There are 14 different types on this page. Even discounting Catholicism and Native American Faiths (since those are on Fantastic Catholicism and Magical Native American, respectively), that's still 12. Most of these only have a couple examples—I see no reason not to consolidate them into one list.

Thoughts?

This seems more like a Useful Notes than anything else.

Yep, this looks like an Useful Notes page stuffed into a trope page. I think we ought to cut out the UN bits and keep the trope.

Kind of a reversed trope, to my mind — originally magic and religion were synonyms. That's why witches (that is, anyone believed to have magical powers) were thought to have consorted with the Devil; because you can't have magic without some spiritual — that is to say, religious — creature having been involved in the process.

It's only in the modern era, influenced by scientific thought and, more recently, D&D, that "arcane" magic (the stuff with runes and circles and stuff, generally based on hermetic alchemy) has started to come unstuck from a religious underpinning. We are now as or more likely to see magic as a sort of science, or at least governed by scientific rules, than as power granted by some supernatural being.

edited 27th Aug '12 2:15:33 PM by Escher

Yes, basically that.

I have no idea how you could think this is a useful notes page.

edited 28th Aug '12 11:05:02 AM by abk0100

This is definitely an actual trope. It's religions, usually ones foreign to the audience, being shown in media as granting magical powers. Wicca and voodoo get this a lot in modern media, but they aren't the only ones.

Well, this got derailed fast...

I suppose parts of the description could go on analysis, but the trope itself is definitely, you know, a trope. What about my suggestion for consolidating the examples?

I agree with it. I might prefer a separate category for fictional religions, but I'm fine either way.

It's a useful notes page because the "examples" list is actually a bunch of "here is how this religion is related to magic" discussions, with mentions of maybe a couple of works that treat that particular religion as a source of magical powers, but often just a hand-waved generalization.

I'm not saying it's not a trope, I'm saying the page as currently designed looks like a Useful Notes, and it needs to be reformatted. It also needs a cleanup in general.

I'm thinking anything that uses magical powers related to the symbols of a religion, without the religion itself (such as the kabbalistic Tree of Life showing up in Evangelion) should be removed; the trope is "People who are deeply involved in religion gain magical powers".

edited 29th Aug '12 7:28:22 AM by Escher

How do you get that when there's maybe a handful of real life examples and the vast majority is fictional works? It's just got a little bit too much Analysis on the page that should be in the Analysis tab.

Every "Real Life" tab is a useful notes. That and many of the examples are awful — either zero context, only subversions (where the religious person claims powers but uses tricks instead), or just totally inaccurate. For example, for some reason the Islam section has a zero-context reference to Hermetic magic, which is NOT based on Islam at all, and Hermes Trismegestis was Coptic — that is, Egyptian Christian. I don't know what this has to do with Islam making you magical.

I also don't think it's an example if you have a magical character who happens to be religious — the Rozen Maiden example stands out. The talking magical doll isn't magical because it's Sufi. It's magical because it's a magical talking doll. The trope is "Being religious gives you magic powers".

I guess it does get better as you go down the page into Shinto and Wicca, and especially into "Non-specific". Still there's enough "Real Life" sections and natter to justify me saying this is a trope mashed together with a useful notes page.

And yes, I was exaggerating in my original post. I can see that there's a trope here, it's just half-buried until you get deep into the examples section.

edited 29th Aug '12 8:07:28 AM by Escher

So, I guess that's a "no, we can't talk about your suggestion," Discar.

Sure, consolidate the examples. While it's nice to have the notes about what sorts of magic are supposedly connected to different faiths, that sort of thing ought to go in the description or on a separated Useful Notes page.

Bump. I made a sandbox with the consolidated examples. How's it look?

And bump again. Anyone have anything to say?

One last bump.

Looks reasonable to me. We could quibble over whether some of the examples belong on the page at all, but the consolidation seems like a definite improvement.

I'd be happier if you could soft-split the description between trope and analysis, so we could move the analysis part to the analysis page when this gets installed, but I won't insist on it.

I swapped the sandbox over. Does anyone have any specific ideas about the description? I'm thinking we can shunt the three big paragraphs (the ones starting "Generally," "Shinto," and "It should be noted") over wholesale, but that might leave the main page a little bare.

I think first first part of the description needs a change. It'd be good to lose that first meaningless bit about how awesome religion is, and the second paragraph is odd to me, because it suggests that conflating religion with magic is somehow mistaken. Which is crazy; religion and magic were the same thing up until, really, the 20th century. I'd suggest changing the first three paragraphs to this:

Faith and power have always gone hand in hand. And not just power in the spiritual and social senses — religion and magic were the same thing for most of the world's history. Every religion's most devoted practitioners are associated with supernatural powers; often by people within the religion itself, and almost universally by those outside it. And going the other direction, having magical powers meant that person was associating with some sort of supernatural entity, whether calling upon the gods or consorting with the Devil.

This is also true of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, but treated somewhat differently; many Asian traditions ascribe mystical powers to those who have, through meditation and spiritual growth, become more closely attuned to the truth of the universe. They are not seen as contacting a specific supernatural entity; rather, through religious experience, they attain a mental state that grants them abilities beyond normal humans.

Even the word "magic" comes from religion; it is derived from "magi", Persian priests. The modern idea of a 'wizard' — somebody who can just do magic entirely on their own, whether born with the gift or trained in mystic arts — did not really develop until the 20th century, and was not solidified until Dungeons And Dragons made a strong distinction between Priests and Magic Users. The increasing importance of science and technology in our world has trained people to think of even amazing and wonderful events as under human control and within human understanding, and our concept of magic has similarly changed into something closer to "science we don't understand", with comprehensible, repeatable rules, rather than begging for favors from entities greater than us.

edited 17th Sep '12 10:26:30 AM by Escher

I like that definition.

Welp, I didn't hear any loud protests, so I'll go ahead and drop that into the page's description.

Looks good to me. We done here?

looks that way.