mana

[prettygoodword]

mana (MAH-nah) - n., (Polynesian culture) prestige, moral authority, spec. the power of the elemental forces of nature embodied in an object or person; (gaming) a unit of magical energy.


The concept of mana, and the word itself, is universal across Polynesia, and based on its meaning in other Oceanic languages apparently had a root sense of storm wind. The word was introduced to Europe by missionary and Melanesian ethnographer Robert Henry Codrington in 1891, apparently taking his cue from Maori, and popularized in Mircea Eliade's writings on religion. With that in the cultural background, Larry Niven used mana (iirc explicitly citing it as Maori, but I need to confirm this) as the name for fuel for magic spells in his The Magic Goes Away series of contemporary fantasy stories starting in 1969, and table-top RPGs such as D&D took the concept from there, and of course FRPGs took most of their framework from TTRPGs.

---L.

Comments

[pauraque]

I never knew Niven was the first to use mana in that sense! I knew it was a Polynesian word originally, but I guess I never investigated who borrowed it for fantasy purposes.

[prettygoodword]

Niven surprised me too, when I first learned that. I never did finish reading The Magic Goes Away, let alone any of the sequels or shared universe anthologies, and didn't grasp how influential it was.

At one point, when I was rather young, I had the vague idea the gaming sense was borrowed from Biblical manna.

[full_metal_ox]

I learned the term circa 1975 in junior high, by way of the occult treatise Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, who was trying to find commonalities among the magical practices of a variety of cultures; he cited Eliade as an influence.

(There’s been a significant Venn overlap between Neopaganism and the TTRPG community—which, of course, does not equal D&D being the slippery slope to Satanic baby-sacrifice.)

[prettygoodword]

Eliade shows up in a striking variety of places, given how little I see him discussed directly.

[pauraque]

It's interesting, because in gaming spaces I typically hear the pronunciation /mænə/ which is the usual pronunciation for "manna," but I very rarely hear /mɑnə/ which is how "mana" is usually pronounced when referring to actual Polynesian culture.

[prettygoodword]

That's interesting, because I rarely interact with gaming spaces except through text, so had no idea a different pronunciation is common there. That said, my dialect doesn't always clearly distinguish between /æ/ and /ɑ/, and MA-nuh and MAH-nuh sound almost the same to my ear. Certainly not distinct enough to rely on for differentiating words.

(Yes, this sometimes makes my partner shake her head, as she grew up on Long Island and clearly distinguishes between marry, merry, and Mary.)

[pauraque]

I'm fascinated by vowel mergers. My dad is from upstate New York and he also distinguishes Mary-marry-merry. I can imitate his pronunciation of "marry" /mæri/ if I really try, but it's a struggle because that sequence of phonemes simply doesn't occur in my dialect. All three are distinctly /mɛri/ for me.

I happen to live in Barre, Vermont, which rhymes with... well, all of Mary-marry-merry, if you're me. But for people without the merger there is some debate whether it should rhyme with marry or merry. (Of course only a Flatlander would pronounce it "bar"!)

[prettygoodword]

I can hear the difference of Mary-marry-merry if janni emphasizes it, but I cannot pronounce them correctly. All the same vowel, as far as I can say.

[full_metal_ox]

It's interesting, because in gaming spaces I typically hear the pronunciation /mænə/ which is the usual pronunciation for "manna," but I very rarely hear /mɑnə/ which is how "mana" is usually pronounced when referring to actual Polynesian culture.

I tend to use the Polynesian pronunciation, which may be reinforced by my awareness of Gothic J-rock and fashion diva Mana (an etymologically unrelated feminine (1) Japanese name whose meaning can rely upon the choice of kanji—his choice is 魔名 (“demon name”), in the ideogrammatic equivalent of a Gothick Mysspellinge.)

It’s also safe to assume that he’s aware of the magical-as-interpreted-in-RPG meaning:

What you also wouldn’t guess at first glance is how immensely invested in video games and video game consoles Mana is. He has an admirable collection of old-school gaming hardware, and used to be featured in the gaming magazine Game Labo with his column titled Mana-sama’s Game Inferno, coursing through three different titles with slight changes (Mana-sama’s Nostalgic Game Inferno, Mana-sama’s Deep Game Inferno, and Mana-sama’s Chance Meeting Game Inferno, translated respectively) . The column ran from March 2012 until September 2014, and Mana’s contributions to the magazine were later compiled and released as a 98 page book titled Game Inferno Ultimate.

Source: https://jrocknews.com/2018/06/mana-history-of-the-pioneering-gothic-lolita-guitarist.html

(1) Mana, the Trope Codifier for the Gothic Lolita aesthetic and one of rock’s most effective specimens of Dude Looks Like A Lady, regards himself as a latter-day onnagata, committing to the bit 24/7/365.25.