Charismatic Magic

Charismatic magic is the art of forming communion with spirits to accomplish a goal. These communions are relationships between the practitioner and the spirit. It is a partial merging of minds. The nature of the relationship and the type of spirit the practioner communes are the determining factors in charismatic magic and how it is employed.

Relationship

This relationship between a charismatic and a spirit depends on the power dynamic and what each party seeks from the arrangement. This relationship can be that of comrades, familial, lord and servant, strictly transactional or even predatory or parasitical. Individuals without training, especially the strongly empathic or intuitive, can form communions without formal training. Usually this is with a local spirit of telluric or elanic origin, such as a nature spirit or the spirit of a close ancestor.

Sometimes, as in the case of those often called prophets (or the mad), there is such a strong correlation between the mind of the mortal and that of an exani that spontaneous communion occurs. Most of these untrained charismatics enjoy mutually beneficial relationships with these spirits. However, untrained practitioners are often preyed upon by predatory or parasitic exani.

Spirit Type

The origin of the spirit communed with is how most people define the practioner. They are given names such as priest, necromancer, shaman, sorcerer, warlock or druid.

Elanic Charismatics

These traditions generally concern communion with the elani, those originating from living, mortal beings, usually those of the dead. The vast majority are in communion with ancestral spirits or those of cultural heroes and are religious in nature, involving reverence and worship. There are also those charismatics known as necromancers who form non-religious communions. Necromancers usually dominate these spirits and command them, but the relationship can also be mutual or even one in which the spirit is master.

Mutually beneficial communions provide the elan some sort of desire, such as remembrance, reverence, seeing their will done in the mortal world or their wishes known, or simply providing them the ability to persist in local reality.

The charismatic commonly benefits by receiving advice or information from the elan, but some are also able to merge their spirits with the dead, temporarily gaining abilities and skills the spirit had in life. In some traditions, non-living vessels are created for the dead to temporarily occupy and potentially control. Some necromancers use the semiotic arts to raise the dead in dead bodies or trap them in objects.

Untrained communion with elani is the most common and usually involves communion with close departed relatives but can also be between vulnerable or young individuals and desperate spirits bound to a place who wish to escape or possess.

Telluric Charismatics

These traditions concern forming a communion with telluri. Establishing such a communion is often accidental, especially with smaller spirits, requiring little or no training to achieve attunement sufficient with such entities. Larger, more complex and powerful entities can be communed with only through long effort, usually with training by a mentor or with the assistance of mind altering substances or meditative aids.

This communion provides the telluran with temporary consciousness, the ability to observe and think about itself from another perspective. Larger entities whose beings are made at least partially of living organisms do this naturally through the minds of non-sapient animals, fungi and plants but even so, they are strongly attracted to sapient minds, but have difficulty accessing these stronger minds, especially in normal, waking consciousness.

The charismatic gains knowledge of the telluran and the elation of being part of something so alien and powerful. They also gain the ability to call for aid from it in order to protect its existence, their own and all others in communion with it. Many telluric charismatics are also somatics. Studying and contemplating unconscious telluri gives them insight into their own internal unconscious system, the physiological processes that make up their living body.

Exotic Charismatics

These traditions involve communion with exani, those consciousnesses which originate in separate realities. The types of exani are sometimes vast entities, in which case charismatic is only truly interacting with a mental construct projected into local reality by the entity. Priests are those most likely to interact with such powerful exani, worshipping them as gods. Others are beings closer to the mental level of the charismatic, but even so, their minds are nearly always alien in nature and forming a communion is difficult or mind alteringly dangerous.

Most practitioners belong to a specific tradition that may be that of a village shaman or a priest in a large, organized religion. These traditions teach methods of communicating with familiar exani within that tradition. Others, often termed warlocks or sorcerers, commune with less powerful exani and either dominate them and bind them to their will or form a more transactional arrangement with them. In most societies, such practioners are looked upon with suspicion and disapproval.