Hydromancy

Hydromancy is essentially rejecting reality and substituting your own reality via pure willpower- notably, however, a Hydromancer exerts power via manipulation of the self. The magic has been compared to the philosophy of solipsism, in which only the self can be known to be real.

Hydromancy is typically viewed as the 'flexible but weak' school of magic, as it can accomplish a wide variety of things with a high degree of precision but it is reliant on limited pool of personal willpower. Common Hydromantic abilities are messing with minds and enhancing one's body.

Mikelle McDowell is primarily a Hydromancer, and has learned not only a wide range of Hydromancy spells but also rituals to restore willpower or perform esoteric tasks.

## Cadwell Lectures

“The Greeks in Antiquity describe four major movements in the art form of Hydromancy: Strengthening, Honing, Inebriating, and Asserting the Truth. All magic born of Willpower was said to be simple variations and combinations of these four cardinal directions. Though this description of Hydromancy fell out of favor even by the time of Alexander the Great, its influences were long reaching in the Western magical tradition. Illusions, most notably, despite their strong association with Hydromancy in modern traditions were considered impossible or impractical to accomplish via personal willpower, and instead as a part of the Aeromantic School, or as an example of Geomancy of an Element such as Haze or Mist, as famously popularized by Alika of Thrace. It was only the result of Phobos II’s War of Terror against the Thaumaturgical League and the revelation of his near sole usage of Illusion magic that Hydromantic Illusions gained wide acceptance in the West. In a modern classification system, Illusions are derived into two, mutually exclusive subcategories, which, in common parlance, are known as Source and Destination illusions. Other common terms for the same division include: Mirage/Hallucination, Noninvasive/Invasive, External/Internal, Greater/Lesser, and Vapid/Pure, though there is an increasing tendency towards standardization at this time. Source illusions have no target and are perceptible by all, while Destination illusions modify an individual subject’s perceptions directly. From a scientific perspective, they are akin to convergent evolution, in that, other than the purpose to deceive, they are completely unrelated in methodology. Some texts also describe a third category of illusion with various designations such as Extant, Substantial, or Perfect, or, for those with more historical consideration to its origins, Śūnyatā, or Empty. This third, contentious category is reserved for illusions upon the nature of reality, through the more modern method of asserting the absolute existence of the willpower construct upon reality, or, originally, through dismissing selected perceptions of reality as illusion. Extant illusions predate Hydromantic Source and Destination illusions by at least eight centuries, and are most famously associated with Nagarjuna, who is credited with possibly discovering the method and whose work from circa 200 CE are still definitive on the subject. More recent strides in...”

"…as of today three proposed solutions have been presented for the Reimer Paradox. The first, and longest standing was proposed by Reimer herself two years after the original publication. Her proposal involved the presence of an 'anti-mind,' as it has been crudely termed, that served as an external force acting against the desires of the individual. Further study has shown trends that suggest the existence of the phenomena as an explanation, but no concrete evidence has arisen. Foznel rejected Reimer's resolution and postulated his own solution to her paradox, that the mere study of the system alters the data retroactively. Foznel described an 'observation reaction' effect that would explain the contradiction in data. Study on the proposal is impossible by definition, making it an unpopular theory. The third resolution was a more recent effort by the current Vice Director of Hydromancy, rejecting both Reimer's 'anti-mind' and Foznel's 'unobservable phenomenon.' Kroll's proposed resolution attacked one of the suppositions of Reimer's arguments…"

"–proving that the self indeed was a naturally growing substance. A Doctor Mei Qing devoted her life towards studying the expansion of self, eventually devising a formula to force the development. The formula proved too successful, and her test subject's soliptical perception expended exponentially, consuming all in its wake and devolving into a tumorous, cannibalistic orgy of over-inclusive, untempered mentality. The Thaumaturgical League's response was swift, and the area was cleansed before apocalypse could occur. Further experiments into Doctor Qing's notes were met with similar failure, but better containment procedures. Doctor Qing's professional rival, one Shi Huang, worked from a psycho-behavioral angle, as opposed to Qing's thauma-chemical. Mr. Huang's developments continued past his rival's demise, demonstrating that active use of physical, mental, and magical prowess can increase willpower stores. Sickness and abuse can likewise diminish it. Huang's work was stolen before publication by Andreas Persopoulos, his relay to the Europe-based League. Persopoulos refined the work, but failed to account–"

"–Crastor, in retribution, ordered the execution of every decedent of his rival's ancient experimental line. It was estimated that at least five hundred where killed in the genocide, spelling an end to the Egophage subspecies which had lasted for thirty generations of well documented breeding. As the process for their original creation was lost, Crastor's revenge could be considered successful, as the Millow family was unable to revive their business. Without Egophages to provide efficient willpower recycling, research into rapid expenditure of self faltered, as well as many other high energy hydromancy studies. Attempts were made to recreate the modified humans, all of which failed until six years ago when a strain was successfully cultivated in an African village. However, eighty-seven years without a reliable and efficient source of constant willpower flow led to a greater focus on personal scale energies. It also, unfortunately, coincided with the discoveries of quantum physics, delaying magical theory in the same area by an estimated two decades. Crastor himself sought to replace the niche he eliminated through use of electrical–"

"…according to the Ashbrun theory of sociopolitical relativity. It was since disproven through the experiments of Monverily, through use of a simulated civilization and a chosen external pressure of an abnormally large hurricane, where in it was found that despite the tight grouping of the simulated social strata, the general cohesion of cumulative waste willpower actually decreased with the increase of pressure. Monverily's contribution was initially ignored, the simulation dismissed as inaccurate in favor of Ashbrun's well accepted theory, but repeated experimentation found that same result, simulated or otherwise. A correction was made to the theory to account for its break down among large enough groups and large enough stimuli, and the cause was attributed to what has been termed the Friendly Anticooperation Effect.

"The Friendly Anticooperation Effect in conjunction with Kawahito's discoveries a decade earlier, stuck a fatal blow to the last holdouts of the Collective Man Hypothesis. Some in the modern age have attempted to device the Hypothesis to allow for the observations made, but they are a small minority among the scientific community. Similar efforts were made to dismiss the Gaian Shadow Hypothesis, but they were unsuccessful, owing partially to the unfallsifiable nature of the Hypothesis, which still maintains a moderate support among…"

"–prompting the resurgence of the Ethical Board, which proposed and failed to enact seventeen amendments for the Thaumaturgical Leagues charter. Despite being a political failure, the newest incarnation of the Ethical Board successfully made its mark by assassinating scores of League Scientists that were deemed immoral. Among the victims were Doctors Patrick and Calvern, the leading experts in mental defense against intrusion, in the process destroying years of doubtlessly revolutionary work. Needless to say, the Board eventually overstepped their bounds by murdering a connected individual, and all involved parties were terminated. The work lost to their culling is numerous, the true extent not discovered until six years later when one Professor Asmod, the inheritor to Calvern's estate through marriage, returned from his extra dimensional sojourn. The succeeding years focused on recovering the lost work, to the detriment of novelty, a short period known as–"

“Evidence has shown that Hydromancy emerged as a force in prehistory, coinciding with the development of language. The precise dating of the origin is limited to speculation, as is the nature of it's original manifestation. Contemporary scholars theorize that this proto-magic was limited to the unconscious rejuvenation of the body as well as temporary, reactive boosts in prowess similar to an infusion of adrenaline. Nonetheless, it is known that a more nuanced and conscious expression of Hydromancy existed by the time of the first human civilizations. The earliest forms of writing make indirect reference to the art, and it is known that ancient Sumer practiced all three branches of magic. The specifics of their tradition is lost to us, as their methodology was never properly recorded. The oldest surviving treatise on Hydromancy comes from ancient China, where its discovery is attributed to the mythical Yellow Emperor. Study of the documentation has proven that there has been no significant change in the magic's fundamental underlying mechanics since that time, nor in a human's ability to manipulate it, though the particulars, philosophical mindsets, and ultimate expressions have all changed with the various cultures that developed it. Near every culture understood the nature of the power as one arriving from or through the self, and the dangers of overuse in the form of what is now referred to as 'Willpower Death,' a concept that is also known as 'Unmaking,' 'Magic Collapse,' 'Hollow Rot,' and a myriad of other titles owing to the widespread usage over location and history. The accepted modern definition traces back to the ancient Greek philosopher, Empedocles, whose concept was tinkered with over the next one hundred years by others. Aristotle, as a part of his many other works, refined Empedocles' theory to a standard that would be accepted as fact through Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for the next millennium. Criticism and revision of the numerous errors in Aristotle's treatises on magic wouldn't occur until the Abbasid Caliphate, but the corrections would fail to spread to Europe for...”

“The energy to power Hydromancy is referred to primarily as Willpower, and has historically also been known as Mental Energy, Soul Energy, Aetheric Fluid, Essence of Life, Force of Personality, Distilled Spirit, and many others. Efforts to measure and quantify Willpower go back to the alchemists of Medieval Europe, to little success. Ancient Egyptian writings are known to refer to units of Willpower as 'Heqat,' most notably in the 'Recipes of Userkaf.' However, by the time of Ptolemaic Period, the concept had died out entirely. Efforts in the mid nineteenth century attempted to fit Willpower to the international system of measurements. The Destille was defined to be the amount of Willpower it takes to accelerate a one kilogram object of imaginative complexity one to a speed of one meter per second over the distance of a meter. Efforts were stymied by inconsistent measurement and the ultimate disproval of imaginative complexity as a discrete uniform product. It was later proven that the measurement of the absolute willpower of another individual is a necessarily inconsistent process, unknowable to any degree of certainty by any individual with their own pool of willpower. Efforts have shifted instead to categorizing relative levels of Willpower of external sources, and absolute measurements of ones own Willpower through meditative processes. For similar reasons, the quest for the least amount of Willpower necessary for a living being to function has been abandoned, as in the year 1902, Dr. Francis Albrecht experimentally proved that for any Willpower possessing organism, it is possible to cleave it into two separate living organisms with less than halved Willpower in comparison to their progenitor. Back in the 1960's, efforts for quantifiable Willpower were resumed, through a methodology of forcefully altering the local logical reality to allow for the knowledge to consistently exist. While experiments were successful, it has since been proven that it is impossible to both know the absolute quantity of another's Willpower in violated dimension space as well as know the relation between the violated dimension space and existing reality to any degree of precision, thus maintaining the fundamental inconsistency of knowledge. Further efforts to forcefully alter causality of the Gaian locality were halted, and the experimenters executed. The general consensus at the time of...”

“Hydromancy is a well-defined, well-studied science, consisting of hundreds of years of observation and theory in a continual process of peer-review and expansion. Common systems of experimentation and theory have independently and co-dependently developed, based on various models which pertain to certain aspects or sets of aspects of the greater magic as they relate to the so-called physical world. The models themselves are accurate in what they predict, contradictory in what they assume, and have well-defined failure points where the approximation no longer accurately represents general observation. The so-called 'Absolute Model,' which perfectly describes Hydromancy in all cases, is a current work in development, and has been for the last eighty years or so. It is also generally considered impractical for use and overly complicated for analysis, especially considering that, within their limitations the 'limited models' can more succinctly, and nearly as accurately describe the effects. There are between fourteen and seventeen consistent frameworks, or coordinate systems as they are sometimes called, also known as frames of reference, or metaphysical truths. The first, and generally most simple is the Absolute Solipsistic framework, based on the assumption that the Hydromancer is the solitary resident of a purely mental universe. This framework describes a great deal of Hydromantic theory, but completely fails to properly explain the interactions between two opposing Hydromancers, as well as anything to do with Aeromancy. An offshoot of the Absolute Solipsistic framework, championed by Zacharie Beaumanoir the head of the Committee for the Development of Hydromantic Theory and its Practical Application of the Geomancy Division in the year 1803, known as Relative Solipsism, emerged as a direct consequence of these failures. Relative Solipsism allowed for near accurate description of the interaction between opposing Hydromancers as well as cooperating practitioners, but loses the ability to explain how Hydromancy interacts with the physical world and struggles to explain Aeromancy. A third framework, Anatta Hydromancy, developed in colonized India, has its roots stretching far earlier than the Solipsistic frameworks, but did not fully coalesce as mathematical theorem until far later. This coordinate system is organized around an axiom denying the existence of self, and, while it fails to describe Hydromancy in it of itself, it has been found particularly useful in describing interactions between the magics in a readily applicable manner. Collective Will framework, which emerged in the late 18th early 19th century, was developed as a means to describe interactions between large numbers of practitioners and the macro-systems of Hydromancy without care for specific manifestation. It was found to be useful in its niche, but in general an impractical model, owing to its general simplicity. Three separate models developed in an attempt to synthesize the Solipsistic frameworks with the Collective Will framework, namely the Queen-Worker Model, the Infinity Mirror Model, and the Atemporal, or Simultaneous Reincarnation Model. Separate work has been done to define Hydromancy in the terms of Geomancy, to which the Gaia-Hive and Gaia-Mind Models owe their existence, and in Aeromancy, which birthed the Conceptual Idealism Model, the Universal Model, and the Absurd Model. In an effort to document frameworks and allow conversion of theories and treatises of one framework to a usable form for another, the Meta-Hydromancy Model was developed, though it has been necessarily proven to be inconsistent. The full Absolute Model is able to handle the inconsistency, which is the source of the vast majority of its complexity. Models based on...”

“Since the dawn of Hydromancy, its absolute connection with the mind was well established. Fringe heterodox groups which deny the universality of this association did, and continue to, exist, but they have never achieved a significant following to date. But, while ascribing a mental basis to Hydromancy is and was the norm across time and culture, the definition of, and knowledge regarding, the mind was not. Nor were attitudes towards the conditioning of such, especially in regards to the development of one's Hydromancy. Several competing schools of thought arose, of contradictory nature. The earliest formalized of such was the Virtue School, based on the teachings of Aristotle. The school of thought maintained that one's Hydromantic abilities are a natural consequent of acquiring virtuous habits and otherwise honing the rational mind. In the time of the Roman Empire, this was the dominant school of thought, but by the time of the Thaumaturgical League it had fallen out of favor. Modern Hydromancers rarely subscribe to Virtue Theory, but the influence of the philosophy is still felt. The traditional opponent to the Virtue School, from the time of antiquity was the school of Hedonism, which maintains that the proper development of one's mind arises from indulging in each and every unrestrained impulse, under the assumption that the natural proclivities of the mind are what is best for the mind. There is ample evidence that the tenants of this school are the oldest, going back to prehistory, but a formalized system and rational justification did not come into being until sometime after Aristotle. Hedonism, as a philosophy for mental development, became dominant with the founding of the Thaumaturgical League under the strong championship of the Hydromancy Division's head. The fall of the division brought with it a fall in popularity, as well as a general stigma which persists to this day. As a direct consequence, the Ascetic school of thought emerged, which was founded on dogmatically denying any and all impulses and requiring deliberate consideration before each and every action. This reactionary school has superficial similarities to some of the Hydromantic philosophies from South and East Asia, but it is ultimately unrelated. The nineteenth century, as a part of the New Age of Hydromancy, introduced the Habitual School, which purported that it is the act of consistent, near ritualized, repetition that serves as the base of Hydromantic Development, the specific nature of such being irrelevant. Only perfect consistency in thoughts in action were considered relevant. This School proved effective, but was considered to have too many necessary side effects on the developing minds for it to be adopted by the majority of practitioners. More recently, with the reemergence of the Hydromancy Branch and the advent of the Vice Director, emphasis has been placed upon the cultivation of perfect self-knowledge and self-control. This should not be confused with the Ascetic School, as no recommendation is placed on the actions, only the perception of such, though a culture of shunning physical pleasure in favor of intellectual pursuit has grown despite no specific doctrine of such, in following the lines of the Vice Director. Specific research on the tangible returns of the various schools have shown conclusive data pointing towards...”

“While Hydromancy is associated with the mind primarily, there is a great association with all other parts of the self, including the body to a great degree. The link between Hydromancy and the Body goes back through history, especially, considering that, at some points in some cultures, the distinction between Mind and Body was not clear. Eastern traditions often paired Hydromancy with Martial Arts, and willpower cultivation with traditional chi cultivation exercises in pursuit of more effective magic. Classical Greece and Rome similarly had an emphasis of Bodily exercise, to be coupled with the Mental, for daily life and in pursuit of magic. Practitioners were often wrestlers or athletes of other forms, and they were known to make use of magic in competition as a form of rising past the natural human peak of exertion. The Panhellenic games included a general expectation of magic use in many of the events, though there is evidence that there was some sort of distinction between which sorts of magic were legal and which constituted cheating, as seen by some ancient records of disqualification relating to unfair magic use. The exact nature of this distinction is lost to us, as are most records of magic from the Classical period, which is attributed to the Lethe Effect. Herophilos was known to have studied the effects of willpower on the body as part of his general studies of medicine, but any specifics of his magical research were lost, as with the rest of his mundane research. Modern studies have been made to great success, most notably by Franz Degn in the early 17th century, who attempted to quantify the general effects of Willpower on healing laceration and burns. His son and pupil, Hubert Degn, would expand upon his father's work and made detailed measurements of the physical properties of human skin and muscles with various levels of Willpower. Both Degn's were part of a broader philosophical movement aimed at defining magic to be material change in a purely physical world. The competing philosophy of its time, which aimed to define magic as a mental phenomena in a dualistic world, would not produce similar, empirical efforts focused on the human body unto 1703 when Pierre Robiquet proved the mental existence of magic to his own satisfaction when his hypnotized subject grew back her damaged skin in a different color. Replications and expansions of Robiquet's study have proven successful, showing that every organ in the human body may have its properties altered by Hydromanctic self-regeneration, allowing for an entirely different body to emerge, up to and including changed DNA. Similar efforts have succeeded in permanently regenerating an individual into another species, included fantastical creatures with no known real examples, and into inanimate objects. As a result of these, and other experiments lead to the now defunct Coxon Hypothesis of 1957, which stated that healing through Hydromancy is impossible, and that all examples of such are a form of transformation towards a more ideal state. Rosencratz successfully disproved this notion in 1989, by demonstrating a newly invented technique to accomplish such. The general use of willpower for improvement of the human body, however, is generally accepted to be based on the temporary usurpation of one's physical form with a mental representation of such, bleeding greater capabilities into the material world by whit of the fact that improvements in an imaginary plane require less energy and effort than corresponding improvements in the physical world. Similarly, this process can be applied to actions and movements originated by the Practitioner, to improve them, in a nonspecific, indeterminate manner for a more ideal result. Energy consumed in the process is used to force the changes in the physical world, in a process known as 'smoothing' or 'coaxing'. Natural tendencies towards least resistance allow this to be an efficient, if limited process without conscious direction, though specific manipulation rather than general allows for more potent effect from similar exertion, for example, the difference between 'make the projectile travel further' and 'make the projectile more aerodynamic' would be measurable for similar expenditures of willpower, though...

*“The energy to power Hydromancy is referred to primarily as Willpower, and has historically also been known as Mental Energy, Soul Energy, Aetheric Fluid, Essence of Life, Force of Personality, Distilled Spirit, and many others. Efforts to measure and quantify willpower go back to the alchemists of Medieval Europe, to little success. Ancient Egyptian writings are known to refer to units of willpower as 'Heqat,' most notably in the 'Recipes of Userkaf.' However, by the time of Ptolemaic Period, the concept had died out entirely. Efforts in the mid nineteenth century attempted to fit willpower to the international system of measurements. The Destille was defined to be the amount of willpower it takes to accelerate a one kilogram object of imaginative complexity one to a speed of one meter per second over the distance of a meter. Efforts were stymied by inconsistent measurement and the ultimate disproval of imaginative complexity as a discrete uniform product. It was later proven that the measurement of the absolute willpower of another individual is a necessarily inconsistent process, unknowable to any degree of certainty by any individual with their own pool of willpower. Efforts have shifted instead to categorizing relative levels of willpower of external sources, and absolute measurements of ones own willpower through meditative processes. For similar reasons, the quest for the least amount of willpower necessary for a living being to function has been abandoned, as in the year 1902, Dr. Francis Albrecht experimentally proved that for any willpower possessing organism, it is possible to cleave it into two separate living organisms with less than halved willpower in comparison to their progenitor. Back in the 1960's, efforts for quantifiable willpower were resumed, through a methodology of forcefully altering the local logical reality to allow for the knowledge to consistently exist. While experiments were successful, it has since been proven that it is impossible to both know the absolute quantity of another's willpower in violated dimension space as well as know the relation between the violated dimension space and existing reality to any degree of precision, thus maintaining the fundamental inconsistency of knowledge. Further efforts to forcefully alter causality of the Gaian locality were halted, and the experimenters executed. The general consensus at the time of...”*

## References

1. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-year-two.6716/page-119#post-1779621
2. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-26#post-1561315
3. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-46#post-118274
4. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-50#post-118393
5. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-168#post-252238
6. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-246#post-463531
7. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-246#post-463531
8. ↑ https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/polyhistor-academy-original-setting-survival-quest.614/page-100#post-119875
9. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-3#post-1236985
10. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-5#post-1241540
11. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-7#post-1246384
12. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-12#post-1262103
13. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-16#post-1284748
14. ↑ https://questionablequesting.com/threads/kroll-academy-vn-preview.5591/page-19#post-1363464