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The Dresden Files => DF Spoilers => Topic started by: dspringer1 on June 12, 2019, 09:42:36 PM
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I have read all the books and short stories and listened to a few of the forums, but I have to admit that I have only a hazy idea what the White Council actually does
There are some hints
1) They have a financial arm that trades in the stock market, manages investments
2) They have the wardens that enforce the laws of magic and defend the white council/wizards (collective security)
3) They find and train powerful practitioners in the art of Wizardry
4) They have alliances, mostly with smaller powers who they protect. They have diplomatic relations with all the significant supernatural powers and are members of the unseelee accords.
5) They are located worldwide, but the center of their power is Europe. They are fairly strong in North America, much weaker elsewhere. Less about physical territory and more about spheres of influence
6) Pyramid watching - although what purpose that services.
#3 is clearly the center of the their purpose, but #2 is also pretty high up. But judging by Harry's life, the White Council has very little impact on the day to day lives of Wizards and relatively little impact on the supernatural balance in their community. Harry upsets the balance (in a good way), but he is clearly an outsider in this respect.
But none of the above really speaks to what role the White Council has in the larger supernatural community. Maybe they are just a supernatural nation defending their own interests, but there is always this undercurrent that they (should) serve some larger purpose (humanity perhaps). Certainly they are one of the very few powers (and probably the only powerful one) that acts to some extent out of a sense of human morality. The other supernatural nations are all either very focused on their personal interests or predators or both. I suspect it was no coincidence that the first nation targeted by the outsider attack was the White Council.
Which leads to my next question - how much purpose did the original Merlin try to embed into the White Council -- and how far has the current White Council fallen short from that original vision?
And my last question - what allies did Merlin have (like Odin) that are still around - but no longer tied to the White Council's current agenda. Harry is going to need to gather strength for the final battles. Odin is one arrow in his quiver, but he needs more. Given another future book involves professional wrestler who are ex-gods, that might be another way Harry gathers powerful champions for that pivotal fight based on the outcome of that book. And Thomas is gaining reputation and power in the White Court -- which means he might eventually bring the White Court on Harry's side as well in the end days. Perhaps bigfoot will play a role as well :)
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I would argue that #3 is their main activity (gets the majority of wizardly attention), but not a main goal.
I think their main goal is the intertwining twosome of 1. protecting humanity by 2. suppressing sorcerors. They train wizards simply to fill their own ranks with the strongest, and to keep them from turning to black magic.
Everything else is in support of that twofold goal, and/or the simple consequence of what they are -- humans, individuals with individual interests, long-lived wizards, being active members of the supernatural world, signatories of the Accords, and so on.
Edit: also, don't overlook the sheer bulk of bureaucratic inertia that is the simple act of being the White Council; "being the WC" is probably takes up more WC time (in hours of wizards' attention) than any other single thing they (the wizards performing WC duties) do. Wizard Peabody certainly didn't overlook it.
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On what are y'all basing your estimation that the WC spends so much time on training? Based on Carlos, let's say an apprenticeship is 15 years. How many apprentices would a wizard have to have before they spent a majority of time on 3? Let's say it takes them 5 years to find an apprentice if they're out there looking. So let's say ten apprentices. Do we know of any wizard who has had more than two apprentices?
I'd say the main purpose of the Council is enforcing the Laws of Magic. I base this on things like the conversation between Harry and Luccio in White Night about it.
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On what are y'all basing your estimation that the WC spends so much time on training? Based on Carlos, let's say an apprenticeship is 15 years. How many apprentices would a wizard have to have before they spent a majority of time on 3? Let's say it takes them 5 years to find an apprentice if they're out there looking. So let's say ten apprentices. Do we know of any wizard who has had more than two apprentices?
I'd say the main purpose of the Council is enforcing the Laws of Magic. I base this on things like the conversation between Harry and Luccio in White Night about it.
That is the problem, remember in Proven Guilty when the Korean kid got the chop, the Merlin explained to Harry that there were too many kids with talent and not enough wizards to train them...
So they go warlock and get the chop... Part of the reason being the penalty is so harsh if the wizard makes a mistake with his or her charge, they both get the chop, most just do not want to take the risk...
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I think we can safely say that being on the White Council gives you access to a lot of wizard training and knowledge, well beyond what you get from simply apprenticeship. Certainly Harry has gotten access to many reference books and sources that the common want-to-be-wizard would never have a chance to acquire. Harry has also received advanced training, although a lot of that was specific to the Wardens. But I suspect whatever role you play in the WC involves some specialized training.
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That is the problem, remember in Proven Guilty when the Korean kid got the chop, the Merlin explained to Harry that there were too many kids with talent and not enough wizards to train them...
So they go warlock and get the chop... Part of the reason being the penalty is so harsh if the wizard makes a mistake with his or her charge, they both get the chop, most just do not want to take the risk...
Eh, so far as I can tell that's only when the apprentice has previously broken the Laws. If you take them as apprentice before they do, there's no Doom to consider.
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On what are y'all basing your estimation that the WC spends so much time on training?...Do we know of any wizard who has had more than two apprentices?...
Hmm. This is a good point.
That I recall, the only wizard in the books with more was Kemmler, who had at least 3 (I suspect he had more, but sacrificed them as pawns during one of the White Council assaults).
Given how long a wizard's (potential) lifespan, they would indeed need many apprentices, if they are to spend "most" of their time on training.
That said, 15 years per is a hefty chunk of time, and it appears to be a relatively time-intensive process, so I expect they do more apprentice-oriented stuff than anything else, for the duration of the apprenticeship. But yeah... 2 apprentices = 30 years, and for a 300-year-old wizard that's only 10% of their life...
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I'm not certain we can say the White Council is very strong in North America. They have four wardens and Harry hasn't been doing his job as such for a couple of years. They almost certainly don't have much of a presence in Mexico as the more southern parts of Mexico were Red Court territory.
As far as training goes, it wasn't clear when Harry was at Luccio's bootcamp if any of the apprentices had a specific teacher. Could the White Council have taken on the role of teacher to a large number of students rather than relying on the old system of individual teacher and student pairs?
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I'd say the main purpose of the Council is enforcing the Laws of Magic. I base this on things like the conversation between Harry and Luccio in White Night about it.
Well, that's what the Wardens do. Listen to a couple of Google engineers talking shop, you'd think "engineering" is all about software; but a couple of General Motors engineers would have you thinking it's about hardware; etc...
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Well, that's what the Wardens do. Listen to a couple of Google engineers talking shop, you'd think "engineering" is all about software; but a couple of General Motors engineers would have you thinking it's about hardware; etc...
That's a good point, but the conversation has a lot to do with how it's all the Council does vis a vis wizards. There's also the conversation about it between Harry and the Merlin at the end of Chapter 1 of Proven Guilty. I read it as enforcing the laws of magic were always Harry's job and they are especially so now that he is a warden.
@KurtinStGeorge: I think that was a war time special. Harry does mention that a lot of the younger warden's, like Carlos, aren't really that great because they've had a narrow training.
@dspringer1: What makes you say that? Harry doesn't have much additional knowledge outside of his apprenticeship from the Council. I don't know of any special advanced training Harry has received. He has given special training to young wardens. Both at Luccio's boot camp and in AAAA Wizardry. There is mention of reports and wards being circulated during the war with the Red Court.
I think the OP question is a good one because we don't spend a lot of time dealing with the Council. Harry is probably the worst wizard to learn details of the Council from because he avoids it as best he can.
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1,2,4.
Like Harry, wizards like secrets. However the Council does have a data store of some type, it pops up a couple of times in text. Also the Council has published books when it has had a reason to. Certainly Eb has, it's mentioned as a training resource, by Harry. So did wizard Peabody.
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In theory I think that the council's purpose was to:
1. Enforce the Laws of Magic
2. Defend the mortal world from supernatural threats
3. Find and train new wizards
The first two of these have been mostly relagated to the wardens, in practice the rest of the council pretty much just tries to keep up appearances and protect themselves against the other supernatural nations.
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I think, based on the Pratchett, model, we're missing Merlin's first purpose:
Prevent open conflict between wizards (especially spilling over into the normal world). After all, the plural of Wizard is War.
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I'm not certain we can say the White Council is very strong in North America. They have four wardens and Harry hasn't been doing his job as such for a couple of years. They almost certainly don't have much of a presence in Mexico as the more southern parts of Mexico were Red Court territory.
I think the WC as a whole was pretty reduced by the war vs the Ramps, and the Wardens especially, of course. I'm not sure that NorthAmerican wizards suffered any more (or less) than wizards elsewhere; but I don't know that they didn't get different exposure/effect, either.
The Red's old territories in Latin America became a (supernatural) power-vacuum, one that the WC was unable to exploit because they remained so short-staffed from the wars. The last comments I recollect were that the power-struggles continued; but the Fomor seem to particularly be aiming at that sort of chaotic situation & power-vacuums, so they may be big in Latin America now...?
... As far as training goes, it wasn't clear when Harry was at Luccio's bootcamp if any of the apprentices had a specific teacher. Could the White Council have taken on the role of teacher to a large number of students rather than relying on the old system of individual teacher and student pairs?
I think those were apprentice Wardens, and not an exemplar of how other non-Wardent wizards' apprentices might generally be taught.
IIRC, the "boot camp" model was a new-ish endeavor to fill the WC & Wardens combat-ready ranks faster than their old-fashioned methods were doing.
I would presume that they got some general training before their combat proclivities were clear, and we know nothing of their introductory "grade-school" training. Maybe they were on an ordinary 1:1 apprentice:master track, before their master decided they would make good soldiers & gave them over to the Wardens' newfangled bootcamp.
We really don't know.
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I think the White Council defends the mortal world to protect themselves rather than because it's one of its missions. Any power making significant inroads into the mortal world would threaten the WC's resources (infrastructure and recruits) and make long term survival chancy. Harry is an exception for going out of his way to help vanilla mortals. I don't think a WC oriented towards defending the mortal world would be quite so isolated from it.
My take on the actual purposes:
1. Enforce the Laws
2. Mutual protection (like squashing warlocks)
3. Train new Wizards (to keep them from becoming warlocks)
4. Settle disputes among wizards (so they don't turn to black magic to get one over on their rivals)
The rest of what they do is more or less derived from these. Worth nothing that the 0th purpose, like all institutions, is to maintain its own existence.
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@noblehunter: 2, 3, and 4 all reinforce purpose 0, which in turn, allows them to pursue purpose 1.
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1.Laws of Magic
2. Governing body of human magic. Stops wizards and humans with magic getting involved in mortal international affairs.
3. International Supernatural Politics. Mainly to do with the Accords. Luccio had to intervene with the Accord and the Denarians. Albeit with Dresden implying Mab's wrath.
4.Fighting other supernatural threats: The Black Court Purge, Kemmler and his disciples (including WW1), The Red Court, The Fomor, White Court on and off, The Rakshasa thing.
5. Miscellaneous Important roles in Supernatural Circles: The Gatekeeper, The Blackstaff, The Warden.
Number 4 has atleast half a dozen examples. Seems to be their main purpose other than the laws.
Plus according to Luccios lengthy discussing/debate with Harry. Stopping Wizard's from getting involved in mortal international affairs. This is also corrobaratted by WOJ that one of the White Councils purpose is to stop Wizards from advising/becoming kings and emperors. @Serack any help with that quote.
They kinda /do/ win. It’s one reason the White Council thinks of itself as something so ohmygodmighty important. But bear in mind a few things:
1) The White Council /exists/ in order to limit the power of wizards. These days, it’s mostly about keeping wizards out of the black magic–but in the past, it was also to keep wizards out of politics. They would show up as advisers, rarely (most “court wizards” were charlatans or underpowered schmucks), but the Council itself was very much against getting involved in things.
That’s mainly because if the Council threw its weight in anywhere, it was all but guaranteeing a civil war among its own members. (Remember, it’s very Euro-centric.)
The original Merlin learned a lesson about wizards involving themselves in politics. They already have too much power to use wisely, from his point of view.
There's a few other relevent things about the White Council their powers in that WOJ as well. How Wizards were rarer in the past yet could travel faster then most using Ways up until Cars, Trains and Planes.
2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.
3) Travel in general was a lot harder. Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you. Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don’t have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease. They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks. For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you’ve got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections. And that’s it. In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you’re going to die of pneumonia in the future. (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you’ve got cancer or other serious medical issues.) Wizards don’t face that same danger. If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn’t of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was. And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME. Which most of them did. That kinda limited how much conflict they would actually get involved in.
4) The Inquisition. Fact of the matter is that the Inquisition, for better or worse, made everyone REALLY aware of practitioners. If a wizard started slinging his power around willy nilly, it would attract attention. Probably /hostile/ attention, at that. Which leads us to…
5) Wizards have to sleep. Yes, an enraged wizard could probably kill just about anyone he wanted to, flatten towns, all the mighty wizard stuff. But… there are about a million humans to every full-blown wizard talent. A strong wizard can kill a mortal with about as much effort as it would take you to pick up a piece of gravel and toss it twenty feet. Now, go out to a gravel pile and do that a MILLION times.
More on the ability to travel giving them power and influence
Of course, that leaves many, many other things they could do to influence events. The most powerful such was the gathering of information and rapid communications. Their ability to travel rapidly, to gather information and send it elsewhere was something that didn’t really get beat until a Mr. Ford, Mr. Marconi, and some guys named Orville and Wilbur came along. And they were basically in the information business, which is an excellent way to guarantee security.
There's this important bit that kinda counters stopping wizards from having influence but I think shows the delicate game they play with Mortal history and culture
They were also largely responsible for the Renaissance, in the Dresden universe. Not directly, but by going out and finding the best and brightest minds and seeing to it that they got the education and the chances they needed to succeed in life. Some wizards even did direct mentoring of various brilliant figures of European history (DaVinci and Gallileo were two prime examples).
But they stayed out of direct involvement in wars and politics, instead focusing on becoming involved in the intellectual progress of society. Wizards from France and Germany, for example, would treat each other much the same way as opposing lawyers in a big case. Even when their clients were tearing each other to bits, that didn’t meant that the two wizards were foes. They were, in fact, professional colleagues, who were likely to go off and get a beer and roll their eyes at their clients’ foolishness.
and finally how they lost alot of there power or were kept in check.
(All of this is mostly focused on the White Council, which was centered in Europe. Wizards in other areas of the world, such as the Americas, eastern Asia, and Australia have far different histories.)
But that factor–the sheer weight of numbers of mortals–dictated the role they had to assume to survive and prosper. They hoped that a more advanced, less warlike culture would provide a better place for wizards to live. In fact, it did. But it also robbed them of the extreme power they’d possessed until that time, relative to vanilla mortals.
6) PEOPLE BELIEVED IN MAGIC AND IT SCARED THEM. I mean, there was none of this “but there’s no such thing as magic” nonsense involved. And not all the witch hunters were in it for the money. There was a class of men who knew all about the various forces of the supernatural, out there in the darkness, and who made themselves as able to contend with them as any mortal could be. If a wizard went all kaboomy on mortals, he knew that there was someone who was going to hunt him, striking in a moment of vulnerability.
(I’ll leave it to you to deduce who they grew up into, eventually. It isn’t complicated or hard to see.)
End of the day, even wizards bleed. And as the wise Governor of California says, if it bleeds, you can kill it.
Sorry for the quote dump.
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(I’ll leave it to you to deduce who they grew up into, eventually. It isn’t complicated or hard to see.)
I haven't seen much on this. Is everyone agreed that it's the Venatori Umbrorum? That's the only one that seems not complicated or hard to see for me.
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I haven't seen much on this. Is everyone agreed that it's the Venatori Umbrorum? That's the only one that seems not complicated or hard to see for me.
Dunno... I thought they were created as a cover-organization by the original Venatori of the Oblivion War...?
I guess wizard-hunters could have been co-opted as a cover. Wizards&witches would seem to be the obvious ones to be harboring the sorts of information that those older Venatori might want to suppress, so... maybe?
Maybe the O.W.Venatori decided to unify a bunch of previously separate groups of wizard-hunters under the "V.Umbrorum" umbrella, and hide themselves as "invisible cells" within the larger organization?
I'm kind of inclined to look at the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, which points to the Ordo Malleus...
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The purpose of the council is, ultimately, to look after itself. Everything it does is an extension of this self-serving altruism.
The laws are to ensure that no one wizard becomes powerful enough to enslave them or destroy them, or from enslaving or enraging humanity which would accomplish the same thing. They train young wizards, kill warlocks, suppress supernatural threats and keep magic a secret to this end.
They guard reality from Outsiders because this reality is where they keep their stuff.
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Dunno... I thought they were created as a cover-organization by the original Venatori of the Oblivion War...?
I guess wizard-hunters could have been co-opted as a cover. Wizards&witches would seem to be the obvious ones to be harboring the sorts of information that those older Venatori might want to suppress, so... maybe?
Maybe the O.W.Venatori decided to unify a bunch of previously separate groups of wizard-hunters under the "V.Umbrorum" umbrella, and hide themselves as "invisible cells" within the larger organization?
I'm kind of inclined to look at the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, which points to the Ordo Malleus...
I just can't think of another candidate group that they "grew up" into that's in the books. There aren't many candidates. The only human occult organizations we know of are the Venatori Umbrorum and the Thule Society. I'd say it's the Thule Society because the one time they were noted, they were considered enemies of the White Council, but they were first mentioned in A Fistful of Warlocks, which was published after the WoJ.
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Dunno... I thought they were created as a cover-organization by the original Venatori of the Oblivion War...?
I guess wizard-hunters could have been co-opted as a cover. Wizards&witches would seem to be the obvious ones to be harboring the sorts of information that those older Venatori might want to suppress, so... maybe?
Maybe the O.W.Venatori decided to unify a bunch of previously separate groups of wizard-hunters under the "V.Umbrorum" umbrella, and hide themselves as "invisible cells" within the larger organization?
I'm kind of inclined to look at the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, which points to the Ordo Malleus...
I agree the Malleus makes sense - which grew/evolved into Forthill's club. Men of the Church standing sentinel against the darkness of the supernatural world.
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I'm kind of inclined to look at the witch-hunts of the Inquisition, which points to the Ordo Malleus...
When I read that, my brain went to the malleus maleficarum, and thought you were referencing something from outside the Dresden Files. I forgot about them. They do make a decent candidate, but I'd imagine a group which formerly hunted wizards would be more impressive than what we know of Father Forthill's order. Especially if they've "grown up" from that instead of something like, "become." But that could just be parsing Jim's words too carefully.