4E Flavor: history and philosophy of magic

[b]On The History Of Wizardry And Other Arcane Magic[/b]
Arcane magic works through the subversion of the natural world. Whether the gods intended that mortals harness minute eccentricities in the fabric of reality to bend the world to their whim is hotly debated by those with nothing better to do, but it's widely accepted that the workings of arcane power are largely unnatural. Not, perhaps, "unnatural" in the same sense ghosts and demons are (though the manipulation and summoning of both those things tends to be the province of arcane magic), but at the very least "unnatural" in the same sense that windmills and belt buckles are. To wield the blessings of the gods or channel the natural faculties of the spirits, one simply has to make the right friends. But a would-be spellcaster must be very clever... or very lucky, or very desperate.

[b]Sorcerers[/b]
Most scholars believe that the first arcane spellcasters were sorcerers. It's said that in ancient times, the world that Moradin forged had not fully cooled, and the energies of change and creation that the craftsman god wielded still crackled across the landscape, sometimes earthing themselves in people. Even absent the literal truth of such a mythic past, bizarre celestial events, freak magical phemonena, and interbreeding with supernatural creatures might all have resulted in mortals with extraordinary, innate powers. Ancient texts sometimes speak of folkloric heroes and villains whose blood seethed with crackling lightning or burning magma without making any mention of the spirits or gods, and such accounts are invoked to serve the argument that sorcery is an ancient, perhaps prehistoric phenomenon. Some do believe that sorcery is actually a recent occurrence, a mutation sparked by the magical fallout of a modern society in which wizardry is commonplace, but they are in a minority.

[b]Warlocks[/b]
Warlocks, too, are believed to originate in antiquity. To the layman, they resemble sorcerers, since both species of spellcaster basically amount to an apparently natural person who can wield supernatural powers as though they were innate capabilities. The educated expert will name two key differences:

Firstly, unlike that of a sorcerer, the power of a warlock is never inherited from forebears, kindled by some accident, or otherwise acquired unintentionally - there is always a pact.

For as long as there has been magic, there have been people without magic, individuals who coveted the power wielded by others all the more because they were born with none of their own. In the days of yore, when gods and spirits were the only source of magic, the warlock's pact served as a path to power for those who were shunned by the spirits, scorned by the temples, and bereft of supernatural ancestry. Even to one who had access to the mysteries of their culture's religious tradition, the pact held its own appeal - it required no diligence, no patience, no faith or (self)-sacrifice, merely the willingness to transgress. It's thanks to this that a fraction of pacts are struck out of desperate necessity, by people who need immediate power to ward off some threat or avenge some wrongdoing. The greatest difficulty is in finding how to strike a pact, and finding a patron to strike a pact with. The knowledge of such things is understandably hidden or destroyed by most who happen upon it, but has a way of working itself back into the mortal world and happening to fall under the eyes of those who seek it.

Secondly, unlike that of a sorcerer, the power of a warlock feeds on souls.

Perhaps some mortal souls (or all mortal souls, depending on who one asks) are incomplete, hollow, lacking in some vital organ or mechanical component that the immortal can supply. Or perhaps it's just the misfortune of the mortal species that many of the world's closest supernatural powers have the knack for ripping out pieces of a mortal soul and replacing them with something else. Either way, the warlock's pact is the first and most quintessential example of the chimericist heresy; it transforms the participant into something unnatural, an extension of the terrible creature it has sworn a pact to. The warlock becomes something like its patron's extruded feeding appendage, a soul-reaver; it latches instinctively onto the life-force of its rivals as it works its magic, drinking down the spirits of fallen foes both to power itself and to pay tribute to its patron.

Early texts attributed to historical figures who fought or had dealings with warlocks have contained descriptions like "and he looked upon his brother, and saw that he was hollow now, a human skin stretched across one of faerie's grinning, fang-ed mouths". This leads researchers to believe that even cultures predating the organized study of arcane magic were aware of the dangers of the warlock pact. There is much disagreement on just how literally such narratives should be taken; some claim that the warlocks that legend describes as feral, ravenous monsters or walking gateways to the Hells are victims of poetic license, but others infer that the warlock tradition has evolved over time just as any other would, and that the ancient pacts carried with them many more traps and pitfalls for the pactee than the carefully vetted, cleaned-up and optimized invocations used in contemporary times.

Either way, it is no coincidence that "warlock" translates to "oathbreaker" in a number of ancient languages; to become one is to shatter one's bonds to mortal society, to forsake kinship with one's fellow mortals.

[b]Witches[/b]
As nightmarish as the warlock's pact is, it may have laid the groundwork for wizardry. The magics which call forth the attention of a pact patron are not precisely the same as those which actually graft a patron's power onto a petitioner's soul. Some would-be spellcasters began to experiment with the ritual, establishing a channel of communication with alien intelligences without going as far to swear the warlock's pact. Instead of requesting power directly, witches bargained for knowledge, aiming to learn the secrets of the patrons' power so that that power might be replicated. Of course, a single ritual-fueled dialogue, even with a supernatural, extraplanar intelligence, is simply not enough to allow a seeker to begin casting spells. What witches bargained for was steady, continuous access to magical knowledge, a dependable source of tutelage that would persist beyond the ritual of bargaining. They received familiars, enchanted creatures or objects bound to the witch's soul that could provide both the power and knowledge required for their master to learn to cast spells on their own.

It must be said that witches, especially in the beginning of that magical tradition, did not fare much better than warlocks did in terms of the price they paid for power. Many of them consigned their own souls to Hell or Faerie in exchange for their familiars, or were forced to offer human sacrifice or some other blasphemy to their otherworldly patrons before those patrons would grant them the knowledge they sought. But the knowledge was granted, and unlike the direct and personal transfiguration of the soul produced by the warlock pact, the knowledge could be passed on.

The spells witches learned from their familiars were, in the beginning, quite meager compared to the awesome and terrifying powers that warlocks and sorcerers could bring to bear, but they were understandable, repeatable, and teachable. The great secret discovered by the tradition of witchcraft was that the world was not so immutable as it seemed - that, owing either to hidden strengths in the mortal soul or hidden flaws in the fabric of reality, a perfectly ordinary person could work miracles. All it took was the right word, enunciated in the right way, accompanied by the right gesture, at the right time of day, on the right day of the week, facing in the right cardinal direction...

Actually, the whole business was nastily difficult. Familiars were happy to explain to their masters how to work specific spells that the terms of their summoning bound them to teach but notoriously unhelpful when it came to explaining the larger framework. Intense experimentation and collaboration between witches' covens allowed arcanists to begin to piece together and make sense of the bizarre and arbitrary rules by which magic worked, until at last practitioners had accumulated a critical mass of knowledge great enough to allow them to begin to devise entirely new spells without any reliance whatsoever on supernatural guidance. This knowledge base necessarily meant that familiars had to offer more and more, and witches less and less, to make a supernatural bargain worth striking, and even that newly-trained witches might not have to rely on heretical bargains with unfathomable monsters at any point, instead using what magic they'd learned from their mentors to summon forth or create a familiar of their own.

It also meant that, in theory, one might not need a familiar at all - that arcane knowledge could be collected, refined, and passed on by mortals alone.

[b]Wizards[/b]
Sorcerers are born, warlocks are made, but wizards are taught. It's strongly held by some that the ancient tradition of witchcraft had nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of wizardry and was indeed a pale imitation of it, that the secrets of magic were passed on to mortals by the gods (usually Corellon or Ioun) or their angels, or that some genius somewhere derived wizardry completely from observation and first principles. Whatever the relation, magic as a teachable skill represented an enormous paradigm shift. Once the cat was out of the bag, arcane magic could spread through the world like wildfire, leaping from mind to mind across the conducting medium of ink and parchment... in theory, anyway. In practice, the secrets of magic were now a valuable commodity, to be traded, hoarded, and fought over.

Historians cannot point to any particular place or time as the definitive origin point of wizardry. Hypotheses clash constantly with each other within the academic world, placing the first "true" wizard or wizards in this ancient witches' coven or that one, in one early nation-state or another. Some theorists go so far as supposing that organized magic was first developed in a legendary, hyper-advanced civilization predating all recorded cultures, one that either destroyed itself or ascended to a higher plane while seeding the rest of the world with the arcane secrets. Whatever its absolute beginnings, early wizardry was fractious, scattered, and petty. Mages jealously guarded the secrets of whatever spells or rituals they'd managed to acquire for themselves while scheming to steal the knowledge of their rivals, all despite (or perhaps because of) the general weakness of wizard magic at the time.

As time went on, it became clear that the most powerful wizards were those with the most opportunity to work closely with other wizards. Collaboration allowed the creation and deployment of spells leagues ahead of the standard; it was a common occurrence for the independently researched and tightly guarded signature spells of two former rivals to not only turn out to work similarly but to improve drastically in function when informed by each other. The skills of lone practitioners fell to the wayside compared to those who took students, master-apprentice pairings could not truly compete against tight-knit cabals, and the spells of small cabals paled in comparison to those developed by entire circles of mages working in tandem. It's this progression which produced, eventually, the wizard's academy, an institution of magical learning whose existence (theoretically) transcends that of any individual member.

Of course, wizards remain fractious and competitive both within and between academies. Plenty of magical wars have charred themselves into the annals of history, conflicts that sprung up between different academies for either occult or personal reasons that had nothing to do with the larger political entities of the time. Within academies, rivalries have raged for generations because of disagreements both pointlessly abstract and embarrassingly petty, and more than one place of learning has literally destroyed itself thanks to the titanic egoes that the study of magic usually attracts.

Nevertheless, the profession of wizardry grows and thrives, and in the modern world wizardry represents what magic is to the general populace.

[b]Artificers, Bladesingers, Swordmages...[/b]
Many magical traditions have arisen from the framework that modern wizardry provides. When spells can can be envisioned and designed according to their desired function, then recorded in teaching materials and passed on through instruction, specialized bodies of magical effects can be built to serve almost any imaginable purpose. An artificer, for instance, is technically a wizard, in that they practice formal, intellectual magic which is either taught or discovered through diligent research and does not depend on the intrinsic supernatural characteristics of the practitioner... but an artificer's combination of that magic with medicine and machinery, combined with the fact that artificers largely eschew the practice of keeping spellbooks, means that actually calling an artificer a wizard on a regular basis would lead only to confusion. Similarly, while no swordmage spell involves a specific magical effect that a determined wizard could not reproduce, the skill set required to actually use sword-magic in a combat situation is so nuanced and specialized that a classically-trained wizard would probably get themselves killed if they tried to employ it.

[b]Bards[/b]
Bards are a bit of an oddity, and the most difficult tradition of arcane magic to truly pin down. In fact, there is no singular bardic tradition. They demonstratably wield arcane magic, but not always visibly, not always intellectually, and often not even consciously - yet at the same time, sorcerous power does not roil in their blood, and eldritch pacts don't writhe in their souls. Some bards actually are wizards, or were, and simply have developed such an intuitive facility for a particular style of magic that they no longer use it according to the formal structure taught in wizard's academies. Others seem to have been blessed with magic for their musical or oratory skill, or simply their raw gumption, except they report no specific moment of exaltation and no meeting with any sort of supernatural entity. Many scholars point to the Feywild to explain bards' existence, and indeed there are some bards with obviously close ties to that place, but plenty more whose power seems to be entirely of the human, material world. Others argue that it is the thorough taming of arcane magic by generations upon generations of wizards that has allowed bards to exist - that the powers of the cosmos have been so thoroughly bent to the mortal will that they have begun to serve (certain) people naturally. This is at odds, however, with recordings of historical figures who could have easily been bards as contemporary arcanists understand them. Ultimately, as there is no still no single, unified theory of arcane magic, there is no definitive summation of what allows for bardic magic. There is only the general acknowledgement of the fact that the mortal capacity for creativity, improvisation, and storytelling must be great indeed that sometimes magic itself takes notice.

[b]Why Magic?[/b]
Among wizards, the question of why magic functions is hotly debated. Natural philosophers and alchemists have made great headway into discovering the rules by which the undisturbed universe functions, but the reasons why this function can be so predictably disrupted by the right kind of person concentrating hard is often unclear. There are several schools of thought as to the underpinnings of thaumaturgy:

[b]Atomism:[/b] Sometimes referred to as mechanists or fundamentalists, many wizards postulate that the entirety of the universe is composed of a single substance which is responsive to sapient thought. This substance is most popularly referred to as "quintessence," and the atomists postulate that all phenomena encountered by sapient beings at the macro level (trees, rocks, shadows, minutes, love) are constructs of focused quintessence organized into self-perpetuating patterns. As the mind is a natural channel for quintessence, all magic really requires is that the practitioner memorize the pattern that constitutes some phenomenon (fire, say) and will enough quintessence through that pattern to cause it to spring to life.

Rituals work by freeing quintessence from patterns it's naturally locked in and then shaping the resultant "mana" (high-energy quintessence, prime for reformatting) before it dissipates or congeals. The alchemical reagents or rare herbs that power ritual magic are simply those substances which experiment has shown yield up their stores of quintessence easily. Since quintessence can absorb and retain "resonance" (the most subtle qualities of the Pattern it occupies - harmonics or tessellations within the quintessence that can remain even when it's been nominally released into mana), certain rituals demand quintessence of certain origin to power them. Residuum, of course, is quintessence deliberately calcified into a neutral state, easily unpacked into mana free of any lingering resonance qualities.

Wizards skilled enough to actually cast spells rather than simply work rituals are individuals who've developed enough focus and memory to be able to draw ambient quintessence out of the world around them and fashion it into a pattern immediately. The atomists point to sorcerers as obvious examples as quintessence theory in action - individuals who happen to act as unconscious channels of pure universal power, their spells colored by the basic resonance of the energies they've most commonly absorbed. Atomist wizards tend to excel at straightforward battle-magic and conjuration, and can find stranger spells more difficult to grasp. Atomism provides an excellent framework within which to produce fire or stone from nothing, but tends to produce equations of staggering complexity when put to the task of cursing someone with misfortune or reversing the flow of time.

There is much discourse within atomist conclaves of wizardry as to the precise origins and properties of quintessence, and why it responds to human will. It's generally believed that the sapient races can affect quintessence with their thoughts because sapience is divinely-gifted and it's in the nature of the gods to shape the world with their will, but questions as to how the gods gained that ability or where quintessence came from at all are much thornier. The atomists generally concern themselves with more practical studies into the nature of the universe, cataloging what patterns produce what phenomena, studying the ways in which quintessence patterns evolve when left undisturbed, and noting the most expedient ways by which the raw substance of reality can be gathered or stored.

Atomism is practiced in wizard academies all over the world, and is often the first kind of magical theory an apprentice learns. Atomist wizards most often revere Ioun, Melora. or Moradin above the other gods and practice magic diagrammatically and somatically.

[b]The Imperial School:[/b] Simultaneously the most reverent and irreligious of magical theorists, wizards of the Imperial School reason that it is in the nature of the world to bend to the minds of its inhabitants. They are unlike the atomists in that they do not generally seek or require a mechanistic explanation for this behavior, and unlike the mystics of the spiral tower in that they certainly believe in a coherent reality that exists separately from its inhabitants. The meritocrats  conceive of magic as a chess match or a battlefield: the laws of the universe are merely a challenge to overcome, and if a single man can overcome a hydra with nothing but gumption and a piece of sharpened metal, there's no reason a single man couldn't overcome gravity with gumption and a piece of polished crystal. In short, power is there for the taking because that's simply how the universe works.

The Imperial School doesn't dismiss scholarship, mysticism, or supernatural phenomena in general; it just sees these things as fundamentally exploitable. It's entirely true that a certain somatic gesture produces flames when performed properly or that a certain ritual chant enables teleportation, but [i]why[/i] a given word, symbol, or hand gesture produces a magical effect is probably nothing more than a conscious or accidental artifact of the gods' creation of the world, and the explanation almost certainly varies from one piece of occult lore to the other. The measure of a wizard is his or her ability to grasp these disparate elements and use them to master the rest of the world. When the mages of the Imperial School entertain existential questions, they generally wonder [i]why[/i] it is that the world is ordered in such a way that true magical power results from the exercise of heroism. Some believe that it is by divine mandate that they are empowered to conquer the world while others care not a whit. Regrettably, the arcane spellcasters most emblematic of the Imperial School are probably warlocks; as unsavory as the mystics are and as bizarre as the energies they command can be, there is no doubt that their power is the result of reaching out and seizing what others could not.

The Imperial School is a very flexible conception of magic, easily adapted to suit whatever spellcasting repertoire its adherent desires. On the other hand, its lack of an underlying metaphysical scheme more complex than the word "booya" means that it does not necessarily make for adaptable wizards. An imperial mage might specialize in conjuring fire as easily as in controlling minds, but the pyromancer would not have an easy time giving putting aside his hard-won mastery over fire to snatch mesmeric powers from the universe's jaws instead.

The Imperial School is common both in the Realms and in the Newer Lands, though it tends to take on different flavors in each locale - it is an outgrowth of the practically inborn will to power in the former but more a manifestation of scrappy, can-do pragmatism and tenaciousness in the latter. Mages of the Imperial School tend to worship Avandra, Erathis, and Kord if they worship any gods at all. Their magic is loud, vibrant, and flashy, replete with bold gestures and thunderous incantations.

[b]The Spiral Tower:[/b] The dreamers of the Spiral Tower claim that magic works because the world as we know it is a story, and stories can be rewritten by the canny. Ostensibly an even more comprehensive hypothesis than atomism, the Spiral Tower holds not that all objects and ideas are manifestations of some fundamental force but that mythic elements themselves are the basic building blocks of reality. A person is an actor, a fire is a prop, and what looks like causality and determinism is merely the script of the play. Those who observe the Spiral Tower from without tend to assume that its adherents are merely profligate users of metaphor, but soon learn that the opposite is true; the greater a mage's absorption into the Spiral Tower, the less that mage sees the world and the more that mage sees the Dream.

Spiral wizards see arcane spellcasting as an activity fundamentally divorced from ritual magic or any other sort of supernatural power. To cast a ritual or evoke a primal spirit is to accept the reality of the Dream; alchemical formulae and even the power of spirits or demons s part of the Dream, and the Dream unfolding as it naturally does is nothing of real consequence. To cast a spell, though, to reach out and reweave the universe into accordance with one's desires through the medium of one's cunning, is something more. Most of the world's denizens are sleepers, passively bobbing along in the currents of the universal narrative, but wizards and other arcane spellcasters are lucid dreamers, aware of the fundamental unreality of the world they inhabit and so able to reweave it. The actual minutiae of wizardry - wands and spellbooks, chants and gestures - are essentially props and ornamentation to the wizards of the Spiral Tower, who generally cultivate the ability to shape the dream around them with nothing more than silent, graceful will. Bards are perhaps the clearest example of the Spiral Tower philosophy in action - scholarship or iron focus often have no part in their magical workings, yet the power of their magic is undeniable. Wizards of the Spiral Tower hold that the power of the bards is the power of stories; the Dream reshapes itself around the songs of the bards because they show it how to become more beautiful.

Who, exactly, is the dreamer of the Dream? What would it mean to "wake up"? Is it desirable, or even possible? Though they don't claim this loudly and tend to expect their students to absorb the notion through osmosis more so than instruction, most wizards of the Spiral Tower believe even the gods to be nothing more than subjects of the Dream, merely elements in a winding, quasi-real story whose genesis or ultimate conclusion is beyond any participant's comprehension. Unlike most philosophies of of magic, the Spiral Tower teaches a relaxed, philosophical acceptance of the vicissitudes of reality; its spellcasting is an intuitive activity almost wholly alien to the rigid calculations of the atomists or the fierce invocations of the imperialists. To Shape the Dream is not exploit or roughly countermand the workings of the world, but to subsume one's self within them and so become an active participant in their unfolding.

The Spiral Tower's philosophy is difficult to get one's head around and even more difficult to completely internalize; wizards are adept at understanding esoteric concepts, but rarely so proficient at fully absorbing and [i]believing[/i] them. Nevertheless, there are clear benefits to the Spiral Tower path - its walkers it cast spells with a fluid, effortless grace that is often completely baffling to wizards whose magic involves hours of tedious study or exhausting feats of concentration. An atomist might write pages and pages of equations to describe the exact patterns that magical energy must flow through to finally coalesce into a horselike creature... but a mage of the Spiral Tower simply dreams up A Horse, and that's the end of it.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of mages on the Spiral Tower path are Eladrin, though wizards of all species have subscribed to this school. Esoteric and ineffable as the Spiral Tower philosophy is, it has never been popular, and tends to either manifest in tight-knit cabals hidden away within more mainstream centers of magical study or in secret enclaves removed completely from the majority of the magical world. Adherents of the Spiral Tower most often revere Corellon and Sehanine, and work magic so subtly that they often seem to not be casting spells at all; the world simply reshapes itself around them.

[b]Relations Between Schools:[/b] The philosophies described here represent prevailing attitudes more so than bodies of law, and it's not uncommon for eclectic wizards to borrow elements from more than one in their personal mental models of the workings of magic. Clearly, atomists and dreamers are capable of casting the exact same spells with equal effectiveness, so at some level they are doing the same thing... but which one has truly gotten to the heart of magic and which one can't see the forest for the trees is very hard to discern, and an imperialist doesn't care. Particularly dogmatic adherents of one school or another will generally claim that a mage trained in a different tradition is [i]really[/i] doing magic in the dogmatist's way and simply obfuscating his methods, even from himself. More generous students of the Art assume that even the most wildly divergent theories are both accurate ways of looking at the same thing, or incomplete descriptions of some greater truth as yet undiscovered.