On wizardry¶

Most people who arrive expecting to learn wizardry expect to learn how to make things happen. The first year is largely spent unlearning that.

What it is¶

Magic on the Disc is not a metaphor and not a resource. It is a force with mass, direction and consequence, and it leaves residue. It has its own colour, octarine, which is the eighth and can be seen only by those already committed. A wizard is not primarily someone who uses this force. A wizard is someone trained to recognise it, measure it, and in the overwhelming majority of cases leave it exactly where it is.

The discipline is therefore mostly restraint, which is a difficult thing to examine and an impossible thing to photograph. A university that turned out wizards who constantly did things would be a shorter-lived university, and Ankh-Morpork would be a shorter-lived city.

The instruments¶

The staff is the familiar example. It stores magic over time and releases it all at once, which makes it enormously capable and enormously unforgiving: the failure mode of a full staff is not that nothing happens. Every instrument in the discipline shares that shape. The more a thing can do when it works, the worse the afternoon when it does not, and the two properties cannot be bought separately.

The omniscope will show any time and any place in the multiverse. It is very expensive to build and more expensive to run, and the Bursar has observed that the running cost is the part nobody budgets for. This is held to be a general principle rather than an observation about omniscopes.

What it costs¶

Using magic makes a noise that carries. There are Things in the Dungeon Dimensions with no particular interest in the Disc except that it is warm and they are not, and they are drawn to the places where the wall between is thinnest. Wizards make it thinner. This is the entire reason the discipline is taught slowly, in a building full of other wizards, rather than out of a book by someone working alone.

The practical form of the rule is simple. Capability attracts attention in proportion to itself. A wizard who can do a great deal is, by that fact, standing somewhere that is being looked at.

The orders¶

There are eight orders, and within each of them wizards compete for the higher positions, and between them the orders compete with one another. The senior post is the Archchancellor. Succession was for many centuries a matter of Dead Man’s Pointy Shoes, which is precisely what it sounds like, and the post changed hands often and at short notice.

It now proceeds by election, following the First Law: a wizard shall not kill another wizard. The law is not a statement about the moral character of wizards. It was adopted because the alternative had been tested thoroughly and the university kept running out of faculty.

What it is not¶

It is not witchcraft. Witches work a different discipline, largely out of doors and largely without instruments, and are better at it. The broomstick is theirs. Wizards have been known to use one in extremis and do not care to discuss the occasions.

It is also not sourcery, which is what happens when the line runs eight sons deep and produces not a user of magic but a source of it. The university has no course on this, no degree in it, and one firmly closed conversation.