Court Mages

[Rosemary Tea]

Ennywhey, the other danger there is for those lands and that office to become hereditary. Ever notice how few fantasy mages are married with children?

Fantasy mages are based on medieval scholars, more or less. In medieval Europe, universities were essentially monastic, so students and faculty alike were expected to be celibate (an expectation likely honored in the breach much of the time) and did not marry, at least not while in the university community.

Mages also fill a similar archetypal niche to the witch in the woods, who is always solitary, who prefers to live away from people so she can focus on her magic without getting distracted, without getting constantly bugged by people wanting her to do them magical favors. On the second count, it helps that people are afraid of the witch. They won't bother her unless they're desperate enough to face that fear. Fantasy mages don't usually incite as much fear, but they still tend to be solitary.

I think there ought to be some, at least in my world.

Spin your world however makes sense!

For mine, I started with solitary mages, though not quite witch in the woods solitary, I guess because the single mage who lives alone with their magic is such a trope. But then, one of my mage characters turned out to be the stepchild of a mage... so, obviously, mages can marry. There are also a couple of minor mage characters who I think of as previously married, in one case possibly still married, and who have grown children, although their children did not become mages.

The way it ended up being when the world really took shape is, my mages are not prohibited from marrying or having children, but few do. Most of them are simply not the marrying kind. And magery is a career that really must be put first, takes a long time to fully train for, and requires intense focus. It usually takes until around the age of 30 to reach full mage status, and then you're the new kid on the block who has to prove yourself, kind of like a new junior partner in a law firm. There just isn't much room for starting a family when you're family starting age.

When mages do have children, their children do not necessarily become mages. If they do, they apprentice to someone other than their parent. Lineage within magery counts for a lot, but the lineage that counts is teacher/student, not parent/child. An apprentice is in the lineage of the mage who teaches them, and can ultimately pass it on through an apprentice of their own.

So, my mages mostly have non-traditional chosen families instead of the traditional kind. Most of them do live alone, unless they're married or have an apprentice living with them, but not isolated, they have close neighbors. In some cases, two or three mages live on adjacent land parcels and share village mage duties.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

A court mage sitting in court... Aside from purification of food and drink, having a mage known for pointing out liars would be useful. To say the least. Even the false reputation reinforced by "catching" planted liars to scare the bejeebers out of people would have potential use, let alone a mage who is more accurate than a lie detector.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

A court mage sitting in court... Aside from purification of food and drink, having a mage known for pointing out liars would be useful. To say the least. Even the false reputation reinforced by "catching" planted liars to scare the bejeebers out of people would have potential use, let alone a mage who is more accurate than a lie detector.

This is making me think of the other kind of court: a judicial court instead of a royal court. If mages can detect lies, they'd be vital participants in every trial.

 

[FifthView]

Detecting the true versus the false can be expanded to many things. True gold v. false gold. True friend v. false friend. True alliances v. false alliances. True magical relics v. false relics. Etc.

A court mage sitting in court... Aside from purification of food and drink, having a mage known for pointing out liars would be useful. To say the least. Even the false reputation reinforced by "catching" planted liars to scare the bejeebers out of people would have potential use, let alone a mage who is more accurate than a lie detector.

 

[skip.knox]

These last couple of points reinforce my thought that a "court mage" really only makes sense if they have abilities that will be used frequently. Otherwise you just hire a contractor for the job at hand.

And that, in turn, is going to both condition and be conditioned by larger issues of how magic works in Altearth. The curve I like to throw into any of these considerations is, what if the magic is not completely reliable? What if the mage misses some lies, and mistakenly sees a truth as a lie? There would be the matter of the objective reliability, but also a matter of how the lord *perceives* the mage.

Purifying stuff would be more objective, but the unreliable mage might be more trouble than they're worth. Even if they fail to purify once every hundred times, you'd still want to employ a taster.

>Spin your world however makes sense!
Well, therein lies the challenge. Sense can be made easily and comes in a thousand flavors. And every one of them has consequences and every consequence must also make sense. It's enough to drive a fellow senseless. But that's why we have threads like this one, yah?

 

[FifthView]

what if the magic is not completely reliable?

I'm trying to remember back to what I learned of pre-Columbian societies in Central and South America, from some class or other source. If the shamans* made predictions that turned out false, often they were killed on the spot. So naturally they needed to be very clever to survive in their chosen profession, heh.

*Edit: Oops left off "shamans" previously.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

The curve I like to throw into any of these considerations is, what if the magic is not completely reliable? What if the mage misses some lies, and mistakenly sees a truth as a lie? There would be the matter of the objective reliability, but also a matter of how the lord *perceives* the mage.

Or what if the magic is completely reliable but the mage is not?

Maybe the detection of lies, or truth, works like divination does (actual divination, I mean: tarot, I-Ching, astrology, etc.). The indicators may be reliable in and of themselves but subject to interpretation. The interpreter could interpret accurately, or could miss the mark.

>Spin your world however makes sense!
Well, therein lies the challenge. Sense can be made easily and comes in a thousand flavors. And every one of them has consequences and every consequence must also make sense. It's enough to drive a fellow senseless. But that's why we have threads like this one, yah?

Indeed.

Mages and their relationship to truth and lies are one of the cruxes of my wip. I'm still playing with whether, and to what extent, they can detect lies. One fly in the ointment is that while most of my mages are truthful to a fault, in the belief that lying would weaken their magic, there is one who lies. And gets away with it until he trips himself up, but by then he's been getting away with it for years. So, if mages can detect lies, this one is foiling their lie detection. Either that or they didn't bother to check. Or their lie detection isn't reliable. Or it only works under certain circumstances. I still haven't decided which.

 

[ThinkerX]

Apart from the 'learned councilor' angle, the uses I see for a court mages include:

1 - entertainment. Wondrous illusions. Occasionally, 'informative' or 'educational' illusions - the whole 'picture being worth a thousand words' thing. Worth keeping in mind that mediaeval realms are unlikely to include recorded media or other modern entertainment. (And yes, there would be jesters and bards and whatnot as well).

2 - love charms, curses, and protective spells, mostly for the courtiers, senior staff, and other folks of note. Protective spells, at least, for the top noble or king.

3 - healing ailments beyond the ability of the court physician...assuming such is possible.

4 - scrying, magical means of gathering intelligence on distant places and people. I suppose the 'truth spell' would also fall into this grouping.

Unethical court wizards could also use mind affecting spells (charms and illusions) to make themselves the 'power behind the throne.'

 

[skip.knox]

I'm trying to remember back to what I learned of pre-Columbian societies in Central and South America, from some class or other source. If the shamans* made predictions that turned out false, often they were killed on the spot. So naturally they needed to be very clever to survive in their chosen profession, heh.

Yep, sure. I don't need to kill them, but turn them out from court. Lose the esteemed position and, if they belonged to some wizardly order or other, bring opprobrium to other wizards.

Among the many things that need made sense of would be how such mages would be regarded at court. I figure there would be a range of opinions and reactions, but if magic were universally understood to be something short of 100% reliable and fully predictable in scope and effect, then the fact of failure alone might not be enough. Maybe certain kinds of magery would be regarded much the same as advice from the inner council. Just another voice in planning.

That wouldn't apply to detecting poison or such activities.

 

[FifthView]

And please don't forget the lesser nobility. Might there be a dividing point between those nobles who had a court mage and those would did not? Then there would certainly be those who retained one despite it being foolish.

Reliability might play into this. Those who could afford the most reliable mages would find them and retain them. Those who couldn't would settle for whatever they could get, perhaps—and might even be rubes the unscrupulous mages would trick, i.e., the foolish ones who are trying to keep up with appearances or project competent management of affairs.

 

[skip.knox]

>The indicators may be reliable in and of themselves
That opens up a whole different kettle of fish of another color; namely, to what extent is there an objective reality to magic? Most immediately, if there is an enchanted weapon, is it enchanted regardless of who wields it? Do the stars actually affect our fates?

There is, in Altearth, an underlying reality to all this--a "scientific" magic, if you wish. But like phenomena in real Earth history, there are endless explanations and understandings of magic, and they all have their adherents and their "objective" evidence. In a sense, I'm having to retcon a thousand years of magic in order to get to a certain point. I'm fine with that as I have I confidence I'll never get that far. <g>

For me, the interest isn't in getting it all "correctly" explained, but in coming up with the myriad of ways in which people (humans, gnomes, dwarves, elves, and orcs, at least; maybe trolls) produced effects that they labelled magic. Even inventing that line--what a twelfth century (to grab one at random) average human would call magic and what she would label natural--is endlessly fascinating. Especially when one adds in various classes and levels of education, then throw in non-humans.

 

[skip.knox]

Yeah, among the lesser nobility (and lesser towns?) I can see magic serving much the same role as land ownership did--as both indicator of and passport to position and status. So it would be natural for some to reach beyond their means.

That, I think, is going to be peculiarly human (and maybe orcish). Elves don't care; their social organization is quite different and not at all consistent. Dwarves speak of secrets and techniques, but not of magic in the way humans do. Gnomes say even less, but get rather offended if you suggest some wizard is magicking their crops or has aided in the crafting of a puzzle box. That gives historians from later centuries plenty to argue about.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

>The indicators may be reliable in and of themselves
That opens up a whole different kettle of fish of another color; namely, to what extent is there an objective reality to magic? Most immediately, if there is an enchanted weapon, is it enchanted regardless of who wields it? Do the stars actually affect our fates?.

I don't suppose you're really looking for answers to those questions, but you've inspired me to answer them! Others might have a different take, of course....

>if there is an enchanted weapon, is it enchanted regardless of who wields it?
Of course it is. Otherwise, it wouldn't be an enchanted weapon. However, the kind of enchantment it's under might only show up under certain conditions, i.e. the weapon being wielded by the right hands. If the weapon's enchantment only works for the Heir of Gobbledtygook, it will appear to be an ordinary weapon if anyone else wields it, but the enchantment is still there, just latent. If/when the heir obtains the weapon, the enchantment appears, but it was there all along.

Or a weapon could be enchanted to do one thing in one person's hands and another in another's. Let's say, for instance, that we have a goblin made sword that makes its wielder undefeatable if the wielder is a goblin, but turns on its wielder if anyone who is not a goblin tries to use it.

>Do the stars actually affect our fates? Technically, astrology deals more with planets than with stars (the zodiac is not made up of constellations, contrary to popular belief), but that technicality aside, the correlation between planetary alignments and what happens in our lives is just that: correlation. Synchronicity. Cause and effect? Debatable at best. There is certainly correlation, though. For that reason, millennia of royalty have kept astrologers on hand to keep them advised of the current and upcoming conditions. Even one American president did: Ronald Reagan.

But then, the indicators I meant were the indicators of an objective reality that the mage is expected to discern. If magic can show whether someone is lying or telling the truth, whether they're lying or telling the truth is a hard, objective fact. (Truth may be subjective, of course; for this purpose, I'm defining lie as a deliberate falsehood. If the subject believes that what they're saying is true, they are not lying, whether or not their belief is correct.) But how well the mage can read the indicators may be a matter of making the correct interpretation.

It might be something like taking out a tarot deck and asking "is So-and-so telling the truth?" and then pulling a card. Tarot cards don't have yes or no printed on them, but there are plenty of tarot guides that say if you pull this card or that card in answer to a yes or no question, it means yes, and if you pull any of these other cards, it means no. Those tarot guides don't always agree with each other, though, and they rarely cover every card in the deck. So even if we could safely assume that the cards are accurate (for the purpose of magical worldbuilding, we could throw in that assumption), reading them is an art, not a science.