Superstition II

In "Superstition" (see previous post), Captain Martin approaches his spaceship on a mule not because motor vehicles are tabu or no longer work but simply because resources are scarce after a nuclear war. The story is a curious combination of familiar elements: post-nuclear and borderline sf/fantasy.

Did nuclear horror drive the collective consciousness back into Dark Age superstition or, alternatively, did it open minds to an older, more effective way of interacting with nature? The moral of the story is not that we do not know. Our answer has to be that, if magic turned out to work as well in reality as it does in the story, then we would use it. Paradigms resist change but have changed. Evidence overcomes preconceptions - but that is precisely the scientific method.

When the predicted meteors hit the spaceship, the Old Believer, in science, acknowledges with great difficulty that he seems to have been wrong but soon hypothesizes that precognition etc are mental powers helped by ritual. Surely that is the answer? Practitioners of magic would say, I think, that a ritual does not have mechanistically "magical" effects but does focus powers that are already present within the practitioner.

And this can work, if not on the macro level of detecting and deflecting meteors. A British author told me that he performed a ritual which helped him to complete a novel.