Magic and Sorcery: Modern Magic in Fiction

So, then, you may think that magic is a thing of the Middle Ages - stories told of a long time ago, of places that never existed such as Earthsea, Middle Earth, Westeros and the like. A phenomenon of the past, with no room for it or presence in the modern day.

Well, funny you should say that, because with the proliferation of stories featuring magicians and magical phenomena dating from the turn of the 20th century, right up to the slew of modern fantasy and dark fantasy stories on contemporary bookshelves, you would think that magic had not only not gone away, but has a stronger presence than ever.

Historically, magic was derided during the early half of the 20th Century as superstition, the mindless pursuit of nonsense by the uneducated masses who hadn't embraced Science. Yet Science, for all its vaunted goal of reaching for the stars, put on a pretty poor damned show in two World Wars which became simple grindhouses for human bodies cast like coffee beans into the milling machinery of machine guns, carpet bombing, poison gas and, eventually, roasted alive and turned into shadows on walls in the incandescent blaze of a nuclear explosion.

Though while historically magic still hasn't found the perfect formula for becoming bulletproof just yet, in its appearances in fiction throughout the last few centuries the presence of magic and supernatural powers and abilities has remained steady - and nowadays magic laces throughout most modern fantasy stories and settings like the roots of a particularly virulent strain of ivy through the rotting brickwork of a doomed old building.

The Wickedest Man In The World

Early last century, the occult scene was dominated in so-called real life by the Grand Brotherhoods: the Golden Dawn, the OTO and Thelema. The Masons and Rosicrucians' arcane fraternities cast long shadows back into the past, as well. It was in that time that storytellers such as M R James and W Somerset Maugham wrote stories such as "Casting The Runes" and the novel The Magician, both of which featured pastiches of the same villainous character, bane of the societies of their day: the one and only Aleister Crowley, "Little Sunshine," The Beast 666 His Own Self.

The notoriety of this character meant that writers in this time quite happily borrowed the Crowleyesque archetype of the dark, brooding, wicked occultist in league with Hellish forces to infuse their horror stories with sinister occult teasings. Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out was a prime example: the villain, Mr Mocata (ably played by the late Charles Gray in the Hammer movie adaptation) was the driving force behind the villainy in his Diabolical crusade to jailbreak the Devil from Hell. In contrast, James' figure of Carswell was satisfied with merely conjuring up a lesser demon hitman to terrify and attempt to murder the story's protagonist, and Maugham's villain, Oliver Haddo, was simply content to hypnotise, seduce and corrupt his victim with sexual and occult debauchery. (When you've got it, flaunt it ...)

However, even cast in a negative light, fictional stories of occultism in the modern world survived.

The Occult Backlash

From the shock and horror of the Bomb, a kind of backlash against not only science and technology, but organised religion, began. The general public looked on the high priests of science and religion, doling out received wisdom from above to the milling hoi polloi below, and - upon realising that their leaders were insane - recoiled convulsively and rebelled spectacularly.

There was a sense, in the Sixties and Seventies, that magic set in the modern day could not only be a possibility: it could also be a source of popular entertainment. The US TV shows I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched touched a nerve nobody even realised was exposed. The idea of modern magic, a magic set in a contemporary setting of washing machines and office work and the daily commute, was born. The idea permeated into the collective psyche, and children grew up in the Sixties imagining that they could work magic themselves.


Then the arrival of LSD showed them how.

Illuminatus! and the Principia Discordia circulated; one fictional, the other unreal. A host of possibilities became possible, as the likes of Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Hunter S Thompson, Ken Kesey and Dr Timothy Leary brought Eastern mysticism to the West, via Japan. A plumber from Plympton, writing as T Lobsang Rampa, gave us an entirely made up view of life in Tibet, and the East was suddenly an exotic place with an untouched mine of mysticism to be dug up. HP Blavatsky's Theosophists reemerged from the shadows, revealing that they'd been right there all along, and that they'd laid claim to the resources of Eastern philosophy first; and the world became infused with Taoism, Buddhism and the "left hand path" philosophy of Tantra.

Considerable changes were afoot. The works of Charles Hoy Fort gained ground with a new generation of readers. A magazine, Fortean Times, began recording modern Fortean phenomena, as other magazines and books emerged describing the weird world we lived in. Leonard Nimoy, fresh from his appearances as Spock, went "In Search Of ..." as Arthur C Clarke gave us his Mysterious World, and his book Profiles of The Future gave the world his Third Law, namely "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."


Children's television shows emerged which touched on the occult in a way that had never been experienced before. Ace of Wands featured a man, Tarot, who was a stage magician and practicing occultist with connections to a "magical underworld" of occult book sellers and artefact vendors, using his occult knowledge to solve crimes and mysteries with a supernatural twist.

The Changes was an apocalyptic tale of a world gone mad, where technology died and society fell apart because Merlin had awakened and cast a spell destroying technology and man's reliance upon it. Catweazle introduced a magician brought up from the twelfth century into the twentieth, faced with such bewildering modern concepts as the telephone ("telling bone") and electricity ("electrickery"); Geoffrey Bayldon would drop in on Jon Pertwee in a later incarnation as The Crow Man in the latter's adaptation of Worzel Gummidge. A decade or so down the line, a similar theme would be explored in the form of Mr Majika, the betufted title role played by Stanley Baxter.

The ultimate expression of the survival of The Old Ways in the modern world came in the Seventies with the movie The Wicker Man, featuring a contemporary mainland police Sergeant, a committed Christian, uncovering the deeply-held occult teachings of the entire community of Summerisle. Across the pond, the slightly more contentious horror story The Secret of Harvest Home more or less trod the same ground, though its message was somewhat more misogynistic in its portrayal of women as being threatening, predatory and domineering over men.

In the midst of all of this, a man called Isaac Bonewits became the first, and as far as is known only, man to obtain a PhD in magic, releasing a book called Real Magic which is still in print to this day. In his book, for a true appreciation of magic one has to drop the limiting idea of "white" magic versus "black" magic - magic can, and does, exist in a variety of colours, each being a different vibration and yielding results in different areas of human expertise, such as gold magic for self-confidence, red magic for action and generation of lust, blue magic for generation of wealth and so on.

This is important. We will come back to this shortly.

Anarchy In The UK

At that time, a new strain of magic was beginning to emerge, born of the efforts of such luminaries as Crowley, Gardner and Austin Osman Spare, yet owing nothing to any of them; a form of sorcery which was to the modern occult scene what Punk was to the music scene of its day.

Led by the likes of Peter J Carroll and Phil Hine, inspired by the Principia Discordia, Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! and the Cult of the SubGenius, the branch of sorcery called Chaos Magic emerged kicking and screaming onto the occult scene, just in time to get caught up with the resurgence of one phenomenon from the early 20th century, and the birth of another.

Tabletop roleplaying games, and H P Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos."

Chaos Magic posits the Discordian concept that the root of all matter and energy, the core of all structure and form, is Chaos; that structure, matter, cause and effect, all stem from a fundamental amorphousness where nothing is true and everything is permitted. Chaos Magic stripped away the trappings of the occult, Eastern and Western, and exposed the inner occult workings of the universe for direct manipulation through sigils and energy raising practices such as vigorous sex magic.

The book Liber Null and Psychonaut ushered in a new kind of magician in the Eighties and Nineties - the hardboiled Psyberpunk, an occult version of Cyberpunk, achieving his goals through style over substance and his ecclectic "git 'ard magic." And this rough, callous breed of magician and sorcery began to appear in modern fiction, running in parallel with the street-level cyberpunk science fiction stories of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Pat Cadigan.

The names of authors such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison began to be spoken of with great reverence, as characters such as Luke Kirby, Tim Hunter in The Books of Magic, and The Sandman appeared in 2000AD and amid DC's comics titles. John Constantine sidled onto the scene as the deeply troubled antihero of Hellblazer; a Texas preacher became the unfortunate bearer of the Word of God in Preacher; and across the great divide, tabletop roleplaying games brought H P Lovecraft's Mythos to life in the game Call of Cthulhu, reviving magic even as the Halliwell sisters began their eight year story in TV's Charmed and even technomages were striding boldly across the screen in the TV science fiction series Babylon 5.

The Eighties also brought in something new - a colour, born of the imagination of Terry Pratchett, Octarine, the "eighth colour of the rainbow," a reflection of Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space and Philip K Dick's VALIS shooting pink lasers at Horselover Fat's head.

1993 brought in a roleplaying game which also gave modern magic in a contemporary setting its voice; Mage: the Ascension, a game where characters could play mages from one of nine Traditions, such as the venerable shamanic Dreamspeakers, the modern technomages known as the Virtual Adepts and the hedonistic Cult of Ecstasy. This setting lasted until 2004, when White Wolf brought this game, along with all the other World of Darkness games, to an end, to be rebooted in new forms further down the road.


Pratchett's Octarine might have been inspired by Bonewits' Real Magic, but the circle would not be complete until Chaos Magic adopted its idea of eight colours of magic, not only bringing Pratchett into the mix but also Bonewits and even Edward DeBono's "six coloured hats" game, into occult teachings. Art holding a mirror up to life holding a mirror up to art.

A New Century

With the new millennium, new problems have arisen. The world has, once again, gone backwards socially. Books are being banned in the United States as a terrifying vision of Margaret Attwood threatens to rise. Music has lost its way; politics has lost its way; wars are being fought just for the sake of it, the original causes of those wars long forgotten and those in charge making entirely too much money from them to ever want those wars to stop.

In fiction, too, the modern world may have lost its way. Books coming out nowadays tend to cater for the YA mindset; dark fantasies of sparkly vampires and wars between bloodsuckers and scruffy werewolves might seem new to the young and gullible, but they have been done before, across the roleplaying table, with White Wolf's games Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse set in a World of Darkness. Nancy A Collins also beat Stephanie Meyer to the punch long, long ago with her story Wild Blood, featuring a young werewolf, and Sunglasses After Dark, introducing Sonja Blue.

The late Nineties gave the world stories such as The Invisibles, which gave Chaos Magic the mainstream platform it needed, and 2000AD has featured stories of occult forces in the modern world since the Seventies - the original Judge Dredd was going to be about a punk occult copper dispensing justice in a hardboiled world of supernatural weirdness, a role which would enthusiastically be taken up in this century in the form of the TV series Supernatural and Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files.

The rebooted World of Darkness revived the character of the modern world practitioner of magic, in the form of the roleplaying game Mage: the Awakening. Now, instead of belonging to Traditions, a mage could pick a Path - enchantment (Acanthus), warlockry (Mastigos), necromancy (Moros), theurgy (Obrimos) or shamanism (Thyrsus).

But the end product was the same - hardboiled mages in trenchcoats, leaning against street corners, reading occult symbolism in a lonely billboard advertisement across the road as the rain sleets down.

Whither Sorcery?

 Sorcery old and new, whether set on the streets of a gritty modern Los Angeles, some quasi-mediaeval Middle Earthlike pastiche or a science fiction setting thousands of years from now and a hundred light years away, looks like it will always have a place in fiction in years to come.

Even if only in the pages of fiction, mankind will practice its sorceries out there amongst the stars, rather than huddled in the ruins.

And as Merlin said, in a TV episode of The Time Tunnel:-

"The Twentieth Century? The very heyday of magic, and you, sir, do not believe?"