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Message: <blockquote data-quote="halfling rogue" data-source="post: 6500814" data-attributes="member: 6779182">If you think about it, Wizards or Magic-users (before modern fantasy genre) were clerics. In ancient thinking there was no magic outside of the power of the gods. Those who could wield it were the ones who could access it, and the ones who could access it were the priests, the clerics. Beyond that, we see this in classic fantasy lit like Conan, where wizards and sorcerers are all essentially clerics. And we can definitely see the impact that Conan stories had on the game.So the real question might be, when did wizards and clerics become something separate (in history)? When were wizards disconnected from the gods? Perhaps modernism had something to do with it, in that science and magic, which at one point were one in the same, gradually drifted apart into different categories. While this Enlightenment was taking place, and while God was more and more being removed from science, perhaps He was also being removed from magic at the same time? Thus rendering the picture of a wizard just as disconnected from the divine as the scientist? And when D&D came along, the image of the godless wizard was already ingrained, and yet the past mythologies and literature was littered with divine magic users. Now they are re-combined via D&D, not into one as of old, but as two separate 'classes', the old magic user now with a new name: Cleric, and the new magic user who usurped the old name: Wizard.Just a thought.</blockquote>

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