Dragonspell. Katharine Kerr
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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 Yoga, 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. But what we have are, by and large, hardy fragments of root left from a mangled plant, cut down before its full flowering by the sort of priest who put his temporal power above the spiritual health of his flock. The one true magical system we do have is the Jewish cabbala, kept alive by a people of enormous courage in the face of slander and persecution. In those dark years, Judaism was the only major Western religion to realize that different kinds of souls have different needs, that there will always be some who want to know and to experience the truth for themselves and who are willing to leave safe territory behind to do so. Those of us who believe the same owe it and its people a huge debt.
There is no space here to give the convoluted history of the various magicians and alchemists, Christian cabbalists and Rosicrucians, to say nothing of the Sufis on the Moslem side of the equation, who struggled to keep Western magic alive during the last eighteen hundred years or so. (If you’re interested, you can find books by the historian Frances Yates in any good public library.) That they succeeded at all is amazing enough; to point out that a lot of strange weeds took root and grew in the field cleared but never sown with proper seed seems unfair, but not everyone who claimed to be a follower of the true path was one. And of course the lies and slanders continued and still continue: that magic damns you or drives you insane, that witches worship the devil, and, most recently, that magic is nothing but New Age occult-babble on the one hand or illusion and fraud on the other. As readers, you’ll all have to make up your own minds on the truth of these things. It should be clear enough by now where I stand.
As for the structure of the Deverry books, a lot of people have muttered, either to themselves or directly to me, ‘Why do you use all those damn flashbacks?’ Well, there is in this world more than one way of organizing a story – or a body of factual information, for that matter. The ‘start at the beginning and go through to the end’ principle that we’ve all been raised with dates back to classical Greek thought as transmitted by the Romans, and, as part of Aristotelian logic, it forms the basis of modern science and the scientific world-view (though one that modern physics is beginning to undermine). In this way of looking at the world, Time’s arrow flies straight and in one direction only. The magical tradition, however, teaches that you don’t necessarily have to move in a straight line to reach your destination.
Classical writers like Diodorus Siculus and Polybius state that the Celts who were their contemporaries believed in reincarnation, among other doctrines that are today part of the magical tradition. Certainly the art of the Gauls and the later flowering of Celtic art in the early Christian era are clear enough evidence that here is a people who organized information in a non-classical, non-Aristotelian manner. Since I’m writing about ancient Celts, after all, I’ve borrowed their way of looking at the world, too, in the loops and spirals of my story line as it laces between and laces up the various lifetimes of the characters. I promise, on the gods of my people if you like, that I do have a plan in mind, even if it isn’t a linear one, and I honestly do think that if you try to see it as it unfolds, you’ll get some small reward, even if it’s only a taste of what it means to think in a non-linear manner. If you’ve never seen any Celtic art, the flowing spirals and triskelia of the Gauls, the beautiful lacings and braidings of the Irish monks, by all means do yourself a favour and browse through a book about them in a library or bookshop. My own small craft is, I promise you, nothing compared to theirs.
A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words
The language spoken in Deverry is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such.
Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.
A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.
O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.
W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.
Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.
E as in pen.
I as in pin.
U as in pun.
Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.
Diphthongs generally have one consistent pronunciation:
AE as the a in mane.
AI as in aisle.
AU as the ow in how.
EO as a combination of eh and oh.
EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.
IE as in pier.
OE as the oy in boy.
UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic (KAR-noh-ik).
Consonants are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:
C is always hard as in cat.
G