The Simplex Arcana

Long before humanity even thought about history, an anonymous someone wrote a book. This book detailed the ins and outs of true magic and was regarded as the first and last source of information on learning said magic.
Then the cataclysm came, The Yggdrasil Shudder. The Antideluvian age came to a sudden halt. All knowledge vanished from the minds of those who survived. The world shifted, changed by forces beyond the power of gods. True magic was gone, and the prestige is what remained.
The Simplex Arcana is a tool, a frustrating, inconsistent, and often contradictory tool. The Prestige uses the same principles, but the application is so different, nothing in the book is true. Then again, everything in the book is 100% correct.

Isn't it only Magic?

The Prestige and true magic are different. It's why those who use the prestige get upset when the terms are confused. True magic could break fundamental laws. It could create and destroy matter, it rarely failed or backfired, and anyone could learn how to use it by simply opening the book and scanning its pages.
The Prestige is nothing like it. It forces you to find the flames yourself before you can cast the spell. It forces you to measure risk and reward, and learning it is a cruel and unusual punishment in and of itself. All this assumes you survive the rite that must be taken before even looking into how to cast the simplest of spells.
The Prestige requires The Simplex Arcana, but nothing in the text can be considered a fact when you read it. It must be read, memorized, and then fully tested to determine if there is any truth. This experimentation is a long and dangerous process. You never know if a spell will be cast, or if the effort will maim you beyond repair.

The Good Book

The Simplex Arcana is a book measuring 1 foot, by 11 inches that contains 777 physical pages. The pages, however, are more than sheets of paper. The paper is ancient, heavy and dense. The book has a black and brown leather cover.
Geometric designs are stitched in gold thread across the cover and the same design can be seen faintly on its pages. The book is heavily resistant to any type of wear and tear that may occur during use. It is flame retardant, hydrophobic, and any attempt to destroy the book will usually be met with a strange whining sound that is reminiscent of laughter.
When you open the book, the pages will be entirely blank. As you scan the pages looking for any sign of text, streams of black ink will flow down the page the book is turned to. The ink will form words in a strange language, linger for a moment as the reader tries to understand the text, then the words will morph into the language the reader understands most.

Contradictions

One of the more frustrating elements of studying The Prestige is how one practitioner can read the text, experiment with its teachings, and then meet a practitioner who has an entirely different set of results.
Both practitioners believed they knew what worked and what wouldn't, only to find that they were both equally correct and incorrect. The Prestige differs from one person to another. This is why the text is needed. By engaging in these experiments, one can learn the closest thing to magic there is.
These contradictions led to Grimoires. A grimoire is the collection of notes, detailed experiments, and findings that the practitioner lists on empty spaces and margins of their copy of The Simplex Arcana.

Grimoires

The grimoire is a means of showing one's work during their journey. While learning The Prestige, it's important to document your findings and compare them with others. While The Prestige has been around since ancient Greece, the actual focus on studying it began in the last few centuries.
The lack of those who survive the rite is the main reason for the slow progress. There are so few practitioners that the data collected is minimal. Finding similarities that make sense between two users who happen to share the same gifts continues to be difficult.
The grimoire is a personal thing. The notes within are a product of blood, sweat, tears. After every success and failure, the practitioner's power grows, and their understanding does as well. The only exception to this is Arcana Discordia, which is taught by a Discordian to their sponsored recruit who technically died in the rite to begin with.