The Second Element: Mechanistic Metaphysic The materialist understanding of the universe is the most familiar iteration of this mindset to us moderns. We live in a culture which, at least pro forma, asserts that all reality is matter-in-motion, with each
The tradition of folk-magic, of ‘superstition,’ and of magic in general is old and endemic to humanity. Its philosophical bones appear in modernity, in the medieval era, and in ancient times, in materialism, in mysticism, in simple superstition. To make
You can find Part One of this article, and a lot of necessary context here. Another example (of magic that isn’t Biblically condemned) is magic which is not innate but which does not originate from an exterior supernatural creature. In
Part One Fantasy, some have said, is the gateway to devil worship, sorcery, and the occult. The assertion is not entirely unreasonable: the Bible does condemn sorcery, and fantasy literature does contain an awful lot of (positively portrayed) sorcery. The
Good stories do not use miracles to solve problems, the lore says, and they do not use miracles to solve problems because miracles, according to common wisdom, destroy a story’s stakes, rendering great thrillers into dramatic yawn-factories. Yet the great