Four Essences

Headmaster Mistuhado's consolidated works of the Four Essences. This was written for First Year students.

Abstract

To understand the nature of magic, we first need to understand the four essences that compose it, rather than continuing to toil narrowly within our own traditions without a broader picture of what we can accomplish. Magic is composed of four distinct essences: Matter, Mind, Spirit, and Life. These four essences exist in two sets of two; Matter and Spirit are the building blocks of the multiverse itself, of the physical and metaphysical, material and immaterial. Mind and Life are the magical energies that give those blocks shape and determine how a spellcaster pursues and understands the magic.

Matter

We will start with Matter, or material essence. While students of basic sciences will know that solid objects, liquids, and gases are matter, the essence of matter reflects the energy of fundamental physical forces and reactions such as electricity or combustion. Thus, Matter is not merely earth, water, and air, but fire too, as well as cold and alchemicals like acid. Material essence is also the namesake of the plane we call home, the Material Plane, but ours isn’t the only plane home to Matter. It’s found everywhere, even in realms mainly built of spirit, and Matter in its purest form can be found on the four elemental planes. Spells based on Matter are physical energy attacks, such as fireballs and lightning bolts, but also spells of physical transmutation like enlarge and shrink, or physical creation like wall of stone. Thus, it covers much of evocation, transmutation, and conjuration, as well as certain physical abjurations.

The most important thing to remember about Matter is that it follows physical laws possible to deduce through a scientific process of observation and experimentation. To arcane scholars, that might not seem special, but compared to the other essences, you can’t take that fact as a given! Arcane magic is based upon the idea that we can understand Matter using logic and thought, the classic “Mind over Matter.” Nonetheless, adherents of primal magic have proven that even Matter, the most quantifiable essence, has hidden secrets possible to unlock through faith and holistic understanding.

Before we move on, let’s think about what it means for something to lack any connection to Matter. As mentioned, even most planes built mainly of Spirit also contain some amount of Matter. A being without Matter has no physical form and is thus incorporeal, composed of one or more of the other essences (for instance, a wraith is composed of Spirit and the destructive aspects of Life, while an animate dream is composed of Spirit and Mind). What implications does this have? For one, you might otherwise assume that a creature in a gaseous state or made of fire is incorporeal, whether from spells that cause those effects, or because it is naturally an elemental made of air or fire. However, these beings are corporeal, merely from different states of Matter, and those confronting a fire elemental will find magic designed to fight foes with no bodies isn’t particularly helpful. Meanwhile, pure Matter, with no other essences, is just an object, like a chunk of rock, a flow of water, or a breeze of air.

Mind

Let’s move on to discuss Mind, or mental essence, also known as thought essence or even astral essence among esoteric circles. It’s critical that you don’t overgeneralize Mind to mean “Everything I experience in my consciousness as a thinking being.” All three of the remaining essences (and even Matter, when considering the ability of physical chemicals to alter a mental state) have profound parts to play in your experience of consciousness. But Mind plays a very specific part. This is the energy of knowledge, facts, and your rational mind, including language processing, learning facts, and conscious decision-making. Mental magic is versatile and can be extremely powerful as it assists in gleaning information via divination, building illusions, and even enchanting minds. Not just spells like charm, hypercognition, or illusory image, but a variety of effects from subtle suggestion to obvious dominate. Mind is rarely involved with other schools of magic, but you’ll see it pop up occasionally in mental abjuration effects like mind blank. The transmutation spell haste can either speed up one’s body (mostly Matter) or speed up one’s thoughts (mostly Mind), or both, and is thus available to spellcasters using either Matter or Mind.

Mind is not simply cold and calculating logic. Intellectual creativity and dreams are built of Mind, along with Spirit. Emotions are among the most difficult parts of our experience to distribute among the essences, and are the subject of great debates as to exactly how they should be assigned. Suffice to say, my best summary is that many of our emotions are complex enough that they are composed of more than one essence, and the most instinctual and subconscious emotions aren’t associated with Mind.

But what does it mean to lack Mind? To put it simply, if perhaps circularly, it means having no mind, rendering a creature incapable of thought. While this might be more obvious for something like a stone, even living creatures, including most oozes, have no Mind, nor do rudimentary undead like zombies, as the magic creating them isn’t sophisticated enough to steal or build a vessel for mental essence. Mental magic can’t work on such a being, even though it might be capable of performing actions that seem like it has a mind. Generally, these occur either due to instincts built into the creature’s being through life essence (including the perversion that fuels undead), or are preprogrammed by the being’s creator. This often means a creature without Mind has no metaphysical alignment, though the instincts carried by life essence could instill one in them (as with mindless undead).

A being composed purely of Mind is not alive, and has no body, instincts, or capacity for growth and change. It’s like a bodiless yet intelligent construct, capable of reason, but not of instinct or growth.

Spirit

Matter’s metaphysical opposite, Spirit, or spiritual essence, is also known as soul essence or ethereal essence. For most of us on the Material Plane possessed of all four essences, our spiritual building blocks are intangible and invisible, passing through our physical bodies in a way we can feel more easily than see.

That’s not the case for celestials, fiends, monitors, and other creatures built primarily or wholly from Spirit. Many are fully tangible and manifest physical bodies from the form of Spirit known as quintessence, which might seem counterintuitive to my definition of Matter above. You might be most used to seeing the adjective quintessential, meaning a typical example, but quintessence means “fifth essence” or “fifth element.” It refers to physically manifested Spirit used as building blocks of embodied creatures of Spirit, as well as the Outer Planes.

Why, when there are four essences, is it named this way? According to elemental scholars, in addition to the elements of air, earth, fire, and water, there is a fifth substance called aether, formed when elemental physicality mixes with the essence of the Ethereal Maelstrom. This leads me to believe aether and quintessence are two words for the concept of Spirit made manifest. Since aether is the basis of force at a distance in effects like telekinesis, this also explains how spiritual magic such as spiritual weapon and spirit blast are associated with metaphysical force (as opposed to physical forces in bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing attacks). Spirit has another physical manifestation in ectoplasm, which occurs when Spirit pushes against the veil of the Material Plane. If quintessence, or aether, is Spirit made manifest like Matter, then ectoplasm is Matter stretched by Spirit, amorphous and only partially solid.

So, if we’re not a being of the Outer Sphere or the Ethereal Maelstrom, what does Spirit do for us? It is the building block of our immortal soul, which carries us to our afterlife along the Path of Souls, meaning it’s strongly connected to the metaphysical alignments of good and evil, law and chaos, much like the Outer Spheres themselves. It also carries pieces of those transcendent emotions that can elevate our souls to their highest (such as love) or drag them down to their lowest (such as love, again, but also hatred and despair). Spirit reverberates through you like a breath, and inspires and elevates, so it unsurprisingly is associated with pure inspiration, like the muse that guides a bard or artist. Spirit is not just used for force effects like spiritual weapon or metaphysically aligned spells like divine decree, but also for divinations connecting to the Outer Sphere or beyond, such as read omens, as well as necromancy manipulating spirits or souls, such as resurrection or bind soul. The uplifting and transcendent emotions lead the way to certain enchantment effects, like heroism.

The most frustrating thing about Spirit is how misused the word is. The vernacular is popular, and most languages lack an analogous word meaning “Being composed only of Life,” so beings composed of other essences are called “spirits” an unfortunate percentage of the time. For example, consider the manifestations of Life that form leshys and guide druids. These are often referred to as “spirits of nature” while not being spirits in the true sense, beings composed of Spirit, at all. I prefer to refer to them as vitae, though using the term vitae to refer to a category of vital-only beings is a bit of a neologism of mine.

What would a being without Spirit be like? Much as your physical body can change and grow as you age, work your muscles, or gain weight, Spirit allows you to grow metaphysically. That means a being without Spirit can think, reason, have instincts, and even have a metaphysical alignment, but it has no capacity to grow past those and become a fundamentally different person. This has led scholars to deep questions like, “If a being with no Spirit is created with a good alignment, meaning it had no choice but to be good and has no ability to change or choose, is it even actually good?”

A being of pure Spirit would be a mindless quintessential or ethereal construct, neither alive nor dead, requiring programming from a creator to act. Think of a mindless inevitable aeon and you’re close.

Life

I’ve saved Life for last not only because it is the hardest for me to write about as an arcane scholar, but also because by its nature it is impossible to teach it fully in a text like this. Nonetheless, I shall try. Life essence, or vital essence as it is often called to make it clear the essence has a destructive side, is the essence presiding over what we call positive energy, the cosmic energy of creation and life, and negative energy, that of destruction and death. It’s tempting to misattribute metaphysical alignments from the Outer Sphere like “good” and “evil” to positive and negative energy, but that would be an attempt to project morality onto amoral forces. Used for their intended purposes, both are part of the way the universe is supposed to work. Twisted against their intent, using positive energy to destroy or negative energy to create can lead to unspeakable evil.

Before we get sucked into a discussion on undead, let’s finish defining vital essence. It’s not so simple as “I’m alive. I have Life.” Life is the counterpart to Mind because it represents the irrational, the instincts ingrained in you from birth as part of your very lifeforce, your faith in the unknown. Here we return to emotions. Our most primal and subconscious emotions and urges are ruled by Life, and that is critical to understanding how we act in ways we might not have wanted to rationally, or in ways we can’t explain.

Let’s address undead. If negative energy isn’t evil, why are undead evil? The tragedy of undeath is that it perverts negative energy outside its natural role of destruction and forces it to create. The result is a being with a horrifying emptiness filled only by a connection to that subverted need to destroy, full of instincts and subconscious urges from the corrupted essence that inexorably twist it to evil. This is why ghouls must devour the living’s flesh, vampires need fresh blood, and even incorporeal undead drain Life. Many become evil almost right away, but those with the willpower and virtue to stave it off are still doomed, with time, to change.

So, what would a creature be if it didn’t have Life at all? It would be neither living, nor undead. Even beings of the afterlife built of spiritual quintessence have vital essence. It would be a construct, albeit an intelligent construct with a soul, able to reason and grow, but with no inherent instincts.

What about a being of pure Life? Disembodied and acting on instinct? The vitae of nature called upon in commune with nature and that come to embody leshys are the perfect example. Powerful and wise beyond time, they don’t have Mind or Spirit until embodied in a leshy, and thus don’t remember or change in the way that we do.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have demonstrated and explained the nature of the four magical essences. By isolating and understanding the essences, we can build them together and see why and how magic works. Arcane magic is the study of the physical world (Matter + Mind), though that doesn’t mean arcane spells can’t occasionally access topics of magic traditionally covered by Life or Spirit through a scientific fashion, such as in the study of necromancy. Occult magic is the study of the metaphysical (Spirit + Mind), though sometimes there is an overlap with the other essences, as in the case of object reading, where a material object houses a psychic imprint. Primal magic is the faith in the physical and natural world (Matter + Life), and among all magics hews closest to those two essences in traditional spellcasting, but creatures such as fey have found ways to exploit the powerful energy of primal magic to create cerebral mental effects. Divine magic is the faith in the metaphysical (Spirit + Life), but such faith can still on occasion create or manipulate Matter, or effects of quintessence that seem similar to Matter. Thus, a reminder: The world needs magical scholars to continue these studies. Even these fundamentals house contradictions and idiosyncrasies awaiting the next new magical theory.