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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 6259548" data-attributes="member: 6670763">A word can be thought off as two things: An acoustic symbol for a concept, or a series of sound waves of specific frequencies.If you look at words as acoustic symbols for concepts, both the concepts and the symbol chosen to represent it are completely arbitrary. You would indeed require a kind of deity that in some way establishes a mechanism that senses the words being spoken and then causes some effect in reaction to it. Arbitrary symbols can not be part of laws of nature woven into the fabric of the universe.You could go the route of sound waves triggering physical reactions in the magical background field of the universe. That would require some form of ether that interacts with matter on a subatomic scale, which doesn't exist in reality, but shouldn't be implausible in a hypothetical alternative universe from a physicists perspective. The main problem here would be the range of human vocalization. There's a virtually infinite range of combinations of sound frequencies, but the human body can only create a tiny fraction of them. That all the cool effects can be created by human voice, but not by animals or physical actions in the environment would be a huge coincidence. However, it's more plausible that humans have actually evolved to be able to create the sounds that lie just in the "magical" frequency range.I think Skyrim is going kinda in this direction, with dragons somehow being uniquely suited to create the words correctly. Humans can learn to do it, but it requires huge amounts of training.Throughout history, most concepts of incantations require a divine agency, though. Not neccessarly a god as understood by the modern English word, but some supernatural enteties that are able to understand the intention of the person invoking the incatation and then react by doing magic on their behalf. Either by choice out of kindness, or by a compulsion created by even higher powers. The idea that the spirits have to comply with these orders is quite common though. Which is one commonly used distinction made in religious studies to differentiate between a wizard and a priest. A priest is performing a prayer to a divine entity to make a request for divine intervention. The wizard performs a ritual that compells a spirit to do as it is ordered. If the ritual is performed correctly, the spirits don't have any choice to disobey; if the spell fails, the ritual was performed incorrectly. (As always in social studies and anthropology, this is a generalization that aknowledges individual cases being different, and is only one of many possible interpretations not always shared by everyone.)</blockquote>

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