Summoner post Shadowbringers

[Atamis]

Something else I've been pondering. Is all this summoner lore just ascian propaganda to cause more strife via primals?
Bismark is alive and well in the first. He does not temper people, he does not run amok trying to fight everything that flies, he isn't after more and more aether, and judging by the greenery growing on him, he isn't sucking the land dry by simply existing.
Primals as we know them on the source do. All of the primals were summoned by ascian means as all the beast tribes learned from them supposedly and we have no idea how long bqck this started. The waring triad is by far the current oldest known case.
They call Bismark a fae i stead of primal, but maybe they don't have a word for them. We haven't heard of any other primal like being on the first before eden showed up nor has there been any mention of summoners.
So i am lead to believe most of the summoner lore about aether, demis, egi, and everything else is flawed. its build off a.meams of summoning that exists solely to imbalance the aether for calamities.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Bismark is alive and well in the first. He does not temper people, he does not run amok trying to fight everything that flies, he isn't after more and more aether, and judging by the greenery growing on him, he isn't sucking the land dry by simply existing.

No, that's a fundamental misunderstanding. Bismarck on the First is indeed a living thing, insofar as we can consider the fae living creatures. They — Bismarck, that is — is most definitely not a primal. But, it could well be that the Bismarck we met on the First was the original inspiration for Bismarck the Primal that we fought, on the Source, moons ago.

You've confused something very important, and that is that all the primals we've encountered on the Source are "thoughts" and "ideas" given physical form through a summoning ritual. And this is where the distinction I brought up earlier, between Creation and summoning magic, is crucial. The key distinction is that Creation magic is far more challenging, involving the creation of an entirely new idea or concept from scratch, and fuelling it with an enormous amount of aether, to create something new, from nothing.

Summoning, on the other hand, works on "second-hand" ideas. The beast tribes on the Source all have existing religions; they all worship gods that were possibly inspired by historical persons or heroes from their past (including the Vanu Vanu's primordial memory of a sky whale, ie, Bismarck). So, in times of trouble and distress, the beast tribes turn to their gods for salvatation. The Ascians manipulated this fear by teaching the beast tribes about summoning, and showing them how to channel aether into their "idea" of a god who would save them from their enemies.

So, in other words, the beast tribes weren't thinking of a completely new concept — that would involve knowledge and discipline that was way beyond them (even the Ancients, with all their wisdom, could fail a Creation project, let alone lesser mortals!). Instead, they relied on their (often very skewed) vision of their god and saviour, and used the Ascian summoning ritual to turn that idea into physical reality.

The mechanism is essentially the same: Channel and shape aether around an incorporeal idea, and turning into a corporeal reality. That being the case, the end-product — ie, the summoned or "created" entity — would require phenomenal amounts of aether to take shape. The Ancients were able to fuel this process entirely through their own aether — that was how much more powerful they were, compared to sundered mortals today.

No one alive today in the sundered worlds are capable of fuelling summoning magic through their own aether alone. And that means that summoned primal will always need to absorb environmental aether to sustain itself. Once created, any "living thing" will have that fundamental instinct for self-preservation, and that is the case here for primals as well. Once summoned, they will seek to stay around, but in so doing, they will bring about environmental disasters on the Source.

That's precisely what the Ascians want. They are constantly sowing chaos in the Source, so as to create conditions for a Rejoining. They've been trying various means of doing, through the ages. Primal-summoning is merely one out of many tools they use.