Many are exposed to magic at a young age. Each with their own definition and experience, children see magic in a card trick or the way a rainbow appears when it rains. Adults see magic in the families they’ve created and the comfort of a quiet home. Now lets look at some different types of magic.
Egil
Egils saga has the clearest forms of magic out of the Sagas we have read so far. There is the curse that Egil places on the land, causing the lands to be unrestful until they have driven out King Eriki and Queen Gunnhild. The curse on the farmers daughter, causing her to fall ill rather than in love.
Genie from Aladdin
In Aladdin, we see very different magic from Egils. Genie is capable of making anything happen. With a simple snap of his fingers Queen Gunnhild could have removed Egil from her sight. Genie is well known for his comedic quips and his three wish limit.
Madoka Magica
Madoka Magica is an anime based on the idea of Magical girls. Magical girls are females that acquire magical abilities, usually from an outside source or an amulet. Madoka Magica is well known for its cute characters and psychological plot. The young girls give themselves (i.e. their souls) to a small Pokemon like creature that can grant them any wish as long as they work for him. The outcome, however, is less than magical. The characters are brutally eaten, ripped apart, tortured and then they get to relive the entire experience. If their lucky they might even get to live long enough for their powers to consume them and become the things they hunt.
Hocus Pocus
The kids movie Hocus Pocus is about three children and a cat that use to be a young man. These kids are being chased by three witches that want their spell book back. If they succeed they will kill all the children in the village and create a potion out of their souls to help keep them young and alive.
Sacrifice vs ingredient
Now that we’ve looked at different examples of magic, lets look at the ingredients.
- For Egil’s curses theres whalebones, drops of blood and, the occasional horse head.
- Genie needs no ingredients.
- Madoka Magica needs the souls of young girls and their desires.
- Hocus Pocus needs young children, weird ingredients like eye of newt, and magical chanting.
Now lets look at sacrifice. Most of these require some sort of sacrifice.
- Genie sacrificed his time and freedom to be an all powerful genie, though some may say he didn’t do it by choice.
- Egil sacrificed his blood, a horse, and technically a whale.
- Madoka Magica sacrificed their freedom and souls, unwittingly because they didn’t actually know the consequences of their wishes.
- Hocus Pocus planned to sacrificed animals and young children for their goals of living forever.
Each “ingredient” leads to the sacrifice of something vital, except Egil. Egils magical sacrifice’s have no real consequence outside of a hurt hand and some wasted time. Does this mean that magic has changed and evolved over time, or are we missing crucial pieces to the spells? If not, then why was magic so much easier to perform? Was it the spell itself or the connection people had to magic that allowed the old spells to be simplistic?
If we look at each thing given as simply an ingredient for a spell, does that distance us emotionally from the truth? I would now like to look at one more example of this. From the anime Fullmetal Alchemist.
Now while Alchemy is not normally thought of as magic, this show gives it a sort of magical quality. Edward Elric is a young man that is trying desperately to find a philosopher stone to help him return his brother back into a human form. Edward has gained special abilities after he tried to bring his mother back to life and lost his arm and leg to “god.” We will be looking at two examples of ingredient vs sacrifice in this show. The first is the philosopher stone and its actual ingredient make up, along with Edward and Alphonse (Edwards younger brother) own sacrifice for their mother. We will then look at Nina Tucker and her status as an ingredient for her fathers chimera experiments.
A philosopher stone (as defined in the series) is a small, blood red stone that has unlimited power. It can use alchemy to change anything from one state to another without the need for equivalent exchange, which is the guiding rule for alchemy in the show. The brothers, Edward and Alphonse, are searching for this stone to hopefully regain their bodies, which they lost trying to bring their mother back from the dead. Alphonse lost his entire body while Edward only lost a leg. Edward then gave his arm to bring his brothers soul back and trap it in a suit of armor. We later find out that a philosopher stone is created out of hundreds, if not thousands, of souls.
Later in the series the boys go to study under a scientist thats trying to create talking chimera. A chimera is a creature made from alchemy out of two or more creatures. The doctor had seemingly successfully transformed one chimera before it starved itself to death. As the brothers and the audience falls in love with little Nina tucker and her dog, we are thrown into a horrifying plot line where little Nina and her dog are mixed together to be come the chimera her crazy father was trying to create to keep his license. In the end they are both killed.
Looking at the process to create the philosophers stone, the chimera and the resurrection of a human being, it begins to blur the lines of ingredient vs sacrifice. If we look at the Nina Tucker situation, we could look at her and her dog as simple ingredients to create a talking chimera, but when we see little Nina talk to Edward and call him big brother in her grotesque chimera form, it’s hard to look at her as an ingredient.
Looking at the philosopher stone, at the lives it took, is just as ambiguous. There is one part where an entire kingdom, over a million people, are used to create a philosopher stone. This blurry line between ingredient and sacrifice is a common steeping stone for magic, it comes down to the user and the necessity for the spell. The whole is it good for the one or the many debate and all that. In the end, it comes down to the practitioners discretion.
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