“Congratulations, dear Master... You’ve summoned the greatest and most
powerful witch in the world. Because what else can a Caster be?”
In reality, to no one’s surprise, Caster is not a true witch of history or legend. Instead, the true identity of this Servant is the author who reinvented witches at the turn of the 20th century,
Lyman Frank Baum.
Born in New York in 1856, L. Frank Baum was the son of a businessman, but he was a dreamy child, starting writing early in life and falling in love with theater in his teens. Attempts to “straighten him out” with military academy failed, with an early discharge due to stress and many instances of severe discipline for daydreaming. As he grew up, he never ceased his adolescent dreams, jumping from various flights of fancy to another, whether it was playwriting or breeding fancy poultry.
For most of his life, though, Baum struggled with financial success. Though he loved the theater, he experienced only wavering financial success, with a tour of one of his few successful musicals, the
Maid of Arran, ending when one of his other dramas caused a fire that destroyed the theater in which it was performed and torching the only known copies of most of his scripts and costumes. The newspaper he edited for went under after a few years. Even when he tried to run a bazaar, it failed and went bankrupt due to his habit of giving out wares on credit to likable but unreliable patrons.
It wasn’t until his late thirties, when he began to write and publish adaptations of fairy tales, that his career took off. First, a recollection of rewritten Mother Goose prose achieved financial success, and shortly after, he hit it big with the
Wizard of Oz.
Oz was Baum’s attempt to adapt and abridge the stories of Lewis Carroll and European fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers, rendering them into an “American” version that lacked what he perceived as boring, heavy-handed moral lessons. Indeed, Baum deliberately cribbed their work, relying on a large library of their books which he devoured and loved to the point he successfully petitioned for them to be legally declared as necessary to his work when they were nearly seized by creditors in bankruptcy.
Lovingly recreating stories of witches, both good and ill, Baum is one of the fathers of the modern American fairy tale and indelibly painted his mark on witchcraft for generations of children, removing their horror and keeping only the wonder.
Is it any surprise then that when summoned as a Caster, he sought to present himself not as a besuited man, but as the ideal and cute good witch, worthy of Glinda or Ozma herself? After all, in the stories of Oz, Ozma spent the first two books magically transformed into a boy named Tip, completely unaware of her true identity as the mystical and eternally young princess of the magical kingdom of Oz.
“It’s just a bit of literary magic reversing the narrative, dear Master!”
While unquestionably a man in life and when summoned, Baum immediately paints over his Saint Graph to recreate the image of Ozma, portraying himself as an adorable and wise young witch. It is these associations with witchcraft, his dreams of magic, and his association as a member of Miss Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, that allow him to qualify for the Caster class despite being an “ordinary” author all his life. In fact, some view the Wizard of Oz as a theosophical allegory, drawing on many of the same imagery and symbols.
But then, Baum drew upon and reinvented so many things that its status as a secret work of theosophy is certainly questionable, no matter what he claims… Right?
Originally Posted by pinetree
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