thought

[permetaform]

I've seen many stories where the source of magic is tied to inner purity, ie. Healers have White Magic and thus are Pacifist and Good whereas Mages have Black Magic and Destory stuff and are Evil.

Well, see, that don't much make sense to me completely. It might be too much reading of the Devil's Fairytales (or some such title along those lines) where a painter was brilliant and nice and painted these eeeeeevil pictures. So Hell really really wanted the painter to go to hell so he could work for them; and they set about corrupting him. Well, what do you know? The painter became corrupt and wretched and mean but could only paint these highly religious pictures, so in the end the painter went to Hell and his latter paintings were admired in Heaven.

Along those lines, why aren't there more stories where, to be able to produce Good Magic you become mean-spirited? Like, by creating light, you become not-light to offset the balance? Conversely, by creating dark magic, you become more not-dark?

Comments

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I've generally seen them both associated with parts of the natural order.

Exactly! Chaos would be neither good nor evil. I wasn't equating good/evil with order-chaos, but rather trying to show how the good/evil concept comes from a completely different school of thought than chaos-order or yin-yang concepts.

permetaform was asking why there aren't more stories where good and evil balance out a person. I was saying that it's probably because the concept of good/evil comes from Western ideology. Western ideologies don't believe in balance the way Eastern ideologies do.

[franzeska]

Yes, and I'm saying that yin/yang can represent many relationships, but I've never heard of it representing chaos/order. Yin is normally something feminine/dark/passive and in some sense orderly, while yang is normally something masculine/bright/active and in some sense orderly. Where are you getting the chaos thing from?

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Chaos-order is out of ancient greek mythology, or at least, that's the main place I've seen it, but I'm sure it's rooted in other religions as well. You also have, like, Hinduism and the whole life-death cycle -- the idea of destructive forces balancing out with creative forces.

I didn't mean to imply that yin-yang and chaos-order are the same thing, just that they come from similar schools of thought -- they both revolve around the idea that the universe (people, the gods, the weather, whatevs) is made up of opposing forces that balance each other out -- Western ideology, namely Judaism and its offspring, have a very different concept of the universe, one which doesn't revolve around finding balance so much as striving for perfection.