Wizardry, as popularized in Britain and North America, began with John Dee, Elizabeth I’s personal occultist, alchemist and antiquarian. While most of Britain was hostile to occultism during Dee’s lifetime, he managed to gain Elizabeth’s trust after escaping an accusation of treason. With her support, he set about establishing the first national school of wizardy, reverse engineering a cultural philosophy for British magic from Scottish witch circles, Greek theorists, Christian theologians, and a trunk of manuscripts taken from the Welsh Marshes. While most of his journey into the occult turned up only hearsay, he was able to develop some useful but inconsistent magical techniques and establish a few consistent techniques for the following:

• Scrying
• The creation of homunculi
• Transmutation

Upon his ousting by Elizabeth’s successor, James I, he used the last of his resources to form the first wizarding order, the Order of Dee, in 1597. They were tasked with continuing his search for occult knowledge and turning that knowledge to a greater good: the proliferation of the British Empire, which Dee had helped establish with Elizabeth. While they wouldn’t work directly with the Crown until the late 1680s and William III, they did collaborate secretly with a number of nobles to push Britain forward, many of them sneaking into the colonies to form their own sub-orders and subjugate the local populations. After being accepted by William III on the word of several colonial governers, the Order of Dee became an essential part of the British Empire between 1700 and 1750, akin to the British East Indian Company. The population never entirely accepted wizards, however, and it only took an untimely fire wiping out their greatest occult repository and a slanderous accusation of an illicit relationship between Dee and Elizabeth during his service to shatter the Order entirely. The smaller orders formed by colonizer wizards became the norm, with colonizer populations being more welcoming of an extra barrier of power between them and the natives.

In the wake of the American Revolution, most wizards in the new country returned to Britain. While the government wasn’t ready or willing to reinstate the Order of Dee, it was willing to employ wizards on an individual basis to turn their purported alchemical prowess* to repairing the country’s coffers. Those that didn’t return, usually due to legal issues with the Crown, largely aggregated in the South under a few dozen small orders, usually in Virginia, Tennessee, or the Carolinas. A society where wealth was concentrated in farmland and slavery benefitted from their ability to scry, allowing farmers to predict famines or escape plots by slaves. Their ability to create homunculi was also greatly valued, if stigmatized. Simple homunculi were used to support slaves temporarily if they became suddenly unavailable (punishment, sickness, etc) but the wealthiest of Southerners would secretly commission highly realistic homunculi. They would serve as slaves in positions where African slaves weren’t trusted, often being used to get around the restrictions on teaching African slaves how to read and write. Many wizards became plantation owners, and vice versa, the racism used to support slavery dovetailing nicely with the Order of Dee’s commitment to the profileration of British (now American) ideology. In this, the wizard gained the acceptance in the South that he never achieved in Britain.

When the Civil War broke out, the Confederacy instated the Order of Dixie, a wizarding order that reported directly to President Davis, just as Dee once reported to Elizabeth. With few exceptions, America’s wizards joined the Order of Dixie, either because they owned slaves or because their customers did. As the largest concentration of wizardry in over a century, they were able to develop a number of spells, hexes and curses tuned directly for war, most notably the Blasphemies given to each Confederate general. While powerful, their novelty masked a number of weaknesses that the North were able to exploit thanks to a number of spies, and their ability to influence the war was shattered with the catastrophic death of Major-General Cleburne. After the Union victory, the Order was disbanded and, while many wizards were not imprisoned or indicted due to political pressure, they were limited in their ability to hold government office. This led to the creation of the Klan, the Lily-White League, the Keys of Kelley, and dozens of smaller organizations meant to continue the Civil War on their terms, operating in secret and using magic to arrange terrorist attacks on newly freed slaves and Northern-born politicians. The most aggressive of these even scheme against the North.

*While Dee was able to develop a way to transmute common metals into valuable ones, the exchange rate was never efficient, with several tons of material often needed for just a few grams of gold. Nonetheless, several kings, presidents and prime ministers have tried to use Dee Transmutation to turn their less useful resources into gold. So far it’s never proven effective.