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angharaI just read a comprehensive essay on the subject, which is well worth reading - go here to do likewise - and although I don't agree with EVERYTHING this guy says he makes some wonderful points, and he is also well-read enough to quote from quite a number of other people with names that are quite luminous in the genre who had things to say on the same subject. I'm not going to do that - the quotage, I mean - but the piece did stir up the subject in my own mind and I'm going to throw out a few ideas here.
Fantasy is a lens which sharpens and clarifies the sliver of reality viewed through it, or at least that's what the very best fantasy is. Magic is one of the tools used to accomplish this, and it's a powerful one. I'll even go so far to say that it's a threatening one, because there is, and always has been, that propensity to react against something that affects you deeply.
Sufficiently advanced magic takes on a reality all of its own and begins to be something believed in on its own terms, with something approaching religious faith. This is possibly the reason why the more fundamental Christian ilk feels so violently threatened by such things as the magic in Harry Potter, because they confuse a powerful system of magic being used to shape a fictional story and certain aspects of the reality in which it is based with a potential rival to their own creed and dogma and set of beliefs and a false dichotomy of "people who like and believe THIS cannot possibly believe OURmagic faith and so they must be like be our enemies". And enemies are there to be attacked. And thus magic gets a reputation because it's batting against an already established system which is entrenched, and very much opposed to the things that the new fantasy might be bringing in with it.
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superversive writes from the POV of a Catholic baseline – and that may be the reason why I instantly put the thing into a Christian frame in that paragraph above. But I am going to take this one step further, and perhaps into contentious territory. If any sufficiently advanced technology, as the quote goes, is indistinguishable from magic then it is also possible that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a religion.
If anything that is beyond our comprehension or ability to explain away by empirical means may be tagged with the word “magic”, then the Christian mythos starts to drip with the thing – what are miracles if not magic? Changing water into wine? Walking on water? Resurrection, for that matter…? But over the course of two thousand years the magic has hardened into a cracked outer shell of dogma. It is no longer the original magic but the recasting of that magic into something useful and controllable by a series of human interpreters who sought to use the instances of true magic into something that supported their own thesis, or theory, or grip on power.
I believe there is real magic in belief. I truly believe that sometimes wishing for something hard enough actually does make it come true because the sheer power of the act of visualisation often means that you are, however unwittingly, also working in real-terms for the manifestation of that thing in your life. I remember reading Richar Bach’s “Illusions: the adventures of a reluctant Messiah” (I couldn’t remember the exact title so I just looked it up and this jumped out at me from one of the book’s Amazon reviews: “I'm a Christian, but believe that when you move beyond a literal interpretation of Christ's words and see the symbolic message in them, it's not too different from what's in this book. But that's a big leap for most Christians and this book will probably make their blood boil).” – this encapsulates precisely the conundrum I was talking about up there in the third paragraph…) Specifically, I am thinking about the blue feather incident, where the reluctant Messiah of the title instructs our POV character, his equally reluctant disciple, on the principles of visualisation. Visualise something, the Messiah says, and it will manifest in your life. All right, says the disiple, a blue feather. The Messiah raises an eyebrow but goes, okay, blue feather. CONCENTRATE on it.
Next thing, they’re passing a dairy delivery truck and our disciple’s eyes go wide. Hey, LOOK, he says, and sure enough, on the side of the truck it says BLUE FEATHER DAIRIES.
This is where it gets interesting.
The disciple says that he expected a “real” blue feather. Yes, says the Messiah, but how did you visualise this when you invited it into your life? Were you holding it in your hand or was it just, like, floating disembodied in space?… Floating, the disciple admits. Well, the Messiah explains, that accounts for it. You didn’t personalise the magic and all you did was manifest a generic iteration of the item that you were seeking, not the thing itself in your possession.
Oooooh. It’s MAGIC. It’s real magic because this is delievered utterly matter-of-factly, as though it were common knowledge, as though anybody could do it.
But this is where the organised and dogmatic faith departs from the pure unfettered faith of a child not yet trained to obey all the “rules”. The original miracles are crusted over by the barnacles of creed, words that are repeated verbatim every Sunday to the point of becoming invisible, and completely detached from the things that they may actually mean. True, there are occasional intra-dogmatic kerfuffles within denominations who argue until they foam at the mouth whether “Body of Christ” and “Blood of Christ” are representations of the things they puport to be or whether they MAGICALLY (and I use the word advisedly) transform into the actual real thing when the priest intones the words above the plate and the chalice. Magic is rich and powerful stuff. Powerful enough to make the faithful, who would otherwise recoil at the idea of eating human flesh or drinking human blood, accept even the most potent of the interpretations of those words when they are uttered by a consecrated being over a consecrated thing and freely partake of it despite the implications and moral and ethical contradictions inherent in what they believe they are consuming.
True magic lies in weaving together something that is impossible with something that is yearning for the impossible in such a way that the impossible thing becomes not just possible but inevitable.
This is what writers do every day.
What is it that makes magic come alive for the reader? Is it that the writer must believe in it first, and to what degree should that belief be taken – philosophical, empirical, dogmatic? What is it about magic that pulls in the human mind? What are the riptides and the undertows of that wine-dark sea in which we all like to occasionally drown?
What makes magic… for YOU?…
Fantasy is a lens which sharpens and clarifies the sliver of reality viewed through it, or at least that's what the very best fantasy is. Magic is one of the tools used to accomplish this, and it's a powerful one. I'll even go so far to say that it's a threatening one, because there is, and always has been, that propensity to react against something that affects you deeply.
Sufficiently advanced magic takes on a reality all of its own and begins to be something believed in on its own terms, with something approaching religious faith. This is possibly the reason why the more fundamental Christian ilk feels so violently threatened by such things as the magic in Harry Potter, because they confuse a powerful system of magic being used to shape a fictional story and certain aspects of the reality in which it is based with a potential rival to their own creed and dogma and set of beliefs and a false dichotomy of "people who like and believe THIS cannot possibly believe OUR
superversive writes from the POV of a Catholic baseline – and that may be the reason why I instantly put the thing into a Christian frame in that paragraph above. But I am going to take this one step further, and perhaps into contentious territory. If any sufficiently advanced technology, as the quote goes, is indistinguishable from magic then it is also possible that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a religion.If anything that is beyond our comprehension or ability to explain away by empirical means may be tagged with the word “magic”, then the Christian mythos starts to drip with the thing – what are miracles if not magic? Changing water into wine? Walking on water? Resurrection, for that matter…? But over the course of two thousand years the magic has hardened into a cracked outer shell of dogma. It is no longer the original magic but the recasting of that magic into something useful and controllable by a series of human interpreters who sought to use the instances of true magic into something that supported their own thesis, or theory, or grip on power.
I believe there is real magic in belief. I truly believe that sometimes wishing for something hard enough actually does make it come true because the sheer power of the act of visualisation often means that you are, however unwittingly, also working in real-terms for the manifestation of that thing in your life. I remember reading Richar Bach’s “Illusions: the adventures of a reluctant Messiah” (I couldn’t remember the exact title so I just looked it up and this jumped out at me from one of the book’s Amazon reviews: “I'm a Christian, but believe that when you move beyond a literal interpretation of Christ's words and see the symbolic message in them, it's not too different from what's in this book. But that's a big leap for most Christians and this book will probably make their blood boil).” – this encapsulates precisely the conundrum I was talking about up there in the third paragraph…) Specifically, I am thinking about the blue feather incident, where the reluctant Messiah of the title instructs our POV character, his equally reluctant disciple, on the principles of visualisation. Visualise something, the Messiah says, and it will manifest in your life. All right, says the disiple, a blue feather. The Messiah raises an eyebrow but goes, okay, blue feather. CONCENTRATE on it.
Next thing, they’re passing a dairy delivery truck and our disciple’s eyes go wide. Hey, LOOK, he says, and sure enough, on the side of the truck it says BLUE FEATHER DAIRIES.
This is where it gets interesting.
The disciple says that he expected a “real” blue feather. Yes, says the Messiah, but how did you visualise this when you invited it into your life? Were you holding it in your hand or was it just, like, floating disembodied in space?… Floating, the disciple admits. Well, the Messiah explains, that accounts for it. You didn’t personalise the magic and all you did was manifest a generic iteration of the item that you were seeking, not the thing itself in your possession.
Oooooh. It’s MAGIC. It’s real magic because this is delievered utterly matter-of-factly, as though it were common knowledge, as though anybody could do it.
But this is where the organised and dogmatic faith departs from the pure unfettered faith of a child not yet trained to obey all the “rules”. The original miracles are crusted over by the barnacles of creed, words that are repeated verbatim every Sunday to the point of becoming invisible, and completely detached from the things that they may actually mean. True, there are occasional intra-dogmatic kerfuffles within denominations who argue until they foam at the mouth whether “Body of Christ” and “Blood of Christ” are representations of the things they puport to be or whether they MAGICALLY (and I use the word advisedly) transform into the actual real thing when the priest intones the words above the plate and the chalice. Magic is rich and powerful stuff. Powerful enough to make the faithful, who would otherwise recoil at the idea of eating human flesh or drinking human blood, accept even the most potent of the interpretations of those words when they are uttered by a consecrated being over a consecrated thing and freely partake of it despite the implications and moral and ethical contradictions inherent in what they believe they are consuming.
True magic lies in weaving together something that is impossible with something that is yearning for the impossible in such a way that the impossible thing becomes not just possible but inevitable.
This is what writers do every day.
What is it that makes magic come alive for the reader? Is it that the writer must believe in it first, and to what degree should that belief be taken – philosophical, empirical, dogmatic? What is it about magic that pulls in the human mind? What are the riptides and the undertows of that wine-dark sea in which we all like to occasionally drown?
What makes magic… for YOU?…
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Date: 2008-04-30 09:56 am (UTC)I remember being amused in the Elenium/ Tamuli when the knights discovered that there had never been a need to go to other "pagan" gods to get magic, since magic in that world was a granting of prayers.
This, of course, upset a magician whose speshulness had just taken a nosedive.
Eddings had a pretty loose take on magic, in all his books, and that's fine by me. I'm pretty casual when it comes to magic systems myself, readingwise.
I'm an atheist, but I adore magic in fantasy, not because of any belief in it or religion, but because I find the idea of a world where theoretically anything is possible exciting. I love reading and learning about that world and its own particular limitations and majesties.
because this belief that there is a (or several) all powerful beings that watch over them usually means that they strive to be a better person,
with all due respect, religious people (of whatever kind) often make this statement, yet myself and other atheists would say that we try to be good people too.
Being godless does not equate us as being immoral. We take our morals and ethics from ourselves and human conduct.
You could say that, as cynical as some of us might get, we believe in humanity.
But we are not default immoral, and we do not feel the need to have supernatural agents watching over us to make us behave or strive to be better people.