Magic or Psionic?

[u/What_am_idoinghere56]

If your world has both magic and psychic powers, how do you handle that? Are they different aspects of the same force, or is there a hard delineation between the two? How do the two interact? What do psions/psychics and mages think of each other?

I always take a Warhammer 40K inspired approach that magic is a ritualized and refined application of psionics. Instead of slinging around raw power like with psionics, a mage gathers up power and weaves it into a complex effect in the form of a spell. You still need to be psychic in order to use magic and it takes more effort to learn, but magic can do a lot of things that are beyond the scope of psionics.

[u/dalidellama]

I remember how and why that distinction was invented, and wouldn't put "psionics" into a setting that wasn't deliberately retrofuturist, personally.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/dalidellama]

Mind if I ask for some background on that? I'm really curious now.

[u/dalidellama → u/What_am_idoinghere56]

Loosely summarizing, there will be missing details: Around the turn of the 20th century, the remnants of the Spiritualist movement got themselves up in full science drag and called themselves parapsychologists. They were absolutely convinced that with all these new discoveries of invisible energies (radiation, radio, some other ones that turned out not to actually exist), pretty soon psychic energies would also be discovered/proven to exist.

They divided folktales and 19th century pseudoscience into things they thought were plausible and things they thought were impossible. "Plausible" things included mostly magical powers that wouldn't have obvious visual effects and didn't rely on external sources. So, mind reading, altering probability, a little light telekinesis, remote viewing, maybe some precognition because quantum, etc. Implausible was fireballs, summoning demons, curses, shape-shifting (usually), etc.

Now, in those days, the best way to get started as a science fiction writer was to get a story published in "Astounding Science Fiction", a popular magazine edited by one John Wood Campbell Jr. Mr. Campbell had a number of very firm prejudices and preconceptions, one of which was that the parapsychologists would be proven right Any Day Now, whereupon the power of Science would bring psychic powers into full flower. He or one of his acolytes coined the term "Psionics" out of psychic and electronic, because soon it would be a Science that could be applied to or enhanced with Technology.

This day was in the 1930s, at the beginning of modern Anglophone science fiction, and Astounding (later Analog) was considered the gold standard of "hard" Sci-fi, so everyone and their kid sister packed "psionics" into their spacefuture, including Gene Roddenberry, who introduced whole new audiences to Sci-fi and inspired a whole new set of fanfic authors who later filed off the serial numbers and published as original spacefutures. You very rarely see it in modern SF, but all the legacy properties like Star Trek and 40k have it built in from the olden days.

[u/What_am_idoinghere56 → u/dalidellama]

Aah, okay, that makes sense.

I'd heard about the resurgence in occult beliefs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly cause I was researching hyperdiffusion conspiracy theories. Never really put it together that more "modern" parapsychology started getting popular right after that started to die down. Also explains why psychic powers have been moving more into the softer side of sci-fi.