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There's something to be said, here, about the need of humans to impose order on disorder and our fundamental inability to accept randomness, but that's hardly the point. The real point is knowing this common factor allows one to invent other rituals of prescience that are believable—at least, insofar as any of them are believable.
So, if one is going to write urban fantasy, one should introduce such rituals based on modern techniques. EVP has already made inroads in this direction. What randomness can be leveraged in such a work to provide the necessary rituals?
- Static
- Radio background
- Nuclear decay
- Laminar-flow turbulence
- Traffic patterns
- Lottery number selection—that is, selection when people buy tickets, not selection of the winning numbers.
Related, but separate. What if randomness is not random? What if probability is a function of our perception of the universe? If it can be manipulated like a field force?
"You look unconvinced, which isn't surprising. But it's because you haven't gotten it, yet. You don't understand. You're one of the people—and there are lots of them—who believe in neoMagery, but only because you've seen it work. You haven't taken the next step.
"You're like somebody who believes in gravity, but only because you've seen apples fall and hit scientists in the head. You haven't grasped it, internalized it, thought about it and its implications. You know apples fall and think you accept gravity, but until you can take the step to believing that planets orbit around stars, you still don't really get it.
"Think about it! There are plenty of rituals centuries—even millenia—old that purport to predict the future. It's one of the fundamental motivators for people to study magic in the first place. You've got to know about some of them. The Tarot, for example. Tea leaves, phrenology, the I Ching, that thing with the chicken guts. What do they all have in common? Randomness! They're all random! The reader pulls information out of non-information, interpreting the results of a randomizing event to predict the future. It's information creation—no, that's not it. It's information transformation. Information is lost, and new information is pulled from that loss.
"But once you understand that it's randomness that's the key, think about what the modern world has to offer that gypsies of old didn't have. Technology: computers! Radios! I don't know how many hundreds of mathematicians and computer scientists have dedicated how many thousands—tens of thousands—of hours to trying to generate pure randomness. Everything from the lottery to traffic lights depends on randomness.
"A Tarot deck has, what? 76 cards? 78? Say it's 78—156, since cards can be reversed. How many cards are dealt in a reading? Ten? Whatever. Say it's ten. Do you know, then, how many possible readings there are? If my mental math is right—and it is—it's on the order of ten to the twenty-first. One with twenty-one zeroes after it; one sextillion. So a Tarot reading is pretty much just picking a random number from one to a sextillion. Seems like a big number, doesn't it? And in fact, it is a big number.
"But give me a computer, and I can give you a random—perfectly random—number between one and a hundred sextillion. Or a hundred septillion—is that even the word? The point is, give me a size, and I'll give you a number. In fact, I'll give you scores of numbers. A Tarot reading of a hundred cards, a thousand cards, a million!"
The final refuge of arbitrarily long life: formality. Courtesy. Civility.
What if the world is simply consensual? That the historical revolutions in how we understand the world haven't changed our understanding, but have changed the world? This makes genius a fascinating thing. There are certain people in history who have fundamentally changed our understanding of things; what if they are geniuses not in recognizing what exists, but in causing it to be?
Consider the sort of mind and will one would need to overcome the collective unconscious, to defeat common belief in a belief-based world. Then crackpots are people with enough mental might to create their beliefs locally, while geniuses are people who can impose their beliefs on others. Perhaps Nicola Tesla had a death ray, but it only worked for him. Or on him.
Perhaps all those mediums (media?) actually could talk to the dead...until Houdini showed up.
Schrödinger's cat at all scales, and reflective of intent.
I wonder how localized it could be. Could you then have a world where, for the isolated tribe in the heart of undeveloped Brazil, all the old rituals worked but nuclear fission wouldn't? While, of course, the inverse would be true just a few thousand miles north?
Then the tendency of researchers to find confirmation of their existing beliefs isn't a psychological handicap, it's a natural consequence of reality.
Insofar as reality means anything in that sort of world.
Better yet, what if this is because reality—objective reality, which we will postulate for the time being does exist—is simply beyond the ability of humans to perceive? That all conflicting beliefs are simply dim reflections of reality, and we operate according to the frame of reference we impose on the unknowable. Relativity in all things. The sun moves around the earth and the earth moves around the sun, depending on your belief system; on your frame of reference. Both are equally wrong and right.
He was short, skinny, and almost as good as he thought he was.
If you would lead people, you must give them somewhere to go.
And there's a character for you, of the sort suffering from vague insanity. For him to be believably significant, he needs to have stature. A deposed king, or a grim conqueror of continents. He surrounds himself with things that are broken—not because he revels in flaw, but because he must believe that broken things may be mended. He demands there be value in that which is broken, and will therefore not discard it.