Where did the idea of magic come from? – The Spruce Crafts Magic
My grandfather, who was an immigrant from Spain, came to America as a young man in 1892. My mother was a seamstress. My brother and I had a magic wand. They were in my father’s house, so when I was 15 I went over and my father brought it over and said, ‘You can have it back.’ He also gave the whole family this magic wand.
Your first book about magic, The Magician, was released in 1988. Can you explain why magic has remained so popular for nearly two centuries?
People have been fascinated with magic for a very long time. Magic was a significant part of the Victorian fantasy genre. It doesn’t seem much as a story element anymore, but the belief that magic is real is important to the fabric of the human condition and to our experience of the universe. The magic of the witch-finder is so powerful because that person knows how to read what is happening to them and to their environment or someone else in the world. Her words and her visions are so powerful because she has discovered a way to tap into the invisible. The power is just huge. We can’t put things in terms of technology or religion – that’s too limiting. I don’t believe science is going to replace it soon, at least not the way it is today. But science has always been a part of human life, whether science was a part of religion or whether it was a religion.
The first step in taking that scientific approach is not denying anything, in part because every element of science is going away. What we’re doing is looking at the big picture of it and making sense of it. We could all benefit from seeing where it came from. If it hadn’t been around, it probably wouldn’t be here.
What are some of the biggest challenges for an author writing about magic in today’s age of technology and change?
We have an enormous amount of technology in our lives. We’re surrounded by technology constantly, it’s part of our daily life. As readers, you’re exposed to it all of the time. People are just so much able to experience it. And that’s been a great challenge. There’s always been a kind of mystical thinking that’s been present in magic – there’s been people with their own ideas and their own beliefs, and that’s been part of the fantasy genre. A lot of people have taken magic and tried to make it real in any sort of interesting way. How much do we want to
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