What is magic, and why are people fascinated by it?

As the very existence of the fantasy genre demonstrates, magic, as a concept, is considered fascinating by a whole lot of people. Some (see for example the Paganism thread in Troper Covens) believe that (some form of) magic is real, while others think that it is just make-believe; but in any case, it seems plain to me that magic, as a concept, strikes a chord in many people's imaginations.

My question is, why is it so? It cannot simply be a power fantasy — after all, modern technology gives us more power than most fantastic interpretations of magic would. Two days ago I traveled more than 1000 kms in little more than one hour, flying higher than any bird; an today, I am writing a text that people from all over the world will be able to read near-instantly. And of course, a nuclear weapon is vastly more destructive than any fireball.

So, what is magic, and why are people interested in it?

edited 20th May '12 10:09:39 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Magic is more individual than modern technology. You probably shared that plane you took with hundreds of others, and while there are weapons more powerful than fireballs they are hard to get and very regulated. With magic you can just have this power without going through the long process of getting a pilot license or the even longer process of getting military grade weapons.

I think it could be very well a power fantasy.

edited 20th May '12 11:39:07 AM by honorius

If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied -Rudyard Kipling

But in many fantasy worlds, magic also requires extensive training, not differently from the training necessary for taking a flying license.

Furthermore, in quite a few of these worlds magic is something that "runs in the blood", to a certain degree, and that is somewhat rare — if you don't have the talent for it, you just don't have the talent for it. Compared to that, modern technology is far more democratic: basically everybody can make use of it, and everybody with an average intelligence or better, if motivated enough, can even learn to build and adapt technology him/herself...

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I am not sure I agree. The ability of a person to use technology is itself just as much of a crapshoot based on their circumstances.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

Magic I like to view as a science that the gods are skilled in. Born from a deep understanding of reality and its rules. Guanyin isn't breaking physics. She's just gaming the system with her awesome powers of understanding and knowledge!

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Yet most of the time the protagonists are special and didn't have to train for it because they were The Chosen One, or all training is done offscreen, so the reader (substitute with other terms depending on medium) sees lots of awesome powers given for free. When s/he identifies with the characters in the book s/he identifies with the one with magic powers and not with the common man.

If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied -Rudyard Kipling

@Pagad: I took that to mean "If given the opportunity, anyone can learn to use it" as opposed to magic, where you can't learn to use it unless you were born with it.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

But real-world logistics are something fantasy worlds typically circumvent. Sure, you can just head down to the store and get a lighter and aerosol can to make a blowtorch, but the materials that made each of those items required many hands to acquire and exorbitant sums of money. Even assuming it takes a long time to study magic, acquire a spellbook, and to learn how to do a spell, once you do, that knowledge belongs to you.

There's also a lot of fun in learning how an alien form of physics works. Functional Magic and Magic A Is Magic A are large amounts of fun when a world really goes into depth about how they work, and the rules remain relatively consistent. We all like making up our own worlds and our own rules at some point or another, especially when they are symbolic of something else. A lot of magical universes use The Power of Love or The Power of Hate as Phlebotinum for a reason.

edited 20th May '12 12:44:33 PM by KingZeal

I'm going to indulge in a bit of Personal Dictionary here, so bear with me.

Answering the first question posed in the thread title renders the second one moot. Magic is that which fascinates us. It is anything that produces a sense of awe in the onlooker, and thus is highly subjective. The reason most people aren't impressed by the wonders of modern technology is that they are commonplace and we've become jaded. If you contemplate the sheer magnificence of what things like the Internet and movies can do for us, you will find that they are magical after all.

Sure, most settings require extensive training of magic. However, in most settings magic potential is still something inherent to specific persons. Non-magical persons can train as much as they like, they'll never be able to do magic. Thus, yes, technology is more democratic - while, OTOH, magic makes people special.

It's friendship!

I think there's something very artistic about magic, classical elements, and fantasy settings. So they're ideal for epic literature such as Lord of the Rings.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Eh, we all have limitations on what we can do based on what we inheirit. My nearly entire lack of musicality limits what I can do in that particular area for instance. If you are born dyslexic, then reading is going to be much more difficult for you than most. The difference from these real examples is that magic is generally written as a way to power, and if you have it at all you have it in plenty. It would be possible to write a world where everyone had at least some magic, but only a few had a great deal of it; making it much more like the usual distribution of talents in our world.

One fun book that treats magic as technology is Harry Turtledove's Toxic Spell Dump. It was a fun riff on how magic is most often used.

Most forms of magic in fiction are typically painted as a field at least marginally understood to follow some graspable rules and structures, even if nobody knows many of them. It's something that can be studied, can result in "A produces B", but can also result in "C produces AMDSFIUBGVIUSDH and hell if we know why", as well as "E does crazy shit and the last three who tried it died messily, so like, don't do it." In this sense it's basically a science, with a good deal of wiggle room on how well it's understood.

What differentiates it from classical sciences as a concept is that instead of the source being an object or group of objects, the source is typically some sort of abstract personal agency. It may come right from a character, it may be focused through things, things may be enchanted to do things, and stray bits of free-floating whatever might cause wacky stuff, but ultimately magic is seen as spiritual — a kind of distillation of that which makes life life instead of merely the sum of its parts.

In this way it's basically the natural intersection between science and spirituality, appealing to both existence and actualization; of course people will find the concept fascinating

edited 21st May '12 12:36:15 AM by Pykrete

Arthur C. Clarke said it best. Much as I dislike the man.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We in the modern day routinely do stuff with our technology that in pre-Enlightenment (and some post-Enlightenment) countries that would get us burned at the stake or drowned or so on for the crime of witchcraft. And we never seem to pause and wonder how we got here so fast?

I think the refined version (I forgot who came up with it) really hits the nail on the head:

'Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it.'

The 'don't understand it' is key. Magic, to me, means that A leads to B but it remains a mystery how and why this happens. It's not for nothing that in Real Life, calling something 'magical' is usually a tongue-in-cheek way to say either 'I don't understand how it works' or 'I don't feel like explaining how it works right now'. If it's ever invoked in seriousness in a Real Life context, all alarm bells should go off - 'WARNING. OBSCURANTISM IN PROGRESS. Time to measure some marigolds and analyse the fuck out of their so-called magic.'

As for why people are fascinated with it... well, of course this air of mystery has something to do with it. If magic is by definition something you can't understand, and people are fascinated by what they can't understand, it stands to reason people will be fascinated by magic.

And I think there's another reason. A large part of This Very Wiki is devoted to explaining how certain things aren't as easy, safe, spectacular and/or practical as they are often depicted in fiction. Magic is a handy way to circumvent those pesky constraints - a way to say, 'Screw physics and screw common sense. I want my awesome and I want it just the way I imagine it!'

I, for one, think that's a very cheap and childish reaction, and that staying within the bounds of reality makes for a far more interesting story.

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...

Magic allows the patterns that can't exist to be, even for a short time, imagined as reality. In short, yes: it allows story. And, if there's something the human brain likes to do, is to identify pleasing patterns and pass them along. Even if they are not actually all that objectively, solidly real.

So, it's more than a wish, a bit less than prayer: and easy to label make-believe and fable. When, it's a deep-seated aspect of meta-cognition. Applied with enough social force, it can have surprisingly real effects. In short: if enough people believe in the right kind of magic, a curse can work on the psychosomatic level via conditioning and feedback. Or, just good, old-fashioned murder to facilitate it along.

Well, that's my fairly Jungian (with amendments) viewpoint.

edited 21st May '12 4:01:46 AM by Euodiachloris

Time was, all magic was the dark side.

That is, when it wasn't a replacement for science.

Aside from how we have tamed magic into our fantasy tropes, isn't magic now just the thing that will solve all of our niggling little problems?

I would probably also distinguish magic from a True Miracle, which would truly have no limits.

"Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes."

Honestly, magic is a just catch all term for super powers with mystical connections.

Our western magic traditions are generally highly ritualustic worshipping of divine beings.

A single phrase renders Christianity a delusional cult

The way I see it, Magic is a way for us to justify everything we belive to be impossible. And we like it just because it allows us to rationalize such impossible events.

For instance, assume I want to visit the Eiffel Tower. Maybe I can't pay for a trip to France, or if i can, i can't really take a full weekend off to fly there. So, it's impossible to realize that particular objective. But wait, I'm a wizard! I can just teleport there! I'll be savoring the view in seconds from now AND still be back in time for my other plans!

Magic is science without the boring bits.

Seeing as there are no boring bits of science, that's an odd way of thinking about it.

Magic is a great way to say what if. In many cases it's a way for an individual to modify the world around them with significantly more ability than they would normally posses.

Fight smart, not fair.

There's plenty of boring bits of science. I can render completely faded writing visible, but first I have to set up a hyperspectral camera and wait while it does its stuff, then find the wavelength in which it's still visible. Magic would let me do that with nothing more than a gesture or two.

Only if you use it in the sense of A Wizard Did It. It only takes a few of those before it becomes a boring Deus ex Machina.

Fight smart, not fair.

I think that there definitely boring bits in science — or at least, bits that only very peculiar mentalities can find interesting, like for example a classification of a number of marginally different subspecies of ferns.

There is quite a bit of "stamp collecting" going on in science; and — despite the disparaging name — it is important and valuable stuff. Despite what fictional depictions of scientific research suggest, the "eureka moments" are the exception, not the rule.

This said, there are boring bits in many systems of magic too. For example, I really like the concept of truename-based magic; but as the account in A Wizard Of Earthsea points out, learning the true names of all things would be a quite tiresome enterprise. Frankly, I'd rather study differential equations.

To be honest, as I mentioned in other threads, I am a bit of a fan of the Renaissance notion of magia naturalis, which one-ups Clarke's Law by stating that science is magic. There are a few variants of the idea, but the one that I favor is the following.

We have the world of forms — a conceptual space of mathematical structures, abstract concepts and so on — and we have the material, physical world. Magic, ultimately, consists in establishing a connection between these two worlds, by imposing Form over the material world or by study the Forms which are superimposed to natural phenomena. So scientific research is magic: if you find out that a phenomenon can be described by a set of equations, what you are doing is establishing a connection (a "morphism", as category theorists would say) between the phenomenon and a mathematical structure.

Technology is also magic: you find ways to impose your will to reality, shaping it according to your ideas — that is, to abstract objects belonging in this conceptual space.

Art is extremely powerful magic, as it shapes reality according to ideas of Beauty and so on, that is, to some of the most complex and powerful objects of the conceptual space; and similarly, lawmaking is magic, because it has (or should have) a similar connection to the ideal of Justice.

It is quite a bit of a Personal Dictionary trick, perhaps; but I think that it's a nice way of considering it.

edited 24th May '12 4:00:33 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Magic is change accomplished through a focus of will, that focus usually being some form of symbolic ritual.

Trump delenda est