One of the most interesting role-playing games out there is Mage: The Ascension. This is part of the World of Darkness, a shared world that dates back to the peak-Trent Reznor years of the 90s. The game centers on magical warfare between different camps of wizards, so obviously it's in the fantasy zone. But what's most interesting about it are the ways it's grounded in reality.
To begin with, there's the actual practice of magic in the game. You can't actually, for example, just point at someone and make them disappear to Elsewhere. People who have been doing magic for a very long time might be able to do something like that, but player characters start out as newbies, so it's out of their league. Besides which, big shows of force are called "vulgar" and the universe tends to punish them. So what the player's character actually does is a variety of small rites and procedures that may influence things in a supernatural way, but not so's anyone would notice.
Morality is relative, but the mages most aligned with "good" values of freedom and equality are in the Council of Nine Traditions. The Nine Traditions are aligned but varied. There's a shaman tradition, a witch tradition, a tradition that draws on the beliefs of Western religions, and a couple of "magic from science" traditions, for example.
The players on the other side(s) provide the second dose of realism. While the Nephandi are the most evil and the Marauders are probably the most dangerous, the most persistent opponents are the Technocracy. Descended from the groups who first invented money and agriculture, among other things, they've made their form of magic so commonly accepted that it just gets called "science" and "technology." The technocracy can be represented by telecoms who've vanished phone booths so that their mobile phones will have a place in every pocket, and pharmaceutical companies who can "treat" any idiosyncratic belief with SSRIs.
Are corporate America and the tech world literally run by sinister warlocks with a tight grip on arcane powers. No, I don't believe this. Again, not literally. But on another level, maybe? The COVID panic felt like something akin to the Technocracy flexing its muscles.
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I read your link to the tv tropes page before reading the rest of your blog post. The first thing I saw was just how close the plot is to today's reality despite the game itself being a fantasy.
The next thing that occurred to me is best answered by the only Mage I'm familiar with - John Michael Greer, the former archdruid who described how he got involved in magic back in the 70s. It's quite impressive.
From my first tentative dabblings in magic in the mid-1970s until 1994, when I was initiated into the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), I worked pretty much exclusively with the Golden Dawn tradition of practical occultism, as interpreted by Israel Regardie on the one hand, and Dion Fortune and her students W.E. Butler, William Gray, and Gareth Knight on the other. That was partly a choice of necessity, since the Golden Dawn system was very nearly the only thoroughly developed curriculum of occult study and practice you could get in those days—if, that is, you happened to be a geeky young man with very little money, no connections in the occult scene, and no access to occult literature except via a few not very impressive bookstores.
Even after I found my spiritual home in Druidry, I continued my Golden Dawn studies and practices. My completion of the OBOD study course in 2001, though, marked a turning point. By that time it was a good deal easier to get access to a wide range of magical instruction, and I’d also picked up a reading knowledge of Latin and French, which opened doors to a range of traditions most people in the American occult scene have still never heard of. By that time, too, I’d worked my way through the Golden Dawn system in its entirety, and while there was still plenty of work there for me to do—you can easily spend an entire lifetime working through the possibilities of any reasonably complex system of magic, and never run out of things to do—I was ready to explore something else for a while.
I probably posted a bit too much of his magical studies history but just to show there's no pointing of the wizard's finger to make anyone disappear or make any major changes in the material world. There are, however, magic circles and arcane incantations that can make certain metaphysical changes:
Novice mages don’t operate on the plane of the Absolute. They operate on the planes of form, and if you invoke the Sun on the planes of form, you won’t get the Absolute; you’ll get the kind of solar influence that astrologers, for example, know well; and if you invoke the Sun only, without equilibrating it with the other planetary forces, you can pretty much count on pushing your personality in the direction of too much solar influence, which will make you behave like an arrogant blowhard—the astrologically literate may imagine a really out-of-control Leo here. If your personality already tends toward arrogance and self-glorifying egocentricity, furthermore, this fate is going to be all but impossible to avoid, because the energies of the ritual and the dysfunctions of the self form a feedback loop that drowns out the signals that something’s gone wrong.
The above harkens back to what you described in your closing paragraph;
"Are corporate America and the tech world literally run by sinister warlocks with a tight grip on arcane powers. No, I don't believe this. Again, not literally. But on another level, maybe? The COVID panic felt like something akin to the Technocracy flexing its muscles."
You could well be right, not warlocks in any sense but their self-importance. Spiritually, these are dangerous waters for those without humility.
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