Vijayendra Mohanty

Some time ago, on an episode of Game of Thrones, Sam and Gilly were walking back to the wall from the far North. To pass the time, Sam the nerd starts telling Gilly all that he knows about the wall and the history of the night's watch. He knows dates, names, and events of key importance. This amazes Gilly. To her, the fact that Sam can know all these things by simply looking at small squiggly lines on paper, is nothing short of magic. As someone who writes to convey ideas and is rather acutely aware that every word he writes will outlive him by centuries, I often find myself struck by this very same sense of amazement. Writing is a powerful kind of magic that transcends the limits of a human lifespan.

When people first started writing, it was not a commonplace talent. Priests wrote, kings wrote (or had people write things for them and about them). The common folk only heard the stories. This is perhaps why, to this day, something becomes more worthy of trust if it is in writing. Think of the phrase “likh ke deta hoon”.

Isaac Asimov once speculated about the origin of the phrase “Cyclopean Wall”. A cyclopean structure is, according to the dictionary, ancient masonry made with massive irregular blocks. Asimov deduced that even though a civilisation (a Greek city state for example), might have had the technological know-how to build great walls with large blocks of stone, to a less advanced people, it might appear to be magic. In this case, it is possible that they thought these walls had been built by Cyclops — the mythical one-eyed giants of Greek myth and folklore. Since a non-scientific people could not wrap their heads around the idea of man being able to lift and use enormous rocks, they assigned magical qualities to the architectural style itself.

There is a superstition in the Western world that involves horse shoes. If hung above the door, a horse shoe is supposed to ward off bad luck. Horse shoes are made of iron and the analogue of this superstition in India assigns magical properties to the metal. I remember once, when I was a child and tormented by nightmares, my mother gave me a piece of iron to place under my pillow at night. Iron, she said, has magical properties and can ward off evil.

Remember those stories where the hero had a magical sword. A weapon that was hard and sharp yes, but there was something additional to it. It was particularly effective against monsters and creatures of darkness. It could do more than just injure them — it can kill them. It can cause them to disintegrate and melt away into the darkness. Iron has always been considered to have magical properties. This may be because the first weapons and cutting tools were not made of iron. They were made of copper and bronze — metals which are pretty but not very effective when moulded into swords, especially when the opponent has an iron sword.

Now imagine a soldier convinced of the superiority of his bronze blade facing off against a strange invader from another land. His sword bends and then is cut clean in two by his enemy's iron sword. His surviving colleagues run back with stories of an invincible enemy and their magical swords. The mind is susceptible to irrationality in the heat of battle, but some strains of such thinking must have remained. These strains have been assigning magical qualities to iron ever since.

The human tendency to make sense of things can be an overpowering one. In the absence of reliable information, it tends to runs away in strange directions.