#there are ways to add supernatural elements well though. angel of the crows does it

[unnonexistence]

oh my god i should reread one of the bailey school kids books. it would be so funny

[tanadrin]

(Warning: talking about things I have no expertise of, or indeed any kind of comprehensive knowledge)

I’m interested in the way our perceptions of magic differ from actual magic, and in general, how different the pseudo-historical “ISO Standard Fantasy Setting” differs from the thing it supposedly imitates. What it actually imitates is, of course, a certain genre of Romantic literature recycled through D&D (or through Tolkien then D&D again, or Tolkien, his imitators, and D&D), and closely related works. The conventional tropes of modern high fantasy were established in a relatively short period, even compared to hard SF, in the middle of the 20th century. They don't much resemble either their immediate predecessors (Dunsany, for instance) or their supposed source material (actual medieval literature) except in very very superficial ways--knights on horseback, for instance, things called faeries.

Sometimes there's back-contamination, where our erroneous impression of the past as conveyed by pseudo-historical settings in fantasy literature (Medieval Tymes, if you like) color our perception of *actual* historical periods. The video game Crusader Kings 2, for instance, feels much more like an ISO Standard Fantasy Setting that happens to be set in Europe than it does the actual Middle Ages (and this is before they added the admittedly silly Monks and Mystics expansion, which adds a whole new level of tongue-in-cheekness to a game that already played around a lot with its source material). There's very little use of medieval art or architecture in CK2, or even direct imitations of it; even less medieval music. THere's a lot of imitation, though, of what we *think* the middle ages should look like based on fantasy literature and its derivatives--which is why the Elder Scrolls and Song of Ice and Fire mods work so well with the base game's style, since in a way they're truer to the spirit of CK2 than actual history is. Both those works--Martin's especially--are firmly embedded in pseudomedievalism, and built on the ISO Standard Fantasy Setting in different ways.

But let's talk about magic in particular, which is a mainstay of the fantasy genre outside high fantasy, but which I feel, as a reader, tends to be treated in common ways across very diverse works of genre fiction. Here I'll include video games like the Elder Scrolls, traditional games like Dungeons and Dragons, novels of low fantasy (The Dresden Files, Harry Potter) and novels of high (Chronicles of Amber, China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, Discworld, Codex Alera). Every one, I contend, against our intuitions on the subject, while formally fantasy resembles science fiction in its treatment of magic; that is to say, magic is treated as an element of the world, and bears far more relationship to our modern conception of the natural order and of the natural world than any traditional form of magic. Magic is gone; magic has been killed stone dead. With very, very few exceptions, anything we think of as "magic" in film, books, TV, comics, etc., is really a form of not-magic, a kind of exotic naturalism, and at some point between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, our cultural understanding of the world shifted so much that we (read "the people reading this post, not every human alive") became unable to conceive of magic as it was traditionally understood.

First off: in anthropological and philological terms, magic is a broad and vague label for a huge variety of practices from various cultures in various times and places, founded more or less in common quirks of human psychology, and without a single coherent definition. It's a collection, not a system; "systems" of magic are modern inventions, though there are definitely various kinds of magical traditions from different cultures. If you pick up a book like "The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment" (Penguin, 2016; ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver), you can look at a nice cross-section of different references to and discussions of magic from Biblical, Classical, Persian, Medieval, and Renaissance sources. Obviously, there's a lot going on that's different in each text, but a couple common themes emerge, I think.

First of all, you can classify most forms of these "magics" into discrete categories: divination through randomness or omens (entrails, crows, smoke, dreams, the stars); theurgy, or appeals to higher powers like angels (or accusations of appeals to powers like demons), which is big in medieval magic; speaking with the dead or with spirits (e.g., necromancy); and medicine. None of these are distinct, and none of these are distinctly magic, by which I mean many or most of these categories blend into one another and to other activities like cooking, worship, healing, or scholarship, and a strong "natural" versus "supernatural" dichotomy does not seem evident, especially in ancient sources like Plato, Pliny, and the Old Testament.

I think it's important to remember that a systematized explanation for how the world works was lacking for most of human history; you might see salt dissolve in water and precipitate out again, and fire burn things and acid eat them away, but knowing nothing about atoms or chemical reactions or the various electromagnetic and atomic forces which govern most human-level behavior of particles (to say nothing of the gravitational forces which dominate the heavens), it makes perfect sense to speak of the material universe being sustained and governed on an ongoing basis by the direct intervention of God, or spirits, or gods, who act according to consistent principles; in these circumstances, a denial of free will and a statement of absolute Divine control of the physical world isn't just a philosophical position, it's a productive explanation of minute details of life that otherwise lack compelling ones. Even if, as Plato and Pliny, you are more systematic about things and posit that sympathy operates between objects and can produce effects at a distance, much as one musical instrument can be caused to resonate by another, absent understanding of sound (and air molecules) or light or the particles and fields which mediate the electromagnetic or graviational forces, you still need to posit things like daimons and spirits as the actors which actually transmit such connections; and there is inevitably a tendency to personalize such things, even if you're not entirely anthropomorphizing them.

(Likewise, if you notice study of the heavens is capable of predicting things like eclipses and the tides, you may reason that it's capable of predicting other things, like whether you're going to win this war--after all, the moon seems to have an effect on the tides, why shouldn't it have an effect on human beings? Astrology isn't just primitive astronomy; it blends with astronomy in a perfectly seamless fashion.)

*How* magic works is not distinct from *what you do to make it work*. The two are the same; the former does not exist as a separate concept. A spell is performative, not in the sense that it's fake, but in the sense that saying "I take you to be my husband" actually marries you to the person standing next to you if the circumstances are valid.

So substances might have inherent properties; how those properties interact with one another and with the body is going to belong to the same category of knowledge as how the planets affect individual persons or spells affect your neighbor's cow, i.e., the fundamental mechanisms remain mysteries. Thus, medicine blends seamlessly with other kinds of magic, with ritual and with religion. Praying for your son to get better and putting a salve on his forehead aren't entirely distinct actions; thus, medical treatments from the middle ages contain a mix of what seems to us like perfectly sensible actions (mash up this plant and eat it) and insanity that nobody could possibly believe helps (then bury the rest in a cornfield and say verses from the Bible over it). And because other kinds of magic can help or harm, and medicine can help or harm, medicine is prone to being viewed as a kind of malicious magic: it's no coincidence that our word "pharmacy, pharmeceutical" comes from the same Greek word used to translate "witch," as in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live": pharmakeos, i.e., a poisoner. In fact, all the vocabulary around magic-users is a pile of confusion, a conflation of different kinds of action that don't fit neatly with modern notions of A Wizard. "Witch" is from a word originally meaning "diviner;" in the Middle Ages and early Modern period it seemed to be understood as one who invokes the power of supernatural beings to do evil things--note that the crime of witchcraft was because witches necessarily consorted with the *devil*, not because they used magic per se (presumably, power from God or the angels was OK--and indeed, grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon talk about magic from these sources, and emphasize the necessity of moral purity in order to get the spells to work). "Maleficium," in Latin, originally just meant "evildoer," however that evil was done; likewise, mekashefah, the word (originally feminine) which "witch" translates in the above Bible verse. The "witch" of Endor is not at all a crone; she's an apparently respectable woman capable of furnishing Saul and his men with a decent meal, and the term the Bible actually uses is "sho'el 'ov" - i.e., one who knows how to ask ghosts questions.

(With the exception of necromancy, little distinction is in fact made in the Old Testament between kinds of supernatural power; e.g., in Exodus the magic of the Egyptians is depicted as illegitemate, but no less efficacious for that. Magic plainly works, even if it's wrong.)

Charms, spells, and incantations are more often than not about invoking a specific power: gods, in Greek and Roman magic, God and his angels in Christian. (Pliny divides magic into medicine, astrology, and religion; the first two, he says, produce predictions which corroborate divination--as stated above, astrology is not entirely distinct from divination for obvious reasons.) Later, alchemy begins to produce actual theories of matter; but it's still not at all distinct from the kind of magic that involves invoking higher powers.

So what *isn't* magic? That's considerably easier to answer than what is: when you look at the kinds of things that look like magic to us moderns, it becomes easy to recognize the ways in which scientism has so preoccupied our way of viewing the world that it becomes inextricable even from our supposedly "magical" fantasy.

Magic isn't sufficiently advanced technology, for one, or a highly refined and subtle art (Tolkien; he knew this, obviously, and wasn't going for magic-qua-magic). Magic isn't *energy*, or a *force* or a *field*; these things are the language of *science,* of electromagnetics and gravity and atoms (contra Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, and every video game ever). It's not local variations in the natural law (as a distinction between natural law, human law, and especially moral law actually *isn't* that clear cut). It's not telekinesis or ESP, however those are caused! Remember, these are pseudo-*science*, they were invented in the scientific era. If you're an ancient using magic to make objects move, you're not "moving it with your mind." You might be invoking spirits to move it for you, but *you* are not doing it with some invisible arm. Magic isn't beams of light or deadly green lasers. It's also not some kind of metaphysical illusion. Sure, magicians have been denounced as tricksters and illusionists all throughout history, but if there's deception in magic, it is good old-fashioned sleight of hand--maybe your court magician replaced his staff with a snake when nobody was looking. It's not a ghost-snake you can put your hand through, though.

A fantasy story using traditional notions of magic would involve attitudes pretty alien and unsatisfying to a lot of modern fantasy readers: a close connection between the physical and moral world, little attention to *how* things worked, and more attention to what you *did* to make things work, nothing like a systematized, sciencified magic, and a blend so close between magic, religion, and nature that they are entirely indistinguishable.

None of this is to say that the traditional F&SF conception of magic is wrong or bad somehow; it fits our modern sensibilities quite nicely and makes for compelling stories. But don't make the mistake of confusing these functionally-distant reinterpretations of history for how people actually used to understand the world.