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Magic Systems Aren’t Magic
A Few Notes Toward More Authentic Magic in Fantasy Novels and an Invitation to Read the Witchy War Series

D.J. Butler

Choose Your Magic

When I tell people that I write fantasy novels, more often than not the next words I hear are “what’s your magic system?”

This is a ridiculous question. It reflects a state of affairs in which many fantasy writers today are writing “fantasy” novels with no magic in them at all, and using artificial constructs euphemistically called “magic systems” or “hard magic” instead. This is a loss to fantasy literature.

Magic is notoriously difficult to define. Etymologically, we get the word from Greek mageia, which means the theology of the magoi,1 the dream-interpreting Persian priests said to have called on the infant Jesus.2 This suggests that as we examine the meaning of the word “magic” more deeply, we’re going to find connections with religious practice, spirituality, oracles, and things done by outsiders, that is to say, people other than ourselves.

A recent study of Jewish magic by Yuval Harari devotes its substantial first chapter to reviewing academic understandings of what magic is from the mid-nineteenth century to date.3 Harari characterizes the evolving understanding of magic as moving broadly through three trends, or three kinds of theoretical explanations of magic. There is obviously significant overlap among his categories, and I would suggest we should see a fourth category interwoven with the others. What follows is my synthesis and summary of what Harari claims.

Harari describes early theories as evolutionist, meaning that they identify magic as “a stage in the process of spiritual and cultural advancement that humanity undergoes in the course of its development.”4 Some of these theories find the origin of magic in specific human needs (exorcism of spirits, which are the source of all “physical and spiritual problems”5) or in posited early beliefs about the structure of reality (in animistic thought, in which all things have individual spirits;6 or in the allegedly even earlier belief that all things have a collective soul;7 or in the belief in “the law of participation, which implies a linkage between the individual’s personality and things in the world”8). Other theorists have tried to identify in magic a pre-modern intellectual phase with some relationship to science and religion, e.g.: that magic is the “original form of human thought,” preceding religion, which in turn precedes science;9 that magic is the “first sign of scientific thought,” in that it posits knowable laws of the universe that can be manipulated to achieve results;10 or conversely that the laws of magic have their origin in religion, where they “serve as part of the perception of holiness and holy powers.”11

Harari goes on to identify as separate trends sociological and anthropological explanations of magic; for simplicity’s sake I’ll lump these together. Some theorists have found the definitions of magic in the community of users and non-users, for instance arguing that: religion is how we collectively approach the “lofty and beneficent” gods for help, whereas magic is how we individually approach “inferior and negative entities;”12 magical acts are externally or physically identical to religious acts, but are socially prohibited;13 magic is religion before it gets organized, and lone sorcerers are replaced with a priestly caste;14 or magic is what is performed by people of low or vague social class.15 Some writers have argued for a calendrical explanation of magic: religion is comprised of acts that are performed cyclically, and magic is undertaken in response to crises.16 Recent theorists have argued that there is little or no distinction between magic and religion at all: that all magical and religious behavior exists on “a continuum of ritual behavior”;17 that the difference between magic and religion exists only in the eye of the Western observer;18 or that the difference between magic and religion is purely a semantic problem.19

I would extract a fourth category of theories of magic from Harari’s summaries, to wit, psychological explanations of magic. Some thinkers have seen magic as “the emotional reaction of primitive man to the anxiety evoked by the surrounding world.”20 Others have seen magic as a psychological tool, protecting the self or “ego” and thereby developing the institution of the individual,21 ritualizing optimism to confer hope,22 or imposing order on the world.23

Magic is as Magic Does

Obviously, we have just begun to scratch the surface of what magic is in the real world. No mention is made in the above summary, for example, of the content of real-world grimoires, of magic as initiatic traditions, of what real-world spells actually look like, of the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy, or many other important and interesting issues.

Nevertheless, Harari’s summary suggests a criterion by which we may judge the verisimilitude of “magic systems” or otherwise the magic described in a fantasy story. An authentic magic system would fit many, or maybe all, of Harari’s definitions. In other words, an authentic magic system would be one in which academics who are not themselves practitioners, observing magical practice in the story world, could propose any of the foregoing theories to explain why practitioners do what they do.

To make a few more specific points. In an authentic magic system:

1. At some margin, magic should resemble science, with knowable laws and repeatable operations.

2. At some margin, magic should resemble religion. The line separating magical and religious ritual should be difficult to find. One person’s magic should be another person’s religion.

3. Magic should be connected to social and in-group status (the theology of the stargazers becomes the wizardry of the Greeks).

4. Magic should meet (individual and also collective) psychological needs of those who seek to employ it.

A “hard magic” system certainly could meet our criterion for authenticity. Without conducting any kind of survey, my unscientific impression is that most of them don’t, and in fact, don’t consciously try. Instead, they are constructed to follow consistent internal logic and provide a system of costs and possibilities for the story setting.

The lack of authenticity in the magic systems of contemporary fantasy is a loss; let’s consider again Harari’s list. In the real world, magic is intimately connected with the human response to crises (which is to say, growth, heroism, narrative, destruction, change, and initiation). Magic is at some (or all) stages intrinsic to human thought, and it is closely related to human worship. Magic is defined by social lines, and by our perceptions of our own cultures and other cultures.

In other words, magic is tightly connected to the human spirit. Fantasy at its best is the what-if literature of human spirituality, one reason being that magic in the real world is tightly bound to the human soul. Therefore, what-if postulates about authentic magic in a fantasy setting are what-if postulates about our spirit, and the human condition. A “hard magic” system that is rigorous, logical, and consistent, but lacks the ambiguity, sociality, spirituality, visceral psychology, and thought-content of real magic, has taken a long step away from the human soul. To me, candidly, many “hard magic” systems feel like fan fiction for a roleplaying or collectible card game, rather than the mirror to the human condition they should be. Our literature becomes the poorer thereby.

So, Dave . . . What’s Your Magic System?

My Baen series Witchy War, which includes novels Witchy Eye and Witchy Winter, is set in an alternate earth in which I’ve taken Jacksonian America apart and rebuilt it as an epic fantasy setting. Therefore, all the magic as practiced by the characters in Witchy War comes from real-world magic, either built from the blocks of real-world or in the form of whole real-world traditions.

Sarah Calhoun and other characters in Witchy War (the monk Thalanes, but also the Yankee chaplain Ezekiel Angleton and the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell) practice a high magical art called many things, but especially gramarye. I deliberately emphasize this name for its connection with grammar, and the implication that such magicians construct spells from basic principles. Specifically, they build spells using the laws formulated in the real world by James George Frazer (and in the story setting, by Sir Isaac Newton in his groundbreaking opus, the Principia Magica):

If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not.24

In other words, Sarah and other gramarists practice magic like anthropologists. This is explicitly a magical approach taken by the educated and upper-class among magical practitioners, including Polite monks (sisters and brothers of the Humble Order of St. Reginald Pole, patron saint of Christian magic) and university-trained magicians, though the monk Thalanes at least expresses the view that all magic is some form of gramarye. Gramarists’ spells work because the practitioners have the ability to construct analogies and impose them on the world by force of spirit.

High and Low Forms of Magic

Early on in Witchy Eye, the Appalachee Elector Iron Andy Calhoun refers to the Emperor Thomas as a “Chaldee numbskull,” which is to say, a devotee of astrology.25 This is a fair accusation: Thomas has nativities cast, uses judicial astrology (the art of forecasting events and choosing propitious times by studying celestial bodies), and seeks to capture the benevolent influence of the zodiac and the planets by the use of images (when we first see him in a recruiting handbill in Free Imperial Nashville, the image of Thomas’s crown “subtly” incorporates the “seal of the planet Mars”). This latter astrological art is not one you see in supermarket tabloids these days, but is taken very seriously by such important grimoires as The Picatrix26 and Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.27

Witchy War includes practitioners of Vodun (voodoo). In Witchy Eye we meet Etienne Ukwu, the gangster son of New Orleans’s bishop. Etienne is also an initiated houngan, that is to say a Vodun priest (and he has other intimate connections with Vodun divinities, but . . . spoilers). In Witchy Winter, when he confronts an initiated mambo working for his enemy, the Chevalier of New Orleans, the accusation that each hurls at the other is faithlessness: the misdeed of being a mere bokor, a mercenary practitioner of Vodun magic operating outside the confines of an accepted tradition and without the consent of the loa.28

German Brauchers in Pennsland and the Ohio are referred to in Witchy Eye, but really come onto the stage in Witchy Winter. Braucherei is a tradition of active prayer on behalf of petitioners; brauchen is to try in Pennsylvania Dutch, and a braucher is willing to try to effect a cure or solution on behalf of another person—provided that the braucher must remain disinterested, so he receives no payment and can’t be related to the person he’s helping. In Witchy Winter, Luman Walters is a hedge magician whose quest for initiation into the secrets of the universe has led him to borrow or steal from many magical traditions, including braucherei. The braucher prayers (formulaic prayers, that sometimes have fixed ritual gestures and may require physical components) Luman knows come from the best-selling grimoire ever written in North America, John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend.29 Another braucher art Luman practices is the writing of himmelsbriefe—fixed-text “heavenly letters” which, written with fine materials and pure intent, and supposed to protect their bearer.30 Braucherei’s strict moral requirements weigh on Luman, and push him to take some large personal risks late in the story.

In the Hellenistic world there existed a cosmopolitan, international system of magic, in which spells and magical words fossilized into existing professional practice and were shared around the Mediterranean. Even relatively insular cultures like the Jews participated in this international system, while omitting certain practices and adding their own contributions.31 In the Witchy War setting, this corpus of magic is identified with the pseudo-pharaonic culture of Memphis and said to have been preserved by the great Memphite wizard Jean d’Anastasi (this is, ahem, one of my little historical jokes). Memphis is Luman Walters’s other great source of spells and arcane arts,32 and although it imposes dietary taboos on him, it doesn’t include the moral strictures of braucherei . . . and at least one of those Memphite spells gets Luman into trouble.

Classical shamanism is at home on the steppes of Asia, but features of shamanism appear in magico-religious practice all over the globe. In Witchy Winter, the ceremonial misbirth of one man’s child drives him to seek a physician. In turn, that healer must first heal himself, and he does so by shamanic initiation, rising on a drum-that-is-also-a-horse out of his body and into the eternal world of the stars. There he is torn to pieces by cosmic ogres and rebuilt with iron bones and a piece of quartz in his head; this rebuilding gives him powers, including the power to return to celestial world, where he can interact with the spirits of all things, living and dead, and effect powerful healing. In the course of his rebuilding, it is implied that this religious experience dates back to or connects with the lore of the red-headed giants who were among the earliest inhabitants of the continent, and who have now mostly been driven into the north. Note that the words shaman and shamanism do not appear in the book.33

A North American spiritual practice said to have shamanic features is the Midewiwin medicine society of the Ojibwe. The Midewiwin know healing songs, and at key points in the year enact important rituals in their lodges that are designed to fill their spirit pouches with beneficent power.34 Midewiwin medicine men appear briefly in Witchy Winter.

The Fine Line Between the Magical and the Spiritual

Finally, as in the historical real world, in the Witchy War setting, there is a fine line between Christian practice, scripture, and liturgy, on the one hand, and magic on the other.35 Examples in Witchy Eye include: corn reading, the practice of reading passages of the gospels to fields of grain in order to drive away malevolent spirits and permit the grain to grow better; a curse pronounced by the Bishop of New Orleans, complete with the shaking of dust from his shoe on the cursed party;36 and an instructional illusion spell formed of the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. A particularly fun example for me from Witchy Winter is one cleric’s conversion of a funeral mass into an attack spell, complete with hostile psalm passages, a voodoo doll in the casket rather than a corpse, and a crowd chanting kyrie, kteinon (“Lord, kill!”).

This doesn’t exhaust the forms of magic that are referred to or appear in Witchy War. Lullian Alchemy gets a nod, for instance, and there are rune-carving vitki priests in the Germanic northwest of the Empire, and there is a deck of Tarocks that shows extraordinary properties. But I’ve tried throughout the series to build “authentic” rather than “hard” magic, because I believe that authentic magic connects more meaningfully to the human condition. And connecting to the human condition (in the context of a rollicking adventure tale) is what I think fantasy literature should be all about.

1 Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “mageia”.

2 Matthew 2.

3 Yuval Harari, Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017, pp. 15-67.

4 Ibid o. 15.

5 Ibid p. 20.

6 Ibid p. 18.

7 Ibid pp. 29-30.

8 Ibid p. 53.

9 Ibid pp. 21-23.

10 Ibid p. 18.

11 Ibid pp. 34-45.

12 Ibid pp. 32-33.

13 Ibid pp. 35-38.

14 Ibid p. 38.

15 Ibid p. 58.

16 Ibid p. 63.

17 Ibid p. 64.

18 Ibid p. 65.

19 Ibid p. 65.

20 Ibid p. 24.

21 Ibid pp. 26-28, 39-43.

22 Ibid pp. 45-50.

23 Ibid p. 59.

24 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963, p. 12.

25 I have found a useful handbook for getting into the basics of astrology to be Frances Sakoian and Louis S. Acker, The Astrologer’s Handbook, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1973. You’re going to want to have a good handle on naked-eye astronomy before you even start, or it will be hard going. An excellent historical survey is Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology, 2 vols., New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. The classic and highly influential early modern work is William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, a three-book work first published in 1647. Lilly was the great English astrologer of his day. My edition is William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, 2 vols., Bel Air: Astrology Classics, 2004.

26 John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock trans., The Illustrated Picatrix: The Occult Classic of Astrological Magic Complete in One Volume, Renaissance Astrology, 2015, pp. 84-132.

27 Donald Tyson ed. and James Freake trans., Three Books of Occult Philosophy Written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 1993, pp. 375-411.

28 I’ve found accessible discussions of voodoo thought and practice in: Mambo Chita Tann, Haitian Vodou: An Introduction to Haiti’s Indigenous Spiritual Tradition, Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 2016; Kenaz Filan, The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Loa, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2007; and Kenaz Filan, The New Orleans Voodoo Handbook, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2011.

29 John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend, Daniel Harms ed., Woodbury, Llewellyn Publications, 2012.

30 C.R. Bilardi, The Red Church, or the Art of Pennsylvania German Braucheri, Sunland: Pendraig, 2009, pp. 307-315, and Karl Herr, Hex and Spellwork: The Magical Practices of the Pennsylvania Dutch, York Beach: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2002, pp.75-105.

31 Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 291-350. “To take a modern example, the charm against the Evil Eye will contain the name of Christ or of a Saint in a Christian charm, the name of Muhammed in the Muhammedan, and that of an angel or a mysterious name of God in the Jewish formulas, though all the rest would be identical.” M. Gaster, The Sword of Moses: An Ancient Book of Magic, from an Unique Manuscript, Lexington: Theophania Publishing, p. 6.

32 Luman’s mental “grimoire” is drawn from Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

33 The single must-read book on shamanism is Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

34 See Frances Densmore, Chippewa Customs, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1979, pp. 86-97.

35 A ground-breaking and influential study of this subject is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin Books, 1971. An interesting book to read while considering the subject is Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Scot’s aim is to end the persecution of witches, and it seems likely he didn’t believe in the reality of the magic he was documenting at all. Nevertheless, to expose the very idea of witchcraft as his peers understood it to ridicule, Scot documents many instances of Christian prayers or artifacts being put to magical ends. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Mineola: Dover Publications, 1972.

36 Matthew 10:14-15.

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