The Difference Between Magic and Science

Science, Magic, and Power: The Bruising of Qilwa and Contemporary Portrayals of Magic in Media

In Naseem Jamnia’s 2022 fantasy novella, The Bruising of Qilwa, magic weaves through the narrative. In Jamnia’s world, magic has many disciplines and each specialization requires intense study with masters. Characters experiment with it in laboratories and write research texts on applied and theoretical findings. Over the course of the narrative, we learn about magic’s potential to heal, and its ability to cause illness and even death.

Protagonist Firuz, a refugee who uses they / them pronouns, uses magic in a way that resembles immunology or medicine. This interpretation is reinforced by the interchangeable use of “blood magic,” the colloquial name for Firuz’s ability, and “Sassanian science,” an official discipline of Firuz’s people, for whom magic is both a cultural inheritance and an incredibly practical skill. In the opening scene of the novella, Firuz uses their magic at a clinic to sense internal injuries in rock quarry workers. In this way, magic is a system of knowledge—a science.

Considering magic alongside science may be a strange concept in the 21^st century, but two hundred years ago, many aspects of the scientific world were considered ‘magic.’ The term ‘scientist’ itself did not exist, and ‘a science’ was what we now refer to as a discipline: a set of inquiries, theories, methods, and knowledges, such as music or chemistry.^[1] Science experiments were often billed as natural magic in Western Europe and early America, with electrical displays or medical feats being displayed for public awe.^[2] Some of these demonstrations doubtlessly inspired Mary Shelley, who used electricity for the scientific magic of Frankenstein.^[3]

"Why was it important for higher education to devalue magic, specifically, as a serious mode of scientific inquiry? What was the investment in framing European modernity as anti-magic, even as scientists, philosophers, and political thinkers continued to investigate or practice magic?"

The association between magic and science started to change over the course of the 19^th century. “Higher education grew hostile to magic,” distancing itself by labelling such things superstition.^[4] However, as Renée Bergland puts it, “the more radical change was that magic, religion, and science came to be viewed as not only separated from but even opposed to one another.”^[5] Historian and philosopher Dr. Jason Josephson-Storm explores how, despite this hostility, major scientific thinkers and political leaders continued to utilize the occult. Even after science started alleging its opposition to superstition, thinkers analyzed psychic phenomena and utilized spiritualism. His work highlights the question: why was it important for higher education to devalue magic, specifically, as a serious mode of scientific inquiry? What was the investment in framing European modernity as anti-magic, even as scientists, philosophers, and political thinkers continued to investigate or practice magic?

Josephson-Storm argues that part of it was the importance of assuming “there was something distinctive and original in ‘modern’ European thought and culture.”^[6] Throughout this transformative period, the West was reckoning with the changes wrought by the scientific revolution, industrialization, and, importantly, colonialism. The world had gotten much smaller, and the inequitable relationships at the heart of colonialism meant there needed to be ideological excuses for why certain countries could continue their violent practices while other people suffered. Disciplines (or ‘sciences’) exaggerated the differences between Europeans and colonized peoples, claiming biological, religious, cultural, political, and rational superiority for Europeans and their colonies across the world.^[7] This led to the association of colonized peoples with ‘primitive’ beliefs and magics, and the myth that European scholarship had disabused itself of such beliefs. Or, as Dr. Graham Jones writes, “Magic—particularly in its conceptual association with science and religion—is truly inseparable from the material violence of the colonial situation.”^[8]

In a similar vein, one of the issues Jones is concerned with is how magic’s portrayal as good or bad is often still split along colonial fissures. He analyzes how some contemporary magicians continue to highlight their relative safety in relation to the trope of a magical Other, whose unknown magic is threatening in its irrationality.^[9] We see this duality in contemporary fiction, where dark magic and cozy magic as sub-genres of fantasy often play on racialized tropes, with the latter focused on pastoral elements and the former more likely to evoke ancient, foreign magics. It is easy to use orientalist tropes as shortcuts to genre conventions of good and evil, savage magic versus enlightening brilliance.^[10]

It is thus even more important to read and support works like Jamnia’s, where these tropes are inverted. Firuz is not the antagonist of the novella. Instead, they are the hero, and the forces which label them dangerous or unruly are the structural antagonists Firuz continues to resist. They face discrimination as a refugee, but even more so as a practitioner of magic, a lower-than-science system of knowledge which the local university neither studies nor accepts. They take on an apprentice of their own, struggling to figure out a teaching structure without any fellow magic users or resources to consult. Firuz is torn between hiding their magic—their knowledge—and using it to save the lives of those around them. Throughout the novella, their magic mirrors systems of knowledge marginalized in Western academic spaces. In Jamnia’s world, practicing magic is a matter of coloniality, race, and power.

More works to consider along these lines include Sinners (2025), which offers a portrayal of Hoodoo that neither villainizes nor obscures the practice and its significance.^[11] In Octavia Butler’s Parable series, the protagonist inadvertently creates a new belief system, one which gives her followers the strength and the knowledge to work through the earth-shattering events they survive—before that system, in the sequel, turns into its own oppressive force. In Elatsoe, by Lipan Apache writer Darcie Little Badger, ancestral magics shape an alternate America where a young girl and the ghost of her childhood dog solve a high-stakes mystery. And in C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, magic is oppressive and revolutionary, healing and plague-bringing, colonial instrument and anticolonial force. In each of these works, magic, power, knowledge, and faith are braided together to explore the positive and negative potentials of magic, and the histories which, while fictionalized, continue to reflect real-world experiences in the past and the present.

"How media portrays magic can help us understand how and when we ‘other’ people and forms of knowledge."

Thinking about the relationship between magic and science reminds us that knowledge—what’s considered important, who’s considered an expert, and what’s framed as dangerous—always has to do with power. These structures of power and knowledge shape our modern world.^[12] How media portrays magic can offer important insights into what we value and dismiss. It can help us understand how and when we ‘other’ people and forms of knowledge, and how and when we can practice magical methods for reshaping power and difference through the stories we read, watch, share, and live.

Shebati Sengupta (they/she) is a writer, educator, and scholar whose work focuses on comparative (anti)colonialisms, speculative futures, and queer, diasporic worldbuilding. They have taught courses spanning creative writing, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studies in community learning spaces and universities. Shebati is a VONA and Roots, Wounds, Words alum. They have also been a fellow at MVICW, Brooklyn Poets, and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Currently, she is completing her PhD in American Studies at the University of New Mexico while based in the Northeast US, on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Massachusett peoples. 

[1] Renée Bergland, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, (2026).

[2] Ibid. See also: Catherine Wynne, “Victorian Stage Magic, Adventure and the Mutilated Body,” The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic (2021): 691-710; Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, no. 1  (1983): 1-43; and Nina Möllers, “Electrifying the World: Representations of Energy and Modern Life at World’s Fairs, 1893-1982,” Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures (2012): 45-78.

[3] Anne K. Mellor, “A Feminist Critique of Science.” Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fictions, Her Monsters. Routledge, 1990. For more on Shelley’s interest in geoscience, as opposed to electricity and chemistry, see: Nora Crook, “Mary Shelley: Geology, Statuary, and ‘the Attacked Escort,” The Wordsworth Circle, 50.3 (2019).

[4] Bergland, 9.

[5] Bergland, 10.

[6] Josephson-Storm, 309.

[7] See, for example: Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020) by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) by Neel Ahuja; The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire (2021) ed. Andrew Goss 

[8] Graham Jones, “Secularism’s enchantments and disenchantments: A reply to Goto-Jones and Zhan,” The Immanent Frame, March 2019. https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/03/15/secularisms-enchantments-and-disenchantments/

[9] Jones.

[10] Mat Hardy, “Godless Savages and Lockstep Legions: Examining Military Orientalism in Game of Thrones,” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 4.2 (2019):192-212; Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Aiyu Niu, and Christopher T. Fan (2025).

[11] “I Don’t Do Horror, Ryan Coogler,” Megan Goodwin, Religion Dispatches, April 2025.

[12] See, for example: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 1999; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.