Thaumatology project

Every magician in genre fantasy - Elminster, Yaztromo, the Harlequin, Yoda, Melisandre, Granny Weatherwax et al - performs magic slightly differently. This happens for the same reason that every primary-world scientist pursues a slightly different path in their research, or every literary critic sees their subject texts slightly differently; all are coming at the matter from their own standpoint, having been struck by different notions and methodologies in their training, practiced certain techniques to a higher standard than others, and read different texts or heard different stories about magic over the course of their career.   Magicians, after all, are thaumaturges, those manipulating the unseen energies around the world in ways that suit them. To do this a magician has to find out what those energies are, think through different approaches to them, and decide which techniques for manipulating them suit his or her purposes. Magicians are scholars of history and mythology, polyglots who learn extinct tongues the better to come to grips with the adjectival nuances of lost writings and oral traditions, the better to decide which ancient stories of witchcraft and wizardry are worth considering and which are mere entertainment. They are also thaumatologists, critical readers of the writings of past and present magicians whose work they find helpful. Only a small proportion of a wizard's library, a shaman's stock of songs, or a witch's knowledge of secret mysteries are actually made up of formulaic spells. They own dictionaries, grammars, books of history, accounts of ancient monsters, maps to hidden ruined temples said to contain hieroglyphs revealing secrets, commentaries on what those secrets might be, and great stocks of historical, theological, linguistic and literary theory. It is from this corpus of literature - oral, written or something else - that they learn how to do magic. And every magician has their own unique stock of this stuff.   The Thaumatology Project is an effort to build a fantasy world, from its prehistory to an as-yet unsettled present day, with an eye to producing this material. The goal is not to produce a complete recorded history, or a single unified field theory of magic, but to create a corpus of languages, religions, stories, traditions and epics that magicians can research to build their own unique takes on magic. Whether any given story is valid is for the individual magician to decide. One magician, for example, may regard a particular demon as a myth, having failed to summon it with various different techniques - but another may decide to retry one of those methods, reciting the incantation in a specific dialect their colleague perhaps doesn't know, or can't find a reliable dictionary of - and they may succeed. But what technique will they use to control the demon? Will they even have one? Perhaps the stories they have read about this entity paint it as rather more benign, or biddable, that those read by their colleague.   Magic is nothing if not a practical science. But getting the underlying theory right is crucial. Building the material from which this theory is built is the essence if what I'm trying to do here.