How do Supernatural senses like Second Sight and Magic Sensitivity work?
By detecting a special sort of species?
And if so is it possible to affect these Supernatural species with Hermetic Magic?
eg MuIm to make it visible (or audible, etc) to mundane senses?
I suspect that the species themselves are not supernatural. They are simply not detected by normal mortal senses.
The senses to detect them seem supernatural. How it is that beings without Might (mortals) can have such senses is not clear to me.
"Supernatural Senses" have no separate species: see HoH:S p.61f Species.
See also ArMDE p.305f Magical Senses for a way, to bestow magical senses to mundane targets.
I am kind of struggling to see anything on HoH:S p61 that says anything except about the typical species that a mundane human detects. I canât see any reference to Supernatural Senses.
It was actually reading the bit about âSynesthesiaâ on p64 that got me thinking that Virtues such as Magic Sensitivity granted the possessor a new minor sense.
How's this:
Species are particles that are continuously emitted from objects, and that, when they strike the sense organs of the body, evoke a response. Humans regularly encounter four types of species:
Iconic species are carried in light, and
are interpreted by the eye.
Echoic species are carried in air and
register with the ear.
Haptic species pass only through
direct contact, and are perceived by
the skin.
Olfactory and gustative species are
sensed either in air (using smell) or
water (using taste). These are the same
species, just experienced by two different senses in two media."
So, all species relate to sense organs of bodies. Their classification is by the organs they are sensed by. Some such species are created supernaturally - e.g. by CrIm spells. But they still relate to sensory organs.
Some bodies may have different sense organs: e. g. some animals have magnetoreception or electroreception - but these are likely not studied by medieval scholars.
Does that help?
Are we sure that these senses are always detecting species otherwise inaccessible to people? Is it not possible that this is merely an ability to know that is filtered through sight (or hearing, etc) as a method of the brain processing the information in a way a human mind can digest?
That is the bit I read and causes me to ask the original question.
The quoted passage says âtypicallyâ, implying it is not all inclusive. Those are the species that are interpreted by mundane sense organs. Says nothing about if your essential nature has a supernatural Virtue that allows you to sense other stuff.
Second Sight says âYou are able to see through illusionary concealment and disguise, including invisibility, and can also see naturally invisible thingsâŚâ
Hermetic invisibility destroys the species being emitted; there are no visual species to be seen by someone with Second Sight. Nor other types of species that Hermetic magic knows how to affect. Furthermore, Hermetic illusions either overlay or change the species being emitted to match the illusion â the true, original [visual, etc.] species arenât emitted.
And yet Second Sight can âsee throughâ nonexistent or wrong species. And since we have no rules to say it behaves in any way other than a sense, we must assume it behaves like the appropriate sense. We donât assume, for example, that Second Sight allows you to âsee throughâ invisibility thatâs on the other side of a closed door.
Interesting
Would this be in ME paradigm?
Then again colour blindness is known
Maybe it works like that:
To complicate matters, Second Sight can also allow you to understand the speech of some ghosts, so it's not limited to vision.
Heck, to really complicate things the effects of The Gift are apparently sensory and/or visual â Rival Magic p111 tells us that the Soqotran Council of Tribes avoids the effects of The Gift by having each sorcerer sit in an alcove where they canât be seen or heard by their fellow sorcerers⌠yet are apparently in close enough proximity that what they say can be conveyed to each other by the King of Olibanum Serpents sitting in their midst. What kind of species convey the effects of The Gift?
There is precedent, your honor! Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie has, well, frosty breath, but itâs purely cosmetic and thereâs no Ignem or Auram requisite, so like, you could design it as Flaming Tongue of the Spoken Lie or Broadway Ballad of the Spoken Lie and it would technically be the same thing. So thereâs something within ME RAW that allows for pure Intellego relayed as a visual manifestation.
RAW does say that you can use creo/perdo Auram to foil the spell, but I assume thatâs the equivalent of (for instance) a demon wearing entirely mundane and normal cloak, gloves, and a big hat to foil their nemesis, whose Second Sight is strong, but still requires visual clues.
Thatâs exactly why Second Sight is a supernatural virtue rather than a hermetic one; same with the gift - itâs not fully covered by current hermetic theory.
Iâd personally would argue that supernatural effects (and their residues: see InVim) give off (usually occult) arcane species, which do not inherently interact with mundane sense-organs.
Second Sight then applies to the eyes, enabling them to interact with arcane species as though iconic species. The arcane species emitted by supernatural invisibility effects would then inherently contain the image of the hidden object, as a microcosm of the macrocosm. The special nature of Second Sight could be due to it naturally originating in the Gifted as a consequence of the human fear of the unknown and the hidden.
Magic sensitivity, in turn, seems to necessitate a separate arcane sense organ, as it allows one to simply identify magic.
A related question seems to be how Masking the Odor of Magic should work. It itself leaves traces that can be detected, necessitating a second casting, a third casting and so on and so forth.
It says "regularly", not "typically". The limit is imposed by humans' sensory organs - while e. g. a migratory bird with magnetoreception has still another sense. Can you transfer such a related organ by Hermetic magic to humans? What would you have to change in the human mind to process its input? See AA p.31f and 39f for a description of the apparatus to assess the considerable difficulty.
Magical senses granted by Hermetic magic work (ArMDE p.305) in this way:
Each magical sense Target grants the recipient
information through one of his senses. This
information is easily distinguished from mundane
information coming through the same sense, but it
is subject to the same limitations as the mundane
sense. Thus, a magical sense that works with the
sense of smell is very bad at giving direction, and
can be avoided by staying upwind of the sensor,
while a magical sense that works with vision is no
good in the dark.
Magical senses definitely do not provide extra sensory organs, supernatural or not. So they also do not need - or postulate - the existence of specific species beyond those from HoH:S p.31f to receive their information.
Also supernatural senses beyond Hermetic magic - like Second Sight, Sense Holiness and Unholiness and Sense Passion (ArMDE p.170f) do AFAICS not refer to any extra types of species beyond those from HoH:S p.31f.
It seems obvious that some hermetic spells can achieve direct acquisition of information without species being involved; see Image of the Beast or The Inexorable Search. Sense targeted spells seem to be a special case - but are they?
[...] a magical sense that works with vision is no good in the dark. (ArM5e Core p114)
Implies that hermetic sense-targeted spells function via otherwise occult (hidden) group of otherwise normally ordered sense species - thus the requirement for media. Then, a True Sight of the Air makes use of occult iconic species, which cannot be transmitted in the dark.
(Note here that species are not exactly classified by the corresponding sense only, but also by their behaviour - primarily by their method of and requirements for transmission e.g. luminosity etc.)
This would seem to be the case as youâve laid it out. However,
Magical senses must penetrate the Magic Resistance of creatures sensed, [...] (ArM5e Core p114)
strongly implies that the sense targets do not act on species whatsoever but instead directly work on the target to be sensed a la an Image of the Beast.
Then, the sense target really just does two things:
(1) it works as a target acquisition mechanism similar to the Spectacle target, wherein âbeing sensedâ creates the necessary connection for the spell, and
(2) it provides a mechanism for interpretation, granting information through one of the senses, with the chosen sense being completely arbitrary - though Sight is our strongest sense and thus most commonly chosen.
In this regard, second sight is qualitatively different - ignoring Magic Resistance means it does not act directly on the target but rather on the aforementioned occult emitted likenesses - why not call these âarcane speciesâ? Note that this wouldnât be a disjunct new type of species but rather a subgroup across all manners of species, i.e. arcane iconic species in this case.
Yes. There is no reason why species are needed for this.
They just use regular senses to display the results of Intellego magic - which by itself can work without species very well. Communicating the location and size of something detected by using a sense to convey results is often just easier.
You are making lots of assumptions here, which are not covered by ArM. Ockham's Razor is a concise formulation of a principle, which Aristotle already requires in the Posterior Analytics in this way: "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [all other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses."
So far ArM does not need the assumption, that every supernatural detection method is resisted unless it relies on "occult emitted likenesses".
Suppose a supernatural detection method is used on an magus (wlog wrt some other target with MR).
It either acts on the magus directly, and is âkept awayâ as in ArM5e Core p86 or it does not act directly on the magus.
If it is to capture a likeness of the magus while not acting directly on him, it must act on a likeness of the magus outside of himself, i.e. a likeness emitted by some means.
Hermetic invisibility works by destroying visible likenesses (species), leaving only invisible i.e. occult likenesses.
This is wholly deductive - ockhamsâ razor need not apply.
This is a bad quote, as neither ArM5 p.85f nor ArMDE p.221ff do address use of supernatural detection methods on the magus at all.
Whether such a detection method is affected by MR or not is completely dependent on the method and described with it. For example:
Second Sight deals with ways of concealment, not with the being concealed. So its MR does not matter.
Sense Holiness and Unholiness reveals a property of the being, to which it can resist with MR.
So does Sense Passion. (All ArMDE p.170f).
The Major Hermetic Virtue Sense of the Mystic (HMRE p.52f) is inspired by Second Sight and allows a magus to bypass MR of creatures sensed with Magical senses (AMDE p.305f).
This Virtue requires a big Breakthrough of about 45 points. It might come with any weird - and likely witchy - theory on MR, which the saga needs to provide.
Nothing of this needs likenesses emitted by anything.
Thatâs a silly statement.