"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 04 - Dragonspell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

1934-1988 He is, and will be, sorely missed.
Note on the Series


Over the past few years, readers have asked me various questions about the Deverry series. Usually
these questions are asked in noisy rooms at conventions where no one can really hear the answers, but
now my publishers have kindly given me a chance to answer some of them in print, where it’s always
quiet. The two things you all most want to have clarified, it seems, are the kind of magic the characters
use and the way I’ve organized the books.

Deverry dweomer is very loosely based on the ‘real magic’ of the Western tradition, a field of study
that can best be defined, perhaps, through its history. First, though, let me define one thing that magic
isn’t, popular belief and oft-repeated cliches to the contrary. Magic is most emphatically not a substitute
for technology nor is it the equivalent of technology. No more will the true magician study it only for
personal gain. As a very wise man recently defined it, ‘Magic is the art of producing changes in
consciousness at will and of using these changes to expand the consciousness of all humanity.’ Notice the
emphasis on consciousness here. This is not to say that magic never produces any effects in the so-called
‘real’ or physical world - quite the contrary -simply that in true magic, consciousness is always central
and these physical effects secondary. In Deverry, since I’m writing adventure stories first and foremost,
the physical effects are quite spectacular, but this is one reason that I say the magic is very loosely based
upon the Western tradition.

What is this tradition, then? Over the past two thousand years, thanks to the invective of the various
churches and more recently of the scientific community, magic has had to lie hidden in the West,
practised in secret, persecuted in public whenever the inquisitors got wind of it, and because of that
persecution what should be an organized body of philosophical thought and spiritual practice has become
maimed and garbled, conflated in the popular mind with superstition, devil worship, and the tricks and
silly stories of con men and hucksters. In Asia, where no one organized religion ever got the whip hand
over the soul of humanity, the situation is different. Most of you know about ioga, for instance, a truly
spiritual discipline reaching back thousands of years, or have heard about the monastic life of Buddhism
and the intense spiritual insights and powers that its devotees attain after years of meditation. Western
magic should have been no less.

Let me say here that when I talk about Europe and Asia, I don’t mean to deny the existence of the
native spriritual systems of Africa and the Americas. I simply don’t know enough about them to discuss
them intelligently. The roots of all these spiritual disciplines, however, including what should have been the
European, probably lie in some common ground: the developing shamanism of Palaeolithic hunters some
fifteen thousand years ago, or maybe even further back than that-I doubt very much that anyone will ever
know, and you should all be extremely sceptical of anyone who says they do, particularly if these claims
involve flying saucers, the lost continent of Atlantis, or other such sensational plot elements. What we do
know is that by the time the art of writing was slowly spreading through the Eurasian continent, round
about 2000 BC or so, shamanism had developed into a vast variety of spiritual practices, which in Asia
had the good fortune to become firmly woven into the religious life of their cultures.

In Europe, Mediterranean Africa and the Middle East these spiritual disciplines flourished only until
the spread of monotheism. We know their remnants as pagan mystery cults, such as those of Eleusis; we
see fragments in Hellenized Egyptian religions such as the worship of Isis; we have a handful of texts of
the Gnostic mystery schools, some Christianized, others not, that have miraculously survived the
organized persecutions and suppressions of the Orthodox, whether Christian or Moslem, of later years.