Styx

[madimpossibledreamer]

another good person in my life has died and it sucks

To intern: file this under the expanding Magic section.  It’s fascinating and useful to know as we learn about the opportunities and threats magic poses, but ultimately doesn’t quite get to the meat of the matter, which is cataloguing powers of ally, friend, or more complicated relationships than that.

I really want to learn more about Father Styx's powers.  It'd be really interesting to learn more about how they work, maybe even replicate them.  I always wonder about Miss Calendar, how things would have gone if she'd have stayed alive.  If Angelus hadn't killed her.  I'd like to think things would have gone better.  I'd like to think that maybe if I'd been more focused on experimentation and learning, maybe I would've been less focused on practical applications and them maybe I wouldn't have gone as far as I did.

I can't be sure, obviously.  Because what ifs give no certainty, no matter how hard we will it or how how many spells we try to use.  But I'd like to think Mr. Giles would have been happy and maybe I would've been more happy, too.  I don't think Xander ever fully forgave him, but I understood.  Better after I lost it.  Xander never went evil so he doesn't get it, no matter how hard he tried for me.

Um.  Sorry about rambling.  Feel free to edit this for your records or cut it out altogether.  It's old history and not exactly relevant, so it might not be what you want to have here.

So, as a play on the term technopagan, Father Styx calls himself a technochristian, but from everything I can tell, a lot of his techniques and spells aren’t solely restricted in that aspect.  What I mean here is, all of this technomagic type stuff shows a very specific aspect of how magic works in the first place.

Apparently Robin already touched on this a little, but to elaborate: magic involves the will to bring a change to the world, and the belief to cause that change to happen.  For all that, though, the man makes it look effortless.  Most other magic users look at technology and magic and see some giant divide between the two.  Interestingly, that might actually be a kind of artificial barrier humans put up, because we like challenging ourselves and get bored.  There’s actually research about how the natural versus artificial sharp distinction is a pretty Western thing.  For that matter, there are people who argue that magic itself is unnatural because it’s doing things that are impossible by the conventional laws of reality.

Science would argue that that’s impossible, because you can’t break the laws of reality.  If you’re appearing to do so, that means that you just haven’t learned the relevant law of reality yet, or you need to reassess your paradigm.  It could be that there’s a different set of laws at play that seem contradictory but aren’t—for example, quantum physics is relevant at the small scale, and is contradictory to conventional physics, which governs the large scale things.  So by that line of thought, magic is a science, trying to find out how the world works.

I’m only just now actually learning most of this Theory of Magic stuff, so take it with a grain of salt.  Which just proves again how stupid I was, pushing as hard as I did.  I was basically trying to skip directly to advanced calculus when I hadn’t even learned algebra yet.  I had the brains, but not the background.

Also, using this logic, Father Styx would be a Catholic alchemist.  You know, apart from the fact that he’s not Catholic, but Anglican, and the part where he’s probably not trying to transmute things, and yeah, okay, so I get it, it’s a bad comparison, but hear me out.  The point is that the Catholics used to be super into science and funding science, because they fully wanted to understand and appreciate the world their God had given them and thus worship through knowledge.  The alchemists were the original chemists, magicians methodically and scientifically trying to catalogue the results of their magical experiments.  So, uh, in spirit, there’s a definite similarity there.

Any technopagan could use similar spells.  For that matter, anyone with magic, as long as they could get past that mental barrier.  The main difference, in general, besides the types of changes that people with magic try to affect, are the means by which people do it.  But if you’re able to step outside your comfort zone, you absolutely can learn how to do any and all different types of magic, different means to achieve the same end.

I said Father Styx makes this look easy, and that’s because he does.  He doesn’t act like there’s a barrier in the first place.  Maybe there wasn’t, for him, or maybe he’s just been doing this so long, but either way, it’s impressive.

If not for the priest or alcoholic things, I’d bet Xander would’ve been over the moon meeting the guy.  He really likes the Babylon 5 technomages.  Er, wait.  You guys call him Johan, right?  It’s useful to use all the same terminology so everybody can understand each other properly.