The Sci Fi Catholic Yak Module
In the Twentieth Century there is a great tendency to view magic as tapping into a natural source of power, with the need of a ethics on how to use it.
Why not? This is the century of electricity, of internal combustion engines, and all other techological advances based on tapping several sources of energy. So what's one more source of energy?
And why should a particular source of energy be condemned, when all the other ones are accepted? After all not a single one of those who condemn the use of magic in stories refrain from turning up the light at night, never wondering how their actions would look to a medieval mind.
We are all wizards now, thanks to technology, and magic might be seen as an alternative energy source.
Avoid sin! Don't covet the book, go get some of the work of Carlo Ginzburg. He's the leading living authority on this and has the rare gift of being a truly top-notch, pioneering historian and being able to write rigorous books accessible to ordinary readers.
Two excellent case studies from the Inquisition records (not in Spain, but the more normal practice) written engagingly for non-specialists are: "The Night Battles" and "The Cheese and the Worms", which are widely available. World-class scholarship good enough to read on an airplane!
I found these excerps to be quite interesting. I have not read a lot of fantasy, but I do know that every "secondary world" I've ever read treats magic as a natural resource. This plot device, like many cliches of fantasy, can be interpreted in a wide variey of ways. Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series has magic whose nature is much like radiation; since the series is a parody of fantasy, one could see why he would draw comparisans between the two. Both are forms of "natural energy" which only a select few people can control with any kind reliability. The humor of the books occurs when this magic becomes beyond the wizard's control. There lies within Pratchett's works a constant critique of pop culture issues (such as controlling radioactive energy).
Forms of magic (like Pratchett's) also remind us that, for all the critics call fantasy "escapism", much fantasy derives inspiration from the real world around us. Magic can lead us to ponder many things about ourselves. I already mentioned C.S. Lewis' insight about magic and technology being two means to conform reality to the will. This insight was taken to an almost idealized form in "The Lord of the Rings". The Ring itself is obviously the most powerful magical object in Middle Earth (as far as I know). How the characters react to it not only tells us about the real dillema of human nature when it is faced with power, but is also similar to Plato's "Ring of Ganges" thought experiment. Hypothetically, if you had a Ring of Power, what would you do? The greatest fantasy works are not only able to suspend disbelief, they also allow us to look at real life issues or scenarios regarding ourselves and the real world. Just because fantasy allows us to put our head in the clouds does not mean we can't have our feet planted on the ground. I may have paraphrased Chesterton there; if I did, kudos to him. But to finish what I was saying, what I've been trying to get at. If magic was believed to have been part of the natural world, and has been abandoned in our time because we find that electricity or radiation far more useful, the concept of magic in of itself will never die in the human mind, because it allows the human imgination to create something which the reason can temper with; magic may not be real, but that does not stop us from created any number of principles or systems for it. It does not stop us from asking practical questions by using hypothetical means.
If any of you don't believe me, go read some Harry Potter fanfics sometime, and see how much people change or expand Rowling's magical world; you would be amazed how many different ideas can be "grafted" on another person's system of magic.
On the subject of magic in fiction, I read this blog-essay recently. It seems apropos.
Ah, I see someone already pointed it out to you in the comments on an earlier post. Never mind. ^^;
Commenting by HaloScan
