Magical systems

[pegkerr]

This is going to be an extremely long and confused thinking-out-loud entry about my thoughts as I try to get a grasp on my magical system in the book. I am quite frustrated. I have been brooding about the book brainstorming session I had with B. minnehaha last Friday night, because I am still quite perplexed about how to pull all the pieces together. I keep circling round and around the idea I had several months ago that somehow magic in this system has to do with phlogiston.

I was very struck by Alan Jacob’s article "Harry Potter’s Magic," which I’ve quoted from before, in which he posits that J. K. Rowling’s magical system is sort of taking off from the split in magical and natural sciences:

The place to begin is to invoke one of the great achievements of twentieth–century historical scholarship: the eight volumes Lynn Thorndike published between 1929 and 1941 under the collective title A History of Magic and Experimental Science. And it is primarily the title that I wish to reflect upon here. In the thinking of most modern people, there should be two histories here: after all, are not magic and experimental science opposites? Is not magic governed by superstition, ignorance, and wishful thinking, while experimental science is rigorous, self–critical, and methodological? While it may be true that the two paths have diverged to the point that they no longer have any point of contact, for much of their existence—and this is Lynn Thorndike’s chief point—they constituted a single path with a single history. For both magic and experimental science are means of controlling and directing our natural environment (and people insofar as they are part of that environment). . . . It was not obvious in advance that science would succeed and magic fail: in fact, several centuries of dedicated scientific experiment would have to pass before it was clear to anyone that the "scientific" physician could do more to cure illness than the old woman of the village with her herbs and potions and muttered charms. In the Renaissance, alchemists were divided between those who sought to solve problems—the achievement of the philosopher’s stone, for example (or should I say the sorcerer’s stone?)—primarily through the use of what we would call mixtures of chemicals and those who relied more heavily on incantations, the drawing of mystical patterns, and the invocation of spirits.
At least, it seems to us that the alchemists can be so divided. But that’s because we know that one approach developed into chemistry, while the other became pure magic. The division may not have been nearly so evident at the time, when (to adapt Weber’s famous phrase) the world had not yet become disenchanted. As Keith Thomas has shown, it was "the triumph of the mechanical philosophy" of nature that "meant the end of the animistic conception of the universe which had constituted the basic rationale for magical thinking." Even after powerful work of the mechanistic scientists like Gassendi the change was not easily completed: Isaac Newton, whose name is associated more than any other with physical mechanics, dabbled frequently in alchemy.

This history provides a key to understanding the role of magic in Joanne Rowling’s books, for she begins by positing a counterfactual history, a history in which magic was not a false and incompetent discipline, but rather a means of controlling the physical world at least as potent as experimental science. In Harry Potter’s world, scientists think of magic in precisely the same way they do in our world, but they are wrong. The counterfactual "secondary world" that Rowling creates is one in which magic simply works, and works as reliably, in the hands of a trained wizard, as the technology that makes airplanes fly and refrigerators chill the air—those products of applied science being, by the way, sufficiently inscrutable to the people who use them that they might as well be the products of wizardry. As Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "Any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic."

(This essay was a cornerstone of the paper I wrote for the Nimbus 2003 conference on the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues in the Harry Potter books.)

Many examples of urban fantasy can be described as stories where both a "magical" explanation and a "real world" explanation can simultaneously exist. A good example is Megan Lindholm’s novel Wizard of the Pigeons. Is the main character a mentally ill Vietnam veteran living on the streets of Seattle? Or is he a wizard? Perhaps he is both. I’m interested in doing this, in coming up with an explanation for the events in my story, and perhaps an explanation for why Minnesota culture is the way it is, that is both. But I’m really groping here to pin my ideas down.

Now re: my idea of using phlogiston: the idea is that phlogiston is a theory that chemists explored and eventually abandoned. I found an essay that suggests, intriguingly, that if refined a bit, the phlogiston theory actually works:

It may seem hard to believe that phlogiston theory, which is incorrect, was so persistent. How could it survive all of the attacks, and come back for more? I think the answer is that phlogiston theory is actually very close to the truth. If we consider a chemical's tendency to take up oxygen, and call its lack of oxygen "phlogiston," we can describe absolutely any chemical reaction involving oxygen. Instead of putting oxygen on one side of any chemical equation, we can put this anti-oxygen on the other side. It will always balance. One atom of phlogiston would always have an atomic weight of -16, and the weights will always balance, too. So, we can always construct a self-consistent phlogiston theory, even today.

So what if I do what Jacob’s essay suggest, and use this idea of phlogiston, which was abandoned by scientists, as a basis for my system of magic. What would that mean to the story?

When B. minnehaha was asking me questions about my ideas about magic under this system last Friday night, he said that it sounds as if what I had in mind was that magic was "manna," meaning it was a "thing" which was quantifiable, something that you could have "more" of or "less" of, something that you manipulated as a substance by certain rules (an alternate technology), rather than something that was called into being by ritual and spells. I think that sounds right.

Now: re: winter magic and summer magic. B. wrote two columns (titled "Summer Magic" and "Winter Magic") on the back of one of our ever-helpful placemats, and we tried to put the characteristics of each magical system in the two different columns. I think that this book will be mainly about winter magic, because Solveig’s a winter magic kind of gal, but it’s helpful to understand both, and how they interact. I think of them as two sort of interlocking systems with entirely different characteristics and functions: one wanes while the other waxes. A person may be proficient in one system, and indeed may only know about one system, but not the other.

The totemic animal of winter magic is fish, which become very wise as the ice freezes and the magic builds up in the water. The totem of summer magic is birds, which fly through the air. As I mentioned, mosquitoes are significant here, too, in a way I haven’t entirely worked out. Their larvae live on the surface of the water, right on the border between the summer realm of the birds (air) and the winter realm of the fish (water), and they suck blood, which is mystically linked to the oceans. Minnesota is strong in winter and summer magic because it is as far as you can get in all directions from the oceans. The distance from the oceans means we have such a wide temperature extreme (the ocean are a heat sink) AND it is a source of salt, and salt leaches away magic. Being far from the oceans, we have a high concentration of magic. Anyway, the fact that mosquitoes bite some people and not others is magically significant.

Again, the idea is that winter magic builds up in water when it freezes. The magic becomes concentrated in the water, and especially the ice. (Perhaps it’s somehow magically significant that water expands as it freezes, unlike most solids?) An ice palace, therefore, would be a concentration of winter magical power, a tremendous focal point. Solveig became "steeped" in winter magic because she fell through the ice as a girl and absorbed that winter magic.

I’m not entirely sure what this means, and I’m not quite sure how I want to play it. I think I don’t want to write a story about someone who is gifted, "the One" (like Neo in The Matrix, say), someone who the fates decree will solve the magical problem, and therefore has all sorts of magical powers that they can whip out whenever the going gets tough. I am interested instead in someone more like Frodo, who has to solve a problem, and does it not through any special magical reserves, but through sheer human courage, and drawing on inner reserves, specifically calling upon her heart of flesh (as opposed to the heart of stone). That’s the humanness aspect that all good fantasy stories illuminate for me. Yet, how do I reconcile this with the idea that somehow she is steeped in winter magic? What does that mean? I want her to solve her problem—whatever it was because she has winter magic and because she’s a damned good architect. In other words, the solution is both magical and real world.

B. minnehaha suggested that if winter magic is concentration of power, that it’s "strong" whereas summer magic is "weak." I saw what he was getting at, but immediately disagreed with him. Winter magic is concentrated, yes, but the fact that summer magic is dispersed, attenuated, doesn’t at all mean that it is weak. Perhaps summer magic values dispersal, because if the magic is dispersed, it infuses everything and a master summer magician, then, is someone who is connected to everything, through that magic. A summer magician is like a zen master who learns to become one with the universe. Power is expansion, where it is concentration in winter magic. I discussed with B. the idea that women are sometimes said to be "specialists" in inter-relationships (connectivity), and men in the particular and concrete; therefore women might be natural summer magicians and men winter magicians. And Solveig, the untypical winter figure is a woman in a man’s world (architecture). But am not certain how much I want to get into what might be gender stereotyping here.

Still, what does this have to do with phlogiston, or anti-oxygen? What do summer and winter magicians do with their power? I suggested that perhaps experienced practitioners of summer and winter magic, who use it "right" might not strike you as particularly impressive or powerful people, because their concerns are not worldly and acquisitive. Perhaps powerful winter magicians seem to be merely taciturn Norwegian bachelor farmers, who like to go ice fishing and pull up the fish out of the water. Perhaps they’re catching those fish to seek wisdom, asking the fish questions as they pull them up. But they’re not doing it to acquire money or power or anything material. Unless they "go bad" like Rolf. How does what Rolf’s doing with the ice palace have to do with how winter magic works (or how winter magic is corrupted)? And what about all those other ice palaces, built in other St. Paul Winter Carnivals? Were they all built by "bad" winter magicians? Or were some "good" winter magicians? What might they have been trying to accomplish with all that focused winter magical power?

And summer magicians? What do they do with their time and how do they practice their art? Uh . . . my mind’s a blank.

I looked up archetypal symbolism connected with fish and birds. It’s been bothering me that I don’t know what the fish are "up to." What do they have to tell Solveig? What is their significance? Fish are a common symbol of fertility, which in psychological terms may symbolize a promise of personal growth. If the fish is in the sea, the sea may symbolize the unconscious (alas, we have no seas in Minnesota. But still . . .) According to Jung, fish, being cold-blooded and primitive creatures, may symbolize a deep level of unconsciousness. 'Fishes and snakes are favourite symbols for describing psychic happenings or experiences that suddenly dart out of the unconscious and have a frightening or redeeming effect.' (Jung).

Birds may represent the simplicity of nature and the need to get in touch with nature. An invitation to enter into the spiritual realm. May symbolize energies that can bring you healing or balance in life. A bird taking wing may represent the need for you to take wing, unencumbered by circumstances that prevent you from the freedom you require.

So . . . fish have to do with the unconscious, perhaps unconscious wisdom? And birds with spirituality/freedom?

Peg, going off to think and wrestle with all this maddeningly slippery stuff some more

Edited to add: Upon re-reading this, I now think it is probably all garbage. But perhaps that is merely the effect of too little sleep.

Edited again: Garbage! Swill! Dreck! Inane stupidity! Ack!

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

The totemic animal of winter magic is fish, which become very wise as the ice freezes and the magic builds up in the water. The totem of summer magic is birds, which fly through the air. As I mentioned, mosquitoes are significant here, too, in a way I haven’t entirely worked out. Their larvae live on the surface of the water, right on the border between the summer realm of the birds (air) and the winter realm of the fish (water), and they suck blood, which is mystically linked to the oceans. Minnesota is strong in winter and summer magic because it is as far as you can get in all directions from the oceans. The distance from the oceans means we have such a wide temperature extreme (the ocean are a heat sink) AND it is a source of salt, and salt leaches away magic. Being far from the oceans, we have a high concentration of magic. Anyway, the fact that mosquitoes bite some people and not others is magically significant.

This is very, very cool.

maddeningly slippery stuff

it's like ice!

It sounds like everything's churning away rapidly, which I would think is a great sign for the future of this project!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'd ask: what happens when everything is working right? What happens when it goes wrong? Is the ice palace/Rolf/Jack stuff because of it going wrong? Is it typical of it going wrong? Is it an apparent going wrong which is leading to it going more right than before?

If winter magicians are usually insignificant bachelor farmers (that's a very Garrison Keiller image for me!) are summer magicians women who cook and bottle and preserve? If Solveig is odd in being female in winter magic (connected to her father and the ice experience?) then is there someone in the novel who is male but into summer magic? (If there was and they were wise but powerless/low power in winter that could be interesting.)

You can't have salt leaching away magic, because for one thing look how magical islands are, and for another it doesn't work with phogiston. But you could have the ozone in salt air preventing people from manipulating the magic, and then you could do something with ozone leaking from electricity/something doing that at some point, maybe. So it's not leaching it away, but it's like, oh, the difference between electricity running along in wires and static everywhere. In fact that could explain why islands seem to magical and Minnesota seems so mundane, because the islands have wild uncontrollable magic bits and Minnesota has these currents under control -- hmm, I wonder if you could do something with them getting out of control?

Water being weirdly triangular and hence floating and allowing life on Earth could be magic, could be a way of allowing magic, but you have to be very careful using this kind of thing because it's possible to come up with something that will make people throw the book across the room, fantasy or not.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

(alas, we have no seas in Minnesota. But still . . .)

But still, should you need a sea, there's a great lake up to Duluth.

And should you need a magical water event, I'll show you where the extinct waterfalls were along the river and you can make them flow again.

K.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Or the post-glacial and HUGE Lake Agassiz that was once there.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There are a few ways to play this. There's history: the glaciers and the prehistoric lake. There's geography: the Driftless Zone is the area in which the glaciers never went. There are more recent riverbeds and ice damns and waterfalls.

I really like the idea of a magic system based on seasonality. There's so much you can do with it.

B

[pameladean]

And! And! And! We used to have seas up the wazoo. Look at almost any geological marker near the Mississippi. I'm thinking of Great River Bluffs State Park, but there are more.

Pamela

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

And the whole Minnesota River Valley.

B

[(Anonymous)]

You may have answered this earlier, as I have only recently started following your lj, but why is Solveig building a construction of winter magic in the summer world?

Leshii

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, the ice palace is being built in the winter. At this point, I think that the action will start in the summer, continue throughout the autumn and winter, with the climax occurring in the ice palace itself. The denoument (I think) will occur at the May Day Parade, which is put on by the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater every year the first weekend in May.

As I said, the focus will be on winter magic. But I'd like to know about summer magic too, as part of the overall magic system.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, but summer magic is also air magic, if I am following you. This castle stands in the air, where winter birds can fly through. It looks like an intersection of magics.

Leshii

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

Perhaps summer magic values dispersal, because if the magic is dispersed, it infuses everything and a master summer magician, then, is someone who is connected to everything, through that magic. A summer magician is like a zen master who learns to become one with the universe. Power is expansion, where it is concentration in winter magic.

This reminds me minorly of a concept David Eddings brought up, where the Light spread its power out over many people to fight the Dark, while the Dark concentrated its power on one person. Both powerful, but different strategies.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad to see this, actually. I was going to email you with comments and ideas even before I saw this.

I think this is vitally important, because it defines the shape of your world. It's world-building, and even though it's very similar to our world it's still different. The answers to these questions will shape your plot, and your plot will shape the answers.

Some comments:

"Again, the idea is that winter magic builds up in water when it freezes. The magic becomes concentrated in the water, and especially the ice. (Perhaps it's somehow magically significant that water expands as it freezes, unlike most solids?) An ice palace, therefore, would be a concentration of winter magical power, a tremendous focal point."

No, it wouldn't. An iceberg would be a tremendous focal point. Antarctica would be a tremendous focal point. An ice palace--eh.

What would make an ice palace a focal point is not just the fact that ice concentrates magic, but that somehow the shape of the ice matters. That's what an ice palace gives you: an architect making design decisions that affect how the magic works. If it's just raw volume of ice, your villain would head either North or South...it wouldn't work for your plot.

What I have been thinking about since Friday is the notion that it's not ice per se, but instead the barrier between water and air. This gives you a number of things. One, winter is inherently more magical because you can have more surface area. Instead of just the surface of a lake, you can have a three-dimensional structure. This makes an ice palace more magical than an iceberg because you can have more surface area in close proximity--if you architect it properly.

It also means that things like waterfalls are magical--there's a lot of air/water boundary in spray--but much more volatile. I think this will work with your differential between summer and winter magic. And it lets you work in Minnehaha Falls, which seems like a good idea to me.

I think it also helps to postulate that only natural water--and not tap water--has this property. I don't have a coherent "why" for that yet, but otherwise you're going to have to deal with magicians taking showers in order to do better magic--and that seems kind of silly.

So it's natural water in contact with air. It happens in both summer and winter, but it looks different in summer and winter. And that results in a difference in what can be done with the magic.

At least, that's one way to do it.

I don't believe you necessarily have to explain any of this in the book, but I think you have to know what it is.

"Winter magic is concentrated, yes, but the fact that summer magic is dispersed, attenuated, doesn't at all mean that it is weak. Perhaps summer magic values dispersal, because if the magic is dispersed, it infuses everything and a master summer magician, then, is someone who is connected to everything, through that magic."

This makes sense in your plot, I think. It's less about strong versus weak, and more about the differences in style between liquid water and solid water. And it plays nicely with the difference between water and ice. Both are the same, but water disperses whereas ice remains concentrated. Ice disperses slowly, of course, which I'm sure you will make much of when the time comes.

None of this explains the fish, though, and you need the fish for the plot. Why should the fish get wise in the winter? I think it would have something to do with the way ice formed on a lake, but I don't have a good theory yet.

"Still, what does this have to do with phlogiston, or anti-oxygen?" I don't think it has anything to do with phlogiston. To me, a good magic system is one that deviates from the real world only a little. If you're going to make phlogiston the source of your magic, then you don't get the seasonal effects you need for the plot. If you're going to create a magical world where the seasons matter, then why do you need phlogiston? (Unless there's a seasonal phlogiston theory that I don't know about, in which case it's perfect.)

Definitely interesting ideas, and certainly worth thinking about more.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"As I mentioned, mosquitoes are significant here, too, in a way I haven't entirely worked out. Their larvae live on the surface of the water, right on the border between the summer realm of the birds (air) and the winter realm of the fish (water), and they suck blood, which is mystically linked to the oceans."

That last doesn't work, because the oceans are salt water and salt water is bad for magic. And you need salt water to be bad for magic otherwise your book is going to be set in some seaside town in Newfoundland.

Actually, blood is pretty salty, too. Maybe your mosquitoes are anti-magical in some way. Maybe they derive power from non-magic.

B

[siriologist.livejournal.com]

Winter magic is concentrated, yes, but the fact that summer magic is dispersed, attenuated, doesn’t at all mean that it is weak.

This make perfect sense physically since as molecules freeze the atome get more dence and therefore more concentrated in the substance. When something thaws the atoms get more spread out. That should work for the magic as well as the atoms. Winter magic should be more centered inside something as we all turn inward and huddle more in winter. Maybe it takes an internal power to use the winter magic and more external power to gather and utilize summer magic. Maybe summer magic is collected with dream catchers and directed by wands, where as winter magic is more drawn or pulled from the ice (fishing) and utilized by an internal direction rather than an external wand. Maybe the fish whisper the spells to the fishermen.

therefore women might be natural summer magicians and men winter magicians. And Solveig, the untypical winter figure is a woman in a man’s world (architecture).

I like this aspect and think it would be cool to use this as a reason why Solvieg is atypical and can solve the problem most people can't without her having to be "the one" ala Neo.

I don't know enough about your antagonist, but maybe he's trying to force the winter magic rather than drawing or fishing it out to use. Maybe winter magic has an organic limit, and the antagonists abuse of the magic is from trying to force more of it than natural.

Or NOT. ;)

At any rate I don't think any of your ideas are garbage, swill, or dreck (my comments on them might be...). They sound pretty cool to me. But...I know from which you come as my chapter at the moment *is* garbage, swill, and dreck, and boring to boot and I can't for the life of me figure out what the heck it needs.

Good luck
Carole

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

That's quite a nifty magic system! It's nice to see some important polarities that aren't the standard light/dark good/evil ones. The aggregate/disperse polarity is absolutely reasonable and natural, and ... in all my reading of fantasy and of terrestrial magic systems, and of course many many role-playing games, I can't think of anything quite like it.

And of course it allows considerable subtlety of motivation and characterization. Which is what one has come to expect from you, of course.