Andrei Istrate asked Heather Rose Jones:

Hello Heather! I stumbled upon your page after seeing your short review of Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages". I'm halfway through Daughter of Mystery and I wanted to ask, how did you create the whole "mystery system"? What were your influences when creating it?

Heather Rose Jones Thank you for asking! (I'm adding that to my list of "interesting ways people have found my novels.")

In fact, when I was first starting to write Daughter of Mystery, I decided to keep a "development diary" where I jotted down notes about how the story and the worldbuilding developed, just for my own later amusement. (The story itself went through some fairly drastic changes as I wrote.) The story as first conceived was more of a straightforward Ruritanian romance, without overt fantastic elements.

When I started brainstorming for the nature of the conspiracy that Estefen would trick Margerit into joining, my first idea was some sort of Rosicrucian/Masonic type of group that studied alchemy and ceremonial magic. As I played with that idea, the thought came to me, "But what if the magical aspects were *real*? What if getting drawn into a magical ceremony really did have the potential for physically attacking Alpennia's rulers?"

And here in my notes from December 2007 (when I'd written up to the point of the reading of the Baron's will and was starting to think ahead to what Margerit would be doing in Rotenek) is a note that seems to answer your question very directly:

"I need to develop the 'fantasy' aspects of the world. My current ideas draw from historical supernatural practices except that in this world 'stuff works'. Examples would be alchemy (transmutation, humors, sympathetic magic, the mystic marriage?), the invocation of saints, angels (and demons) with regularly observable and supernatural consequences in the physical world (misc. charms, protections, interventions in natural law, etc.). Overall, the basic principle is 'stuff works', where knowledge and practice are the key factors with some smaller element of chance and talent. I don't want the supernatural effects to seem mechanical and there isn't any clear physical manifestation of the supernatural creatures being invoked, but the results should be systematic, not attributable to chance, and logically related to the method of invocation."

I don't know how much farther you've read in the series. In Daughter of Mystery, the supernatural elements we encounter are mostly religious in context, and in part it's because that's the way Margerit experiences them. But as the series goes on, as other characters with other interests come into focus, and as Margerit's experience of the world widens, we start seeing other venues in which "magical stuff works".

The specific aspect of the Mysteries of the Saints is drawn largely from historical folk-magic practices that use saints as intermediaries (or, if you will, as a conceptual focus for the person performing the work), shading imperceptibly into Catholic religious practices around the cults of saints. In the world of Alpennia, "low magic" is more likely to be focused around objects and arbitrary signifiers (written formulas, use of candles and tertiary relics, etc.) while "high magic" is more likely to be focused around ceremony (scripts and symbolic roles).

Every time I need a new infusion of ideas for expanding the fantastic aspects of the Alpennia books, I start by studying some real-world historic approach to magic and the supernatural. For The Mystic Marriage, this was alchemy and the lore of gemstones. For a future book (Mistress of Shadows) I'm going back to the idea of secular ceremonial magic in some of its darker forms, as well as researching folk-magic/religious practices of Islam for a character who is part of the Franco-Egyptian community in Paris. I find my writing is richer for being rooted in the complex diversity of historic beliefs and practices, even though I then adapt those to my own vision of how all these practices are part of the same underlying system (although my characters would never believe that!)

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