/jp/ - Otaku Culture

To add, Gandalf uses words like “wizard” and “spells” and “magic” because it’s his role/mission to enchant/inspire. Elves do not enchant others on purpose. Sauron in contrast is the capital-d Deceiver, doing it to subjugate and spread fear. Gandalf is not meant to be a crutch, but to enchant the free peoples to victory.

There’s a ton of Prime Directive elements in middle-earth, and the five wizards can be compared to higher (alien) societies sending down five of their learned men to act, and guide, as sages of sorts, as that is all a wizard is, at the end of the day. A man of sufficient wisdom to share. He (by he I mean Gandalf) is a wizard as he’s a stage magician of frightening scale.

Even physics today is indistinguishable—from magic—as what does the scientist say when they confront something new or bewildering? “Hmm…That’s weird…I do wonder how that works…”. If that doesn’t sound familiar to you… The mad (“mad”) scientist hanging off the edges of present understanding is quite literally the modern day variant of the wizard, poking at the unknown and being an enigma to others. Those certified wizards in history were all mad natural philosophers (proto-scientists) for their time. Magic is a black box that may or may not be white within.

Tolkien also associated big industry and the war machine with sorcery due to his time in the world war. This is seen in the form of Saruman heading ruinous nature killing infrastructure.

Isaac Newton was called “the last of the magicians” due to him being more so of a natural occultist than natural philosopher proper. He was a hermetic who searched for the philosophers stone and saw value innsacred Jewish geometry.

Galileo thought he could read fate in the stars, and would entertain “Should a Leo date a Gemini?”. He was so dangerous to the Church they had to house arrest him.

Paracelsus, the foremost physician of his day, the ‘father of medicinal minerals’, is credited as the person responsible for the homunculus—which he believed could be created by… masturbating into a chicken egg… yeah…

The one behind the four elements, that of Empedocles, later influencer of Aristotle, was one of the first people to propose that light travels. He also thought he was a living god, started a cult, and jumped into a volcano after proclaiming he’d rise from the ashes as some sort of divinity.

Bothers me how so many don’t see the parallels between the wizard stereotype and esoteric science bases. The devices of the old Greeks were seen as the stuff of wizards for so long.