In other news, my training with Master Diogini continues to go along swimmingly. He is a stern teacher, but I am an eager student, and my understanding of the Veil and its nature has increased exponentially since my first lessons.

You see, most humans belive the afterlife to be something distant and unreachable; they look towards the wide open sky when referring to it, not understanding that it is much more closely tied to the Earth-- and specifically, the people living in it. Although many cultures believe in the sanctity of the body after death, accepting it as the only remains left behind by the deceased, the Order's occult traditions place a much bigger emphasis on the Memory of the departed, and specifically the Emotion contained therein; these powerful feelings are the true link that connects Earth and the Beyond. Even the post-mortem connection between Body and Soul, in the case of those spirits who remain shackled to the material plane, can be attributed to the Ego's attachment to the Body as the image of Itself.

[...]

All these complex metaphysics have some interesting applications in regards to the occult practices, namely that the empathic conection between a living person and the Memory of a departed soul close to them can be exploited in order to open tiny pinprick holes in the Veil, allowing one to potentially contact those on the other side. Of course, like all of the Order's true magic, this requires a symbolic focus to channel the raw emotion. When I developed my Blade, I chose the Three of Swords-- a card associated with pain and grief-- to channel my feelings of vengeance; a relatively simple emotion for a relatively simple spell. For somethin as complex as the entire relationship between the deceased an their loved ones, however, no single card suffices; the entire deck needs to be deployed in order for the connection to be clear and effective. [...]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                ~C.R.

[...] And so, as these philosophers postuled, the sensible world, or what we perceive, and the real world, or what truly is, while usually linked, are not necessarily one and the same. Performance magic makes ample use of this fact, chiefly focusing on ways to trick the audience's sight-- the sense in which humans rely on the most-- in order to achieve effects that appear impossible at first glance. With Occult magics, however, we need not limit ourselves to visual illusions; with different methods, every single one of our senses can be similarly tricked, and with some effort, all those methods can be combined to create a singular illusion that, for all an observer's perception can tell them, IS real. Of course, there are limitations to this technique: Firstly, such illusions are incapable of inflicting harm upon a subject; even if one were to trick the observer's nociception, something that isn't real cannot cause true damage to that which is. Secondly, a person's touch and proprioception are particularly are particularly tricky to fool, and it can be challenging to give an illusion a convincing sense of mass [...]