Science and Magic are not so far apart

How humans approach Nature and the Universe

The vocabulary with which we talk about the world often limits us, or at least proves to be an untrustworthy guide. Take magic, for example. Recently I have pondered what exactly do we mean by this striking word.

If we ask the question: “are creatures like elves, giants, and dragons supernatural?”, one answer would be “of course they are. They are magic; by definition, they defy the laws of nature.” I too might have answered like that once. What changed my mind was the following Tolkien passage:

For the moment I will say only this: a “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faërie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

“On Fairy Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien

The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with the Professor. Some modern fantasy works treat magic as a system parallel to and independent of science — which is to say, parallel to and independent of the laws of Nature. But the notion makes little sense. Any world in which a particular kind of lizard can breathe fire is, by definition, a world in which it is possible to breathe fire. You cannot say that it goes against the laws of Nature; Nature, as defined in the work, clearly allows it.

Hugo Weaving meets Hugo Weaving

The problem (on which that I have touched in my Deathly Hallows article) is that magic has two meanings.

The first is what we mean when we say that fire-casting, or teleportation, or the such, is magic: the power certain people or objects have over the world. That is, what in our Primary World we call skill or technology.

However, there is, as Tolkien notices in the passage, a second meaning of magic. One that is not concerned with what a thing does, but what a thing is.

Dragons, elves, and unicorns are magic, not because they can do feats impossible in the real world (there is little a horned horse can do that a regular horse can’t), but because they strike the human mind with the awe and wonder of things that are not us. It is the feeling one often finds in regard to Nature, though familiarity may dull our minds to it.

Both of these meanings — magic as power and magic as wonder — are unified in that which Tolkien claims to be the one of the main features of fairy-stories: “the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy.’”¹

We could compare it to science. Science too, is double-edged. We often think of it as the production of technology: white-coated men in sterile rooms, building machines to fly higher, lift heavier, or live longer. But we might as well think of the astronomer who gazes upon the stars, or the biologist who stoops low to watch the creatures of the Earth. One is concerned with acting over the world, one with understanding it.

In well-ordered minds the two aspects will work together, the higher informing the lower. In evil or sick minds, the two aspects will become adversarial.

So both science and magic are, in a sense, relations between a human soul and the universe. The difference, of course, is that science is eminently rational, while magic is non-rational. The feeling one gets from imagining a fire-breathing dragon, or watching a real sunset, is a relation between a human mind and Nature, but it is not a rational one.

Non-rational, of course, does not mean irrational. To feel wonder for a thing and to yearn to understand it are desires that walk together. Tolkien himself describes his elves as both artists and scientists, in a language that implies both to be the same or very close activities:

The Elves represent, as it were, the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of Humane nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men. That is: they have a devoted love of the physical world, and a desire to observe and understand it for its own sake and as ‘other’ — sc. as a reality derived from God in the same degree as themselves — not as material for use or as a power-platform.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 181

Magic (and science) are thus very closely tied to Nature. But this raises an important question.

Elves and fairies are magical: they strike the human mind with awe and strangeness and beauty, as does Nature. Elves and fairies of the tradition and myths. But Tolkien’s elves, the quendi, are not just Nature. They are, as much as Men, acts of direct creation from Eru Ilúvatar. Therefore, at least some part of them is not merely natural, but supernatural.

And if there is a single word more tricky than magic, it is supernatural.

But that’s a story for another post…

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1. “On Fairy Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien