#humorous to me like.. I truly just sat down at the computer with 0 knowledge of anatomy completely freestyling what a leg looks like

[lucalicatteart]

Just a short info post on the topic of people accidentally haunting themselves through use of magic, and what is usually done when people believe they’re being haunted.  Completely random topic in the middle of things I’d rather be focusing on (the avirre’thel, elven history, etc.), but... apparently my brain was thinking about this so I had to write some about it lol

(actual info under read more, as usual..)

---------

[[ ALSO: there’s still a glitch where when viewing blogs on the side on tumblr, read more’s don’t work and it shows the full text, so I’m sorry if this appears full length. If this happens just view my blog in a new tab or something instead so there’s not long strings of text... lov tumblr being a very functional website..]]

Technically, there's no such thing as ‘spirits’ in Nanyevimi (at least not in the way we usually think of them). There are a few things that may mimic the presentation of something like a haunting, a spirit sighting, etc., (which I’m about to explain), but these are magical in nature, rather than just an actual function of the world. 

The most common phenomena that can mimic the presence of some sort of ghosts, is... essentially, people haunting themselves??? As in any world, people in Nanyevimi are still capable of convincing themselves something is true through confirmation bias based on their preexisting beliefs. Which, when much of the population consists of magic users.. can become a bit more complicated, as they do actually have the potential to unknowingly effect their surroundings. 

Essentially, anyone who's capable of using magic, even if they don't have very strong abilities (actually, especially if they don’t/are relatively untrained), can end up performing small feats of magic accidentally. This is why latent magic can be so dangerous (as explained in this post on latent/undiscovered magical abilities HERE (link)), and why especially the more powerful you are, the more significant  it is to be exceptionally well controlled, lest you accidentally blow up your house or kill someone lol.. 

So, if it's something believed by a large group of people, all of whom can use magic (such as a small rural town of elves), it can almost end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy..  A myth starts, then people begin to fulfill the myth (unknowingly) through VERY small energy barely noticeable accidental acts of magic. For example, a mysterious breeze coursing through the forest on a day where it otherwise wasn't windy, and people are like “AAAa! See! The forest is haunted!!”, when really it was one of them which caused the breeze to happen in the first place lol. Which only makes more people believe and do the same thing.

 Collective energy output like this can sometimes end up functioning similarly to an enchantment, without an actual enchantment having been placed by anyone, where the more collective belief and accidental magic bestowed into something, the more that that thing actually follows through, in a series of tiny acts over time that just gets worse the more that people buy into it*(1). 

So for example, there may be woods that are thought to be 'cursed', where bad things always happen to the people who travel through there, but rather than it being the doing of some evil ancient monster (like the locals believe), it's actually just.. literally the people who live near the forest themselves. The small bits of accidental magic seeping from them act to confirm their intentions, and cause little accidents like a branch falling on someone, someone's hat blowing off, a pothole in the road that knocks someone's wheel off their cart, etc. While it  wouldn't really be anything extreme*(2) (crafting actual apparitions, monsters, natural disasters or etc. would take far more advanced magic than what could just happen without the person knowing they’re doing it), these small things would still be enough to reconfirm the myth over time. 

(for more info on how magic, enchantments, etc. works, you can read the large masterpost sort of thing about it HERE (link))

Interestingly, you rarely if ever see this effect of “self-haunting” occur in mostly Jhevona populated areas. This is thought to be because of their cultural focus on extreme self-control and awareness of their magic, thus making it much less likely for them to unintentionally use magic. For someone so deeply in tune with their internal intentions and awareness of their magic, accidentally using magic without knowing it would be exceedingly rare. (Though in cases where this has happened, the effect is usually much more extreme, since they're capable of far more advanced magics... which is part of why they prevent this stuff from occurring in the first place. ). 

These self-hauntings also never occur in non-magical societies, and you actually rarely have stories about “ghosts” or curses or etc. in their cultures. Human (and other non-magic) cultures in the realm certainly can also fall prey to psyching themselves into things and etc., so it's not like because they can't do magic they're suddenly immune to superstition, they have plenty of similar-ish beliefs, but it's just much less prevalent for it to be genuinely reinforced in their cultures, since they usually can't find much tangible evidence. Like, if they believe something like a curse, it's usually just based on "a feeling" they get, or based in it just being a tradition that is passed down. They culturally would describe it more as a sort of  ‘energy’ instead. 

So, humans/non-magical people in the realm may have beliefs more like “Stay away from the woods because they have a repellent force, and they don’t want us near them/the gods don’t intend for us to go into them/we’ve hurt the forest’s feelings and are not allowed there now”, and would also not have much evidence for this aside from maybe a few personal stories or “gut feelings”. While among magical groups, it may be described more as “There is an evil ghost haunting these woods!/Someone has cursed these woods!”, and they MAY actually have have physical evidence of it existing/something that seems like tangible proof rather than just suspicion (despite it still usually just  being an accidental magic placebo).  Beliefs like this can stick around in certain magical cultures more prominently , because they're not as easy to discount or disprove if locals have apparently witnessed actual physical evidence of it, etc. Because it feels stronger and more personal to them, they also usually attribute it to ghosts/spirits (sometimes of ancestors), or more active/deliberate and personified parties, rather than just obscure feelings or the vague workings of gods. 

There's no real solution to people haunting themselves, other than for the group to learn what's going on and ALSO learn better magical control and discipline so it's less likely for them to cast accidental spells. If they ONLY learn what could be going on, but don't train their magic, they'll just end up repeating the same thing later, falling back into haunting themselves, since they still have underlying issues with accidental spells.  

Due to their generally higher mastery of magic, sometimes Jhevona (if there are any groups of them in the local area) will be called to help with stuff like this.  Kind of like teams of paranormal investigators, except they're just magic specialists who may come in and help test for traces of magic in an area (to see if people are casting spells accidentally or not), better train the people in the area in their magical control, etc. If the Jhevona is powerful enough in enchantment magics, sometimes they can even kind of just slap a band-aid on the issue by simply overriding whatever magic is being done with a larger enchantment which then blocks the accidental magic from coming through, effectively ending the self inflicted "curse" in the area, though it’s not a very long term solution, and people may end up haunting themselves again in other ways.  

(Though sometimes an over-riding sort of enchantment can be done to help diagnose the issue, like if they do this and the “haunting” DOESN'T go away then.. you may have some more serious problem on your hands, like a mage causing trouble intentionally, or etc.)

There are a few other things which can, on the surface, resemble a form of ‘haunting’.. Mostly just, enchantments done by malicious parties (actual people though, not ghosts.. just like.. random mages who want to trick people in a small town out of their money or something), and also occasionally forms of soul magic gone wrong can trap someone’s soul in an object or place in an unnatural way, and this can mimic the existence of ‘’spirits’’ or etc., though this one is very rare, since soul magic in general is pretty rare. I may elaborate more on those two options later, but this post was mostly about self inflicted “haunting” through accidental magic lol. 

[ *(1) note: Magic scholars disagree on whether enough collective belief in something can ACTUALLY create an enchantment without an enchantment being set. All magic seems to based on intention, but especially enchantments are extremely literal in that sense, so it could follow that if enough people intend something, and enough people are accidentally seeping magic into that intention and giving it an actual energy behind it, it may genuinely become it’s own ‘independent magical function’ (what enchantments basically are), “feeding” itself (as all enchantments must be recharged over time) on the magical energy output of the collective group.

But, it’s commonly thought (and observed) that enchantments must be specifically set by one individual (though that individual can draw energy from others as part of it), and that they also take a great deal of magical energy to set up (which is why it’s mostly Jhevona and other higher-energy magical species who do them, rather than lower energy beings like elves).  Whether a collective group of people could create a genuine enchantment function just by casting enough intention and fueling it with accidental magical leaks is still uncertain, but would definitely be interesting from a magical study point (and would confirm some less common beliefs that magic to a degree operates on it’s own.. since this would effectively be like.. an enchantment casting itself just because there was enough intention and energy going around. But, that’s a debate for the magic scholars (who already spend most of their time arguing about this stuff anyway lol).]

[ *(2) note:  It should be noted that this ‘unintentional magic’ really only manifests through minor physical alterations of the environment, or other very small simple spells. Things like Illusion magics and etc. are so powerful and inaccessible that it's not like someone could just 'accidentally' do them, even if casting illusions or hearing voices would go along with the idea of placebo hauntings. Though in some ways magic can seem like it has a mind of it’s own and is never fully controllable, there are still plenty of user based limitations.

Much of magic is intention based, meaning it is affected by your mental state. If you try to cast a spell to burn your house down, but you don’t really actually want to burn your house down, you will have mental resistance  (unless you’re immaculately well trained) and the spell will probably not actually work. You'd end up casting the fire somewhere else and burning a random stranger to death or just shooting water at your house or something instead, etc.  

Which of course, this means that SOME things can be done on intention alone.. but these primarily involve pure energy magic, or simplistic elemental magic. Some basic magics like these can be utilized (to a primitive degree) without training or much knowledge, since they mostly consist of pure bursts of unaltered energy, rather than a careful manipulation of energy or matter. Most higher level magics are too complex and require a lot of very intentional manipulation based on former knowledge, so it'd be nearly impossible for someone to do them just 'accidentally' .

Unintentional magic usually exists solely in the form of like, accidentally creating a breeze, or moving an object, shooting out a burst of energy at someone who has attacked you even if you didn't MEAN to hurt them and it was just an accidental self defense out of your body being surprised (also why they say to never sneak up on mages lol), accidentally setting a fire, etc.

Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that it'd be impossible for someone to 'accidentally' perform some feat of magic that they're not trained for/otherwise incapable of.

 If you're ALREADY an illusion magics user, you could accidentally use illusion magics perhaps under certain specific conditions, but if you're just some random elf with very little magical training who's convincing themselves of a placebo haunting, you're not going to be able to break out some master level illusions spell if you can't already do that normally, etc. “Weak” accidental magic can still cause massive damage, kill yourself and people around you, destroy your environment, etc. even with just simple pure energy magics, so like.. it’s still Dangerous, and unintentional magic can operate in pretty hazardous ways, but , you’re also just not going to be able to accidentally do stuff that’s WAY beyond your scope to already reasonably be able to do. ]]