You’ve discussed why a masquerade probably wouldn’t work nowadays, but what about historical fiction? Say, the Roman Empire, Medieval Europe, or the Golden Age of Piracy.
Could a masquerade have been upheld then? And if it could, would it?
Dave L
Hey Dave, great to hear from you again!
Yes, a historical setting can make the masquerade feel more credible, but it depends a lot on how far back you go. The main advantage to going back is that you can get away from the era in which nearly everyone has a video camera in their pocket and the ability to easily share whatever they see with the world. The less advanced your technology, the more difficult it is to share information, and the easier it is to believe that the supernatural stays hidden.
However, there’s a trade-off: the further back you go, the less it feels like the supernatural should be hidden. For a variety of reasons, audiences are simply better primed to believe that magic needs to stay secret in modern times than in olden times. In extremely broad strokes, people in the past were more likely to believe in the supernatural; plus there’s the assumption that modernity is somehow hostile to magic and wonder.
For my money, the sweet spot is from the 1920s to the 1980s. This is late enough to feel modern without getting into the camera-phone problem, so assumptions about what justifies a masquerade will be at their highest. If you go further back than that, it’s probably a wash.
Of course, you can still have a Roman, medieval, or piratical masquerade if that’s what you want to write about. There’s nothing to say that masquerades inherently won’t work in those settings, but I don’t think they’ll be any more believable than masquerades in a modern setting. If there is a benefit, it’s too small to be worth transplanting your story into a different time period.
We also need to remember that camera phones are far from the only obstacle to a believable masquerade, nor even the most daunting. You’d still need to justify why magic would stay hidden in the first place despite all the advantages that would come with magical beings living in the open. If there’s no way to justify the conceits, then you need to keep your audience from thinking about them in the same way you would in a modern setting.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your writing!
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Not to mention that the further you go back in time, the easier it would be for your mage or vampire or werewolf or whatever to simply use their powers, as the news wouldn’t travel far. Today, a vampire couldn’t enslave a village without it getting around. In medieval times, there would be few travellers (and they could be ‘disposed of’), so the vampire could just openly keep the villagers as his personal slaves without fearing some kind of problem.
Then there’s superstition, so if everyone believes vampires exist, why try to hide it?
While there are always conceptual problems with Masquerades, I think Anne Rice dealt with the increased difficulty of maintaining it over time.
By the 80s the rules were extremely strict whereas in the 17 or 1800s vampire’s victims were usually assumed to have been the victims of ordinary violence if the vampire was competent enough to make it look that way.
EDIT:. Not saying she got it completely right especially as her vampires have to feed so often that there’d literally be killings at fancy dress parties at palaces.
Certainly the sheer number of deaths would be suspicious. The events of Queen of the Damned would have also been hard to hide, though they lead to a world of very few vampires which helped the survivors hide much better.
Yes, the less regularly violence happens and the harder it gets for someone to just ‘disappear,’ the more specific the masquerade must be and the more strictly it must be observed.
I still think that there would be a point at which the masquerade would simply be dropped.
I also wonder whether it would really emerge, considering that those who usually labour under the masquerade are also usually the ones who have the highter level of power at their disposal – not to mention that they could definitely make a lot of money with those special powers.
It depends.
Travel between CITIES was far more restricted in the Middle Ages–though not nearly as restricted as people think. Pilgrimages and the like were extremely common, for example, common enough that there was bustling business along those routes. The nobles and Church also traveled between cities (the coming of the king was likened to a plague, and in fact some nobles claimed to have plague to avoid the “honor”). And remember, cities in Europe are much closer together than fantasy generally portrays. Wealth meant farmable land, and a city was a trade center–a good investment, in other words. Wealthy nobles built cities to exploit resources from regions in the same way that wealthy people today buy up tech startups. Anywhere with even marginal utility would get a city, because not doing so functionally reduced your wealth.
The issue is how cities worked. A city would create a VAST footprint. Within that footprint would be numerous towns and villages. It makes sense economically–the villages acted as depots for the farms in the area, concentrating the goods (mostly food, fuel, and cloth) to be carried to the city. Travel to and between towns would be extremely common, even among farmers. Basically the tavern acted as a communal living room (inns were frequented by travelers, taverns by locals, as I understand it).
What this means is, while what happens at one city may not be heard of (or at least not clearly) in another, what happens in one town will VERY quickly spread within that area. Farmers gossip constantly, even today, and far more so back when everyone was illiterate and word of mouth was how news spread.
As for why to hide vampirism if everyone believes in it, the solution is pretty obvious: Everyone hated vampires. Most cultures had traditions for how to deal with them, and we’ve found a few burials where such measures had been taken. Sure, vampires (or werewolves, or mages) are strong, but they’ve gotta sleep sometime, and even the strongest can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers (only 10% of the population can be in the armed forces at any given time in pre-industrial societies, which means 90% was available to attack the vampire even if the vampire had the army with them). You also in Europe have the Church to consider, which includes armed groups. Fundamentally it’s a political issue, but there are many, many political reasons to keep quiet about what you are!
If the church learns about a vampire, they might send specialized fighters (laymen or others). Yet, it does always depend on who the vampire is.
If your vampire is a regular person, a farmer or tradesman or craftsman, then there might soon be action against them, either from the local authorities (local lords in the countryside, the city authorities in the cities) or the villagers/citizens themselves.
If the vampire is nobility, is ruling the area, it’s unlikely that someone from the area will go up against them, hated or not. It would then fall to other authorities (the church, the ruler on the level above) to take care of the situation and that demands them learning of it which could take a while.
While there were relatively small armies, what needs to be considered when it comes to attacking the vampire in their castle is a) that castles were built for defence and aren’t easy to take and b) those who were trained for fighting usually were quite good at it (mercenaries especially, as they depended on their skills with weapons and warfare). Peasants had no effective weapons, no easy access to them, and a rudimentary knowledge of how to use simple weapons. The German Peasant War shows clearly that even a peasant uprising was likely to end with the death of many peasants and not with the death of the ruler.
The more I think about it, the more I think it’s the spies of the vampire that will need to remain hidden. Peasants of the Middle Ages could have simply up and left, burning their crops as they went–they did this routinely anyway, as armies (friendly or hostile) moved through their territory–and the castle would need that food to survive. The vampire would have to play a very careful political game, where he had enough spies to keep tabs on the peasants so he could put down any potential uprisings before they got too bad. If the spies were discovered the peasants could put out the vampire’s eyes (so to speak) really easily. Even today a small town can make life VERY uncomfortable for someone who violates the social conventions; in the Middle Ages the violator would die. And remember, without them the peasants could simply melt away–this happened often enough.
The other issue is keeping the peasants out of the army. Remember, the main goal of armies in the Middle Ages wasn’t a pitched field battle, but a siege. Anyone who’d been in the army would know how to do this. It’s not hugely hard–you just keep the food and fuel out of the castle, and build a wall on the outside of your army (because you DO NOT want the vampire’s allies coming up behind you).
The biggest issue with a vampire ruler is everyone else. If your ruler occasionally eats someone, but otherwise leaves you alone, they’re better than the ruler that takes 40% of your produce. The vampire’s killing wouldn’t be sufficient to be noticeable in the demographics. Taking 40% of your produce would wipe out most of the villages around the city. The vampire may be bad, but it would be surprisingly easy for everyone else to be worse.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on the strategic and military side. Don’t forget that a peasant who leaves from place A will be homeless and without means at place B.
Yet, from a ‘how much do they impact my personal life’ point of view, a vampire who demands someone to drain every now and then might indeed be better than a ruler who takes far too much in taxes (often paid in produce) from you, that’s true. Bad when the village decides that you’re the next meal, but most people will never be in that situation.
I actually really like that as far as concepts, a vampire king might generally require lower taxation over time when compared with a conventional noble class, even if they expect payment for Mills and the like.
Though, I think that might be a good enough reason to try and destabilize the hypothetical Vamp-king’s hold. Think a medieval cold-war.
“Don’t forget that a peasant who leaves from place A will be homeless and without means at place B.”
A serf, maybe, as they were tied to land. But there were a LOT of people who could freely travel. Castles don’t build themselves, after all, and it takes a certain amount of experience to do (and thus they need to train apprentices). There’s also becoming a bandit, or a monk (see St. Moses the Black), or a number of other options. If all else fails, mercenaries always need fresh blood. If there’s enough of them they may make a new village or town.
The issue with peasants is that they rely on vertical social ties (the bonds to their lords) for military protection and horizontal social ties (the bonds with other peasants) to weather the random ups and downs of life (bad years for crops, invasions, that sort of thing). A peasant without those ties is more or less a dead man walking. But Medieval society recognized that and had a number of de facto means for dealing with broken ties. They certainly won’t be comfortable ways, but any society that routinely destroys villages in military training exercises must necessarily develop methods for dealing with dispossessed individuals. Whether the system could cope with the scale of dispossessed people generated by the peasants saying “Nope, I’m out” to a vampire overlord is an open question, but for at least some of the people there are good options.
It’s not about being able to travel freely. A lot of people were able to do that, due to not being serfs (and we know a lot of serfs did disappear, too, as one year and one day in a free city would set them free). Yet, farms don’t grow freely in the wild. You need to buy a farm (or the land and material to build them) to work on it for yourself. Unless you’re invited to someone else’s domain (several times during what we call ‘middle ages,’ for instance, young farmers from Germany went east or southeast where a local lord offered them land), you have to bring something to buy with. A peasant who destroys their farm can’t sell it. A peasant who can’t sell their farm, can’t buy a new one. They could slip into serfdom, of course, but they couldn’t stay free and just burn the ground and move elsewhere.
A masquerade during the Inquisition period (late Middle Ages to early Renaissance) would be very believable, I think.
You’d have to be careful to avoid the “oppressed mages” problem, but I think you could avoid it if the Inquisition hasn’t been launched to persecute magic users but regular people like Protestants and independant women, like in real life, and hate towards anything different (such as magic) is just a by-product. The Church propaganda against “heretics and Satan worshippers” would create a climate of intolerance in which magic users would have a very strong reason to keep a low profile.
In addition, the Catholic Church at that time was wide-spread and with great influence over most of Europe in every class of the population, from kings to peasants. And they had great power over minds, since people at the time really believed their afterlife was at stake if they didn’t listen to the Church. So magic would have to be VERY powerful before magic users could decide they don’t mind making them their enemy.
A conspiracy of sufficiently human people (e.g. vampires might be noticed) might have effective means and strong motives to infiltrate some branch of the Inquisition, turning it into a useful tool that complements their general masquerade and doesn’t stray too far from its historical counterpart.
Given the correlation between forbidden knowledge and being able to read and write, wizards, cultists etc. are likely to be Catholic priests or monks in any case, and joining the Inquisition would be just a career choice (and probably an opportunity).
Conspirators in the Inquisition might of course fail very plausibly at finding, and prosecuting, themselves (and not fail against rival factions), without excluding that someone else (e.g. foreign inquisition) poses a threat to their cabal.
The influence of the Church that you mention also makes the Inquisition a natural funnel for investigating reports of supernatural stuff of any kind, particularly if people maintain the expectation that the issue can be solved with an investigation and trial (against liars, devil-lovers, heretics, deranged criminals, and other problematic people) rather than a violent showdown against some monster or magical manifestation.
Vampires don’t appear on video, obv.
I do think one of the main metatextual reasons for the masquerade is to enable a modern day setting that the reader presumably already understands (it allows you to not make things different, and shoots down questions of “but wouldn’t a lot of things be different?”) A modern day setting may be desired to make it easier for readers to project themselves into the shoes of the main character, especially for wish fulfillment about falling in love with a sexy vampire or being the next chosen one or getting a letter to vampire school or whatever. I agree with Oren that the masquerade as a trope feels less beneficial in a historic setting, even a real one, since people don’t know history and you can’t just take it as read that people will understand the characters’ lives, major goals and fears, political and economic situation, level of technology, etc. You have to worldbuild anyway, so you may as well weave vampires in there.
It depends on whether or not you believe that vampires are visible in a mirror and why. One reason why people believed that vampires wouldn’t be visible in a mirror is that in the past mirrors were made by coating the back of a sheet of glass with silver and vampires were supposed to be weak to silver – so the mirror wouldn’t show them. This would hold true, to a degree, for an early camera. When we get to modern mirrors or cameras, though, silver is no longer involved, and with digital cameras, there is virtually no reason why vampires shouldn’t turn up on the pictures. Besides – it would be just as suspicious if someone were to take a picture of an interestingly-dressed person and find them missing.
“You’d still need to justify why magic would stay hidden in the first place despite all the advantages that would come with magical beings living in the open.”
People can’t fight back against things they don’t know exist. Also, open magic risks independent factions competing with the ruling cabal’s monopoly. Yes, this implies the hidden wizards are controlling jerks. There’s your story hook.
The likelyhood of humans finding out about mermaid civilizations is far lower in antiquity, at least.
I don’t know about that, given how many different stories about mermaids and water spirits exist in all over the world. The Greek already spoke of water-based creatures who’d hunt, kill, and eat sailors. Kelpies have been part of Scottish mythology for a long time, too. Water-people are an old myth.
Contacts where water breathing sea creatures come to the surface (e.g. the standard folktale premise of a fisherman catching a talking fish or a mermaid) are far more likely than contacts where humans visit the depths of the sea and find something and come back alive.
To this day, human presence underwater remains very localized (and easily avoided), very limited, strictly temporary and very dangerous and expensive. We developed means to look for merfolk, but we don’t use them; our technology is more likely to annoy merfolk (e.g. with cables and pipelines on the sea floor), possibly causing them to hide better, than to make a contact more likely.
I’ve read that we know more about outer space than what’s at the bottom of the ocean
And survival equipment for space is easier to maintain than for the sea
You could try a story where the masquerade gets broken and the supernatural beings have to integrate into society somehow.
Seems like the further back you go, the easier it would be to maintain a masquerade, but the less you’d NEED one; the more likely people are to believe in the supernatural AND the more difficulty people would have against them. No guns, bombs, landmines, radios to coordinate attacks, mass communication, etc.
Thank you for answering
An old RPG supplement (Night’s Edge, introducing supernatural elements to the Cyberpunk game) had a quote, “If every hunter had a flamethrower, vampires *would* be a myth.”
I do think there’s another element, in that as out capacity for recording images goes up, so does our capacity for faking them. It might be that there’s a peak danger period (whether we’ve reached it, passed it, or it’s still in the future) where if a Masquerade can make it past then, video evidence will stop being credible enough to break it.
But.. in ancient history everyone tried to proof that they were “special”, godsend, divine or imbued with supernatural power, Divine right, blessed by the gods or the gods themselves if we take the pharaoh as an example. Vlad Tepes didn’t refused the monstuous nature his enemies designed because it was useful for him to be viewed as a supernatural monster. For a country as little as valachia all help to ward of Austrians and Otomans was welcomed.
I think you could have a story of hidden magic in historical times if you wanted to. For example, make your main characters part of a benign magical circle (maybe peasant witches) who have to hide from more powerful and sinister magic users that are aligned with official power structures (be it wordly government, religion or both).
It doesn’t have to be a full masquerade where most people don’t know that magic exists at all, but it would explain why your characters hide that they have magic.
It depends on what you want for your story. Even if a full masquerade might be less plausible, if you really want it, go for it! Just don’t draw attention to the unrealistic aspects and you’ll be fine.