Interesting. Sometimes in manga/anime there’s an aristocracy that is powerful because of its magic (usually alongside plucky commoners or main characters who are actually more magically talented, eg Misfit of Demon King Academy), or a family/clan that cultivates magic (and magicless offspring are shunned, eg Jujutsu Kaisen). The cultural assumptions involve sympathy to children of the aristocracy who struggle to live up to expectations, contempt for aristocratic jerks who bully others based on their position, and an underlying assumption of equality of possibility.
It appears that the Russian tropes appear to embrace classicism more enthusiastically (as do many of the Disney cartoons): is that the case?
Soft sci-fi is similar in some ways to magic. The Jetsons inhabit a world where high tech is available to all.
With Sorcerer, yes, when you multiclass to one you pretty much have to say that your character suddenly discovered that he had dragon or whatever blood in him all along. None of the other spellcasting classes require any inborn talent, though. Besides, with all of them, the only things that determines how powerful you are is (a) your intelligence (or wisdom or charisma), and (b) your experience. A naturally talented Wizard is nothing more than a very smart Wizard.
What magic exists in Jewish folklore is similar to that. Rabbi Loew of Prague, for instance, built the Golem because he was a very learned man, not at because he had any innate powers. In theory, anyone can study Kabbalah and learn magic, but most people shouldn’t.
Going back to the “first edition” AD&D rules (which were, maybe, a little different from even-earlier D&D rules), you had two different types of spellcasters: magic-users (which were later relabled “wizards”) and “divine” spellcasters who relied on their deities (or other supernatural beings/entities) for their spells: clerics, druids, etc.
Both types had to select their spells for the day, placing a specific spell in each spell “slot,” and once they used a spell, that spell and slot was gone for the day.
While clerics and druids prayed/meditated each day for their spells, rather than studying a spellbook (the way that magic-users did), the mechanics of the spell slots worked exactly the same.
Magic-users were assumed to have spent many years in “hard work and studying” before they even became 1st-level characters: while most other classes had a “starting age” somewhere in their late teens or early 20s (if they were human), magic-users started out in their late 20s or 30s.
Clerics and druids had access to any spell on their spell lists, when they chose their daily spells, but magic-users were limited to the spells that they “knew” (i.e., were in their spellbooks). And, adding a new spell to your spellbook was often expensive and laborious.
Also, multi-classing was a different thing in 1E AD&D. Technically, only non-humans could multi-class, and they had to choose which classes they took upon character creation, and could not change later. Humans (and only humans*) could choose to change classes as they advanced, which was a matter of stopping advancement in your original class, and switching over to the new class (but you had to have a very good score in the new class’s primary ability to be able to switch into it). I knew a couple of people who built magic-users that way, taking a couple of levels in a fighting class, to give them more hit points, before becoming magic-users.
*- Half-elves could do this, too, but only if they were working on becoming bards, which was an insane class that was, in essence, a three-classed fighter/thief/druid.
Sorcerers, and “spontaneous spellcasting,” didn’t come about until 3rd Edition (2000), primarily because the designers, and players, wanted another, less complex option for playing an arcane spellcaster.
Krabat, by Ottfried Fischer, is about miller apprentices learning magic from the miller master, a sorcerer that reads them spells from a book. Anyone can learn, but every year one of the apprentices dies and they cannot leave the mill. They just have to memorize the spells the master reads aloud and use them, or not memorize them if they don’t want to. But everybody could.
Until, at the end, Krabat defeats his master, the master dies and the apprentices lose their magic and become normal again. So everybody can learn, as long as the master is alive. No amount of learning is any good without the master.
To me, the interesting part is that first edition clerics got any 7th-level (and 6th-level, and 5th-level, and 4th-level, and 3rd-level) spells from a supernatural entity, but a couple of tucked-away references in the rulebooks specified that clerics worked their 2nd-level and 1st-level spells just by dint of committing various readings to memory upon having received a course of instruction; they’re drawing on education and training — and not actually petitioning a patron deity or an intermediary thereof — for those spells.
Which is to say: if a divine spellcaster is out to blanket an area in magical silence, or create stuff out of thin air, or blind a guy by casting a ‘light’ spell on his eyes, or even conjure up an elemental to do one’s bidding, the effect kicks in thanks to, well, hard work and study, is all; the patron deity could even cease to exist, and the magic would still work anyway.
The grimoire I’ve been studying is attributed to a 15th century Jewish Kabbalist, and the purification rites are definitely based in Levitical ideas of priestly purity - you’re meant to make the same kind of anointing oil used in the Temple, set up a prayer space resembling the tabernacle, wear garments based on the High Priest’s vestments, avoid touching dead things, observe the Sabbath with fasting and rest and study, and so on, so that at the end of the process you’ll be pure enough that your guardian angel (who actually does the magic on your behalf) will deign to make their presence known to you. Oddly enough, though, the text doesn’t require you to be Jewish as long as you’re a montheist, and the author says that even a pagan could do it as long as they allow for the existence of a singular creator god.
Some of the scholarly reading I’ve done on the topic suggests it’s based on a Talmudic-era ritual meant to give the aspirant instant eidetic knowledge of the Torah, and that the angel in that version will actually kill you and melt you into a puddle of bile if you aren’t pure enough when you invoke them. I certainly wouldn’t want that to happen.
They’re sort of all over the place. One series has a Russian die in prison, reborn to another reality as a French aristocrat who has magic - title of the first book is “the Bastard.” Another series is Russian aristocrats and an emperor, but they’ve just introduced cellphones. A couple have been early Industrial Age, and some are old school feudal, but it’s always all about the nobles. Despite the love for the gentry, the protagonists are invariably minor nobles set against corrupt heavyweights that don’t properly care for their commoners. Rather than Disney, I get shades of Anne McCaffrey vibes (who colonizes a planet and reverts to feudalism?)
In fact it was a plot point in the Krynn setting; for a long period clerics on that world only had low level spells, because they had no access to the gods.
Speaking of Weis Hickman properties (Krynn), in the Rose of the Prophet Trilogy, the nomadic pseudo-Arabic people who the story revolves around believe that only women can perform magic. But that’s really just a cultural prohibition as shown when a (male) wizard from another continent is captured into the tribe. In theory, anyone could learn it who wanted to put the time in and had the smarts for it. Also, mortal magic was bound by use of scrolls and artifacts versus finger-waggling hocus-pocus.
Meh. I haven’t played since 3rd Edition, and I still have a soft spot for 2nd Ed. AD&D despite how clunky and counterintuitive some of the game mechanics are.
I can’t recall the title as I read it decades ago, but I recall a short story where anyone who learns the simple ritual to call a familiar can work magic. The reason you don’t see magic used everywhere is very simple: using magic as all including just summoning a familiar is guaranteed to kill you, and quickly.
Using it attracts hostile entities, which can only be held off by following rituals and taboos that attract even stronger entities that can only be held off by even more rituals and taboos, which in turn…it’s an escalating cycle that quickly overwhelms anyone. At most you’ll last long enough to start a few new stories about magic.
In Andre Norton’s Here Abide Monsters apparently anyone can work magic with enough concentration and willpower in the new world the protagonists find themself in. The problem is that doing so awakens and attracts dark powers that try to kill you.
I recall an old story called Elemental where anyone could work magic. It’s just that the proper structure of spells is constantly changed by a huge number of external variables, so nobody could cast them consistently; just having an occasional success by luck that kept the concept of magic alive. Then somebody figured out how to apply computer analysis to all the variables, and working magic consistently was as straightforward as looking up the daily spell update.
I can never remember the details of how magic is supposed to “work”. Is it particularly rare in literature that anyone can learn to do it? Is that not the default? Hence the point of studying spellbooks and such.
I hope I am not misremembering these examples. There is Gladstone’s Craft sequence, where magic represents crafts or professions, e.g., law.
Magic, Inc.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell has a “practical magician”.
Lots of “urban fantasy”
Stories by Clive Barker, e.g. The Inhuman Condition, The Hellbound Heart…
In my experience, the default is that you have to have a natural gift for magic, but that just gets you through the door - after that, you still have to study and practice. That’s the system in Harry Potter, Wizard of Earthsea, the Dresden Files, Star Wars, and most other fantasy from the past 40 years or so.
Wouldn’t the whole ‘technomage’ concept found in Babylon 5 fall under this heading? The concept is that an act of ‘magic’ is that which appears miraculous simply because we don’t understand how something works.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I believe that in Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell you had to have an innate ability for magic, plus lots and lots of study, to be a ‘practical magician’, i.e. someone who could actually do magical stuff.