From Being to Knowing
written by Allisen, filia Irrumator, of House Manere
A comprehensive text on the five substances: animal, corpus, herbam, imaginem, and mentem.
A hulking volume, bound in leather with gold embossed symbols for each of the forms described within, ab esse ad posse is another of the pre-eminent texts to be written in the past 50 years. Comprehensive on its chosen subjects, it is said that Allisen spent the bulk of 10 years researching this volume, and the time spent shows. Utilizing the resources of Antrum and her extensive network of correspondents, Allisen amassed a compendium of foundational and innovative work of her day on the five substances, interwoven with her original synthesis of the material presented. Allisen's opening remarks in this text create the background and introduce the structure for the exploration of these magical forms. Based on the philosophical viewpoint dividing the natural world into these five categories: the vegetative, non-sentient animate beings (animal), sentient animate beings (human) , impulses read by the five senses and the intangible yet real matters of thought and the mind. Beginning with the text with herbam, Allisen's text goes from the most earthly to the most numinous. Notable selections are the "Compositae" from Aegidius' work Primo Vere, a battery of muto and creo spells for growing and shaping plants, and the autumnal musings on perdo magics and natural plant death found in Scolopax' Sylvanus. Contributions to the volume on animal are perhaps the weakest, especially when compared to the binding and releasing strategies from Foucault's Compendium of Spirits and healing spells for flesh and skin from the inimitable earlier work by Cornix. Allisen's own contributions are most numerous in the volume on imaginem and it is no small tribute to the author that her own work fits amongst the spells and musings of her forbears.
