The word wizard is of Germanic origin, but wizardry is a facet of a great many magickal traditions. Before science as we know it, there was a branch of study called natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was the idea that insight into the ultimate nature of reality could be gained by studying nature. Natural philosophy had proponents well back into ancient times, Plato and Socrates and their peers.

Before natural philosophy there was the lore we might call wizardry. Wizards, no matter what name they went by in their culture, were the keepers of stories. They had mastery of words. Sounds pretty mundane to our thinking, yes?

They must have been good at it, because today we use the term “wizard” to describe someone who is miraculously good at something. They were. They were also the members of their society who had an understanding of all their people’s arts and skills. Even if they didn’t practice them all, they would learn instructions for training in just about anything their people could think of, from farming, to hunting, medicine to war. This is why you so often hear of kings turning to them as advisors. The Arabic title Vizier, which is another word for wizard, was almost universal in that culture, alchemy being a big practice among their people, as well as astrology and other “sciences.”

So our modern slang of calling a person a wizard of something is pretty close to the original meaning? Yes, indeed.

Now English at the time didn’t exist. The oldest spoken languages on the planet had roots extending back into prehistory. The imagery behind those languages was more clearly linked to the complex forms we see in dream symbolism, and our most primal instincts regarding consciousness at all, then the debased trade tongue so many people speak today. This is why, in these old languages, what we would think of as a simple word had such a wide range of possible meanings based on how it was said.

And your state of mind when you received it? Yes, and that is the actual power behind wizardry. The ancient wizards found words for things. They among their people were the ones who had the knowledge and skill necessary to describe and explain even new and foreign things. A wizard could appear to bring things into reality, because by their description they gave other people a way of looking at and understanding something that they might just ignore or avoid.

A word is like a handle on an object. It makes it easier to manipulate ideas when you put a name to it. Exactly. This is also why they were so often seen as prophets. Because they were so well versed in stories and poems and lore, they had what seemed like a mysterious ability to anticipate outcomes of events. They could even seem to be able to read people’s minds just based on things they said and didn’t say, as well as on how exactly they sounded when they said it. Perhaps we might say this was simple deductive reasoning, but how many people manage to do this well even in this day and age? Because of their mastery of words they could make complex comparisons and “perceive the unseen” by picking out missing parts of a pattern by virtue of observing contrasting elements. Like being able to look at a jigsaw puzzle and know what the missing piece looks like, but applied to general reality as a whole.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~