Involution
Sensoria, Systems
I want to do some more thinking about vestigia, though I’m going to need a different term, since in the novels it is/they are a trace left behind, not an impression in the moment. Sensoria would work, except I think that’s a technical term for the collective sense organs of the body. But maybe I can work with that until I find a better term.
This is a set of sensations (sometimes) and mental images (usually) I get when I stand in particular spaces or in contact with particular objects (structures and trees, rarely if ever anything smaller) and empty my own mind of conscious thought. The images can be closely related to what’s there in ordinary reality, or they can be something else entirely. There’s an area of beech trees in Donadea, for instance, where in my head it is always autumn, with slow-falling brown-gold leaves. But in an area of woods near Castletown, it’s a different wood, with much more hazel and wetter ground, and in Raglan Castle in Wales, there’s a sensation of busy purpose and things being carried. There’s a tall oak in Charleville which carries with it the sensation of beams of sunlight coming down at a sharp angle through windows high up in a gothic structure, despite my only having seen the tree in the darker end of twilight, and another oak elsewhere in Offaly which makes me think of cavaliers around a campfire.
I don’t know what these sensoria mean, or if I can do anything with them. It is of course entirely possible that they are just associations of my own overactive imagination. They are definitely no more than unsubstantiated personal gnosis, as the saying goes. But they are there in the range of things I can “pick up”, and they seem to have a relation to what I think of as magic.
The obvious-to-me thought is that if I want to effect change or the possibility of change in the world - which is what magic is for, tipping the scales - then I can get particular effects by working magic in those places. And if I’m to work out a systematic approach to magic (of which I am not yet convinced), then I should have some kind of understanding of what those effects are. I can see uses for the sensation of autumn, or the metaphor of the falling leaf. The hazel is perhaps a more practical landscape, one of provision or harvest or forage. Light in dark places is an image with wide application, although I have no idea what to do with the cavaliers. And so forth. A catalogue of these things might be useful, though I would imagine it will be slow to build up. A notebook would work, but the Locke index that I would otherwise like to use is probably less useful. Strong indexing would be a necessity.
What I’m envisioning here is that I can sit down at the kitchen table and go “right, I need a working to do X”, and from my various notes and systems pull together that I’ll need particular materials, maybe, particular words or invocations, at a specific time, in a place with the correct sensoria, and then be able to go there and do that. More local places will be useful, of course - I can’t go to Raglan every time I want to invoke the spirit of moving-things-busily.