What is it to be bound by the power and magic of names?
Warren Ellis makes a very interesting point through his character Don Bastardos aka Fidel Castro in the second issue of Doktor Sleepless. Bastardos brings up the point that a drug fell out of pop culture favor when it became known that said drug had a different name which was much less palatable. With the name more sterile and medical than, say, adventurous or wanderlust evocative, the drug disappeared.
From what I’ve observed, western magical tradition is most involved with having the right name to call a deity or spirit or some other such being. If one has the right name, one controls the not-human.
And to think that the not-human was, you know, NOT human, right? To not be bound by the same set of problems and workings as we are, what would that be like, how much magic could one make of all this, this stuff, unformed and just waiting to be wrought into a thing so beauteous that… words just fail.
BUT!
“To be in any form, what is that?”
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
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1 comments:
It's actually rather interesting how names play such a large role in how we interact with things. I'd never considered much how that related to drug use, but it makes sense that the name of a product would effect it's purchasing.
Have you ever considered the idea of "true names" that pops up in fantasy on occasion? The thought that if you could call something by its real name, that you would either a) be more connected to it, or b) have control over it. I know it comes up in Eragon at some point, but has appeared in many other places as well.
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