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| Do you believe in magic, magic? |
Mage,
magus, enchanter, sorcerer, shaman, kalku, bomoh, wizard, warlock.
With
so many synonyms for essentially the same thing, a magic-user, it can be overwhelming
for a writer to know just how to choose!
Spell-chuckers are great, because they bend and break rules that
otherwise requires a Keanu Reeves-level of suspension of disbelief to
occur.
Need
a rainbow bridge to span a bottomless chasm to get to the treasure room on the
other side? That’s a job for an
enchanter!
How
about a bit of sourceless glowing to light the gloom of a dark labyrinth? Lumous!
A kindly wizard will guide your way.
How
about asking a pile of bones the blind spots and safety points of a lair so
your ragtag band of heroes can tiptoe past a sleeping dragon and through the
Portal of Times? Necromancy is your goto
house of magic!
Really,
spell-chuckers can be called whatever the writer wants them to be. Names can be important, especially to give the
story a bit of flavor for the archaic.
But really a magic-user by any other name would still defy the laws of
physics.
Still,
it might help to have an etymological/traditional breakdowns of some of the
major power-wielders who hang out at the docks, waiting for a quest:
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| You could have just used the door. |
Witch is taken from
the Old English wicca for a male
practitioner of the magic, and wicce
for a female. In modern use, "witch" is for female magic-users and
"warlock" for males, but really there's no difference. They both need weigh less than a duck and
need to be burned at the stake.
Wizard is from Middle
English "wys" meaning "wise" and "ard" meaning
"art". Those clever junior
high classes! At one point a wizard was
considered someone (usually a man) very learned in a vast number of studies,
such that he (bastard) probably seemed to have (or claimed to have) magical
abilities. Really, what he (bastard) was
just blinding the unwashed masses with SCIENCE.
Magician comes from the
Greek "magos" and Persian "magush" as priests, by
definition, have power derived from the gods/goddesses. This developed into the
Latin "magus" (singular form) and "magi" (plural), and later
dropped the religious aspects except for that O. Henry story where the wife
totally pulls one over on her husband.
Hair will always grow back, you fool!
Sorcerer/sorceress is derived from
their use of "sorcery" (obviously) which comes from the Latin
"sortiarius", specifically someone who tells fortunes from lots. Not the vacant kind, but the ones you would cast
made from sticks, bones, bits of rubbish.
Whatever. Because of the use of other powers then the Christian god,
sorcery generally has negative connotations, which is why today David
Copperfield is called a “magician” and not a “sorcerer”.
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| How? With magic . . . mutha'f*&$#@! |
Necromancer
is
actually one of the easier ones, which may or may not gross you out. It comes from the Latin necromantia, which means “divination from dead bodies” which comes
from the Greek nekromanteia, nekros meaning
“dead” and manteia meaning “divination”. Pretty straight forward. If it’s dead, these folks have power over
it. Which does nothing to explain the
Necromongers from that Riddick movie.
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| Lord, don't it feel good to be a Necromonger! |
That’s
what makes it all so much fun.
Who do you consider to have it all? The sorcerer? The magician? Male aes sedai?
ReplyDeleteTricky, considering the myriad of systems that exist out there. If we look at some of the major ones, like Rowling and Jordan: both claim that death can't be healed. It's a permanent state. But for D&D enthusiasts and the worlds inspired by them (like Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame), death isn't so permanent. It's possible, though extremely rare, to overcome it. In such a case, then, I'd have to go with a cleric having the greatest potential source of power; with heavy emphasis on "potential'. After all, this is someone who is in direct communication with their god.
ReplyDeleteBut I'd certainly be open to debating the question.