The magic system in the world of Primitia can often feel vague, unintuitive, and abstract— especially to those with no intuitive sense for field theories in modern physics! There is a lot of jargon I use both in-universe and from the real-world that can muddy the waters. All that said, I don’t believe it to be the magic system itself to be too complex conceptually.
To help one garner a better intuition on ideas of Sentia, the Æther Field, sequencing, flux, etc., I have done my best to draw distinct parallels in the following analogy involving a quaint pond, some fish, and a fisherman:
A pond of fish…
I want you to picture a quaint, tranquil pond inhabited by a school of fish. Think of the Field like the pond, and think of any conscious entity like the fish below the surface.
Disturbances seen at the surface of the pond (waves or ripples) correspond to any act of consciousness by a conscious entity. The simple practice of thinking, deciding, willing, remembering, praying, etc. are reflected in a corresponding ripple produced at the pond’s surface. One might imagine spell casting as a more advanced form of “conscious act.”
So, how do the fish do this? That is, create these ripples on the surface of the pond.
Even though a fish might jump out of the water and cause a splash, for the sake of this analogy, we are going to assume that the fish cannot jump out of the water (except for in a very special case).
A Humble Fisherman…
Now, imagine a very skilled fisherman has managed to hook every fish in the pond to a line with bobber. As the fish tug on their respective lines, the bobbers moves up and down at the surface, creating these ripples. In essence, the movement of the fish correspond to acts of consciousness as described above.
Let’s now focus on a single fish. The harder this fish tries to pull on its line, the larger the up-and-down motion of its bobber becomes and the bigger the ripples on the surface it creates. The effort the fish puts into yanking on its line is like the energy put into its “act of consciousness.”
The more frequently a fish pulls on the line, the shorter the spacing would be between each ripple. The flux is like amount of ripples per unit time traveling across the ponds surface.
Let’s go deeper…
Literally! You might imagine not every fish is going to swim at the same exact depth. Some will be closer to the surface, whilst other will be deeper and near the bed of the pond.
If a fish swims frantically, tugging desperately on its line, nearer the pond’s surface, the more of that of tugging is reflected by the motion of the bobber on the surface. The same kind of tugs made by a fish deeper below will not translate to the same movements by the bobber on the surface; they will be less noticeable. The deeper the fish (conscious entity), the less it can affect the surface of the pond (displacements in the Æther Field).
The depth at which the fish tugs on its line is analogous to the field being manipulated by acts of consciousness.
Note:
Acts of consciousness defined by panpsychism could be quite literally any action in the universe (any action within the laws of physics). Anything from a person grieving, to leaves performing photosynthesis, to atomic nuclei vibrating, to planets orbiting suns. All acts would create these disturbances in the pond (the field). The difference between these different acts is the level of consciousness being invoked. To put simply, there is “more” consciousness invoked in the decision to go to the grocery store and buy food than there is in a million rocks tumbling down a hill. This is why, though rare, high-level consciousness in the universe is unique and special.
In this sense, low forms of consciousness (a person being asleep, electrons orbiting nuclei, etc.) are like fish deeper in the pond compared to higher acts of consciousness (being awake, cheering at a little league soccer game, winning the lotto, spell casting, etc.) that operate closer to the pond’s surface. This is why even though a large amount of energy is released by something like a meteor colliding with a planet (not one with higher consciousness at least that might observe, in-fear its impending destruction), it would not affect the Æther Field nearly as much as a baby crying for its mother. And in turn, a baby crying wouldn’t effect the field as much as a mage casting a spell.
How Taut is the Line?
The line attached to any fish can we tighter or looser. In a similar fashion to the depth at which any fish swims, how taut the line is also determines how much of a fish’s swimming is translated to motion in the bobber. This tautness of the line is analogous to Resonance, which is essentially how efficiently the Field registers and responds to stimuli from entities. Higher Resonance begets tighter lines and bobbier bobbers.
Effection
I know what you are thinking…
"That's great and all, but how does magic work under all of this philosophy and metaphysics BS?"
Well I am glad you asked because sadly this is where the analogy really begins to breakdown (if you haven’t already felt it dissolving). But by now, you should have an intuition on what needs to happen next.
There must be some mechanism by which magi (e.g. fish nearest the surface of the pond with relatively taught lines) affect other fish around them. Through the shared medium that is the Field, these fish have to tug hard enough on their lines to not only create disturbances on the surface of the pond, but also affect the other bobbers and therefore other fish.
Now you might be thinking, can’t the fish just bump into each other directly without going through the medium of the field? Well… yes. That could totally do that, but that would be analogous to just affecting reality directly instead of through the field. This would be like a mage reaching out with their hand to pick up the apple on the table as oppose to using some form of telekinesis to lift it.
ISSUES
There are definitely problems with the analogy at this point. The biggest of which is how magi affect ordinary matter when it is the deepest in the pond and they are near the top.
The simple (though rather inelegant) answer is that magi are very large fish and atoms are very small fish so that the difference in depth is negated by their relative “strength”.
So does this mean that other magi can affect each other really easily? Or that magi can affect non-magi easily? Well not exactly. There is a difference in efficiency depending on the directionality (entity influencing the field / the field influencing the entity). For instance, a human might be a large fish, but they are lazy. So they can’t move the field very much, but they are hard to move themselves. This gets into the Magi Classification scheme, but I will leave the analogy where it is for now.
…The Abyss Stares Back
Many fun questions can arise when contemplating this analogy even more deeply. For instance, pondering what idle tides and waves in the pond might be interpreted as. One way to interpret these default waves or tides is as the will of God. More should be discussed in Æther Field Saturation but the gist of it is that the Æther Field has different default modes of oscillation similar to (The fundamental), and depending on an advance magi’s emotional aptitude, they will resonate with the field at different harmonic frequencies. This leads to greater spell casting efficiency. In this sense, it is possible that the universe (God) has a bias in a specific emotional directionality. These is applicable to the theme of nihilism versus existentialism.