What makes an Archivist divine?

[Wolfswift]

So I'm playing an Archivist in a 3.5 game right now and I like the Archivist, but I'm a bit confused as to how its a divine casting class?

From my understanding, divine casters are granted their magic from deities or nature or some kind of powerful outside force. Hence why they don't suffer arcane spell failure, they themselves aren't shaping the magic but being provided it and as such have much smaller less intricate somatic gestures. But in exchange they usually fight or adventure for their deity or the betterment of nature and so forth, but if say a cleric of a lawful good deity decided to start mass murdering folks and raising an undead army to conquer the world, their deity could and likely would cut off their magic. Granted they could probably find another god or demon lord or something who agrees with their new agenda to provide them magic again, but still. They'd be inconvenienced for some time and it could be in an important situation that could lead to their downfall. Hence most divine casters must strictly adhere to their deities credo or continue supporting nature or lose their magic.

Whereas arcane casters learn the deep mysteries of the universe and use complex somatic gestures to give shape or substance to their magic all on their own. They don't have another force providing their magic to them, they do it purely on their own merit. So should they decide the world should perish and do a 180 on their adventuring path, they have no fear of losing their magic.

Which seems like it's where the Archivist falls, they may learn divine spells and generally work for a church or what have you, but for all intents and purposes, they seem more arcane than divine in my book. They don't have to keep a certain alignment or follow any particular god or anything, there's no mention of them losing their magic if they break their god's credo or anything. They have to find and research their own spells, gods aren't just beaming spells to them or anything. They don't need to worship anything, they don't need to pray for spells, they study their prayerbook full of spells they learned themselves.

So why are they divine casters? Am I mistaken about the differences between divine and arcane casters? Is it just arbitrary that their just the divine Wizard because Wizards of the Coast said so? Does anyone have any idea?

For our game I'm just having my character act something like a Favored Soul of a deity of knowledge for the setting. Or something similar to Pathfinder's Oracle class. He was chosen by the deity for his path and they provide his magic, but they expect him to work for it and research for himself. So he's essentially a Wizard but has a deity's support. But no where in the Archivist class have I seen any connection to any deity being required, so this is just my own head cannon, but I'd like to know if there's a real reason they're divine.

[DdarkED]

Fluff and Wis as bonus spells is all i got. in every other way they feel arcane to me as well (besides spell options)

[Thurbane]

Have a read of the text of the class in HoH, and in this article: Archivist - Magical Scholar (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20061212).

They both (moreso the book) go into quite a bit of depth on the mechanics and fluff of their spells, and why they are divine. The fluff also freely acknowledges that the Archivist has more in common with a Wizard than a Cleric.

[JoshuaZ]

The arcane/divine distinction is in many ways a very modern one that is mostly from D&D itself. The distinction between them is much blurrier in historical sources of how magic worked; a wizard might call down magic through a ritual but also work with angels and demons or use secret divine names. The archivist is in that older theme. They know how to access the divine power, whether or not that power is being granted to them explicitly by the gods.

One can imagine something like the following: I need to heal, so I use power from the god of healing, which would be interested in healing in general so doesn't mind that I call on it. Then I need to throw fire, so I access the power of a god whose portfolio involves flame etc. The archivist doesn't have a personal relationship with a specific deitiy, and by the same token doesn't need to worry about losing their power: if the goddess of flame and purity is unhappy that the archivist is trafficking with undead that's not an issue, they'll just borrow some power from a different god who is just devoted to burning everything.

[Segev]

The archivist might be a more god-approved version of the Ur-Priest. More mercenary than clerics, but willing still to appease the gods and do favors for allowance to use the divine rituals. Not stealing power without propitiation.

[Fizban]

So I'm playing an Archivist in a 3.5 game right now and I like the Archivist, but I'm a bit confused as to how its a divine casting class?
Because the rules say so. All the fluff in the world to justify it is in the end, fluff to justify the rule.

As to why they might want that rule, in particular, there are lots of prestige classes that concern themselves with whether you're divine or arcane, which are written with the clear expectation of a link between those designations and the spell list you draw from. So a class that draws from the cleric list should count as divine, else it will cause unexpected prestige class combinations.

And there's the casting in armor thing, but that's more a reason to refuse letting "divine" casters access the sor/wiz list. Nevermind how much they walked back on it in just a few books.

[Ramza00]

I think of Archivists as people who believe in the concept of Gnosis (as in Gnosis in Gnosticism, not necessary the belief system but instead the greek word for knowledge). Archivists are Pantheistic believing the divine is everywhere and it comes in many forms (the all) and it is okay to worship these many forms. To worship is not the same thing as devotion (love, loyalty, will), or endeavors (will) but instead should be gaining knowledge to know ones proper place in the universe but also this knowledge allows one to be a level / agent of change.

While Wizards treat the universe in a more Newtonian fashion, yes this Newtonian fashion involves knowledge but it is a different style of knowledge and one's relationship with said knowledge.

I think of Archivists as flavor similar to Binders, they cast divine spells from powers that are not their own, but instead of giving the powers that be something in return and making a pact, a bargain, Archivist can tap into the universal divine (but also the fragmented divine) merely by having knowledge of the great hidden well of knowledge that under-guides reality.

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Now in actual practice this can be hard to differentiate Archivists vs Wizards, for example the Master of the Mystic Arts / Kamar-Taj in Marvel's MCU. Are these people Archivists or are they Wizards?


"The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization. The sorcerers of antiquity called the use of this language "spells". But if that word offends your modern sensibilities, you can call it program". The source code that shapes reality. We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the multiverse, to cast spells, conjure shields and weapons to make magic."

This can be arcane magic or divine magic, only difference is "skinning / coding" where you throw in some "paint" saying you are tapping into the great divine, the essence of things that is something something gods or something something the great divine that permeates everything. Or you can paint it as tapping into Newtonian mechanics and you are altering reality with your spells.

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Aka it is flavor but there is no hard and fast rules where the flavor of one ends and another begins, instead it is more like a gradient instead of a very vivid dividing line. Or you can see it as a venn diagram and in the middle zone that overlaps only flavor separates the two.

[Esprit15]

Personally, I tend to have them as tending to be the Cleric equivalent for gods of magic and/or knowledge.

[dgnslyr]

I guess Archivist implies a different type of cosmology than the one we're typically presented with in D&D; it would make more sense in a world where gods are vague and indirect and intangible, rather than one where they tend to trounce around the landscape as superhuman actors. Certainly, there are real-world religious traditions where the understanding of the divine comes from a logical buildup from first principles, the only real difference from math or philosophy being the additional base assumption that the divine exists. Calvinism and the idea of predestination, for example, came into being when John Calvin sat down, thought logically and decided that if God knew everything, then He must also know who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. And this is hardly the only example of rational thought applied to a theological context; pretty much every real-life doctrinal schism happened more or less because someone sat down, thought logically about the current understanding, and decided that things didn't quite add up; this is how religions evolve over time as shaped by their most prominent thinkers.

In D&D, an Archivist could be a devotee of a quiet and mysterious god who only very rarely designates champions to directly grant spells. Only a select few are chosen as paladins or clerics and receive a direct hotline to the divine, for example, but anybody could become an Archivist-scholar that studies religious texts academically to understand Their mysterious ways and uncover Their divine secrets.

[darkdragoon]

They interact with (un)holy writings, places, relics etc. They literally know where to go and who to talk to.

The default example is one going to a particular place to deal with a potentially troublesome scroll.

[daremetoidareyo]

Maybe archivists are just more animistic? Spirits and demons and fey and gods and all of that stuff are just powers that operate like a spiritual ecosystem. The battle spirits of the paladins, and the hermit spirits of rangers, and the nature spirits of druids, etc. all can be accessed by anyone with the training, but part of that training is necessarily "divine" because archivists aren't doing the magic, they are exhorting it from extant supernatural sources.

The focus on knowledge and ancient scrolls then serves as 1st person experiences of the supernatural, which then can be dissected and merged and whatnot to create a governing divine mechanism of how to cajole these entities to produce the necessary effects, not through devotion, but through studying the tastiest sweets of shared common interests with these spirits.

Which makes spirit shamans like cultural shamans and archivists like ethnosupernaturalist dabblers.

[rel]

divine casters are granted their magic from deities or nature or some kind of powerful outside force.

What about all the clerics powered by unshakable faith in their own awesome? There is plenty of room for divine power flowing from within a character.

[Malphegor]

I've always felt that Archivists represent the idea of scholars in a divine organisation (a church, for example) who keep track of the filing and the spells granted to them by their deity. A paperwork cleric, who deals with... ahem... clerical duties, more than the actual godbothering. Administrators.

the 'horror' they represent that puts them in Heroes of Horror is the idea that divine magic can be shared the same way arcane magic is shared amongst wizards- a god's instructions to gaining powers, granted to its follower, can be copied over and over and over without the will of the god being involved. They don't steal the power of the gods, indeed they pay well for the spells to be scribed for them to peruse, but they make the power the gods grant open source public domain shareware rather than drm locked 'you must be this indocrinated to cast these spells'

A cleric might find a high level archivist to be terrifying because they represent the power of the god's followers without the piety and respect their god normally demands.

And then there's the fact that they can learn from any divine spell that exists. Any. A druid can scribe their scrolls for a archivist to learn them, as can a paladin. All are the same to the archivist's eyes, just a divine spellcaster who holds secrets to tapping into X power or Y deity. That's kinda horrifying from the right angle-the archivist potentially represents the redundancy of the other divine spellcasting classes, since once they can do everything, why be anything else?

[ezekielraiden]

One of the most common and important duties for many working priests in churches in the high middle ages was illuminating manuscripts and keeping/maintaining books of various kinds. These priests were well-known for caring about scholarship (see St. Aquinas and the Scholastics generally), and eventually helpes create the modern university system.

Such scholar-priests often translated works from Arabic into Latin or their native language, and during the Age of Sail, they were among the few people who tried to preserve/understand Native culture in the Americas while it was being conquered and/or destroyed. Hence, although devout, they also had a scholar's perspective on knowledge and the generality it could have.

That, to me, is why the Archivist is a divine caster. It recognizes the place that jurist-priests and scholar-priests had during the Islamic Golden Age, the High Middle Ages, and early Renaissance--basically the whole time from the decline of the Byzantine empire to the rise of empiricism and the "Enlightenment" period in Europe (aka on the order of 700-1000 years of human history across three or four continents, and several distinct cultures therein).

[PairO'Dice Lost]

As I see it, the basic differentiating factor between arcane and divine magic is whether you do/get the magic yourself or whether you do/get the magic through/from another source. And while classes are mechanically classified as either arcane or divine with nothing in between, there's actually a flavor spectrum of "how divine" or "how arcane" classes are if you look at things right, based on how much control you have over your own magic, what you have to do to keep it, and so forth.

All the way over on the arcane end, you have the wizard: he puts in all the work himself, he knows all of his spells and the underlying theories, he's not beholden to anyone for his magic, and while it's easier for a wizard to work with other wizards to learn faster he's entirely capable of sealing himself up in a tower and ignoring the world while he derives spells from base principles. The cleric is the exemplar of the divine end: all of the power and knowledge is granted by the cleric's patron, the breadth and kind of magic gained is purely dependent on the patron's portfolio and whims, he fits into the social structure of a church/cult/etc. with a bunch of restrictions and expectations laid upon him, and if he makes one wrong decision it's all gone until he begs his patron for forgiveness.

The sorcerer is slightly "less arcane" than the wizard: flavor-wise sorcery is inherited and doesn't involve much if any study, and mechanically sorcerers have fixed spells known (which, flavor-wise, they don't get to choose themselves), so while sorcerers are independent of any sort of patron (aside from maybe having a dragon as a great-great-great-grandmother) they don't "own" their magic in the same way wizards do. The paladin is slightly "less divine" than the cleric: they have all the same magical strictures as a cleric, but the social strictures are somewhat less (stereotypically, most paladins are crusading heroes) and while paladins can serve a specific patron they can also serve the abstract principles of Good and Law and Justice and Other Capitalized Concepts, so they just need to worry about following their simple (albeit punishingly strict) code, not pleasing a particular being.

And you can keep ranking classes by arcane-ness and divine-ness until you get to the classes in the middle, where things get very fuzzy. The archivist is the "least divine" divine class, and I'd say the warlock is the "least arcane" class: in the same way that an archivist is basically a wizard that happens to use magic of a normally-divine nature, warlocks are basically favored souls (chosen by a particular patron, granted power once that they can use as desired, has a fairly casual relationship with their patron and doesn't necessarily study/understand their powers, etc.) that happen to use magic of a normally-arcane nature. You can even think of it as "Archivists are arcane casters who cast divine spells, and warlocks are divine 'casters' who use arcane 'spells'," and the flavor still applies.


My personal view on what flavor role archivists play is that where clerics tend to represent more modern ideas of faith and religion (serving a god or gods because you believe in their principles, being part of and beholden to a larger religious structure, and so forth), archivists represent a more ancient view, where religion is not so separate from everyday life, faith isn't required, and the relationship between gods and mortals is more transactional. So somewhat like Ramza00 and Malphegor said about gnosis and the universality of divinity, an archivist is deals in worship without devotion and sacrifice without ritual.

For instance, the Norse people didn't have priests of Thor in the D&D sense that those priests devoted their lives to Thor, served Thor above the other gods, thought storms were awesome, and were the only ones to wear holy symbols of Thor everywhere; rather, lots of people carried Mjolnir pendants around, there wasn't a strict division between clergy and laity, and they didn't pray so much as say "Look, controlling the weather is your job, we sacrificed a bull to you so now you have to make it rain on our crops, okay?" (I'm drastically simplifying, of course, but you get the idea.) A lot of things that we think of as mystical or superstitious they didn't view that way, instead seeing things in much more mundane terms; they didn't think of e.g. putting a metal horseshoe above the door as some sort of magical talisman so much as, well, you tie down the lids of your garbage cans so the raccoons don't get to them and make a mess of things, you put iron above your door so the elves don't get to your baby and steal it away, same difference, y'know?