Marketing’s magic

Eh…and before you go on reading this, let’s make it clear I won’t talk inspiring selling know hows. I won’t either tell you the secret on how to sell your book to any publishers¹.

MAGIC AND DEMOCRACY

Whilst democracy is what we call our way to make everybody the same, we still believe in magic. Or, at least, spend a very joyous escape pretending magic does exist…

And magical is a category in which not everybody belongs. Who is able to manipulate the elements (proved non existent and I mean water, fire, air and earth not the 100 ~ in the periodic table and of which water is just a combination of oxygen and hydrogen) and who is able to foretell the future? Only those who are special. The worthy, the evil or the different. Not just anyone.

MAGIC IS A BEHAVIOUR

Who hasn’t tinkered with a pendulum, the Tarot, i-ching, the pair of pencils against each other? Who hasn’t worn a lucky T in worrisome situations? Even if your lucky T is an AC/DC T or your lucky knits are polka dotted, and you secretly use them since you have already ridiculed publicly those who do; magic is something we try doing in secret.

Magic is not a religion. Despite what we have been made to believe, it was just recently introduced as one², in spite of being a behaviour.

A behaviour that’s become popular in most narratives; such as in: Macbeth, Faust, LOTR, Harry Potter, Charmed, Bewitched, Zelda, Dungeons and dragons, Final fantasy, A song of ice and fire… The idea of magic being an exchange.

To perform magic you need to exchange blood, life or words to get an unknown but powerful energy in return. This energy being limited by serious restrictions.

It is still the same from Sumer times. It requires summoning, spelling, demons, potions and accessories ( wands or staffs). Even those modern adaptations like in The fever king by Victoria Lee³, the magic systems depict a certain exchange of energy. Tough this one, is introducing magic to science the same way Underworld changed vampirism from divine curse to viral infection.

In the original entry I exposed the theory, magic as an exchange of mysterious interactions between energy and matter and the restrictions on it; was slowly disappearing. After reading the series of The black witch, Crystal throne (I’m stuck in the last book) and The all souls trilogy ( reading the last quarter of the second book); I reluctantly admit magic is still here. It has us reading about the unproven properties of plants Why are we still depicting plants as powerful medicines when very few plants have effective medicinal properties? and divination using tea leaves or the sixth sense, third eye… chords. Which means we are not as sensible and rational as I thought we were becoming. I mean, we might not want to pay for our fortunes to be told but we still associate magic to good luck.

Therefore…

Thanks for reading, subscribing or whatever it is you do with this blog’s entries. Pasto kalo.

1. If I haven’t done so… What kind of advice would I give you? It would be a dishonest one. ↩︎
2. Gerald Garner introduced Wicca as a religion in 1954; being the overkillz wicca is the masculine version of the witch noun in the Anglo-Saxon language ( says Wikipedia). ↩︎
3. According to me, I read the webtoon promotional version and translated some «5 things I learnt writing X» entry in Terrible minds ↩︎