Twelfthtide 23:01 The Old Magic

I normally provide a quarterly summary of key blog posts but this year has been my least prolific ever, somewhat compensated by a rich year in terms of forthcoming publications, but more notable in terms of method and framework development with Estuarine Mapping being the highlight.  The scarcity in one context probably has some relation to the abundance in the other.  But there were valuable posts so I have provided a summary at the end. 

My last Twelfetide series focused on what makes human systems complex systems distinct and I used the first post in that series to summarise my 2017 series which addressed the subject, but in a different way.  While I was at it I provided a summary and links to all of the previous Twelfetide series, and I’ve also adopted the older spelling of the word this year.  The third post in last year’s series looked at the role of narrative and then in April, I talked about the importance of Science Fiction & Fantasy and even created a category for it.  Those two posts set the theme for this series where I want to use science fiction and fantasy to explore some wider themes relating to sense-making and anthro-complexity.  

In this first post, I want to look at two authors in particular namely Alan Garner and Guy Gavriel Kay.  For those who don’t know them it is worth a basic introduction, especially as Alan Garner is probably my first ever encounter with Fantasy via Children’s Hour on the BBC with David Davies reading his Wierdstone of Brisingamen and as I have previously posted, I was at times terrified.  His works were also a part of my 2012 Christmas series on Children’s Books.  His universe is drawn from Celtic myths and legends, all jumbled together in a wonderful set of stories.  Implicitly in the Weirdstone and more explicitly in its equal The Moon of Gomrath, he contrasts the Old Magic of nature with the newer High Magic of the wizards.   While the latter can’t free Susan from possession by the Brollachan, Colin resorts to the Old Magic and subsequently when Colin lights wendfire on an old straight track and inadvertently raises the Wild Hunt.  Susan in the previous book was caught up in the old Book, representing through the Mark of Fohla the power of the new moon, while their enemy the Morrigan represents the power of the old moon.  His books are, in the main, based on and around Alderley Edge in Cheshire and that is my banner pictures.

Guy Gavriel Kay is a much more prolific author, originally from Winnipeg he spent 1974 helping Christopher Tolkien edit the Simarillion before qualifying as a lawyer.  He has a strong, moral presence on social media and writes complex novels that could be, but should not be, classified as historical fantasy.  They are much deeper than that classification would allow.  His first set of novels was the Fionavar Tapestry (which a month ago was a free download on Audible) which tells the story of three young Canadians who are transported to the ‘the first of all worlds’.  The basic construct, and you can see elements of the Silmarillion in this, is that Fionavar is the world from which stories ripple into all other worlds.   The story of Arthur, Gwenevere and Lancelot is played out again in the books as it has been played out many times before.  We have the Lios and the Svart Alfar (elves of light and dark) that we also see in Garner.    Yggdrasil along with Huginn and Muninn link us the the Norse legends and the Cauldron of Khath Meigol is the Cauldron of Annwun from the Mabinogi and Rakoth Maugrim, the Sauran figure who exists outside of the Tapestry links to Chinese legends.   In a later novel Ysabel two of the characters come back into a different context, but with the central theme a contest between two males for one female, in welsh legend that is the story of Pwyll, Rhiannon and Gwawl and it is also the Arthur, Gwenevere and Lancelot theme.

What both authors have in common, over several books is a reweaving of patterns from older traditions, a modern version of the oral tradition that I talked about in yesterday’s post.   Now there is an important point here in that they are reworking patterns, not creating a formulaic set of recipes as we see in the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell’s work.  I don’t see that as an archetypal form, any more than I see his, and Jung’s archetypes as universal.  Creating recipes has utility but the formulaic nature lacks depth.  The really powerful stories create new forms, by weaving or blending old and new themes.

Both books also involve people making choices, often (in fact in the main) difficult ones, that are mostly against their own self-interests, at least when they were made.   In The Darkest Road, the final book of the Fionavar Trilogy the concept of heroes and villains is not that clear gut and the overall theme of forgiveness and sacrifice is clear.  Power on its own is not enough, neither is withdrawal from engagement.  One of the most engaging sub-themes of Fionavar is the story of the pacifist Paraiko and their rituals.  In all these cases the choices are exercises of Free Will, they are not the inevitable journey of a stereotype, there are genuine counter-factual pathways which the stories could take.

The other major theme here is the contrast between older wisdom and modern thinking, and from that we get the title of this post.  In Fionavar and Wierdstone the older, more basic magic of the emotions is contrasted with the intellectual magic of the Mages and in Fionavar the Mages draw on the strength of a companion to wield their magic, the latter being a perpetual sacrifice.  In Ysabel the difference is between scientific (and more specifically medical knowledge in Megan) and the awareness and acceptance of Magic in her older sister Kim.  In all the books, nothing is solved by either winning out, in effect, they come together in different ways.  THe contrast is there to make you aware of something, not to create dichotomous categories as we see in a lot of contemporary management literature not the mention the whole right/left brain/hemisphere nonsense.  The point is that we are part of our past and our present, we need to respect both.

The granularity of the patterns is also important, the hero’s journey is too coarsely grained but we need familiar elements in the stories we are told and in turn, tell.  For me, this is one of my frustrations with the pattern languages you see in cybernetics where the patterns are coarsely-grained categories.   I keep wanting to break them down and use multiple agents to add high-abstraction metadata from varying perspectives so that we can create new assemblies that may become assemblages in the act of telling and retelling.  I’ll be picking up this theme again in the new year, but I would refer you back to an earlier post on the paucity of mental models to make sense of the world (another categorisation of filters approach).  Also to a quote from a book we are about to publish on SenseMaker® by Anna Panagiotou and Eleanor Snowden who argue that Assemblage is a slightly problematic term in English as it doesn’t mean an assembly of parts. It “translates to agencement; meaning to arrange, to play out or to piece together”, it is “not a unified whole, but more a heterogeneous co-existence”.    Hopefully, I am not being too obscure here, my point is that don’t want a formula. But meaning comes from a series of agencements. 

A good story allows us to use the past, but to weave it into new contexts with new experiences.  Our past stories, in the sense of the oral tradition, are a key component here and it is one that, in a modern age, technology can enable.  

Last year’s blogs summarised 

The Twelvetide series was followed by posts on the theme of Rewilding Leadership which was a focus for us in 2023 along with rewilding as a concept more generally.   At the first Rewilding Leadership course later in the year, I created a simpler way of explaining complexity (which has developed considerably since looking out for it in the new year).     Narrative was the theme in a two-part series at the end of January before two posts on the danger of metamuggledom (which I contrasted (unfavourably)  with the aesthetic movement of meta-modernity.  That got followed up with the new phrenologists post  IN April.  The annual Cynefin update was replaced on St David’s Day with an early version of Estuarine Mapping (which has been the big hit this year).  The Granularity pair of posts later in March are ones that I need to build on.  And of course, last March was the Mike Jackson lecture at Hull which I reflected on here and which you can listen to in full on the Centre for Systems Studies website and I picked on some of these from that in subsequent posts, the first on conjecture and then on eliminating the incoherent.   April saw two posts on craft.  What I see as a growing existential crisis in HR/OD came next along with noting a rather poignant anniversary.   May saw a post on curation. In June I  posted on emergence through abduction and language.   June also saw me use a Robert Frost poem to look at the rich contextuality of language.  In July I created a post linking to other key posts and went on to discuss wandering and lame excuses before a post on the elephant metaphors used by Senge.  July also saw a polemical post on purposelessness Tand an introductory post on distributed decision making which will be a major theme this coming year.  Then I hit an extended fallow period interrupted by a tribute to Larry Prusak, before I picked things up again a few days ago.  The fallow period was in part induced by putting a lot of work into two major articles, there are interesting posts from other members of the team and the wider network that you can pick up on.

The wonderfully moody picture of Alderley Edge Woods is cropped from an original by Riik@mctr used under a Creative Commons license via Flickr.  You can almost imagine Colin and Susan meeting the Hooded One here.  The ‘weaving’ picture is  also cropped from an original, this time by Robert Linder on Unsplash