Averroes
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The Setting:
- Magic has always existed in Averroes, but in a much more contained manner than most would imagine. Magic is extremely difficult to learn, and someone could spend their entire life studying it and only barely learn to use simple fire magic. Very impractical and largely considered the practice of the elite.
- This changed with the early work for Ibn Rushd in the late 1100s, speculating how magic could be improved, and that learning to master magic was the greatest challenge of any people. His ideas inspired Giordano Bruno, who in the late 1500s created the first bounded field.
- Bounded field mechanics are simple enough: Anyone who dies within the field has their soul contained. If a contained soul is available within the field when a child is born, the two souls effectively merge. While the child is still their own unique self, as they grow they'll gain the knowledge of their past lives and their magic. This effect stacks: every successive rebirth includes all knowledge from all previous lives.
- While Bruno was executed for his heresy, his idea spread. Initial bounded fields were small (a single large house, a village), the advantages of bounded field use were almost immediately obvious and only grew more present. While some religions declared it blasphemy of the highest order (seeing it as preventing a soul from moving on to the afterlife), others argued that the souls were actually being passed on, and only the worldly knowledge remained.
- By the modern day, entire countries (and coalitions of countries) have formed together with bounded fields. For the most part, the larger the bounded field, the better. Larger bounded fields come with major advantages (knowing the native tongue of your past lives is a prominent one), and the use of more and more advanced and varied magics has lead to bounded field countries dominating any and all world conflicts. Countries still exist which reject the idea of bounded fields, but they're falling farther and farther behind.
Cultural Notes:
- You're considered your own truly distinct person from your past lives. For the most part, discrimination isn't about the people you were in a past life, but instead about the number of people you were in past lives. Those on their first lives are officially equal with everyone else but absolutely looked down on with a level of pity. They have to go to school and learn everything for the first time (where as second generation onward simply do refresher courses).
- Generally speaking, it's understood that someone who has a past life will start to demonstrate it around the age of four or five.
- Different groups and cultures exist and there's a large amount of variety. There are at least a few areas and countries with monarchies where their previous leader is found and re-enthroned, effectively giving them the same king they've had for the past few hundred years. Overall there is a much stronger push for adoption culturally, as blood ties are seen as less important. Some cultures outright reject bounded fields for a variety of reasons, but these groups are shrinking over time as people move out, hoping to give their kids a better future.
- Generally speaking, more religious areas tend to not have bounded fields. South of Europe (think Italy) rejected them, while Northern Europe embraced them.