Luccio's perspective compared to Harry's

[KurtinStGeorge]

After reading the latest short story featuring Luccio in Dodge City (A Fistful of Warlocks), I started thinking about Anastasia Luccio and other White Council members personal perspectives versus that of Harry's.  So Anastasia was born in the late 18th or early 19th Century.  Let's say she joins the White Council around 1830 or a little before that.  After a few years she is introduced to older members of Council, perhaps even a Senior Council member or two.  Consider that with the possible exception of Ancient Mai, every other SC member is from an older generation than the members we see today. 

Now stop and think about your own life and stories you heard as a child from either your grandparents or other relatives who where older than your mother or father or maybe even from a next door neighbor who was around the same age as your grandparents.  Think particularly about those stories about what life was like when they were children.  So the living memory of other people you have been exposed to may go back sixty or seventy years before you were born, occasionally more if you had any particularly long lived family members who told you a story or two that really impressed you.  I'll give you an example from my life.  When I was a child; maybe eight or nine, my family went to a wedding in New Mexico, I think near Silver City.  I grew up near Los Angeles, CA so this was something unusual.  Before the wedding my mother met with some of her cousins.  One of them showed my mother an photo album with pictures of people, none of whom I knew, though my mom recognized several.  There was one very old picture; think Teddy Roosevelt era, of a young man that my mom asked about.  I think the only reason she asked was because the photo was so old.  Her cousin identified this man as a great uncle on her father's side, someone she had never met, but a person her grandfather had talked about a great deal.  He had been a soldier during the First World War and had died in his mid to late 20's, during the 1920's, but it had been the war that had killed him.  She told us that he had been a victim of a poison gas attack and he never really recovered from it, it slowly destroyed his lungs over time.  It was a horrifying story and the person who told it hadn't actually witnessed it, but the story her grandfather told her made an impression on her and later on me.  That's one small example of living memory being passed down from one generation to another, actually several generations.

Think about the people Anastasia met when she became a Warden or even earlier than that.  Some of the older European Council members she met not only had lived during the time of witch burnings in Europe, they may have witnessed someone being burned at the stake. (The Witchcraft Act of 1735 in Great Britain made in illegal to claim someone had magical powers or was a witch.  Though witch hunts continued sporadically for sometime after that in other places.)  It's one thing to read about something like this in a book, now imagine having a friend, colleague or family member who could describe to you the crowd of onlookers, the executioner and the victim or victims.  Then imagine this living witness telling you about the sound of the crowd made and the crackling of the fire, the screams of the victim(s), the smell of burning flesh and the feeling of pure fear that you could be next.

Harry has an academic appreciation that wizards were once burned as witches.  Luccio, Ebenezer, Arthur Langtry and other older members of the White Council didn't experience this directly, but they knew people who did.  I think this explains; at least partially, why Council members are disturbed by Harry's openness to openly proclaim himself a wizard; and some of his other more flippant behavior, even if most of society thinks that he is a crackpot.     

 

[Snark Knight]

I doubt very many Council members were victims of burning at the stake, given the difficulty a mob would have catching someone who can ward their home, veil, and retreat to the Nevernever if cornered. The mobs probably mostly got random wrongfully accused vanillas or innocent small-timers, with a scattering of genuinely malignant sorcerers and warlocks.

But yeah, a lot of their defense probably also did rely on concealing what they were (and, as Harry mentioned at one point, propagating myths that magicians needed elaborate props like crystal balls, so, hey, obviously we aren't magicians, right?) rather than, say, advertising in the Yellow Pages. And if, as several of us were discussing recently on another thread, some of the unsolved assassination attempts on him have been the Librarians probing how hard it would be to kill a wizard after Harry outed himself as a testable specimen, the orthodox Council view on discretion might still have its merits.

[groinkick]

I doubt very many Council members were victims of burning at the stake, given the difficulty a mob would have catching someone who can ward their home, veil, and retreat to the Nevernever if cornered. The mobs probably mostly got random wrongfully accused vanillas or innocent small-timers, with a scattering of genuinely malignant sorcerers and warlocks.

Unless a member, or members of the vampire courts (or anyone in the supernatural community), or warlocks aided, and tricked vanilla mortals in taking down White Council members.  I find that kind of scenario very likely.  Using mortal pawns as weapons against the White Council. 

[Zaphodess]

Yeah, wasn't it said in the books somewhere that the wizard who enchanted Bob's skull in the Middle Ages was burned at the stake. So they did get a real wizard occasionally.

I suppose plenty of below WC level practitioners were also caught. As magic is supposed to be passed down family lines, most often through the mother's side, there could still be wizards on the Council who might have witnessed their mother being burned as a child. The last witch burnings in Europe happened in the 18th century.

[Quantus]

I doubt very many Council members were victims of burning at the stake, given the difficulty a mob would have catching someone who can ward their home, veil, and retreat to the Nevernever if cornered. The mobs probably mostly got random wrongfully accused vanillas or innocent small-timers, with a scattering of genuinely malignant sorcerers and warlocks.

But yeah, a lot of their defense probably also did rely on concealing what they were (and, as Harry mentioned at one point, propagating myths that magicians needed elaborate props like crystal balls, so, hey, obviously we aren't magicians, right?) rather than, say, advertising in the Yellow Pages. And if, as several of us were discussing recently on another thread, some of the unsolved assassination attempts on him have been the Librarians probing how hard it would be to kill a wizard after Harry outed himself as a testable specimen, the orthodox Council view on discretion might still have its merits.

It's Long, but here is the WOJ that directly addresses the question of the Council v. the Inquisition. 

Please read it for yourself rather than taking my summaries/interpretations, but I think it's more or less saying that the Inquisition was to the Council what the Stokerocalype was to the Black Court: it made the Massive vanilla population both aware of and afraid of any sort of Magic, and Wizards of that day were insanely outnumbered...

Granted I dont see it often playing out with an arrest, a trial, followed by a bonfire in the Town Square, as that should certainly give the Wizard time to escape or at least call for help (unless somebody new enough to chain them up in the river or something).  But getting ambushed and beaten, then burned for good measure before they wake up?  Certainly. It's going to take a much smaller mob to take down your average Wizard than it would to take down a BC Elder, and that happened a great deal. 

[LordDresden2]

I doubt very many Council members were victims of burning at the stake, given the difficulty a mob would have catching someone who can ward their home, veil, and retreat to the Nevernever if cornered. The mobs probably mostly got random wrongfully accused vanillas or innocent small-timers, with a scattering of genuinely malignant sorcerers and warlocks.

Or more than a scattering.

When you consider the 'rules' of how the DV works, the more you consider it, the more likely it looks that a lot of the victims of the witch-burnings may have been guilty as charged of nasty actions.

As JB notes, a wizard-level talent might come along in a given country back in the day maybe once in 3 generations.  Bigger countries would have a few more possibles, smaller ones a few fewer.  But still pretty rare.

So you've got a small Council, slow communications, hard travel.  Most magical talents are therefore going to be either self-educated or taught by whoever local is available.  Further, for a person with modest powers, a lot of the most immediately useful things you can do with it, the stuff that would occur most naturally, takes you into black magic.

You're a poor farmer, barely making subsistence, illiterate, with a large family to feed.  You don't own your land, you just farm it, and your local lord, or later your local landowner, takes a bit chunk of the crop as payment for being allowed to use the land.  In some periods, it may well be literally illegal for you to leave you manor or land area.

(If you think I'm kidding, I'm not.)

But it just so happens that you can force your local landlord/noble to give you a break on your dues and fees and boon work, and even have him think it's his own idea.  All you have to do is change his mind...

Or you're a small villager, an apprentice of somebody, and bandits are raiding the town, stealing the meager prosperity, harassing the women, or worse, and you've never used a weapon in your life.  But it just so happens that you can kill someone by concentrating hard...

The thing is that there's going to be a nasty tendency for small practitioners to end up sliding into black magic, even starting from natural, perfectly understandable motivations.  Even if they don't know why they shouldn't do it, the effects still follow, and pretty soon you've got a warlock loose.

Add in the fact that not every practitioner starts with good intentions, and suddenly it becomes likely that a very significant percentage of them end up going to the bad.  Probably the majority of practitioners that people actually get much direct experience with were Trouble.

So it's a good bet that in the DV, a lot of the people executed for using magic to do various evil things...actually did those evil things.  Not nearly all, of course, but a significant percentage were probably guilty.

The Medieval and immediate post-Medieval era tended to see magic users as in league with the Devil...and you know what?  In the DV it's a good bet more than a few were!  Even Harry, in his younger, stupider days, consorted with Chaunzaggoroth.  One way for a minor practitioner to get more power, even with good intentions, is to find a 'reasonable, sympathetic' contact like Chaunzaggoroth to help them...bit by bit, compromise by compromise, they end up being what the mob thinks they are to start with.  Harry was not nearly as desperate as some of the people who would have been calling up such beings back in the day, and he still came close to getting ensnared.

But yeah, a lot of their defense probably also did rely on concealing what they were (and, as Harry mentioned at one point, propagating myths that magicians needed elaborate props like crystal balls, so, hey, obviously we aren't magicians, right?) rather than, say, advertising in the Yellow Pages. And if, as several of us were discussing recently on another thread, some of the unsolved assassination attempts on him have been the Librarians probing how hard it would be to kill a wizard after Harry outed himself as a testable specimen, the orthodox Council view on discretion might still have its merits.

It might well.  It's not by any means clear that Harry is in the right in his 'highly public' approach.  It's not clear that he's totally in the wrong, either.  It's too soon to tell.  But the fears of the older Wizards are by noi means unreasonable.

[LordDresden2]

Unless a member, or members of the vampire courts (or anyone in the supernatural community), or warlocks aided, and tricked vanilla mortals in taking down White Council members.  I find that kind of scenario very likely.  Using mortal pawns as weapons against the White Council.

Husbands, wives, parents, kids, sibings, friends.  There are lots of possible hostages.

Betrayal is an ancient method of taking down someone dangerous.  Food can be drugged, drinks poisoned.  Even a powerful Wizard can be 'kincaided' by someone armed with a crossbow and firing from concealment.  Your spouse/lover can slit your throat in your sleep.

Wizards are squishy humans, vulnerable to most of the same stuff everybody else has to worry about.

[LordDresden2]

After reading the latest short story featuring Luccio in Dodge City (A Fistful of Warlocks), I started thinking about Anastasia Luccio and other White Council members personal perspectives versus that of Harry's.  So Anastasia was born in the late 18th or early 19th Century.  Let's say she joins the White Council around 1830 or a little before that.  After a few years she is introduced to older members of Council, perhaps even a Senior Council member or two.  Consider that with the possible exception of Ancient Mai, every other SC member is from an older generation than the members we see today. 

Now stop and think about your own life and stories you heard as a child from either your grandparents or other relatives who where older than your mother or father or maybe even from a next door neighbor who was around the same age as your grandparents.  Think particularly about those stories about what life was like when they were children.  So the living memory of other people you have been exposed to may go back sixty or seventy years before you were born, occasionally more if you had any particularly long lived family members who told you a story or two that really impressed you.  I'll give you an example from my life.  When I was a child; maybe eight or nine, my family went to a wedding in New Mexico, I think near Silver City.  I grew up near Los Angeles, CA so this was something unusual.  Before the wedding my mother met with some of her cousins.  One of them showed my mother an photo album with pictures of people, none of whom I knew, though my mom recognized several.  There was one very old picture; think Teddy Roosevelt era, of a young man that my mom asked about.  I think the only reason she asked was because the photo was so old.  Her cousin identified this man as a great uncle on her father's side, someone she had never met, but a person her grandfather had talked about a great deal.  He had been a soldier during the First World War and had died in his mid to late 20's, during the 1920's, but it had been the war that had killed him.  She told us that he had been a victim of a poison gas attack and he never really recovered from it, it slowly destroyed his lungs over time.  It was a horrifying story and the person who told it hadn't actually witnessed it, but the story her grandfather told her made an impression on her and later on me.  That's one small example of living memory being passed down from one generation to another, actually several generations.

Think about the people Anastasia met when she became a Warden or even earlier than that.  Some of the older European Council members she met not only had lived during the time of witch burnings in Europe, they may have witnessed someone being burned at the stake. (The Witchcraft Act of 1735 in Great Britain made in illegal to claim someone had magical powers or was a witch.  Though witch hunts continued sporadically for sometime after that in other places.)  It's one thing to read about something like this in a book, now imagine having a friend, colleague or family member who could describe to you the crowd of onlookers, the executioner and the victim or victims.  Then imagine this living witness telling you about the sound of the crowd made and the crackling of the fire, the screams of the victim(s), the smell of burning flesh and the feeling of pure fear that you could be next.

Harry has an academic appreciation that wizards were once burned as witches.  Luccio, Ebenezer, Arthur Langtry and other older members of the White Council didn't experience this directly, but they knew people who did.  I think this explains; at least partially, why Council members are disturbed by Harry's openness to openly proclaim himself a wizard; and some of his other more flippant behavior, even if most of society thinks that he is a crackpot.   

This is something I've often pondered.  It's interesting to note that our two main 'long-lived heroes' in the DV are Harry and Thomas.  Harry could yet live for centuries, Thomas for millennia, at least in theory.  However, it so happens that both are young enough that in practice they share the same life-perspective as the rest of us, so far.

That's why Thomas was so horrified by LR's way of controlling his sisters, and wanted so badly to save Inari from it, for ex.  Whampire or not, Thomas is basically a guy who grew up in the last 20C and thinks like that.

Harry is effectively the same age, and thinks similarly about most things, though I've noticed of late that he's beginning to see why his elders do the things they do a little more clearly.  That happens to us all, but I suspect it hits Wizards harder with their longer spans.

[Rasins]

It's Long, but here is the WOJ that directly addresses the question of the Council v. the Inquisition. 

Please read it for yourself rather than taking my summaries/interpretations, but I think it's more or less saying that the Inquisition was to the Council what the Stokerocalype was to the Black Court: it made the Massive vanilla population both aware of and afraid of any sort of Magic, and Wizards of that day were insanely outnumbered...

Granted I dont see it often playing out with an arrest, a trial, followed by a bonfire in the Town Square, as that should certainly give the Wizard time to escape or at least call for help (unless somebody new enough to chain them up in the river or something).  But getting ambushed and beaten, then burned for good measure before they wake up?  Certainly. It's going to take a much smaller mob to take down your average Wizard than it would to take down a BC Elder, and that happened a great deal.

This is where I have a bone to pick with Mr. Butcher.

Which Inquisition?  There were several.

The one that gets the most press was the Spanish Inquisition.  But you have to remember that was only in Spain.  And it wasn't about witchcraft.  It was about converted Jews and Muslims who were thought to have been insincere in their conversion.

I know most folks believe there was a world-wide inquisition, but that just isn't the case.

There were witch burnings all over the place, but they took place over 1000 years, or longer.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

[LordDresden2]

This is where I have a bone to pick with Mr. Butcher.

Which Inquisition?  There were several.

The one that gets the most press was the Spanish Inquisition.  But you have to remember that was only in Spain.  And it wasn't about witchcraft.  It was about converted Jews and Muslims who were thought to have been insincere in their conversion.

I know most folks believe there was a world-wide inquisition, but that just isn't the case.

There were witch burnings all over the place, but they took place over 1000 years, or longer.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

For that matter, the Inquisition (very broadly defined) still exists.  No large-scale church could avoid having something along those lines to police doctrinal disputes, watch for heresy, and generally police the organization.

Throughout much of European history, in many places the ecclesiastical courts were generally seen as more tolerant and forgiving than the secular authorities, there were times when offenders would deliberately to things to try and get their case transferred to the Church courts, for precisely that reason.