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Cody Cook (8 KP) rated Writings Of Thomas Paine Volume 4 (1794 1796); The Age Of Reason in Books
Jun 29, 2018
Thomas Paine was a political theorist who was perhaps best known for his support for the American Revolution in his pamphlet Common Sense. In what might be his second best known work, The Age of Reason, Paine argued in favor of deism and against the Christian religion and its conception of God. By deism it is meant the belief in a creator God who does not violate the laws of nature by communicating through revelation or miracles The book was very successful and widely read partly due to the fact that it was written in a style which appealed to a popular audience and often implemented a sarcastic, derisive tone to make its points.
The book seems to have had three major objectives: the support of deism, the ridicule of what Paine found loathsome in Christian theology, and the demonstration of how poor an example the Bible is as a reflection of God.
In a sense, Paine's arguments against Christian theology and scripture were meant to prop up his deistic philosophy. Paine hoped that in demonizing Christianity while giving evidences for God, he would somehow have made the case for deism. But this is not so. If Christianity is false, but God exists nonetheless, we are not left only with deism. There are an infinite number of possibilities for us to examine regarding the nature of God, and far too many left over once we have eliminated the obviously false ones. In favor of deism Paine has only one argument—his dislike of supernatural revelation, which is to say that deism appeals to his culturally derived preferences. In any case, Paine's thinking on the matter seemed to be thus: if supernatural revelation could be shown to be inadequate and the development of complex theology shown to be an error, one could still salvage a belief in God as Creator, but not as an interloper in human affairs who required mediators.
That being said, in his support of deism, Paine makes some arguments to demonstrate the reasonableness in belief in, if not the logical necessity of the existence of, God which could be equally used by Christians.
For instance, just as the apostle Paul argued in his epistle to the Romans that, "what can be known about God is plain to [even pagans], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:19-20, ESV), so also Paine can say that, "the Creation speaketh an universal language [which points to the existence of God], independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be."
The key point on which Paine differs from Paul on this issue is in his optimism about man's ability to reason to God without His assisting from the outside. Whereas Paul sees the plainness of God from natural revelation as an argument against the inherent goodness of a species which can read the record of nature and nevertheless rejects its Source's obvious existence, Paine thinks that nature and reason can and do lead us directly to the knowledge of God's existence apart from any gracious overtures or direct revelation.
On the witness of nature, Paine claims, and is quite correct, that, "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." What is not plainly clear, however, is that man is free enough from the noetic effects of sin to reach such an obvious conclusion on his own. Indeed, the attempts of mankind to create a religion which represents the truth have invariably landed them at paganism. By paganism I mean a system of belief based, as Yehezkel Kaufmann and John N. Oswalt have shown, on continuity.iv In polytheism, even the supernatural is not really supernatural, but is perhaps in some way above humans while not being altogether distinct from us. What happens to the gods is merely what happens to human beings and the natural world writ large, which is why the gods are, like us, victims of fate, and why pagan fertility rituals have attempted to influence nature by influencing the gods which represent it in accordance with the deeper magic of the eternal universe we all inhabit.
When mankind has looked at nature without the benefit of supernatural revelation, he has not been consciously aware of a Being outside of nature which is necessarily responsible for it. His reasoning to metaphysics is based entirely on his own naturalistic categories derived from his own experience. According to Moses, it took God revealing Himself to the Hebrews for anyone to understand what Paine thinks anyone can plainly see.
The goal of deism is to hold onto what the western mind, which values extreme independence of thought, views as attractive in theism while casting aside what it finds distasteful. But as C.S. Lewis remarked, Aslan is not a tame lion. If a sovereign God exists, He cannot be limited by your desires of what you'd like Him to be. For this reason, the deism of men like Paine served as a cultural stepping stone toward the atheism of later intellectuals.
For Paine, as for other deists and atheists like him, it is not that Christianity has been subjected to reason and found wanting, but that it has been subjected to his own private and culturally-determined tastes and preferences and has failed to satisfy. This is the flipside of the anti-religious claim that those who believe in a given religion only do so because of their cultural conditioning: the anti-religionist is also conditioned in a similar way. Of course, how one comes to believe a certain thing has no bearing on whether that thing is true in itself, and this is true whether Christianity, atheism, or any other view is correct. But it must be stated that the deist or atheist is not immune from the epistemic difficulties which he so condescendingly heaps on theists.
One of the befuddling ironies of Paine's work is that around the time he was writing about the revealed religions as, “no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit," the French were turning churches into “temples of reason” and murdering thousands at the guillotine (an instrument of execution now most strongly identified with France's godless reign of terror). Paine, who nearly lost his own life during the French Revolution, saw the danger of this atheism and hoped to stay its progress, despite the risk to his own life in attempting to do so.
What is odd is that Paine managed to blame this violent atheism upon the Christian faith! Obfuscated Paine:
"The Idea, always dangerous to Society as it is derogatory to the Almighty, — that priests could forgive sins, — though it seemed to exist no longer, had blunted the feelings of humanity, and callously prepared men for the commission of all crimes. The intolerant spirit of church persecution had transferred itself into politics; the tribunals, stiled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an Inquisition; and the Guillotine of the Stake. I saw many of my most intimate friends destroyed; others daily carried to prison; and I had reason to believe, and had also intimations given me, that the same danger was approaching myself."
That Robespierre's deism finally managed to supplant the revolutionary state's atheism and that peace, love, and understanding did not then spread throughout the land undermines Paine's claims. Paine felt that the revolution in politics, especially as represented in America, would necessarily lead to a revolution in religion, and that this religious revolution would result in wide acceptance of deism. The common link between these two revolutions was the idea that the individual man was sovereign and could determine for himself what was right and wrong based on his autonomous reason. What Paine was too myopic to see was that in France's violence and atheism was found the logical consequence of his individualistic philosophy. In summary, it is not Christianity which is dangerous, but the spirit of autonomy which leads inevitably into authoritarianism by way of human desire.
As should be clear by now, Paine failed to understand that human beings have a strong tendency to set impartial reason aside and to simply evaluate reality based on their desires and psychological states. This is no more obvious than in his own ideas as expressed in The Age of Reason. Like Paine's tendency to designate every book in the Old Testament which he likes as having been written originally by a gentile and translated into Hebrew, so many of his criticisms of Christian theology are far more a reflection upon himself than of revealed Christianity. One has only to look at Paine's description of Jesus Christ as a “virtuous reformer and revolutionist” to marvel that Paine was so poor at introspection so as to not understand that he was describing himself.
There is much more that could be said about this work, but in the interest of being somewhat concise, I'll end my comments here. If you found this analysis to be useful, be sure to check out my profile and look for my work discussing Paine and other anti-Christian writers coming soon.
The book seems to have had three major objectives: the support of deism, the ridicule of what Paine found loathsome in Christian theology, and the demonstration of how poor an example the Bible is as a reflection of God.
In a sense, Paine's arguments against Christian theology and scripture were meant to prop up his deistic philosophy. Paine hoped that in demonizing Christianity while giving evidences for God, he would somehow have made the case for deism. But this is not so. If Christianity is false, but God exists nonetheless, we are not left only with deism. There are an infinite number of possibilities for us to examine regarding the nature of God, and far too many left over once we have eliminated the obviously false ones. In favor of deism Paine has only one argument—his dislike of supernatural revelation, which is to say that deism appeals to his culturally derived preferences. In any case, Paine's thinking on the matter seemed to be thus: if supernatural revelation could be shown to be inadequate and the development of complex theology shown to be an error, one could still salvage a belief in God as Creator, but not as an interloper in human affairs who required mediators.
That being said, in his support of deism, Paine makes some arguments to demonstrate the reasonableness in belief in, if not the logical necessity of the existence of, God which could be equally used by Christians.
For instance, just as the apostle Paul argued in his epistle to the Romans that, "what can be known about God is plain to [even pagans], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:19-20, ESV), so also Paine can say that, "the Creation speaketh an universal language [which points to the existence of God], independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be."
The key point on which Paine differs from Paul on this issue is in his optimism about man's ability to reason to God without His assisting from the outside. Whereas Paul sees the plainness of God from natural revelation as an argument against the inherent goodness of a species which can read the record of nature and nevertheless rejects its Source's obvious existence, Paine thinks that nature and reason can and do lead us directly to the knowledge of God's existence apart from any gracious overtures or direct revelation.
On the witness of nature, Paine claims, and is quite correct, that, "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." What is not plainly clear, however, is that man is free enough from the noetic effects of sin to reach such an obvious conclusion on his own. Indeed, the attempts of mankind to create a religion which represents the truth have invariably landed them at paganism. By paganism I mean a system of belief based, as Yehezkel Kaufmann and John N. Oswalt have shown, on continuity.iv In polytheism, even the supernatural is not really supernatural, but is perhaps in some way above humans while not being altogether distinct from us. What happens to the gods is merely what happens to human beings and the natural world writ large, which is why the gods are, like us, victims of fate, and why pagan fertility rituals have attempted to influence nature by influencing the gods which represent it in accordance with the deeper magic of the eternal universe we all inhabit.
When mankind has looked at nature without the benefit of supernatural revelation, he has not been consciously aware of a Being outside of nature which is necessarily responsible for it. His reasoning to metaphysics is based entirely on his own naturalistic categories derived from his own experience. According to Moses, it took God revealing Himself to the Hebrews for anyone to understand what Paine thinks anyone can plainly see.
The goal of deism is to hold onto what the western mind, which values extreme independence of thought, views as attractive in theism while casting aside what it finds distasteful. But as C.S. Lewis remarked, Aslan is not a tame lion. If a sovereign God exists, He cannot be limited by your desires of what you'd like Him to be. For this reason, the deism of men like Paine served as a cultural stepping stone toward the atheism of later intellectuals.
For Paine, as for other deists and atheists like him, it is not that Christianity has been subjected to reason and found wanting, but that it has been subjected to his own private and culturally-determined tastes and preferences and has failed to satisfy. This is the flipside of the anti-religious claim that those who believe in a given religion only do so because of their cultural conditioning: the anti-religionist is also conditioned in a similar way. Of course, how one comes to believe a certain thing has no bearing on whether that thing is true in itself, and this is true whether Christianity, atheism, or any other view is correct. But it must be stated that the deist or atheist is not immune from the epistemic difficulties which he so condescendingly heaps on theists.
One of the befuddling ironies of Paine's work is that around the time he was writing about the revealed religions as, “no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit," the French were turning churches into “temples of reason” and murdering thousands at the guillotine (an instrument of execution now most strongly identified with France's godless reign of terror). Paine, who nearly lost his own life during the French Revolution, saw the danger of this atheism and hoped to stay its progress, despite the risk to his own life in attempting to do so.
What is odd is that Paine managed to blame this violent atheism upon the Christian faith! Obfuscated Paine:
"The Idea, always dangerous to Society as it is derogatory to the Almighty, — that priests could forgive sins, — though it seemed to exist no longer, had blunted the feelings of humanity, and callously prepared men for the commission of all crimes. The intolerant spirit of church persecution had transferred itself into politics; the tribunals, stiled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an Inquisition; and the Guillotine of the Stake. I saw many of my most intimate friends destroyed; others daily carried to prison; and I had reason to believe, and had also intimations given me, that the same danger was approaching myself."
That Robespierre's deism finally managed to supplant the revolutionary state's atheism and that peace, love, and understanding did not then spread throughout the land undermines Paine's claims. Paine felt that the revolution in politics, especially as represented in America, would necessarily lead to a revolution in religion, and that this religious revolution would result in wide acceptance of deism. The common link between these two revolutions was the idea that the individual man was sovereign and could determine for himself what was right and wrong based on his autonomous reason. What Paine was too myopic to see was that in France's violence and atheism was found the logical consequence of his individualistic philosophy. In summary, it is not Christianity which is dangerous, but the spirit of autonomy which leads inevitably into authoritarianism by way of human desire.
As should be clear by now, Paine failed to understand that human beings have a strong tendency to set impartial reason aside and to simply evaluate reality based on their desires and psychological states. This is no more obvious than in his own ideas as expressed in The Age of Reason. Like Paine's tendency to designate every book in the Old Testament which he likes as having been written originally by a gentile and translated into Hebrew, so many of his criticisms of Christian theology are far more a reflection upon himself than of revealed Christianity. One has only to look at Paine's description of Jesus Christ as a “virtuous reformer and revolutionist” to marvel that Paine was so poor at introspection so as to not understand that he was describing himself.
There is much more that could be said about this work, but in the interest of being somewhat concise, I'll end my comments here. If you found this analysis to be useful, be sure to check out my profile and look for my work discussing Paine and other anti-Christian writers coming soon.
Mandy and G.D. Burkhead (26 KP) rated Poison Study (Study, #1) in Books
May 20, 2018
Shelf Life – The Chronicles of Ixia merits closer study
Contains spoilers, click to show
This review is for the entire Chronicles of Ixia series.
The first trilogy, comprised of Poison Study, Fire Study, and Magic Study, follows Yelena Zaltana. The second series, also called the Glass series, follows her friend Opal Cowan in Storm Glass, Sea Glass, and Spy Glass. The final trilogy, Shadow Study, Night Study, and Dawn Study, is where things get a bit odd. Maria V. Snyder had thrown in a few short stories/novellas throughout from different characters’ points of view. Perhaps she got bored of just sticking to one POV, or maybe fans wanted more from the other characters, so the third trilogy is from Yelena’s POV in first person and the POV’s of multiple characters (mainly Valek, Leif, and Janco, with a few others popping in from time to time) in third person.
I’m not sure which editor thought it would be a good idea to have POV switch from first person to third person in the same novel, but—yikes—is it jarring. Even with the wonky POV stuff in the third trilogy, these books are amazing and absolutely worth your time to read. Snyder’s world-building is compelling, detailed, and original. The books take place mostly between two pre-industrial countries: Ixia and Sitia. Ixia is a post-revolution country ruled by Commander Ambrose. His personal body guard and assassin is Valek. In the first novel Yelena is in prison for murder and is offered the choice to be the Commander’s food taster in exchange for her life. She agrees, and throughout the first book she and Valek begin to fall in love.
Ixia reminded me a lot of Communist Russia or China. In its attempts to throw away the corrupt government and society that came before, it has also thrown out all culture in the process. The country has been re-divided into districts with numbers instead of names, everyone is forced to wear a uniform, all art and extravagance has been destroyed, people have to have passes to travel between districts, and magic is forbidden. Anyone born with it is killed (or so the reader is led to believe). But Maria V. Snyder does a wonderful job of showing the good with the bad in this totalitarian dictatorship. Everyone has a job and nobody goes hungry, women are now equal to men, and violence and sexual assault are intolerable. This is why Yelena ends up in prison in the first place: she murdered the man that raped her. Now, this is probably my first major gripe with the series. We learn that Commander Ambrose loathes sexual assault and will execute anyone found guilty of it, but apparently killing a rapist in self-defense is also an executable offense. And all of that being said, Ambrose still has his own personal assassin. It all feels a bit contradictory, but again, that’s what I like about this series: it does an excellent job of peeling back the layers of her fictional societies and pointing out that governments and people in power tend to be hypocritical.
Now, the series name (or rather one of them) is Chronicles of Ixia, but honestly, it should have been called Chronicles of Sitia, because that is where most of the story takes place and is by far the more interesting and vibrant country. Sitia is part jungle, part desert, and full of magic. The peoples are divided into multiple clans or tribes that are all unique and compelling. In the second book, Yelena flees to Sitia after the Commander learns she has magic, and there she finds the family she was kidnapped from as a small child. They are part of the Zaltana clan, a group of people that live high in the trees in the jungle. Whenever I read about them, I would have to remind myself that they were not wood elves or dryads, because while there is magic in these books, there are no fantastical creatures: all characters are human or animal.
Another fascinating tribe is the Sandseeds, a group of nomads in the desert known for two major things: breeding super smart horses and having Storyweavers. The Storyweavers are people who have the magical ability to see the future and guide others, but who have to do it really cryptically because reasons (I appreciate that this gets pointed out by an annoyed Yelena multiple times). And of course, the Sandseed horses are fantastic; they choose their rider and able to mentally communicate with magical people. They even have their own horse names for people that they like.
Besides the different clans throughout Sitia, there is also the capitol, the Citadel, which is home to the magic school and the Sitian Council. While very different from Ixia, Sitia is by no means perfect. Its Council epitomizes everything annoying and dysfunctional about a bureaucracy. While the council members are elected and come from every clan in Sitia, they are at best useless and at worst actively impede the main characters.
The magic school is interesting, though the story doesn’t actually spend much time there. I like how magic was done in this series: it usually runs in families, most people with it have control over one or two things (ie. fire, mind-control, telepathy, etc.), but those who have the ability to master more can become Master Magicians after enduring a daunting trial. Magic is bound in people’s blood, so blood magic is a thing and is obviously bad, and magic (and a person’s soul) can be stolen using an intricate and gruesome blood ritual that involves prolonged torture, rape, and then murder.
The power blanket is another interesting concept used in this series. Essentially is resides over the entire world and is the essence of magic, so magicians can pull from it to augment their own magic. However, if they pull too much and lose control, they can flame out, killing themselves and temporarily damaging the blanket in the process. I thought this was a good literary tool to prevent magical characters from being too OP (at least most of the time).
I especially like the romantic relationships in this series. Valek and Yelena are of course the main couple. In the first book they fall in love, in the second book they get separated, and throughout the series they regularly cross paths and save one another. Yelena and Valek are heartmates, and as the series progresses they both have to mature and learn how to trust one another. My biggest complaint about the romance is that all sex scenes are just fade to black, which I personally find a bit boring.
The other major romantic relationship is between Opal and Devlen. This one was a bit awkward. Opal actually goes through a couple of guys first: a stormdancer named Kade and another glassmaker named Ulrick. And I really liked that the author included this. Many people have multiple partners before finding their soulmate, and a woman who does is not a slut. Her relationship with Devlen, however . . . Well, she’s a more forgiving person than me.
You see, it turns out that Devlen is the man who kidnapped Opal a few years earlier and tortured her because he was trying to steal her magic. But he didn’t actually enjoy torturing her and never raped her, which I guess makes it better? Well, he manages to switch bodies with Ulrick and, as Ulrick, tricks Opal into dating him, then, when he’s discovered, kidnaps and tortures her (again) to gain more power. But then she steals his magic, he spends some time in prison, and the combination of the two miraculously turn him into a good guy, claiming that magic is what made him evil in the first place.
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t completely buy his redemption arc even at the end of the third book in the Glass series, but by the ninth book they’re still together and he’s on the good guys’ side, so I guess it was real. And I have definitely watched/read much worse evil asshole to boyfriend stories. At least Devlen genuinely feels guilty for the horrible things he did in the past and attempts to make up for them, and in her defense, Opal has to do a lot of soul-searching before she can find it in her to forgive and trust him, and even more before she can develop romantic feelings for him (that aren’t based on deception, anyway). Also, Ulrick becomes a huge jerk because of his newfound magical abilities, tries to kill Opal, and later gets assassinated by Valek. I appreciate what Maria V. Snyder is trying to do here, which is to teach through her storytelling how good people can become evil, and evil people can redeem themselves and be good. Their romance was uncomfortable to read, but it was supposed to be uncomfortable, because that’s how all parties involved felt.
Now, let’s talk about Commander Ambrose. Towards the end of the first book, Yelena discovers that Ambrose is a female to male trans person. This is revealed to be why Ambrose hates magicians so much: he is afraid that one of them will read his mind and then reveal his secret (which is how Yelena discovers it). After I read the first book, I was really pleased that Snyder did such a good job of depicting a trans person, as that’s really only a small part of his character, and those who know (mainly Valek and Yelena) don’t make a big deal out of it.
And then . . . I really wish that the author would have just left the issue of the Commander being trans alone. Yelena discovers it in the first book, she keeps it to herself because it’s nobody else’s business, the end. But by creating this weird intricate background to explain why Ambrose is trans, Snyder just kind of shoots herself in the foot.
Throughout the rest of the series, I kept hoping for some other LGBTQ+ characters to show up to redeem the blunder with Ambrose. I actually believed that Ari and Janco were a gay couple for the longest time, what with their banter and often being referred to as partners. However, if this was the author’s intention, it was never really explicitly stated, and the partner thing just seems to refer to them being partners in combat and nothing else.
The first trilogy, comprised of Poison Study, Fire Study, and Magic Study, follows Yelena Zaltana. The second series, also called the Glass series, follows her friend Opal Cowan in Storm Glass, Sea Glass, and Spy Glass. The final trilogy, Shadow Study, Night Study, and Dawn Study, is where things get a bit odd. Maria V. Snyder had thrown in a few short stories/novellas throughout from different characters’ points of view. Perhaps she got bored of just sticking to one POV, or maybe fans wanted more from the other characters, so the third trilogy is from Yelena’s POV in first person and the POV’s of multiple characters (mainly Valek, Leif, and Janco, with a few others popping in from time to time) in third person.
I’m not sure which editor thought it would be a good idea to have POV switch from first person to third person in the same novel, but—yikes—is it jarring. Even with the wonky POV stuff in the third trilogy, these books are amazing and absolutely worth your time to read. Snyder’s world-building is compelling, detailed, and original. The books take place mostly between two pre-industrial countries: Ixia and Sitia. Ixia is a post-revolution country ruled by Commander Ambrose. His personal body guard and assassin is Valek. In the first novel Yelena is in prison for murder and is offered the choice to be the Commander’s food taster in exchange for her life. She agrees, and throughout the first book she and Valek begin to fall in love.
Ixia reminded me a lot of Communist Russia or China. In its attempts to throw away the corrupt government and society that came before, it has also thrown out all culture in the process. The country has been re-divided into districts with numbers instead of names, everyone is forced to wear a uniform, all art and extravagance has been destroyed, people have to have passes to travel between districts, and magic is forbidden. Anyone born with it is killed (or so the reader is led to believe). But Maria V. Snyder does a wonderful job of showing the good with the bad in this totalitarian dictatorship. Everyone has a job and nobody goes hungry, women are now equal to men, and violence and sexual assault are intolerable. This is why Yelena ends up in prison in the first place: she murdered the man that raped her. Now, this is probably my first major gripe with the series. We learn that Commander Ambrose loathes sexual assault and will execute anyone found guilty of it, but apparently killing a rapist in self-defense is also an executable offense. And all of that being said, Ambrose still has his own personal assassin. It all feels a bit contradictory, but again, that’s what I like about this series: it does an excellent job of peeling back the layers of her fictional societies and pointing out that governments and people in power tend to be hypocritical.
Now, the series name (or rather one of them) is Chronicles of Ixia, but honestly, it should have been called Chronicles of Sitia, because that is where most of the story takes place and is by far the more interesting and vibrant country. Sitia is part jungle, part desert, and full of magic. The peoples are divided into multiple clans or tribes that are all unique and compelling. In the second book, Yelena flees to Sitia after the Commander learns she has magic, and there she finds the family she was kidnapped from as a small child. They are part of the Zaltana clan, a group of people that live high in the trees in the jungle. Whenever I read about them, I would have to remind myself that they were not wood elves or dryads, because while there is magic in these books, there are no fantastical creatures: all characters are human or animal.
Another fascinating tribe is the Sandseeds, a group of nomads in the desert known for two major things: breeding super smart horses and having Storyweavers. The Storyweavers are people who have the magical ability to see the future and guide others, but who have to do it really cryptically because reasons (I appreciate that this gets pointed out by an annoyed Yelena multiple times). And of course, the Sandseed horses are fantastic; they choose their rider and able to mentally communicate with magical people. They even have their own horse names for people that they like.
Besides the different clans throughout Sitia, there is also the capitol, the Citadel, which is home to the magic school and the Sitian Council. While very different from Ixia, Sitia is by no means perfect. Its Council epitomizes everything annoying and dysfunctional about a bureaucracy. While the council members are elected and come from every clan in Sitia, they are at best useless and at worst actively impede the main characters.
The magic school is interesting, though the story doesn’t actually spend much time there. I like how magic was done in this series: it usually runs in families, most people with it have control over one or two things (ie. fire, mind-control, telepathy, etc.), but those who have the ability to master more can become Master Magicians after enduring a daunting trial. Magic is bound in people’s blood, so blood magic is a thing and is obviously bad, and magic (and a person’s soul) can be stolen using an intricate and gruesome blood ritual that involves prolonged torture, rape, and then murder.
The power blanket is another interesting concept used in this series. Essentially is resides over the entire world and is the essence of magic, so magicians can pull from it to augment their own magic. However, if they pull too much and lose control, they can flame out, killing themselves and temporarily damaging the blanket in the process. I thought this was a good literary tool to prevent magical characters from being too OP (at least most of the time).
I especially like the romantic relationships in this series. Valek and Yelena are of course the main couple. In the first book they fall in love, in the second book they get separated, and throughout the series they regularly cross paths and save one another. Yelena and Valek are heartmates, and as the series progresses they both have to mature and learn how to trust one another. My biggest complaint about the romance is that all sex scenes are just fade to black, which I personally find a bit boring.
The other major romantic relationship is between Opal and Devlen. This one was a bit awkward. Opal actually goes through a couple of guys first: a stormdancer named Kade and another glassmaker named Ulrick. And I really liked that the author included this. Many people have multiple partners before finding their soulmate, and a woman who does is not a slut. Her relationship with Devlen, however . . . Well, she’s a more forgiving person than me.
You see, it turns out that Devlen is the man who kidnapped Opal a few years earlier and tortured her because he was trying to steal her magic. But he didn’t actually enjoy torturing her and never raped her, which I guess makes it better? Well, he manages to switch bodies with Ulrick and, as Ulrick, tricks Opal into dating him, then, when he’s discovered, kidnaps and tortures her (again) to gain more power. But then she steals his magic, he spends some time in prison, and the combination of the two miraculously turn him into a good guy, claiming that magic is what made him evil in the first place.
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t completely buy his redemption arc even at the end of the third book in the Glass series, but by the ninth book they’re still together and he’s on the good guys’ side, so I guess it was real. And I have definitely watched/read much worse evil asshole to boyfriend stories. At least Devlen genuinely feels guilty for the horrible things he did in the past and attempts to make up for them, and in her defense, Opal has to do a lot of soul-searching before she can find it in her to forgive and trust him, and even more before she can develop romantic feelings for him (that aren’t based on deception, anyway). Also, Ulrick becomes a huge jerk because of his newfound magical abilities, tries to kill Opal, and later gets assassinated by Valek. I appreciate what Maria V. Snyder is trying to do here, which is to teach through her storytelling how good people can become evil, and evil people can redeem themselves and be good. Their romance was uncomfortable to read, but it was supposed to be uncomfortable, because that’s how all parties involved felt.
Now, let’s talk about Commander Ambrose. Towards the end of the first book, Yelena discovers that Ambrose is a female to male trans person. This is revealed to be why Ambrose hates magicians so much: he is afraid that one of them will read his mind and then reveal his secret (which is how Yelena discovers it). After I read the first book, I was really pleased that Snyder did such a good job of depicting a trans person, as that’s really only a small part of his character, and those who know (mainly Valek and Yelena) don’t make a big deal out of it.
And then . . . I really wish that the author would have just left the issue of the Commander being trans alone. Yelena discovers it in the first book, she keeps it to herself because it’s nobody else’s business, the end. But by creating this weird intricate background to explain why Ambrose is trans, Snyder just kind of shoots herself in the foot.
Throughout the rest of the series, I kept hoping for some other LGBTQ+ characters to show up to redeem the blunder with Ambrose. I actually believed that Ari and Janco were a gay couple for the longest time, what with their banter and often being referred to as partners. However, if this was the author’s intention, it was never really explicitly stated, and the partner thing just seems to refer to them being partners in combat and nothing else.