What makes a Wizard Green?

[grokrathegreen]

As my main target audience is folks who are already in the know on John Michael Greer's writing, and my sense of the term 'Green Wizard' has come out of his writing, I didn't say what a Green Wizard actually is. I did leave a link to the post where Greer initially introduces the idea, but then decided it would be good to add to Greer's sense of the concept my own two cents.

"In ancient times, a wizard was actually a freelance intellectual whose main stock in trade was good advice, supported by a thorough education in agriculture, navigation, political and military science, languages, commerce, mathematics, medicine, and the natural sciences - in essence, the true Renaissance man."

Though actual historic wizards were often interested in the magical lore of their respective cultures, its not the defining characteristic. Nor is the mere fact of being educated, as there were then specialists in the various topics at that time, and there we are ever more troubled with specialists in our current era. Indeed a wizard, in this sense, is marked by their wide ranging curiosity and the breath of their education; for our own era this implies a vast degree in distinctiveness, as so great is the breadth of topics to study, that any attempt to sample widely will collect a unique managery of interests. Also the knowledge of a wizard is actionable, a wizard whose spells cannot actually do anything is hardly worthy of the title.

For the professional wizard the ability to personally apply their education to the world is an important practical concern; it is nearly impossible to make a living as a teacher or advisory specifically with out falling into one of two traps. Either one must seek sponsorship from one of various government or private sponsors -and their money comes on strings, strings that can very easily get tangled around ones neck!- or one must target your teaching to the idle, bored, and curious people of means, and become a petite celebrity. Though both of these options pay the bills for various specialists I know, the effectiveness of such paths at effecting the word often come to ruin, bound by the same tethers that the patrons wear. Therefore it is necessary that a wizard seeking to affect change be willing and able to labor as the worker of the ideas they carry, thereby one can receive compensation for the work, which means one can take clients who are not of the idle class, but those who seek do realize results; also a working wizard is advantaged by the fact that ones ideas are generally lies until one has tested then in the real world, and laboring to do them oneself is the ultimate feed back. What separates the wiz from the purely manual laborer is that they are the dreamer, inventor, crafter, and worker in one. Many a jack of all trades is a wiz in the context of their world; but mastery require more than knowing how to do something, and being able to do it; wizardry is primarily separated in the education to know what to do and why it is to be done. 

If you look back at the quoted list above, those skills include the liberal arts, that is to say the topics of education for a person who is self-directed in the world. And now having pointed in the direction of what a wizard might be, I can return to the titular question, what makes a wizard green? Merely actionable, machine knowledge, is the education on how the achieve a given goal. To achieve a given goal one need merely apply actionable knowledge. But the liberal arts are the part of an education that does the much more difficult thing, producing a goal. The difficulty in producing a goal, in contrast to producing a result, is that while a result is based on the goals, materials, tools, and skills, the goal itself is based on values. And what the defining values are is a wizard of a different color.

For the purposes of this blog a Green wizard is to be marked by their values, and talking about those values will be a perennial topic. Other writers could do well as defining a green wizard by ganja, greed, nausea, or envy if it suited their goals; to list some potential associations with the color which don't happen to be topical to my project. The emblematic use of green, for me is in the context of the color of a lush landscape. 

A Green Wizard is a wizard who is particularly focused on the relationship between their own livelihood, and by extension their clients and colleagues, with the greater living world. There are challenging ethical, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic questions which stand to be faced at the higher levels of Green Wizardry. In the mid levels there are certain extant traditions of knowledge, which can allow a Green Wizard to think clearly about the present and potential health of their living environment, and how their own livelihood relates to that health. But before diving further down those rabbit holes of wonder, I am going to go back to basics of showing the results of some basic Green Wizardry spells in the Grimmore.

In the next post you will meet Bregalad, summoned in response to the challenges of transportation in making a living as a Green Wizard.