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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.
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.
