ann_leckie | (no subject)

rachel_swirsky has placed me under an obligation to post this.

Long ago, on a message board far away, someone posted something that nearly sent me to the emergency room with the burning of the epic stupid. It went like this: the poster was working on a novel set in a world where magic worked, instead of science.

Okay. So. When queried, the poster further explained that you know, magic worked! And not, like, machines and stuff.

In vain did one explain that machines work because the universe is fundamentally the way it is, and a universe where machines did not work would be so alien as to be, perhaps, not inhabitable by humans. Machines do not function because of some mystical "scientific" or "machine" property they possess.

And, furthermore--the thing Rachel says I ought to post--Clarke's law works in both directions.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes?

Sufficiently comprehensible magic is indistinguishable from technology. If you know magic works, and can wield it reliably, then it's susceptible to scientific investigation, and susceptible to use as technology.

Which makes a problem for fantasy, actually--if the universe is made so that magic works, then it's not magic, is it?

I would elaborate, as it is an issue I have pondered more than once, but I'm brain-ached at the moment, and must return to my perusal of The Unholy Grail: A Social Reading of Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal

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One thing everyone should keep in mind is that the idea of magic being separate from gods is a relatively modern one. This is why in older literature people lost their magic if they lost their purity or faith, or broke a rule of their gods, or gained magic by dealing with the gods.

I already pointed out that in the Middle Ages, if magic didn't come from God (directly as a miracle or indirectly as natural magic), it came from Satan, who was a fallen angel, after all. It became a huge issue in the Middle Ages, because people wondered, if our priest is a jerk, does that mean God ignores the rituals of communion, marriage, baptism, and funerals he performs? That would mean the parish was going to hell. So the Church ruled that what mattered to God was what was in your heart, not the heart of the priest, when it came to these semi-magical rituals.

The Church intellectuals ran into a lot of stuff they couldn't puzzle out logically but thought true, which is why revelation was as important as observation in their world view. God said so, after all. Or maybe it was the other way around.

The Church itself was considered an authority, including theologians like Augustine and Aquinas. I sometimes wonder about Aquinas' tone of thought when he wrote that there was no Biblical reason for women not to priests, so we just have to trust that the Church knows what it's doing. Was he being snide? Sincere? Sarcastic? Hairsplittingly careful? He wasn't popular in his life time, protected mostly by the reputation and influence of his more respected teacher, Albertus Magnus, so who knows?

And just because magic was hard to understand didn't negate belief in it. I read "Scientific American" and despite my college education only really understand about 75% of it, on a good day 90%, so it is not a great leap of imagination for me to imagine myself a knight who can't even read trusting a monk who can about the mysteries of religion and magic, or a monk reading the Bible and wondering, WTF?

sorry, "women not to be priests"