Sorcerers as a Metaphor for Alienation
Something I toyed with in my magic-user taxonomy post
When you choose the road of Sorcery, you give up your humanity.
You can still have a human body for a while: a voice, a face, a set of hands and feet, but they’re never truly yours anymore. You begin to disconnect from the body, the self becomes a moth in a cocoon of meat woven like silk.
Your body stops having that consistent form: your head decays into a skull, your voice becomes dolorous and your hands warp and amalgamate into tentacles. In seeking enlightenment, the Sorcerer looses their identity, because the magnum opus is their identity now. Their true name is written on the scroll of an elder god in flaming blood, tied in blacksteel chains and cast into rivers of jale fire that link together every disparate earth in the universe.
The body and mind, though, are still part of one organism. This horrible metamorphosis enacts its toll on the Sorcerer’s brain, melting it into sludge that leaks through clogged nostrils. The only escape is further mutilation for the sake of apotheosis.
As above, so below.
The power to change the world will always change you.