magician

Historical background

Historically, witches such as the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, wizards such as Prospero in The Tempest, or other characters like Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's play of the same name were widely considered to be engaging in real-world or realistic magic. Contemporary authors tend to treat magic as an imaginary idea, opting to build their worlds with a blank slate where the laws of reality do not carry as much weight.

Function

Within a work of fantasy, magic can help to advance the plot, often providing power to heroes or to their opponents. The use of magic frequently manifests itself in a transformation of a character, if not the transformation of the fictional world.

Fictional magic may or may not include a detailed magic system, but it is not uncommon for authors to omit details or explanations of certain limitations, ostensibly for pacing or other purposes; in these cases, it is possible that magic serves more as a convenience to the author rather than as a device for the character.

In nearly any given fantasy magical system, magical ability is limited. Limitations can add conflict to the story and prevent characters from becoming all-powerful with magic, although characters with unlimited power (such as deities or transcendental beings) are not unheard of in fiction. Fantasy writers use a variety of techniques to limit the magic in their stories, such as limiting the number of spells a character has or may cast before needing rest, restricting a character's magic to the use of a specific object, limiting magic to the use of certain rare materials, or restricting the magic a character can use through its negative consequences.

It's common for magic to be performed through the use of certain words or incantations to cast spells. While many works use this method without offering an explanation for it, others do offer an explanation.

Hard magic is a magic system with specific rules and regulations; a soft magic system is usually much more vague and undefined with a mysterious aspect to it.

Introduction into the story

Authors introduce magic into their stories, and to their characters, in varying ways. Although there is great variation in how spontaneously magic occurs, how difficult it is to wield, and how the guidelines to the magic are implemented, there are a handful of methods for introducing magic found in many fictional works. While some fantasy works such as Hellblazer portray magic as a power gained through a pact with a devil or other spirit (as is traditionally recognized in folklore), others like Harry Potter portray magic as an innate talent, equivalent for example to perfect pitch.

Common tropes

Appearance

Due to their traditional image as a wise old man or wise old woman, magicians may be depicted as old, white-haired, and in some instances with their hair (and in the case of male wizards, beards), being long and majestic enough to occasionally host lurking woodland creatures. This depiction predates the modern fantasy genre, being derived from the traditional image of wizards such as Merlin.

Several golden hats adorned with astronomical sequences have been found in Europe. It has been speculated by archaeologists and historians that they were worn by ancient wizards. The similarities shared with a fantasy magician's hat shape may mean that it is ultimately derived from them.

In fantasy, a magician may be shown wearing a pointed hat, robes, and/or a cloak. They may be accompanied by a familiar and possess magical objects such as wands, amulets, or broomsticks. In more modern stories, a magician may be dressed similarly to a stage magician, wearing a top hat and tails, with an optional cape.

Terry Pratchett described robes as a magician's way of establishing to those they meet that they are capable of practicing magic.

In the Dragonlance campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, wizards show their moral alignment by the colour of their robes.

Items

In some works, such as fairy tales, magic items either endow the main characters with magical powers or have magical powers themselves. Writers often use them as plot devices or MacGuffins to drive the plot of a story.

Wands and staves have long been used as requirements for the magician. Possibly derived from wand-like implements used in fertility rituals, such as apotropaic wands, the earliest known instance of the modern magical wand was featured in the Odyssey, used by Circe to transform Odysseus's men into animals. Italian fairy tales put wands into the hands of powerful fairies by the Late Middle Ages. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf refuses to surrender his own staff, breaking Saruman's, which strips the latter of his power. This dependency on a particular magical item is common, and necessary to limit the magician's power for the story's sake – without it, the magician's powers may be weakened or absent entirely.

Talismans such as rings or amulets may exert magical influence.

Seven-league boots and invisibility cloaks have also proven popular. Many characters are often seen using magic swords or other weapons. A magician's crystal ball is a crystal or glass ball commonly associated with clairvoyance, fortune-telling, or scrying.

Education

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, wizards already possess innate magic abilities, but require enrollment in Wizarding Schools in order to develop their skills and practice magic properly. Harry Potter popularized the “magic school” setting, but it is common enough to occur in settings where magic is instead a learned talent involving the study of ancient texts or mastery of magic tools. Ancient tomes such as grimoires fit both niches, as they often have magical properties of their own.

Limits

To introduce conflict, writers of fantasy fiction often place limits on the magical abilities of magicians to prevent them from solving problems too easily. A common motif in fiction is that the ability to use magic is innate and often rare, or gained through a large amount of study and practice. The extent of a magician's knowledge is limited to which spells a wizard knows and can cast. Magic may also be limited by its danger; if a powerful spell can cause grave harm if miscast, magicians are likely to be wary of using it. Other forms of magic are limited by consequences that, while not inherently dangerous, are at least undesirable. In A Wizard of Earthsea, every act of magic distorts the equilibrium of the world, which in turn has far-reaching consequences that can affect the entire world and everything in it. As a result, competent wizards do not use their magic frivolously.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, magic is mostly limited to non-humans, such as the Istari (more commonly known as wizards), or elves crafting magical items. A common limit invented by Jack Vance in his The Dying Earth series, and later popularized in role-playing games is that a wizard can only cast a specific number of spells in a day. In Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, once an area's mana is exhausted, no one can use magic.

Magic may require rare and precious materials, such as rare herbs or flowers (often selected by prescribed rituals), minerals or metals such as mercury, parts of creatures such as the eye of a newt, or even fantastic ingredients like the cool of a soft breeze on a summer's day. Even if the magician lacks scruples, obtaining the materials in question may be difficult. This can vary by fantasy work; many magicians may require no materials at all.

Society

Many magicians live in pseudo-medieval settings in which their magic is not put to practical use in society; they may serve as mentors, act as quest companions, or even go on a quest themselves, but their magic does not build roads or buildings, provide immunizations, construct indoor plumbing, or do any of the other functions served by machinery; their worlds remain at a medieval level of technology.

Sometimes this is justified by having the negative effects of magic outweigh the positive possibilities. In Barbara Hambley's Windrose Chronicles, wizards are precisely pledged not to interfere because of the terrible damage they can do. In Discworld, the importance of wizards is that they actively do not do magic, because when wizards have access to sufficient "thaumaturgic energy", they develop many psychotic attributes and may eventually destroy the world. This may be a direct effect or the result of a miscast spell wreaking terrible havoc.

In practical terms, the powers given from magic may give the characters authority; magicians may advise kings, such as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Belgarath and Polgara the Sorceress in David Eddings's The Belgariad. They may be rulers themselves, as in E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, where both the heroes and the villains, although kings and lords, supplement their physical power with magical knowledge, or as in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, where magicians are the governing class. On the other hand, magicians often live like hermits, isolated in their towers and often in the wilderness, bringing no change to society. In some works, such as many of Barbara Hambly's, they are despised and outcast specifically because of their knowledge and powers.

In the magic-noir world of the Dresden Files, wizards generally keep a low profile, though there is no explicit prohibition against interacting openly with non-magical humanity. The protagonist of the series, Harry Dresden, openly advertises in the Yellow Pages under the heading "Wizard" and maintains a business office, though other wizards tend to resent him for practicing his craft openly. Dresden primarily uses his magic to make a living finding lost items and people, performing exorcisms, and providing protection against the supernatural.

In the series Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, human forms of life should have only been capable of acquiring divine magic powers through individual spiritual development, whereas the race of human magicians with inborn magical ability ended in conflict with pureblood human society, because this race appeared as a result of an experiment of mixing humans with non-human sentient Heavenly Beings that acquired magic powers not through spiritual development, but through deep studying of laws of nature and by falsely causing the world's laws to react to actions of the Heavenly Beings as to actions of Divinities.

Character archetypes

A magician is someone who uses or practices magic derived from supernatural, occult, or arcane sources. Magicians enjoy a rich history in mythology, legends and folklore, and are common figures in works of fantasy, such as fantasy literature (as well as comics and animations adopted from it) and role-playing games.

People who work magic are called by several magic user names in fantasy works, and terminology differs widely from one fantasy world to another. While derived from real-world vocabulary, the terms magician, mage, magus, enchanter/enchantress, sorcerer/sorceress, warlock, witch, and wizard, each have different meanings depending upon context and the story in question.

Mage

In many fantasy settings, a mage is a general term for a user of magic, or may be a term for a generalist spellcaster. The word mage (and its doublet word "magus") is derived from the Latin magus and, potentially, from the Iranian word for a Zoroastrian priest ("Magi"). An archmage, with the prefix "arch-" meaning "a title in a hierarchy which indicates a higher degree of rank", is used in many fantasy works to indicate a powerful mage or a leader of mages.

Enchanter

Enchanters typically practice a type of imbued magic that produces no permanent effects on objects or people and are temporary, or of an indefinite duration, or which may require some item or act, to nullify or reverse. The female version of the enchanter is called an enchantress. For example, this could include enchanting a weapon or tool to be more (or less) effective, enchanting a person or object to have a changed shape or appearance, creating illusions intended to deceive the observer, compelling a person to perform an action they might not normally do, or attempting to charm or seduce someone. For instance, the Lady of the Green Kirtle in C. S. Lewis's The Silver Chair is an enchantress who can transform herself into a large green serpent. She also enchants Rilian, compelling him to forget his father and Narnia. And when that enchantment is broken, she attempts further enchantments with a sweet-smelling smoke and a thrumming musical instrument to attempt to baffle him and his rescuers into forgetting them again.

Sorcerer

The term sorcerer has moved from meaning a fortune-teller, or "one who alters fate", to meaning a practitioner of magic who can alter reality. A female version of a sorcerer is a sorceress. They are also sometimes shown as able to conjure supernatural beings or spirits, or to "animate" inanimate objects, such as in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Due to this perception of their powers, this character may be depicted as feared, or even seen as evil. Villainous sorcerers were so crucial to pulp fantasy that the genre in which they appeared was dubbed "sword and sorcery", where typically the hero (or anti-hero) would be the sword-wielder, thus leaving the sorcery for his opponent.

Witch

Witch (an often female practitioner of witchcraft) and wicked (an adjective meaning "bad, evil, false") are both derivative terms from the word, wicca (an Old English word with varied meanings, including soothsayer, astrologer, herbalist, poisoner, seductress, or devotee of supernatural beings or spirits). L. Frank Baum combined these terms in naming the Wicked Witch of the West, and other witches in the Land of Oz. Baum named Glinda the "Good Witch of the South" in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In The Marvelous Land of Oz, he dubbed her "Glinda the Good," and from that point forward and in subsequent books, Baum referred to her as a sorceress rather than a witch to avoid the term that was more regarded as evil. While the term “Cunning Folk” is historically how magicians fitting the “good witch” archetype are addressed, modern fiction uses the term “witch” for malevolent, benevolent, and neutral characters alike. This is most notable in literature such as the Harry Potter book series by J. K. Rowling, where “witch” is used as the feminine form of “wizard”. Outside of Harry Potter, the term warlock is often used to denote a male practitioner of witchcraft.

Wizard

In medieval chivalric romance, the wizard often appears as a wise old man and acts as a mentor, with Merlin from the King Arthur stories being a prime example as well as also working for King Arthur as a court wizard (another word for court magician). Wizards such as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Albus Dumbledore from Harry Potter are also featured as mentors, and Merlin remains prominent as both an educative force and mentor in the modern works of Arthuriana. While many fictions and literature often use the term "witch" as a feminine form of "wizard", a rare feminine term for a female wizard is "wizardess".

Wizards can be cast similarly to the absent-minded professor: being foolish and prone to misconjuring. They can also be capable of great magic, both good and evil. Even comical magicians are often capable of great feats, such as those of Miracle Max in The Princess Bride; although he is a washed-up wizard fired by the villain, he saves the dying hero. Other wizards, such as Saruman from The Lord of the Rings or Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, can appear as hostile villains.

Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea explored the question of how wizards learned their art, introducing to modern fantasy the role of the wizard as the protagonist. This theme has been further developed in modern fantasy, often leading to wizards as heroes on their own quests. Such heroes may have their own mentor, a wizard as well.

By medium

In role-playing games

Magicians in role-playing games often use names borrowed from fiction, myth and legend. They are typically delineated and named so that the game's players and game masters can know which rules apply. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson introduced the term "magic-user" in the original Dungeons & Dragons as a generic term for a practitioner of magic (in order to avoid the connotations of terms such as wizard or warlock); this lasted until the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where it was replaced with mage (later to become wizard). The exact rules vary from game to game. The wizard or mage, as a character class, is distinguished by the ability to cast certain kinds of magic learned from spellbooks, while being vulnerable in direct combat; sub-classes are distinguished by strengths in some areas of magic and weakness in others.

Sorcerers are distinguished from wizards as having an innate gift with magic, as well as having mystical or magical ancestry.

Warlocks are distinguished from wizards as creating forbidden "pacts" with powerful creatures to harness their innate magical gifts, similarly to clerics and paladins, who are empowered through divine and deific sources to perform thaumaturgical feats, while druids and rangers draw power from nature and the elements. Bards, on the other hand, are similar to wizards in learning magical abilities as scholarly practices, but differ in their power being tied to artistic expression rather than arcane knowledge.