Longish read about a history of the concept of “mana” and how it came to be used in games
The answer, we now know, is ‘no.’ Under closer scrutiny it became clear that the idea of mana as the universal and most primitive experience of the sacred is crap.
And yet ‘mana’ as the universal, primitive experience of the sacred persists in popular culture today, from Star Wars’ “The Force” to Max Long’s fake-Hawaiian New Age religion of ‘huna’. How could the concept of mana as a generic spiritual force become invalidated and ubiquitous at the same time?
One answer can be found in the story of Mircea Eliade. Born in Romania in 1907, Eliade began his academic career studying the philosophy of Renaissance Italy. A detour took him to India, where he studied South Asian languages and Indian philosophy, eventually producing a Ph.D. dissertation on yoga in 1933. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Eliade lived as an intellectual and writer in Romania, inadvertently spawning numerous Wikipedia edit wars by possibly—or possibly not—becoming a fascist. By the end of World War II Eliade had washed up in France, where he had a position at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études. It was there that he wrote the two works that presented his master philosophy: The Myth of the Eternal Return and Patterns in Comparative Religion.