"The Anubis Gates" was written by Tim Powers, not K.W.Jeter. Just to be clear. Powers also wrote "The Stress of Her Regard", which edges over more into horror fantasy but is strongly evocative of Victorian/19th century England and Europe. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stress_Of_Her_RegardWell known Victorian/Edwardian mountaineer, chess player, poet (mediocre, if truth be told), magician and explorer Aleister Crowley defined Magick (he preferred the older spelling to distinguish what he was interested in from mere stage magic, or conjuring) as "The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will," in his 1929 book "Magick in Theory and Practice". And if we weren't paying attention the first time, on the next page he gave us a secondary definition: "Every
intentional act is a magickal act." The key word here is of course "intentional".
Behaviorists, and those more recent psychologists who basically accept the Behaviorist position without saying so in so many words, claim that there is no such thing as an
intentional act; all human actions are conditioned responses to stimuli - or programmed actions, in short. I suspect that Crowley would have agreed that
most human actions are indeed "programmed" and thus not intentional; but he would have maintained that intentional action is not impossible
per se -just very difficult. Thus any human act that is
not programmed is by definition intentional and has magic[k]al power.
Following on from this, I have, for myself, redefined Magic as
the conscious, intentional creation of new realities.This would seem to mean that
all artistic creation, whether painting, sculpture, music, poetry, or genuine craftsmanship, is magical in this sense.
By this definition, then, Steampunk
is a form of Magic.
Athanor.
