anna katherine

There is a very popular idea in fantasy writing that magic should have rules. What I mean is, there should be a system, a consistency to the magic being used by the characters.

I am totally fine with this idea. Since magic often takes the place of (or artificially creates) real-world systems, it makes sense that there should be rules, if only to know when you’re breaking them. (Boy hero survives killing curse — news at 11!)

But here’s the thing: Real world magic, historically speaking, doesn’t really happen that way. It’s not organized, and it’s not bound by a common magical language or a single set of ideas — it’s just a mishmash of anything we humans could get our hands on.

When I talk about “real world magic,” I don’t mean modern Wiccan religion, or Satanism, or whathaveyou. I mean the stuff Classics majors drool over and folklorists clutch to their collective bosoms. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation; Agrippa’s Natural Magic. In “real” magic, people are walking around living a giant Skinner box experiment:

[A pigeon] is put into an experimental cage for a few minutes each day. A food hopper attached to the cage may be swung into place so that the pigeon can eat from it. A solenoid and a timing relay hold the hopper in place for five sec. at each reinforcement.

If a clock is now arranged to present the food hopper at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior, operant conditioning usually takes place. In six out of eight cases the resulting responses were so clearly defined that two observers could agree perfectly in counting instances. One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor. [...]

The conditioning process is usually obvious. The bird happens to be executing some response as the hopper appears; as a result it tends to repeat this response.

Skinner goes on to relate this to common human behavior:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

This accounts for stuff like turning your coat inside-out when you’re having a bad run of cards, throwing salt over your shoulder to avoid bad luck, or any number of childhood magics that we all grew up with (avoiding sidewalk cracks, holding our breath at the graveyard, etc.). But what about the big stuff — the magic you do on purpose?

Turns out that back in the (papyrus) days, if something sounded like a good idea, they’d stick it in on the principle of the thing. For instance, one of my favorite Greek invocations is for Abrasax, the year god. He wasn’t a member of the traditional pantheon, though — someone just took the number of days of the year, added it all up, converted the numbers to letters, and came up with Abrasax. With all that math and cryptography involved, it had to be magical! The logic seemed good, the name was added to a bunch of already-in-progress magic, et voila, Abrasax kind of takes off.

Math wasn’t the only thing that made stuff magical — words, gods, and anything else that was Not From Around Here could easily be taken up and applied to the magic already being done. Georg Luck, in his academic text Arcana Mundi, says:

Incidentally, the borrowing of names, concepts, and rituals from foreign religions is one of the characteristics of ancient witchcraft, as the magical papyri attest. Even though cities like Alexandria and Rome were already full of sanctuaries of exotic deities, apparently there was still room for more speculation and more experiment. No doubt the religions of ancient Egypt were similarly misinterpreted or at least simplified by the Greeks of the Hellensitic period who lived in Egypt, and these religious practices survived, through a series of transformations, in the mainstream of magical doctrine.

So in Salt and Silver, our characters fumble around with magic and demons that have been around forever — or that they maybe just discovered last week. They mix together religions and folklore and cultures, just in case. They do things they don’t understand because it seems to have worked in the past. They make stuff up, just in case it might work.

What this all comes down to is: Rules for magic? What rules? The only rules that apply here are whatever makes people people. Rather than a rigid system of magic, there’s just psychology (as in: “this is how humans behave — because we are humans, we will do what humans do, even if, logically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever”). In real life, we take stuff that sounds good, and if it works — or seems to, anyway — we’ll keep doing it. We’ll pass it on to others. And at some point we’ll even forget where it came from and just assume that it’s always been like that. The magic may not make sense if you pull it out of context, but that’s kind of the point — the context is us. Without people, there might as well be no magic at all — in either the real world, or, at least in this book, in romantic escapades.

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