It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.

Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.

Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.

So, to then go into the more extended version: Two basic approaches are used, which have different strengths and weaknesses. Both have distinct problems, and both of those in casual use are very simplified versions of more complex underlying theories which are a topic for another time.

For now, I want to instead focus on the ways that classification is applied in common use. These systems can be split into the basic approaches of functional and categorical. Functional descriptions are based on what someone specializes in, while categorical systems create labels based on what general approach someone uses for performing magic (n.b., if you want a head start on the theory, you can also say that functional and categorical design respectively map into type theory and set theory mathematics). I’m going to go over each, and go over some of the conclusions people draw about a person based on a given label, as well as reasons those labels and those assumptions are imperfect.

Functional Classification

A functional description defines a mage based upon their essential, central talent. This system assigns different focal points a name, and describes a mage based upon which they use. Often, this essentially just means defining what they do, finding a word for it, and adding something like -mancy as a suffix. Pyromancers are all going to be mages who specialize in the use of fire. Hydromancers use water. Telepaths make cognitive contact with other people, while empaths make emotional contact with other people.

This is useful, because there are some specialties that show up in more or less the same form often. Fire has been such a fundamental part of human life for so long that it has a strong cognitive and sociocultural presence in people’s minds. It is important, ubiquitous, dangerous, features in many early human schema for understanding reality. As a result it shows up in more or less the same way cross-culturally and has for a very long time.

However, there’s an immediate problem with this: Not everyone fits into a tidy label. In principle basically any given concept can become the focal point of someone’s magic, making a complete list of terms impossible. Some are common, like fire, but others are more unusual, abstract, or hard to explain. As an example, Alice’s specialty is constructing long-lasting or permanent workings, more or less. It’s not exactly that, but that’s the easiest way to summarize her fixated fascination on how things last over time that drives her connection to magic. How do you put an easy label to this which would distinguish it from other manipulations of abstract energy?

The other place where this system most immediately breaks down is in precision. A pyromancer is using their own concept of fire, which is going to involve things which are unique to them. Fire’s conceptual meanings and cultural contexts, the memories people form, are fairly consistent across human cultures, enough that you can cluster all such ideas under one word. But the question “what kind of magic is this?”, if brought to the finest level of refinement, is restricted to a single individual. (This is part of what leads to the signatures Kyoko detects being so exact, though her understanding of what she’s perceiving is not completely accurate.)

And that’s for an idea which has a single-word definition and is consistent cross-culturally. It gets worse the more unusual or niche a mage’s focus becomes.

This, then, is the basic limit of the functional labeling system. You can’t have every specialty, you can only have specialties defined to a certain level of precision, and if someone doesn’t easily map to a given functional label the system stops providing any useful categorization for the mage at all. Lots of people are outside the range of what this system can describe.

Assumptions and Stereotypes

You can make loose guesses about someone based on functional labels like this, if someone falls into a clear and common enough functional category to base guesses upon. Some are going to be by direct inference. A pyromancer will be more dangerous as an attacker than capable of defense, because fire is a top-rate weapon. But it doesn’t provide really any protection at all, so a pyromancer will almost always be off-specialty in their defensive spells. Other specialties have similar strengths and weaknesses.

These inferences are clear, and their implications are very easy to follow. You can easily construct descriptions based on them which provide imprecise but functional predictions about what to expect. Since they’re based in things that apply to an intrinsic quality of the magic in use, they’re pretty reliable and consistent. Every strict pyromancer is going to be subject to that disparity in offense and defense. It’s not a very precise way to gauge how large that gap is or how dangerous the person is, but you know it’s going to be there.

The other major set of conclusions is less objective, less guaranteed. It’s derived from the fact that a human mage’s personality and their magic are closely related. As a corollary of that it follows that if you know something about their magic it will correlate with something in their personality or identity. It might even be causal.

But I’ve already mentioned that the precision of the category is limited. And the detail of where someone lands within the range of a label will dramatically change the implication about who they are. A pyromancer can expand from fire into emotional passions, or into kinetic force, and both are easily seen to be extensions of “fire” in its cultural meaning, but they’re different kinds of extension. One of these people is different than the other.

Thus, while there are trends and some stereotypes hold up, it’s never totally certain that this kind of archetype will apply to a given mage. Fire mages are almost all passionate, but there’s an intrinsic almost in that, and the error values are hard to estimate. Telepaths all feel a deep interest in how people think, but what that interest is varies so much that the universality of the statement is useless, and more refined versions are much less confident.

So, this type of language has stark limits. It can only create generalized or imprecise labels, the stereotypes can’t be fully trusted to apply, and there are lots of people who don’t land in the system at all. This is part of why this would be called a functional categorization system. The goal is not to create a comprehensive understanding of what mages are like. It is to establish easy ways to gauge what someone with a common general area of focus can do and what they’ll be like, without knowing them well. This is part of why, for example, in the climactic fight of Seed and Trellis Kyoko refers to someone as a pyromancer. In a fight, you quite simply do not have time to be making detailed assessments like that. You see someone use fire, you know they can use fire, you start using heuristic descriptions of someone who uses fire in order to fight them without needing those details. This is one of the major applications of a functional categorization system in common use.

 

Categorical Classification

The categorical approach aims to be more universal. Rather than individual concepts, it focuses on the ways that people approach magic, attempting to sort large groups of people into classes. What they do with this magic is not defined strongly and may not be defined at all in this schema. It does not attempt to say much about who a person is. It only examines the question of how people’s magic works in the abstract, which makes statements about what it does but not exact ones.

The underlying theory of these categories is far beyond the scope of this note and will be discussed more later on. For now, I’m just going to list the most common system by its basic definition, the one people know without knowing why (and sometimes without knowing the formal description at all):

Create a sieve to sort mages into five classes. First, ask whether someone’s magic directly interacts with another living thing. If so, you can slot that person into the witch category. If someone’s magic does not directly intersect with living things, ask whether it directly intersects with an environmental state external to the mage. If so, ask whether that environment is physical or conceptual. If it’s physical, they’re a druid; if it’s conceptual, they’re a shaman. Having reduced the field to mages whose abilities are defined not by another living thing, or by an external environment, ask whether they use deductive or inductive logic as the primary source of internal concepts. If they use deductive logic, they are a wizard; if they use inductive logic, they are a sorcerer.

That’s the basic definition, and a lot of people don’t even know that degree of formal theory, much less why this sieve exists or why it can sort a large majority of human mages. They use the casual framing, which is that wizards use rational thought, sorcerers use emotions and simple ideas, druids use the physical world, shamans do things with spirits, and witches do things with something alive.

So, let’s break that down further, starting with the distinction between wizards and sorcerers. Both of them work primarily with abstract ideas and physical forces, and on that basis it might seem like they should be similar. In practice, though, the two are extremely different.

Wizards are using quantitative logical analysis. They use careful, rigorously disciplined thought processes. Wizards rely heavily on mathematics and formal languages. This clear definition space makes them very good at working with intricate, complex structures. They’re good at manipulating abstract energy, something that will be defined more clearly later on. Because formal logical structures need to be very rigorously defined, wizards tend to require more time to perform a working than other mages.

Sorcerers, by contrast, are intuitive and emotional. They use simpler heuristics which tend to be simply defined. Most sorcerers are easily defined under the system mentioned earlier, focused on a relatively simple idea like “fire” or “stone” or “movement”. They excel at completing workings quickly, adapting on the fly, creativity, and lateral thought processes. They rely on inductive reasoning more than deductive, and often use their emotions to help shape and power magic.

Druids are engaged with their physical surroundings. They tend to have a particular environmental description they associate with, which might be something broad like “urban” or “forest”, or as specific as “the banks of the river”. Druids emphasize holistic reasoning, and they’re very adaptable, usually able to adjust to another environment given time. On average they are more able to expand outside their area of focus than other mages. They excel at identifying and manipulating natural ley lines, interfacing with existing physical events or objects, and sustained workings on large scales.

Shamans are more abstracted, emphasizing concepts and spirits more than material objects. They tend towards idiosyncrasy, with few of them really fitting tidily into normal categories of thought. They excel at certain abstract magic, interaction with spirits, certain manipulations of people’s thoughts, and most magic associated with the Otherside.

Witches have little to no concrete, material power. They do not engage with the inanimate, and physical forces are difficult for them to manipulate. They focus on living things, body and mind alike; this can include people, animals, or themselves, though plants will generally end up being druidic in nature for reasons beyond the scope of this note.

These are very universal categories, and very few mages are going to be outside this list entirely. It’s sort of the inverse of functional classification in this way. Functions are so specific that they inevitably leave out a large portion of mages, but they describe the mages in question pretty clearly. Categorical systems include almost everyone, but they provide little specificity about any individual person. Anyone who acts on a living thing with magic is a witch, and that includes a huge range of concepts. A healer, a telepath, and the necrotic specialist in Seed and Trellis are all witches. They aren’t the same.

Furthermore, while functional classification can be very specific to the individual but do so at the cost of leaving many individuals out of the system, in this categorical system almost every mage is included, but some fit into multiple categories. Picking one as a primary category, if it’s even possible, requires a lot of the abstract theory that most people don’t know. Categorical systems are more robust, particularly with recent advances in human mathematics, but using them to their full capacity is much harder than using functional classes.

But even with the full theory, which place a mage fits into can be hard to say. Shapeshifters, who are almost always going to be manipulating their own body with magic, are the easiest example of a place where this breaks down. Changing their own body is by definition witchcraft. But because many emphasize a specific animal from their natural world, they in some ways resemble a druid. And in personality, shapeshifters most closely map to a sorcerer for reasons that might be described at some point later on. Which of the three to consider them will depend heavily on what kind of question is being asked. This is a niche specialty, but it’s not rare by any means, and is certainly common enough to make this gap notable.

And, finally, sometimes the stereotypes are just wrong. Alice is a great example. The classic archetype of a wizard would be someone who is aloof, coldly rational, analytical, and lacking empathy. Alice is analytical, but the other three of those aren’t applicable to her at all. It’s true that she compartmentalizes emotion very well, but unlike many wizards she engages with it fully when she’s not working. She’s curious, friendly, and invested in what happens to people. She is motivated by things other than direct gain and has an overall playful attitude much of the time. None of that changes the fact that she is an analytical person who uses clear deductive logic, who specializes in the manipulation of forces into permanent workings, and who by any reasonable metric is a wizard in this system.

As for why most mages do fall into these general categories and why they’re different from each other, that’s a topic for another essay, because it gets very technical and this has already been a significant amount of text.

Now, all of these do have implications about someone’s personality. A sorcerer and wizard might both have a particular knack for controlling kinetic force, but the stereotypes about the two are very different, and not without reason. They have different areas of expertise and different considerations when you’re dealing with them. A shaman is usually set apart from their society and their world in some way. They have an especially high rate of dissociative, psychotic, and autistic traits, and it is usually not clear entirely how much of their dissociation and psychosis are mental illness relative to accurate perception of a nonreal world. Witches are all going to care about other living things, in one way or another. They get called cunning more often than smart.

But these stereotypes are unreliable, for a variety of reasons. First, of course, is that these categories are all so broad. Sorcerers might all trend towards emotion, but…what kind? Lability is associated more with fire or water, maybe air, while consistent and direct expressions of feeling are more characteristic of earth magic and kinetic force. Witches care about people, but what kind of caring? It’s so broad it’s barely useful to know.

Assumptions and Stereotypes

These categories are broader, which makes the confident facts and stereotypes about them less concrete and less specific. They often don’t tell you much specific about what the person is capable of, making them much less useful in situations like combat. And, in many cases, despite being broader, they’re not always any more confident in being applicable to a given mage.

Going through in the same order, wizards use deductive logic. Thus, people assume they’re cold, analytical, logical. They’re dispassionate. To a degree, this is strictly true; a wizard has to be capable of constructing rigorous conceptual definitions, they have to be able to hold complex cognitive structures despite interference from distractions like emotion. But as Alice, the first example of a wizard, clearly shows, this is not universal. She’s capable of that kind of compartmentalization. She can focus through a great deal of pain or emotional turbulence.

But this does not intrinsically mean she does so habitually. Alice does not compartmentalize emotion in this way when she’s not actually working magic. The fact that she is capable of it doesn’t mean she does it all the time, the way the stereotypes would suggest. She’s a mischievous person, she’s emotive and expressive, she’s motivated by things other than direct personal gain, she’s sociable in her own way. Her lab is a disaster that only makes sense to her, because (among other reasons) it doesn’t matter if anyone else can understand the idea-set that a wizard is holding. It only matters that they can. If someone’s batshit insane formal language works in a very strange way and they’re the only person who can understand the method in its madness, it’s still possible to use it for magic. (Doing this can actually be helpful for highly skilled wizards, since it means they can create frameworks purpose-designed for expressing the kinds of concepts a given working will need.)

Other things that are implied by being a wizard are more certain, though, and they’re useful to know. A wizard often can use formulae from other sources without changing them. They have extensive reference libraries as a result, things they can use in their own structures. A focus enchanted to help with a specific magic is doing something similar to this, and wizards excel at this, as well as at enchanting objects. Stored spells, being a structure which lacks only a single adjustment in order to complete the working and trigger the spell, are something wizards do extremely well, and a very skilled wizard can compete with even the heavyweights of the supernatural world in their design.

Sorcerers use heuristic algorithms. They might not know that term, and in fact many have no ability to directly explain what they’re doing. They work on intuition and impulse, and their structures don’t readily fit into language formal or otherwise. For reasons far beyond the scope of this note, this makes their magic much faster than if they were using the formal language of a wizard.

They tend to have a strong personal connection to what they use, as a result. A wizard who is a pyromancer might just be fascinated with ideas of exothermal reactions, but a sorcerer will feel emotionally connected to the flame. Like all mages, they have elevated risk of mental illness. But where wizards have primarily issues with emotional reasoning, understanding of people, or personality disorders, sorcerers are more likely to have chemical or neurological oddities involved. They have a high rate of autistic savantism. They have a tendency towards impulsive choices, dissociative conditions, and mood disorders. All of those will factor into the stereotypes people form about them.

Sorcerers are also often dismissed or written off as unskilled hacks. Heuristic structures are never exact, and as mentioned in Magical Mechanics, the exacting efficiency of a working is seen as a mark of skill. By using emotional connections (a desire to burn linked to passion, for example), they make it harder to generalize or formally define what they’re doing. They struggle to teach other people to do what they do. They often don’t have much formal education about magic and work on intuition instead.

However, by the same token, sorcerers are using structures other people can’t. They work effortlessly with ideas that wizards have to laboriously define. A highly effective heuristic algorithm can still produce a very refined structure; the mark of a skilled sorcerer isn’t exacting definition, but rather very elegant design of useful structures, carried out at speed. Sorcerers are generally easily classified in a functional system, working with straightforward ideas as their central focus of magic.

The fact that wizards and sorcerers both work with ideas and forces unrelated to their world sets them apart from the other classes, all of which do interact with that world. A druid is the most clear case of this. They manipulate objects and forces in their environment, they blur the line between themselves and the space around them. This blurring is central to the way people think about them. Who they are is partially defined by where they are or, at minimum, where they like to be. Their sense of self often lapses and produces schizophreniform psychosis. They are known for unusual priorities, behavior, and needs.

This last is a central detail of how druids live. You can see this with Jack Tar, who is very much a druid in this classification system. He is an unhoused vagrant, because anything else would produce internal dissonance. This is a need most people wouldn’t understand, but in his world it makes perfect sense, and if they understand the conditions he’s in, the behavior would make total sense. In this way, it is sometimes unclear whether something is actually psychotic or just reflects a real state that only the druid is experiencing.

They often struggle to explain this, and other things about their magic. They’re similar to a sorcerer in this, but they are not generally seen as unskilled in the same stereotypical way. This is largely because sorcerers work with much simpler ideas. A sorcerer also completes workings quickly, while druids often excel at much longer-term projects like manipulating a region’s weather system.

In terms of reasoning, druids are known for holistic reasoning, pulling in ideas from things that are around them which may not seem obviously related. They’re also notably adaptable; since there will always be some environment around them, they can always find something that their magic can in principle use. Jack prefers a city, but he’s not helpless in the forest, not at all.

Shamans have a lot of the same problems as druids, but even more so. They engage with abstract conceptual forms, spirits, things that are defined as ideas in the environment they occupy rather than things that are concrete and material. This is not as simple as the spirit world, and it would be more accurate to say that shamans work within the aether, but most people don’t have a clear sense of what the difference is (it will be discussed in another note), and the spirit world is the primary portion of relevance.

Because they’re working with such abstract ideas about the world, shamans are idiosyncratic as a rule. They think in ways that are odd and don’t readily map into common patterns of thought at all. Like sorcerers, they are frequently autistic. Shamans are almost never easily described by a functional classification. What they do varies widely and can intersect other categories in this system easily.

Shamans are set apart from the concrete world surrounding them, by definition, and this almost always shows up to some degree in their personality and behavior. They are not part of mainstream society, are not associated with normal life very closely. Dissociative and psychotic conditions are extremely common, and it is never entirely clear how much of them is mental illness and how much is just perceiving a real but immaterial object.

Witches are the last class, and are a catchall group, more or less. Anything that affects the mind and body of a living thing, in any direct way, is witchcraft. This is going to include any form of mental magic, whether cognitive or emotional. Any magic which directly alters someone’s body, whether necrotic or healing in nature, similarly lands here.

Witches are cunning more often than wise. They know people or animals intimately, they know how they work and why. Focusing heavily on something alive makes them fairly useless when working with anything that isn’t. If they can find something that is alive in the right way for them to act on it, they have a great deal of power. This all-or-nothing pattern ends up strongly impacting how witches function.

Because they do focus on animate things, you can immediately tell several things about a witch. They will be invested in life, usually in people. If they have a clear functional class, they will be very strongly fixated on that phenomenon in people, which says a lot of things about them. What that type of fixation is will vary widely, though. A telepath cares how people think, but this does not tell you their intentions towards those people. Other witches work only on themselves, which can suggest any of a wide range of things about them, but it always suggests something. Many are social butterflies and heavily dependent on social bonds for emotional stability, in one way or another.

Witches often exhibit manipulative traits that characterize narcissistic personality disorder, among other personality disorders. Even a well-intentioned telepath fundamentally believes that it is acceptable for them to change another person’s mind with magic, and that implies things about how they think of people. Dissociation and PTSD are very common (PTSD is almost universal among mages to some extent, but witches commonly have PTSD due to abuse, before magic develops).