Some things in this curriculum are handed to a beginner on day one. Others are stated to be out of reach for years, and a few are described as impossible for anybody at apprentice level. Nothing ever says what the difference is made of.
The eighth discipline gives it a name and a shape, and the shape is borrowed from a physics chart most people have seen. Radio waves at one end, gamma rays at the other, everything in between arranged by how much energy it carries. The claim is that magic has one of these too — a range of energy types, ordered weakest to strongest — and that where an operation sits on it is what makes it easy or hard.1
The whole range has a name. It is called the Deunium, and a footnote defines it as our actual universe along with the wide range of spiritual spectrum that composes it.
The argument is short and it is worth having exactly, because everything else rests on it. The electromagnetic spectrum is described as the study of nothing else but pure unbound energy. It teaches that everything in the physical world is made up of energy — so by projection everything in the magical world will be conformed by energy too.
By projection. The word is doing the whole job. This is an inference from one domain to another rather than an observation about the second, and it is marked as such in the sentence that makes it.
Then a second reason, and this one is doctrinal rather than inferential. The spectrum of light matters to the practitioner because Magic derives directly from the First Light — which ties the physics chart to this curriculum's own account of creation, where light is the second moment and becomes the medium everything else runs through. So there are two arguments for the same conclusion sitting side by side. One says magic must be energy because everything is. The other says magic is light because it came from the Light. Neither is developed and both are used.
The magical spectrum is given as a list in ascending order, and the list is the reason this entry matters.
Inner Potencies. Elementals. Celestials. Demiurgic. The four worlds. Macroprosopal. Strong Potencies.
Seven bands. Two of them come with footnote definitions. Demiurgic describes those beings which shape and create the universe. Macroprosopal refers to the higher face of god, which is composed by the Crown or Divine Will — and then the line that follows from it: that is why God is Will and Nothing else.
Read the order and the ladder is legible even where the terms are not. You start with what is inside you. Then the elemental beings, then the celestial ones, then the beings that make universes, then the four worlds themselves, then the highest face of the divine, and finally something above that.
Which puts the practitioner's own inner power at the bottom of the range — the weakest band, the radio waves of the arrangement, and the only one a beginner has access to.
Set the seven bands against what this curriculum actually teaches and the correspondence is close enough to be worth laying out. Inner Potencies is where every drill lives: the furnaces, the charge-and-project exercise, the sphere built as a thought-form out of your own understanding. Elementals is the conjuration material — the water elemental, the gnomes, the dwarf, the beings housed in a receptacle. Celestials is the invocation material — the angels convoked, the Elohim, the Solar Angel.
Then it stops. Demiurgic beings are named nowhere as something a practitioner addresses. The four worlds are described constantly and are never operated on. The Macroprosopal face and the Strong Potencies have no procedure attached anywhere.
So the spellbook covers the bottom three bands of seven and nothing above. And the curriculum's own limits line up with that exactly: spell levels are capped at two, familiars and angels are stated to be out of reach at apprentice level, and the one-word incantations are said to need power the student does not have.
The spectrum is not a piece of background cosmology. It is the reason for every ceiling in this curriculum, stated once, in the reading list, before any of the ceilings appear.
The consequence for a working practitioner gets one sentence and it is the operational payoff of the whole model. Every single magical operation produces certain types of energies. Some are weak, some others are stronger — and it depends on what side of the Dimensional Spectrum or Deunium the wizard is working on.
Which side you are working on. Not which spell you chose, and not how hard you tried. The energy an operation puts out is a function of where on the range it is being performed, the way a radio transmitter and an X-ray machine differ by band rather than by effort.
That reframes what a stronger spell is. It is not a bigger version of a weak one. It is the same kind of act performed at a different point on a scale, using different beings, and the reason a beginner cannot simply push harder is that pushing harder does not move you along a spectrum.
One entry in the list of seven does not belong with the others and it is worth stopping on. Inner Potencies, Elementals, Celestials, Demiurgic, Macroprosopal and Strong Potencies are all powers or classes of being. The four worlds are not. They are the curriculum's standing account of how anything at all comes into being — four levels every operation passes through, from an idea to a thing.
And they turn up here as band five of seven, between the universe-shaping beings and the highest face of the divine. Then, a few lines later, the four worlds appear again in a different role: magic is an energy form that through careful exercises can be shaped following the four worlds structures into many different effects. So they are a rung on the ladder and the shaping frame applied to the whole ladder, in the same passage, and nothing marks the change.
⚠ Reported as printed. The two uses are not reconciled anywhere in the ranges read in this build.
The entry closes by deriving something the rest of the curriculum spends hundreds of pages on, and it does it in two sentences. Magic is an energy form. Shaped through the four worlds, it produces many different effects — and these different effects, in time had gathered into groups. As it now stands, magic is a discipline with many branches of study, each branch possessing remarkable effects and wonderful results.
Gathered into groups. Not designed into schools, not revealed as ten, not handed down. The ten schools of magic are described as an accumulation — effects that piled up over time until they sorted themselves.
Which is a notably modest origin for the structure the entire spellbook is organised by, and it is the last thing said before the schools are introduced.
Before attempting anything, ask which band it sits in. Is this your own inner power, an elemental, or a celestial? Those are the three a practitioner at this level has access to, and the seven-band list is the only place the material says so directly.
Read the ceilings as band boundaries rather than as arbitrary rules. Spell levels capped at two, familiars out of reach, one-word incantations needing power you lack — all of these are the same fact stated in different places, and the fact is that the range above Celestials has no procedure attached. Expect strength to change with position, not with effort. The energy an operation produces depends on where on the range it is worked, so the way to a stronger effect is a different band and different allies, never more force applied to the same one.
And run every effect through the four worlds when you want to know what it is. Idea to thing, four levels. That is the shaping frame the entry names, and it is what turns an energy into a particular result rather than into heat.
The energy inference, the seven bands, the Deunium, and the derivation of the schools are all in the physics entry of the eight disciplines. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
The physical half is accurate as far as it goes. The electromagnetic spectrum does run from radio waves through to gamma rays by increasing energy, and radio waves are produced naturally by lightning and other atmospheric activity, as stated. ⚠ Deunium, Macroprosopal and the seven-band order are this system's own terms. Macroprosopus is a real Qabalistic term for the greater countenance, and its use here — the higher face of god, composed by the Crown or Divine Will — is consistent with that. ⚠ Five of the seven bands are named once in this list and given no procedure anywhere.
⚠ The four worlds appear as one band among seven and, twelve lines later, as the frame through which all magical energy is shaped. Both uses are reported as printed rather than resolved. Unresolved: the transition from everything physical is energy to therefore everything magical is energy is marked in the passage as a projection and is never argued further.
Follow the spectrum and magic is one substance at different strengths. Energy, ordered weakest to strongest, where the difference between an easy working and an impossible one is a position on a range rather than a difference in kind.
Follow the practice and the bands are populated by persons. Elementals turn unruly if you do not re-cast daily. A dwarf has to be dismissed politely. A hero of Heaven comes only if the fight is just. A fairy cannot be housed at all. None of that is how a scale of energies behaves.
Both accounts run through the same curriculum and the seam shows at the third band. Below Celestials, everything can be described either way. Above it, the model has bands with no beings named in them and no procedures — which is precisely where the practice stops.
Zero handshakes on this page. The material is one system's internal explanation for its own ceilings, and the honest connection — a scale of power that determines what a practitioner may attempt — is carried inside this build by the school and assistance pages, where the same limit is expressed as a headcount of allies rather than as a band.
Sharpest implication. The seven bands run Inner Potencies, Elementals, Celestials, Demiurgic, the four worlds, Macroprosopal, Strong Potencies — and the entire working spellbook operates in the first three. Every ceiling later in the curriculum, stated in a dozen separate places as a separate rule, is one fact printed here in a reading list: there is no procedure above the third band.
Generative questions.