[caption id="attachment_438" align="alignleft" width="300"] c. Tom Brown[/caption]

If you try and write for Hollywood, you’ll find some interesting issues come up around magic. I had a brief flirtation with this about three years ago. You see, there are rules. Magic has to make sense, and the mechanics of it must be conveyed to the audience. As a writer you are encouraged to lay bare where it comes from, how it works, what the limits are. We are to understand the magic.

What you get, by doing that, is ‘magic’ as some kind of pseudo-science. You get stage magicians tricks that work. We all know Harry Potter does it by waving the wand and saying the right words. We know the ‘magical powers’ of the X-men stem from genetic mutation. Bitten by a radioactive witch, perhaps. Learned from an ancient book. Tidied up into neatly labelled little boxes where it can be safely ignored.

There is no room, in the explained magic of pyrotechnics, for any sense of wonder. ‘Numinous’ is not something that anyone in the mainstream film industry gets excited about. That magic might be unexpected, uncontrolled, hard to explain and emotionally affecting just doesn’t enter the picture.

As a Pagan, I find this bloody frustrating. My understanding of magic is not akin to the dice throwing of a Dungeons and Dragons game. I’m more interested in awe, in subtlety and the magic of transformation than in sudden big bangs. I don’t actually want to be able to set fire to things with the power of my mind.

Out there in the mainstream, magic is either part of the unreality of fantasy, or it’s the magical realism permitted in certain kinds of Literature – and I fear that its place in the book shelves comes down to white westerners being more willing to accept the exotic otherness of beliefs from other cultures, more than anything else.

Of course we can’t have real, experienced, felt, subtle magic in any kind of real-world setting. It can only be there if it works for the special effects department, so long as you’ve got a really good explanation and put all the toys away when you’re done. To be honest, I would rather we stayed away from stories of magic than kept on defaulting to this bland, tamed, house trained version.

But given a choice, I’d like more real magic. More shivers of inspiration. More gasp inducing moments of beauty and surprise. I’d like good stories with magic I can recognise in there, and magic I can’t. There are people out there doing it, and not explaining the mechanics.

Then when we’ve got some real magic back in the mix, perhaps the collective cultural soul won’t look so wan and threadbare.

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