Fantasy Fiction and Real Magic
In which I accidentally write a trilogy despite criticizing generic fantasy, the redemption of Faust
This topic in general has been on my mind a lot, and now it looks like, for all my criticisms of generic awful commercial fantasy fiction, I have accidentally written a trilogy myself. Thinking about the relation of the idea of real magic to fantasy fiction caused me to decide that really, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis just weren’t very good fantasy fiction writers, because with them you start the idea of equating magic with the trappings of stereotypically magical items and actions, such as Gandalf needing his ring and his staff and performing various spells. This is a very shallow view of what magic actually means, because by this metric if you have some sort of technological item, such as the screen you and I are using, well, that really resembles a black scrying mirror, doesn’t it? But no one thinks technology is really magic that way. In fact, I wrote an entire satire about that, although it was mostly inspired by academic archaeologists and the fact they tend to label everything as “ritual” until they understand what various things actually were for.
Then I remembered that there actually is an explanation of magic in Harry Potter, which is that magic is literally just early natural philosophy/proto-science. There’s Nicolas Flamel and Agrippa and all these other people as well as mythological references like the centaurs and… None of these topics are things I would consider to really be objectively evil in the real world, or boring in fiction. Plus there’s much more depth. Lots of Harry Potter magic doesn’t consist of waving a wand or casting a spell, as much as that’s an infamous part of the series. There are potions, mythical creatures, the broomsticks, the flying cars, turning into animals, and apparating which is a 19th century spiritualist reference (apparition.) Basically everything that isn’t understood by “muggle” society gets folded into magic, but it doesn’t need to be a super streamlined system because it’s all taken from actual folklore and history, and in actual folklore and history I find it impossible to label it all as just “evil” or whatever since a lot of that is literally the origins of our modern science and it’s not evil, which I’ve mentioned in passing in other articles.
For example, when I was in elementary school, once we were required to do a book report on a famous scientist, and I, being a rather ambitious little kid, decided to ask “who was the first scientist?” and my teacher answered Isaac Newton. Whether or not that was entirely accurate (there was definitely science before Isaac Newton, though maybe he was the first really modern one depending on your standards,) I did my book report on Isaac Newton, and the biographies I had definitely mentioned all the alchemical and hermetic types of things he did and young me was like “cool, just like Harry Potter!” So, incidentally, magic in fiction looks a lot less evil when you explain it in terms of real-life mystical beliefs rather than being like “the good gods grant you healing wishes and have white feathery wings, while the evil gods grant you bloodthirsty wishes and have black bat wings!” There is literally nothing convincing about that, sometimes violence is in self-defense and this seems like a lot of unnecessary prejudice against black and bats in lieu of more depth.
That’s basically Lord of the Rings and Narnia unfortunately, and people who weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated as Tolkien and Lewis took it and removed all vague semblances of symbolic value from it as well. It’s little wonder when you see a psychedelic rock or heavy metal band of one stripe or another, the general tendency seems to want to be to sympathize with Sauron and run around naming everything after names that start with Amon. Regardless, I can forgive bands that were overly sentimental toward mediocre fantasy books everyone read while stoned or tripping in the 60s and 70s more than the modern power metal types of bands that like to reference Dragonlance and whatever.
Lord of the Rings is starting to seem like the kind of thing people just get sentimentally attached to when they’re in their childhood or adolescence and think everything new to them is amazing even when it isn’t, much like Dragonlance, but at least it’s earnestly much less embarrassing since at worst it just seems sort of shallow and like the fandom is mostly just people on drugs plus bandwagon effects. The really heretical stuff is from the unfinished parts of Tolkien’s writing that he didn’t publish, Christopher Tolkien published those, and even if Lord of the Rings is basically just a bunch of things happening to people who are passive in a world I wouldn’t personally want to live in, it doesn’t have characters and plots that are just completely dislikeable or unconvincing.
People often come away with the message that isn’t what Tolkien intended at all and just like the orcs or Gollum or whatever or they want to be Gandalf or an elf instead of a hobbit or human, but at least it was kind of memorable and didn’t have anyone going like “wait a second” until it was revealed Gandalf could summon giant eagles all along toward the end. Now knockoff fantasy, I can’t say the same for. But the second article in my accidental trilogy spawned by Lord of the Rings (below) makes it look like Tolkien was really only writing Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit out of commercial interest anyway even if he set it all in his “legendarium,” and the heretical stuff is basically what he was really interested in, but he knew he couldn’t publish that because he himself was commercial with these books from the outset. Tolkien is on record as kind of actually believing in reincarnation and discussing memories he had of the fall of Atlantis in his correspondences, as far as I can tell he basically believed in his own mythology which is kind of ridiculous since it’s all stuff he made up in the first place, he didn’t say he was doing esoteric research into the evidence for Atlantis, elves, etc., he said he was doing mythopoeia and didn’t seem to use a single purported nonfiction esoteric source when coming up with his conceptions of Atlantis, elves, etc.
When you look at the etymology of the word “magic,” it does indeed mean the things the magi did. When you consider who the magi were, it makes sense that they would come to be associated with a lot of false religious rites, but they were also genuinely educated and wealthy, so it makes sense some of the things they learned and taught would be legit as well. So the idea that there is a legitimate use of the word magic to not exclusively mean negative things makes a lot of sense in that light. In terms of the Bible, it reminds me of one of the words that’s sometimes translated as magic, pharmakeia, which is described negatively, but also where we get our modern word pharmacy. Generally that word isn’t translated as magic so often in modern Bibles, the more controversial exclusively negative translation for magic is found in the Old Testament. What the word pharmakeia reminds me of connotation-wise is drugs. You can go to the drug store and get your drugs and that’s all neutral or positive, but you can also do drugs or drug someone and that’s negative, and that seems to be exactly what pharmakeia is referring to in the Greek used in the Bible.
Now with the Old Testament references, I think a lot of the practices that are banned are things that are still done today, since a lot of people are still pagan, a lot of people still try to summon the dead or go into trances and get possessed, but the proper way to translate that probably isn’t “magic” or even something more ominous such as “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” It’s true that you shouldn’t try to summon supernatural powers that aren’t from God, though to some extent I think that’s actually impossible, philosophically-speaking, demons aren’t supernatural, they’re preternatural, just like angels, human souls, and all those kinds of things. I also think it sounds ill-advised to summon demons or the dead in general. What can demons or the dead do for you? Demons are evil and want to try to trick you and screw you over, and the dead are, well, dead people.
When Saul went to the Witch of Endor to summon Samuel, aside from Samuel’s rest being disturbed and the witch clearly being surprised at things not going the way they normally do with Samuel actually showing up as a visible spirit rather than her getting vague impressions or whatever, why would the dead even know the result of a battle, and if they did would they necessarily be honest? The same goes for demons, they don’t know everything, the actual best-case scenario is that they’re trying to make the things happen they said would happen and that’s actually worse because it’s demons and they’re trying to harm you, they’re not going to say nice things and actually mean it.
As for casting lots, interpreting dreams, etc. those just seemed to be OK as long as it was in a Hebrew context and not a pagan one, much to the chagrin of many modern people who want to say that ancient Biblical society wouldn’t be doing anything they view as superstitious in their post-Enlightenment view. There’s basically no reason to engage in any of the practices condemned in the Old Testament in my opinion, but it also muddies the water a lot to call them “magic” when people like calling everything “magic” and that’s really not the fault of mediocre fantasy novels according to my research, people called everything magic long before mediocre fantasy novels came onto the scene. I would say the urge to stop calling everything that you think is wondrous magical is probably the fault of mediocre fantasy novels though, because mediocre fantasy novels have caused me to do all this analysis of what’s wrong with them. It’s easier to say something like “they’re bad because they include concepts of magic, we all know magic is banned by God.” But, is everything called magic really banned by God? If you base your definition of magic on mediocre fantasy novels then sure, I’m sure God hates mediocre fantasy novels too. But is stage magic banned by god? Installation wizards? Magic markers? There’s some reason to consider it suspect until you find it doesn’t originate with Jack Parsons or Arthur C. Clarke, people just are in a habit of calling things that are amazing magical and that doesn’t even have to do with some kind of philosophy of magic, much less the really diabolical ones like Thelema rather than alchemy.
There is an innocence to calling things magic that’s really only lost as soon as you start reading mediocre fantasy novels and later ending up hating them, boring generic TTRPGs that are always set in a medieval fantasy world, and things of that ilk, and if Goethe had a redemption of Faust, this is our modern redemption of Faust, this is like the redemption of Doctor Strange. Why does Marvel have so many problems with his narrative? It doesn’t seem like he should just be evil, but the modern worldview doesn’t really have a good conceptualization of what “magic” is supposed to mean despite the initial innocence people have regarding that concept, so he just ends up with no plot and then actually ominous people like Elon Musk want to identify with him just because they want AI to be their mystical sugar daddy. I think Harry Potter incidentally had the best idea of what it was supposed to mean though despite the moderately common criticism that Harry Potter didn’t have much of a system of magic because magic isn’t a system, it’s just a way of looking at certain things as being spiritual in mostly a more paradoxically naturalistic context.
Spengler called the age of Western civilization the Faustian age, and he said that the Faustian age was about discovery and invention, to which his many critics say the Faustian age is about relentless expansionism. I think the Faustian age is more that we have no real idea what we’re doing. We can’t go back to some kind of traditionalist age, most of which are imaginary anyway, because there are a million reductios ad absurdum wherever you turn, which also should make it clear you don’t want to. But there are also a billion uncertainties, and people retreat into what the postmodernists would call hyperreality, which I think is a lot of what’s been driving my analyses of fiction since I’m by no means a literary critic, I just want to get out of hyperreality like all of us should.
Incidentally the very crux of the idea of hyperreality manifests through all these thaumaturgical notions and discomfort with even thinking about them. Goethe wrote his version of Faust as based on basically blind upward striving similar to what he saw with morphology and evolution (then called metamorphology, it way predates Darwin,) essentially just the growth of organisms, and I find that interesting. He also did the same with basing his Devil Mephistopheles on darkness like what you find in his Zur Farbenlehre which was largely an elaboration of Aristotle’s theory of colors which he wanted to prove true and I think he kind of did since the whole idea of color is “frequency,” frequency of light vs. darkness. Goethe’s writing is also where a lot of the vitalist ideas like what you find in Nietzsche that keep appearing in controversies on Substack come from as well, though I don’t think I’d classify Goethe as vitalist so much as organicist even if I’m bringing philosophy of science into this and that might be seen as conflating terms. So, on that note, want to know what really drove my analyses of fiction? Really the background I have in science to be honest. I really don’t like “it’s magic” as an explanation for much anything in fiction, it’s extremely unsatisfactory, but clearly all the litfic stuff is also garbage, we do live in a thaumaturgical age where people watch Star Trek and decide to invent communicators, where science fiction is basically real and often that does come with the rather Satanic views of people like Heinlein who were into Thelema, but it shouldn’t always come with that, reality is clearly reality and is going to keep changing as people keep making things. Secular humanism and high modernism have both come to an end and this seems like the epitome of the thaumaturgic age to me.