I would like to sell my soul in exchange for dominion over the Earth!
"Sorry dude... not with that soul.
Best I can do is assistant manager at the Arby's down the street. I'll even throw in some heroin, you're gonna need it."
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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A doll's house and a goat isn't far off, keep it up
This is such a pet peeve of mine.
Why are anglo writers obsessed with using latin as some ancient, mystical language? Why would Latin be tied to magic in any way? Do they realize that Latin was spoken all through Europe for millenia and its vulgar form evolved into tons of current languages? Or that people were using latin in churches, courtrooms and universtities all the way up to the 20th century? Latin was an optional in my high school. I took two years.
If random Latin words could do magic all of Europe would have been constantly exploding. Newspapers would be covering the latest magic volcano to pop up in Southern France. World War II movies would include accidental summonings.
Also, for us romance language speakers it sounds vaguely understandable, so the weird things they use for spells sound goofy as hell. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than using fake Latin-sounding made up stuff as in Harry Potter.
Latin was the lingua franca for the educated western world for centuries. Texts on alchemy, mysticism, and religion were all written in Latin. Church rituals were performed in Latin.
Most magic in fiction has its roots in the past. What language would be more fitting?
Aramaic
Definitely a better pick, if you're just gonna piggiback on a language. Still raises a ton of questions, though.
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It sounds cool.
Now that is an acceptable answer.
If you don't speak Latin, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese or French.
Because if you do it mostly sounds like either Sunday mass or an English tourist trying to order a drink by reading from a guidebook.
Nobody speaks any of those languages. They just pretend to when the germanics are around so we think the roman empire is still strong.
Okay, well, if you're just gonna tell everybody we have to cut you out of the mailing list now.
Well that's just the thing though. People (allegedly) used to do loads of magic, now they dont. Makes sense the spells and rituals would be in the language of the time.
Also lots of the books and grimoires we still have access to are in Latin or translated from Latin. So there's a connection there too.
Wait, are these last couple of comments supposed to be in-universe or in real life? Because it's confusing either way.
Fuck you.
Love,
Black Phillip
haha
I mean... we've just met, buy me a drink first?
Genuinely don't know where this is coming from.
Oh, hey, I Googled it. It's a goat thing. Still don't get it because I haven't seen the thing. But yeah, okay. Goat.
Alastair Crowley? Gardener? Eta: The Catholic Church?
Weren't both of those people English?
Do English people think the Catholic Church is magic? I know they sometimes wear dresses, but their hats are round, not pointy. Completely different thing.
And yeah, they say they are turning wafers into human flesh, but I've had the wafers and trust me, they don't taste like chicken at all.
The perception may come from old writings for medical tinctures and the like including the instruction to "say three Hail Marys". This wasnt a magic incantation; it was a way to measure time for people who did not have watches.
A few years ago I heard about some folks who found a very ancient recipe to cure MRSA. The strain evolved away from being affected by that recipe in the past and it was abandoned, but this much later that recipe worked on modern strains. Included were the instructions to say five(?) Hail Marys, which translated to "wait five minutes".
My grandma was a matron and used tricks like those when I was a kid.
You guys keep giving me anecdotes about how the anglosphere mistook common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells as a response to my post about how the anglosphere mistakes common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells.
I get how it would have become fancy-sounding shorthand to them, I'm saying that using it as pop-culture shorthand for mysticism feels ethnocentric and silly to me.
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I think this is an interesting topic
This comment from an old Reddit post seems to contain some knowledge, imo
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/1SHtAFS093
As noted in that comment, in reading Goethe’s Faust I remember distinctly that line, ERITUS SICUT DEUS, SCIENTES BONUM ET MALUM.
Something about its oldness, religiosity and simplicity make it magical to me
Sure. I guess what I'm saying is that perception is fundamentally anglocentric.
Obviously, by being retained as a liturgical language romance language speakers associate it as much to demonology as they do to... you know, your cousin getting married or a nerdy college student having obnoxious debates at the pub.
I'm also saying that it sounds dumb to me. Just culturally it immediately flags somebody copying their homework or resorting to things that sound fancy to them when they're not.
In many cases you don't need an obscure language to do magic. Latin is merely the language in which the sorcery books were written. And they were written because it was the language of the scholars, which magic practitioners pretended to be.
Actually, Europe wouldn’t have stopped exploding to this very day.
It would have gone from constant explosions every day with particularly intense bouts of Sunday explosions to a school or university exploding every couple of weeks.
The Vatican would be a smoldering crater basically all the time, though.
This is such a pet peeve of mine.
It's not a peeve, it's a goat.
harry potter in today's world: "electro petroleum!"
Maybe the revival in a few centuries will try to do the same with English-sounding fake words because in the future they sound magical, too.
"Flyare alting!"
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You get free goats when you study latin? Why didn't I know this?!?
But my friend often said he dont has a goat on his latin lesson. (Unfortunately this Joke only makes Sense in German, but ill leave it here anyway)
Live large! Say it in German! We don't mind!
Ne, ich hab kein Bock!
(For anyone curious: This literally translates to "No, i dont have a goat" but is a usual phrase for "I dont want to")
Romanes eunt domus
People called 'Romanes' they go the house?
Domus? Nominative?
SATANAS DIABOLICA
"oh, shit" 😐
Don’t say Cardi B’s real name out loud unless you want to meet Black Phillip.
I prefer Pig Latin for all the pork
So this is a you summoned a demon reference but instead it's just a plain old goat, right?
Not some linguistic thing where a lot of Latin has Baaaa~?
Yeah, but I'm failing to see the difference between a goat and a demon.
I can eat and milk a goat...
I'd be hesitant on doing either to a demon... unless we're talking certain anime here...
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