I've made a rough ugly slide showing most of the magical traditions in the fifth edition books with connections both inferred by me and explicitly stated in the books.
It's ugly, it's almost certainly very flawed, but I'd like feedback about what you'd like to see changed (and also feedback about how I can get it into a readable graphic , when I try and save from power point into a jpeg or tiff the text boxes get all screwed up.)
Obviously that are lots of traditions that we haven't heard of and aren't included.
With a few exceptions I didn't put down traditions that only have a single supernatural virtue.
ars fabulosa vs ars goetia vs ars elementia these three are similar enough that they are almost certainly related. Despite the fact that faerie borrowers are a very recent tradition I decided that their arts are the most ancient. Faeries need to interact with humans I see Ars fabulosa being the natural outgrowth of humans and faeries interacting, the humans are going to find a way to turn it to their advantage and the Faeries are possibly even going to help them. Ars Goetia I see as a corruption of Ars Fabulosa, Demons have all sorts of ways that they can tempt humans, I don't see them taking the initiative to give humans access to ablation, they're too cowardly and it just isn't at all in their interest. Ars elementia has technques and forms it is a bit different than the other two. I see it as a refinement from an earlier set of more pure arts.
I didn't put precursors to many infernal traditions. I think that the demons have the information to supply anyone with a tradition that will suit the demons interest (even if the tradition is originally a human invention) there's no reason to infer extra infernal connections.
The Vitkir have no obvious precursors, their magic is quite unlike anything else that we've seen. I'd like to think of them as the result a startlingly original magician in the fifth or sixth century (alternately these secrets could have been pried away from powerful magical or faerie entities -which I guess fits with the legend of Odin sacrificing an eye).
The folk witches are apparently a synthesis of several supernatural virtues, sort of like the order was a synthesis of magical traditions the folk witches appear to be the product of a mini Bonisagus using inferior materials (supernatural virtues rather than traditions). Perhaps the founder of the folk witch tradition was of the same tradition as Bonisagus. The folk witch magic does resemble some method/power traditions but my slide was just too full and Id probably have to draw lines mostly frm infernally tainted traditions and I felt it would do more harm than good.
The Seirenes apparently learned their tradition from magical/faerie/infernal beasts this could be an explanation for other traditions as well.
Haruspexes and Pharmacopoeians look like magical advancement of a mundane skill to me, they're similar to the faerie/divine/magic/infernal touched crafters in city and guild. I'd wager that the first among them didn't even realize that they were magicians.
This is a good start. I noticed a couple of things. I think the Learned Magicians should trace their magic back to the Cartoush magic of Ancient Egypt, which, I believe, goes back to the Magoi, which is divinely inspired. The Defixio magic followed the same path.
Gruagachan Lore says that the god Gruagach taught them their magic. There is some debate as to whether he was a Magic god or a Faerie god impersonating the Magic version. I like to think that he was Magic, but it's not defined in canon.
Diabolists get their power directly from the Infernal, so I would say they are a primenic (is that even a word?) tradition. However, some other traditions get corrupted instead of being infernal at their root, so I would not say that infernalists are the primigenic tradition. Not for everybody at least.
For Folk Witches, I imagined that "Folk Witch" was a disparate set of "sub-traditions" continuously forming from the wreckage of grander traditions, and being "discovered" by isolated Gifted individuals who had no formal training. I imagined it as a kind of ground-state.
Say a tradition is essentially wiped out, and there are only a few semi-trained "apprentices" remaining, or alternately an isolated Gifted individual "spontaneously" discovers a neat trick he can do with his Gift. Those semi-trained apprentices (or the lucky/genius individual) sort of muddle through and try to train a few other Gifted characters, and within a generation or so the proper magic of the tradition (if there was any) is basically lost. It has devolved to a handful of supernatural tricks and some inefficient, poorly understood rituals. It is now a "Folk Witch" Tradition.
So, the "Folk Witches" in Hedge Magic Revised Edition, just represent the state of this mish-mash of half-remembered (or not yet really invented) traditions in 1220. So "Folk Witches" in 600 AD, 0 AD, and 1000 BC, would exist, but would look quite different (and this is why they vary a lot by locality too).
Very cool slide. If I'm reading it right though, everything is either Divine, Infernal, or Faerie in origin. I'd rather see Magic stand on its own, probably connected to the pagans. I always liked the early AM hints at Atlantean/Old One origins behind a hermetic tradition in Egypt leading into classical paganism.
I'm out of step with AM5 in this regard though, I know. I don't like the pagan gods being aligned to Faerie instead of Magic in this edition either.
Don't know what OS you're using, but on Macs every "print" command allows the option of simply printing to a PDF file. I tried it with your slide and it looks very authentic. Thanks for putting all the work in!
To begin with, why would you use PowerPoint at all? PowerPoint is the traditional tool to produce small, sparsely populated documents that consist of multiple pages/slides, and even this domain is more and more adopted and dominated by PDF. Unless you'd like to hold a real lecture in front of a real audience, and, most of all, insist on fancy transitions between the slides, I'd recommend PDF — not only for its widespread availability on the user end, but also because of its universal composition capabilities (most contemporary design applications, including OpenOffice, export as PDF), and, last but not least, because of what you're actually trying to achieve: to create a large, single-page document that other users may want to display, navigate or even print.
As for JPEG, I wouldn't try to export a schematic drawing as a JPEG/JFIF image. JPEG's strength is photo-realistic images, but certainly not homogeneous areas populated with text (read: high-frequency pixel alterations). If, for whatever reason, you'd like to have a bitmap graphics variant of your vector graphics, take a look at PNG (8-bit, not 24-bit !), or maybe the old fashioned GIF. TIF(F) may or may not cause compatibility problems across platforms, depending on what compression you use, and on what program the audience uses to try to open your image.
The document as such is very interesting to go through! Thank you for pointing it out.
One of the things I really liked about it is how you can click on the origin lines in Powerpoint and see where they are coming from and going to, since there's some places where they overlap and it looks like they're pointing at something else. Nice work, Erik!
I do think it's canonical that both the Ars Fabulosa and the Elemental Arts derived from the Goetic Art, which in turn was an infernal twisting of Solomon's Art. I'd say the Ars Notoria also come from that original Art of Solomon, even though I seem to recall they are described as being basically the same.
Personally, I'd also add Adamic as one of the first magical powers. But that may be just me.
On first glance it does appear to me that there is Divine origin, Infernal origin, and Fae origin... Not sure if this was the intent, nor am I familiar enough with the Canon to say if this is "correct" according to Canon.
I"ve been playing with flowcharts at work just in the last week, and have been using the "smart objects" in Excel / Word that are native to the 2008 office edition. There are flowchart elements built in, and they are quite pretty, with options for shadows, etc. You can also make the arrows different colors which might help the clarity that Erik D. was mentioning. Might be something to look into.
I agree that I'm not sure why you chose Powerpoint as the platform.
I agree that doing a PRINT / AS PDF on Mac will get you where you want to go for general distribution.
Not that it matters much what you use, but Visio is quite good for flow diagrams and so forth (amongst the MS Office suite). Although, I'm not sure that Visio comes with most versions of Office?
For the computer challenged people like myself (and I will venture that Erik as well) Powerpoint works well for this kind of graphic design. Other approaches look too arcane for us
Thanks for sharing!
