Bad mages, bad mages, what you gonna do…
…what you gonna do when they hex for you!
Okay! Now that we’ve gotten the obligatory bad punning out of the way, to the main point.
Apropos to yesterday’s discussion about the morality, or lack thereof, of magic users in sword & sorcery, I had a thought about the nature of magic in many works of fantasy fiction. Specifically:
The magic in very many works of fantasy fiction isn’t magic at all, but mechanistic physics, and not supernatural, but natural.
As a general rule of thumb, “magic” means using supernatural forces or entities to achieve a desired end in the natural world. In other words, it means appealing to forces outside of nature. And in a lot of fantasy literature, magic is portrayed as simply an extension of the natural world, a level of physics that some people have the talent or the ability to manipulate. Like, Harry Dresden goes on about how magic comes from life and emotions and the heart – all natural processes. Harry Potter’s magic, of course, is wholly mechanical. Very often magic-using protagonists are born with their abilities, and must learn to use them in the face of persecution or fear.
In other words, this magic is wholly natural – there is no hint of the supernatural, the unnatural, the uncanny, or the occult about it. It’s merely a force to be manipulated, like electricity or magnetism.
By contrast, there is a very different sort of tone in a work if the magic is less natural and more supernatural – if it is gained by trafficking with forces and powers and entities outside the circles of the natural world. Because there’s an excellent chance those entities won’t be at all friendly, and may demand a price for the gifts of knowledge and power. This sort of magic is altogether uncanny and unnatural; while the previous sort of mechanistic magic follows the laws of the natural world, this kind of magic violates those laws, even blasphemes them. Think of Tsotha-lanti or Xaltotun of Acheron in Robert E. Howard’s “Conan” stories – Tsotha-lanti, who communes with the dark things in the well below the Scarlet Citadel, and Xaltotun of Acheron, who sacrifices virgins to the serpent god Set. A more modern example would be the character of the villainous Dr. Facilier in the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog”, who obtains his supernatural powers from his “friends on the other side”. Of course, in the end Dr. Facilier’s “friends” (obvious spoiler alert) prove rather less friendly than he thought.
How would this reflect in the morality of magic-using characters? If the story’s magic is mechanistic, simply a natural force, then a magic user is no more likely to be evil than your average electrician. However, if the story’s magic is of the second type, genuinely supernatural and uncanny, the the magic user will almost invariably be evil.
And magic users of the second type, I think, are one of the defining qualities of sword & sorcery. Magic users of the first type are more likely to be found in high fantasy, heroic fantasy, or urban fantasy.
Though I do think that a story about a conflict between the two types of magic systems might be interesting to write.
-JM