I mentioned this in the TVtropes thread, but Merlin did not think through his interdict all that well—If you are going to compromise everyones mental integrity to end a cycle of magical destruction, then limiting information spread is an asinie way to do it—it would make infinitely more sense to subject all wizards to a magical prohibition against large scale destruction and killing. Phrasing it so that it wards agaist Dunning-Kruger fueled magical accidents without shutting down experimentation entirely is an interesting exercise, but should be possible.
Frankly, we don’t know enough about why Merlin did what he did to judge his action either way—we don’t know what danger was being foreseen, we don’t know the limitations of his own powers. There’s really no sense in criticizing him or praising him at this point of time—we lack crucial information.
It’s possible that the Interdict is a natural property of the Source of Magic, and was swept up in the legend of Merlin as time passed. We have no real evidence for a time when people could record spells indefinitely, AFAIK.
I understood Merlins Interdict to be interfering with The Source of Magic, not with “everyones mental integrity”, which would seem much much harder to do. Magic seems to function by checking prerequisites, like “waved magical active stick in spatial pattern X”, “said wingardium leviosa with exact pronounciation Y”- Just add to this list of prerequisites of sufficiently powerfull spells a call of a function which checks wether the user is authorized; if not, check wether user should be authorized. If ve is, add to list of authorized user, if not, deny.
Doesn’t work. It’s not that powerful spells are known but can’t be cast, the function of the Interdict somehow causes powerful wizards’ notes to be unintelligible to the uninitiated.
Not just notes. - All written instructions on how to do spells above a certain level just flat out fail unless someone explains the spell to you in person at least once. Which has to be a mind hack, and if you are willing to alter peoples minds to remove the risk of idiots or madmen blowing up the planet/opening the gates of hell/ect, then picking this specific modification is very.. odd.
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?
Back up one step further: what evidence do we have that the Interdict actually exists? As opposed to, say, all powerful wizards simply having the same inclination toward secrecy and self-discovery. How did Quirrell put it...
The fools who can’t resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you do not share with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves! Every powerful wizard knows that!
I’ve never received the impression that wizards powerful enough to be subject to the Interdict have actually tried to circumvent it. If all known examples of written instructions for powerful spells were gibberish to begin with, would the world look any different? Not to mention, why would it be necessary to cast a huge mind-altering spell to make people do what they were inclined to do anyway?
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.)
Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
If by “tampering” you mean just “permanently modifying”, the Source of Magic (TM) could just watch wizards’ minds(1) to detect when they’re writing in sufficient detail(2) high-level(3) spell descriptions, and enchant the written artifact.(4)
(1:) I can’t think of a way it would act the way it does—i.e., trigger wand-less and wordless spells, as well as accidental magic—without reading wizards’ minds at all times (or tampering with their minds at birth), anyway, at least not while following Harry’s genetic marker theory.
(2:) It needs to act only when the description tells you what to do, not what it does. Presumably it lets a historian describe what wondrous feats Merlin did as long as he didn’t describe how the spell was cast.
(3:) I’m really curious how that works. It’s clear that some spells are “harder” to cast, and some are “more powerful” than others (not sure if the two are perfectly correlated), but AFAIK it’s never described what that really means, except for trivial things like complex wand patterns and not-really-helpful stuff like “only first-year student magic level”.
(4:) Basilisks turn you to stone when you look at them, the Mirror-of-I-can’t-remember-who-it-was showed you what you wanted when you looked at it, so it’s clear that magic effects can be triggered by looking at the magical item.
(4b:) Exactly what “written artifact” means would be kind of hard to figure out. If it also applies to non-textual artifacts—sound recordings, encoding a description with smells and colors, planting a row of trees of two species to spell the description in ASCII—then it’s really complicated.
It might just look at what people intend to do, but then it would be vulnerable to complicated attacks like encrypting the description with a key, giving the encrypted text to a scribe who knows the described spell but doesn’t know the key nor what the encrypted text is, and asking them to write the encrypted text, then writing the key separately—or even unintentional recordings. Then again, we have no evidence it isn’t vulnerable to all that, there would have been little opportunity centuries ago. Harry’s pouch does respond to languages neither the caster nor the user knows, but then again it doesn’t answer for simple encodings like “1+1” for “2”...
I mentioned this in the TVtropes thread, but Merlin did not think through his interdict all that well—If you are going to compromise everyones mental integrity to end a cycle of magical destruction, then limiting information spread is an asinie way to do it—it would make infinitely more sense to subject all wizards to a magical prohibition against large scale destruction and killing. Phrasing it so that it wards agaist Dunning-Kruger fueled magical accidents without shutting down experimentation entirely is an interesting exercise, but should be possible.
Frankly, we don’t know enough about why Merlin did what he did to judge his action either way—we don’t know what danger was being foreseen, we don’t know the limitations of his own powers. There’s really no sense in criticizing him or praising him at this point of time—we lack crucial information.
It’s possible that the Interdict is a natural property of the Source of Magic, and was swept up in the legend of Merlin as time passed. We have no real evidence for a time when people could record spells indefinitely, AFAIK.
I understood Merlins Interdict to be interfering with The Source of Magic, not with “everyones mental integrity”, which would seem much much harder to do. Magic seems to function by checking prerequisites, like “waved magical active stick in spatial pattern X”, “said wingardium leviosa with exact pronounciation Y”- Just add to this list of prerequisites of sufficiently powerfull spells a call of a function which checks wether the user is authorized; if not, check wether user should be authorized. If ve is, add to list of authorized user, if not, deny.
Doesn’t work. It’s not that powerful spells are known but can’t be cast, the function of the Interdict somehow causes powerful wizards’ notes to be unintelligible to the uninitiated.
Not just notes. - All written instructions on how to do spells above a certain level just flat out fail unless someone explains the spell to you in person at least once. Which has to be a mind hack, and if you are willing to alter peoples minds to remove the risk of idiots or madmen blowing up the planet/opening the gates of hell/ect, then picking this specific modification is very.. odd.
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?
Back up one step further: what evidence do we have that the Interdict actually exists? As opposed to, say, all powerful wizards simply having the same inclination toward secrecy and self-discovery. How did Quirrell put it...
I’ve never received the impression that wizards powerful enough to be subject to the Interdict have actually tried to circumvent it. If all known examples of written instructions for powerful spells were gibberish to begin with, would the world look any different? Not to mention, why would it be necessary to cast a huge mind-altering spell to make people do what they were inclined to do anyway?
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.)
If by “tampering” you mean just “permanently modifying”, the Source of Magic (TM) could just watch wizards’ minds(1) to detect when they’re writing in sufficient detail(2) high-level(3) spell descriptions, and enchant the written artifact.(4)
(1:) I can’t think of a way it would act the way it does—i.e., trigger wand-less and wordless spells, as well as accidental magic—without reading wizards’ minds at all times (or tampering with their minds at birth), anyway, at least not while following Harry’s genetic marker theory.
(2:) It needs to act only when the description tells you what to do, not what it does. Presumably it lets a historian describe what wondrous feats Merlin did as long as he didn’t describe how the spell was cast.
(3:) I’m really curious how that works. It’s clear that some spells are “harder” to cast, and some are “more powerful” than others (not sure if the two are perfectly correlated), but AFAIK it’s never described what that really means, except for trivial things like complex wand patterns and not-really-helpful stuff like “only first-year student magic level”.
(4:) Basilisks turn you to stone when you look at them, the Mirror-of-I-can’t-remember-who-it-was showed you what you wanted when you looked at it, so it’s clear that magic effects can be triggered by looking at the magical item.
(4b:) Exactly what “written artifact” means would be kind of hard to figure out. If it also applies to non-textual artifacts—sound recordings, encoding a description with smells and colors, planting a row of trees of two species to spell the description in ASCII—then it’s really complicated.
It might just look at what people intend to do, but then it would be vulnerable to complicated attacks like encrypting the description with a key, giving the encrypted text to a scribe who knows the described spell but doesn’t know the key nor what the encrypted text is, and asking them to write the encrypted text, then writing the key separately—or even unintentional recordings. Then again, we have no evidence it isn’t vulnerable to all that, there would have been little opportunity centuries ago. Harry’s pouch does respond to languages neither the caster nor the user knows, but then again it doesn’t answer for simple encodings like “1+1” for “2”...