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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6612191" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know where to refer you, and I can't tell from your requests whether you want primary sources or gaming materials, but I do know a bit about Egyptian magic and I think if you are going for authenticity, you won't be able to get there completely with D&D.So, Egyptian magic is based on the theory that there is this stuff call haka that the creator deity used to build the universe, and which is left over from creation and apportioned according to a person's importance and role to all the various bureaucracy of sentient beings that are supposed to make creation work - from the mightiest deity to the peasant farmer.  What haka does is transform the image or symbol of a thing into the real thing itself.  So Egyptian magic is all about depiction and theatrics - you act out what you want to happen.  Most of it looks very much like stereotypical 'Voodoo' magic.  Of course, ordinary people don't have a lot of haka.  How magical you are is directly tied to your birth, and to your proximity to the gods.  Peasants can't really expect their magic to work except on peasant stuff.  You have to be of 'noble blood', a member of the aristocracies, and trained as a priest to get any big effects.   Like almost all ancient magic, the Egyptians made no distinction between Arcane and Divine magic, but contrary to the usual D&D players misconceptions, it's the Arcane magic that has no ancient equivalent.  All magic was Priestly, and involved evoking the Gods (little and great) to get them to work on your behalf, because mortals - with the possible exception of Pharaohs and the like - just didn't have enough haka to get things done.  There was linguistically really no difference between the word 'priest' and the word 'wizard', and a magicians tools showed off his proximity to the gods and were heavily religious in nature.  D&D magic was influenced by Egyptian concepts to a certain extent (partially indirectly, as Egyptian style magic underwent a revival in the 19th century, and forms the basis of many modern occult texts).  In particular, the verbal, somatic, and material components of D&D spell-casting are very much in tune with actual Egyptian magic as it was practiced.  An Egyptian spell contained a verse to recite, often very much in the form of a prayer, and a list of instructions to undertake while saying the verse.  Like almost all historical magic, the spells tended not to be flashy.  Quite obviously, if a spell purported to create fireballs, very quickly people would have realized it wasn't working and ceased belief in it.  So most ancient magic took the form of curses, or warding away evil spirits, or of promoting good spirits, and other ways of influencing what we'd normally think of as luck or coincidence.   There were spells to make beer brew right, or make a surgery go well, or to make a pregnancy successful, or to cause a wound to not become infected, or to break a curse an enemy had placed on you, or allow you to find something you'd lost, or to cause the banks of the Nile to overflow in the proper season.   Most of these are less flashy versions of spells that are core to D&D - and that's not coincidental.   Gygax adored ancient Egypt.  Green Ronin's world of Testament series seems to have done a lot of research to try to capture the world as the people living in Biblical times actually perceived it.  I'm not sure I recommend it, but if you are going for authenticity in D20 compatible systems that's probably as good as you are going to get.</blockquote>

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