Man, Myth and Machines: An Exploration of the Fusion of Magic and Science in Fiction
When Arthur C. Clarke established what would become his foundational rules for world building advanced civilizations he penned what would become perhaps his most influential quote, “any sufficient advancement in technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Clarke’s writing on the interactions and reactions of vastly adept species capable of traversing vast distances and manipulating the physical universe to their will was an insight into the newly explosive role of applied science in his era, and one that would prove to be prophetic as the tech boom brought forth ever more revelations and inventions that, even a few decades ago, would seem impossible. The indistinguishable nature of scientific advancement from magical artifice becomes evident as we view either aspect through the lens of an uninitiated observer, that is to say a peasant in 13th century Florence would view something as simple as a gas stove and its ability to conjure forth fire as incomprehensible as a modern physicist, tied to the strictures and framework of mathematics, would view an alchemist transmuting base metal into gold. But the lack of distinction is one that ultimately transcends perception, and instead relies on the closely paralleled definitions of the occult and the technological, and it’s civilizations that have come to embody this realization that have flourished and expanded.
To illustrate this we can begin by examining the motivations civilizations utilize in both their academic and arcane pursuits. That is to say, what causes individuals and groups of people to seek out advancements in both magic and science. The motivations are twofold, the first being, as an extension of life’s innate curiosity, an ability to understand that which is not understood or to perceive that which is unseen. The scryer lit by firelight, closing a drawn circle on a dirt floor with an oak wand is indistinct in motivation from the particle physicist aligning a beam of protons against one another through a hundred thousand miles of metallic circuits. Both individuals seek to peer into the unseen and to elucidate on what they find there, to move beyond the observable, physical universe and discover truth in what lies beyond. The desire to comprehend and harness the knowledge of what moves in definition from arcane to mundane is the first pillar of great techno-magical civilizations, the expansion of innate curiosity into using physical and mental action, through ritual or experimentation, to expand perception and increase knowledge.
The second pillar of unification behind magic and technology is observed in a natural extension of the first. Once knowledge and understanding are obtained, the ultimate goal of their use becomes the effecting of change from the mental to the physical universe, or the transmutation of thought into the governance of reality. Magic and science again converge in purpose as the practitioner utilizes newfound understanding to begin the process of altering the world around them. The natural philosopher takes the unseen world as one that is no more indefinite than the physical, and in doing so uses their knowledge of its governing laws to manipulate its influence into reality. Likewise the scientist beholds and documents the interactions of the unobservable, documenting their interactions and their principles and using this understanding to effect changes in the invisible world that become immediately observable. In the understanding of the motivations behind the practitioning of science and magic, we come to understand that seemingly different approaches are unified in purpose, and that this unification, once understood, allows techno-magical societies to emerge from the dark ages of both superstition and raw empiricism where they can flourish.
Take for instance the following: physicist James Maxwell proposed a thought experiment in which there exists a bottle divided in half, and in the wall dividing the bottle are hundreds of thousands of doors so small that only single particles can pass through at once. Maxwell proposed that if each door were to be opened and closed in succession by a minute demon so as to allow only the fastest moving particles through, that eventually half of the bottle would heat up to boiling in a lossless system. A demon driven engine that circumvents the inhibitions of thermodynamics would be an invaluable asset to any emerging civilization, and the elimination of energy requirements through pollutant rich fuels or manpower through the implementation of a demonic system would remove the industrial inhibitions that slow the progress of tech heavy civilizations. The goals are the same, to create the abundance of energy needed to drive everything from steam mills to interstellar engines, and through combining the knowledge of particle physics with that of the summoning and direction of minor spirits it becomes possible to envision it.
The influence of this fusion becomes evident too as we examine it from a cultural standpoint. Take, for instance, the struggle for the recreation of intelligence that drives civilizations to pursue the avenues of magic and science as they tinker with what defines their consciousnesses. The desire to create in the image of one’s own species is innate and seemingly universal, and from the production of effigies to the synthesis of artificial intelligence we see the same drive, and in molding the two the ultimate answer to the pursuit is realized. Summoning a spirit into a homunculus baked from clay and cattle blood is an act far less divided in motivation from endowing a machine built of silicon and tungsten with intelligence. The desire to create a reflection of self is there, both in the occult and in the technological, and emerging from the desire to see one’s mental universe emerge into reality. Which is to say nothing of the potential for the overlap of the occult and the high tech in the field of intelligence research. As societies begin to recognize their own intelligence as organized systems of energy between billions of interacting neurons, they begin to reflect a deeply held notion of magical practitioners regarding the definition of self. In thinking of intelligences as distinct patterns of energy specifically channeled along certain routes, we can see a magical circle inscribed with runes to direct the flow of an extra cosmic entity (be it an angel, demon, or what have you), into containment it’s not hard to see parallels in synthetic simulations of neural nets. At their own most base levels, both concepts rely on the channeling of energy into specific pathways to produce simulacra of existing minds, and in mirroring each other the potential for the fusion of the two becomes obvious. A civilization finding shortcuts in the occult to force the ghost into the machine would follow the natural route of extrapolation in a setting where the two concepts were seen as unified. Shunting demonic energy down pentagrams carefully laid out with halogen lasers into strings of tungsten and germanium arranged along leylines to pull an intelligence into a mechanical receptacle, be it a faustian supercomputer at the heart of an interstellar vessel or a servitor android inhabited by the ghost of a long lost relative, is certainly an attractive alternative to plinking away at simulating the billions of neurons that make biological life tick in a way that can be recognized as an intelligence of its own. The field of electro-demonics certainly has a nice ring to it, and in rediscovering the summoned familiars of past centuries sufficiently advanced civilizations could side step the arduous mechanical and software based problems in the creation of artificial intelligence, prompting the use of summoning based technologies throughout their lives and infrastructure as they followed the technological progression of becoming cheaper and more easily produced over time.
In closing, charting the progression of advanced species and advanced civilizations comes to the logical unification of their combined knowledge. Impossible, magical feats of science are the children of minds that accept the arcane and the mundane as being two sides of the same coin, the universe in which the observer exists. Arcane tech emerges in industrially new and in more advanced civilization through the reconciliation of two seemingly distinct worldviews to allow the seemingly impossible to become reality, because significant advances in technology aren’t indistinguishable from magic. They /are/ magic.
