'The Illusion of Knowledge'


The smell of an old book has meaning to me.

It means power.

I don't mean the smell of a rotten romance novel that some fool left out in
the rain. I mean the smell of true age.

True age, when a book was bound several centuries before that particular
binding process was supposedly invented, is distinctive.

If it wasn't already apparent to you, I am a Mage, and those books I seek are
books of magic.

Magic is different than science. Fundamentally so.

Science proceeds.

Magic regresses.

To study science is a matter of research and experimentation.

To study magic is a matter of learning what has been previously recorded.

There is a reason for this. Magic is a constant.

Science, being based entirely on observable physical laws, is fluid.

The laws which science attempts to compile never last. Universes come and go.
Sometimes they just mutate.

Magic, however, is based on the laws which govern all things.

It has been studied for lengths of time which make the age of our pitiful
little cosmos seem insignificant, by being from *out there*. Things with minds
so much powerful than ours. Beings which find it constraining to exist in a
mere seven dimensions. And almost unbearably claustrophobic to enter our
little world.

But, sometimes, they do. And, even more infrequently, they leave behind tiny
scraps of knowledge.

It is from these scraps that all mortal magic springs.


=====

Philip Barkow
pbarkow@is2.dal.ca

The Sunburst Project, Week 5
http://www.chaoseed.com/btr/sbp/
4/13/00