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Fantasy and Sorcery

pic505841Over on the Strategic Sorcery Group we have been having some discussions about the intersection of Role Playing Games, Fantasy fiction, and Sorcery.

Here is my position in a nutshell:

Magic is real but deals with subtle forces and intelligence’s that, Because of their subtle nature, are is easily polluted with fantasy from the mind of even the best magician. The job of the Strategic Sorcerer is to anchor it more strongly to reality. Anchoring it to fiction does the opposite.

I am not against Role Playing Games. I have played D&D, Mage the Ascension, and my favorite Arcanum.

I am not against comic books. I love the Invisibles. I have read the whole series multiple times. I read through a readers guide to the Invisibles because I love it so much. Yet, I find the idea that it is on any list of how to learn magic, much less a top 5 list, to be inane.

More often than not I see people linking their magic to fantasy or role playing games as an extension of fandom, not of magic. It is an attempt to frame real life in the terms of the game or show or book. To view yourself as a Mage against the Technocracy, or an Invisible against the Archons. It promotes a fantasy life over dealing with real life, and makes magic worse not better. I don’t think many of us would like cops who think “Man, I am just like Jack Bauer on 24! I am gonna act like that…” or doctors who think “I am just like House. What would House do?”

As Sorcerers we are already dealing with powers and forces at the edges of reality. It is our job to ultilize these forces to effect the real world, not drift off into fantasy. Strategic Sorcery is all about real life, not escapism.

RPG‘s do help visualization skills, promote imagination, and can even build empathy and other skills. But you get these benefits from playing the game as a game, just like any other game. Games are great and helpful. One of my favorite reads from last year was Superbetter. But that is something very different

You might even find yourself inspired to try an experiment or investigate something magically through an RPG or a piece of fiction. If so, take that idea and see what the essence of it is and apply in as real a way as possible.

It’s not that there is no overlap. Real magic finds its way into fantasy all the time, and magicians can take some inspiration from fantasy. I joke all the time that I went to Nepal to learn magic from the Tibetans because that’s what Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange did. But they did that in the stories because it was once the place that many people thought of as the ultimate seat of esoteric knowlege. I didn’t pretend I was Doctor Strange, or try to create spells like the Crimson Bands of Cittorak, or contact Agamotto. I moved to Nepal to see what it was actually about.

I will end by reiterating my main point:

Sorcery is subtle and intangible enough. The work of the Sorcerer is to apply it to influencing reality, not drift into escapism.

 

NOTE: This is not an anti-chaos magic rant. Chaos magic has much more to offer than weaving fiction into magic, and there is a lot of exciting work being done in that field.

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hermetic lessons

Define reality!

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Joshua Roberts

What about Moore’s Promethea? Not to learn magic per se, but I found the journey thru the major arcana and the journey up the tree of life categorically different from magic in other comics. It was more of an illustrated guide than anything else.

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    Inominandum

    From the above:

    “You might even find yourself inspired to try an experiment or investigate something magically through an RPG or a piece of fiction. If so, take that idea and see what the essence of it is and apply in as real a way as possible.”

    Reply
Andrew Watt

Well said, Jason.

I think there’s some benefit to fantasy as part of a magician’s technique. Learning to LARP, or to play role-playing games face to face, gives us practice in building up a persona or personality; LARPing in particular, which borrows in part from elements in costuming, armor-making, leather-working, throwing, speaking real words, and so on, is better real-world training than some people get in school in similar fields. In general, free-form roleplaying is useful as well. It’s practice in storytelling, group process, imagination, memory, world-building, visionary experiences, and exposure to the mathematics of probability in games that use dice. I know, for my own part, that games provided one of the first outlets for my irregular experiences… and I’ve constantly earned more from my freelance-writing gigs as a game designer than I ever have as a magician.

But I’m reminded, too, as I read this, of a guy’s review from several years ago of one of those game-console dance games. He and a buddy played a number of different games together, to help this guy prep reviews of them. Then they played this dance game with accelerometer controllers in hand.

I can’t find the review now, but the guy wrote that after the dance game, they were both really uncomfortable for a while. “It was that while we were playing games, we were playing games. But when we played the dance game, we weren’t just playing a game about dancing. We were actually dancing. With each other.” George Bernard Shaw’s famous remark, “Dance is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music,” came home to roost: when they were shooting zombies, it was just a game. When the game’s control systems required them to move, to sweat, to gyrate, to pay attention to rhythm even while moving with exuberance — in a word, to dance — the game became too uncomfortably real. Both of them, the reviewer reported, felt like they’d crossed a taboo line in playing this game together.

And I think that magic is like that: there are a good many ‘games’ out there which will train you in part to think and act like a magician in a fantasy world… but there doesn’t seem to be a game yet that will help you cross the uncanny valley from playing a magician in a game, to being a magician in this world.

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    SA Smith

    Two things.

    1. Agreed re; LARP. I’ve learned more about people management, task organization, getting things done, manipulation, straight up sorcery and extreme burnout* in LARPs than anywhere else.

    2. To the overall topic, I’ve always thought of the magic in fiction as opposed to just straight magic in the same way as gold in the ground vs gold at a jewelry store. Yes, I could go to somewhere where there is gold then mine and refine it or I could just go to the store, plop down $200 and just get the damned gold.

    It’s the same way with magic in fiction.

    Yes, I could read the fictional source material, filter through all of the changes made to make it playable and digestible, then reconstruct it to get to the “good stuff”.

    Or I can just go out and get the material that likely inspired the fiction in the first place.

    *For example, let’s say I have 9 plots going on at the same time that I need to keep track of while having to support the community through a brutal time while at the same time not freezing and about four other problems(including an injury).

    Reply
Bill Trumpler

It’s inane to list the Invisibles IF Ultraculture means for you to take the book and pretend to be an Invisible fighting Archons, sure. I completely agree. But what makes you think that is what is being suggested by listing it? Sure, the magic Morrison discusses in the letters column is overly simplistic, and his take on sigil magic certainly doesn’t rate, to me, as a top five, but the Invisibles has a way of inspiring the would be magician to explore, learn, experiement, etc., and I have recommended it for that very reason to many up and coming mages. Plus, and you are free to disagree, but there are some elements of Morrison’s gnosis, like the time-worm, that jive with my experience very well . Your criticism of Ultraculture’s choice assumes a lot that I don’t see being implied since the article mentions the caveat of the letter columns being the real value. Where, specifically, does it state that the value in the Invisibles lies in pretending to be a an agent fighting the evil Archons? Why resort to weak man fallacies?

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    Inominandum

    It doesnt say that, and I did not say that it did.

    In what capacity however DOES the Invisibles Comic Book rate as one of the top five books for understanding magic. I love the invisibles, but no no no no no.

    Reply
      Bill Nemo

      Ultraculture makes the caveat that the columns were why it was a good choice. I don’t agree, but not because I think the stuff is completely useless. Rather, I find Morrison’s discussions on sorcery kind of blunt force simplistic and limited in scope. Not every problem can be dealt with by ejaculating on a doodle. On the other hand, sombunall of his visionary experiences jive to me. I wouldn’t put it on a top five, but then almost everyone who post these top books list mentions a book or two I would not put on a top list – sometimes I find them as useless as you find the Invisibles as books for learning magic.

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Bill Trumpler

Don’t get me wrong. I get that -as you say – more often than not you personally may run into people that make this mistake. I repsect that is your experience. But it seems to be an incomplete data-set to me, because I frankly find it rare that someone comes along who goes that far into fantasy and runs about pretending to fight the Technocracy or Archons or Oyster Boys or what have you. It reminds me a bit of the old joke about the guy who assumed all Indians walk single file because the Indian he met walked that way.

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    Inominandum

    Look, I cannot name names and start blathing about things said in confidence, but consider that I run a course that almost 1400 people have passed through, and do consultants with magicians for a living.

    I see consistent patterns emerge and the sample set is probably wider than you think.

    Reply
      Bill Nemo

      To be fair to your data-set, I concede that I primarily deal with those who have long since filtered through the occult wringer, and individuals such as you describe are less likely to cross paths with me due to my hermit streak. Even when they do, my demeanor usually chases them off pretty quickly.

      Reply

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