The Dark Path 2
From Atlantic Roleplay Wiki
The Dark Path - Volume II.
by Annatar.
THE MENTOR MAGE
Thus he discovers the next portion of the Magician's road - instruction in the magical arts. Rare is the magician who is self-initiated, who has traveled the path without a mentor. For most initiates, this segment must be undertaken with a spiritual mentor, if only for sanity and survival.
The student-mentor relationship varies from tradition to tradition. Always, however, it falls to the mentor to take responsibility for the bond, to prepare her student for his new role. Some masters may be kind, others abusive; each mentor's duty is sacred, though, and difficult. The untrained student is a pile of clay that, in time, must mold itself. The mentor must teach his student how to transform from clay to a vessel of knowledge. Through this transmission, magic survives.
The first step often involves physical, menial labor. Humility and discipline - both of which are particularly hard to develop in the morden age - are essential tools for the aspiring magician. Through the mentor's direction, the pupil learns these qualities, often at the end of a broom!
Some traditions - particularly shamenic societies and religious orders - belive that gods or spirits instruct the student. Meditations, fasts and ordeals open the channel for the spirit's arrival. Even then, a mortal teacher must show the initiate the way. A Hermit must guide her student down the road she has walked herself.
This is a period of learning and unlearning. The student must dissolve many misconceptions he once held - concepts that are enough to sustain people blind to the Otherworld, but that prove too thin for initiates of the magical arts. notions of cosmology, of the spirit, of man's destiny and his relationship with the maker must be questioned, overturned, reilluminated and ultimately reinstated. A center must be provided for the magician's reference and return, and some force must drive him. By compelling the student to solve seemingly unsolvable puzzles, the mentor breakes her student's mental constructs, then reshapes them again.
In many magical traditions, these new notions still have some cultural basis: Magic does not develop in a vaccum. Even though many sorcerers develop heterodox ideas, their pratices often remain rooted in their home culture.
Thus, it is that some magicians develop skewed ethics. When "right" and "wrong" seems to become meaningless concepts, the sorcerers decides they must be abandoned, along with old notions of guilt, responsibility and taboo.Indeed, there is some truth in that abandonment; even so, just has old concepts must be unlearned, new and greater notions of responsibility must be learned as well. Im the iconoclastic rush, many students forget this step.
Pity the initiate who never progresses beyond this stage - and pity the magicians who fall back for any number of reasons, from a lack of discipline to an inability to discern the truth. For they have seen now the world of magic. and they are a part of it, but they exercise no control over the Black Art, and they are powerless before it.
...ooOoOoo...