A Circle of Folk Wisdom, vol. 1
edited by Tersa, filia Metella, of House Ægidius
The crate from St. Cyrynthia has arrived, and here on our desk sits the leather involucrum of the latest number of Circulus scienticulæ.
We wish we could recommend it.
After all, what covenant in the Order does not have a spot on a favored shelf for one or another of the Horreum scienticulæ produced by her forebears, Melina and Martia, from 316 to 364? And does not have next to it their own bound copy of numbers of Luscirpiculæ, the engagingly chatty addenda, errata, appendices and commentary they distributed between editions? —Perhaps your copies have been moved to a higher, dustier shelf, to make way for a copy of Allisen’s mighty Ab esse ad posse, or a great wodge of For Those So Lazy? It has, after all, been over fifty years since the Verbi Melians laid aside their work on folklore to take up the somewhat narrower field of exorcism, at once more dangerous and considered more worthy of our attention. But I assure you: time has not dimmed the diverting charm of these pages, any more than Marienburgher children have stopped their “Ragged-and-tough, Huckem-a-buff” chanting games in the endless heat of summer afternoons—to take but one example, from Luscirpiculæ vol. quartus num. quintus.
Our only complaint had been that further editions of the Horreum were not forthcoming; that the flow of Luscirpiculæ had stopped. When word came to us, then, that Tersa filia Metella intended to resume the Melian exploration of folklore and hedge-magic, we wrote of our eager anticipation. But it is clear from this concluding number to the first volume of her Circulus that she did not mean to resume so much as redeem, and that we have very different ideas as to what redemption means. One will find no new work in these pages, detailing what folklore and magicula we might have learned from the far reaches of the Skullstorren, or Gætan; instead, one flips through page after closely argued page of dry and dusty neotraditionalist arguments, mostly from the quill of Tersa, though also a few like-minded St. Cyrynthians—arguments that take up this page or that of their predecessors’ work, worry at each nugget of magic, each Finder’s charm and healing simple to be found within, and tease them with unwieldy logic until, half-broken, knotted into unrecognizable shapes, they can be (somewhat) explained as nothing more, after all, than a combination of the five essences and the ten elements and substances. —This is dry and sterile work that pales in comparison with what it thinks to be returning to us: after all, the whisper of uncertainty that thrills beneath Melina’s and Martia’s cheerfully omnivorous work is this: we do not know everything there is to be known about magic. To pretend otherwise is to turn our backs on what we should aggressively pursue.
The Circulus scienticulæ, then, is not as we had hoped. Perhaps the pseudonymous Morgenstern will next turn his encyclopedic wit to the task of resuming this quotidian but important work? Until then, let your copy of the Horreum stay on its favored shelf.
Some footnotes.
So, I, uh, kinda invented hand-written magazines? Sorta off-handedly? I hope no one minds?
My rationale being this: we’ve got a bustling literary culture that does not (so much) revere ancient, classic texts as cannibalize them for their own current works; more to the point, doesn’t use books by reading them and pondering them in libraries, but as actual tools in, well, yes, libraries—but as means to an end, not so much an end in and of themselves. They take bits and pieces of books, the pages they need, and make books of their own; they write commentaries and copious lab notes; they use writing itself as a tool to open up spells and poke and prod them and put them back together again, and other people find reading through that process useful, and so forth and so on. And Charles’ suggestion of linen- (or hemp-, or a hemp-analogue–) based paper, as a cheaper and more readily available writing surface than, y’know, parchment, made a more copious and, yes, trivial, and just more bustling literary scene seem suddenly more possible.
So, yes, books are written, as we think of books, but there’s also the great argosies like For Those So Lazy, which seems to be a catchall for every covenant’s I Hate to Housekeep book, shambolic masses of this spell or that clustered around the same basic kernel of original stuff. And I’m thinking that the more cooperative covenants, such as the Melian covenants, might devote themselves to group efforts, coordinated by an editor, that put out definitive editions now and then, and update them with quires of commentary, addenda, appendices, and emendations on an irregular basis.
We have, then, the original Melian encyclopedia of folklore, the Horreum scienticulæ or Storehouse of Little-Knowledge, that was edited over fifty years by Melina and then Martia; I imagine at least four editions were draft in that time. But between them were distributed smaller works, individual quires of 12 – 16 pages usually, with commentary etc. These were called the Luscirpiculæ by Melina, as a typically self-deprecating Melian joke: it means “Rushlights,” and you weren’t supposed to waste more than a rushlight on reading them. (Which is my attempt at a Foxfire reference, so hey.) —Tersa, then, isn’t publishing a complete new edition of the Horreum; she’s putting out these smaller quires, the Circulus, the first six numbers of which have been gathered together in a single book, volumen primus.
So:
Make sense? —Of course, this quire or that of Luscirpiculæ or the Circulus could also be sewn into the binding of some other book, if so desired.
So: anything too small or too insignificant to bind up between boards and make, y’know, a book might then be sewn up in a quire and wrapped in a leather (or some other tough, flexible material) involucrum, or envelope; I’m imagining they’re then rolled up almost scroll-like for shipping. But maybe not. The involucrum is intended to be reused, of course, and the quires can be pulled out and sewn into whichever other book they’re intending to emend.
I think that covers most everything our kindly friend the Censor didn’t get to in their diss. —If this doesn’t work for one reason or another, we can easily enough make it a quirk of Melian literary production, or even just the Horreum, if we like. But I do kinda like the idea of the books being supplemented by hand-written magazines: it gives us a means of distributing magical writing in smaller doses. If we want it.
Oh, I weep for the Griseldan line!
Poor old Griselda must be tossing in her grave. Very nice.
I like the idea of there being periodicals as you describe. It does fit with the pragmatic approach magi take to texts. I'm struggling to avoid the "women's magazine" analogy here, but failing --I imagine a good market for a healthy distribution of recipes spells, household hints useful laboratory advice, and probably more often than not outright gossip Cholaeic Lore. Not to mention those True Confessions...
The Known World's paper equivalent should definitely be vegetative, I'd say, rather than parchment. Parchment is a royal pain in the ass, and has there ever been a real world culture in which literacy was truly valued that hasn't found an alternative? (Not a rhetorical question - I don't know the answer.)
Magical Involucrum
Also, if we assume magical involucrum, this matches perfectly with something else previously established:
Mages shrink their works and distribute them by pigeon. The enchanted involucrum (close it and it shrinks itself and its contents to one tenth its size and weight for easy shipping on the leg of a pigeon) works much better with a linen magazine than with a leather-bound parchment tome.
And the distribution method naturally leads mages to frequently use the magazine form in preference to the tome form, with the magazines eventually getting bound into tomes for better storage and handling.
Oh, and very cool entry.
Mosley's Compendium
It strikes me that this is almost certainly also the format of Mosley's Compendium, once edited by Mosley, inherited upon his death by the neo-conservative Aelfred at Ne Interire. The original "Compendium" itself has likely never been released in a new edition as such; there is instead a regular (or at least semi-regular) flow of associated quires released for it.
Mosley’s Prismatic Involucrum!
I’ve been reading Jack Vance. —I wish now I hadn’t put in the detail about the crate; I always forget to remember the pigeons. (Then again, submitting your work to Antrum via pigeon probably smacks of desperation.)
edit Prismatic. Christ, I’ve been here too long.
I like it.
Though your note above has me wondering if there’s a Folio Sextus—a top-secret invitation-only APA ’zine that dishes the Order’s gossip…