Sorcerers Versus Superstition

Better knowledge may win.

Wizards may have superstitions about lucky colors and numbers.¹ But what they may also have is more knowledge about magic than the common crowd, and so a hearty contempt for the superstitions they hear bandied about.

They may very well be joined by philosophers and clergy who maintain that such beliefs are obviously against the order of the universe. (For clergy, you need a religion with a defined theology to pull this off.)

This can cover a whole range. Granting a logical reason for the characters to talk about the matter, it gives you enormous scope to define how magic works by defining how it doesn’t. Or even having wizards argue about whether something is superstition with all the chances to build your world involved.

This can range from a wizard huffing about how the newspaper includes “your lucky numbers!” to one bringing the authority (and if necessary, force) of the crown to bear on a village to insist that a peril be properly warded against and not hedged about with daisies. Or rowan trees. Especially not with rowan trees planted close enough that their roots will tear up the wards.

(In part, of course, because superstitious views can range from absolutely conviction to not being absolutely certain it doesn’t work. One man has a panic attack on realizing that he slept the night in a house that has no daisies in the garden. Another idly thinks he might as well have daisies planted, they would do no harm -- and perhaps is a little surprised at how much planting them calms him. A third doesn’t believe a word of it and suffers no harm, but plants them to calm the silly.)

One notes that the wizards do not have to have advanced very far into making magic technology² to hit on at least some objections to popular beliefs.

The treatise “On the Sacred Disease” may not actually be by Hippocrates, but it was indeed ancient and contains

I am about to discuss the disease called ‘sacred.’ It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character.

On the other hand, while this was unquestionably a correct diagnosis of epilepsy, there are far later clashes.

Such as a Renaissance doctor decrying the work of witches because they always neglect the important element of astrology, and pay no heed to conjunctions.

In a still later era, John Keats deplored the ignorance that prevented him from selling his carriage, because all those peasants are firmly convinced that consumption is contagious when all educated people know it’s hereditary.

So you have a lot of leeway here.

Consider it well. You may, after all, paint yourself into a corner. If your wizard ridicules the notion that specific days are of importance, you can not have a plot twist dependent on waiting for a specific day for magical reasons unless you can go back and revise that out -- possibly impossible for a series³ -- or devise some reason why he was wrong. Or work around it. (It is, after all, conceivable that he was hired to cast the spells, and the contract specifies the days. Then the ridicule is foreshadowing.)

On the other hand, there is the question of scope. If you have a full blown magic system, models⁴ by which it works for different schools of magic,⁵ a historical development of magic,⁶ and superstitions of varying degrees of belief, accuracy, and populations who believe,⁷ you have -- probably too much for a single work. Especially since you have to worry about what is crucial to the work, and what is necessary to make the world feel real and keep the crucial parts from advertising their plot device status.

Maybe a series. But keep what serves the story.

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