Magician (fantasy)

, from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) People who work magic are called by several 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. 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. 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. In modern fiction, a witch may be depicted more neutrally, such as the female witches (comparable to the male wizards) in the Harry Potter'' series of books by J. K. Rowling. 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. 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. 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. Other wizards, such as Saruman from The Lord of the Rings or Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, can appear as hostile villains. 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. 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. ==Appearance==

, circa 1,400-1,300 BC, Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, Germany. 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. 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. Magical implements '' by John William Waterhouse (1902): showing implements used for magical purposes; the crystal, a book, a skull, and a wand A magician's crystal ball is a crystal or glass ball commonly associated with clairvoyance, fortune-telling, or scrying. Wands and staves have long been used as requirements for the magician. Today, magical wands are widespread in literature and are used from Witch World to Harry Potter. 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. In the Harry Potter universe, a wizard must expend much greater effort and concentration to use magic without a wand, and only a few can control magic without one; taking away a wizard's wand in battle essentially disarms them. In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patricia Wrede depicts wizards who use magic based on their staves, and magicians who practice several kinds of magic, including wizard magic; in the Regency fantasies, she and Caroline Stevermer depict magicians as identical to wizards, though inferior in skill and training. ==Education==

(1853): studying for arcane knowledge Magicians normally learn spells by reading ancient tomes called grimoires, which may have magical properties of their own. Sorcerers in Conan the Barbarian often gained powers from such books, which are demarcated by their strange bindings. In worlds where magic is not an innate trait, the scarcity of these strange books may be a facet of the story; in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Prince Rupert seeks out the books of the magician Prospero to learn magic. The same occurs in the Dungeons and Dragons-based novel series Dragonlance Chronicles, wherein Raistlin Majere seeks out the books of the sorcerer Fistandantilus. In JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, wizards already have skills of magic but they need to practise magic in Wizarding Schools in order to be able to use it properly. Some magicians, even after training, continue their education by learning more spells, inventing new ones (and new magical objects), or rediscovering ancient spells, beings, or objects. For example, Dr. Strange from the Marvel Universe continues to learn about magic even after being named Sorcerer Supreme. He often encounters creatures that have not been seen for centuries or more. In the same universe, Dr. Doom continues to pursue magical knowledge after mastering it by combining magic with science. Fred and George Weasley from Harry Potter invent new magical items and sell them as legitimate defense items, new spells and potions can be made in the Harry Potter Universe; Severus Snape invented a variety of jinxes and hexes as well as substantial improvements in the process of making potions; Albus Dumbledore, along with Nicolas Flamel, is credited with discovering the twelve uses of dragon's blood. ==Limits on magic==

To introduce conflict, writers of fantasy fiction often place limits on the magical abilities of magicians to prevent them from solving problems too easily. 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. This can vary by fantasy work. Many magicians require no materials at all; ==Use of magic in society==

Nevertheless, 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, Sometimes this is justified by having the negative effects of magic outweigh the positive possibilities. 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. In the Harry Potter series, the Wizarding World hides themselves from the rest of the non-magic world, because, as described by Hagrid simply, "Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.” ==References==