casting a spell right now is not the same thing as activating it right now
Wdym? How do u activate a spell?
Hey, that post is a year old today!
Not all paradigms can co-exist with the concept that you can cast a spell without activating/releasing it.
Maybe an easy way to grok this is the idea of enchanting a face lotion to prevent blemishes.
The spell is cast when you enchant the face lotion, right?
You have done an act of magic by casting that spell.
But, the spell isn't "activated" until you put the lotion on your face.
The act of applying the enchanted object is how the spell effects are activated.
This is an overly simplistic explanation. It's possible to cast a spell intending the spell to be stored within an object for later activation, and still get interesting results. (E.g., you have a totally unrelated checkup with your doctor, and your doctor spontaneously brings up a new prescription face cream your insurance now covers).
Other examples include enchanting a candle but burning it later. Or, enchanting a piece of jewelry and not wearing it until needed.
What I think is probably a good skill for practical sorcerers to learn is the art of "waking up" and "putting away" enchantments.
An example of this is well-warded practitioners who need to "turn off" or "put to sleep" their wards so that a diviner can perform an accurate reading.
Then, the practitioner needs to be able to turn their wards back on again.
I don't have the wherewithal to brainstorm about other paradigms at the moment, but for me being able to activate a previously cast spell means storing an entire spell inside of a physical vessel, which is then used when the need arises.
A way to do this is to speak to the spell vessel, in the same way that you speak to spirits, and ask the spell to go and do it's job, or to take a break, or to go to sleep, etc.
Spells which are woken up after a long sleep often do well with a feeding to get them up and running again.
Another example would be that baked flour tablet thing from like 2014 or 2015 conversation here, were you basically bake a spell into a disk.
And then you snap it in half / break it, to activate it.
@sorcererpoet is who I remember discussing that with but IDK if that's correct.
Youâre not thinking of these are you?
@lazywitchling this time, no, I am not. I definitely reblogged the post in 2018 without any commentary.
I had a very long conversation with @sorcererpoet (since he confirmed it was him) around how the snapping works, and what kind of activation happens. How long to leave them in the oven, how to enchant the symbol. I can try to look through the posts to get the actual timeline. But I definitely remember having an entire conversation about this back and forth, it wasn't a single post.
