…The entire art of healing is about convincing the spirits acting upon the wound and the body to do their job, or in some cases to dominate and command them directly in order to do your bidding. That’s literally the “magical” process involved, and I don’t see how the merit of the shaman as a healer is diminished or negated by it.
Again, you are using categories that just don’t fit the worldview represented.
It is, if you have no way to mitigate the incalculable (in the sense that it’s impossible to calculate, not in the “extremely large” sense) but very real and ever-changing chance of you getting blown up or braindeaded at any immersion. At that point, it becomes an activity for the mad, the suicidal, or the incredibly desperate. Which is certainly a viable story to tell, but it is also very author fiat-y.
I’m not entirely sure what we’re discussing now, but my point was that if the shaman does the healing, then if the healing fails that’s the shaman’s failure and you might want to look for another one because this one isn’t cutting it, but if the healing is done by a spirit entreated by the shaman, then if the healing fails then, yes, maybe that is the shaman’s failure, but it may also be that there was no chance of succeeding in the first place, because, I dunno, the patient really pissed off the spirit or this particular spirit is a dick, or it isn’t a dick but it woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning (metaphorically).
You understand why the ancient, honorable practice of killing witches and wizards can be found in many, many cultures across the world, then? Even if we don’t believe in the supernatural, what he is describing, the risk involved in the ritual, was absolutely real for the people that practiced magic in the pást and yes, they knew the forces they dealt with where unreliable and outright malicious in many cases. Hence why the shaman is, despite being vital for many tribes, also a pariah in some cases or barred from living with the rest.
This is also why trolls (which in many nordic stories are seen as only mages, or people with supernatural powers) were very commonly killed, and why in south american tribes wizards are more often than not bad news.
…I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Trolls being the only ones who are mages, or trolls being nothing but mages (but there being also other mages)? (I don’t agree with either one, but I also don’t know your frame of reference, and I’m definitely not intending to start to argue about folklore this time, I just wish to understand what this sentence means.)
Not to mention the problems caused by inaccurate translations. But it is, in fact, perfectly possible to argue about troll folklore in specific place and time.
Although admittedly, I know my Finnish trolls better than Norse ones, and both of them are nonetheless Nordic.
Sure, but what Havenstone was describing weren’t unreliable and outright malicious forces. What he was describing is outright roiling, unmitigatable chaos. “Unreliable and outright malicious” can be used to describe, e.g., the Unseelie fae (mandatory “fuck redcaps”), but those also have rules. What Havenstone is describing is basically you roll a die, and the possible faces on it are “good result”, “nothing happens”, “madness”, “explode”, “your innards turn to purple spiders”, and “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu ftaghn!”, and you have no way to skew the die result.
If I’m reading correctly, it means “trolls are a separate species comprised of nothing but magic-users, or they’re otherwise-human magic-users”.
“Trolls” may very well have the distinction of being the mythological creature with more variance throughout the world. You should never argue troll folklore, because chances are anything is true about them, depending on the place and time.
Nah, I have to concede here. I was referencing something I read a long time ago in an apendix of the Volsunga Saga, but given my unfamiliarity with the framework of the stories, I rather take your word for it.
Yes, and I am saying that if this never stopped people from trying to skew the results as they commonly did, nor avoided the existence of “mages” in our own world, then I don’t see why it would be unresonable that for the promise of knowledge and power people in fictional worlds would risk turning into frogs at the hands of some amoral god or spirit. Is a negotiation at the end, politics, exchanges and all kinds of wordplays, it can’t be some form of hard science.
Yes, but this isn’t “the glorious incomprehensible marrow of the universe”. It’s an actual entity that’s right there (sort of), and you have to very much understand it, because otherwise you can’t negotiate with it, let alone attempt to play politics. The closest thing to what Havenstone is describing is WH40K’s Warp, which routinely makes psionics brains asplode, and everyone avoids it until they’re forced to, well, not. Well, except Orks. Orks are… a different topic.
I don’t mean this in a snide way but I feel this is what @JBento is doing. You’ve simplified the types of possible magic into either “indistinguishable from science” and “an incoherent and utterly random mess”.
Narratively speaking, this is exactly what happens. Either you can rely on magic working predictably, or you can’t, in which case the magic runs on author fiat. It’s the equivalent of someone writing a story about a (fair) boxing match between Mike Tyson and Stephen Hawking, and either things work as expected (and Mike Tyson wins), or they don’t, in which case who wins is just dependent on who the author wants to win, regardless of how much sense it makes. Either things have rules (even if you don’t know what the rules are) and you can trust the narrative, or they don’t, and you cannot.
Hmm. What if the effects are random and the author actually rolls dice or something equivalent to decide what happens?
Then I guess that depends on how much you trust the author to follow through with the roll results. 
Bonus points if you’re told the rolls and the table. Extra bonus points if the main character’s head asplodes about a quarter fo the way into the story. 
That’s one way to write it – it’s more or less how magic looks in the universe of the Cthulhu mythos, for prominent example.
But there’s a wide space between that and “every time you say Abracadabra, X happens” or magic as “reproducible events with predictable results” – your earlier statements on how we should understand predictability in “scientific” magic. Even in our interactions with other humans, we don’t have the level of control or prediction that allows us to have a high degree of confidence that our action will produce the desired result; politics is much more art than science. How much less would our interactions with the Powers of the cosmos be “reproducible” or “predictable” enough to underpin a technology?
And yet even if we barely understood Them, we might observe that it seemed relatively rare for people to walk away brain-dead. Engaging with Them would no doubt be risky, but even assuming a meaningful risk of death, there might well be benefits sufficiently outweighing that risk. Our observation of the pattern that only a few shamans get eaten by the spirits, while the others enjoy extraordinary benefits, could lead sane people to bet on becoming shamans – while still leaving magic miles from being anything we’d want to describe as a science. Don’t shift the goalposts on “predictability” to claim that this brings us back into the realm of hard magic…if anything we understand more than we do the Warp is science, then everything is science.
My Cthulhu shout-out above was written before I saw this. 
But no, that’s not what I’m describing. You just described a much more predictable system – one where there are 16% chances of a few specific outcomes, and a 66% chance of things going horribly wrong. Even if we throw out the six-sided die metaphor and let our grasp of the odds be a lot fuzzier, that’s still recognizably describing a hostile cosmos.
But that’s not the only way to write a magic beyond human control. The forces we can’t control, understand, or predict might not be malevolent. They might be some version of mostly-benevolent, a la Narnia (“Safe? 'Course he isn’t safe!”) or Middle Earth. They could be indifferent, but only rarely destructive. Engaging with any of those wouldn’t be madness or suicide.
We live in a world profoundly shaped by the myth of science and technology as salvific forces, so much that it can be hard to imagine safety in contexts that are profoundly beyond our understanding or control. One thing I like about mythopoeic fantasy is that it can remind us of alternative myths.
I think you overestimate the extent to which understanding a force preceded engaging with it. Shamanism (let alone other fantasy magic systems) just isn’t rules-based in the same way that science is. It involves improvisation, unknowable and unmitigable risks, performance without certainty of outcome.
“Political Science” is literally a thing, though.
Observation of patterns is a scientific approach to things. You’re already postulating that we have a decent sample size from which we can calculate the statistical chance of getting removed from the board by engaging with magic. It becomes a simple risk/reward evaluation - is what you want important enough for the calculated risk? The more desperate you are, the higher the risk you’re willing to take. (this is a topic I’m extremely ill-equipped to discuss, though, as I’m naturally risk averse, to the point that I wouldn’t play a DnD Wild Magic charcter if you paid me. Well, maybe if you paid me a lot)
And honestly, it still sucks narratively. There’s a reason why stories with gambling focus on stuff like Poker and Blackjack, where the character can use skill and, well, math, to heavily skew the odds, and not, say, craps and roulette (unless they’re cheating, of course).
Nobody expects the call of Cthulhu. Because everyone just texts these days. Also, call screening. Neener neener, squidface.
This goes back to a point I made before: the shaman’s magic is to have the spirits in their rolodex. That’s what the magic is. The rest is negotiation, but the actual magic is getting you to the negotiation table in the first place, and that has very specific rules.
Like, my router is what’s getting me to this forum, but it’s not it that’s having this conversation.
Idk if superpowers fit into the category of ‘magic’ (it’s more of a power system, I guess? That’s what anime forums would call a discussion on it, anyway), but I guess I lean towards soft systems, or at least that’s what I’ve done with AToH.
There’s some rules: Powers aren’t repeated among humans, you can’t gain new ones by training really hard or thinking of your friends, and what you’re born as is what you’re stuck as.
Beyond that, I kind of leave the door open. There’s no limit to what powers someone may be born with (except for reality warping and the like, yuck), and I don’t set hard limits for what extra bullshit you could pull off with your powers.
For example, someone has Atmokinesis? Technically, that means they have mastery over the air, which means that they can make sound reach further, letting them hear conversations from further away than should be possible. Their control over the air means they can sense people moving through it, which lets them identify where others are, or use it as a form of telekinesis. Atmokinesis also means they have control over storms and lightning- who’s to say they can’t manipulate that lightning to make the overheated bolt of plasma look like a dragon?
It’s a bit of a mix between soft and hard, I guess, but it fits my purposes, and allows enough flexibility if you’re as much of a nerd regarding abilities as I am.
You still need to tackle hard parts, though. Like, can an Atmokinetic manipulate the air in someone’s bloodstream? Can they just give people embolies? If yes, why don’t they just win every fight like that (presuming they don’t care about the survival of whoever they’re fighting, though I’m not sure it’s all that more deadly than just hitting somebody in the face with superheated plasma, especially because they can just un-emboly right afterwards)? If not, why not? Maybe they can just affect air if there’s no intervening barrier, but now you’re moving towards hardness again.
It’s an aspiration. It’s not very good at predictions, and no one with your level of risk aversion should be trying to base a technology on it.
Like I said, if anything where we observe patterns is science, then all human thinking is science.
But it’s not. Nor is everyday human risk assessment – you jump straight to talking about sample sizes and statistical probability as if anyone who ever observed a pattern observed it through a statistical lens.
Your taste in stories is your own, but I disagree that any story involving forces beyond mortal ken or control is boring.
You’re very talented at defining opposing arguments out of court, but I don’t think this is how most shamanic cultures would draw the lines. The actual magic – the power that produces extraordinary outcomes – is the negotiation with the spirit realm, more than the instrumental steps that made the negotiation possible.
I am unfamiliar with this idiom, and google is of no help. 
Perhaps, but there’s a good number of these cultures that feature folktales of non-shamans just physically going to talk to the gods/spirits to entreaty them, in a way that is very definitely described as not-magic. When they return to their community, while they often take positions of authority, those positions are not that of shaman or shaman apprentice or their equivalents.
It’s the difference between communicating with Apollo while sitting in his temple at Delphi and climbing Mount Olympus to have a chat.
As in, the definitions of the terms involved that you operate under are such that the argument you are making cannot possibly be wrong. Or at least that any opposing arguments cannot possibly be right.
In this case, your definition of science is broad enough that most forms of magic (most forms of knowledge in general, really) must necessarily be included in it. You’ve also defined things in such a way that anything that still falls outside this massive scope is necessarily bad.
I think perhaps there’s a disconnect between seeing the world a certain way (one which I agree with for what it’s worth, I don’t believe in the supernatural) and allowing for the existence of other methods in history and fiction. Or just other methods in general.
Just to be clear, a common problem I keep seeing is the assumption that there is a very definite line between “magic” and “mundane” that just doesn’t work with most of the cultures we are referencing. For most of these peoples there is no “mundane”, as the spirit world permeates and inform everything perceptible.
Trying to say “well, this interaction is magical while this one isn’t” seems to me rather useless. And again, above you keep defining the “magic” as the process by which the spirit is summoned, when in the real world is the interaction with the spirits what it is considered the speciality of a shaman.