[Torg] What is Magic? (Magic Axiom, 2 of 9)

[Jones Jasyn]

What is Magic?

Magic and magical concepts have existed in every culture known. Magic forms the backbone of most myths and legends, and folklore and superstition are alive and well in the modern world.

Magic has many permutations. Nearly every culture views magic differently, and many cultures have multiple forms of magic. Then there are the manifold magical systems developed for roleplaying games and fantasy fiction.

All of these seem incompatible, yet all of these apparently different magical systems share a single fundamental concept: 

*Magic involves people causing effects by manipulating symbols that represent the desired effect.*

Let's clarify. A symbol can be anything: a word, a picture, a gesture, or an activity. An effect is a specific desired end: cause injury, cure an illness, bring good fortune. In magic, people manipulate symbols that represent the effect and by doing so, cause the effect to actually happen.

Let’s look at some examples:

Real World Magic

• A college student shuffles the cards of the Tarot deck. Each card has a meaning, the way in which they're laid out has a meaning, what cards appear where in the layout have meaning, and whether the cards are upright or inverted has a meaning. These cards are said to foretell the future of an individual.

• According to Joseph Campbell, the paintings on the cave walls in Lascaux invoke the magic of the hunt. People drew images of a successful hunt, so their hunts would be successful.

• Isopsephia is an ancient form of numerology. To use this system, the person must convert the letters of their name to numbers, then find other words, names and dates whose numbers are related. Because their numbers are related to his numbers, those words, dates, and names are significant and foretell the person’s future.

Magic in Fiction

• The television show The X-files featured an episode with an Appalachian folk magician. He wanted to harm a family, so he made dolls that looked human, that had the same hair color as the person, that had bits of the target's hair and clothes, that had features which resemble the target's. What he did to the doll—burn it or stick pins into its eyes—happened to the target.

• In Randall Garret’s "Lord Darcy" stories, magic involved performing actions with objects, these actions and objects being related to what the magician wants to occur. The specific relationships were detailed in a series of laws—the Law of Contagion, Similarity, Synecdoche, etc.

• Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea had magic that revolved around a language, the true language that was spoken to create the world.  Words in this language have power. By using the word "tolk", for pebble, a magician could create a pebble, create the image of a pebble, cause the pebble to move, or break a pebble. Magicians studied intently in order to learn and use the words, and went to great lengths to discover lost words.

In Roleplaying Games

• The magic of Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons involves spell components. Magicians burn guano to cause a fireball. They rub fur on a glass rod to cast a lightning bolt. To understand another's language, they take a ceramic model of a ziggurat and break it. Each component symbolizes the spell’s effect.

• In Call of Cthulhu, characters research ancient texts, written in dead languages, that tell of monstrous and inhuman beings from beyond existence. When the stars are right, they read the incantation—that includes appeals to unknown powers—and can summon or banish impossible horrors.

• In Mage: the Ascension, mages use foci—ranging from feathers and drawings to dances and meditation—to work magic, each Tradition having its own unique sets of foci corresponding to its paradigm.

The Fundamental Principle of Magic

What is magic?

"Magic is the use of symbols to cause specific results, the symbols representing the desired result."

Symbolic manipulation is the implicit principle behind all magic: magic in the real world, magic in fiction, and magic in roleplaying games.  This principle describes what magic is, because it’s what everyone believes magic to be.

Jasyn Jones
jasynj (at) gmail (dot) com

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Check out my Torg webpage, Storm Knights:

darleyconsulting.com/games/stormknights/