Religious Wizards

WARNING! THIS ONE KIND OF BECAME AN UNFOCUSED RANT, BUT I'M PUBLISHING IT ANYWAY!

It seems like all wizards nowadays are massive fucking nerds.

The modern wizard, at least a common representation of the wizard archetype in tabletop roleplaying games, is largely based on themes on an academic scholarship. The casting of magic spells, the primary ability of the wizard, seems to be cast through personal knowledge alone. 

                                                                    Solomon, biblical wizard

spellbooks, grimoires, and magic scrolls (often used as necessary equipment for wizards) exist and have existed throughout time and cultures. The idea of going to magic school, a very popular staple of the fantasy TTRPG wizard, is also not completely unsubstantiated. The formal training of the Onmyōji from feudal Japan comes to mind, though I doubt that this is where this idea was popularized in the case of the modern conception of the wizard. The kind of scientific bent that wizards take is not completely unheard of, I can imagine a lot of this comes from ideas surrounding alchemy (many of which are true). 

 The Alchemist by Joseph Wright

There is only one part of this that bothers me: the subtle yet seemingly almost omnipresent concept of secular magic.

    This just doesn't add up, youre saying the dudes who spend their lives learning to control supernatural forces aren't spiritual in nature? we watch them divine the future, raise the dead, turn people into frogs or something and say "Oh uhh yeah man we should treat that narratively like a scientist a college student or some shit"? Ive got three culprits for this shit: ancient alchemists, the nerds who create and play these games and fucking Harry Potter but whatever its fine...

No its not fine, i fucking loathe you, fuck you, fuck you , fuck youI hate you i hate you ihate yoy i hate you.

      there's nothing wrong with your Harry Potter twink mage but lets explore at least one way to spice up magic and those who practice magic based off of some mythological, historical and contemporary magical practitioners. 

Make space for the other 

   you see these kinds of diagrams all the time amongst real-world occultists, this one is Hermetic I think

okok this one is more of advice surrounding wordbuilding religion but I think it really applies here. 

    So when I first started playing tabletop roleplaying games, I remember my friend telling me that the fantasy world (in this case the default setting of pf1e: Golarion) is different in terms of religiosity from the real world because everyone knows that the gods exist (and which ones exist) because clerics can follow a god and do magic as a result if they are a good boy/girl. This made sense to me at the time. 

    Since then, I have become someone who is more concerned with religion and spirituality, both personally and academically. (religious studies is currently my minor in my undergraduate studies). It seems strange to me now that people in our world hold their individual spiritual beliefs because they just kind of guess or assume that it's out there without any kind of direct experience with divinity. People experience things that are miraculous all the time, either through internal experience or through external situations that create or affirm beliefs in what we might consider the supernatural. Of course, I do not think that all of these cases are necessarily magic or god(s), or spirits, or whatever the believer might ascribe to the situation but nonetheless, these are real experiences of the supernatural and divine (our baseline for magic), the same way people experience them on Golarion. A lot of these experiences nonetheless conflict, two people can experience the same thing and take completely different things from it, some people have never had an experience with the supernatural or divine (at least in their eyes). I think a lot of the boringness comes from clerics having the magic of the ONE TRUE RELIGION and wizards just kind of have to not step on their toes as the Religious Magic Guys. In truth, magic is not separate from spiritual tradition but an aspect of it, an aspect that almost all religious and spiritual traditions have had in one way or another, even if it is forbidden. I say you should probably just turn your clerics into wizards.

       Zhang Guolao, one of the eight immortals in Daoism

                                        A little piece of the Shams al-Ma'arif, a controversial grimoire in Islam

                                  

                              

      Santeria, a religion that has played a big part in my life, has a robust magico-religious belief system and associated practices

                                               

    So maybe we can leave a little more slack with our explanations of magic, the origin of the world, gods, and the cosmological structures of the world. Maybe you, as the GM, have a 100% complete explanation of all of these things, but the people of your world and your players probably don't! maybe all of the wizards in your world don't all agree on "The Weave" or some shit like that but have the room to disagree with each other. One wizard could believe each of their spells to be individual entities that they have to supplicate or appease, one wizard thinks of their magic more as finding glitches in reality that they hack into existence, another could believe that God gives them their magic, another that it comes from within maybe one wizard thinks his spells are the product of demons or psychic aliens possessing his body. 

 Harut and Marut, these two dudes, either angels or kings in the Quran Surah, stuck in a well, teaching magic

Maybe they're all right, maybe they are all wrong, maybe they are all just a little right or maybe some guy hit it right on the head. Hell, some of the people that I've encountered that remind me of real-life wizards seem like they might be schizophrenic or on drugs or something, the same can certainly be true in your fantasy setting. 

                                        Aleister Crowley, famous occultist, piece of shit and founder of Thelma

People, including those who engage with the study of magic believe different things, let them show their party a weird cosmogram full of symbolic language they made, let them have magical goals that go beyond personal or political power (maybe like a gnostic or hermetic kind of transcendence). Ill probably write mores stuff on this later but I think I got everything I needed out of my system. ill post some links to some cool GLOG wizard templates and alternate classes below. 

Monastic Wizards by Arnold K

The Sage by Sam

Oh and here a little YouTube video I found that helped put some of my frustrations into words.