"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 04 - Dragonspell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

But what we have are, by and large, hardy fragments of root left from a mangled plant, cut down before
its full flowering by the sort of priest who put his temporal power above the spiritual health of his flock.
The one true magical system we do have is the Jewish cabbala, kept alive by a people of enormous
courage in the face of slander and persecution. In those dark years, Judaism was the only major Western
religion to realize that different kinds of souls have different needs, that there will always be some who
want to know and to experience the truth for themselves and who are willing to leave safe territory
behind to do so. Those of us who believe the same owe it and its people a huge debt.

There is no space here to give the convoluted history of the various magicians and alchemists,
Christian cabbalists and Rosicrucians, to say nothing of the Sufis on the Moslem side of the equation,
who struggled to keep Western magic alive during the last eighteen hundred years or so. (If youтАЩre
interested, you can find books by the historian Frances Yates in any good public library.) That they
succeeded at all is amazing enough; to point out that a lot of strange weeds took root and grew in the
field cleared but never sown with proper seed seems unfair, but not everyone who claimed to be a
follower of the true path was one. And of course the lies and slanders continued and still continue: that
magic damns you or drives you insane, that witches worship the devil, and, most recently, that magic is
nothing but New Age occult-babble on the one hand or illusion and fraud on the other. As readers, youтАЩll
all have to make up your own minds on the truth of these things. It should be clear enough by now where
I stand.

As for the structure of the Deverry books, a lot of people have muttered, either to themselves or
directly to me, тАШWhy do you use all those damn flashbacks?тАЩ Well, there is in this world more than one
way of organizing a story - or a body of factual information, for that matter. The тАШstart at the beginning
and go through to the end1 principle that weтАЩve all been raised with dates back to classical Greek
thought as transmitted by the Romans, and, as part of Aristotelian logic, it forms the basis of modern
science and the scientific world-view (though one that modern physics is beginning to undermine). In this
way of looking at the world, TimeтАЩs arrow flies straight and in one direction only. The magical tradition,
however, teaches that you donтАЩt necessarily have to move in a straight line to reach your destination.

Classical writers like Diodorus Siculus and Polybius state that the Celts who were their
contemporaries believed in reincarnation, among other doctrines that are today part of the magical
tradition. Certainly the art of the Gauls and the later flowering of Celtic art in the early Christian era are
clear enough evidence that here is a people who organized information in a non-classical, non-Aristotelian
manner. Since IтАЩm writing about ancient Celts, after all, IтАЩve borrowed their way of looking at the world,
too, in the loops and spirals of my story line as it laces between and laces up the various lifetimes of the
characters. I promise, on the gods of my people if you like, that I do have a plan in mind, even if it isnтАЩt a
linear one, and I honestly do think that if you try to see it as it unfolds, youтАЩll get some small reward, even
if itтАЩs only a taste of what it means to think in a non-linear manner. If youтАЩve never seen any Celtic art, the
flowing spirals and triskelia of the Gauls, the beautiful lacings and braidings of the Irish monks, by all
means do yourself a favour and browse through a book about them in a library or bookshop. My own
small craft is, I promise you, nothing compared to theirs.
 Acknowledgements


For my translations from the Llywarch Hen corpus I used Patrick FordтАЩs edition of the text in his The
Poetry of Llywarch Hen, University of California Press, 1974. Since I was also swayed by his arguments
in the introduction to that edition, 1 have translated тАШhenтАЩ in this context as тАШthe ancestorтАЩ. Any errors in
these translations are of course mine alone, as are such minor acts of magic as my turning winter into
summer for the epilogueтАЩs epigraph.