Questions about the vyozhi

Questions or discussions about Almea or Verduria-- also the Incatena. Also good for postings in Almean languages.
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Aurora Rossa
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Questions about the vyozhi

Post by Aurora Rossa »

I was reading about magic in the page on Cadhinorian religion and the parts about the vyoži left me with some questions.

First, what do the vyoži do all day when they aren't fullfilling the wishes of magicians? The section on magic says they have their own agendas and goals and makes it sound like they have intelligence all their own. Given that Almea sounds like it mostly follows natural physics, it would seem they don't intervene on their own very often. Yet it seems unlikely that such powerful and motivated beings would remain idle most of the time.

Second, where do the vyoži come from? Does the world have some sort of supernatural ecosystem which spawns beings like them?

Finally, how do the vyoži fit into the rest of Cadhinorian mythology? Does their demonstratable existence suggest that at least some Cadhinorian myths have more truth to them than Earth ones?
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Post by zompist »

I hate to get all mystical on you, but this is a bit like an ant asking for an explanation of the reinsurance market. We just don't have the context to understand the native environment of the vyoži.

An analogy might be with humans playing video games. The vyoži live in another universe with vastly different laws, but they can interact with Almea's (and maybe ours) in certain ways. Like characters in a video game, Almeans may amuse them and may be useful for their temporary goals— and might as easily be perceived as boring and useless.

Some Almeans would think this is way too flippant. To the Cuzeians, for instance, the Powers were close to what Christians call angels, beings which have some purpose or work to do in the natural world; they were associated with stars and planets. The Cadhinorians also often supposed that the vyoži had some role in the world, though they were much more marginal in their theology. (E.g. they didn't believe that the gods needed to work through vyoži, and non-magicians don't worship or particularly seek out vyoži.)

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I hate to get all mystical on you, but this is a bit like an ant asking for an explanation of the reinsurance market. We just don't have the context to understand the native environment of the vyoži.
By that you mean it differs so fundamentally from our own world that we would nothing in it familiar enough to really understand?
An analogy might be with humans playing video games. The vyoži live in another universe with vastly different laws, but they can interact with Almea's (and maybe ours) in certain ways. Like characters in a video game, Almeans may amuse them and may be useful for their temporary goals— and might as easily be perceived as boring and useless.
So two universes, one physical and the other magical (or supernatural), generally separate but able to interact under certain conditions. Any idea where this magical universe came from or does it differ too much for you to explain that?
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Post by So Haleza Grise »

Eddy wrote:
Zompist wrote:An analogy might be with humans playing video games. The vyoži live in another universe with vastly different laws, but they can interact with Almea's (and maybe ours) in certain ways. Like characters in a video game, Almeans may amuse them and may be useful for their temporary goals— and might as easily be perceived as boring and useless.
So two universes, one physical and the other magical (or supernatural), generally separate but able to interact under certain conditions. Any idea where this magical universe came from or does it differ too much for you to explain that?
I don't know where you get the dualism from. Try thinking like a Platonist, or a D&D player: natural laws exist and hold true in most circumstances; it's just that they are superseded by magic whose origin ultimately transcends the natural world without being distinct from it.
Duxirti petivevoumu tinaya to tiei šuniš muruvax ulivatimi naya to šizeni.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

I don't know where you get the dualism from. Try thinking like a Platonist, or a D&D player: natural laws exist and hold true in most circumstances; it's just that they are superseded by magic whose origin ultimately transcends the natural world without being distinct from it.
He made it sound like two separate worlds, universes with vastly different laws and all that. By a Platonist perspective, do you mean that the vyoži world lies above (metaphorically speaking) the physical world, imparting form onto it? I have read a little bit of Plato and some stuff about the neo-Platonists, but otherwise I wouldn't call myself an expert on that philosophy.
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Post by zompist »

These perspectives aren't so different as they sound. For instance, to our knowledge the vyoži aren't physical beings. So a bunch of natural laws don't apply to them-- they aren't affected by gravity, electromagnetism, etc. in the same way matter is. Now suppose there are other non-physical things also present in the universe, that make up the vyoži's environment.

Now, do they live in this universe but with a different set of laws applying to them? Or do they live in a separate universe with a possibility of acting in this one? I can't think of a way one could decide the question; they look like two ways of interpreting the same situation.

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

These perspectives aren't so different as they sound. For instance, to our knowledge the vyoži aren't physical beings. So a bunch of natural laws don't apply to them-- they aren't affected by gravity, electromagnetism, etc. in the same way matter is. Now suppose there are other non-physical things also present in the universe, that make up the vyoži's environment.

Now, do they live in this universe but with a different set of laws applying to them? Or do they live in a separate universe with a possibility of acting in this one? I can't think of a way one could decide the question; they look like two ways of interpreting the same situation.
So kind of like the electromagnetic spectrum. We see only a tiny portion of it, visible light, but it also contains so much more that we can hardly perceive. The vyoži exist on a whole other "wavelength" that we cannot perceive and that has little contact with the physical realm.
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Post by zompist »

Kind of. Though as a sometime physics geek I have to point out that all the types of electromagnetic radiation are all the same thing— light. The variation is just in one linear parameter, frequency; X-rays and infrared aren't two entirely different things. Maybe a better analogy would be normal matter vs. neutrinos, which don't respond to electromagnetism. (They were thought not to have mass either, but it looks like that's changed.)

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Post by dhok »

Perhaps Zomp is the vyozhi, and Almean magicians are able to reach into our universe to have him help them...

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Post by Aurora Rossa »

Nah, if anything Zompist would fit the role of supreme god of Almea (whoever that is) and not simply a collection of its middling spirits.

@Zompist: So in other words, not unlike the discussion in another thread I started about metaphysics. Salmoneus pointed out that if an immaterial soul can affect the physical world in an empirically quantifiable way, we could surely consider it an aspect of the physical world, just one we can't directly observe.
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