Hold up.. checking assumptions. Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
Trivial.
Someone explaining to you in person is the same as someone authorizing you to use a piece of software. You can still speak the words of the spell, still do the sacrifices, but the computer is just not going to listen to your commands unless you’ve been given those privileges.
Yes, that would be a possibility for controlling distribution of powerful spells, except that the Edict of Merlin explicitly doesn’t do that: you can’t speak the words because you can’t understand the writing. If you could read and speak the spell (and whatever else the spell requires) presumably you could cast it. (Otherwise Merlin needn’t have bothered making the texts unintelligible as well.)
Trivial.
Someone explaining to you in person is the same as someone authorizing you to use a piece of software. You can still speak the words of the spell, still do the sacrifices, but the computer is just not going to listen to your commands unless you’ve been given those privileges.
Yes, that would be a possibility for controlling distribution of powerful spells, except that the Edict of Merlin explicitly doesn’t do that: you can’t speak the words because you can’t understand the writing. If you could read and speak the spell (and whatever else the spell requires) presumably you could cast it. (Otherwise Merlin needn’t have bothered making the texts unintelligible as well.)