Magic and the Mundane

A Ladder to the Moon, By Me

This is a topic that I've been stewing on for basically my whole life regarding fantasy worldbuilding.

This is a good video about it! 

 I Hate Modern Magic 

Magic has become boring. I hate that. Even the oft praised Brandon Sanderson's Magic systems leave me dissatisfied, even thought they have interesting elements and are worth a look. They're good power systems, don't get it twisted, but they're not really... magical? As for DnD and Anime and video game magic systems, they're all awful and boring. If I see one more Elemental magic system I'm going to scream. Everything's about mana points and floating magic circles and aura farming and it's all so dreadfully boring. Beyond the flashing lights and the spectacle, these magic systems are built on thin air. They lock Fighters and "Muggles" out of the action in favor of special magic people and make everything disconnected from the material realities of life. The worst of it is that this magic is nothing at all like Real Magic.

Magic does not actually exist- sorry if you're a member of one of the modern religious denominations which still believes in the power of ritual, but I'm writing under the assumption that nothing supernatural exists. If ghosts or extrasensory powers do exist... then they aren't magic. Because if we can put it in a lab and measure it, then it isn't magic. For something to be supernatural it must not be part of our world, and by definition things that are real are part of our world. When Magic is real, it's physics.

People in the past believed in Magic. They had a bunch of different concepts around how it worked- but by and large they believed that there were things which you could do that would mysteriously grant you effects that benefited you. They were right, obviously, there are lots of things that they did that were Magical thinking that actually did work.

It turns out that planting fish-heads in soil next to your crops really does bring you a bountiful harvest, because fish carcasses are full of calcium and phosphorous. Herbs really do have special powers, too, and those powers have been refined and studied by modern sorcerers to create the wondrous elixirs we take for granted, like Advil, and Xylitol. Bones ground into the forge introduced carbon into the iron, making an early form of steel that really was better than the contemporary non ancestor-blessed metal. Alchohol really was pure and holy and better than (dirty) water. They didn't have comprehensive proof that these occult rituals did anything, and of course, a lot of them didn't. Runes didn't confer any protection when inscribed into stone or metal, deathbed curses weren't real, and even if you personally believe in a few of them, you agree that 99% of the gods, spirits, and demons they prayed to weren't there to listen.

We live in a world blanched of magic. The catoblepas was just an ugly cow, the peak of olympus was empty and abandoned, the Blemmyes were just a mistranslation passed through a system of Chinese telephone until people thought there were a bunch of crazy Humanoid subspecies in foreign countries. Yes, there exist magical rocks and flying chariots- but those things aren't magic, they're science, which is unfortunately a lot less cool.

As funny as it is to call a bottle of Nyquil a magic potion and larp as a witch's apprentice drinking experimental brews to cure the deathly curse you contracted by kissing butch lesbians at the club during flu season, it is not a magic potion. It's a drug sold from a drug store and it gets made in industrial batches by machines, not witches or goblins sweating over a smoking green cauldron. The wondrous things that exist today that we would have called magic back then did not exist back then, yet we believed in them anyway.

TV killed the magic mirror and the wishing star.

Modern fantasy makes magic a sterile thing, severed from the underlying archetypes and mythology that make it compelling, but dropped into our magicless world and clumsily reattached. Wizards are a type of guy. If you are not a Wizard you are not a Magic Person. A Fighter is a guy holding a wedge with a lever attached, and that's it. His sword does the things that a mundane piece of metal can do, in our sad blanched world. Wizards can do anything they want to though. Because Magic!

Magic is when a Magic Guy points a Magic rod and it acts like a Rifle that shoots "force." What even is force? It's like if you made throwing a firebolt boring. Except they already did that, because Magic Fire doesn't actually act like fire. Magic fire is stripped of its significance, it's just a gun without the bullet because the material conditions that are required to create firearms are more disruptive to "fantasy" than the presumption that a portion of the population can hurl lethal bolts of directed energy at will.

Mages are no longer required to keep familiars- spirits who taught mankind sorcery. They are no longer forced to consort with devil or Djinn or brew magic potions or meet their fetch in Annwn or the Duat's riverbed, they do not sell their soul, they do not reach anamnesis, they are no longer required to learn the name of God, they are no longer required to do anything other than be the Simulacra. Palpatine could throw lightning because he was a Dark Sorcerer of unending evil- using the Force that connected all living things in the most deeply perverse way such a power can be used: to inflict excruciating death onto another person. DnD Wizards can throw lightning because it's something that a player might want to do. (Anime wizards can shoot lightning because it looks really cool.)

There is a tendency in modern fantasy to box up the fantastical into a neat parcel and separate it from the "real." (As per the video I linked at the beginning,) Mages are a distinct class of person, not just smiths who learned the secrets of Atlantean metal, or musicians so skilled they can make rats and children fall into a trance, or or heroes so pure of heart that fate itself will not allow them to die until they complete their quest. Unicorns aren't just a rare creature with a strange ability- they are a fundamentally magical creature compared to a distinctly un-magical creature like a rabbit or a dog.

That's not how the ancients saw the world; all animals were magical. Dogs and cats were, and sometimes still are, thought to be able to see/repel ghosts and demons. But when you crack open a Monster Manual, Fantasy Games feel the need to emphasize that there are Special Magic Dogs that can do magic things that Real Normal Dogs can't. There are magical metals and there are normal metals, Magical people and normal people, Magical swords and normal swords. The thought of a "normal sword" existing in fantasy is ludicrous to me.

I do not mean that all swords must have supernatural special properties, a world populated entirely by vorpal blades and flame tongues, what I mean is that I think the concept of a sword is so inherently resonant that calling one mundane is backwards.

Blood is magic, moonlight and daylight are magic, cold iron and silver  are magic, running water is magic, wine is magic, telling the truth is magic, lightning is magic, fire is magic, singing and dancing and music and poetry are magic, making a promise is magic, Love is magic- the most powerful of all, Hate is magic, Death is magic, Life is magic.

When you say that all of these things are just atoms and math clashing together in mundane and meaningless patterns, only rendered "really magical" upon the introduction of some theoretical "magic" particle of energy, you've lost the plot. You've elevated something produced wholly by simulacra into the space that actual resonant and meaningful archetypes should have taken. Why are you even writing fantasy if you believe that fairy tales are such silly things? Why do you need a Magical Electron to come into your story and make things like love "real?" It's a story. In stories birds can just talk sometimes, you don't need to invent a phony pseudoscientific method- you're just replacing one fake reason with another. 

I hear "in this fantasy world magic is just another fundamental part of physics" a lot. If we lost even a single one of the fundamental forces then the universe as we know it would have been radically altered. Without gravity, neither stars nor any other astral body would have formed- just an endless sea of diffuse particles. I can't even imagine a universe without electromagnetism or the strong force, and the weak force is the reason that stars and nuclear fission work. I cannot imagine how you would come up with or implement a new fundamental force, let alone tailor it so carefully that its emergent properties caused the things we have historically imagined to be magical. What the author really wanted was a pseudoscientific explanation as to why there were long-eared people who could live forever and people could get superpowers from reading books. The thing is, there is no possible scientific explanation for magic- if there were, it wouldn't be magic, it would be science. Magic is the explanation, it does not need to be explained.

Good magic is resonant. It means something. It speaks to fundamental human beliefs and desires, those beyond science. Good magic is a metaphor, or a literalization of one. Good magic is more real than reality. In the same way that we wish that justice and truth and love were real, tangible things, we wish that magic were real. Good magic hits like that. Bad magic can be replaced by a gun- and would be better off for it. (If your magic is a metaphor for technology that's okay... but it should be a good metaphor for technology. Why not just use technology? Star Trek did it.)

I like fantasy stories that don't ask permission. Game of Thrones is really good, because nobody knows how its magic works. It isn't so much a tool the characters can wield as it is a situation they find themselves in. Scarlet Hollow is also really cool and thematic. There's no hurling fireballs, but there's this kind of Seydrcraft connection type magic that allows you to glean information you shouldn't in really cool ways. My favorite of all time is the Force, before all that EU crud bloated it into a lame power fantasy, the Force was a metaphor for Buddhism/correct action and political influence. It was about controlling yourself and giving up control over others, about the corrosiveness of violence, and about how wanting to be an evil fascist wizard is actually really pathetic and you shouldn't invade Vietnam actually. The Dark Side of the Force is a prescient depiction of becoming blackpilled on 4chan.

 Honorable Mentions;

• Worth the Candle, for having a huge maximalist gauntlet of good metaphor magics. Water magic is depression, responsibility, and the weight of generations! Gold Magic is the way we alienate and dehumanize ourselves and others for the sake of capital and power! Spirit Magic is Nofap! 
• Curse of Chalion, for being an actually good depiction of Divine magic instead of just having it be Yellow lasers instead of Blue.
• Mythras, for being the only ttrpg with an interesting magic system.
• Cultist Simulator, for making me feel like an actual Wizard attaining occult powers.
• Hunter X Hunter, whose Magic System is essentially "What if every sport, game, craft, or autistic hyperfixation could be used against someone like a martial art? What does a fight between someone playing slots and someone using Jujitsu look like? Also they can cheat and make up new rules, and the loser sometimes gets actually violently murdered by the winner." 

 

Urgh. This was a bit navel-gazey and overly negative, I'll try to write something more creative and constructive next time so I don't go insane.