Re: Introduction and Backstory Noodle

on 22/04/2006 5:12 pm, nyra at nyra@xxxxxxx wrote:

Bill Swears schrieb:

Tim S wrote:
on 21/04/2006 8:58 am, David Friedman at ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
[...]

An excuse to discuss an idea I have played with for the fantasy without
magic (unconnected to _Harald_) that is one of my other projects.

All magic is earth, air, fire and water--or, of course some combination.
[...]
Could something similar be true of magic? Could one have a system where
everything can be resolved in terms of four basis vectors--but
everything can also be resolved in terms of a different four that span
the same space? So you might have one time or place where everyone took
it for granted that a serious mage, or serious spell, was either earth,
air, fire and water. And another time or place where they took it for
granted with a different list? And both were right?

If so, any obvious candidates for the second four? Third four?


The hot, the cold, the wet and the dry?

BTW, I suggested these because they are real historical examples and
actually fit David's original question: they are offset by 45 degrees from
the four elements, as you describe below:


The good, the bad, and the cute furry creatures who tickle you to
death and steal your small change?

Both the humours and the four elements have been mapped to these axes
since days of yore (n.b. i'm not sure i got the humours right) -
hot: Fire, Air, Sanguis, Cholé
cold: Earth, Water, Phlegma, Mela cholé
dry: Fire, Earth, Cholé, Mela cholé
wet: Air, Water, Sanguis, Phlegma

Yes, I think that's right.

The English names of the humours are

sanguis = blood
cholé = choler = bile
mela cholé = melancholer = black bile
phlegma = phlegm

and the corresponding personalities are sanguine, choleric, melancholic and
phlegmatic.

The humours come (via Galen) from the Hippocratic authors of the 5th C BC in
Greece/Ionia/Magna Graecia.

The four elements come from Empedocles at about the same time. The hot, the
cold, the wet and the dry I believe also come from (one of?) the Hippocratic
writers, along with various other systems of pairs of opposites which were
popular at the time.

I think Aristotle was the one who matched earth, air, fire and water with
the hot, the cold, the wet and the dry. I don't know who match the humours
with the elements.


Second and third four could be polarized. Are there opposite numbers to
the horsemen of the apocalypse? That might be an interesting track to >
take.

Death, War, Plague and Famine... Life-Death is a nice pair, but folks
like Plague i'd boil(hoho) down to something more fundamental, like
Expansion-Contraction (the latter being Famine).


Life, peace, health and plenty? But that gives us eight altogether with the
corresponding opposites.

You could do something with colours: brightness, saturation etc. Might
work better when stipulating beings with only two colour receptors.

I think there were classically four basic colours counted by Greek and Roman
painters: black, white, red and yellow.

The visual system (further upstream than the retina) seems to pick out the
opposing pairs red-green and blue-yellow, with black-white as a separate
system.

Tim

.

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