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Mastery of a subject is not without some intrinsic virtue, or at least not to those with master's degrees. Having never gone to college, I'm not sure if I personally would be a fan of virtuous power through academics.

As a young convert, I once set out to write a blog post on (pardon the terms) Catholic magic and Protestant magic. The matter is more complicated than that, of course, and now that Catholicism is no longer shiny and new I can see more subtle distinctions.

But the original distinction is that Protestantism reduces things to systems, whereas Catholicism functions on symbols. So in the Protestant fantasy, even from those who are no longer officially Protestant, the magic can be reduced to its component parts. Compare to Tolkien, where, say, the One Ring is a symbol, recalling Plato's anarchic fear of an invisible man.

I don't think this loss was intentional, and by the efforts of many writers to somehow bring the magic back, not desired even today. Jack Vance wrote a world where magic was powerful, arbitrary, and very dangerous; his heirs in D&D reduced all that to logistics. Such is engineering.

I think there is room for those writing the more mythic magics to make a comeback, since the absence of myth is so keenly felt. In my C&D series, a LitRPG, I tried adding back some of the uncontrolled symbolic aspects of the myths that had lost the original power, and my audience loved it.

But in defense of Promethean fantasy, it is not intrisically wrong to steal fire from the gods if the gods have been unjustly keeping it from the mortals. Indeed, the question is the same as in comic books: if you have the power, can you use it justly, as compared to the villains, who do not? Literature demands the villian is more powerful than the hero, although whether this state of affairs lasts is up to the author.

But to return to my original distinction, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in such a division. Brandon Sanderson, a Mormon, writes the most systematic systems, but frequently it is the weaklings who win. Japanese fiction is still pagan, at least for the moment--the Death Note follows an elaborate system of rules, yet it is as much a cautionary tale about the pursuit of power as any pagan myth. And I often find myself straddling the lines.

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Agreed, mastery of a subject is not without merit, and indeed could be viewed as an expression of virtue. The question is whether the story fundamentally hinges on mastery or on virtue. Which is not to say that one is right and the other wrong, only that they are different.

The notion that Protestantism reduces things to systems and Catholicism functions on symbols is an interesting one. It puts me in mind of Joseph Bottom's contention that the novel is a fundamentally Protestant form. A story that runs on symbols has no reason to be particularly long. It concerns archetype symbolic figures performing symbolic acts. It is not concerned with their inner motivations or with the long struggle to come to grips with a situation. The situation presents itself and they act. Snow White is a symbolic figure. So is the prince. So are the Dwarves. So is the evil queen. They perform their symbolic actions which have their symbolic outcome: the happy marriage of the virtuous characters and the punishment of the evil character. It does not take very long, or much elaboration in the telling, to tell such a tale. This is why traditional fairy tales are short.

Novels are long because they deal with the psychological reality of our actions and motivations. Magic as system fits more easily into this paradigm than magic as symbol.

This was a problem I struggled with in writing Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight. Characters in a novel require a character, if not a deep psychological profile. They do things with reluctance and with difficulty. Yet the original ballad, a mere thirteen couplets in length, contains none of that. Isabel foolishly summons the Elf Knight, then wisely tricks him and kills him. How does she go from bring foolish enough to summon him to wise enough to deceive and kill him? In the ballad, it doesn't matter. The ballad is all archetypes and symbolic action. In a novel it matters. It is because it matters that the ballad is 13 couplets and the novel is 90,000 words.

Combining unruly (and therefore symbolic) magic with psychologically realistic characters isn't easy. Tolkien does it in part by mixing psychologically realistic characters with symbolic ones, which is also not easy. (Ask me how I know!) And now I wonder if the reason that so many Tolkien imitators switched from unruly to ruly magic, from lapsarian to Promethean fantasy, was precisely because of that difficulty. Or perhaps it was not the difficulty, but that they already belonged to a tradition that though in terms of systems rather than symbols.

Much to ponder here. Thank you.

But in regard to, "it is not intrisically wrong to steal fire from the gods if the gods have been unjustly keeping it from the mortals," isn't that exactly the argument that the serpent made to Eve in the garden? “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Even if we look at it from a purely literary point of view, supposing a pagan pantheon of good and evil gods, then an unjust god (one who unjustly withholds power from man) is clearly an possessor of unruly magic, and stealing unruly magic, as Gollum does, is surely a fatal mistake. Not so?

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I suppose I haven't thought of it that way, in, re: evil gods. It's possible it's an Americanism to think more in terms of overthrowing a tyrant than what to do afterwards. But I have plenty of thoughts on this subject, perhaps more suitable for a full post than a comment.

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Interesting thought. Actually, that's exactly what Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight is about. What to do after the tyrant is overthrown, and whether one who overthrows a tyrant is doomed to become tyrant in their place. I'm looking forward to reading your post on the subject.

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Interesting discussion. I admit I'm not very familiar with "fantasy" literature beyond Tolkein, so I can't really comment on those magical systems. But I think, despite our best efforts, rules are hard to apply to the supernatural generally, which is probably where much of the anxiety around religious behavior comes from: how should we conduct ourselves in order to not provoke these unpredictable and chaotic unseen forces (or maybe gain their favor)? Fairy stories highlight the mysteriousness and danger associated with capricious supernatural powers, which humans aren't meant to meddle with (the occult version of learning not to touch hot stoves.) Once a vague understanding of those forces and that behavior has been achieved, though, there have always been attempts to gain some control over the chaos with magic (cooking on hot stoves), whether to make the crops grow, cure illness, or give a neighbor the evil eye. Supernatural means to supernatural ends...

Though it's not quite the same kind of magic you're referring to here (story magic is often a different animal than what people practiced in real life), I always liked this perspective on magic vs science from an anthropological perspective:

"The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic."

-James George Frasier, The Golden Bough

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That's a fascinating quote from Frasier. Essentially he is describing magic as counterfactual physics. But what you say about not provoking unpredictable and chaotic unseen forces reminds me that there is a great deal to fairy tales that is not magic in this sense at all. Magic as counterfactual physics presupposes what physics supposes, that the universe is not willful but operates according to laws. But that was not the common religious supposition of most of our ancestors. They saw themselves living in a willful universe, a universe in which every tree and brook had its own animating spirit.

The religious impulse then was not necessarily to control such spirits, but to propitiate them. Ceremonies and sacrifices to honor and propitiate the gods are not really attempts at magic, but a kind of treaty and tribute towards a fellow being. But that then leads to the idea that one might bind and control such spirits, as one might bind and control another human being. Thus one gets the genie in the lamp, essentially a demi-god enslaved.

And this would seem, at least a first thought, to be a third class of magic. Not chaotic, since it reliably binds its victims. And not counterfactual physics, because it does not share the assumption of physics that the universe is orderly. Much to ponder there.

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Yes, I think religion and magic, though not the same, often complemented one another, tackling the problem of the uncontrollable natural/supernatural forces from different angles. Most cultures have been suspicious of anyone who dabbles in arts outside the sanctioned religious system, but they often turn a blind eye if the sorcerer is working for the restoration of order. Encouraging disorder (would the permanent binding of a higher order spiritual being be considered a breach of the natural order?) is what gave magical practice a bad name. Interestingly, many of the early Indo-European mythologies don't appear to have had a concept of "evil" in the strong sense that we think of it today. Rather, they seemed to think of good/bad in terms of order/chaos. Existence was a war against chaos. Agents of order were the good guys and agents of chaos were the baddies, whether on the local or cosmic scale. I'm not enough of an expert on this stuff to put all of the pieces together in a neat package, but these traditions are fun to think about. As you say, much to ponder :-)

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There do seem to be two fundamental ideas of evil in world religions. There is the idea that creation itself consists of good and evil as equal and balancing forces, order and chaos in eternal struggle. And then there is the Judeo-Christian idea the universe is fundamentally good and that evil is a turning away from or a falling from that fundamental goodness. Evil, then, is not a equal balancing force but a flaw in the essential goodness of creation.

And while this idea makes evil a lesser and fundamentally weaker thing that good -- Satan not a rival god to Yahweh, but a fallen creature -- it also makes evil something much worse, since it has no proper place in the design and plan of the universe. Evil is an interloper, a spoiler, the snake in the grass. In the balanced view of the universe, chaos is as necessary as order. In the lapsarian view, it is not necessary but catastrophic. That may be why the strong sense of evil is missing from those mythologies based on balance. An evil that never had to be is far more lamentable than one that is a necessary balancing force in the universe.

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Funny you should mention magic-as-bound-demigods. I feel that is a compromise between the systems of the mage-as-engineer and the mage-as-agent-of-chaos: mage-as-lawyer. After all, everyone knows a legal contract can be legally air-tight yet still go horribly wrong, yet people make contracts all the time and generally assume things will go as planned.

Jack Vance, though he was never a stickler for a story's self-consistency over books, has the infamous Vancian magic at the beginning of the Dying Earth series, but in the final book it's revealed that the mages are simply binding creatures called sandestins to do their will, and not possessing power in and of themselves.

In my own works, I've used magic-as-bound-demigods not once but twice, as I like it so much. In the World of Wishes, humans make usurious contracts with the Djinn, a group of alien AIs with technology so advanced that it may as well be magic. Although the story is hypothetically science fiction, the use of wishes and credit is a force of chaos and Promethean power, particularly when the bills become true. I can't say, looking back, that there is not a bit of fear of our own machines inside the story, or perhaps it's just become more obvious now that AI is everywhere.

But for my Witch-Queen series, I deliberately chose a world of daemons that could be bound as the sole basis of magic. (Or insomuch as one chooses these things, when an idea comes to you strongly.) Daemons are neither good nor evil, and they cannot disobey a command, but they have their own agenda which may or may not align with their masters'. I did this also because I wanted more "magical" magic, that is, (by my past self's definition) "Catholic" as opposed to "Protestant."

What such stories inevitably tell is the reverse of a Promethean fantasy: sure, you can have all the power you want, if you pay the price. And the drama follows from the price paid, not the fireworks.

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In effect, the Faustian bargain.

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