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hrjOne of the more interesting themes in reviews of Daughter of Mystery is along the lines of how “it’s very unusual in Fantasy...to have magic coexist so intimately with Christianity, and also to write protagonists who are quietly and earnestly devout without ulterior motives.” And: “perhaps the most splendid thing is the way the author handles religion.” Now some writers of historically-based fiction might be startled at the thought that characters who are “quietly and earnestly devout” are unusual. Me? I’m tickled to death when I get comments like that because getting the religion “right” is one of the things I’m most proud of. You see, I’m an atheist (and raised as a Quaker), so the traditional steeped-in-everyday-life Catholic religion of my characters is a decidedly alien setting for me. Based on comments and questions regarding the way religion and magic are handled in Daughter of Mystery, it seemed people might be interested in a blog on the topic. So I’m going to cover three things. Why did I chose to have my characters relate to their religion in the way I did? How did I come to develop the form of magic that exists in the world of Alpennia? And what is the relationship between magic and religion in that world?
To some extent it was a no-brainer that my characters were going to be sincere believers in the religion they were raised in. My protagonists were unusual in certain very specific ways within their culture, but I wanted them to be “ordinary” in most other ways. They aren’t me and there’s nothing in their backgrounds that would specifically have spurred them to be skeptics or non-believers. Now this isn’t saying that Alpennia has no skeptics! In the scenes with the student mystery guild that Margerit joins, we find that Morpirt Albin has doubts about the divine nature of mysteries. There are more like him; we’re in the middle of the Enlightenment, after all. But beyond simply being “ordinary” in her religious devotion, the way I interpret Margerit Sovitre’s belief is that her mystical experiences deepen her faith rather than eroding it. After all, she communes with the saints and they grant her visions and miracles! Why would she have any doubts?
Some readers have also speculated on the absence of any mention of religious conflicts or of any Protestant sects in Daughter of Mystery. This wasn’t meant to be a meaningful omission. The story is, in many ways, a very inward-looking one: a tale of small domestic concerns within a small portion of society in a small country of relatively homogeneous culture. And because I chose to write it using an extremely tight point-of-view, there isn’t a great deal of mention of matters that don’t impinge on the two protagonists’ immediate concerns. Rest assured that, except for the physical presence of the imaginary country of Alpennia, and except for the existence of magic, the world of the setting is extremely like our own. (More on this later.) We’ll get a bit more religious diversity in the sequel, The Mystic Marriage, when a prominent minor character is Jewish and the differences between how various religions interact with magic is at least of passing concern for the primary characters. We’ll also see more about how magic works outside a religious context in the specific case of the magical aspects (though they don’t call them that!) of alchemy.
Before talking about how magic works within the story setting (both how the characters think it works and how I understand it to work), I thought it would be interesting to walk through the development of how I added magic into the plot. Writing Daughter of Mystery was something of a “process experiment” for me in many ways. One of those ways was that I had absolutely no idea where the plot was going to go when I started writing. So I thought it would be amusing to keep a “plot development diary” at the beginning to track how elements and characters got added and how my original ideas changed as the story evolved.
At this remove, I’m not exactly sure when I first started working on the story, but my first dated plot-diary notes are dated at the beginning of December 2007 and I believe I had seriously started working on it only a few weeks before that. The initial concept and characters had no elements of magic or prominent religious aspects at all, but by 12/1/2007 I’d come up with the idea that Margerit would get into trouble in Rotenek by dabbling in some sort of ceremonial magic or alchemical work that had specifically been designed as “bait” to interest her and would be sprung as a trap.
In my notes dated 12/4/2007 (when I’d written up to around chapter 10 or so) I noted in the plot-diary: I need to develop the "fantasy" aspects of the world. My current ideas draw from historical supernatural practices except that in this world "stuff works". Examples would be alchemy (transmutation, humors, sympathetic magic, the mystic marriage?[*]), the invocation of saints, angels (and demons) with regularly observable and supernatural consequences in the physical world (misc. charms, protections, interventions in natural law, etc.). Overall, the basic principle is "stuff works", where knowledge and practice are the key factors with some smaller element of chance and talent. I don't want the supernatural effects to seem mechanical and there isn't any clear physical manifestation of the supernatural creatures being invoked, but the results should be systematic, not attributable to chance, and logically related to the method of invocation.
[*] Note that I had absolutely no ideas for doing a second book at this point, much less that it would focus on alchemy and be titled The Mystic Marriage. Such are the seeds planted!
In general, my own philosophy tends to lead me to create magical systems that are very mechanical. (My invention of “the mechanistic heresy” was something of self-mockery.) I didn’t want the magic to be simply an alternate technology, and I didn’t want it to be something that had such significant and predictable effects that it would substantially alter the course of history. I wanted Alpennia’s history to be recognizable as our own. (This is touched on when the characters discuss the difficulties of using the mysteries for practical purposes, given that the effects can often be difficult to distinguish from lucky chance and given that the ability to perform “effective mysteries” and the ability to tell that a mystery has been effective rarely occur in the same person. Toss in the confounding effects of deliberate fraud and a formal aversion to approaching the mysteries scientifically and you end up with a system where the existence of magic may have very little impact on the larger course of history.)
At some later time I came back and inserted the following commentary: At this point my idea is that Margerit only gets involved in magic via her studies. I also have the notion that magic will be involved in the resolution of how M&B disprove the charge of treason, but I didn’t work out the details for quite some time. And about a week later I added a whole list of plot and character elements that had shifted how I understood the earlier chapters, including: Work out the irrealis parts of the magic/religion in more detail. Since this will be critical to the plot, it needs to be introduced and set up properly.
When I was first working on Daughter of Mystery, I would spend a few months writing a little every day and then something would disrupt my routine and I’d let it sit for months at a time. The next relevant entry in my plot-diary comes almost a year later on 10/28/2008 when I jotted down what I was thinking of when I came up with the book’s title: Also, I think I've come up with a better working title: Mystery's Daughter (or maybe Daughter of Mystery). I wanted something that would refer ambiguously to both M and B, and hit on the idea of the "Saints' Mysteries" being the thaumaturgical system associated with doing magic via invoking the saints. So as a thaumaturgist, Marguerite is a daughter of the saints' mysteries, but in the more ordinary sense, Barbara is the daughter of a mystery. (A key “aha!” moment was when I tracked down the etymologies of both senses of the word “mystery”.)
So at that point I’d developed the idea that I was working specifically with “miracles of the saints” and something of a formalized hybrid of folk-magic and saints’ cults that paralleled formal ecclesiastical ceremonies but “belonged” to lay people in some essential way. Everyone participated in ceremonial “mysteries” as a part of everyday religious devotion but that for some people those ceremonies were conduits for genuine acts of causation. Part of my inspiration for the lay mystery guilds came from the way that medieval craft guilds evolved into social and benevolent organizations, and I could easily see that in the world of Alpennia such organizations might well evolve into social clubs that organized around the celebration of mysteries. By 11/11/2009 my notes indicate that I was focusing on Margerit’s experiments being a more activist, hazardous approach to the Mysteries. That is, that she puts herself in peril not simply by her ability to perceive the workings of the mysteries but by actively experimenting with developing and changing them for her own purposes.
So that covers how my ideas of the magic developed. But how do the inhabitants of the story understand magic? Firstly, they don’t think of it as “magic” at all. There are certain “high” religious practices that have “active consequences” and there are many more folk-religious practices that either have or are believed to have “active consequences” and that are at least formally distinct in peoples minds from what they would consider “sorcery” or “witchcraft” or some other category that implies heretical practices. Many of these practices are formally accepted as at least quasi-orthodox in the world of Alpennia specifically because of the place of high ritual thaumaturgical practices to which they can be connected.
So if these magical “mysteries” are specifically associated in Alpennia with cults of the saints, what’s going on in Protestant lands? That will get touched on a bit in The Mystic Marriage and moreso in later books. The short version is that, as part of the Reformation, the mysteries of the saints were rejected by Protestant movements as “Popish nonsense” ... but when you have people running around with an innate ability to “make things happen” or to be able to tell when other people are “making things happen”, it’s going to come out in some fashion. It just may not be labeled “religion”. I still have some thinking to do on exactly how that will manifest, but there are a lot of possibilities. And, of course, there are more religions in the world than the various Christian sects. We may well get a chance to see how magic comes out in a Jewish context eventually, and who knows what else.
And then we get into the interesting case of alchemy (which I’ve done a lot of thinking on for Book 2) and similar activities. Because although alchemy in the world of Alpennia uses exactly the same underlying “magical” power as the mysteries do, it is perceived by its practitioners as a non-religious activity, indeed as a science. The difference between Alpennia’s alchemy and Alpennia’s “real science” is that alchemy harnesses the available non-causative energy using symbolism and ritual, but it isn’t treated as religious ritual (and is therefore subject to a certain amount of suspicion and scrutiny). It would have been very easy for me to conceive of the idea that the essential element in any sort of “magic” in my world is the innate ability of the practitioner. (Remember what I said about defaulting to a mechanistic view of magic?) And I’ve clearly set up a system where innate ability is important. But I decided that I wanted more ambiguity in my world. I wanted it to be not entirely clear whether the Mechanists were right and -- given the right people with the right innate abilities -- you could create entirely predictable and reliable miracles at will. The magical elements in alchemy manifest in the ability to drive chemical and physical reactions (ones that are physically possible in our world) under conditions where they would not naturally occur. So for example, it is possible to create synthetic gemstones using alchemy that would ordinarily require temperatures, pressures, timeframes, and non-reactive containers not available to the ordinary experimenter. (Although I was delighted to discover that the first real-world synthetic gemstones were created right around the time my novels are set.) And these alchemical reactions can be produced by performing your reactions according to the correct astrological alignments and using the proper symbolism in the performance of the preparations. And -- as I indicate in passing -- as long as the “recipe” is performed correctly, the practitioner need not have any special magical sensitivity to be successful, though magical sensitivity is immensely helpful in identifying and devising those recipes.
So do the saints actually grant miracles if asked properly? Does it matter that the person petitioning the saints have some innate characteristic that makes their prayers more special? Or is there a neutral force in the world that some people have the ability to wield? These are the questions that the great philosophers like Fortunatus, Tanfrit, and Gaudericus have pondered and argued at length. And if they cannot come to a definite conclusion on the matter, how can I?
To some extent it was a no-brainer that my characters were going to be sincere believers in the religion they were raised in. My protagonists were unusual in certain very specific ways within their culture, but I wanted them to be “ordinary” in most other ways. They aren’t me and there’s nothing in their backgrounds that would specifically have spurred them to be skeptics or non-believers. Now this isn’t saying that Alpennia has no skeptics! In the scenes with the student mystery guild that Margerit joins, we find that Morpirt Albin has doubts about the divine nature of mysteries. There are more like him; we’re in the middle of the Enlightenment, after all. But beyond simply being “ordinary” in her religious devotion, the way I interpret Margerit Sovitre’s belief is that her mystical experiences deepen her faith rather than eroding it. After all, she communes with the saints and they grant her visions and miracles! Why would she have any doubts?
Some readers have also speculated on the absence of any mention of religious conflicts or of any Protestant sects in Daughter of Mystery. This wasn’t meant to be a meaningful omission. The story is, in many ways, a very inward-looking one: a tale of small domestic concerns within a small portion of society in a small country of relatively homogeneous culture. And because I chose to write it using an extremely tight point-of-view, there isn’t a great deal of mention of matters that don’t impinge on the two protagonists’ immediate concerns. Rest assured that, except for the physical presence of the imaginary country of Alpennia, and except for the existence of magic, the world of the setting is extremely like our own. (More on this later.) We’ll get a bit more religious diversity in the sequel, The Mystic Marriage, when a prominent minor character is Jewish and the differences between how various religions interact with magic is at least of passing concern for the primary characters. We’ll also see more about how magic works outside a religious context in the specific case of the magical aspects (though they don’t call them that!) of alchemy.
Before talking about how magic works within the story setting (both how the characters think it works and how I understand it to work), I thought it would be interesting to walk through the development of how I added magic into the plot. Writing Daughter of Mystery was something of a “process experiment” for me in many ways. One of those ways was that I had absolutely no idea where the plot was going to go when I started writing. So I thought it would be amusing to keep a “plot development diary” at the beginning to track how elements and characters got added and how my original ideas changed as the story evolved.
At this remove, I’m not exactly sure when I first started working on the story, but my first dated plot-diary notes are dated at the beginning of December 2007 and I believe I had seriously started working on it only a few weeks before that. The initial concept and characters had no elements of magic or prominent religious aspects at all, but by 12/1/2007 I’d come up with the idea that Margerit would get into trouble in Rotenek by dabbling in some sort of ceremonial magic or alchemical work that had specifically been designed as “bait” to interest her and would be sprung as a trap.
In my notes dated 12/4/2007 (when I’d written up to around chapter 10 or so) I noted in the plot-diary: I need to develop the "fantasy" aspects of the world. My current ideas draw from historical supernatural practices except that in this world "stuff works". Examples would be alchemy (transmutation, humors, sympathetic magic, the mystic marriage?[*]), the invocation of saints, angels (and demons) with regularly observable and supernatural consequences in the physical world (misc. charms, protections, interventions in natural law, etc.). Overall, the basic principle is "stuff works", where knowledge and practice are the key factors with some smaller element of chance and talent. I don't want the supernatural effects to seem mechanical and there isn't any clear physical manifestation of the supernatural creatures being invoked, but the results should be systematic, not attributable to chance, and logically related to the method of invocation.
[*] Note that I had absolutely no ideas for doing a second book at this point, much less that it would focus on alchemy and be titled The Mystic Marriage. Such are the seeds planted!
In general, my own philosophy tends to lead me to create magical systems that are very mechanical. (My invention of “the mechanistic heresy” was something of self-mockery.) I didn’t want the magic to be simply an alternate technology, and I didn’t want it to be something that had such significant and predictable effects that it would substantially alter the course of history. I wanted Alpennia’s history to be recognizable as our own. (This is touched on when the characters discuss the difficulties of using the mysteries for practical purposes, given that the effects can often be difficult to distinguish from lucky chance and given that the ability to perform “effective mysteries” and the ability to tell that a mystery has been effective rarely occur in the same person. Toss in the confounding effects of deliberate fraud and a formal aversion to approaching the mysteries scientifically and you end up with a system where the existence of magic may have very little impact on the larger course of history.)
At some later time I came back and inserted the following commentary: At this point my idea is that Margerit only gets involved in magic via her studies. I also have the notion that magic will be involved in the resolution of how M&B disprove the charge of treason, but I didn’t work out the details for quite some time. And about a week later I added a whole list of plot and character elements that had shifted how I understood the earlier chapters, including: Work out the irrealis parts of the magic/religion in more detail. Since this will be critical to the plot, it needs to be introduced and set up properly.
When I was first working on Daughter of Mystery, I would spend a few months writing a little every day and then something would disrupt my routine and I’d let it sit for months at a time. The next relevant entry in my plot-diary comes almost a year later on 10/28/2008 when I jotted down what I was thinking of when I came up with the book’s title: Also, I think I've come up with a better working title: Mystery's Daughter (or maybe Daughter of Mystery). I wanted something that would refer ambiguously to both M and B, and hit on the idea of the "Saints' Mysteries" being the thaumaturgical system associated with doing magic via invoking the saints. So as a thaumaturgist, Marguerite is a daughter of the saints' mysteries, but in the more ordinary sense, Barbara is the daughter of a mystery. (A key “aha!” moment was when I tracked down the etymologies of both senses of the word “mystery”.)
So at that point I’d developed the idea that I was working specifically with “miracles of the saints” and something of a formalized hybrid of folk-magic and saints’ cults that paralleled formal ecclesiastical ceremonies but “belonged” to lay people in some essential way. Everyone participated in ceremonial “mysteries” as a part of everyday religious devotion but that for some people those ceremonies were conduits for genuine acts of causation. Part of my inspiration for the lay mystery guilds came from the way that medieval craft guilds evolved into social and benevolent organizations, and I could easily see that in the world of Alpennia such organizations might well evolve into social clubs that organized around the celebration of mysteries. By 11/11/2009 my notes indicate that I was focusing on Margerit’s experiments being a more activist, hazardous approach to the Mysteries. That is, that she puts herself in peril not simply by her ability to perceive the workings of the mysteries but by actively experimenting with developing and changing them for her own purposes.
So that covers how my ideas of the magic developed. But how do the inhabitants of the story understand magic? Firstly, they don’t think of it as “magic” at all. There are certain “high” religious practices that have “active consequences” and there are many more folk-religious practices that either have or are believed to have “active consequences” and that are at least formally distinct in peoples minds from what they would consider “sorcery” or “witchcraft” or some other category that implies heretical practices. Many of these practices are formally accepted as at least quasi-orthodox in the world of Alpennia specifically because of the place of high ritual thaumaturgical practices to which they can be connected.
So if these magical “mysteries” are specifically associated in Alpennia with cults of the saints, what’s going on in Protestant lands? That will get touched on a bit in The Mystic Marriage and moreso in later books. The short version is that, as part of the Reformation, the mysteries of the saints were rejected by Protestant movements as “Popish nonsense” ... but when you have people running around with an innate ability to “make things happen” or to be able to tell when other people are “making things happen”, it’s going to come out in some fashion. It just may not be labeled “religion”. I still have some thinking to do on exactly how that will manifest, but there are a lot of possibilities. And, of course, there are more religions in the world than the various Christian sects. We may well get a chance to see how magic comes out in a Jewish context eventually, and who knows what else.
And then we get into the interesting case of alchemy (which I’ve done a lot of thinking on for Book 2) and similar activities. Because although alchemy in the world of Alpennia uses exactly the same underlying “magical” power as the mysteries do, it is perceived by its practitioners as a non-religious activity, indeed as a science. The difference between Alpennia’s alchemy and Alpennia’s “real science” is that alchemy harnesses the available non-causative energy using symbolism and ritual, but it isn’t treated as religious ritual (and is therefore subject to a certain amount of suspicion and scrutiny). It would have been very easy for me to conceive of the idea that the essential element in any sort of “magic” in my world is the innate ability of the practitioner. (Remember what I said about defaulting to a mechanistic view of magic?) And I’ve clearly set up a system where innate ability is important. But I decided that I wanted more ambiguity in my world. I wanted it to be not entirely clear whether the Mechanists were right and -- given the right people with the right innate abilities -- you could create entirely predictable and reliable miracles at will. The magical elements in alchemy manifest in the ability to drive chemical and physical reactions (ones that are physically possible in our world) under conditions where they would not naturally occur. So for example, it is possible to create synthetic gemstones using alchemy that would ordinarily require temperatures, pressures, timeframes, and non-reactive containers not available to the ordinary experimenter. (Although I was delighted to discover that the first real-world synthetic gemstones were created right around the time my novels are set.) And these alchemical reactions can be produced by performing your reactions according to the correct astrological alignments and using the proper symbolism in the performance of the preparations. And -- as I indicate in passing -- as long as the “recipe” is performed correctly, the practitioner need not have any special magical sensitivity to be successful, though magical sensitivity is immensely helpful in identifying and devising those recipes.
So do the saints actually grant miracles if asked properly? Does it matter that the person petitioning the saints have some innate characteristic that makes their prayers more special? Or is there a neutral force in the world that some people have the ability to wield? These are the questions that the great philosophers like Fortunatus, Tanfrit, and Gaudericus have pondered and argued at length. And if they cannot come to a definite conclusion on the matter, how can I?
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not magic
Date: 2014-04-16 09:47 pm (UTC)Exorcism is something that needs to approached correctly or it can backfire or return. This is not the place to discuss it imo.
Re: not magic
Date: 2014-04-17 06:38 am (UTC)I'm like Margerit in that my, er, metaphysical experiences strengthen my faith. I don't see it as proof of the existence of God; for all I know it's all in my mind, and I know that other people have different things in their minds (fortunately, or we'd all be the same and that would be boring).