The Smell of Sorcery (and how to get it)

Without that smell, fantasy tales fall short

The Fields We Know

We live in a rational world. We live in secular times. Reason won out in Europe four centuries ago and it had been gaining strength for hundreds of years before then. In ancient Greece and later Rome, reason and the secular also won the upper hand. In India the ancient Vedas were told by scientists, and in China reason won the field after centuries of war, and the great Empire was born. Man has been waking from the long nightmare of unreason and religion for over two score centuries.

This is now our home and the fields we know: reason, the mundane, the practical life lived under skies free of mad gods.

This is true today even though almost none of us can ken the wonders we use each day. We hold up a palm-size bit of plastic and metal to our ear and we speak to someone half a world away and hear their answers. This marvel and wonder no better than one in a hundred, or a thousand, wholly understands. But yet we trust at least that the cell phone is a thing made by men and that it works by natural law, that there is no god or demon sprite that makes it work, no hex or spell that must needs wake up and fetch us the voice from so far away.

Reason is our home, and magic is a foreign land.

News From Nowhere

The foreign land where magic breathes is one I call ‘Eartherea.’ All magic lands are part of that wide realm, that shows up here and there about the Earth and has been dreamt of by so many talesmen and madmen and prophets and priests, and most of all by us when we were young.

In times and lands where the priests rule and the gods are seen by living eyes, the talesmen know the smell of magic all too well. So when they tell their tales of Eartherea, they fill the tales with magic’s smell. It fills the tales, so that there is no line that marks the ‘real’ from wonder.

But we who tell such tales today go as strangers and aliens o the marches of Eartherea. Our audience too knows that land only by hearsay. Their hearts are anchored in this secular world of ours — the true world, the ‘real’ world, or Earth. And so if we want to give our audience the full taste of Eartherea, we must give them tales that reek the true tang of magic.

Three Above All

Where shall we find this tang of magic? We must seek it in three places, and if we can’t find it in all three, the magic tale will miss and fall short and prove that it is false.

First (and more than all else) the talesman himself must breathe magic. He must reek of it in his body and his breath like an old unwashed man who eats too much cheese onion and garlic pie. His very hair should stink of it. His clothes should smell of little else. If only the talesman can show this knack of breathing magic in his words, then he may fill the most common tale that seems to take place here and now on Earth with the foul taint of sorcery and the unknown, the marvelous, the wonderful, the forbidden and the mad. Here we find what is called ‘magic realism’ and all good pornography. If only the talesman smell strong enough of magic, it may prove enough in and of itself to turn a tale into a wondrous glimpse into dreamland.

The next place where we should smell magic is in the hearts and minds of the actors in the tale. They must with all their hearts know that wonders can at any time come true. Some of them may doubt this, some may scoff: they will be wrong, they will be shown to be wrong, and what is more, they will know beneath their bluster that they are wrong.

This means that the souls inside the story will come at their lives and their work and the stones in the ground they live on in a way that we do not. We on Earth trust that stones are ruled by natural laws, and will at all times act in the same way under the same set of conditions. But in Eartherea stones are living things, or they are touched by living wills, and the way a stone will behave may depend on the mood of the folk around it as much as temperature and pressure and physical tools. Look at a house cross-eyed, and that house might fall apart; smile on a bit of wood and your chisel will carve it more true. This is what the characters in the tale must believe.

The third place that must scent of magic in a tale of the fantastic is the world of the tale. It is not always enough that the talesman believes in magic, or that the characters in the tale believe in it. For we in our smug world of reason and practicality may look on such a tale as the story of madmen, told by one who’s mad himself. We must see and be shown that the magic of this tale is ‘real.’ The stone and wood and mountains and sky must all of them stink of magic, of wonders, of the strange.

Eartherea is like the land of dreams. She holds the sheerest pleasure and the most frightful pain. She is not rational, she is fickle, changeable, whimsical, beguiling, sullen, shifty, and emotional. Wishes and rules there trump reason and the laws of nature at almost every turn. The only time that natural law seems to work in Eartherea is when she seeks to lull some poor hapless wight into the snare of trusting that fire must be hot, that streams flow down hill, that fish do not fly. As soon as the character starts to trust in natural law and acts upon that trust, that is the moment when the fire burns cold, the stream flows up the hill, and the fish fly out of the nets far away.

Getting the Knack

You talesman who would tell of Eartherea, must first learn how that dream-land operates. To know how it operates, you must know how the folk who live their lives in it must think and act. And to know how those folk think and act, you must yourself believe.

Therefore each of us talesmen who would quarry tales from the mines of Eartherea must let grow in our own hearts a way of seeing the world ‘as if’ magic were true (though we know it does not!) and the laws of nature only seem to work, for now, on sufferance from the forces and odd beings that are not to be seen, not to be found, but fill the air around us. We must first learn magic’s smell, and then learn how to take it in and breathe it out ourselves.

It ought to be simple enough. We all knew the trick once upon a time. When we were little and looked with eyes that were big, we smelled of magic all the time.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 22, 2008)