Editing The Gift:The World (section)

=The World=

[[Image:Worldinhands.jpg]]

Mages have lived among humanity for at least as long as there have been civilizations.  Sometimes, they lived openly, but usually, they lived secretly, fearful that the secrets that gave them power could fall into the wrong hands.  Single organizations have not dominated over long periods of time.  Mages are just too hard to control and too individual in outlook to create very stable political organizations and organizations of mages tend not to last for long.  History is littered with secret societies, cabals and covens who snatch glorious power only to lose it again and be destroyed.  For instance, while Hermticism has played a tremendous role in European magic in the last thousand years or so, European Hermetics have never been united under a single leader and have regularly gone to war with one another. There are two usual ways for a magical group to die. The first is defeat in mage war. Extermination of one faction by another has simply been a fact of mage history. The second is magical disaster resulting from magical research. The disaster might target all mages of that group directly, or might just bring the group into such disrepute that it dissipates or goes underground.  In the modern world, the only thing that mages in general seem to agree on is that the existence of magic must be kept secret from “mortal” society for fear of magical proliferation. The mages have a big advantage in life and they don't intend to lose it.

A lot of mage groups think that they know it the true nature of reality, or at least have a uniquely correct insight into it, but the different traditions cannot agree on what it is.  Many mages spend their entire lives in search of the Truth.  Spirits exist corresponding to the cosmology of each magical group. Whether these spirits were created by the mages' spells of summoning or existed already is a matter of much disagreement, as is the question of whether these spirits visit in their natural forms or disguise themselves to meet the mage's expectations.  There is solid evidence that very powerful beings exist but whether they are gods or not is a matter of perspective. Exactly what the nature of the universe's most powerful beings is is a hotly debated topic among mages.  There are known to be a vast number of other planes, possibly an infinite number.