"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
The above quote is the third and last of Clarke's Laws of Prediction, and as sure as you are reading this page you've read it somewhere before. Clarke was a science fiction author, and therefore used this law primarily for things that could speculatively happen in the future. But I'm a fantasy writer whose fascinated with ancient history, especially prehistory and alternative history, and I'm also insatiably fascinated by religion and myth, including hypnotism, NLP, Huna, Yoga,Tai Chi, Qui-Gung, Ayur Veda, as well as many other ancient disciplines and beliefs. Therefore ever since I've known of "Law Number 3," I associated it with the far distant past.
In fact I don't know too much about how Clarke used the "Law," because I haven't read him. His work makes great movies, but it takes me a long time to get around to the science fiction I have on my list. Somehow I just just feel cozier and more literary with a book that feels as though it took place in the past, and is now being told of. The neurosis doesn't extend only to science fiction: a book set in modern times has to be downright extraordinary if I'm going to like it much, and most of the time I don't even care for fantasy wherein a modern person goes through a worm-hole to an ancient type of world. On the flip side, I can't get enough of the science fiction movies that are adequately well made, my favorite TV show is set in modern times, and Narnia, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Harry Potter, and the Faerie Wars are examples of exceptions in my tastes to the "don't go through any wormholes" rule.
But to get back on track here, I have already theorized in other posts how the modern names for ancient monsters like dragons and giants and goblins have somehow demystified those beasts and hominids, and I think the same can be said for magic.
Most of what I know of what I will call magic in my prehistoric fiction stories comes from my study of NLP as a journalist. NLP, or neuro Linguistic Programming, is an offshoot of hypnosis that was discovered, rather than invented, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. It can be used as a self improvement tool or healing tool, as well as a form of therapy, a form of marketing, or a form of persuasion. But as NLP has grown, its top teachers have branched out into other forms of what one might call self-empowerment through a common practice of modelling. Modelling emulates beliefs, rituals, and techniques, whether conscious or subconscious, that work for sucessful people who may or may not know anything about The Law of Attraction, NLP, or any kind of spirituality.
My mother studied Ayur Veda under Deepak Chopra and I was able to get free tickets to several seminars by Chopra and colleagues and also learned some interest facts about Ayur Veda, the national health system of India. What is so surprising to me that these ancient techniques work better than modern science, in many cases, and that only 20 years ago the same types of powerful visualizations and meditations were scoffed at as superstition and hocus pocus. Now they are being used in the most advanced hospitals in our country, and science is proving over and over again that the techniques work. There is such thing as mana, or chi, or ki, and it can even been photographed using Kirlian technology. There is definite proof that faith and mindfulness can overcome material boundaries. There are NLP trainers among us who can use "Jedi Mind Tricks" and convince people to allow them amazing control and leeway. There are gurus who can hold their body parts in fire for a time without being burned or experiencing pain. There are lava walkers and indian yogis who can do seemingly impossible things through no "David Copperfield" tricks whatsoever.
Thse disciplines and techniques I speak of can be considered technology or magic, depending on your perspective, or, in the case of a book, depending on how the author describes them to you.
In addition to technological magic, which is what I would call the practices I have so far mentioned, there is also magic that is probably closer to what Clarke meant when he made up the "Law."
We still don't know how they built those pyramids and megalithic structures. We still don't know how they quaried them, and every year we find things associated with them that boggle the mind even more. We still don't know how ancient man got his uncanny knowledge about certain things in our world.
In these speculative stories I'm writing at the moment, there will be no impossible or unexplainable magic. Everything spell that a magic wielder uses will have it's counterpart in real tangible practices from around the world, from many different disciplines and religions. What's more, the way I present them will be an educated guess at what was available to mankind before 10,000 BC. The primary magic system I plan to use will be something like what might have spawned Yoga, Huna, the Kabbalah, and Martial Arts, as well as other more occult practices. I will also use technology that man MUST have had during the given time period, based on archeological evidence. And I will also allude to another form of "magic" which I believe exists, and for which there's alot of proof, but which also is a topic of hot debate. In the case of this third type of magic, it will be left entirely up to the reader whether this type of magic is truely at play, or whether it is just the imaginations of various superstitious characters through which the story is told. But more on that type of magic later; it's gonna take a whole post.
-J.L.L.
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