Lore: Ponies & The Celestial Wheel

(This Lore was largely crafted before season seven and the movie)

The Part Where I Throw A Bunch Of Names At You
(Maybe Skip This Bit, I Dunno)[1]

Tiamat The Destroyer, the Mother Of Dragons, has her own version of why the Sun orbits the World, but she sleeps in a remote place guarded by her children and will only speak to fellow immortals. The spirits have their own version, though currently the easiest to access is the Spirit Of Chaos, Freedom And Havoc, and getting a straight answer out of him is an exercise in non-euclidean frustration. Fortunately for the current caretakers of the heavenly bodies, Luna and Celestia are the immortal daughters of Solar Order and Lunar Harmony, respectively, with a mortal alicorn and they have heard both stories.

They know what once, long, long ago, the Sibling Suns danced together through the Void and all the little planets danced around them, as foals around their parents. Then the larger, Elder Sun died and did so violently, almost flinging its smaller sibling out into the reaches of deep space and destroyed all but one planet, the World. What spared this planet, the stories differ, but Celestia and Luna believe that both sides contain elements of truth. That both Bahamut The Preserver and Harmony, Spirit Of Love, Friendship And Good, sacrificed themselves to save the planet.

That both Tiamat and Discord twisted the broken cosmos, and she and Order settled things into a new place. Order, Spirit Of Order, Stability And Tyranny, took his position within the Sun and his form as a soot colored elk with burning antlers, traits he'd pass in one form another to his descendants. Rainbow-maned and white-scaled hippocampus Harmony had the greatest concentration of her remains interred within a tomb formed from the rubble of the destroyed planets and made into the World's Moon. Much more of her remains fused with discard stellar dust to create facsimiles of stars and Strife, Spirit Of Hatred, Conflict And Evil, gathered the rest. She scattered Harmony's elements and her crystal heart over the World, as it was in Strife's nature to plant the seeds for her own destruction.

The Corpse Sun was cast out to a point equidistant from the World as its living sibling. In its death throes, it cast off cosmic volumes of its mass into the Void. What remained of its core collapsed, not into infinite black but into an even stranger mass the size of a mountain and the weight of the Sun. It was used as a counter-weight to its sibling and the Moon set as a kind of lever to move it around from a distance. This was the Celestial Wheel.

Spirits and immortal dragons, drained from their work, retreated into dormancy and the stewardship of the Wheel and rulership of the World passes into new ownership. First was Tiamat's children but by greed and pride, rage and gluttony, by both sloth and passion, the dragons lost control of the Wheel, the World nearly ended but only an Age did and new stewards rose. And so it was, Age after Age.

In the Age before this one, the Wheel was stewarded by sphinxes, minotaurs and diamond dogs and their reign ended by pride, rage and greed. Sek'bastet Sun-Eye demanded the Heavens recognize her superiority and was rebuked thoroughly. Ahribull cursed his own people when they ended his rampage with earth's fire and struck a fatal flaw into their great machinery with his last, spiteful breath. Cerberus the Plutarchs dug too deeply for gems and was struck dumb as they gazed upon the Heart Of Tartarus.

The Celestial Choir went silent and the sphinx race scattered to the winds. The minotaur's Astronomicon detonated, transforming the Island Of Cretes into the Cretin Islands. The trail of amber pylons, the so-called Yellow Brick Road, that redirected the Heavens' own power into the engine that moved it, collapsed into a useless mess, just as the bloodlines of the diamond dogs did into inbreeding as maddening greed made them covet kin as much as gems. So that Age ended, and the new Age of ponies began.

Others tried to take over the Wheel, The Sovereigns Of Seasons to the west, Sun Wu Kong, Shen Long, Baba Yaga and the kirin to the east, but it was the ponies who succeeded first and after them the Sisters. It was not, as the stories remember, the sole work of the unicorns but a collaboration of all three tribes. Part of the reason the Sisters, and for a thousand years just the one, were able to command the Wheel like none other before them was because they possessed the magic of all three tribes.

[1]Cliffnotes: The world Equestria takes place on, simply called "The World", used to be part of a binary star system. The larger star went supernova and dragon not-gods and/or spirit not-gods like Discord intervened to make sure the World wasn't destroyed. This broke physics so bad that they had to make the remaining Sun spin around the World, using the neutron star that remained after the nova as a counterweight and building the Moon as a kind of visible handle for that. While other people had a hand in upkeeping this system called "The Celestial Wheel" throughout history, now it's done by the power of the three pony tribes.]

Unicorns, The Spell Ponies

It is said that before the Celestial Sisters, unicorn wizards valiantly sacrificed their lives to shift Sun and Moon across Sky, as only the magicraft of the horned ones was capable of it. That they gave of themselves to this noble cause for the good of all pony kind and all the peoples of the World. 

And this is all technically true, but it glosses over some details. The unicorns were the only pony tribe capable of upholding their part of the Wheel, although it was certainly the most arduous part. In the time before the Sisters, nearly their entire society bent their efforts, in one form or another, to sustaining their portion of the Wheel. 

“Wizard” is the name of unicorn magi, a practitioner of a race's active magic as opposed to simply possessing passive magic. Unicorns have none of the latter, save the mark magic common to all ponies. Other races possess mechanically similar magic, such as the simian kong, the abjuring wendigo, the anti-magic hippopotamus, the cryokinetic penguins and the aquakinetic kelpie, but it's one of the less common magics to develop.

The nature of wizardry is thought made into reality, with unicorns having a particular bent for manipulating space. Barring modern advancements, unicorn magic passes like a thought, transient in nature unless focus and energy is continuously paid into the working. “One and done”, a single effort of will and the spell is complete, and finished just as quickly. This is both the strength and weakness of wizardry.

Long before the sisters, the mightiest of magi fed their lives into the Celestial Wheel. Where the workings of the other tribes sustained themselves for a time, the unicorn wizards had to repeat the spell, day in and day out. Some perished in the effort, giving a lasting push with their final breath that would keep the Wheel going for days. It gave their fellows time to mourn and recover. Some wizards gave their lives on purpose, sacrificing themselves when they knew a beloved peer was close to falling as well.

And fall they did, fell like flies. It soon became apparent that it was an unsustainable model, there simply weren't enough unicorn magi to sustain the losses. It was Clover The Clever that managed a solution when she led the unicorn wizards to break rank with the other pony magi and break the unspoken rules. She broke the traditions of master and apprentice and opened schools to teach magic to the masses. With a vast pool of capable wizards, the unicorns could rotate stewards for the Celestial Wheel and reduce the strain a great deal.

The other magi saw this as a betrayal and, as more and more unicorn commoners joined the elite rank of magi, the other tribes saw the spell ponies become arrogant. This worsened the already growing divide between the tribes in those days. Unicorn wizardry was just about the only magical pony art that survived mostly intact when the Celestial Sisters render the mortal magi elite obsolete. With schools and disseminated teaching, the magic of the spell ponies carried on.

One aspect of unicorn wizardry died out, forgotten on purpose by the Celestial Sisters, smothered especially by the eldest. The death curse, the ability to fuel a spell with one last burst of power and actually make it stick, overcoming the temporal power of living thought with the permanency of death. Aforementioned sacrificial unicorns used it to spare their comrades, but too many wizards, especially after the art's mass dissemination, used it to bring a brutal and spiteful end to vendettas. Especially commoners trying to get at seemingly untouchable nobles, it caused total chaos and Celestia worked diligently to see it forgotten.

Pegasi, The Sky Ponies

The pegasus magi played the same role as the sphinxes’ own Celestial Choir. Unlike the correlation between the unicorn wizardry and minotaur artifice, sphinxes used the same magic; the spirit speech of shamanism. This magic is shared by a number of others in a myriad of forms; caribou divination(a), cow necromancy, antelope beast-speech, buffalo earth song(b), sasquatch hedge magic, orangutan plant-speech, hippocampus bardic magic, penguin ice spirits, goat diabolism, thestral dream magic and both lung and coatl dragons, who have the same divine bent as the sphinxes.

(a) Under The Northern Lights by CoastalSarv)
(b) Are you familiar with Estee's Triptych Continuum and her interpretation of earth pony magic? Well, that's how I imagine buffalo magic.)

To see the invisible, touch the intangible, hear the inaudible, speak with the deaf,[2](c) this is the summarization of shaman spirit magic, the magic of the pegasus. Most pegasi are attuned to spirits of wind and sky and weather, flighty and whimsical spirits perceived more by feel than some sort of sight, who speak in a language of cold fronts and pressure changes and respond more to physical force and personality than spoken word. A pegasus with a huge ego and capable of great speeds could whip the sky in whatever shape she pleased in record time.

[2] Or "speak with the dead" in the case of cows.]
(c) If hafta hear another Gurren Lagann reference one more time)

Not all pegasus bend their wills to the weather. Their cousins, the thestrals, are attuned to spirits of the night, of dreams, darkness and deception, and some pegasi can achieve divination, necromancy, beast-speech and more. Certainly the ancient pegasus shaman from before the Sisters had to emulate the magic of the sphinxes to beseech Sun and Moon. Unlike the Celestial Choir, they could not sing sweetly from the ground but had to make the dangerous journey up to where Sky ended and Void began and call out desperately through nothing as life was sapped from their bodies.

The mortality rate was not nearly as high as the unicorns' but enough of their magi perished, taking their secrets to the grave, that the other shaman surreptitiously disseminated the procedures to important workings without spelling out the basic secrets of their magic. This is part of why, even to this day, pegasi remember many weather working techniques but do not seem to recall the mechanics behind their magic.

Arion, The Earth Ponies

If unicorns pushed Sun and Moon along and pegasi convinced them to go along with it in the first place, the earth ponies marked the path that they would follow. They did so with standing stone circles in those ancient days when they were still called 'arion', a name as forgotten as the purpose of those mysterious monoliths today. That is to say, only remembered by a pair of very old mares and another handful of assorted immortals.

As pegasus magic interacts with the ethereal spirits that live all around them, earth pony magic manipulates the ebb and flow, currents and tides, of the passive magic that naturally exists in the world. This form of magic is often called druidism, although sometimes referred to as geomancy, especially when the speaker, usually a unicorn, is trying to fold shamanism under the former label. The two tribes are set apart from unicorns for having a secondary and passive magic, flight and strength, whereas unicorns have only the one trait, a magic pulled from themselves and pushed out into the world.

Earth pony magic is aspected towards, well, earth, stone and vegetation. They often know how the arrangement of things will affect rocks and plants, how the arrangement of rocks and plants affect things or both. A "rock farm" rearranging stones to affect the flow of magic in an entire nation, boulders set in magical hotspots to grow valuable gems, a farming family's old rituals drawing on the chaotic energies of nearby haunted forest to produce a valuable fruit, a tundral city arranged to channel all of its inhabitants love into a single foci producing a protective barrier, a florist truthfully telling you how her flower arrangements will affect the flow of energy at your wedding.

A sizable minority of earth ponies go in a different direction with their magic, interacting directly with the background magic all around them, called rangers by old texts on the subject. A ranger can feel vibrations of magic echoing through time, allowing her to predict the future or remember the past. She can travel through the tiny streams of magic to seemingly teleport, or store objects away in the ether. 

Few other races wield this magic; such as the iceberg pushing penguins, the rock gardening qirin, the whale herding and coral planting dolphins and sheer elephantine landscape reshaping. Druidic workings are involved projects but on land they tend to be lasting, involving only light upkeep once finished. When the arion druids maintained their part of the Wheel, few deaths resulted and only in the case of an accidentally dropped stone or the once in a few generations emergency that required some noble sacrifice.

The druidic elite had little reason to disseminate their precious secrets to the masses. When the Celestial Sister toppled them from their privileged positions as keepers of the Heavens, fewer and fewer gifted young earth ponies presented themselves for arduous apprenticeship. More than a little bitter, the druids took their magical secrets to the grave, save those who passed them on to their descendants, and the world was lesser for it.

Others

The three tribes cover three what is approximately five to six of the major forms of magic. Their closest neighbors, minotaurs, gryphons and somewhat distantly yaks, cover the last few. For the sake of completion, these magics will be covered. The label of enchantment has been used to describe all of these forms of magic, despite the wide differences between them, a label also applied to hippocampi magic, enchanting one's own form, enchanting an object and enchanting another's mind. Used by different speakers to describe different things, the label has become essentially useless.

The minotaurs practice invocation magic, also called artificery and alchemy alternatively. They create things and the things they create are imbued with magic. Their magic is chaotic, wild, filled with endless possibilities and liable to go out of control, which the ordered minds and culture of the minotaurs cannot deny but still reject. When they make mechanical wonders with their magic, they seek to recreate it over and over until all the magic is lost and there is only the mechanical. 

Once, minotaurs did not keep their magic in check. Once, madbulls and madcows, the strongest of their kind, ruled over the rest with inventions forged from impossibility. Once, they built a great engine that pulled Sun and Moon across the sky. Once, they lived on a single great island and not a shattered archipelago. That was a long time ago. 

No more. 

Other races share in this magic; the gizmonk with the exact same magic and a complete lack of constraint, the donkeys that infuse mundane creations with order and perfection, zebras, abyssinians and octopi with their potion craft, penguin ice sculpting, coyote bone magic, svaltarfar and their enchanted metallurgy and oni with their enchanted woodworking.

The gryphons and the yaks practice exvocation magic, a magic of movement, an art of aligning one's soul to concepts and one's body to the soul. The difference lies in execution, be it martial arts or dancing respectively. Martial exvocation tends to only change the user's body to some new and often combative nature while dancers become a locus of change that radiates out over the environment.

Gryphon masters of their Way Of Winds transform their bodies into weather, yak dancers become avatars of physicality and competition that drive their people to great heights, chupacabra that outright shapeshift in disturbing and monstrous forms for battle and healing, dancing with dire wolves to bring a bounty of nature in even desolation, tengu ninjutsu, the mind bending harpies, kinetic driven rhinoceri, changelings and penguins.

Two other cases worth mentioning are the smaug dragons and giraffes. Giraffes have vast reserves of magic potential, above average for other races, but lack an instinctual outlet for this potential, including an innate caution towards madness causing dark magic. As a result, more than a few giraffes are absolutely insane with power.

Smaug dragons, the kind of dragons that live in the Dragon Lands nears Equestria, have vast power equal to their size and even an instinct to avoid dark magic, but a lack of innate magic craft and benefits compared to their sheer size, strength and fire breath leads most smaug dragons to simple ignore active spellcrafting entirely.