Criticism
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True wizards begin their careers when everyone else’s are winding down with retirement in sight. This is because magic is about wisdom as much as it is about power, and all the discernment in the world cannot compensate for the lack of experience of youth. There are no “boy wizards”, nor ever were. I would…
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I really don’t care which form of magic came first. I don’t care which form better fits modern notions of how the universe is constructed. I don’t even care how it fits in with subjective notions of politics. I am only interested in magic that works best, and works as magic, and endows useful and rare…
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One of the problems with defining magic is that at various points in history, and in many cultures, magic has not only overlapped the contemporary notions of religion, science and art, but even completely encapsulated them. Greek medicine and magic were virtually the same phenomenon, and medieval optics were profoundly occultic– as examples. Our solution is not to merely understand the…
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When I pay homage to the ancestors, I add the names of practitioners of magic whom I have known but are no longer among the living. Most of them got that way because they did some inadvisable magic— in my estimation, at least. One of the debts we owe to the dead is not to make their mistakes.…
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I think it’s high time to acknowledge that there is a substantial subgenre of magical literature; baroque excuses for why the author’s magic hardly ever works. Some of those may well be good excuses, but they do not frequently illuminate the narrow path to success.
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Someone need to write a book about the struggles to define magic (magia) between various monotheistic religious sects; particularly between Catholicism and Protestantism, but also between Catholicism and Islam, and Judaism and everybody else. There’s tons of history in there that hardly anybody has put into a coherent narrative. It’s really interesting stuff, and relevant to anybody…
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Maybe the world needs a little more purple magic.
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