Doing in the wizard

I'm having a lot of trouble with magic.

Specifically, what role "magic" should play in a novel set at the end of the Aegean Bronze Age. Because worship of complex pantheons of gods was the default state, sacrifices and scrying, amulets and cantrips were everywhere. Because demigods and magical armor and curses are all over the stories told about (and one presumes told in) that time.

But what do you do in a story, in a work of historical fiction grounded in archaeology and history and set before a modern reader? There are choices, but I find all of them equally unpalatable.



The conservative answer is that magic isn't real. That's the serious historian's answer (few historians take cultural relativism to the point where they allow each culture its own laws of physics). Thing is, it would be dishonest to the cultures to leave it all out. It is not a good depiction of a person from the time to have them not have their relationship to the gods on their mind. Or to not have (depending on the specific culture) a few protectives spells and amulets about their person.

On the flip side, of course, when you put that stuff in, it creates a distance from the reader. The reader -- who probably doesn't accept the divinity of Poseidon or the dangers of the Evil Eye -- is going to look down on these characters for their foolish superstitions.

It may be possible to show how augurs and sacrifices and processions fill necessary social, political, even economic functions. How protective amulets are a useful comfort to the individual regardless of actual efficacy. It may be possible, in short, to bring the reader far enough into the mindset of the culture that they accept along with the characters the reality of the supernatural.

It might even be possible to break through that barrier thrown up in the 18th century; that division we recognize now between naturalistic and supernatural. We tend, today, to throw out anything we can't rigorously proof. But well before even Aristotle, how are you going to proof a naturalistic explanation for earthquakes? What predictive (aka useful) power does this explanation have? And a supernatural explanation is not usually contradictory to observed reality. If the myth is that storm clouds gather reflecting the dark mood of Zeus before he lets loose with the thunderbolts, well, that's a pretty good way of knowing a storm is coming with enough time to get under cover.




Equally unpalatable is deniable magic. This runs in two forms. The first is where there is a naturalistic explanation for everything that is labeled magic. The difference from the above is the train of coincidence that makes, well, magical things happen anyhow. Think of Flood Geology. (Or before that, Immanuel Velikovsky.) This is when things are set up in the most peculiar way possible so something that looks exactly like the Biblical Flood can unfold in a manner that is intended to be coherent with modern science (it isn't).

So a haughty character is struck down by the gods. Or by the unwise move of wearing steel armor on a hilltop during a thunderstorm. A character returns from the dead. Or was just in a chemical trance brought on by a concoction similar to the fabled zombie drug.

Some people think that you can get the best of both worlds going this way. That you can have demons flying around the sky throwing fireballs and it turns out it was all the result of a particularly bad loaf of bread (aka ergot poisoning). Me, I think you've taken the sparkle out by making the explanation that mundane, and pulled the reader out of the story with how strained and contrived the "real" explanation was. It reminds me of the ending in multiple Scooby Do episodes where the clearly intangible floating ghosts who were walking through walls and soaring over the heads of our characters are revealed to be an elderly farmer wearing a bed sheet dipped in glow-in-the-dark paint. Oh, really?

(And now that I think of it, it's also a bit like those serials where the cliffhanger ending had the characters go over a cliff in a hurtling car. Then the next episode shows the car from a different angle, where it is going at most three miles and hour and all the doors are wide open -- and ignores completely you would have totally seen the hero getting out, anyhow.)

The very worst form is when the writer thinks they are being clever and leaves a, "It was all a dream....but was it?" escape clause. When everything about the demonic invasion can be explained by bad weather and a migration of lizards....except for one bright red trident left stuck in a door.

What else do I need to say about the latter but that this is annoying and cheap?



And then there's actually in-your-face magic. One danger is that magic has to be carefully defined otherwise it removes all tension. Protagonists with powers outside the usual have a terrible tendency to whip out new ones at the slightest hint of crisis.

A bigger problem I have is, which magic? If one set of gods is real, why not all of them? If one person can see the future, why can't all the diviners and oracles do the same? Basically, if magic hardly ever works, or worse, works completely differently from the way everyone in-world thinks it is supposed to work, you are back to Case A again; a world of superstitious idiots.

And if it does work, at least to some statistical significance, why hasn't it changed society? This is something that bugs me in every superhero story; why are the cops surprised? Why are the muggers so bold? Why do they still have plate glass and bank vaults, if they get broken into every other day?

That's the thing; usually when magic is added, it is to be a game-changer. The protagonist (or the villain, let's be fair) can do something no-one is quite ready for. And, yes, that's the powerful fantasy as well. If it is (relatively) ordinary and integrated into society, your hero can no more whip out an unexpected spell and make their escape than he can whip out an unexpected sword and solve his current problems that way. Not to say the adventurous hero doesn't do exactly that, it is just when you come down to it, in this flavor the magic might as well not be there at all. But if it does change the game...then all the ills above come to fall.

My bottom line is that it real magic feels cheap. I'm not entirely sure why. It doesn't feel wrong for an outright fantasy, or an alternate world. I think it is because a real historical culture is a balance of needs and pressures and evolutions and the job of the historian is to explain how it works and how it got that way. Saying, "Oh and by the way the gods are real" is to my mind no different from changing the availability of tin or the size of horses or the temperature at which iron melts; either because you really want armored knights in the Bronze Age or because it is just too damn much work to research, understand, and explain to the audience how self bows and chariots work.

Removing the real reasons why supernatural belief systems and their accoutrements exist in a culture, and their real function in a culture, is to portray that culture falsely. I think it gives a less rich picture. Certainly a less nuanced one.

And in the bottom line, the only thing functional magic gives you is the dangerous chance to have something spectacular and marvelous and not a little bit outright power fantasy happen. And if you are planning to write adventure, with impossible odds and unlikely derring-do, it is really hard to resist adding that double-edged blade to your story-telling arsenal.

Hence my problem.