Also, it's not a slur, as it derives from 'wise one'.
Very much so!
I do my best live up to the name 'magician' but usually just call myself a 'sorcerer'. In my view 'Magician' is the path overall, and represents the work of a lifetime as one moves from doing magic to being magic.
To me 'Magician' is a high honorific, and includes the connotations we get from the Chaldeana of one who embodies "celestial wisdom." They loaned us the words 'magic and "magi" which gives us 'magus' and 'mage.'
But the way I look at it, in rough practical terms, with degrees of overlap:
Magician
Employs "The Above" - however the conceive of it. God, the gods, and/or Infinite Noetic-Mind, all good, in my view.
Mental magic like New Thought, Chaos magic, as well as religious magic when prayer are answered (the miracles part). Tend to not cause harm.
Looks like: magician, philosopher, priest, Solomonic magician , New Thought practitioner. Hermetic mind magic and religious magic.
Sorcerer
Employs "The Below"
Sorcery, necromancy, goetia, traditional witchcraft. This can include acts to cause harm.
Looks like: sorcerer, brujo / bruja, witch, bokor, GV magician. But also the Hoodoo practitioner, and the Curandera who both would bristle at being included here.
More on "The"Below" from JSK, which is a good lens to use to soften some of the "hard" Platonism found in Lurianic Kabbalah everyone uses.
In Western thought since before the Christian era and well into it, it was
held that the sublunary sphere was the whole extent of changing Nature.
From the Moon outwards everything was One, eternal and immutable.
Physics, as such, only applied below the Moon. Not until Copernicus was
this distinction challenged, until eventually Thomas Kuhn - physicist,
historian, and scientific philosopher - could speak of seeing change in the
'incorruptible' heavens as the epitome of a scientific paradigm shift. Simply
put, some ancient models need inverting in order to serve any purpose in
modern magic. For magical purposes, the Sublunar sphere - what is Below
- provides a more coherent model of what is Above than the false image of
the heavens can now do for what is below. Our planetary 'superiors9' can
instead be subsumed into older more terrestrial guises. But I race ahead . . .
In short, this is the magical paradigm shift employed or assumed
throughout the current work, both Archaic and harmonious with material
science.
It is important to understand that the sublunar world in Late Antiquity
was the so-called 'World of the Four Elements'. However, in its best, most
immediately useful and most developed form, the sublunar sphere was also
divided into seven, and the correspondence was extended to the planets.
Dualistic qualities were often attributed to them, including moral ones:
seven virtues and vices for example. This I propose to reverse, since in
reality, since planetary astrology is a historical development and the
cosmology involved here is far older even than history, the symbolism was
3 or can be considered as 3 having been transferred upwards rather than
downwards. In other words, these sublunar spheres commemorate far
earlier levels of myth and ritual, from which the qualities of the planets
were extrapolated subsequently. This is not to deny astrology its place,
whether calculatory or symbolic. The Celestial realm is one of the Three
Worlds, along with our Earth and the Underworld, a subject that awaits its
place.
The higher worlds are occupied by the gods and their retinues, but the
Moon is the preserve of terrestrial daimons, which is to say the dead [or
which category certainly includes the dead as a major proportion. The very
term terrestrial appears contradictory in this context, and its use shows the
pace at which ideas were evolving while terminology struggled to keep
pace. These spirits form a very important class and are not distinct from the
souls previously mentioned. The idea of a sublunary world between Earth
and the Moon, occupied by spirits or demons, was long enduring; it was
simply forgotten that most of them were former human beings. Reclassified
as Aerial demons, they are traceable in Agrippa and much demonological
lore, the angels being [considered] resident higher up, in accordance with
Christian Neoplatonist ideas. The positive aspects of sub-lunar spirits have
been eradicated from many of these later redactions, along with their
identity with the dead.
In Plutarch the essentially benign role of some
among the lunar terrestrial daimons is very apparent, and he names some
very interesting names:
The daimons do not always pass their time upon her (the moon), but
they come down hither and take charge of Oracles. They are present at
and assist in the most advanced of the initiatory rites (Mysteries). They
act as punishers and keepers of wrongdoers, and shine as saviours in
battle and at sea. Whatsoever thing in these capacities they do amiss,
either out of spite, unfair partiality, or envy, they are punished for it, for
they are driven down again to earth and coupled with human bodies.
Of the best of these genii they told him were those who wait upon (the
god) Saturn (in Elysium) now, and the same in old times were the
Idaean Dactyls in Crete, the Curetes in Phrygia, the Trophonians in
Boeotia Lebadea, and others without number in various parts of the
world… (Moralia. XII. 8On the Face in the Moon9)
