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Old 07-22-2022, 05:23 PM   #17
jason taylor
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
Default Re: You got magic in my scifi game!

Quote:
Originally Posted by VIVIT View Post
I would go through your post and respond to your points individually, but you're just proceeding from false premises here. You're speaking of magic as if it were some specific thing that works in some specific way, but it isn't. It's as varied as any human social construct. Every known human culture has beliefs about the supernatural, and beliefs about how people can do things by supernatural means, but details vary quite a lot. Sometimes this is understood to involve the action of spirits, and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the user is held to possess a special power, and sometimes they aren't. Sometimes both criteria are true! And the definitions of terms like "magic", "sorcery", "witchcraft", etc., are nebulous and often loaded, change with time and place—and, of course, the language being spoken.

Oftentimes the explanations of a particular thaumaturgical practice, and the terms and categories used to characterize it, are contentious even within their native cultural context. Is she a vile witch, or just a harmless cunning-woman? This even applies to the miracles of Jesus, with the 2nd-century philosopher Celsus polemically accusing Jesus of having practiced mageia—an obvious cognate of magic, but one that has exotic, sinister connotations analogous to the lowercase-v version of the term voodoo.

But we're speaking Modern English, not Koine Greek. Magic and mageia are different words. The modern meaning of the term "magic" has influenced by centuries of linguistic drift, and has never referred to any one practice or set of practices. Saying that the word "magic" can only correctly be applied to practices understood to involve spirits is like saying that the word "religion" can only be applied to the worship of gods.

If you wish to extend that that far magic just means "everything". It certainly does not stop with nature when several beings that are credited with being magical (like Odin) have been born and/or will die. Or are limited to a specific Earthly effect, like sympathetic magic: we will have better crops because of the number of consummations, Mrs Jones will have a difficult birth because we did not untie a knot, a sword will be more deadly if you pour sacrificial blood on it (as opposed to just being carbonized by the blood) etc. In that case by magic you just mean "weird" and that is so vague a definition as to make it impossible to say whether it should or should not be included in sci fi. Most of the effects of technology are pretty weird, even fairly primitive technology (isn't it cool that when I whack that cave man with a bone instead of my hand, I kill him and isn't it even weirder that the trailer to 2001 then plays).

If you define magic like that than magic definitely belongs in sci fi. Because everything is magic.
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Last edited by jason taylor; 08-23-2022 at 05:21 PM.
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