Poetic Truth, Material Reality

Poetic Truth, Material Reality

A post all about magic! ^_^ What is it? How does it work? Well, let's look at some examples:

Quentin Blake

In Roald Dahl's Matilda, the protagonist is a brilliant child in an environment that doesn’t give her any way to express or develop her intellectual curiosity. She sneaks home books from the library and reads them in secret. She develops a special relationship with a kind schoolteacher, who teaches her things the curriculum won't permit. 

But it's not enough. So all that leftover energy goes into trying to solve the little problems in her world, to push out against the walls. Her irrepressible intensity and unused energy manifest in the ability to move things with her mind. 

There are rules to this power (She can lift small things but not large ones, fling them around but not make delicate motions. She refines and strengthens her skill with practice), but these rules reflect the emotional truth that the magic represents within the diegetic reality of the story. She graduates from manipulating petty annoyances to simulating hauntings when she comes to grips with how significantly her circumstances are holding her back, when she learns to weaponize her resentment.

Harry Clarke

Angels have souls made of light, which is perfect and clear and unwavering and exact. They exist only in so far as there is a source that maintains them, and act only in perfect harmony with it. Angels carry messages and carry you through the sky but they can't carry on a conversation. 

Humans have souls made of clay, which is malleable and rich and dense. We have potential, but need guidance. We don't harmonize, we only quiver and burble. 

Djinn have souls made of fire. They can harmonize, but they don't have to, if they don't want to. They emit their own false light, a dark smoky unstable imitation, but it's theirs. It warms and crackles and surges beyond their control if they're not careful, but it's theirs. 

So "Why are djinn are full of terrible pride?" and "Why are they always leading people astray?" and "Why can they spit great tongues of flame?" are all questions with the same answer.

Ritual practices work because there’s a cultural resonance, some kind of enduring emotional right-ness to them. They work for the same reason that people perform them in the first place. What they reflect about the world around the people that made them is what they create in the world around us. 

There are differences of course. Once you lose the initial why, all kinds of variations and mutations start to proliferate. But there's a reason we make the same signs our ancestors did, a commonality in the worlds we live in that our rituals reflect.

???

Of all the cryptids that are definitely owls, the Mothman and the Hopkinsville Goblins are certainly the top of the list. 

The Mothman is a vast empty shape in the darkness with eyes like the moon, looming over desolate power plants, in the background of tragic accidents, waiting for you where the road ends in the forest. 

The Goblins lurk in the trees outside your home, perfectly still, daring you to disbelieve. 

People still believe in the Mothman. Nobody believes in the Hopkinsville Goblins.

So what is magic?

Magic is subtle, and no two instantiations have magic have any commonality to them, except insofar as there is commonality of human experience and therefore commonality of emotional truth. 

It is the particular act in the particular context and circumstances that is magic, and it is magic because of what it means, at that place and at that time and to those people. If any of those things were different, the magic wouldn’t be the way it was. It would be something else instead.

There are no rules of Magic, capital M. There is no Magic, capital M. But a perfectly acceptable reason as to why any object or creature or place or action does the peculiar thing it does is "because it's magic." 

Every time you say that, though, it opens the door to a story about who it is magic to, and why, and how, and how it came to be that way: The talking door that learned to speak because it fell in love with the fountain in the garden. The silver ring that learned to point to the capitol to comfort the homesick princess. The ghost whose touch drinks all the warmth from your skin because he died desperate for affection, and his hunger has kept him awake. The poetic truth overcoming the material reality, in a way that can't be catalogued or analyzed.

Sometimes you don't have to say anything. It's often better to have shapes in the dark. Mystery is meaning on its own. Magic is beautiful precisely because knowledge cannot be created about it.

But when you do say something, and even when you say nothing, do it mindfully. All of these little histories don't need mapping out, but the shapes and silhouettes you carve out for them should harmonize with the story being told. 

As players pull the threads they want to pull, they'll find out where they knot together and where they diverge, a whole emergent shadow history of the world you've made, its superstitions and secret fears, all explanation and no information.

Less abstract posts coming soon, including a setting-adaptable ritual system, and that occultist class I mentioned in like my first post ever. ^^;