A history of magic

[skip.knox]

My world of Altearth has about two thousand years of history. Much of it is Earth history, so I'm already mostly done!

Magic enters, and Altearth diverges from Earth, in the late Roman Empire. Early on I decided that magic would have its own history, its own development. Structurally this is working really well for me. Early practitioners were "naturals" -- people who simply exercised powers without understanding much about how they worked, and with unpredictable results. This allowed quite a large body of lore to grow up around the practice of magic, since it seems mysterious.

Over the centuries, other kinds of magic appeared, including alchemy, astrology, and so on. Altearth's version of the Scientific Revolution is when people began to gain a scientific understanding of how magic worked, and a whole new set of practitioners arose based on their ability to manipulate phlogiston, aether and such. That's what gave birth to the Modern Age.

Has anyone else treated their magic system as something that evolved over time? If there have been published novels that employ this, I should be glad for the reference.

 

[buyjupiter]

Sounds like you've got something that's working well for you!

In my WIP, I have a society of magic practitioners that live alongside nonmagical peoples. There are historical events that I'm interpreting through a magical lens, ie the reason behind Napoleon's failure to invade Russia is because the magic users who control the weather keep it winter for longer than normal. There are other historical events that I've retold through the magic system that I'm using as well.

Off hand the first series I thought of was Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar world. Magic has gradually evolved in Valdemar and when Lackey starts writing the books there are colleges that teach different kinds of magic. She went on to backfill how the magic evolved this way in later trilogies.

The second thing that comes to mind is Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy/Traitor Spy trilogy. It's similar in feel to Lackey, but there's more emphasis on the magical history of Caravan's world.

 

[Queshire]

though I don't plan to use it fr my current project, for an earlier idea I had the original users of magic were an alien-esque First Race. They could use magic as easy as breathing. every move, every thought, every breathe incorporated magic. Humans could not use the same magic as the first race, but by working together the first race could use their magic to create new magic that humans could use called Origin Magic. Each Origin Magic was essentially a single spell that runs on completely different principles from each other and just by itself was equivalent to an modern style of magic. Some examples of Origin Magic would be the World Construction spell, All Destruction spell, and Time Manipulation spell which could freely create worlds, destroy anything, or muck around with time respectfully. The first people who could use magic were the Sorcerer Kings who were specifically altered by the First Race in order to use magic. They could use multiple Origin Magic spells and developed their own individual styles of magic.

Magic in those days was complex and impossible to understand. To compare it to computer programing it would be full of uncommented spaghetti code. It worked, but it was impossible to understand how. The sorcerer kings would be eventually deposed by an Artificial Spirit called Oracle who took the Origin Magic, examined it and developed lesser styles of systematic magic that regular people could use. By arming the people with magic of their own it managed to defeat them.

During Oracle's rule it tried to simplify things by making one standard culture. This extended to magic at the time. Even though their were styles of magic instead just the spells of Origin Magic there were only a few of them and they were standardized. One mage was a lot like any other mage.

After Oracle's eventual defeat there was more opportunity for different, diverse styles of magic. Of particular note were the life magic of the alf and the rune magic of the svalt. More and more magic styles have developed since for pretty much every purpose. Now there's magic for creating buildings, magic for dueling, even magic used for TV and concerts. Most styles of magic tend to retain some combat potential though, as life in that setting isn't exactly safe.

For the moment, I've given up on that setting though.

 

[skip.knox]

@Queshire: I like the idea of decay. In my narrative, it's mainly about development, articulation, and specialization. But I could project forward to a time when the knowledge was lost again and practice of magic was by rote -- rather like those medieval priests who learned the Mass by rote, reciting words they did not understand. Lots of possibilities there.

@Buyjupiter: Thanks for the references. I've not read either series but will put them on my list.

 

[Addison]

My world shows a development or evolution of magic, sure. A greater understanding and harnessing of it. It's actually the main plot, or major sub-plot, of a story I'm working on. I don't think there's any books that employ this aspect. Plenty have chapters about developing magic I know that.

 

[Queshire]

decay? Huh, I haven't really thought of it in those terms. The magic of the first race and the sorcerer kings were stupidly powerful and complex, but they were also stupidly inefficient. Though they can do these incredible magical feats they have no real idea -how- they are doing it. In contrast, modern magic is much more formalized. Anyone can learn it with enough effort.