   
Lecture On Grimores and Tomes
Being an excerpt from A Cautionary Essay to the Journeyman Field-Researcher about Grimoires and Ancient Tomes and their Effect on Hedge Magery by Dr. Francois de Pompeux
The author would like to say a few cautionary words about Hedge Magery. Doubtless by now you understand the difference between your education at the Université de Magique and what most spell casters get in the outside world, but it would be well to clarify these various conceptual differences for the Journeyman Field-Researcher.
Hedge mages are poor sods – they believe that they are mages or magicians, but in reality they are merely technicians. They have no understanding of theory, little control of what they do know, and worst of all, most of what they know is ignorant blather. They have no understanding to the underlying theoretical laws of Magie; they only know recipes for Magie. If you use the right ingredients, and you follow the directions, it should make a Magie pie that might work.
That is why the spell-book or grimoire of the Hedge Mage is full of ready-made spells. Any Magie needed for various occasions must be written down -- for without the recipe, they are helpless and dependent upon their memory. Having no knowledge of theory, they cannot create spells on their own, nor do they understand the principles necessary for creation of spells.
At best they might be able to cobble together bits of spells and hope for the proper effect—hence the length of time a hedge mage might take in “researching” a new spell. They have to tinker with existing known spells in an attempt to rediscover what you as students of Magic U are learning with ease every day—and that makes them technicians, not mages. And because they have no knowledge to speak of, all they can pass down to their so-called apprentices is their own ignorance, and their books.
The spells they use call for such precise ingredients because the spells are built with all necessary adjustments included—eye of newt because it has exactly So much Water and So much Stone. They use only the livers of farm-raised chicken because the livers contain purified chealated metals that the farm chickens get when they eat corn and meal. The livers of wild grazing chickens do not so contain these metals. And so on, down the ridiculously complex list of ingredients for the spell.
That being said and understood, the Journeyman Field-Researcher is hereby warned in advance to carefully record the mechanisms as well as the inputs and outputs when documenting a hedge Magie spell. How well this is documented may affect Magie U research into the duplication efforts for years to come.
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