority of their incantations. They are more powerful than human sorcerers because they are themselves physically and mentally superior. They have inhuman stamina, inhuman intelligence, and many lifetimes worth of practice. They're almost always win, but the Quya is the inferior weapon.
There was somethinh bakkerspoken about it.
A question in an interview how a race of madnonmen could still use sorcery, considering their mental disfunction. The answer, as I remember, was about memory migration. Like, Cet'Ingira or Nil'Gicass don't "remember" or "understand" sorcery anymore, but have it as a reflex, much like automatism of breathing or walking.
I suppose that makes every Quya an unbeatable enemy for common gnostic adept and explains why there weren't southern or western "renaissances" of tutelage (Gin’yursis was one of the last cunuroi who could both use & explain his art).
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The Nonmen magi who are still around aren't more powerful than human sorcerers due to the superiority of their incantations. They are more powerful than human sorcerers because they are themselves physically and mentally superior. They have inhuman stamina, inhuman intelligence, and many lifetimes worth of practice. They're almost always win, but the Quya is the inferior weapon.
There was somethinh bakkerspoken about it.
A question in an interview how a race of madnonmen could still use sorcery, considering their mental disfunction. The answer, as I remember, was about memory migration. Like, Cet'Ingira or Nil'Gicass don't "remember" or "understand" sorcery anymore, but have it as a reflex, much like automatism of breathing or walking.
I suppose that makes every Quya an unbeatable enemy for common gnostic adept and explains why there weren't southern or western "renaissances" of tutelage (Gin’yursis was one of the last cunuroi who could both use & explain his art).
what if there were secret spells that the nonmen never taught humans??? could be some crazy shit!
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what if there were secret spells that the nonmen never taught humans??? could be some crazy shit!
There definitely were some areas of magic that were never passed on. The aporos for example
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But the Aporos might be a special case in that its practitioners were already shunned by the Quya and the study banned.
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But the Aporos might be a special case in that its practitioners were already shunned by the Quya and the study banned.
Somehow I want meta- (or even plain) aporos to be capable of chain reaction which destroys the very possibility of using sorcery. Bakkerverse-wide, I mean. So that's the reason behind cunuroi ban, not because of a certain luddism in mageocratical society, but to preserve the foundations of known universe.
Oh. Maybe that's why Earwa is a promised land? Somewhere sometime someone was aporetic enough to practically geld the universe to sorcery, except one tiny earwan safespot. Or it'a a "natural" cause of evolution in bakkerverse, where intelligence means sorcery and sorcerers eventually sterilize their world in such sense. Putting things that way, to figth with reality, Inchoroi had to traverse through puny worlds which were deprived of any means to make a real impact upon reality.
Yay. I love my sudden crackpot. Mostly because it makes cunuroi the literal saviours of inchoroi, an equal "perversion" of "natural" order of things.
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Mini-runnaway Aporos explosion caused the anarcane ground. What else could it be ;)
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Mini-runnaway Aporos explosion caused the anarcane ground. What else could it be ;)
I'm of the mind that the Anarcane Ground was no accident. It was done to protect the Mansion from the Quya. What they probably didn't anticipate was the reaction it caused with the Ishroi, who probably just used physical force to remove them from there. There is little doubt this would have been at the behest of the Quya though.
Mind you, that is all totally made up, but seems more plausible to me than an accident.
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I like accidents. They happen IRL. Sometimes things just go wrong for no reason, and I'm ok with that happening in books. Bothers a lot of people though.
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I like accidents. They happen IRL. Sometimes things just go wrong for no reason, and I'm ok with that happening in books. Bothers a lot of people though.
True, I guess I am biased. The thing is though, isn't Anarcanic Ground exactly what they would want though? To me, an Aporosic accident would have something of an unintended effect, like Hyperarchanic Ground. To me, this was their crowning achievement, so wildly successful that it got themselves outlawed and probably killed.
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Its possible, but I don't see it as any less likely that it was some catastrophe that caused the ruling cast to ban the Aporos. Nothing galvanizes like horrific accidents.
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Mini-runnaway Aporos explosion caused the anarcane ground. What else could it be ;)
Cishaurim-like water poured onto chorae (a seed to grow a world without sorcery)? :3