Mark: We're not magic. Magic doesn't exist.
Sarah: Says the man keeping company with two literal sorcerers.
Mark: Sorcery is just physics gone feral. We're psionic. It's not the same thing.
Sarah: Says the man keeping company with two literal sorcerers.
Mark: Sorcery is just physics gone feral. We're psionic. It's not the same thing.
Functional Magic and Psychic Powers frequently fulfill similar purposes in a plot. They're mysterious, fantastic, and enable one individual to wield incredible power. They are for the most part intertwined and interchangeable.
What happens when a creator decides to use both in one universe? What if they want to differentiate them? Is there a real difference? Do mages and psychics get along? Are psychics just mages that have streamlined the process of using magic? And what about Ki Manipulation; is that one or the other, or something else still?
In real life, psychic phenomena, or "psionics", have actually been scientifically studied, and there was assumed to be a realistic possibility that a very developed mind could exert measurable forces on the universe; this led to common appearances of psychic powers in Science Fiction as a way to have essentially plausible magic powers. Thus, despite most studies finding nothing, psionics still retain something a scientific flavor that magic lacks. This is how psionics (especially low-powered psionics) can appear in science-fiction without the work getting reclassified as Science Fantasy, although they've become fairly rare in hard science fiction in the present day. The most common locations for psychic powers in modern media are softer science fiction, true Science Fantasy, and related genres such as superhero stories, which are generally more willing to include scientific-sounding but not realistic elements and to stretch the limits of what science can actually do. Notably, this has led to an increasing blurring of the line between psionics and magic, both by removing some pressure to keep psychic abilities realistic and because these stories are also more willing to include magic-qua-magic, which in turn loosens the original distinction of the two power systems ("realistic magic" and "fantastic magic", broadly), while also allowing more frequent direct comparisons that were rarer in older media.
Eastern cultures, having never really (in general) gone through wide-scale witch trials endemic to monotheistic religions in the west, view cultural depictions of magical and psychic powers a bit more acceptingly, and to that end, both usually fall under the purview of a "spiritualism"/"ki"/"chi" perspective. A lot of Science Fiction/Fantasy/Urban Fantasy from Asia will view magic, psychic powers, and divine powers as interchangeable terms for the same thing.
Compare Unequal Rites, which is about multiple kinds of magic in the same setting. Compare and contrast Magic by Any Other Name, "psychic" being one of them.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Stands are psychic manifestations of the soul, and Hamon is an sun-elemental martial art used to combat the undead. Both are entirely separate phenomena within the universe, though Hamon can be channeled through a Stand, as is the case with Joseph Joestar channeling Hamon through Hermit Purple's vines. Hamon essentially vanishes after Part 3, because a distinct lack of vampires in Part 4 and onward means there's no longer a need to channel The Power of the Sun to take down villains permanently.
- Part 7 introduces the Spin, which the errata in an omake chapter states is an alternative universe version of Hamon. The same chapter also stated that "Stands" are likely the true power that the developers of the Hamon and Spin sought.
Comic Books
- The DCU: Psychic abilities are given the same rules as science. Magic, on the other hand, bends the laws of science and can even be a broad weakness for sturdier characters, like Superman.
- Judge Dredd treats magic as a type of psychic ability, with the Justice Department's PSI-Division having a Department of Magic.
- Marvel Universe: Psychic powers are common mutant or alien powers, while magic stems from a variety of sources. However, it seems that nearly anyone, human, mutant, or other, can learn or acquire magic.
- Monstress: Purebred humans can't use magic, but a small percentage of women (mostly the witch-nuns of the Cumea) have psychic abilities. The Ancients and their Half-Human Hybrid "Arcanic" progeny do have magic to varying extents while some Cats are "nekomancers".
Fan Fiction
- Child of the Storm has both, and there's a certain degree of crossover between the two, with both able to do many of the same things — to the point that it's easy for one to be mistaken for the other, and the White Council, who have a zero tolerance attitude to Black Magic, have executed psychics gone bad in the past. However, there are definite differences; magic, for one thing, is described as being just a little bit alive...
- In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, telepathy and telekinesis are considered different from magic powers to the point where magic can cancel out telepathy and telekinesis, unless one is possessed with a great amount of mental energy from a mindlink, like Empath on occasion with his fellow Smurfs. And there's also power that comes from God, which is greater than either.
- Vow of Nudity: Abalmy scorns magic and somehow developed psychic powers like precognition, telepathy, and telekinesis, and is able to teach them to others. Unlike spells, he can apparently spam his abilities indefinitely.
Literature
- A Certain Magical Index includes both espers and mages. The former are public knowledge but hoarded by the super-advanced Academy City, which is among the factors contributing to its status as an N.G.O. Superpower. Mages meanwhile operate under a Masquerade, and exist all over the world but present less of a unified faction due to their rituals being tied to rival religions. As their powers are equally "illusions", Touma's Imagine Breaker works on both.
- Espers are people who've gone through the city's Power Development Curriculum, granting them a "Personal Reality" which allows them to control a specific force in a specific way (such as electricity, friction, etc.) in proximity to their body.
- By contrast, mages operate on "Idol Theory", where they emulate figures from mythology or even fiction in order to recreate their feats, and their range of abilities operates more on Semantic Superpower. Notably, this means that an esper (even a powerless one) cannot use magic without suffering backlash from rejecting their own Personal Reality, meaning that mage-esper hybrids are limited to a small number of people with some way of surviving this.
- Natural-born espers do exist, but are so rare that they're nicknamed "Gemstones", and tend to have more magic-like powers which are unusually complex or don't seem to follow any internal logic. The first sorcerers developed their techniques in imitation of Gemstones.
- There exists a Secret Art of "angelic magic" where the practitioner ritually aligns themselves with one of the four Archangels, gaining great power over that angel's domain but losing the ability to use conventional spells. Known to very few, the Power Development Curriculum which creates espers is actually a heavily-refined humanist adaptation of this ritual, and the AIM fields generated by espers can actually create new angels in sufficient concentration.
- The Doctor Who New Adventures novel So Vile A Sin mentions that psychic powers were originally magic but survived the Time Lords forcing the universe to run on physics by changing to be grounded in science. The Whoniverse generally takes a Clarke's Third Law approach to psychic powers and magic, meaning if you want to consider them magic or an advanced science to be a matter of opinion.
- In Harry Potter, mind-reading and defending against being read are specific schools of magic known as Legilimency and Occlumency, though when Harry describes it as mind-reading, Professor Snape gets annoyed before stating that calling Legilimency "mind-reading" barely scratches its full potential.
- In the Heralds of Valdemar series, True Magic and Mind Magic are separate (inborn) abilities: true magic manipulates energy from outside sources, with your level as a mage determined by how much power you can channel. Mind magic draws its power from the user's own resources, and there are many specific inherent subcategories to it; a Mind-Speaker can't pull Mind Over Matter unless they also specifically have the Fetching Gift. It's possible to have both mind and true magic, and a trained mage can use magic energy to boost their mental abilities.
- Persons with Mind Magic have the advantage that training their gifts is faster due to its more limited applications, and pure mages often don't or can't counter their abilities because many pure mages just don't know about Mind Magic and how it plays by different rules. However true magic is quite a bit more versatile and given more work can be used to do nearly anything Mind Magic can do, and more. True magic, as well as taking longer to learn, also requires continued work and time spent on it that takes away from time they might spend maintaining fighting skills, so they tend towards Squishy Wizard, while psychics need less work and are usually quite physically adept. As for one defending against the other, mages can learn to specifically shield themselves against Mind Magic, but the shields the Mind-Gifted put up to protect themselves from Psychic Powers only work against some applications of true magic.
- Thanks to some Brainwashing for the Greater Good performed by the last Herald-Mage to counter his countrymen's impression that the Mage-Gift is superior to Mind-Gifts, for several centuries most Valdemarans believe true magic is gone from the world and can't retain the knowledge that it isn't, which poses problems for them as their enemies virtually always include mages.
- In InCryptid, many different types of mages exist, including sorcerers, routewitches, and ambulomancers. None of them have been shown to have Psychic Powers, though several species, like the Johrlac (which both Mark and Sarah from the page quote are) have innate telepathic powers.
- Lone Wolf has the titular hero learn psychic abilities such as Mind Blast and Nexus. These mental powers are supernatural abilities that were taught to the Kai Lords by their gods, so they are somewhat different yet not too far off, from the magic used by the various wizard-types in this world (though Lone Wolf has the capacity to master two of these sorcerous paths).
- In the Rivers of London short story "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Granny", the eponymous granny is surprised when Peter describes her gifts as magic, because she'd been thinking of herself as an elderly version of Carrie.
- The Ship Who... is a science fiction series where Psychic Powers do exist but are fairly minor and mainly restricted to aliens — the Loosies can communicate with each other using telepathy, for example. In The Ship Who Won, Carialle and Keff visit Ozran and find it has "mages" who can do things that seem impossible. Keff, a dedicated LARPer, immediately declares that magic is real. Carialle is more skeptical and thinks it must be somewhat more advanced psionics plus technology they don't understand. She's right.
- In There Was No Secret Evil Fighting Organization, a chronoprohiberic esper who has always dreamed of becoming a Magical Girl laments that her power is not true magic. Esper power is basically an intangible muscle, so it must be exercised to grow, and there's no deeper meaning to having it. Wielders of classical magic, like the elf Baba-Nyan, can do amazing things from the get-go. The trope applies even on a universal level: a world's inhabitants have magic or esper powers, but never both. And should the inhabitant of a magical world move to an esper one, all their magic is lost. They can't benefit from an esper's Super-Empowering, either.
- Whateley Universe: Mages power their spells with essence, while psychics and other mutant powers are just constrained by skill and stamina.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: Telepaths get their powers from a gene that is found in a small percentage of many species' populations (and seemingly all of the First Ones) and which was installed by the Vorlons so they could be used as weapons in the Vorlon-Shadow Wars. Meanwhile, technomages have cybernetic implants that allow them to manipulate energy and employ other magic-like abilities and were devised by the Shadows.
Podcasts
- Metamor City: Mages have existed for millennia and the number of people with the inherent gift to become a mage has remained more-or-less constant. Psis, on the other hand, appeared within the last century and their numbers are increasing, in no small part due to the Psi Collective's breeding project.
Tabletop Games
- Conspiracy X: Both psionics and magic exist. Psionics are inborn powers that are possible because the Atlanteans created the human species using Grey DNA (among others), and the Greys are Telepathic Spacemen. Magic is a time-intensive process that works because of the Seepage (Earth's background supernatural "radiation" which is caused by billions of nascent human psychics existing with untrained minds), and can corrupt magicians who don't do their rituals properly.
- CthulhuTech: Sorcery is taught as a science in universities, while Parapsychics are some sort of mutation or other special ability subject to a Mutant Draft Board.
- Dungeons & Dragons has one of the more notable distinctions. While magic has a variety of sources, psionics always stem from the user's mind. And psi lacks verbal, somatic, or material components like spells usually do. In addition, in 3rd edition most magic-using classes function by Vancian Magic while Psionics are limited by Mana. With all this said, psionics is sometimes defined as a type of magic.
- Fading Suns has both Psychics and Theurgists. Theurgists are priests of the Urth Orthodox Church who believe that they're channeling the divine power of the Pancreator, while Psychics are considered witches by the Church and forced to serve "penance" if not burned at the stake. Though it's not clear where either gets their power. It's also notable that Gjarti, an animistic religion common to "barbarians", also has priests with theurgic abilities.
- GURPS:
- There are completely different rules for magic and psionics. However, if a given setting only has one, and the people in that setting call it the other, who's going to tell them they're wrong? So the Lodge in GURPS Black Ops are psychics with magical trappings, and there's a "psychic wizard" template in GURPS Wizards, with one of the sample characters being a psychic healer in a fantasy world who refuses to believe he's not a magic-user, however many wizards tell him otherwise. On the flip side, several of the sample characters for other templates are "modern day" characters who use standard GURPS magic, but think of it as psi because that's the paradigm they're familiar with.
- The first edition Discworld Roleplaying Game says psychic abilities on the Discworld are generally understood to be a form of magic, and its write-up of Granny Weatherwax gives her a range of GURPS Magic spells and GURPS Psionics abilities. The mental abilities of The Fair Folk, on the other hand, are written up exclusively as psi, which effectively gets across that they are alien. (Second edition creates its own magic system from scratch, so this doesn't come up.)
- Just like the comics, Marvel Super Heroes has psionics and magic. Besides needing different powers to withstand magic or psionic attacks, spellcasting superheroes have unique rules applied to them — including a massive x2 penalty to the Karma Meter when they do a crime like murder (the reasoning is that magic users are more in tune with the universe and have a better understanding of karma, so they are penalized more heavily when they break karma). Meanwhile, Psionic superheroes are treated no differently than other more standard superheroes.
- Old World of Darkness: Sorcery or hedge magic can be learned by any mortal with enough discipline and occult knowledge, while psychic phenomena are abilities that humans sometimes just happen to have. True mages, on the gripping hand, reject your reality and substitute their own and in their own subjective reality may see their powers as magic, psionics, some combination of the two, or something completely different. In fact, the Technocracy often encourages lower-ranking members to see their abilities as psychic or super science as it fits in better with the rationalistic consensus reality they've constructed.
- Pathfinder:
- In the Arcforge campaign setting, magic exists. So does psychic magic, which comes from the mind. And then psionics...which are neither.
- Dreamscarred Press' psionics rules get reskinned to cover a form of occult technology instead of magic, and are an alternate rules set, but the various psionic classes fill similar roles to core Pathfinder archetypes: the Vitalist is a healer, the Aegis a tank, Psychic Warrior a damage-dealer, and the Psion is a multi-purpose spellcaster.
- Within Realms of Pugmire, both the dogs of Pugmire and the cats of Monarchies of Mau are capable of using magic, or rather Sufficiently Advanced Technology left behind by Man, dogs using external devices while cats can absorb artifacts and internalize their power. Rodents, as found in Squeaks in the Deep, however, are incapable of magic, but all have inherent potential for psionics. Magic is discussed as more open/obvious, requiring some sort of gestures or vocalization, and mainly used with the aid of a focus; while psionics, being more internally focused via mind honing, can be far more subtle (to the point that some powers can only be deduced as coming from a psionicist by the rodent's Tell). Psionics are also far more sensory than magic, where a rodent using psionics becomes as inherent as them seeing or hearing something.
- Rifts: On Rifts Earth, and in other worlds in the Palladium Megaverse, Magic and Psionics are considered to related expressions of mystical potential — hence why the game uses the term "Potential Psychic Energy", or "P.P.E." for short, as its name for "Mana" — but they're also separate, to the point psychic powers have a separate mana stat called "Inner Strength Points". It's possible for an individual to be psychic but not able to use magic, a mage but lacking psionics, or capable of using both. However, this last category is the rarest of all, as usually an individual must focus on either one form of power or the other. The Mystic class, defined by its use of both magic and psionics, has only a small pool of psychic powers and gains a similarly small pool of magic spells, restricted by the inability to learn new spells except by levelling up. Likewise, the pythonans — a race of sapient snakes with potent Mind Over Matter abilities, will gain a multiple new psychic powers as they level up, regardless of their class... unless they take a magic-using class, in which case they lose those bonus psi-powers for their class's spellcasting abilities.
- In Shadowrun, psychics are a form of mage who simply believe that their powers are different, similar to the difference between Hermetic Mages and Shamans. Technomancers, on the other hand, are able to access the matrix without using technology and have abilities that function like programs but are learned like spells.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Warp is the source of power for supernatural powers, whether you look at it as psychic or magic. The "other" sources mimic the effect without the corrupting influence and risk of the Warp. Tyranids draw power from the Hive Mind (which is psychic), Orks draw power from their own WAAAGH! field (which is psychic, but looks like magic), the Sororitas' have faith-based miracles (which is confirmed to be close to magic), and the Space Wolves's rune magic which they believe involves channeling the spirits of their homeworld (which they think is magic, but is mostly psychic). In the latter's case, some of the higher-ups know perfectly well they're using Warp sorcery, but keep up the pretense anyway because nobody's about to question them and it's good for morale, especially when fighting Warpspawn.
- Depending on who you listen to, all psychic powers and usage of the Warp is drawing on Chaos, whether it's believed or not. While there might be a hint of truth in that statement, many individuals can draw upon the Warp for their psychic powers without fear, the practice of sorcery is basically outright Ritual Magic that uses the Warp in ways that some just wouldn't be able to use their psychic powers for, or in lieu of them.
- In WitchCraft (and its spinoff Armageddon), both magic and psionics exist (alongside a multitude of other paranormal abilities). As such, a Gifted individual's powers may be based on spells, psionics, both, or something else entirely.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! has the Spellcaster and Psychic types. Interestingly, many Psychic-Type monsters resemble what in the past were Machine-Type, Fiend-Type, or Spellcaster-Type monsters (such as "Mutant Mindmaster", "Cipher Soldier", "Mind on Air" and especially "Jinzo").
Video Games
- Zig-zagged in Gothic. While mages recieve power from one of three gods, the psionicistsnote The term is rarely used in-game. of the Sect Camp use spells of a fourth kind, like mind control and telekinesis, and are not considered mages. Played straight in the alpha versions where psi uses "willpower" instead of mana.
- The King of Fighters: In the Maximum Impact series, there's the classic psychic of the series, Athena Asamiya, but there's a couple of magicians that interact with her: the Beart sisters, Mignon and Ninon; both are magic users but they manage white and black magic, respectively.
- In Touhou Project, the term "magic" is most commonly used to describe the Sufficiently Analyzed Magic used by magicians and Onmyoudou, but it can also be used as an umbrella term to describe supernatural powers in general, such as Sumireko Usami's psychic powers.
Webcomics
- In Homestuck, the psychic powers of the various alien castes is a normal and accepted part of life, and is purely genetic. Magic, however, is power lent to whoever is willing (and foolish enough) to make a Deal with the Devil with a demon or Eldritch Abomination, and is either dismissed as fake or seen as utterly terrifying.
- Rusty and Co. is an RPG Mechanics 'Verse where magic is a Mundane Fantastic part of everyday life. Zar the Psion👁 Image
, on the other hand, is an enigmatic denizen of Another Dimension who dispenses cryptic prophecies, watches the edges of reality for frays, and insists on floating everywhere.
Websites
- SCP Foundation:
- With their variable canon, magic and psychic powers can differ drastically, ranging from basically the same thing to completely different.
- The Tale Just Another Shop That Wasn't There👁 Image
focuses on a Foundation psychometrist investigating cursed items in the Miami area, and summarizes the difference between psychic powers and magic (thaumaturgy) thusly:It had taken decades for the Foundation to accept thaumaturgy. It had taken the Foundation almost a century to realize that psionics was entirely different from that. Anyone could learn magic, but you had to be born with the curse.