Language Archives: Ethereals
The Etymology of the word “Ethereals”
In the days when the authentic Ancient Tongue was the word, the term “Ethereal” referred to a being who possessed a relatively high form of sentient mind—when compared to the other denizens of the age, the ubiquitous insects and dinosaurs. To be deemed an “Ethereal,” the possession of magick was not an explicit requirement; rather, the criteria, which were never made explicit but were presumably taken to be a social norm, were likely similar to our current societal concept of what makes an entity “human.” It would not be until further natural selection had taken its toll that the vast majority of these sentient beings, the “Ethereals,” became associated with the capability to weld “magick.”
A brief digression is now appropriate regarding the term “magick.” Magick, in general, refers to “action at a distance;” in the advent of modern science and the empirical discovery of microscopic particle vibrations, as in electromagnetic and other fields, as a medium in physical reality for apparent action at a distance, this definition has since been refined to refer to “action at a distance, that has no apparent causal relationship in physical reality.” Note that, here, the reference to physical reality has it and the Ethereal Space as mutual dichotomies. The author is not advocating the uneducated view that magick occurs outside the bounds of the universe, as a whole; indeed, although the mechanisms of magick works outside of physical space, it is bound by its own set of “physical laws in Ethereal Space,” as everything in the universe must be.
It is believed that without resorting to magick, the descendents of the first Ethereals would have perished, long ago. The massive dinosaurs possessed a monopoly in prowess over physical reality, and in time, they developed enough sentience to be not merely a worthwhile adversary, but a dangerous predator of the early Ethereal population. Therefore, only the Ethereals who developed magickal abilities survived, and with the decline of non-magick possessing Ethereals, the reference “Ethereal” became synonymous with a being possessing the ability to weld magick.
It is a common mistake to ascribe both the Kinai original of the word “Ethereal,” and the English translation used here, to be the combinative evolution of the word “ether” and “real.” The incorrect consensus advocates that the combination resulted from the colloquial joining of “Ether”, the Kinai word for the English equivalent of “Ethereal Space,” and the English word “real”, to imply that an Ethereal is a being who can make “real” the “Ethereal Space”; this is obviously at fault, since the term had begun its usage before such characteristics ever became manifest. In fact, the term is actually the combinative evolution of the word “ever” and “real.” Indeed, it is interesting to note that the Kinai word “ethe” is one of the stronger forms of the English equivalent “ever,” and the Kinai word “real” refers to existence on Earth. Very likely, the term was originally coined as a phrase of self-determination, or perhaps a blessing, more than a stated identification of immortality, as the first Ethereals did not possess this criterion.
Despite the plethora of factual evidence supporting the latter theory, a considerable number of Ethereals believe in the first, and an even greater number are ignorant of the latter. The mage Alacaster Camus, one of the most adamant advocates of the first theory, the common error, justifies the potential “correctness” of the first theory with his notorious parsimony of knowledge quote, “War cast by great magick was rampant, and immortals became mortal. None who lived in this era is known alive at present. We know nothing of the truth, and there is no absolute certainty that we—all of us—were not always Ethereals, in full blood and magick. We were never merely human—and to believe we were once merely so is as preposterous as believing we were once merely insects. Once an Ethereal, always an Ethereal!” Of course, despite the fact that his statement was met with myriad support and praise from all Ethereal races, a thorough study of the mage proves that he is also an advocate of the view that mages are the only Ethereals. This author, a golum scholar, finds the mage-supremacy belief amusing, at best, considering the origination of the race as degenerates of Draconi. The mages also refuse to believe in their origin, and Camus has yet another widely-acclaimed quote on this matter, though it is not entirely relevant to this article and is not quoted, but may be found in the Gossameir’s records of Camus. It should be noted that the mages are known for their self-imposed ignorance in their tendency to believe what they want to believe in, even in the light of whims that are ever far from the truth.