hrj

Something occurred to me while I was off skiing the cross-country trails at Colby this afternoon (a good time for rumination). Yesterday while I was checking up on the proper Latin declension for "mysterium", I discovered that I'd been wrong in thinking that the "religious mysteries" mystery and the "craft guild mysteries" mystery had the same linguistic origin. And I was thinking, "Darn, this messes up the sort of blended meaning I was using in the novel." (Specifically: the fantastic element where the performance of rituals associated with particular saints can -- for selected people -- result in concrete real-world effects that are nominally attributed to the intercession of said saints but that are difficult to distinguish from effective ritual magic caused by the performer.) But then today it occurred to me that this ambiguity is inherent in conflicting approaches to the phenomenon within the story, with the majority of people treating the mysteries in the "sacred rituals" sense with an emphasis on performance as a form of worship, but a subset of people (and in particular a subset of those whose rituals are regularly effective) treating them as the "workings of a craft or trade" sense with emphasis on achieving particular effects. So, in the end, the conflicting etymologies works better for my purpose than if the two senses did have the same origin. And thereby I've come up with a title concept for the "ancient philosophical treatise on the mysteries" that my protagonists bond over discussing.