Valinard's Tower

Humans are social animals. Our big brains are optimised for navigating social environments, for worrying what people think of us, for dealing with questions of cooperation, negotiation, duty and shame. We’re prone to mass hysteria and tabu. Our thought processes are skewed by the moods of those around us.

Attanasio writes that the first act of human imagination was the immortality of the soul. I’m not sure this is true. I would guess instead that the first act of imagination – and the origin of what we call magic, both in fiction and in the practice of various real-life wizards and occultists – was animism, the perception of the material and natural world as a social environment.

All magic arises from this personalisation of the world. Any transformative process without this personal, social element is necessarily science, and not magic – simply an observable, repeatable feature of the world.

Cernunnos & Once Upon a Midnight Dreary by IrenHorrors

The magic of wizards and magic-users is the magic of language and symbols. As noted real world wizard Alan Moore writes:

“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness.”

Wizardly magic in D&D is legalistic in a way: You invoke the correct symbols, channel the required energies, and the universe is obliged to deliver up a certain result, whether a Fireball or a Floating Disc. It’s social, but in the sense that a trip to the DMV is social; the Wizard is a Wizard because he knows all the correct forms.

Clerical or what could be called shamanic magic is more directly social; it’s about treating the universe, or an aspect of the universe, as a person, and negotiating as we would between two people.

The cleric receives the power to heal and turn undead by following the tenets of their faith; the archetypal shaman invokes and appeases spirits; the Warlock makes an explicit, quid pro quo pact with a higher power.

That the D&D cleric is also an armed and armoured holy warrior is an historical quirk, but it’s interesting to think about reasons why the ‘negotiator’ class might have more need of physical violence than the ‘lawyer’.

It’s these characterisations I bear in mind when designing the classes for my system, and why I’ve chosen to emphasise the spellbook as the essence of wizardly might, and pacts, bonds, geases and vows as the source of the cleric’s power.