It is probably too late to have this reflect in the official cannon, but tying fey as strongly to occult traditions as primal traditions feels much more in line with the stories being told about them in Golarion than having both the first world and the elemental planes rest qsquarely in the realm of primal magic. The occult tradition really needs some lore beyond the old ones and Lovecraftian unknown terrors in pathfinder.
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Are there planes tied to specific magical traditions? I thought magical essences were things that transcended planes? Like there's mental essence everywhere there are minds, material essence everywhere there's stuff, vital essence everywhere there are minds, and spiritual essence everywhere there are souls.
The Magic traditions are more than just the combinations of magical essences. Magically and as areas of knowledge they fit around themes that are bigger and different than “the combination of 2 essences.” Fey creatures feel as connected to themes of occultism as much as themes of primal magic in Golarion and would benefit from leaning in to that, in my opinion.
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I could see it being linked to the concept of the First World as a draft of reality.
Maybe the deities' first attempt was centered on two Traditions encapsulating the 4 Essences : Primal for Vital and Material and Occult for Mental and Spiritual.
But it ended up less than perfect, with the Essences still leaking and blending in odd shapes and ways, and was one of the concepts that ended up discarded when they created the final version of the Universe.
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Yeah, I could see the First World working as a FIrst Draft of reality if the Gods were trying to use opposed essences together- trying to combine material and spiritual essences and trying to combine vital and mental essences, which leads to the sort of fundamental instability of the first world (where more powerful natures can just rework the area around them through force of will.) Specifically, the material/spiritual and vital/mental pairs want to decouple, and free magical ions naturally want to bond with nn essence that does not repel them.
You just need to imagine a mechanism by free vial and material essences want to bond with each other and free spiritual and mental essences want to bond with each other? Perhaps the first draft of reality simply picked the wrong pairs? Or worked on a "attract" rather than "repel" model (similar to how we imagine electricity as a positive flow of particles because of Franklin, when it's actually precisely the opposite.)