Katharine Kerr's Blog

https://www.facebook.com/Kathryn-Flic...

Here's a link to the page. I've put up a couple of posts about the book. Eventually there will be more. The period, 1913-1919, is the time in California where the new film industry was still spread up and down the coast, not concentrated in one spot.

Flickers

Here's the cover! Er, well, if you click on the link above you'll see the cover. Better yet, you'll see the giveaway!

In case anyone is confused, FLICKERS is the only book I have written as Kathryn Jordan. There appear to be other KJs who have written books. More power to them, but I am not them. :-)

Don't forget the giveaway! Closer to the release time I'll post an excerpt here.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

I am Kathryn Jordan! And I wrote FLICKERS which will be published by Kensington Books in March, 2016. And there's a giveaway in progress!

Why did I use a pseudonym? FLICKERS is a historical novel, set in California during the early years of the 20th century. It's therefore vastly different from the Deverry or Nola O'Grady novels. I quite simply didn't want to confuse any readers who might pick up a book of mine for the first time.

The good news: I have a new website at www.deverry.com . Despite the name, it also covers all my other books as well as the Deverry series.

The bad news: my husband's Alzheimer's is much much worse. My time has become pretty limited. Things are a little better now because we have a full-time caregiver. I hope to be posting blogs and more reviews soon.

http://aberwyn.livejournal.com/417528...

I am having trouble with Goodreads' formatting, so I've posted this Nola O'Grady short story at the above address.

Happy holidays to my readers!

This year, 2014, I'll be posting a free read short story, not very long, from the Nola O'Grady world as a holiday present to my readers. I have to polish it a bit more first.

Before we go any farther in our discussion of using Western magic in fantasy writing, we need to consider an important question: what is the difference between magic and religion? For that matter, is there any difference? The devoutly religious will insist that there is. Traditionally among monotheists such as Jews, Christians, and Muslims, religion is considered to be “good” and magic, “bad.” Religion, believers will tell you, is a matter of worshipping the Divine and submitting one’s will to that of God, while magic is a matter of exalting one’s will and making pacts with evil powers.

Yet outside of the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic context, it ain’t necessarily so. It wasn’t even necessarily so during various periods in the histories of Judaism and its two derivative faiths. The doctrine of the evils of magic evolved slowly over many centuries. At the beginning, the “old ways” of the polytheistic religions still held power within the region we considered “The West”, which really should include the north African Mediterranean shore and the “Middle East” as well as Europe. As priests and mullahs gained in importance, they defined their turf more and more narrowly and did their best to exclude others from holding spiritual power.

Ultimately, in the Nineteenth Century, the most rigid separation of magic and religion arose from colonial imperialism. “Natives” in “barbaric” places like sub-Sahara Africa practiced “savage rites” and were “slaves to superstition”. Enlightened peoples, mostly white males by some strange coincidence, “worshipped” a “higher” god and or practised a “healthy, sane” skeptism. I’m not making the terms in quotes up. They were a common parlance in the writings of the time, particularly of course in missionary writings.

The more modern way of looking at the difference between religion and magic is a matter of recognizing a shifting boundary between the two. Basically, who is a wizard and who, a priest, depends on the culture doing the defining. Both cultural expressions of the human mind have much in common.

Let’s look at some of these shared principles.
1. Intelligent but invisible beings other than humans exist in the universe. Whether you call them “gods” or “spirits” is pretty much a matter of cultural choice.
2. These beings are organized in a hierarchy of power. Gods, angels, elementals, efreets, demons, daimones, sprites, imps -- there are a lot of names, but they tend to arrange themselves with gods at the top, angels just below, humans in the middle, and other spirits at the bottom.
3. These beings are also labeled good, neutral, and bad in various ways, depending again on culture. “Good” beings tend to be the ones who help humans, while the “bad” harm them. The “neutral” spirits don’t give a hoot one way or the other.
4. All of these beings are approachable by humans IF the human knows the right way to do so. These ways range from exalted prayer and martyrdom to down and dirty spells, depending on the power of the being in question. Even normally indifferent spirits can be bribed or coerced into co-operating with the priest or wizard.
5. Turn-about’s fair play. If humans want things from the other beings in the chain of existence, those beings often want things from humans, whether it’s the focused attention of worship and prayer or blood sacrifice and sex.
6. If the beings don’t get what they want, they can become quite nasty. Gods can condemn you to hell, efreets can burn you to a crisp, spirits can give you a bad case of boils, demons can eat your soul. The results of pissing them off are all a matter of degree.

7. Thus, messing with magic and religion is dangerous. Even a single, all-powerful god, the kind described as “loving” by its worshippers, demands obedience to an often-irrational code. These gods require sacrifices of and set tests for their devotees and threaten grotesque punishments for those who fail them. Angels tend to despise humans, especially the way they smell. There’s a persistent tradition in both Judaism and its Christian off-shoot that the angels tried to argue God out of creating humans in the first place. The lesser spirits are all “tricksy”, to use a good old word.

Now that we’ve seen the similarities, let’s look for a difference. One that’s often cited comes down to a difference of approach. The traditional formulation: If you want something from a god, you worship the god and then beg for what you want. If you want something from a spirit, you impress or dominate the spirit and then demand what you want.

This distinction, however, doesn’t always hold true. Both gods and spirits can be bargained with to the mutual benefit of both. The core of many ancient polytheistic religions was the principle of do ut des, I give that you may give. The worshipper offers incense smoke, burnt meat, poems, and other things that the gods desire, and in return the god grants the worshipper’s request

Lower spirits as well will grant favors in return for payment. Lesser spirits like fresh blood, for instance, and can be offered slaughtered animals in return for help. It’s possible to treat certain kinds of spirit, particularly the elemental spirits, with respect and receive their help in return. Yet there’s no doubt that domination and blunt spiritual force have always been an integral part of Western magic as well.

Here are a few sourcebooks for those who’d like to read more about ancient religion and magic in the classical world. These books are collections of ancient writings in translation with editorial comments.
THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES, edited by Marvin W. Meyer
MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND GHOSTS IN THE GREEK AND ROMAN WORLDS, edited by Daniel Ogden
CURSE TABLETS AND BINDING SPELLS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD, ed. John Gager
ANCIENT CHRISTIAN MAGIC, edited by Meyer and Smith
THE GREEK MAGICAL PAPYRI IN TRANSLATION, v. 2, “the Texts”, edited by Hans Dieter Betz. This particular book may be hard to find if you don’t have access to a university library.

There are lots of studies of ancient magical systems as well, but the above should give a writer a good grounding in what actual spells really looked like. Writers who want to incorporate “real” magic into their fiction need to know.

The various systems of Western magic fall into two rough categories, folk magic on the one hand and on the other, natural philosophy, the attempt on the part of European intellectuals of the Renaissance and Reformation eras to develop a unified view of the universe from a magical/mystical point of view. The two categories have certain ways of thinking in common while differing wildly in others.

The roots of both, however, go back to very ancient times. Folk charms and spells have probably been part of the human way of thinking from the Paleolithic era at least. Cave paintings such as those at Lascaux show some attempt to control at least a part of the environment by symbolic acts, the drawing and then “killing” of various prey animals. The walls also display hand prints, perhaps of the artists, perhaps of the hunters. In some cases the fingers of these hands have been folded under (not cut off -- let’s be practical here) in various ways that might be symbolic. Perhaps they were meant to ward off evil, perhaps to signal other hunters in the party. We’ll never know.

In among the beautifully realistic pictures of prey, we can find the occasional odd human figure, such as a man wearing a bird mask. He lies on his back, apparently dead, with a staff lying beside him. An early wizard? A spirit? Again, we can’t say for sure, but we can be certain that he’s not one of the ordinary hunters portrayed as stick figures here and there throughout the painting. In some the cave paintings geometric figures appear: patterns of lines, the outline of squares, and occasionally a square or circle divided into quarters. We have no idea what they meant to the people who made them, but I bet they had meaning. Scratching lines into rock is not the easiest thing to do by the smoky light of tallow lamps. You don’t do it to doodle.

Certain figures appear in various early rock carvings overground in Europe and North Africa, the quartered circle, crosses, shapes like an eye, circles with radiating lines around them, the much-maligned swastika, as well as rough human-ish shapes now and then. Some of these carvings date back to the Mesolithic, when the ice sheets were melting. The same symbols appear all throughout human history in the West, (and for all I know, in Africa and the East, as well. Again, I apologize for my ignorance.) Generally they have been regarded as magical by the people who still make them. I think we’re on safe ground in assuming they had some kind of non-ordinary meaning in earliest times as well.

Some of them, particularly the quartered circle, appear in the most elevated of magical systems as well as in the charms of ordinary people. And of course, folding or extending various fingers of an upraised hand still carries meaning today, whether the person doing the folding means an obscene insult or a prophylactic gesture. Prophylactic charms and gestures, that is, things meant to “ward off” various evils, are an important and ancient part of folk magic. Besides various hand gestures, charms against the evil eye have been popular down through the ages, particularly in the Mediterranean world.

Anyone writing a fantasy book set in a non-technological culture, or even for that matter in a more developed world, can use various symbols and gestures as part of the common magic for more than peasants. Plenty of highly educated people in various civilizations believed or half-believed in them, too. Perhaps, like some of the Roman writers who’ve come down to us, they were rather embarrassed by their belief, but they would never have deprived their son of his bulla nor failed to make a sign of warding if a reputed witch passed them in the street.

If you’re building a magic system for a novel or a game, remember to do it from the ground up, in others. Various kinds of beliefs at various levels of complexity will exist at the same time in a culture. If the culture fears magic at the top, those at the bottom will probably practice it in secret. If elaborate intellectually-based systems of magic exist openly at the ruling levels of a society, there will most likely be country witches and warlocks as well, some of whom will have real power.

And don’t forget the universal human urge to get something for nothing. Con men, fake prophets, “witches” who deal in curses, fortune tellers rattling off predictions out of a book -- false magicians of various sorts might well exist in your fictional world. The one genuine thing they’ll provide are plot complications.

(This was originally posted over at bookviewcafe.com)

One of the things that makes a fantasy story fantasy is the presence of magic. I’m often asked how I “created” the magical system in the Deverry books. At times writers just turning to fantasy have asked me how to go about this arcane process. The truth: I didn’t create anything. I adapted one of the many systems of “real” magic, that is, the beliefs that real people have held about magic in various cultures and in various historical periods, including our own. Unfortunately, I’ve only studied Western types of magic, and so this blog and others in the sequence will have to use those as examples. I apologize for my ignorance of Asian and Native American magical practices.

I personally am of the opinion that fantasy magic systems are stronger and more emotionally moving when they have one foot in reality, as it were. Historical magics, whether the disconnected spells and charms of folk magic or the elaborate systems of the elite, address deep human longings and concerns. Wanting to have someone love you, the fear of being harmed, the desire for revenge on an enemy, fear of what the future might bring, desire for riches, and above all, the fear of death -- most folk magic revolves around emotions like these. The elaborate systems of Natural Philosophy, the late medieval/early Renaissance magic of the learned, center around the desire to understand the entire universe, to converse with beings other than ourselves, and to use this knowledge for . . . drum roll . . . most of the same reasons as ordinary folk had. Well, the natural philosophers did worry less about love charms.

What magic has never really been in the West, and I suspect in the East as well, is a substitute for technology, especially not military tech. The big boom in fantasy writing back in the 1980s developed out of two things, Tolkien’s works and fantasy role-playing gaming. Tolkien deliberately left the magic in his works unsystematized -- he stated in print that he thought magic should be mysterious and rare in fiction -- but the games were of course something else again.

Since the early paper and pencil games like Dungeons and Dragons™ centered around looting and combat, their systems of spells did the same. Magic existed to attack enemies, defend against them, and heal the inevitable results of hard fighting. Game-style magic doesn’t translate well to fiction. It’s sterile, limited, and pushes most of the human concerns that motivate real magic to one side. I’m sure that exceptions exist -- I’m giving you my personal opinion only.
Though it’s undoubtedly deeply moving when properly done, Tolkien’s style of magic presents other problems for the fantasy writer. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series would be another example of this way of incorporating magic into a fantasy series. At root, their magic is supernatural in the root meaning of that word. Its power lies beyond the natural world in the realm of the gods and God -- divine immortals who grant a few humans powers as gifts, not accomplishments. Both writers and their characters are deeply suspicious, in fact, of any magic that doesn’t have the divine Seal of Approval stamped upon it. Some would say they’ve been blinded by their religion, whose priests and preachers have always disliked competition. Be that as it may, magicians in this sort of world will always be few and far between. They tend, like Gandalf and Galadriel, to be of another order of being than human, static personalities, fully formed, capable of temptations and fears, but incapable of the dramatic growth and conflicts that sustain a novel.

The other problem such magic presents to the writer is its capriciousness. Without some sort of system, the reader has no idea what the magicians may do or, more to the point, what they may not do. It’s too easy to have such a character pull just the right spell out of the air to solve a problem, save the hero, or change the course of a plot. It’s hard to build suspense when the reader’s waiting for someone powerful to just set everything right. Thus any magical system that’s useful to the writer needs limits.