Q: What’s with the name “Wizard” Academy? Are you guys a cult, or what?
A: Sigh…
We get asked that question a lot.
Wizard Academy is a marketing school.
We have no intention of changing the name.
Any student of language will tell you that “wizard” simply means “wise man.”
A person who cowers is a coward.
A person always drunk is a drunkard.
A person who is dull is a dullard.
A person who is wise is a wisard.
Give good advice at critical times and you’re a wisard, or wizard.
Remember John Milton of Paradise Lost? In 1629, barely 21 years old, Milton stayed up all night on Christmas Eve to write On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. It was the first thing he ever wrote. This is the fourth stanza:
“See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wisards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel quire,
From out his secret altar touch’d with hallow’d fire.”
Obviously, Milton was speaking of the magi (magicians) or “wise men” spoken of in Matthew chapter two who somehow knew that star to be the sign that Christ had been born. These wise men, or “wisards” received no annunciation from an angelic choir. That was given to the shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night, remember?
Yet not only did the wisards’ studies tell them the Christ had been born, they also knew what gifts to bring: Gold, the gift given to a king, Frankincense, burned in the temple as an offering to God, and Myrrh, resin harvested from the skin of the commiphora tree, used to embalm the bodies of the dead. The wise men or “wizards” believed that this newborn baby was king, that he was God, and that he was born to die. And they came to worship him.
Here is the exact passage from the King James Bible:
“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him…’ And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.”
– Matthew chapter 2, King James Bible, translated in 1611
And so it was, and so it is.
Roy H. Williams