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Possible Catalysts for Introducing Magic to Humanity?

Mazeka

Mazeka

You must be joking
Location
United States
The common setting trope of "sudden inexplicable appearance of magical abilities in humans" has never sat well with me in urban fantasy.

I do not mind however, if said magical abilities in a story are a "lost art" that were forgotten over time due to a cataclysmic event of some sort.

What would be an appropriate catalyst for publicly re/introducing magic to humanity?

NOTE: This is NOT a discussion about breaking a magical world's masquerade. This is a discussion about introducing magic from the ground up.

NOTE: The catalyst cannot be apocalyptic in nature. No nuclear wars, no global flooding, no pandemics.
 
Some I recall from various works or thought of myself:

A ritual by the last surviving magic workers on Earth to create a new magical wellspring. It was never performed before because until magic was almost a lost art it wasn't practical to actually get every last magic user to get together in one spot and cooperate.

Magic is only possible in certain regions of the universe, and magic will fade or appear depending on where a planet is. If Earth moves out of it then magic stops working; if Earth moves back into the magic zone then the magic starts working again.

Something strange falls from space and embeds itself deeply into the Earth. Spreading out from it there appears a growing region where strange things occur and magic of some sort begins to be possible.

Scientists in our world or wizards in a magical one open a portal between our world and theirs, and magic begins flowing through it and filling ours like gas expanding into a vacuum.

An attempt to create an FTL drive breaks reality to such an extent that what can only be called magic becomes possible.

It turns out that magic is a highly variable thing where the details of the needed actions to work a spell change so fast and unpredictably that successfully casting a spell is mostly a matter of luck rendering it basically useless and not believed in. Until it is discovered how to calculate the needed alterations via computer providing the exact details of the needed alterations to make a spell work at that place and time accurately and immediately, suddenly making magic reliable and reproducible.
 
Humanity discovers that it is within a simulation or video game. This revelation leads to humans to discovering bugs and exploits in the code of the universe.
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A parasite had been feeding on all natural magicon earth for thousands of years. Magic grew back when this parasite died.
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A ancient civilization had done everything to seal all magic, because they became afraid of their own power and tired of the many wars it caused. The magic that kept the magic sealed away had been broken when a mining expedition dug too deep.
 
One technique I've seen in a few series (Rivers of London is the one which comes to mind) is that magic never actually went away, but it became so unfashionable and overtaken by world events that everyone basically forgot about it, and the idea of "magic" was hijacked by hoaxes and conmen and entertainers.

But actual magicians still exist, although they're stuck in extremely obscure and minor civil service positions that are barely hanging on to their tiny budgets, and all it takes is for someone to rediscover them and figure out how to make magic more relevant in the present day.
 
There's a finite quantity of magic to go around, consequentially existing wizards all find it in their best interests to keep knowledge of the existence of magic as limited as possible to maximize the percentage of it they can draw upon. Until something happens that threatens everyone, wizard and muggle alike and can only be stopped with extremely large-scale, extremely obvious use of magic.
 
There is this commune in the rainforest that discovered a plant that will give you visions when you smoke it, but like no one took these people seriously, because hippies y'know. That was until they accurately predicted every natural disaster, war that had happened the last 30 years. Turns out that these plants are like, really magic and allow us to perceive with natural and ancestral spirits, dude.
The only reason why you haven' t heard of it is, because
the government is trying to keep us in the dark, y' know because, like, magic allows us to understand one another, and like, war is so sad, dude.
 
Good old Shadowrun's natural magic cycle? Levels of magic in the world just naturally ebb and flow in a roughly 10,000 year long cycle.
 
Magic as an energy is Expanding similarly to the Size of the universe, but lags behind like sound and its shockwave, Earth is just weird because it managed to develop life in the period between the universe passing making our galactic coordinates and the magic traveling behind it, so the magic "wave"/expansion reaches earth in what would be modern-day.
 
frostgiant said:
Magic as an energy is Expanding similarly to the Size of the universe, but lags behind like sound and its shockwave, Earth is just weird because it managed to develop life in the period between the universe passing making our galactic coordinates and the magic traveling behind it, so the magic "wave"/expansion reaches earth in what would be modern-day.
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False vacuum collapse except the true vacuum just adds magic. :V
 
Magic is naturally absorbed by sapient beings, and since the population of humanity has boomed so much in the last few centuries more and more of it was absorbed by the growing population, leaving it to become regarded as mythical since there wasn't enough "free" magic left to do anything with. However the gradual slow in world population growth has given the natural process of magic replenishment a chance to catch up, and more and more unbound magic is becoming available and manifesting itself.

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An idea I ran across is that mortal magic is essentially a passive byproduct of gods that they introduced to the world simply by being here, kind of like body heat warming up a bed somebody is sleeping in; and when they left the world magic ran out out and stopped working. But if they were to return, it would slowly become possible to work magic again.

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It turns out that many old books purporting to explain how to work magic actually genuinely describe how to do so, they've just been encoded so the descriptions as written won't work and the key is long lost. The old magicians were paranoid about keeping their secrets you see, and for one reason or another enough of them died without passing it on that knowledge of genuine magic was lost.

Somebody figures out the key then demonstrates they can cast genuine magic using the instructions in the book they used it on. Suddenly all over the world various people and organizations try to do the same thing with other old alleged books on magic, hoping and sometimes succeeding in finding other examples of the genuine article among the frauds.

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God dies or commits suicide, and in the aftermath of his death his power is scattered across the universe allowing any creature to absorb a greater or lesser fragment of it to work magic. Reality itself begins to change and become more subjective and variable because it is no longer being maintained. The collective magically-enforced subconscious will and desires of humanity and other animals keeps the world from falling apart but everything because strange and Faerie-like.
 
One mechanism I've thought of for this sort of thing is that basically you need some small amount of magic as an igniter to allow for greater amounts of magic. Like for someone to be able to cast a spell they must have been exposed to some small amount of magic in order to "ignite" their mana reserves.
We don't have any magic because we've never had enough magic to serve as that initial spark that would get the firestorm rolling.

Now cue to interdimensional traveller showing up, maybe not even intending to give humanity magic and just passing through, exposing enough humans to magic to allow them to cast spells who can now expose other humans to magic and it snowballs.
 
Sometimes artists might notice that it feels like reality is getting 'fuller' when they are preforming their art, animals start acting differently depending on what is written. This is as scientists discovered, because the act of creating art actually changes reality in some minor ways.
It turns out that, the scientific revolution was only possible because science fiction writer after science fiction writer build on each others work in such a way that it created science.
 
Magic is language based and learned, not innate. Somebody breaks open an ancient library full of translations of some sort of "true name" magic language along with guide books for how to use it.

Magic left when the various magical beings that once shared space on Earth with humans withdrew to their own otherworlds. They've been busy there for centuries and have now come back to check things out. With the re-opening of the gates, magic floods back into the world.

Magic is not one force but multiple forces. Some of them already exist and we are familiar with them, others have been forgotten or assumed to be part of one of the existing forces and we just discovered they're separate.

Magic is the result of a pact between humans and supernatural forces; what we think of as spells are shorthand clauses for invoking that contract and getting those forces to do the work. The spells are remembered but nobody remembers the pact or what it entailed, so they're not using the clauses in the right way. Somebody figures out the right way, and the supernatural forces that had been ignoring us for a long time start paying attention again.
 
I remember a story where a bunch of children from earth got kidnapped by a space-witch. The evil witch chose a girl to was to be her disciple, while forcing the rest to be her servants. Magic got introduced to earth, because they overthrew the witch and taught magic to the other children back home.
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Magic was an unknown force humans didn't know of 'true friendship', sure people had 'friends' but no 'true friends'. That was until 'Scrooge' finally learned the true value of friendship. Scrooge quickly began to teach true friendship because it's power increases when it is spread.
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A parasite infected our universe and it's reproduction is changing things in the universe. It is theorized that Order magic sprung up as part of the universe's immune system, while Chaos magic is a side effect of reality very slowly breaking down.
 
An idea derived from the "souls are artificial" concept from the Riverworld series. Humans cannot work magic because only a species with souls can work magic, and humanity is unknowingly soulless. Then one day a scientist invents an experimental device that starts creating souls, and more and more people can suddenly work magic as they become ensouled.
 
Certain trace pollutants in coal or some other common item have an unknown side effect to inhibit magic and magical development, a la leaded gas. The industries that produce most of it just switched for unrelated reasons to a less magically poisonous substitute and 12-15 years later, kids start turning up with terrible cases of wonder.
 
Don't explain it. Just make it suddenly a thing. Maybe add some creepy undertomes to copy lovecraft
 
I had tried to write about a world where the people, places, and things are all slowly changing and mutating, as if phasing into another reality.

The ironic thing is one of the symptons or causes was a world-wide disease acting as a crucible, those who are unefected by it survive to grow and change.
 
For a story I've long had in mind:

Magic requires the presence of unstabilized proto-reality. This...well, it's not exactly a *substance* but close enough...is not normally found in our little spacetime continuum. However, there are natural forces that occasionally cause modest amounts of protoreality to spill into our realm, and when that happens magic becomes temporarily possible.
 
In ancient times, a cabal of druids or whathaveyou enacted the Masquerade to forcibly keep magic a secret; a planet-wide self-sustaining ritual that forces anyone who comes into contact with magic or evidence thereof to dismiss it, even outright forget it. Also in ancient times, this cabal then died, the ritual still perpetuating itself with none the wiser. Here and there, the odd person had enough resistance/unique circumstances to resist its effects and go 'oh hey, magic is real', but remained completely incapable of convincing anyone else of this, even when explicitly casting flashy Obvious Magic in front of them. Unaware of the source of the Masquerade and unable to track it down, it was simply accepted as a 'law of magic', and life went on.

......Riiiight up until someone put a science lab on the moon.
 
Guessmyname said:
In ancient times, a cabal of druids or whathaveyou enacted the Masquerade to forcibly keep magic a secret; a planet-wide self-sustaining ritual that forces anyone who comes into contact with magic or evidence thereof to dismiss it, even outright forget it. Also in ancient times, this cabal then died, the ritual still perpetuating itself with none the wiser. Here and there, the odd person had enough resistance/unique circumstances to resist its effects and go 'oh hey, magic is real', but remained completely incapable of convincing anyone else of this, even when explicitly casting flashy Obvious Magic in front of them. Unaware of the source of the Masquerade and unable to track it down, it was simply accepted as a 'law of magic', and life went on.

......Riiiight up until someone put a science lab on the moon.
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I imagine that the inhabitants of that science lab immediately discover that mission control constantly forgetting their existence or denying their existence.
And then they find the remains of a short term mission that was not in the files.
 
Mazeka said:
NOTE: The catalyst cannot be apocalyptic in nature. No nuclear wars, no global flooding, no pandemics.
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It would be kind of interesting if there was an apocalypse... where alternate-reality Magical Earth was Apocalypse Land, having a big ol' Ice Age or something, and then all the Wizards and Fairies desperately migrate to nominally non-magical Our Reality Earth as like, refugees. And they're in hiding because they're kind of clinging onto existing by their fingernails somehow, and just don't feel up to engaging with the whole world. Maybe just marking time here until they go back, not participating in the world because this isn't their world, constantly gasping for air because our atmosphere is so low in Magicules.

I guess the an important question is if Magic is "coming back" or if it's some fresh new thing. A lot of urban fantasy kind of has to go with "coming back" to explain that yeah vampires and werewolves and alchemists all used to be a Thing, but then they died off, so there's a grain of truth in all the stories about stuff that used to be. Like if you want to write a story about Actually Vampires Are Real, then those four words are each pretty heavy with meaning, because you're implying a whole scenario where vampires were real, but now people know about them but think they're not real just fiction, and that's a very specific amount of believing in something.

Whereas if it's a fresh new thing that's a lot more of the vein of Star Trek, strange new stuff that's got nothing to do with us or our stories. It's fundamentally discovering the unknown rather than decoding the Ancient Wisdom. Kinda like how Fantasy is about the past and SciFi is about the future, a blurry how-it-feels distinction like that.
 
daniel_gudman said:
It would be kind of interesting if there was an apocalypse... where alternate-reality Magical Earth was Apocalypse Land, having a big ol' Ice Age or something, and then all the Wizards and Fairies desperately migrate to nominally non-magical Our Reality Earth as like, refugees. And they're in hiding because they're kind of clinging onto existing by their fingernails somehow, and just don't feel up to engaging with the whole world. Maybe just marking time here until they go back, not participating in the world because this isn't their world, constantly gasping for air because our atmosphere is so low in Magicules.
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Vibes of HRSegovia's rewrite of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. The Magical World escaped various apocalypses by fleeing forward in time until the effects of the apocalypses died down. During one of their periods of dormancy while waiting for the nuclear winter to clear and evolution to reestablish an ecosystem's worth of macrofauna after the KT asteroid, another, non-magical civilization arose and destroyed itself, leaving technological ruins entirely beyond their understanding.
 
An idea I've seen a few variations of; thousands of years ago the most powerful magic using cultures left to colonize or explore space, and in the ensuing millennia what was left died out and has largely been forgotten. But now some of them are coming back...
 
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