Age of Magic
I feel as if there used to be an age of magic. Maybe there's been tons of them over time, with the knowledge growing and fading over and over as generations grew up and died, as tribes and kingdoms rose and fell, and as different things became more and less useful.
People compete with other groups of people all the time, sometimes erasing parts of their culture in the process. In some cases, a group would come in and burn everything they could find, reducing your years of knowledge to a simple pile of ash.
As books were burnt and people were killed or cast out, how much was lost? Enough to end an age of magic? I think it's possible, and I think there's no reason this couldn't have happened over and over throughout history, though perhaps it's not much history wise if everything was burned and kept away.
If it can all be taken away, or just enough to end an age of magic, what's enough to start an age of magic? Does it just take time and people trying? Do people find old grimoires that got missed in the burns and use the spells hidden inside? I have no idea, but I'd like to find out.
I want to go far beyond what I can do right now, and I want to enter a more physical realm with magic. I also wonder if I could play some part in starting a new age of magic, to bring it to more people. I have little idea how I could actually manage this, but I've come up with an idea that may help me at least a small amount.
I am going to find and read an old grimoire if I can find one, and I'll see if it can at least point me in the right direction. The annoying thing about trying to find a good one is that I almost certainly can't look online. Someone with a far more refined intuition than mine would likely find them first, and even if they were slow to buy them, I have no idea how I'd go about looking for one that isn't already properly labeled, and if it's properly labeled then someone else is likely to have snatched it up rather quickly because it was an easier find.
I tried looking on Ebay for a while yesterday, but that didn't give me much in the way of good results. Tons of AI slop, random anime women with minimal clothing (this is partly on me because I hoped looking in all categories would help), and self-help books with "grimoire" in the name for some reason, all getting in the way of finding the few that might be good. Even the ones that seemed like they might be good still weren't quite there.
A good grimoire isn't likely to have been published, and it wouldn't have flashy cover art meant to attract readers, and it certainly wouldn't have anything AI generated. Depending on how far back you need to go to find a good grimoire, it's possible I wouldn't even be able to read one, which sucks.
My hope is that I'll go to an estate sale and find a suspicious stack of notes for sale, or something like that, and it'll turn out to be a real grimoire from somebody who's got some spells they wanted to pass down, but for whatever reason the next generation who would have taken it when the writer died decided it wasn't worth it to them and wanted to sell it.
My odds of finding a grimoire like this are very very slim I would assume, but I've got no other ideas so I guess I have to go with it. If I want to learn more physical magic in a short amount of time, I don't have a better option unless somebody who wants to teach me appears. I certainly won't be helping bring about an age of magic without something to speed me along. Spending my whole life learning just to have some mild tips when I die isn't what brings about revolutionary change. I guess teaching people how to kill curses could be useful, but it's not enough for my ambitious taste.
I'm not sure how to end this post, but I guess I can give you an easy opportunity to add to this all. If you have insights or general information on this, or even just want to chat, I invite you to comment here, or email me, or use Discord if that happens to be your fancy. I feel like I used to know but have since forgotten how to make an email link, so I'll just link the contact info page here.