Heka

Patterns

Introduction

As happens with others I’m lying in bed waiting to nod off when thoughts intrude. In my case those thoughts have to do with the subject of magick, the sort of magick presented in the Dangerous Journeys system, and most especially as presented in the Mythus RPG. Not wanting to lose this thinking, I decided to get up and write this down.

Now I like science, science is fun. Science gives you the tool to understand things, and to learn how to understand things. Given that we are not capable of perfect or even complete understanding we can still learn to understand to respectable degree. As far as I’m concerned science can be applied to magick, as long as you accept magick as something that can be understood; as long as you’re dealing with a phenomenon that does work.

I go into that in more detail elsewhere, in this entry in the series I’m going to be dealing with the subject of patterns.

On Patterns

In our existence I see the following patterns.

1. Folds
2. Fibers
3. Twine
4. String

Now I don’t see Strings as the base because they appear to be too complex to be the base, so I came up with twine which combine with other Twine to make up String. Then String combine with other String to make up Quarks which by themselves or in combination with other Quarks then give us Leptons, Muons, and Hadrons. With the worlds of Dangerous Journeys along with Twine and String you also have Yarn and Thread. Thread then gives us Sparks, which in turn give us other objects I haven’t decided on a name for yet.

Now in our reality Twine and String are what are allowed. In the Worlds of Dangerous Journeys Yarn and thread are allowed along with Twine and String, though they are different patterns than the other two. And note that in the worlds of Dangerous Journeys such as Folds etc. can and do interact with space-time in different ways. This gives us the various Interactions we know as Gravity etc. With the Dangerous Journeys worlds the Interactions are:

1. Folds: Gravity
2. Fibers: Positive Strong Interaction, Negative Strong Interaction
3. Twine: Positive Weak Interaction, Negative Weak Interaction
   1. Yarn: Pre Heka
4. String: Positive Electric Interaction, Negative Electric Interaction, Positive Magnetic Interaction, Negative Magnetic Interaction
   1. Thread: Positive Heka Interaction, Negative Heka Interaction

Beyond Sparks

Now beyond Quarks you have Leptons, Muons, and Hadrons. Given that Muons are unstable and short lived it is Leptons and Hadrons that give us such as Atoms, and from Atoms, Molecules. From them we get such as compounds, chemicals, and minerals. In the case of Sparks we get Hekons, and from them we get more complex patterns, which lead to more complex patterns and so on and so forth.

As with the more and more complex physical patterns the Heka patterns give us give us such as self-sustaining patterns, and from the self-sustaining the self-repairing patterns. When they get complicated enough you get magickal patterns that can be called “Alive”. These we call “spirits.”

Then this complication gets complicated.

For as with physical life, with magickal life qualities such as sentience—self awareness—come into play. With sentience you get sapience, or the ability to reason, and the better a life form, physical or magickal, is at reasoning the more intelligent you can see he is.

Magickal Effects.

Now Heka has an affect on reality much as matter does, though the mechanisms do differ. For the most part the effects are too random to actually be noticed, but sometimes you do have noticeable effects. For the most part this happens with the right pattern. In so far as Heka is part of the physical world you can have magickal compounds, chemicals, and minerals. Though they aren’t really necessary.

With physical and spiritual life patterns can develop that give us magickal effects. When life is sentient, whether physical or magickal, that life gets a degree of control over the magick produced.

Though at first the “magick-user”, if you want to call him that, has no real choice in what sort of magick he can produce, though he may be able to have some influence on such matters as range, area of effect, or even how many individuals he can affect with his psycho-genic ability.

With an individual who is truly capable you get those who can improvise the magick they want, and these we call “casters”.

Up Next

That is as far as we can go in this part of the series, the subject of magick-users whether you’re talking about those with a psycho-genic ability—psychics in other words—or casters—improvised magick—will be dealt with in the next part. See you later.