Of Wizened Wizards and Wicked Wandry

What is magic?

The dictionary describes it as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces” but that hardly does it justice. For magic isn’t a mystery, dear reader. Rather magic is a commonly accepted phenomenon, a common lexicon shared across our species. If you stare back across the ages of man you can find any number of references to the stuff, often with the “wizard” in question channeling some power (whether an element, animal spirit, or the favor of some local deity) to perform tasks by which their people received counsel or protection.

But we live in an age where knowledge of our natural world has superseded superstition. Where once we believed someone could call down the fires of heaven, we now would say someone has a lightning rod and move on with our day. Why then, in this age of enlightened understanding, is magic such a staple in our media? Not only that but how can magic be accepted as occurring even without physical medium?

If we see someone draw a knife and slice at someone’s arm, we expect there to be blood. There is a self evident cause and effect.

Magic however, can be interpreted without said direct physical vehicle.

Darth Vader curls his fingers around open air and the man behind him starts to choke. We don’t think the unlucky Imperial suddenly choked on a scone- no! We know Darth Vader is using space magic to choke a fool. When Harry Potter’s wand chooses him and there’s a sudden gust of wind in the store we instinctively know it’s because he’s experiencing a rush of power and not because Ollivander left a window open. When Gandalf and Saruman duel in Orthanc we know they are exchanging titanic blows of force and not just breaking into a spontaneous break dance competition.

See also: “that one time you lay in bed after drinking too much jaeger”

Now you may say we interpret Vader’s hand as causing the choking, Harry’s wand as causing the surge, Gandalf and Saruman’s staffs as causing the blows. But I ask you: how did we make the connection that the object is causing the act when there is no action being taken? Vader’s hand may be the most obvious corollary (fist around man’s neck= strangling. See fist clenched; see man strangling in background and we can put two and two together even without knowing exactly how he’s doing it from across the room) but the other two? A blade cuts, a gun shoots, a stick….well a stick just lies there, dear reader…until it doesn’t.

So what of the wand? What of the staff? These instruments have come down from the hazy dark years of our kind even unto our own time. One might be so bold as to ask: why? What is so special about a stick? What is the enduring appeal of having someone so powerful be dependent upon something so insignificant, so mundane so…common? Could it be to demonstrate that magic is all around us? Any twig in the grass a viable wizard’s tool? Could it be some tick of our collective consciousness whereby we necessitate magic to be wielded by a totem, a conduit without which the raw power may not be channeled? A tool that, like Excalibur in the stone, would render us special, gifted, unique, if we were but lucky enough to take it up into our hand? Or is that eternal human condition by which some corner of our brain is ever curious, ever hunting, ever greedy for more knowledge by which we may distinguish ourselves? By which we become greater than we were?

We accept these forces as inviolate even as we reject the plausibility of their very existence. We believe in the impossible even as we ridicule the improbable. We accept magic in all its forms, take it at face value, even as we question the very world around us.

What is magic, dear reader? Why do we cling to it so dearly?

Perhaps it’s a desire to reap more from our existence, or just a simple power fantasy shared across generations.

Either way it’s fun as fuck (and remember: when it comes to abilities overkill is underrated).

Yeah you wish you could do this. Don’t lie.