Building Religions 4: Religion and Magic

Building Religions 4: Religion & Magic

I'm going to take a detour here and focus on a theme rather than a single author. For the first several decades of the academic study of religion, it seemed like everyone had to, at some point, work out definitions of religion and magic that would make clear to their readers why the two were different. It's only been recently, however, that scholars have started to ask the question of why it was so important for that distinction to be made, and what the definitions were intended to do.



For games that have been influenced by Dungeons & Dragons, the division has traditionally been fairly clear: clerics and wizards had completely different lists of spells, acquired them differently (prayer vs. studying spellbooks), and used them for different purposes (healing and protection vs. blowing things up). Those of us who grew up with D&D as a model probably didn't question that arrangement too much, and those who play games that evolved out of D&D aren't surprised when we see clerics and wizards turning up in similar roles elsewhere. It seems natural that religious power and magical power are different things.

But where did that idea come from? The immediate source was, if I remember my D&D history properly, that one of Gygax's players wanted to be a Peter Cushing-style vampire hunter, and thus, clerics were born. (Magic-users had already existed, as fantasy versions of tabletop artillery.) They were an afterthought, albeit one that was later fleshed out considerably. It makes sense for someone who, like Gygax, was influenced more strongly by pulp fantasies where evil cultists were essentially wizards with a fondness for spectacle and the occasional human sacrifice.

If you're looking for a more general reason, however -- a reason why the separation of clerics and wizards caught on and spread through other games -- I'd say it was because the idea that religion and magic were fundamentally different forces was already ingrained in culture.

A few years ago, Randall Styers wrote an excellent book called Making Magic, which was all about the ways that scholars have worked to establish and police the boundaries between religion and magic. He divided his argument into three parts, with selections from a whole host of theorists along the way: definitions of magic have been created to show it, first, in opposition to religion; second, in opposition to modern rationality; third, in opposition to morality and social order.

For the opposition to religion, one of the aspects on which he focuses is the idea that magic is this-worldly, while religion is other-worldly. In other words, magic accomplishes goals that are oriented to our needs and desires in the physical realm, while religion is properly suited to matters of the soul and the afterlife. You don't need to look too far to find situations where this division breaks down, of course, but what Styers is more interested in is the implicit notion that "real" religion is an interior, purely spiritual thing. Even the material features of magic -- the elaborate rituals, the ingredients, talismans, potions, and so on -- stand in contrast to the intangible nature of religion.

For the opposition to modern rationality, he draws from an embarrassing abundance of authors who classify magic as a relic of primitive thought, as (to quote James Frazer) "a false science" based on a misunderstanding of the principles of causation, or as a precursor to religion that only survives because some people are too irrational to give it up. The magical worldview, in which individuals are connected to their environments through a network of correspondences, is at odds with the post-Enlightenment view that we are each self-contained, autonomous beings.

Magic's opposition to morality and social order is partly connected to its this-worldliness. Magic, according to the authors who define it in these terms, exists as a way for people to cheat -- to gain power, wealth, revenge, or whatever else might be the object of their desires. Religion, on the other hand, supports the social order, encourages morality, and teaches people to accept their place in the order of things.

Some years before Styers, J.Z. Smith made similar observations about the separation of religion and magic, and came to the conclusion that most of the distinctions derived from a particular agenda: they were efforts, dating all the way back to the Reformation, to separate Protestant Christianity from Catholic Christianity. In early anti-Catholic polemical tracts, their rituals were equated with magic, their hierarchies were corrupted by worldliness, and their saint- and angel-filled theologies bordered on paganism. What Styers does is take Smith's point further, and show how thoroughly scholars have accepted definitions of religion that apply almost exclusively to modern Protestant belief. Insisting that there's some sort of clear line separating religion from magic often does nothing more than perpetuate this Catholic vs. Protestant argument.

Think about that when you're writing, if you're writing a setting in which religion and magic appear as distinct forces. Think about what your assumptions are about what religion is, about what magic is, and about what sets them apart. Even if you say that magic is an ancient power that's been lost to modernity, you're just putting a Romantic spin on the idea that magic is irrational. If you have mages waving wands and flinging bat guano at people, while priests just say their prayers, you're implying that the material components of ritual are somehow less religious.

It's a messy area to think about, but religion (in fiction, as in life) is most interesting when it's messy.