Guild Wars 2

…before the gods arrived? I’m aware that ritualists obtained their magic through the connections of their ancestors but it wasn’t the same magic brought from the gods. What I’m curious is how were they able to use this magic in the first place and where did it originally came from?

It as been revealed that magic predate the Human Gods -by far- but that the same Gods somehow changed it when they played with the Bloodstones. So my guess is that the Ritualists used the magic that was usable at that time, probably with their ancestors doing a sort of connection to the Mists.

We should also take into consideration that the religion of the Six Gods might not be entirely correct (as religion often is). I always wondered why Abaddon supposedly needed to give magic to humans even though all other races could use it by default. And magic was in the world to begin with, even before the gods.

But the lore about the Six Gods makes it almost seem like they invented magic itself and only they could decide who gets to use it and who don’t. Which is of course not true.

Like Valmir said, they were literally channeling the power of the spirits of the dead. I don’t expect that we’ll be getting any better an explanation than that, since ritualists are effectively defunct in the modern day- even if they do still exist in Cantha, it’s been said that they can’t hold a candle to the power the other casters can throw around now.

Note that while we’ve been told that magic predates the gods, we’ve also been told that there was too little of it to be useful before they started playing with the bloodstone, so we can’t simply wave it off as “magic that was usable at the time” .

An Empire Divided

According to historians, these early Ritualists from the pre-magic era relied on a similar power granted by the dead—by ancestors of the great and powerful who maintained a connection to their descendents. The power of Spirit allowed mortal humans to practice what might be seen as a form of magic.

But this may be false – that they performed magic via spirits’ actions – as the above mentions that it’s been revealed that magic predates the gift of magic in 1 BE.

@Windu: The lore is that magic was removed from the world in whole – that whenever the Elder Dragons last feel asleep, there was no or almost no magic in the world that few would have been able to use it. Releasing the bloodstone’s magic was returning magic to the world so that anyone can use it – at such point in time, magic was still, supposedly, so low that very few individuals could use magic (and most likely, those near places of power and Elder Dragons as they hibernated).

My personal theory is that while the Seers sucked most of the magic into the Bloodstones, a certain amount of magic renewal was still occurring after the dragons went back to sleep. Some of this was coming from the dragons, which as previously noted radiate magic while in their dormant state, while some of it may have been coming from natural sources.

From asura records, there certainly was magic around before the gods unlocked the bloodstone – there’s been an interview where it was mentioned that the asura noticed a strengthening (not appearance, strengthening) of magic when the bloodstone was unlocked, and then a weakening – but not all the way down to the original level – when they were split.

Relating this to the ritualists – I suspect what was happening there is that ritualism served as a kind of ‘force multiplier’ when only a limited amount of magic was available. At the time, there was more power available from the Mists, so the most efficient use of the power available on Tyria was, simply put, to open some sort of portal to pull power from the Mists – whether that power comes directly from magical currents in the Mists or through the medium of a spirit. With Tyrian magic having become more powerful, though, it’s become increasingly more efficient in comparison to simply use what’s around you rather than having to suck it from an extradimensional source.

I don’t think that’s really much of a theory, given that the asura felt magic from Primordus and used it. If one Elder Dragon was radiating magic, the chances of the others doing the same is extremely likely, given that the Six Gods pulled magic out of Zhaitan, and Drakkar was radiating magic too (which Svanir called upon).

As Oola said, “We embody magic”.

Perhaps the ancestors were the magic that ritualists tapped into.

Well, that’s pretty much what ritualists were doing – they were calling on spirits to perform magic on their behalf.

Opening a portal to the Mists, which seems to be where spirits normally end up if not somehow bound to Tyria, however, seems to require at least some magic. Basically, they’re relying on what magic they had in order to secure aid from entities that had access to more magic but couldn’t normally access Tyria.