could one learn a weave from a book?

[ROB_88]

i got to thinking the other day, taht in the descriptions of when they place weaves, it sounds like a very systematic process.

so if the description is good enough in an old book, could you learn the right way to place the flows and make a weave without seeing it before hand?

is this how Moiraine learned Balefire?

[MasterAblar]

i got to thinking the other day, taht in the descriptions of when they place weaves, it sounds like a very systematic process.

so if the description is good enough in an old book, could you learn the right way to place the flows and make a weave without seeing it before hand?

is this how Moiraine learned Balefire?

 

No reason you couldn't. It's easier if someones shows you the weave but it's not absolutely necessary. Egwene learned how to travel nearly on her own, with Moghedien providing the final tip. No one showed her the weave, so there's no reason someone could not learn a weave from a book.

[Alric]

Hah, I was thinking of Moiraine before the page even loaded.

 

I would guess so too. Some weaves are very intricate and I would assume that those would be near impossible to describe, but others are described as very simple. So I would guess that some weaves could indeed be learned or (with some effort) figured out from a book.

 

 

[Ananta]

Could they draw how to do the weaves? D: Different colors being different elements.

[Luckers]

Egwene figures out how to make cuendillar based on little more than a rough description by Moghedien, so it does seem likely.

[balefired-ed2]

I would guess that it would be possible, but not entirely reliable. While using the one power does seem very systematic, it also seems to require a great deal of use to obtain the required skill and power level to be good at it. I kind of look at it like boxing. Everyone can throw a punch, but very few can do so skillfully and powerfully without practice. So while some channelers that are either very experienced or very intuitive and strong could probably do it, I would doubt the average channeler could.

[Sharaman]

If you can have a notation for music, you can have one for weaves.

Even easier since channelers "see" them. So they should be able to draw annotated descriptions.

Frankly I've always considered this a gap in RJ's worldbuilding.

The AoL with all its accomplishments and its dependencies on channeling didn't have system(s) of recording at least basic useful weaves.

Post-AoL despite remaining a highly literate society with at least one major centre for studying the OP, didn't have a system.

How did the Brown Ajah and the entire AoL miss something this simple?

[Lenlo]

I like to think that they never wrote down, if they could, any weaves in books because if those books got out of the WT than less novices would come to the WT. After all, if you can learn basic weaves, enough to survive at least, why would you travel all the way to Tar Valon? Now of course it would be more difficult to learn them purely from a book, same as trying to learn a college course with out the professor.

 

Just my two cents, Len.

[jsbrads]

Of course after the breaking the White Tower would keep more power by not writing them down, not that I think that is why they didn't, maybe they just never thought of it.

To put things in context, excluding the last hundred years, 90+% of the population never bothered to learn to read and write, we take it for granted that writing is common today, but over the course of history, it wasn't.

[Sharaman]

RJ very deliberately created a literate society - everybody knows their letter.

The AS have their 13th Depository - no reason why the books would get out.

No hint anywhere that any weaves notation was ever developed either in AoL or later.

[Byzantine279]

It is entirely possible no one saw the point. Perhaps there were books about weaves in the AOL and they were simply destroyed during the breaking, we know for a fact that almost nothing made it through the breaking, particularly when it came to channelers, so I don't see why books on weaving would be any different. The WT likely never thought about it, they don't realize a lot of things which we think of as obvious, in part because we are, as a rule, taught to think creatively, and spend our childhood imagining, something that Aes Sedai could vastly benefit from, but would never think of.

[Sharaman]

The specific books might disappear but the knowledge and memory of notation would not, if it existed at all. Many AS survived the Breaking and the WT was established by them and the ones they taught. The fact that weave notation is never mentioned makes it likely that there's never been weave notation - not in the AOL or later. That is a face-palm omission, given the level of research that went into it and the obsessive habit AS and AoL-ites in general share with our academia in that they write things down.

[Mr Ares]

Actually, no AS survived the Breaking, or at least the full length of it. Thus all the post-Breaking AS were those who became AS during the Breaking, a time when they might well have had more important things to do than learn a system of notation. After the Breaking, they could have created one, but why bother? As for whether they had one before the Breaking, so much was lost that we cannot say with any degree of reliability whether they had one or not.

[Ferdawoon]

We are told people learn the weaves by watching them.

 

If you know the basics of channeling and weaving, having a weave explained can be enough for you to piece things together to make a working weave.

 

Just as in all the magazines with sowing patterns and knitting patterns and things like that. Assuming the reader have the basic grasp of how to use these patterns, they can create the described product.

 

On the other hand: Create a Ter'angreal that when activated give you a catalogue of all the weaves in it, and then have it perform the weave as some form of illusion using colored strings.

[Byzantine279]

Ohh, nice idea Ferdawoon, I wouldn't have thought of that.

 

Actually, on that note anyone else a bit annoyed that they just left the book Ter'angreal, even after discovering it is a repository of knowledge from the AoL (mostly stories, of course, but still...)?

[jsbrads]

Actually, no AS survived the Breaking, or at least the full length of it. Thus all the post-Breaking AS were those who became AS during the Breaking, a time when they might well have had more important things to do than learn a system of notation. After the Breaking, they could have created one, but why bother? As for whether they had one before the Breaking, so much was lost that we cannot say with any degree of reliability whether they had one or not.

 

AS survived the breaking, the two AS who found the aeil in the waste and gave them Rhuiden were pre breaking AS, they were just friggin old and devoted all their energy to projects to direct the course of history rather than teach their weaves

[Suttree]

Actually, no AS survived the Breaking, or at least the full length of it. Thus all the post-Breaking AS were those who became AS during the Breaking, a time when they might well have had more important things to do than learn a system of notation. After the Breaking, they could have created one, but why bother? As for whether they had one before the Breaking, so much was lost that we cannot say with any degree of reliability whether they had one or not.

 

AS survived the breaking, the two AS who found the aeil in the waste and gave them Rhuiden were pre breaking AS, they were just friggin old and devoted all their energy to projects to direct the course of history rather than teach their weaves

 

No they weren't..

 

Interview: Nov 15th, 1998

TPOD Signing Report - Michael Martin (Paraphrased)

Michael Martin

 

My first question: "Was the Aes Sedai who initiated the Pact of Rhuidean from the Age of Legends?" (From The Shadow Rising).

Robert Jordan

 

 

(Pause) "No." (Pause) "No, she was not from the Age of Legends."

Michael Martin

 

My reason for asking had to do with the Oath Rod theory about agelessness and such.

[Thrasymachus]

Another possibility for why the channelers of the Age of Legends may not have desired to come up with some systematic way to write down how to do weaves is that it may always be possible to weave things more than one way, and that they didn't want to come to favor one way of weaving a thing over another, preferring to let each channeler weave for whatever effect they desired in their own ways. In other words, they were resistant to any attempt to standardize weaving. We do know that at least in some cases, it is difficult to learn a weave to create a specific kind of effect, if one has used a different weave to produce that same effect before. Aviendha exhibits such difficulty in learning gateways because she wove it a different way when she fled from Rand. So we know that at least in some cases, it's possible to weave to the same effect in more than one way.

 

Having a standardized system of weaving that they could write down would mean having entries like "Lightball: this is how you weave a lightball -[here is where you put the annotation describing a weave that creates a lightball]" But if they didn't want to standardize weaving, they could, and would, still have written of it in terms of the effects your weave creates doing something like, "To make a lightball, generally you want to use Air to isolate a sphere of gas from the surrounding atmosphere, and then thread Fire into and through that sphere to separate and ignite that gas into a cold luminescent plasma." A Third-Ager reading such a description might be able to puzzle out what to do to make a lightball through reading the description, but have no idea what a cold luminescent plasma was, and only make a lightball because they happened to get lucky with how they wove the Fire. They might also weave the Fire in a different way, and cause an explosion, or something else.

[Barid Bel Medar]

I doubt the AoL AS would have imagined a need to do so, they certainly could not predict the Breaking. (although you could argue that they would have started preserving knowledge after the War of Shadow got really nasty)

 

However, I think they just didn't see the need. Their understanding of the OP far surpasses anything the WT knows currently. It would have been as natural as breathing, they would not have to record weaves because it was easy for them to learn by linking etc...

 

Of course, this is just a suggestion, I think they probably did record certain weaves, certainly experimental weaves and such.

 

However, it is important to keep in mind how much was lost over the years.

 

First we have the breaking, which basically destroyed the whole world and literally transformed it with whole cities destroyed and mountains literally moved. Most documents like written weaves would have been destroyed by the end of the Breaking, however, it is not unlikely that some still survived, and the AoL AS would certainly have preserved the information as best they could.

 

However, we then have the Trolloc Wars, which destroyed a great deal again. In the BWB it mentions how much was lost. Certainly the Post-Breaking Aes Sedai were much more skillful than the current ones, and it is probable that they still preserved a fair bit of AoL knowledge. The Trolloc Wars, lasting around 200 years, ravaged even Tar Valon itself. (I am quite sure I remember correctly, but I could be wrong here)

 

Then later when Hawkwing's empire crumbled and rebellion spread, another mass-destruction occurred, further knowledge was lost in this period. Relatively few documents from Hawkwing's era remain (although it is still a considerable amount in comparison).

 

So it is not hard to see how AoL books about weaves could have been completely lost. Yet still we do not know that the 13th Depository does not hold such things. It is insinuated that this is how Moiraine learned of balefire after all, (although the knowledge of balefire was always around, just forbidden).

 

I do not see any problems with the logic here.

 

 

To directly reply to the OP, yes, I cannot see why it would be impossible. As mentioned, Egwene learns off Moggy's hints (I am not sure if this involved any demonstrations of weaves that Egwene adapted though, but I don't think so) Besides, learning the weave by watching someone else cannot be the only way. How would channelling even exist, Tamyrlin certainly had nobody to teach him/her, obviously they didn't have a book either, but if someone can create weaves by instinct or trial and error, there is no excuse why they couldn't learn from a book.

 

Keeping in mind, I am not saying that it could be drawn (it may be possible, but I do not know), nor am I saying that it could be explained and replicated with precision. But certainly they could read a book which gives a description of a weave and learn it from that, even if they have to adapt it.

[Kaznen]

I think it comes down to how channelers view the OP.

 

The AoL AS, the AM, and Nyneave look at the OP as a kind of instrument of science. Once they established a theory of what they were trying to accomplish they would use the OP to test the theory out.

 

Remember Asmo and Rands' tutoring sessions were never Asmo saying "take some fire like so, a little spirit, and some water...And there is the weave."

 

He explained the theories of even the simplest weaves and Rand had to figure it out.

 

While all the modern female channelers (except Nyneave) look at the OP as a skill set. "Do this and this get, a fireball. Do this and that, healing" is how they learned to channel. While Nyneave (and to a lesser extent Eggy and Elayne) didn't look at what a weave did but why.

 

I think of all the women in the WT Nyneave would be the only one an AoL AS would think of as an AS.

[Naresh]

We are told people learn the weaves by watching them.

 

If you know the basics of channeling and weaving, having a weave explained can be enough for you to piece things together to make a working weave.

 

Just as in all the magazines with sowing patterns and knitting patterns and things like that. Assuming the reader have the basic grasp of how to use these patterns, they can create the described product.

 

On the other hand: Create a Ter'angreal that when activated give you a catalogue of all the weaves in it, and then have it perform the weave as some form of illusion using colored strings.

 

I am reminded of the ter'angreal statue that serves as a repositority for an untold number of books (found among the Kin hoard if I recall). It has sections for fiction and non-fiction, so it seems completely resonable that some of the nonfiction could be centered around the creation of weaves in just such a manner as you describe.

 

As for the original topic, I too have to concur that a suitably insightful channeler who has learned to weave based on the mechanics of channeling rather than the memorization of set weaves should be able to infer how to create a weave to match a description. Unfortunately, it seems the White Tower method of teaching is more of the latter and less of the former- evidenced by the multitude of useless testing weaves.

[Knivy]

Are we sure weaves are made in three dimensional space? Also, with the AoL AS, and even current AS living hundreds of years, why would feel the need to write everything down? The one possible thing i can think of is healing theory, but it seems like they knew pretty much everything about that. Additionally, AS seem very closed about their knowledge, holding what they know for any potential advantage in the future, and writing that down would gain nothing for themselves. The obvious error in this idea is the fact that browns hate the loss of knowledge..

[Andrew Coleman]

Such as the the weaves Moraine learns in NS when she joins the Blue Ajah that only Blues know

[Knivy]

I have not yet read NS, but that does support.

[boli]

Are we sure weaves are made in three dimensional space? Also, with the AoL AS, and even current AS living hundreds of years, why would feel the need to write everything down? The one possible thing i can think of is healing theory, but it seems like they knew pretty much everything about that. Additionally, AS seem very closed about their knowledge, holding what they know for any potential advantage in the future, and writing that down would gain nothing for themselves. The obvious error in this idea is the fact that browns hate the loss of knowledge..

 

They are made in at the least 4 dimention space not including time

 

The weaves come from them but also the source... read Rand's description of the cleansing; but it'll show weaving is in at least 4 dimentionable space. (Black cords, and being able to see power conduits etc).