Atheist magic

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veinglory

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I take that to be an agreement, that you would find fantasy novel with magic and no gods implausible.

Remember we are discussing fiction here.
 

robjvargas

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Atheism preceded science and medicine. By this I mean to say that before there could be mathematics, computer science, the setting of broken bones and all the other wonderful fruits of the realist perspective, someone said, "There's got to be a rational way to look at the situation." That realism - the refusal to rely on supernatural explanations for things and events - was atheism.

A time sequence is not always due to cause and effect. Nor am I certain that the time sequence is even correct.

There's a lot of speculation that the earliest cave drawings were an effort to raw in the spirit or power of the animal being drawn. Early man learned the places to attack to kill his prey, a form of biology. And that may have taken place with *or* without religious adherence.

In a way, theories of magic have always mirrored the modern physical concept that all mass is energy, and therefore energy is all around us.

Modern physics holds to four basic energies: Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Just because we have not, as yet, detected a fifth is no assertion that it cannot exist.
 

evilrooster

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Atheism preceded science and medicine. By this I mean to say that before there could be mathematics, computer science, the setting of broken bones and all the other wonderful fruits of the realist perspective, someone said, "There's got to be a rational way to look at the situation." That realism - the refusal to rely on supernatural explanations for things and events - was atheism.

That's a profoundly ahistorical thesis. I'd like to see the evidence that leads you to that conclusion.

To pick only one counterexample of many that come to mind, take Pythagoras. He was a talented mathematician; we still use the geometrical precepts he estblished. He applied his mathematical insights to music as well, and his work laid the foundation of all subsequent Western musical thought.

He also believed in the transmigration of the soul. He and his disciples were vegetarians because they didn't want to eat anything with a soul, lest it be a formerly-human one. That's pretty supernatural.

Until the Enlightenment at the earliest, natural history, science, mathematics and medicine have been studied and advanced by people who gave every sign of believing in God while pursuing their intellectual work. There's a whole strain of thought throughout European intellectual history that understanding the observable world is an act of worship of the entity that created it.

There have also always been doctrinaire attempts to shut down enquiry, of course. But the relationship between theism and science, between a belief in the miraculous and the pursuit of explanations, is much more complicated than you're making it out to be.
 

Lance Rocks

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I take that to be an agreement, that you would find fantasy novel with magic and no gods implausible.

Back from the beach - hot today!

So much to talk about. First, I'm a lifelong atheist, which for me means a great deal more than an absence of belief in gods (weak atheism).

Second, my opinions are based not only on my atheist life and what I read of physics, but more concretely on the two years of research into atheism and natural theology I conducted for my MS mentioned earlier.

(My text contains eight principles of atheism derived from the literature - happy to share these should anyone have an interest.)

Regarding your query, veinglory, I explained my position on what you good folks are calling "magic:" it's an unexplained physical event - or such an event explained incorrectly. (Physical Event = a movement of matter and energy.)

What I'm getting from the discussion is that Members on this thread believe in the existence of something other than matter and energy. I don't: from what I read it's all matter and energy. (E= mc2)

Now just because I think the world consists of energy and matter; that energy and matter are, in fact, interchangeable both ways; that Einstein was right about special and general relativity...it does not follow that I oppose having a little fun!

: = )

Someone mentioned The Force...why not? From what I see in Star Wars, The Force is demonstrated primarily as an advanced form of telekinesis: lifting objects, controlling minds, staying on target...that sort of thing. Why would anyone object to the use of advanced telekinesis in fantasy? I wouldn't, because we already employ a primitive version using brain sensors and computer-guided machines.

How about producing something from nothing? No problem: virtual particles appear all the time in our labs. The universe itself is said to have exploded from a quantum disturbance of the primordial vacuum. (This theory is discussed by Lawrence M. Krauss in his "A Universe From Nothing.") Seems logical enough to me: apply enough energy and a physical object appears.

Like so many disputes, this one is over terminology. What you wonderful writers call "magic," I call "reality."

Lance
 
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RichardGarfinkle

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I fear you are confusing things. We're discussing fantasy fiction, stories not necessarily set in our reality.

In fantasy fiction the writer constructs a world, and decides how it works.

I'm also an atheist. That doesn't prevent me from creating worlds with gods in them.

There's also nothing that prevents someone from creating a world that has magic in it without any gods.
 

RichardGarfinkle

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Modern physics holds to four basic energies: Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Just because we have not, as yet, detected a fifth is no assertion that it cannot exist.

Rob, I have to offer a correction. Those are the four basic forces. Force and energy aren't the same concept (they also don't have the same units).

At the moment, the existence of a fifth force that isn't really one of the above would have some problems with current theory and experimental evidence. It's not impossible, but it requires some revamping of physics.
 

Lance Rocks

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I'd like to see the evidence that leads you to that conclusion.

evilrooster, thanks for your kind response! Can't reproduce my MS here, but can offer a few pointers.

The earliest written references we have to the atheist outlook comes from the Charvaka School of 6th century bce India. They appeared before the Mogul Emperor Akbar to argue that gods, spirits and "the afterlife" do not exist. The Charvaka believed in the reality of this world and in the physical existence of earthly beings, but in nothing supernatural.(1)

Crossing the Arabian Sea we find the dahriyya, who lived among Muslims of the Middle East and held "materialistic opinions of various kinds." The dahriyya were associated with "infidels, or rather the ungodly," and are reputed to have said:

There is nothing save our life
in this world; we die and we live,
and only the course of time makes
us perish.(2)

You mention Pythagoras (b. 570 bce). But don't overlook Thales (b. 624 bce), Anaximander (b. 611 bce), and Anaximenes (b. 585 bce). Their doctrines are associated with naturalist and empiricist views linked to the development of medical science.(3) According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales."(4)

Thanks for reading!

(1) Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism.
(2) Goldziher, Encyclopedia of Islam.
(3) Thrower, A Short History of Western Atheism.
(4) Russell, The History of Western Philosophy.
 
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robjvargas

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Point taken, Richard. Forces. Not energies.

I wasn't really intending that as a rigorous example anyway.
 

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I'd say think of shamanism or druidism, getting magic and power from life and the earth itself. There are no Gods required, just life and a planet.
 

veinglory

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Like so many disputes, this one is over terminology. What you wonderful writers call "magic," I call "reality."

Lance

I take that as a: yes.

In fact I take it to mean you would never read magical fantasy at all as you require fiction to be completely realistic. This makes my point somewhat moot in your case as you would not read works of magic of any kind, religious or atheist.

BTW you are knee deep in "life long atheists" here, and scientists. I happen to be both. But I still read ad write fantasy. Part of the point of that being to live in "realities" unlike our own.
 
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Stacia Kane

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If your fantasy writing violates known principles of how the world works - essentially, of physics - this neither robs my purse nor steals from my good name.

How what world works?

My "fantasy writing" violates zero known principles of how the world I write works. In fact, I have created those principles. In my Downside world, ghosts are real and the world is run by an atheistic totalitarian magic-based Church. Magic is a real thing based on the manipulation of and exploitation of energy from the earth, from various elements, from animals...

Quite honestly? I find your phrasing above offensive. It implies I'm just being frivolous, writing a bunch of silly nonsense that makes no sense. (Which, frankly, denigrates most fiction writing.) It's dismissive and rather rude. It has the air of, "Well, hey, if you want to waste your time trying to flap your arms fast enough to fly, you go ahead," spoken with rolled eyes and smirks.

The magic system in my books doesn't violate any of the laws of physics in that world, and that's all that matters.


Regarding your query, veinglory, I explained my position on what you good folks are calling "magic:" it's an unexplained physical event - or such an event explained incorrectly. (Physical Event = a movement of matter and energy.)

What I'm getting from the discussion is that Members on this thread believe in the existence of something other than matter and energy. I don't: from what I read it's all matter and energy. (E= mc2)

No. Members in this thread believe in all sorts of things. Specific to this discussion, we believe that we can, should, and do create fictional worlds wherein, as is the chief job of writers, we imagine things and make them reality for our characters (and hopefully for our readers).

It's not "what [we] folks are calling 'magic.'" It IS magic in my world. It most certainly is not an "unexplained physical event"--how magic works is explained, and is the basis of most of the plot points/elements--and it definitely is not "explained incorrectly." I am capable of explaining the way things work in the fictional world I created. I don't appreciate the implication that I am not and do not, or, again, that all us fantasy writers are just kind of naive and gullible and not very bright, like ancient people who saw an eclipse and thought it meant the sun was dead.

We are not talking about real life here. We are not talking about whether magic actually exists, in our world, today. We're talking about fictional worlds, and systems of magic we create in those fictional worlds, and whether or not they can be atheistic. That's the discussion we're having. If we were talking about GONE WITH THE WIND, would you keep informing us that Tara wasn't a REAL plantation and an extensive search of graveyards and death records shows that no one named Katie Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler actually existed so why are we wasting our time with all that fake stuff?

I really don't mean to be rude, but again, I found your comments rather rude and insulting. I'm sure you didn't mean to be, but RYFW means thinking about what we say before we say it, which includes not acting as if writers of a particular genre are kind of dim because they make their own worlds rather than just use our own.
 

Marian Perera

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What I'm getting from the discussion is that Members on this thread believe in the existence of something other than matter and energy.

I don't, and I'm an atheist. But when I write fantasy, why should my beliefs or lack thereof restrict me? The world in which my novels are set has a race where every individual can perform magic (not stagecraft), a race where certain people can form mental bonds with animals, a race where a group of people can generate a power proportional to their numbers in a gestalt effect, and so on. No actual gods, but enough magic.
 

Lance Rocks

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robjvargas, evilrooster, RichardGarfinkle, veinglory and StaciaKane, please accept my sincere apologies. It was not (nor is it) my intent to question or in any way demean your writing skills, your genre, or anything about you, either individually or as a group. I feel very bad this has happened and I apologize.

I'm here on AW perhaps ten days, and when I stumbled by happenstance upon this atheist group I was excited: it's not every day I come across a conclave of like-minded people!

Checking out the subjects in your group, I found the only active thread to be this one about atheist magic. "Great!" I thought to myself, "I can share what I've learned about magic down the years!"

Magic has been nearly as important in my life as atheism. I study it and I practice it, just as you do. There's a chapter in my MS called "A Fluffy White Fudge" in which I debunk the concept of divinity. (Theists love the mystery of divinity - Rudolph Otto's "mysterium tremendum" - but I don't. To me there is no mystery about anything anywhere: only that which is not yet known.)

In this chapter of the manuscript I write:

The majority of scientists are atheist; the same may be true of magicians. We atheists are the magicians, and theists comprise our audience. Perhaps this is why they don't trust us. We pull rabbits from our hat - and particles from the void - whilst theists immerse themselves in mystery.

As it happens, I'm a big fan of SciFi and fantasy. My #1 film of all time is 2001: A Space Odyssey and #2 is David Lynch's ERASERHEAD. (In my own creative writing I'm a surrealist, something like Lynch.)

I'm sorry this happened. I apologize.

Lance
 

robjvargas

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I'm here on AW perhaps ten days, and when I stumbled by happenstance upon this atheist group I was excited: it's not every day I come across a conclave of like-minded people!

Suddenly, I sense a very different feel to your posts.

Lance, this isn't a philosophy forum. Look at the breadcrumb hyperlinks. The first one is "Writing Genre." That first word is the key. This is, firstly, a writing forum.

This forum may include atheist topics, or atheist perspectives, but it's the writing that is the topic at hand.

I'm not atheist. My views don't fit very well into any of the organized religions, although the god I interact with is very like the judeo-christian god.

I'm not in this forum to discuss or argue atheism. I'm at AW in broad to better the craft of my writing. Forums that point to *genres* provide me new perspectives that may or may not show in my writing.

It's not my call in the least, but I have a strong feeling that if you believe that you've become a participant in an atheist group, you are going to find yourself heavily disappointed.
 

evilrooster

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Lance, thanks for your reply, and for your mindfulness of the other people in the conversation.

If I'm reading you correctly, then, you're saying that it's not that mathematics, science, medicine, etc. had to be atheists from the start, but that atheists had to exist and influence the philosophical climate before those things could begin.

I still think you're conflating "not attributing everything to divine intervention" (a-theistic, if you will) with "not believing in gods at all" (atheistic). I'm not sure that the latter is required for the former, nor that it was required for the history of innovation. Post hoc doesn't always mean propter hoc, after all. It's not something I think we can reliably prove.


Going back to the original question of the thread, there's a large strain of "magic just works" fantasy, where casting a spell/manipulating the aether/using a magical device leads to a result in the same way that dropping an object leads to it falling. Although many of these stories are set up in worlds that also have gods, there may not be any divine intervention. And what there is is often unreliable, overpowered, and generally less "safe" than magic.

(Personally, I think it's the cultural influence of Dungeons & Dragons, which split magic users from clerics.)

Two solid examples of a-theistic magic in societies that are based on our own (an thus contain a history of theism) are Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour and Glass books and the Harry Potter books. In neither of those is the existence of gods necessary to the workings of magic.
 

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In this chapter of the manuscript I write:

The majority of scientists are atheist;

Do you have a source for this claim, Lance? Or is it an assumption you've made?
 

RichardGarfinkle

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Do you have a source for this claim, Lance? Or is it an assumption you've made?

There are studies on this. Here's one.
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ehe/doc/Ecklund_SocialProblems_54_2.pdf

It's a pdf, the summary table is on page 19. It has good methodology, dividing up by discipline and using a number of different questions as separate metrics. A plurality in the hard sciences answer yes to a basic question of atheism. The next largest group is agnostic. The two together form a strong majority.

Note, of course, that we only have such studies in the last century and we cannot reliably discuss whether science and atheism have always been paired.
 

RichardGarfinkle

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Returning to the OP for a moment.

We run into some tricky category problems when dealing with atheism in fantasy worlds. Our concept of divinity is to say the least fuzzy. Most theists aren't looking at the abstract concept, divine, they're looking at a specific divine conception relevant to their lives. The question of what makes something a god isn't part of everyday religious life.

Here's a fantasy example. Consider a world in which everything is alive and sentient. In this world any object from a single nail to the sun itself can aid or refuse to aid any person. Gaining the assistance of objects or natural forces is often a matter of flattery and placation. Want rain, placate the clouds. Want a cooler day, ask the Sun to tone down the rays.
Is this a theist world?

Maybe, but it might be Toontown from Roger Rabbit or any other Looney Tunes based universe.

So, is an atheist world one with no supernatural elements in it? Again maybe. In our world we can make a reasonable division between natural and supernatural concepts, but we took a while to get there. Consider the idea of spirit. In various times and cultures spirit has been identified with breath. In a fantasy world where this is true, it becomes hard to classify air as natural or supernatural.

But what if we try simplicity and say that an atheist system has no gods. And magic is a matter of personal power and training. And that the most powerful beings are humans who have mastered the way the universe works and can exercise control thereof.

Arguably, certain forms of Buddhism and Taoism fit the above description.

Or what about a world with gods and with magic derived solely from gods, but where the gods themselves are consequences of the way the universe works, and the magicians do not so much worship the gods, but employ them as the means to affect the universe.

Finally, let's consider the question of personal power versus tool use. I've always tended to create systems and worlds wherein magic is personal to the magician. That it is a result of personal training and/or talent and does not rely too much on external hardware. It's an internal process externalized into the world, like unto art.

I tend to contrast this with technology as being more a manipulation of the external world using external means. A person is at the controls, but the tools are doing the work.
 

benbradley

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This is a little to vague a statement to quote specifics, but I'm wondering if sometimes the word atheist is used where the word secular is meant.
 

muravyets

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Indeed, animism would be one very coherent way to approach it.

It's my preferred approach because it allows me to have supernatural elements without treating them as supernatural. Explanation:

I write both fantasy set in a created world and horror/dark fantasy set in the real world with fantastical bits added. In both sets of stories, my MCs are beings native to the weirdness, who know how it works, and who don't find it odd at all.

In the horror stories, the dead walk, ghosts haunt, vampires and werecritters do their thing, witches and occultists cast spells and summon demons, all just because they do. The arcane secret of this fictional reality is that all such things are real and that's how the universe works. This world is founded on the premise that souls are real, immortal and everywhere, and life and death are just transitions between temporary manifestations in various forms. Evil and horror arise not from the reality of, say, walking corpses, but from evil intentions -- malice, hate, greed, and so forth. There is a balance of energies to be maintained for the good of all beings, and evil people tend to seek to upset that balance, usually because they are short-sighted in their greed or ambition. This results in bad stuff which my characters have to fix.

It's a basically animistic world view, of the dualistic Indo-European type. A similar example might be the Nightwatch trilogy, in which good spirits/witches/psychics are balanced against evil spirits/witches/psychics, forever policing each other to keep the balance that maintains the safety of life.

No deity is required for this kind of supernatural universe because it presumes this is simply the nature of reality. Most people don't know it because most people don't have the ability to mentally tune into the energy frequencies that allow them to see the spiritual plane or dimension that exists all around us. But just because people are ignorant of the nature of their universe, that doesn't make that nature really supernatural or magical or dependent on religion.

In my fantasy stories, I envisioned a world in which magic is the result of manipulating that fictional "fifth force." I created a type of energy/radiation/whatever -- MacGuffin waves -- that is a feature of the natural world, and in this fantasy reality beings evolved to be able to sense and manipulate that energy. Even plants and animals do it, and sentient beings do it a lot. The culture of this world is entirely founded on magic, which functions in their modern world as electricity and the internal combustion engine function in the real modern world.

This fantasy world does have gods, but their function is completely different from the concept of a cosmic, omnipotent creator deity. The gods of this world are really just extremely advanced mystics who channel the magical energies of the world through a consciousness prism, in which the ways that the energy manifests in the phenomenological world attain conscious awareness and direction.

For example, the magical elements of air, fire, water, and spirit coalesce into consciousness and form the continents (or reform them after a massive geological upheaval; this is not a creation myth). That elemental consciousness, which implies that all sentience is of similar nature, remains intact through the bodies of psychic mystics, who become the oracles of what are called gods. And the oracles are also called gods. We can think of them as just super-rarified wizards. We see somewhat similar concepts in Hinduism and some Buddhist traditions, with living people seen as avatars of some deity or spiritual principle.

In my fantasy world, the gods are not worshipped per se. They are consulted for guidance in many cases. In some cases they are placated to keep the energies peaceful. In all cases, they are specialized manifestations of the energy field, so they are in charge of whatever they are the god of. Some are the guardians of their continents. Some are in charge of plant and animal life, or the weather, or the stuff that people do such as law and government, healing, arts, sciences, commerce, etc.

So one my characters, needing a storm to break out at a given moment, would not pray for a deity to create a storm for him. He'd cast a spell or use an enchanted object to create his storm himself. But if he screwed with the weather so much that the god that manages weather got pissed off at him, said god would curse him, i.e. cause his energies to become so disarranged that he suffers for it. He would have to do something to placate that god.

It's an animistic system that assumes that spiritual power is natural and available to all beings, that everything has someone or something in charge of it that we have to deal with or work around, and that essentially tends to view gods as similar to other kinds of beings except with more power and/or more responsibility -- but not in charge of the destinies of other beings.
 
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Dawnstorm

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Finally, let's consider the question of personal power versus tool use. I've always tended to create systems and worlds wherein magic is personal to the magician. That it is a result of personal training and/or talent and does not rely too much on external hardware. It's an internal process externalized into the world, like unto art.

I tend to contrast this with technology as being more a manipulation of the external world using external means. A person is at the controls, but the tools are doing the work.

This reminds of the distinction Ted Chiang (a writer of SF short stories) makes between technology and magic. From an interview on Boing Boing:

Ted Chiang said:
But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding. In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science. Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe.

He goes into more detail elsewhere, but I couldn't find the link. It's an interesting way to think about the topic. My personal angle on this would be social power relations: do you burn the witches, or are they in charge? A super villain with a bomb is a threat, but anybody can replicate a bomb. On the other hand, the One Ring is unique. If you destroy it the threat is gone (not an expert on LotR, but I don't think Sauron can assemble them on a production line, so to speak).

***

The Persona series of video games combines the Jungian concepts of cellective unconscious and archetypes with the narrative concept of the Fool's Journey (form Tarot) to create a very interesting (and surreal) magic sytem. Gods exist, but through the concept of the collective unconscious it's never clear who/what exactly causes them. I tend to think they are the result of magic.

***

My own attempt? It's hard to explain. A friend has recently described it as "sentient magic that forms on imagination and feeds on attention", which is actually a pretty succinct way to put it. The casting of spells, faith, etc. are restrictions on magic; they don't make it possible, they make it (relatively) safe. I don't fully understand my own concept, and each of major factions have their own interpretation of what happens. In a sense, I just throw "it" out there, and have characters confront "it". Magic is fairly weak and dying, but there are things that suggest in the past more people could work magic more easily, and, going back far enough, people could accidently work magic (i.e. under the right circumstances, simply having a strong emotion could trigger magic). Basically, a fresh, or heartfelt idea is more powerful than transmitted, traditional one (though can certainly have heartfelt reactions to tradition): so in a sense, the formalisation of magic under religion and academic magic is the source of its decay, by restricting possibility. Magic is being clichéd to death.
 
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