# A Foundation in the Nine Schools - Angrean Atlas :::section ## A Foundation in the Nine Schools :::subheading{level="2"} *Principles for the Aspiring Thaumaturgist* ::: By Professor Cassian Meridius, Professor of Logomancy, Neuros University, House Canae Written in the 3147th Year of the Chrysian Reckoning ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Preface :::intro *For those embarking upon formal magical education, a structured understanding of the Nine Schools remains essential before advancing to specialized study. This primer offers a systematic review of each discipline: Chronomancy, the manipulation of temporal flow; Topomancy, the art of spatial transposition; Logomancy, the meta-magical arts of spell enhancement, enchantment, and runic inscription; Eidolomancy, the conjuration and binding of mental constructs; Chymancy, transformation of material essence; Archemancy, the study of raw thaumic force and its applications; Filimancy, the weaving and severance of bonds both physical and metaphysical; Animancy, communion with the soul and its mysteries; and Biomancy, the shaping of living matter. While students entering Neuros will have encountered these terms in preparatory studies, this treatise clarifies the theoretical boundaries between schools, their historical development, and the philosophical foundations upon which House Canae methodology rests. Required reading before enrollment in any second-year practicum.* ::: The Nine Schools represent civilization’s systematic organization of magical knowledge - a framework developed over millennia of careful study and refinement. Though the boundaries between schools are matters of scholarly convention rather than fundamental law, they have proven invaluable for pedagogy, allowing students to build competence in manageable stages before attempting the complex inter-school workings that characterize advanced practice. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Music and Magic Anyone with beyond an elementary understanding of magic will be familiar with the different sensation of transporting an object through space versus shoving an object with arcane force. Both methods can achieve the same outcome, but the shapes through which we direct the magic are wholly dissimilar. It is this difference that scholars and mages have attempted to explore by developing the nine schools of magic. While anything beyond a simple cantrip will often draw on multiple schools, it is yet still invaluable to have a more isolated understanding of the low level principles involved. I will not be the first nor the last to draw analogies to music, but understanding each school as a family of instruments, some better at melodies, others better at harmonies, and yet others delivering the rhythm of a spell, is a clichè precisely because it is so apt. So I have chosen, within this introductory primer, to lean heavily upon that analogy, and I shall discuss throughout this text the rhythm, harmony, beauty, or dissonance of magic. I shall discuss the timbre, pitch and loudness of each of the schools, and how they stand (or don’t) on their own, and also at the end touch briefly upon how they can be orchestrated together into beautiful symphonies of spellcraft. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## The Five Spheres Before there were nine schools there were five spheres, and before there were five spheres there was, by most accounts, a great deal of shouting. The first accurate map of the spheres is credited to Canaedus himself, and his temples keep a copy of it still; students of a certain disposition keep one pinned above their desks. The five were Archemancy, whose name alone survived the later reorganization intact; Alchemy, the transformation of things both inert and living; Psionicism, the arts of mind and soul; the Spatial sphere, which held both the folding of space and the bonds that cross it; and Time, which then as now declined to be subdivided. Runes were not counted among them at all. They were regarded as notation, the means by which a working was written down rather than any working in itself, and it was a good while before scholars elevated runecraft to a school in its own right as Logomancy. As practice grew more refined, the composite spheres were split along the seams practitioners had long felt in them: Alchemy into Chymancy and Biomancy, Psionicism into Eidolomancy and Animancy, the Spatial sphere into Topomancy and Filimancy. Logomancy’s admission brought the count to nine. I will confess that the old charge, that my own school is notation masquerading as magic, has never entirely gone away; I answer it, with what grace I can muster, in the section on Logomancy below. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Archemancy Archemancy is percussion. It is deep, resonant, and many spells can get away with only having a single timbre of Archemancy in their entire formula. Whether it is the steady low beat of a force shield, or the rapid high snare of a fireworks display, the steady roll of a mage hand, or thunderous crash of an arcane bolt, all of these have a similar Quality even the unschooled magic user will be familiar with. Archemancy is often the first form of magic tapped into by children. It is fortunate that the magical sense doesn’t develop until 6-9 years, lest parents be forced to deal with the arcane equivalent of a toddler banging pots and pans together. Given the ease with which most children tap into Archemantic effects, it is generally accepted that it was probably the first school of magic to be explored by our forebears. The name itself dates back to before the Shattering,[^1] and may in fact be the first of the modern nine schools to receive the name we still use today. The seminal text on Archemancy has to be Volaria’s “Archemancy and the Modern Mage” (2542 CR), in which she not only provides an excellent overview of Archemancy itself, but also touches upon its interactions with each of the other eight schools. It is essential reading for any serious student. For a more in depth and practical guide, Gideon’s “How to Make Flames and Demolish Buildings” (3005 CR) is close to hand for any professionally practicing archemancer. Some have argued that Archemancy and Topomancy should be a single school.[^2] To that, I would redirect your attention to the first line of this text following the preface. There is a very clear difference between manifesting forces directly versus manipulating the fabric of space. It is a difference not just in measure, but in kind. And any serious practitioner can easily see that. ::: :::section [^1]: See Claudia Valchik’s excellent survey of pre-Shattering arcane texts. [^2]: Ser Jin Hoffenhauser, for instance. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Chronomancy Chronomancy is violet. It is bright, purply, and extremely hard to control. A little bit of it can go a long way. Some say chronomancy was the final of the nine schools to take shape. Others say it was the first.[^3] Still others say fiffle bizzle dunnerfee. There are arguments to this day about the safety of trans-temporal portals currently in semi-common usage at all four major arcane universities. While it has been proven that temporal paradoxes will, statistically, sort themselves out, and that no significant changes can really be made to the primary timeline, still, hiddledeestip. VOrfal haadenstel, ----------------, surely. So, great care should be taken when working any chronomantic effect. Any interested arcanist[^4] will already have been recommended the great “How To Attend Your Own Funeral, and Other Fun Activites with Chronomancy” by the renowned (64XA BC), but an excellent lesser known text is that which will be written by Saskia Jung, “A Mage Arrives Exactly When They Intend To” (5602 CR)[^5]. I’ve noticed that during a later revision of this chapter, I will have appeared to have forgotten to not have set the filimant on the hursle sturren falafel. So I shall have immediately left a note here to remind myself to go back to before the next time I used to occasionally and then repeatedly just once. Hopefully I will not have finally forgotten at the beginning of the time after the last time.[^6] ::: :::section [^3]: See Cassian Meridius’s excellent primer on the nine schools. [^4]: Ser Jin Hoffenhauser, for instance. [^5]: Editors’ note: This text does not appear to be available in any known collection. Not even the one you are currently thinking of. [^6]: Editors’ note: We don’t know either. But Professor Meridius insists it is already taken care of. Or will be? Or will have been later? ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Topomancy Topomancy is brass. It fills a room before it announces itself, commands the geometry of a hall whether the listener wishes it or not, and is almost impossible to perform quietly. A well-cast teleportation ring, a folded doorway, a simple displacement of a coin from palm to pocket; all carry the unmistakable brassy quality that distinguishes the genuine bending of space from mere arcane shove. The novice is hereby warned: a Topomantic effect experienced only in the ear is almost always one experienced elsewhere by someone very surprised.[^7] Topomancy rewards the patient geometer and punishes the impatient tourist. Our earliest systematic treatment of the school comes, perhaps surprisingly, not from the pre-Shattering period but from the first decades after it, when scattered communities found sudden and desperate use for portal-craft in a newly archipelagic world. For a grounding in principles, nothing yet improves upon Maelia Duvrence’s “The Folded Road: An Introduction to Spatial Transposition” (2889 CR), a text so widely copied that its marginalia have developed a cottage industry of their own. For the advanced practitioner, Halvek’s “Working at a Distance” (3102 CR) is indispensable. For those more interested in mapping the criss-crossing paths of existing portals than creating their own (a pastime not uncommon among filimancers), “Magic Portals and Where to Find Them” (3125 CR), by the famed travel writer, Riley vel Hanna, is perhaps the best place to start. The chapter on the Portal Nexus of Aelindhyr[^8] is enchanting; and, while it only took two weeks to research, delayed the book’s publication by five years. ::: :::section [^7]: The author speaks from experience. [^8]: Thrilling to read about, travel to Aelindhyr is nevertheless discouraged, especially without a proper Sidhe guide. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Logomancy Logomancy is the keyboard. It is the great organ’s rank of stops and pedals, the stacked manuals of the harpsichord, every key locked in strict correspondence to a named note; the instrument of the notator, the theorist, the architect of structure that other instruments must then inhabit. It is, I should disclose, my own school, and I beg the reader’s patience with the inevitable partiality of its treatment. Logomancy, strictly speaking, produces no effect of its own. A rune inscribed without an accompanying working will sit inert upon its parchment until the parchment itself rots; an enchantment draped over an object with nothing to enchant is merely a rather expensive shimmer. And yet no other school can sustain a long or complex spell without Logomantic scaffolding, and every thaumaturgist of any real repute will have committed more hours to Logomancy than to any other single discipline. A well-laid Logomantic working is a keyboard set out for other hands; the notes are there, the scales drawn, the effect waiting only for some other school to press its first finger down. The foundational work is, and will likely remain, Pesk’s “On Symbol, Sign, and Seal” (214 CR), though it is best approached only after a year of practical runework, as its early chapters presume familiarity with the very vocabulary they are, in theory, introducing.[^9] A more modern and rather more forgiving counterpart is Bastien Oll’s “Seven Common Enchantments and Why They Keep Failing” (3092 CR), which I am reliably informed is the most frequently stolen book from the Neuros University stacks. Some[^10] would claim that Logomancy is not in fact a proper arcane school at all, but merely the connective tissue that binds the schools to each other and to the rest of the world. It is an opinion I sometimes find myself compelled by, until I take stock of its other proponents, and am immediately dissuaded from joining their ranks. Here I will have to beg forgiveness for shilling my own modest work, “You Will Know Me By The Workings of My Hand: A Study of Ancient Glyphs and Enchantments” (3143 CR), a brief survey of the oldest known still functioning enchantments, and what we know of their makers. My favorite having to be the Skipping Stone of Lyr, still available for rental from Sera’s Hook and Bait in Lyrhaven. ::: :::section [^9]: I confess I still open it from the back. [^10]: Ser Jin Hoffenhauser, for instance. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Eidolomancy Eidolomancy is the flute. All breath and no reed, a tune shaped from nothing but the way air is persuaded to move past an edge. It carries the furthest of any instrument through a still room and is, not at all coincidentally, the instrument most often mistaken at a distance for something it is not. It is the school of conjured constructs, of illusions both gossamer and gross, of mental phantoms that a skilled practitioner can render sensible, even tangible, to all five senses at once. A well-wrought eidolon will bleed when cut, though the blood evaporates upon banishment, and a clumsily-wrought one will bleed upward, or in a colour no painter ever mixed. The school is frequently underestimated by outsiders, who mistake its subtlety for triviality; a battlefield illusion, well placed, has ended more sieges than any arcane bolt. The usefulness of invisibility, and its attendant sufficiency for abuse, need hardly be mentioned to an aware practitioner. I can only say that it is good, indeed, that so few can achieve that particular effect. The standard reference is Ishara Tolmu’s “Of Figments and Forms” (741 CR), which addresses with admirable rigour the distinctions between the projected, the shared, and the bound eidolon. For the student whose interests run toward the theatrical, I recommend Ngozi Ehirim’s “The Honest Phantom: Constructs for Stage and Street” (3071 CR), though I should note that several jurisdictions consider portions of its appendix to be instructional material for fraud. Its use in visualizing the underlying mechanics of the other schools cannot be undersold as a teaching device. Hearing that there is a connection between a drop of water and the ocean, and seeing the string for oneself, and watching what happens when it is cut with one’s own eyes, was instrumental in my learning filimancy. As was the text “Seeing Is Believing: Harnessing Eidolomancy to Visualize the Arcane” (1468 CR) by Herrin Tront. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Chymancy Chymancy is the bowed string. Rosin on horsehair, gut drawn across carved wood, each element of its voice a transformed material singing under another transformed material; the violin in one’s hand is, in the strictest sense, a cabinet of alchemy. The beginner produces a scraping; the journeyman produces a tone; the master persuades the wood to remember what it was to be a tree, and to want, briefly, to sing. It is the school concerned with what things are made of and, more to the point, what they might yet become. Lead into gold is the tiresome cliché, and one that has done great damage to the school’s reputation by oversimplifying its aims; the serious Chymancer is as likely to be concerned with turning a barrel of river water into something safely drinkable, or a wet fishing net into a dry one, as with any transmutation of precious metals. It is, quietly, the most practically useful of the schools, and the one most often left off popular lists of “dramatic” magic, which ought to tell us something about popular lists. The discipline’s seminal text is Korr Ilmenthar’s “The Ninefold Principle of Material Change” (1610 CR), which established the modern taxonomy of elements-of-kind, elements-of-quality, and elements-of-station that underlies every Chymantic workbook to this day. A newer practical manual, Ebba Dal’s “Household Chymancy for the Thrifty Wizard” (3114 CR), has done a great deal to popularise the discipline among amateur practitioners, to the displeasure of some senior faculty.[^11] It is highly advised not to attempt to apply Chymantic principles to living tissue. Not even plants. For a case study on the consequences, I direct you to “The Tiny Store of Nightmares” (192 CR) by Griffith, Ashman, et all., about what befell the incautious chymancer Richard of Oranis. ::: :::section [^11]: Not myself, to be clear. My objection is that three of her recipes do not work as written. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Filimancy Filimancy is the harp. A forest of threads stretched to careful tensions, each plucked line running alone and against its neighbours at once, the whole instrument a working diagram of counterpoint; voices bound, voices crossed, voices severed with a single stilled finger. The school concerns itself with bonds of every order: physical ropes and knots, marital vows, oaths of fealty, the invisible lines of trust between teacher and apprentice, and, most dangerously, the metaphysical tethers by which a soul is lashed to its body. A competent Filimancer can find a knot in the world where no rope is visible, and can cut it, tighten it, or re-route it, as inclination and ethics allow. The ethical piece is not, one is given to understand, always decisive. Much of what we unreflectingly call civilization; our courts, our contracts, our orders of precedence, our rites of marriage and fostering, is at bottom a tangle of quite cleverly arranged knots; and a great deal of what unmakes a civilization is the hand, extended or withdrawn, that unties the wrong one. Students are directed first to Hennel Oar’s “Of Bonds Seen and Unseen” (1459 CR), which remains the gentlest introduction to a school whose later study grows alarming rather quickly. For the advanced reader, Sovia Ren’s “The Unknotting” (2988 CR) is essential, though it is not, in my judgement, suitable for anyone below the age of formal majority; the library at Neuros keeps its copy behind the desk, and the sign-out register makes for its own sort of reading. For a lighter companion, I warmly recommend Thessa vel Marc’s “Fifty Knots Every Tailor Should Know, and Three Every Tailor Should Not” (3089 CR), whose charming and mostly practical title has, I suspect, been a misleading gift at more than one apprentice-tailor’s birthday; the final chapter[^12] ought really to be sold separately. Ser Hoffenhauser once proposed, with a perfectly straight face, that a sufficiently skilled Filimancer might simply untie the other eight schools from the discipline entirely and collect them under Filimancy’s sole authority. I mention it because it remains, on balance, the most flattering thing he has ever written about a school that was not his own. ::: :::section [^12]: A short and careful treatise on the severance of traumatic attachments. The content is, I must stress, ethical; the title has merely caused more misunderstandings than the author can have intended. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Animancy Animancy is the reed. A dead strip of cane that sounds only when breath is passed through it, and only in the shape the breath itself consents to; the instrument most honest about where its life is coming from, and from whom. The etymology is not accidental: *anima* is the breath, and the breath is where the school begins. It is the second oldest of the schools, or so the oldest Animancers like to claim, and the school most intimately concerned with the soul, with consciousness, and with those properties of mind and spirit that do not reduce cleanly to either matter or force. It is also, by a margin the discipline itself freely admits, the most fraught with ethical difficulty; there is no Animantic working so trivial that a serious practitioner will not consider, before casting it, whether the working is justified at all. The live debates within the discipline, whether, for instance, the steamling stands in the same relation to its own anima as the biological ancestries do, and what that might or might not oblige us to, remain unresolved, and in my private opinion will remain so for quite some time. The canonical primer is Ellimar Vost’s “On the Quickening and the Still” (1378 CR), though its theological framings have aged in some chapters more gracefully than in others. I strongly recommend pairing it with Quayon Beresh’s “A Short Commentary on Vost” (2905 CR), which gently modernises the material without losing its spirit. For the student more inclined to practice than to speculation, there is Devika Orathi’s “Thirty-Seven Questions to Ask Yourself Before an Animantic Working” (3084 CR); its prose is dry, its ordering eccentric, and yet I have never seen a serious Animancer set out upon a piece of work without having answered, in pencil and in the margins[^13] and to themselves, at least the first twenty-three. ::: :::section [^13]: I once discovered a copy in which an overenthusiastic scholar had simply scrawled the word ‘NO’ over every page laying out question eighteen. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## Biomancy Biomancy is the voice. The body itself is the instrument; lungs and cords and resonating skull, diaphragm and tongue and lip, and the playing of it is indistinguishable from the being of it. No school so rewards the patient flesh; none is so unforgiving of its neglect. Where Chymancy asks what things are made of, Biomancy asks what living things can be persuaded to do. Healers work predominantly in Biomancy; so do midwives, veterinary thaumaturgists, certain daring tailors, and a small, quiet, and rightly mistrusted minority of practitioners whom respectable faculty do not invite to staff meetings. The discipline demands a feel for the living material, an intuition for what the flesh is already trying to do, that cannot be reliably taught from a book, though a great many books have tried. On the relationship between this school and Chymancy I refer the reader to the earlier section on that discipline; the case of Richard of Oranis is, from the opposite direction, quite as instructive here. The foundational text, now somewhat dated but still unsurpassed in clarity, is Velarin Hoss’s “The Mended Limb” (1687 CR), followed by the indispensable “A Practical Biomantic Formulary” compiled by Kaede Aritomo (3041 CR). For those whose interests run toward the smaller and the warmer-blooded, Jessa Unswick’s “The Veterinarian’s Companion” (3117 CR) is quietly the most-borrowed Biomantic title in the Neuros collection, and not merely by veterinarians: its central section on the repair of small bones is so clearly illustrated that a great many healers of people have been known to keep the volume, with a certain sheepishness, on the bedside table. Finally, for those more interested in plant than animal, I highly recommend Bianca Kyn’s debut title, “From Seed to Forest Green” (3146 CR), written while on sabbatical from Neuros University, and the most comprehensive text on how biomancy can be applied to plants that I have ever had the pleasure to come across. It allowed even me, with my less than reputable history with gardening, to take up a small indoor herb garden. ::: :::divider ::: :::section ## The Schools in Concert I promised, in my opening remarks, to touch briefly upon how the schools may be orchestrated together; and, having now exhausted the reader’s patience on each of them in turn, I shall keep that promise as briefly as I am able. The truth is that any working beyond a cantrip draws upon at least two schools in the same breath, and the great workings of our history upon five or six or all nine. To cast a simple ward upon a door is to call at once on Logomancy (for the rune), Archemancy (for the ward’s force), and Filimancy (for the binding to the door itself); to heal a broken arm is to engage Biomancy (for the flesh), Chymancy (for the bone’s mineral), and, very often, though the healer may not admit it, a touch of Animancy to steady the patient against shock.[^14] The fiction that the schools are nine wholly distinct disciplines is a pedagogical convenience and nothing more; one learns them separately so that one does not, later, confuse which voice one is raising. Compound workings are, nevertheless, a discipline in their own right, with their own conventions, their own etiquette, and, not least, their own category of failure, which tends to be more spectacular than any failure in a single school alone. A Filimantic binding placed across an Eidolomantic construct, for instance, will behave quite differently from the sum of its parts: the illusion, once bound, resists banishment in a way that unsettles many beginning practitioners and, I am reliably told, not a few senior ones. It is in recognition of such strangenesses that Sol Memorial and Neuros both run third-year practica devoted to compound workings, and it is to those practica that I now, with a certain relief, hand the reader off. Of introductory texts in this advanced area, two are essentially universal in the modern curriculum. The first is Milosz Zverin’s “On the Orchestra of Spellcraft: A Study of the Nine in Concert” (2844 CR), a sweeping and beautifully argued treatise that established the vocabulary we still use for combined workings; *keying*, *modal shift*, *dissonance*, *carried tone*. And whose opening chapter is, in my view, one of the finest pieces of arcane prose ever written.[^15] The book is long, occasionally digressive, and expects a firm grounding in at least six of the nine schools before it will fully repay the reader; but no serious curriculum can omit it, and those who have read it come out the other side, in my experience, changed. The second is Tahina Otira’s “First Chords: A Practical Introduction to Compound Workings” (3108 CR), which addresses itself quite deliberately to the student whom Zverin has overawed rather than inspired. Otira proceeds by small, friendly exercises, two-school combinations for a chapter, then three, then the occasional four; and refuses throughout to impose a formal theory until the reader has, through practice, begun to feel the shape of one. It is the book I place in the hands of every first-year advisee who has passed their Year Two examinations; more than one has written me, years later, to say that it was Otira, not Zverin, who taught them how to listen. The student entering serious study, then, ought not to regard the Nine Schools as destinations but as rooms one walks between. The real work of the thaumaturgist is the doorways, and the air that moves through them when they are opened in the right order. I wish each reader the patience to learn each of the nine on its own terms, and thereafter the courage to forget, at the right moment, which room they are standing in. It is a privilege, after four decades of teaching, still to be occasionally surprised by what happens when all the doors are opened at once.[^16] ::: :::section [^14]: I have yet to meet a healer who denies using this trick, and have also yet to meet one who will admit to having been formally taught it. [^15]: I have had occasion to recite it from memory, in full, at more gatherings than my colleagues find seemly. [^16]: I shall be a little disappointed if, in another four decades, that surprise has ceased. ::: :::section Professor Cassian Meridius Department of Logomancy, Neuros University, House Canae Sealed with the Owl’s Sigil Year 3147 of the Chrysian Reckoning :::