Oh sure. I'm not contesting that nor even implying it should be a simple thing. All I'm saying is I don't think ruling out an elemental from being bound as a familiar (read: after mystery initiation or original research) is necessary as a result of that non-sentience.
1 Like
Non-sentience would make it impossible for them to be familiars, but the descriptions of the different types of elementals show clearly that they actually are sentient, though probably only at the most basic level.
( I must admit I can't understand why anyone would want an elemental as a familiar. I mean who would want to befriend a moving heap of dirt?. But then "pet rocks" are apparently a thing, so I guess people are just inherently weird.)
Well, someone with a magical focus in elementals obviously has a motive. I can think of a couple reasons why someone might think having a wind or a wave as a familiar might be a cool thing, frankly. I'm far less sold on a fire one.
Are they fit to become spirit familiars?
If your troupe so desires, yes, but by RAW they are magic things and not spirits, so spirit familiar does not apply.
Searching through RoP:M again, for «elemental», I find it strangely inconsistent. Elementals are often mentioned as its own category, rather than just as a magic thing. They may be intelligent (page 30f) even if this is extremely rare. They are beings and can be trained with animal handling. None of this seems compatible with being «non-sentient».
I reckon you just have to decide how you want to roleplay the elemental, and take it from there. Does the elemental as roleplayed feel like a potential familiar?
1 Like
Jinn? They can potentially become familiars.
Jinn are spirits that can belong to the Magic, Faerie, or Infernal realm, and follow the same general rules as other spirits.
Elemental spirits, and Geni Loci, are all spirits belonging to the Magic Realm, and follow the same general rules as other spirits.
Magic spirits can be bound as familiars if you have the (Theurgic) Spirit Familiar virtue.
For faerie spirits you would need to also have the Faerie Magic virtue.
For infernal spirits (which may or may not be classified as demons, depending on which definition of demons you use) you'd probably need Chthonic Magic.
Magi with (Goetic) Summoning are also able to bind spirits as familiars.
1 Like
A problem here, I suspect, is that "sentient"/"non-sentient" has been misused in a lot of speculative fiction to mean what would be more accurately described as "sapient"/"non-sapient". (I will point here especially to use of the term in Star Trek; Sentience | Memory Alpha | Fandom summarizes that particular mess.) An author who has learned the word from those sources will use "sentient" rather inconsistently with the dictionary and etymology.
It seems to me quite obvious that, in ArM5 terms, genuinely non-sentient things do not have Cunning or Intelligence, that things with Cunning have sentience but not sapience, and things with Intelligence have sentience and sapience.
I will incidentally note that Art & Academe, p.31 says
The principle difference between the mind of an animal and that of a human is the possession of a soul, which is unique to rational beings such as humans, angels, and demons. The soul provides both reason (ratio) and intellect (intellectus).
This suggests that everything with an Intelligence score has a soul providing it. That conclusion can be made consistent with what the core rules say about the Limit of the Soul (p.80), but it requires a bit of forcing.
If the necessity of the soul for an Intelligence score is accepted, one of three things might be happening when a Cunning creature is made into a familiar. The first is that God providentially grants the new familiar a soul (just as He would in the case of the conception of a human child); the second is that the familiar bond results in the familiar somehow sharing, at least in some sense, in the maga's soul; the third is that the binding actually creates a soul for the familiar, and further study of the binding of familiars could result in the insight necessary to fully overcome the Limit of the Soul.
5 Likes
Definitely not. Faeries do not have souls, yet many have intelligence. This point is made very clearly in RAW.
Isn't the distinction between ratio and intellectus an anachronism, made only in the 15th Century by Nikolas of Kusa?
I agree with @loke on that. Don't bring soul in the discussion, it will make thing already more complicated than it is and Faeries are the perfect counter-example to your argument.
4 Likes
This is tangenting rather far from the original topic, but. A statement that most people believe not-X, and a later statement that some people believe X, is not usually understood to be an absolute statement of the truth of not-X in a setting.
(The statement under The Limit of the Soul on p.80 of the core is "faeries are generally believed not to have immortal souls". The statement in RoP:F, p.107, in the Faerie Blood and the Soul box, is "The fact that at least some faeries are rational beings — even if their logic is alien to mankind — has lead some to believe that faeries do have souls.")
Yes, there's the bit on RoP:F p.10 that "Faeries have a rulebook instead of a soul." Since they don't literally have a rulebook, that can be read as a metaphor about how faeries behave, not a metaphysical statement.
Is the natural cumulative reading that ArM faeries don't have souls? Sure. Thus, as I said, the opposite conclusion "requires a bit of forcing". If a given saga adopts the proposition that the Cunning/Intelligence divide matches the presence/absence of souls, it is pushing things out of the default assumption regarding faeries -- but without, in fact, explicitly contradicting RAW.
Quite a few of bits of forcing. Once you go down that route, you need to review the entire ontology of faeries, and their relation to the Divine. So much builds on the assumption of soulless faeries.
You make a good point though. It makes me want to read Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus properly.
One could go with faeries being soulless, non-sapient, and non-sentient. Utterly without thought or feeling, they are piles of sticks and leaves, or any other rubbish, puppeted by natural magic into strange, broken mirrors of our hopes, fears, and desires.
1 Like
Except that faeries are available as familiars for some Merinita, and they're an option as a player character using the rules in Realms of Power: Faerie. Not really fitting with the rules to expect a character to play a p-zombie.
A)
"A TT RPGer must move among the rules like a fish swims in the sea."
Mao said that.
We allow the rules to carry us if they move as we wish, but they cannot hold us, and we move in any direction.
B)
Anecdotal, but in my group faerie familiars and PCs are played only by our p-zombie friends.
2 Likes
Now we can start debating the relation between sentience or sapience, and cognisanze.
Or not ...
... but I really cannot get highly cognisant to work with non-sentient.
All creatures are "playable". Not having a soul does not mean you can't play them. Familiars don't have souls typically as they are animals mostly...
Soul just is an extra story tool in Arsmagica. All creatures can claim to have a soul and behave as if they have one. Few interactions will be able to determine if it is true or not. Hermetic Magic is very poor at doing anything soul related. Demons might act disinterested if they don't have one. Angels might see the truth but might not be interested in sharing it for they still respect all that is good and do not typically reveal things that would bring hurt into the world unless there is a greater reason.
W
And yet islam believes that jinns have free will and a spirit, much like mankind, and it is the light faerie jinns that converted to Islam, not the magic ones, so I don't think we can unambiguously say that faeries have no soul, and their relationship to the Divine... is more complex than it looks on the surface.
Hermetic Magic cannot create souls.
Hermetic Magic can create animals with Intelligence.
Conclusion: Beings with Intelligence do not necessarily have a soul.
2 Likes
Or -- Hermetic magic has no theoretical tools to understand how to create or manipulate souls; but is capable of (perhaps, or sometimes) creating soul-possessing animals with Intelligence. This is just a (Hermetic-level?) breakthrough waiting to happen, but requires methods to detect a soul in the first place....
That's not what the Limit of the Soul says.
You can of course assume that the books are wrong, but in that case you can equally well assume that there is no such thing as a soul, and all theories involving them are wrong.
THE LIMIT OF THE SOUL
Hermetic magic cannot create an immor-
tal soul, and so may not create true human life
nor restore the dead to life. Most magi think
this derives from the Limit of the Divine,
although a significant number think that
Hermetic magic’s inability to raise the dead
reflects nothing more than a flaw in the theory.
Animals have no immortal souls, and so
may be created. Magical creatures and faeries
are generally believed not to have immortal
souls, and there are spells that appear to create
them, but some magi believe that such spells
really summon existing beings. Angels and
demons are nothing but immortal souls.