A wizard is a male witch or sorcerer. Wizard carries a negative meaning: The word comes from the Middle English terms wys, or “wise,” and the suffix ard, which connotes “someone who does something to excess or who is discreditable.” Wizard especially was originally used to describe men who were wonder workers or who produced illusions; they were often lumped in with “witches and necromancers.”
Wizard continued in negative usage and was often applied to magicians who cast enchantments or who were believed to be in league with the devil. Nathaniel Hawthorne captured the essence of popular opinion of wizards in his fictional story, “Anne Donne’s Appeal” (1835), in which he described a wizard as “a small, grey, withered man, with fiendish ingenuity in devising evil, and superhuman power to execute it, but senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child to all better purposes.”
The term is seldom used in modern practices of magic. It has been rehabilitated in fiction, such as in the stories of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, in which wizards possess magical skills and wisdom but are not necessarily evil in nature.
SEE ALSO:
FURTHER READING:
- Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. Wizards: A History. Stroud, England: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2004.
SOURCE:
The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy Written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley Copyright © 2006 by Visionary Living, Inc.
