{"id":27276,"date":"2014-06-18T19:51:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T19:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/longish-read-about-a-history-of-the-concept-of\/"},"modified":"2018-12-06T09:04:24","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T16:04:24","slug":"longish-read-about-a-history-of-the-concept-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/longish-read-about-a-history-of-the-concept-of\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-27276 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/longish-read-about-a-history-of-the-concept-of\/attachment\/27277\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_n7dr5qKSm51qescwho1_640-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>Longish read about a history of the concept of &ldquo;mana&rdquo; and how it came to be used in games<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The answer, we now know, is \u2018no.\u2019 Under closer scrutiny it became clear that the idea of mana as the universal and most primitive experience of the sacred is crap.<\/p>\n<p>And yet \u2018mana\u2019 as the universal, primitive experience of the sacred persists in popular culture today, from Star Wars\u2019 \u201cThe Force\u201d to Max Long\u2019s fake-Hawaiian New Age religion of \u2018huna\u2019. How could the concept of mana as a generic spiritual force become invalidated and ubiquitous at the same time?<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014or possibly not\u2014becoming a fascist. By the end of World War II Eliade had washed up in France, where he had a position at the \u00c9cole Pratiques des Hautes \u00c9tudes. 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. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/theappendix.net\/issues\/2014\/4\/the-history-of-mana-how-an-austronesian-concept-became-a-video-game-mechanic\">The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic\u2014Vol. 2, No. 2\u2014The Appendix<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Longish read about a history of the concept of &ldquo;mana&rdquo; and how it came to be used in games The answer, we now know, is \u2018no.\u2019 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 \u2018mana\u2019 as the universal, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-75W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27278,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27276\/revisions\/27278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}