Magic is a slippery word. Does it refer to a trick or a glimpse of something deeper? This simple question has always puzzled me. This little essay is my attempt to nail down why that is. I want to talk about what we mean when we say magic.

But first let me tell a story.

A Wizard’s Story

Once, long ago, there was a bearded sage who dwelled in a faraway land. This man, a wizard in fact, spent his days pondering the restless energy that animates the universe. He filled books with cryptic runes and arcane formulations. After many years he brought forth the Great Runic Tetrad (sometimes called the Fourfold Physick), a sigil so powerful that it would, if studied deeply by an adept, grant secret knowledge of the earth’s hidden forces and permit him thereby to bend them to his will.

The language is exaggerated, but as it happens this story is true. More plainly, we may say that the wizard is a Scot named James Clerk Maxwell, and his runes, known as Maxwell’s Equations, are fundamental to our understanding of electricity and magnetism. They are among the great achievements of human thought. Artfully wielded, after an apprenticeship in electrical engineering, they will let you conjure the circuits that move our world.

They’re kind of a big dang deal. Here they are.

I love this story, because you really don’t have to work the story very hard to make it sound like a fairy tale. Maxwell’s Equations ARE runes of fantastic power, granting us, among other things, telepathy (telephones), telekinesis (electromagnetism), and iPads. But once you know it’s the story of a physicist, the magic somehow drains out of it. The magic was right there in the story, and then it went away. Why did it go? And where is it now?

Ordinary Magic
Science, magic, and technology have long been tangled together. Technologists are fond of quoting Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The fondness is understandable; it’s flattering to be considered a magician. But Clarke is making a distinction that is easily missed: if you don’t understand the machine with the blinky lights, then you may well think it’s magic, but it isn’t. Magic is something else again. But this other thing, this technological mirage that looks like magic but isn’t, needs a name. Let’s call it ordinary magic, or techno-magic.

It turns out that most situations in which people use the word “magic” they are referring to this techno-magic. Techno-magic is just faulty or missing knowledge in exactly the sense that Clarke describes. This is the smoke and mirrors we find on stage. It’s a trick that you happen not to understand right now. If, however, you were able to examine the mirror and the wires hanging from the ceiling, you would understand that the lady doesn’t REALLY float. And, if you had an engineering degree and enough time to study the circuitry, you’d see that an iPad doesn’t actually qualify as magic, Steve Jobs notwithstanding.

The magic of fiction and games tends to follow this same path. Harry Potter, that paragon of modern wizarding, is all about techno-magic. The Harry Potter books are filled with wizards who are fumbling bureaucrats, and the Hogwarts potions class is a dreary grind. Harry Potter’s magic, exotic as it appears to us, is simply the technology of his world. So it is with computer games too. In World of Warcraft and a hundred others like it, magic is technology, pure and simple. It is devoid of mystery, being instead a consistent and mechanical means to an end.

Ultimately, ordinary magic, technology, is magic that always works. We can even turn Clarke’s dictum on its head: “Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.” It’s mundane trickery and nothing more. But if we reach past the gimcracks, down to the bottom of the bag, there’s something else squirming around.

Magic and Surprise

The dictionary definitions of magic all circle back to the use of the word “supernatural.” Somehow forces are involved that go beyond those considered “natural,” which is to say the world as I currently understand it.

So: magic implies surprise, and surprise implies expectation. Expectation means there is some model of reality, a framework within which the world is expected to operate. Rabbits should not spontaneously spring from empty hats. The magical act is one that breaks the causal link between action and consequence. But this link comes from the model, and the model exists only in the observer’s mind. In short, magic is a subjective art. It happens in the eye of the beholder or not at all. If a rabbit pops out of a hat in the middle of the woods, does it make any magic? This is the key to untangling magic from technology. Technology is something that I do. Magic is something that you see.

Now we are at the heart of the matter: Magic, if it is to be considered in any sense real, must operate outside our frame of understanding. The word magic thus resists definition because it is the thing that by definition resists definition.

Ordinary magic can be dismissed by a better model, or a better framing of the observation. See? the hat has a false bottom where the rabbit hides. But the deeper notion of magic is the fact that no amount of reframing can banish all mystery. The universe, being quite large, will always retain its ability to surprise. The shifting edges of reality resist our embrace.

That’s why we like the small tricks and parlor magic. It reminds us of the truth we all intuit in one way or another: You can’t put the universe in a box.

Rationality and magic are often portrayed as antagonists. Hyper-rationalists and mystics can both be heard fretting that the other side is “winning”. But rationality and magic are simply figure and ground. Will science banish magic? It can’t. That’s the fun of it. Magic is the catnip that leads us into the dark. It led Maxwell to his equations. It is our name for the pregnant void where mind and matter intersect.

You can’t find darkness with a torch. But you can thank darkness for lighting the way.

Salem, Massachusetts is in love with witches. It took three hundred years or so for them to come around, but they’ve fallen in a big way. I spent some time in Salem this weekend, and I can attest that, in addition to the various museums and tours, the “witch on a broom” motif is everywhere, including the local newspaper.

While it’s no big surprise for a town to embrace whatever helps its tourism receipts, two things do jump out at me. One is that I grew up in the Bible Belt (North Carolina), so the whole idea of a town embracing witchcraft is amusing and encouraging. It’s hard to imagine a witch museum in Branson or Pigeon Forge. The other surprise in Salem is that there seems to be so much in the way of “serious magic”. I apply this term very loosely to a New Age-y collection of people who call themselves witches or wiccans or pagans or simply working-stiff astrologers and chiromancers. The point is that the witch is not the Other to be mocked, even in a light-hearted way, but rather a pillar of civic life. Breadwinner and boon bestower, she is celebrated. Which is all rather odd when you consider that this is so only because a handful of people wrongly labeled as witches were tortured and murdered here three hundred years ago.

This brings me to the magic stores. I’m fascinated by these stores. Some of them are cynical and tacky, but others are quite serious. They are packed not with hocus-pocus tricks, but with books of spells and crystal balls and scrying glasses. The magic spells in these books offer what you might expect: money, power, true love. But do they work? I didn’t try any, but consider this. If they did work, if they were potent, demonstrable, and consistent, then they wouldn’t belong in a spell book. Because they wouldn’t be magic anymore. Lightning, eclipses, magnetism, these things once belonged to the magicians, but scientists took them away.

This is one of the essential characteristics of magic. It is not simply unreliable; it is by definition unreliable. The whole experience of visiting the magic shop thus reduces to a problem in aesthetics. I find this very liberating. If you like it, you like it, full stop. If you think the crystal ball looks cool, you should buy it. It’s not a vacuum cleaner. There’s nothing to test, nothing to verify. Does it work? Of course it doesn’t work. Or rather, its charms work inasmuch as it charms you. De gustibus non est disputandum. That’s the real trick.

Cool Tat, Too Bad It’s Gibberish – New York Times
Indelibly lost in translation – Los Angeles Times

The whole concept of what people look for in a tattoo, and what constitutes magical writing, has fascinated me for some time, so I collected my thoughts in the somewhat longer ramble below.

Tattoos Sacred and Profane

Have you ever wondered why people who don’t speak Chinese get Chinese tattoos? One thing seems clear: they don’t do it to communicate with Chinese people. Or if they do, they are often sadly misguided. Here, for example, is a person who was told his tattoo means “courage”. In fact it means “big mistake,” thereby changing it from a statement about the owner to one about the tattoo.

(photo courtesy of Tian at Hanzi Smatter)

Some people say they chose a Chinese tattoo because it’s “exotic.” By itself, this hardly seems sufficient. What does “exotic” actually mean? I think I know: Chinese characters are beautiful, compact, ancient, and secret. Each of these things adds to the overall force of Chinese logograms in the Western mind. That they are beautiful is a simple matter of aesthetics. They are indisputably compact, and therefore more expressive per square inch of flesh than our alphabet. They are also the oldest form of writing still in use. As with Egyptian hieroglyphics, we may therefore imagine their deep roots confer some extra power beyond their direct declarative value. But the most important factor is mystery: these things are secret.

Why is secrecy important? Secret knowledge has the power of magic and can therefore connect with a deeper sense of meaning than a naked word straight out of the dictionary. If you tattoo the word SMART on your ass, you just look like a smartass. You are open to ridicule. But if you tattoo a cryptic symbol that only you and a select few know to be SMART in an ancient runic language, you get to feel cryptic, ancient, runic, and smart all at the same time.

However, this being Chinese, there is a problem with the “secret” part. What is secret to you is the primary language for more people than any other language in the world. This underscores the obvious point: exoticness is in the eye of the beholder. There is nothing exotic about the language you use for your grocery list. As a result, the joke may be on you. It may, instead of saying SMART on your ass, say SMRAT. Or worse: FART. How would you know the difference? There you are, smugly revealing your mystic brand to friends and confidants when one day you see a picture of your tattoo on a web site with the correct translation: FART.

As it happens, this topic is of more than passing interest to me. I design Elvish tattoos. Or rather, people send me money to get their name written in Elvish which they often then use for a tattoo. The people who contact me tend to come from one side or the other of the Lord of the Rings fan spectrum. On one side are the serious Tolkien geeks who know their Quenya from their Sindarin and can quote “Elbereth Gilthoniel” from memory. On the other side are the mild fans who happen to like the way Elvish looks.

The first customer wants to make sure I get it exactly right. It’s a tattoo after all, so I can’t blame them, but sometimes they harangue me about Elvish grammar and orthography and agonize that they might be laughed at by an Elf on the subway someday. They don’t need me to tell them that Tolkien’s trilogy is a work of fiction, and yet there is something terribly important about knowing that the elegant script they receive is genuine. But genuine what?

The second customer just wants the cool Elvish writing because it would make a nice tattoo. They take their writing and leave happy. They don’t worry too much about authenticity because they assumed that from the outset. This may seem unsophisticated because they completely trust me to tell them how Elves write. At the same time, maybe they realize that’s not exactly the point. They are the more pleasant customer to deal with, and my bet is that they are happier with their tattoo in the long run.

One lesson here is that if you’re drawn to cryptic tattoos, you’re better off choosing Elvish over Chinese. If it’s a botched job, you’ll never be ridiculed by the waiter at an Elvish restaurant. But the real question is: Do you define your tattoo, or does it define you? In Connecticut, there is a river called the Thames. It is pronounced not TEMS like its namesake in London; instead it rhymes with SHAMES. Is that laughably provincial or irreducibly authentic? A Londoner may sniff, but this river isn’t in London. This river is in Connecticut, so shut up.

The biggest joke of a mistranslated tattoo may succeed, just as the most perfectly rendered tattoo may fail. It all depends on the secret message and the owner. That your message appears foolish to my interpretation does not deprive you of its secret. If I tear down your church, what have I done to your religion?

So: a good tattoo is meaningful, beautiful, and secret. But secrets come in two sizes: little and big. Little secrets, like where you hide the spare key, can be found out. The rituals of the Freemasons, with their handshakes and special orders, used to excite respect and envy. But these all turn out to be little secrets. We live in an age that dissolves secrecy. You can look up everything you want to know about Masonic secrets in the next fifteen minutes. What’s the point?

The point is that big secrets don’t dissolve. The point is that all writing, even the writing of grocery lists, is magical, no matter the language or location. Because we use it all the time every day, we forget this. So we have to wipe some exotic on it. “Magic” is something we rub on ordinary things to remind us that ordinary things are magic. That’s why we employ so many little secrets; they’re useful tools for holding on to big secrets.

The little secret contains the big secret. How does it fit?

That’s the big secret.

Don’t tell me you need more information… just answer the question. Which is more important? And which is more powerful? They clearly have a tangled relationship. Science fiction authors and scientists are always quoting each other. Arthur C. Clarke, quoting himself, famously conflated magic and technology: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I just finished reading a gift from my sister-in-law, an odd little book called Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler. Actually, the book isn’t so odd… it’s the book’s topic that is odd: The Museum of Jurassic Technology. The cabinet of wonder is the museum, a bizarre and disordered little museum on a nondescript street in Los Angeles. But the more nonsense you read about it, the more sense it all makes. Wonder is the fountainhead of reason.

Wunderkammern, or rooms of wonder, were the sixteenth century predecessors of museums. In modern terms, they were eccentric collections of tchotchkes and oddities from the natural world thrown together with, ideally, a sense of style.

Like this: Athanasius Kircher takes us from here to here, where we learn about these and this which eventually takes us to Arthur Ganson’s Machines (make sure you watch Wishbone Man walking, that tiny tireless Sisyphus). And from Wishbone Man it is a short stroll to here.

But all that is in the past now, and we learn once again that history is not physics, and that precedents are powerful, but not all-powerful. There do exist heroes strong enough to break the spell and release the castle from poisoned slumber. Part of their magic is to insist there is no magic, just as test pilot Chuck Yeager always dismissed the notion of the “Right Stuff” as so much nonsense. We know better.

For all the joy in Mudville these days, I’m sure some people will get perversely nostalgic for the Curse. After Game 4 ended, I went to read what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had to say about the series, and I was struck by the similarity between what I read there and the piece written by Boston Globe sportswriter and Curse fetishist Dan Shaughnessy after three straight losses to the Yankees in the ALCS (Red Sox on brink of elimination as Yanks pound them, 19-8). Here’s what he has to say on October 17th:

For the 86th consecutive autumn, the Red Sox are not going to win the World Series. No baseball team in history has recovered from a 3-0 deficit and this most-promising Sox season in 18 years could be officially over tonight. Mercy. … The first Fenway game of this much-hyped series could not have been more disastrous for Boston. The Sox embarrassed themselves with poor base running, inept pitching, and dubious managerial decisions. By any measure, it was an ignominious defeat as the locals succumbed without much trace of competition or honor. At least the 2003 team, the Grady Bunch, took the Yankees to the limit. That the Sox could play this poorly after the yearlong competition (on and off the field) between the century-old rivals, staggers the New England mind.

There’s your hinge of fate. Something happened on October 17th, God knows what, and here we are today. But I get the distinct feeling that old Dan Shaughnessy will miss writing stories like this one.