So I have seen plenty of topics discussing Black Magic, breaking the Laws of Magic, and
the ramifications of Harry's killing beings other than humans (both on a large scale like when he wiped out the Rampires, and in instances like when he shattered those Sidhe near the beginning of Cold Days) and decided to hammer together a topic discussing my thoughts on the subject.
First lets try to define some things:
The Laws of Magic:- The White Council's 7 Laws of magic
- Bah, if you need them listed out, look them up here
- The universal principles of how magic works... things like:
- Mortal magic has gradually shifting side effects (currently murpheonic field)
- Running water dissipates magic
- Sunrise dissipates magic
- "Black Magic" corrupts the mind
Black Magic:I look at black magic as having various (not necessarily exclusive
or redundant) definitions depending on the perspective of the definer.
Definition 1:Black Magic is any (mortal?) magic that breaks the White Council's 7 Laws of Magic.
Definition 2:Black Magic is any magic that warps (corrupts) the mind of the magic wielder.
WoJ#2Why do I go through the trouble of pointing out two separate definitions? Because Jim has explicitly said "The Laws of Magic don't necessarily match up to the actual universal guidelines to how the universal power known as "magic" behaves."
WoJ#3 However, the first definition is important because it is concrete and has concrete well defined consequences. Break em and you get your head lopped off with few extenuating exceptions.
Grey MagicGrey magic would be any magic that skirts around the [crumbling] edges of the White Council's 7 Laws and might or might not have some mind warping consequences.
Now for the TheorizingSome thoughts on Magic:Jim has made several comments about how the upper bounds of magic are about rewriting reality.
WoJ#6 This combined with the frequent in text comments about a wizard not being able to work a particular piece of magic unless he truly believes that the world should be that way make me think that all [wizardly?] magic is about the wizard wielding his will to rewrite reality to conform to his idea of what it should be. (
This is something I have used as a foundation for other theorizing.)
Reality Pushes BackIn other words, if you use your will/mind as an applied force to change reality, reality will exert an equal and opposite force upon your will/mind that could be changing it as well.
My thoughts on this idea of reality pushing back come from multiple inspirations. One of the most poignant is how Harry insists to Lash that if she has been changing him, she pretty much has to have changed in return.
xrt#X Even more fundamental is the nature of the "murpheonic field." Or at least why it exists from my theorizing PoV. As a wizard develops his ability to shape reality according to his will, he is coming into direct conflict with the fact that humanity has been doing a pretty dang good job of defining just exactly how reality is supposed to work, and as a result is accomplishing all these really cool technological things. But because the wizard is a member of humanity, and is breaking these hard and fast "rules" that this cool technology is based off of, his magic interferes with it and makes it likely to fail.
You could even say that the wizard's mind has been warped by his continued use of magic to reshape reality, until the parts of reality that utilize highly specialized physical laws that his magic flies in the face of [I.E. technology] become highly unreliable to him.
So taking this paradigm and applying it to "dark magic" we can see there can certainly be other ways that using your will to do something particularly nasty like overwriting the will of another human being could warp your own will too. Maybe next time you come across a situation, you won't even think of other possible solutions that don't involve overwriting the will of someone because your own will has become too twisted. You might even be unable to chose otherwise due to having lost what gives a "mortal" free will in the first place. Reality has pushed back.
By the way I am a HUGE fan of LCDarkwood's (A DFRPG Dev, and mod of the associated section of the boards) DFRPG oriented post "
The First Law of Magic In-Play: Semi-Official Advice." Here's a particularly juicy morsel. (spoilerized to collapse it so it takes up less real estate.)
Corruption Isn't Always About Evil
We have a tendency to look at the Laws as things that turn ordinary, nice wizards into MFing Kemmler. So, it's understandable that some players are going to have an issue with the idea of being a Lawbreaker, because they don't really want their character to be an Evil Jackass.
But all we really know, as a baseline, is that breaking the Laws fundamentally changes you somehow. There's a lot of room to decide how you're going to express that change. That's why you don't have to, if you don't want to, worry about intent too much - good intentions can cause corruption just as much as bad ones.
Let's look at another Joe Wizard. This is a young dude, just getting started, who fries a mugger in self-defense because he's afraid. First Law violation, period dot.
But what if we decide the aspect is "Crippling, Massive Guilt"? 'Cause clearly, Joe's not a bad guy, right? No one expects he's going to go from magical self-defense to setting kittens on fire just to listen to them shriek.
However, what could happen is that his guilt keeps him from using his magic, even when its arguably necessary. Even when it could help people and prevent harm. Even when an innocent is being held up by the throat by a loup-garou, and he could save that person, but God, what if something goes wrong? What if he misses? What if he kills another innocent? Better that they die by the loup-garou's hand than his, right? Better he doesn't have it on his conscience, right?
And soon, this Joe Wizard finds himself utterly incapable of risk and sacrifice. His decisions become inherently selfish, all centered around keeping him, at all costs, from having to deal with that guilt again.
How is that not a kind of corruption?
So, keep in mind that you don't have to characterize this process as a descent into blistering, making-soup-with-babies sadism. Anything that people can feel can be taken too far and become destructive.
The White Council's 7 Laws had a focused goal.Ok, so now I've gone through a whole lot of trouble to discuss the mind warping influence of magic without focusing on the Council's "Laws" much. Jim has discussed how the White Council /exists/ to limit the power of wizards, and that the Laws are intended to restrain wizards from doing too much harm.
WoJ's #4 & #5 Considering all the times Harry has pointed out that some bit of magic that is shadowed by the laws skirts them by his magic not being applied to a mortal, I'd like to specify/posit that
the Laws are focused on restraining wizards from doing too much harm to humanity.The Council likely did a pretty good job of distilling down to 7 Laws, the things a wizards shalt not do at risk of becoming a monster bent on harming humanity (or reality itself, and thus humanity). But the writers were fallible, and if you are going to limit yourself to 7 Laws, then what you are going to be accomplishing with those 7 Laws is
going to be rather narrow. There will be things that fall outside them that can have significant effects on a wizard's psyche. And there probably could be individual actions that fall within them that wouldn't eventually result in the wizard bringing humanity to its knees in agony. The things that fall outside of the 7 Laws are almost surely not going to put humanity at risk the way the things that are covered by them would though.
Vs a Mortal MattersOk so basically 5 of the 7 Laws of Magic seem to be: Don't do X to a mortal. Up to this point I've mostly just examined how magic as a whole has repercussions, and that the Council's laws try to keep wizards from performing magic that has repercussions that are bad for humanity. This is examining something more specific. Is it possible that performing these acts against a human might actually have more significant affects on a wizard beyond just the paradigm of, "well it doesn't hurt humanity"?
Assuming the answer is yes, then I can think of two reasons why, the 2nd reinforcing the first.
1) Wizards are card carrying members of HumanityIn short, if a practitioner is human, and is using his magic to rewrite reality to break a law that protects other humans, reality revokes his member of humanity card and he becomes a monster.
* Do it against a non mortal? Well he might become a monster to that race (see Harry's attitude vs Gouls in White Knight and Backup), but he's still a human monster. This is sort of a reality enforced version of the Golden Rule where "others" is "mortals like you," but the consequences aren't necessarily that it is "done unto you" but that you lose what makes you a free willed mortal.
Note that the revoking of the humanity card concept only goes so far, because it doesn't necessarily make this black magic wielding monster fair game for wardens to blast away with magic. (Jim says the council still used mundane methods to off Kemmler. Lots of them.
WoJ #2)
2) Mortal Will has Metaphysical MassI like how this term fits well with the whole "Reality Pushes Back" concept. There have been lots of WoJ's about the significance of free will. So many that I have a rather
large subsection of the "WoJ compilation" dedicated to it.
WoJ#8 is particularly poignant and discusses how mortal free will is what makes the world around them through their choices (sounds a bit like my ideas on how mortal magic works dunnit?).
So it probably isn't a coincidence that most of the Laws of Magic that condemn certain acts against mortals are against using magic to somehow abrogate the mortal's free will (in the first law's case, by snuffing the mortal's life out). Breaking them against a non mortal probably doesn't have the same level of "push back from reality," because the wizard isn't pushing up against the metaphysical mass of a mortal's free will.
*WoJ makes a big deal that magic in the Dresden Verse is not mystic or sentient, but rather something "which obeyed certain universal laws that governed its interaction with reality." I don't want to imply with the asterisked sentence that "reality" is behaving like something sentient here.