In Star Wars, magic – or sorcery, as it is referred to in Episode IV: A New Hope (“Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that old religion… (etc).” – is an existential option and an essential story-propelling tool. In a nod towards science, the Midichlorians have been inserted as apparatus-detectable mediators between the elusive Force and the bodies of living beings. Without the Midichlorians, Lucas would have risked alienating the young audiences who have been taught for several generations now to dismiss and even ridicule the very idea of the miraculous. (It is not impossible that Lucas himself needed a mediator before he could feel comfortable with the metaphysical material he took on board when he decided to build his edifice around the ancient structure Joseph Campbell, whose ideas provided the intellectual framework for Star Wars, named The Myth of the Hero.) Midichlorians or not, there is still the Force, the skilled use of which belongs to the sphere of the miraculous, as no natural law permits inanimate objects to jump all by themselves into the hand of a Jedi – or that of a Sith. Purposeful actions within the sphere of the miraculous, such as making inanimate objects jump into your hand, are known as magic or sorcery.

In the seventies, when Star Wars were being conceived and the first of the original three films made and released, the word magic meant a man in a black tailcoat waving a wand over a top hat and pulling a white rabbit out of it if was contemporary, or, if it was medieval, an old man looking like Gandalf or Dumbledore and wearing a pointed hat and robes, both bestrewn by stars. The term sorcery was hardly ever used and its connotations were largely unfamiliar, although most people felt that it meant something bad and dangerous. Towards the end of the decade, however, the word sorcery had become associated with Carlos Castaneda and his series of books which, at the time, were a worldwide bestseller. Due largely to their popularity and wide distribution, sorcery became more commonplace and lost its sinister flavour (until then, Merlin was referred to as wizard; post-Castaneda, he became sorcerer). In 1977 it was still unusual to find sorcery in mainstream culture and Lucas’ use of it in A New Hope points to his possible sources of inspiration.

How does one tackle the miraculous in any representative medium, knowing that the original and its representations belong to completely different categories of phenomena, and bearing in mind that any such representation must be instantly recognisable if it is to have the desired impact on the audience? Lucas took the obvious and, in our time, probably the only possible route of borrowing from established magic traditions, including world religions (which are magic insofar as they include reference to the miraculous within their systems, as they all do). In this he was largely guided by Campbell’s choices with the addition of Castaneda (who was interested in Campbell although his interest was not reciprocated). It is extremely unlikely that he consciously made any cabalistic references, since Campbell, throughout his work bar a few insignificant exceptions, gave Qabalah a wide berth, reluctant as he was to recognise the influence of the cabalistic undercurrent in Western thought. (This book shall take advantage of this fact and use any notable unintended cabalistic correspondences as a kind of ‘control system’ to show how close Lucas managed to approach some kind of transcendental objectivity in constructing his edifice.)

We shall therefore, in a separate chapter, outline the (only the most) basic concepts of the six magic traditions illustrated above: Castaneda, The Qabalah, Christianity, Arthurian tradition, the vastness and the variety of India, and the Far East – particularly Japan which inspired Lucas, in what has since become a general trend, rather more than it did Joseph Campbell – until, that is, the latter walked on hot coals during a Japanese religious ceremony and finally, on his own bare skin, sensibly experienced the miraculous.