10
Who Is Raistlin Majere?

Kevin McCain

Dungeons & Dragons is full of great heroes and villains. The many worlds of the D&D multiverse are overflowing with them – from heroes such as the twin-scimitar-wielding drow Drizzt Do’Urden and the self-sacrificing knight Sturm Brightblade to villains such as the lord of Barovia, the vampire Count Strahd Von Zorovich, Vecna, the lich who rose to demi-godhood, and countless others. However, there is one that stands above all others. Who is this? Well, several names might come to mind when you consider this question. But only one is correct. No, it’s not Elminster! It is the Master of Past and Present, Raistlin Majere.¹ Villain? Maybe. Tragic hero? Perhaps. Most powerful wizard in D&D? Absolutely! According to the death knight Lord Soth, “Of all of the living I have ever met, he is the only one I fear.”² What other wizard can claim to strike fear into Lord Soth? Or have the Dark Queen, Takhisis, refer to him as “my worthy opponent” and bow to him in respect – “And I bow to you, Raistlin”?³ Exactly, none.⁴

For a small taste of what makes Raistlin so incredible consider the following. He completed the potentially deadly Test of High Sorcery, which all wizards on Krynn seeking to advance beyond a novice level of power must pass, at an extremely young age. He was responsible for allowing Tanis Half-Elven to kill Ariakas, the leader of the dragonarmies, and for stopping the Dark Queen from entering the world – effectively ending the War of the Lance. He traveled through time to learn from and ultimately outwit the most powerful archmage in the history of Krynn, Fistandantilus. He journeyed to the Abyss and defeated the Dark Queen, becoming a god himself. After defeating Takhisis he proceeded to do what she always wanted to, but never could, destroy all the other gods. Ultimately, he was left to rule over Krynn alone – that’s right the hourglass constellation stood alone in the sky (of course, in the end he decided not to defeat Takhisis because he learned of the ultimate outcome of his becoming a god).⁵ He was integral in the defeat of Chaos – without his help his nephew Palin Majere wouldn’t have had access to the necessary spell. Finally, he did what none of the gods of Krynn could do – he found the world when the Dark Queen transported it to another galaxy and hid it from them. This is just a sampling of the incredible things that Raistlin did. How can you describe him? In a word, “awesome”!

Although one could write books describing the amazing feats that Raistlin accomplished (in fact people have), chronicling his tales is not our concern here. Our concern here is with a seemingly simple question: who is Raistlin Majere? Of course, he is the brother of Caramon Majere. He is the wizard with golden skin and hourglass pupils. He is the Master of Past and Present. But, who is he? That is, what makes it true that it was a single person that accomplished all of the extraordinary feats that Raistlin did?

The Question and the Test

Our question is a philosophical one. It is a question that sits at the heart of metaphysics (the philosophical study of the nature of reality). It is the question of what makes a person the same person over time. What makes you the same person now as you were a year ago? Ten years ago? A month from now? Ten years from now? By exploring the question of who Raistlin Majere is, perhaps we can shed some light on the question of who we are.

This question is what philosophers call the “persistence question” of personal identity. It is the question of what conditions are required for a person at one time to be numerically identical to a person at a different time. To say of A and B that they are numerically identical is to say that A is B (they are one and the same thing – there really aren’t two things at all, but rather just one). This is very different from qualitative identity. Qualitative identity is the sort of identity that identical twins could have – not twins like Caramon and Raistlin, but identical twins that cannot be told apart. Although twins of this sort cannot be told apart, they are separate entities. Thus, it is possible for things to be qualitatively identical, but not numerically identical. It is also possible for things to be numerically identical without being qualitatively identical. For example, when Raistlin fights in the War of the Lance he has white hair, golden skin, and hourglass pupils, but when he travels back in time he has brown hair, pale skin, and regular pupils – Raistlin at these different times is numerically identical, but not qualitatively identical. Similarly, you are numerically identical to the person who you were five years ago, but you are not qualitatively identical. After all, if we could place you and your past self in the same room, it would be possible to tell you apart.

Our question concerns the conditions of numerical identity. So, when we ask “Who is Raistlin Majere?” we are asking what makes it the case that the golden-skinned, white-haired, hourglass-eyed Raistlin who fought Takhisis in the Abyss is numerically identical to the pale-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed Raistlin who was hanging around Istar at the time of the Kingpriest.

Now one might be tempted to say that there is an easy answer to this question: these Raistlins aren’t the same. It wasn’t one person who performed all of the feats that are attributed to Raistlin. This would give us an easy answer to our question, but it wouldn’t shed much light on what it is that makes you numerically identical to yourself when you were a child. Worse still, this answer would make it so that we shouldn’t consider Raistlin to be such a great character. According to this answer to the question, there is no single person who accomplished everything that is credited to Raistlin. But, this easy answer is false. There is only one Raistlin and he did accomplish all of these feats. Any acceptable answer to our question must respect this truth. In fact, we will use the criterion of allowing for the same person, Raistlin, to accomplish his many feats as our test of theories. Fortunately, no one faces death for the failure of a theory to pass our test, as the mages do in the Towers of High Sorcery. But failure to pass our test does count as a serious problem for the theory.

Three Robes, Three Answers

It is fitting that the number of serious answers to the persistence question of personal identity is the same as the number of orders of magic, three. Just as, after the Test of High Sorcery, one must choose whether to take the white, red, or black robes, our test will allow us to choose whether to accept the somatic approach, the psychological approach, or anticriterialism.⁶ Unlike the Conclave, we do not seek balance between our answers. We seek an answer that can account for Raistlin’s identity, whether this can be accomplished by all three approaches or only one approach. Just as one should know about the orders before choosing one’s robes, we should know the features of our three approaches to personal identity before submitting each to our test.

The somatic approach to the persistence question is the idea that personal identity is a physical relation. According to this approach, what makes you numerically identical with yourself as a child and yourself five years from now is that there is a kind of physical continuity that links you. One version of this approach says that you just are your body. So, what makes you the same person now as you were in the past has to do with the continuity that there is between your body now and your body in the past – your body now bears certain causal relations to your body in the past.⁷ Another version of this approach says that you are the thinking animal that exists where you are. According to this version of the somatic approach, what makes you the same person now as you were in the past is that you are the same animal – you are the same living organism now as you were then.⁸

The psychological approach holds that some psychological feature (or group of features) is what is necessary and sufficient for you to persist over time. One version of this approach is that you are identical with yourself of five years ago because you can remember experiences that you had five years ago.⁹ It is fairly obvious that this view is problematic. It is plausible that if you are, say, 30 now, then you can remember experiences you had when you were 15. It is also plausible that when you were 15 you could remember experiences you had when you were 5. However, it is also plausible that you cannot now, at 30, remember the experiences you had when you were 5. If this is the case, then, according to this memorial version of the psychological approach, 5-year-old you is numerically identical to 15-year-old you and 15-year-old you is numerically identical to 30-year-old you, but 5-year-old you is not numerically identical to 30-year-old you. This is saying A = B and B = C, but A ≠ C. But, that is crazy! So, we won’t consider the memory version of this approach when trying to determine who Raistlin Majere is. Instead, we will consider the more plausible version of this approach, where the condition that must be met for persistence is psychological continuity.¹⁰ This version of the psychological approach says that the reason why you are the same person now as you were five years ago is that some of your mental states now are causally connected to mental states you had then. The idea is that you are the same person now as you were five years ago because at least some of your current mental states are what they are because of the mental states that you had five years ago.

Anticriterialism, as you might have guessed, is the view that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for persistence. According to this approach, while certain features might provide evidence that one thing is numerically identical to another, there are no criteria that that must always be satisfied in order for a person to persist through time. So, while we might have evidence that suggests that you are the same person now as you were five years ago, there aren’t criteria that guarantee that you are. That’s not to deny that you are numerically identical to your younger self, but, rather, simply to claim that there isn’t anything informative that can be said about what makes it the case that you are the same person now as you were in the past – you just are.¹¹

Now that we have briefly explored the orders let’s enter the tower and take the test.

Taking the Test

Raistlin presents a special challenge for any account of personal identity – not because of all of the incredible things that he did, but because of the extreme transformations that he went through. It is these transformations that pose the challenges for our test of theories. Let’s consider the various approaches and see if they are able to handle the transformations that Raistlin underwent while maintaining that it is one person who completed all of the tasks that he did.

Let’s start with anticriterialism. The test doesn’t pose a challenge for this approach to personal identity at all. Since this approach denies that there are any criteria that are necessary or sufficient for persistence, no information that we provide about Raistlin’s life (or his afterlife) can provide a reason for thinking that the anticriterialist approach fails our test. So, the test of anticriterialism is surely no Soulforge. It has the feel of theft over honest toil – it makes it too easy to get the result that Raistlin persists throughout all of his adventures. While we mentioned above that this is our ultimate test for the theories considered, anticriterialism should be our last resort because it tells us nothing about what it is that makes Raistlin persist. One must sacrifice something for the magic, that’s part of the test – this approach sacrifices nothing and so it gains little power in return. Anticriterialism simply does not tell us what makes you the same person now as you were in the past and as you will be in the future. Thus, we should acknowledge that anticriterialism can pass the test in a sense, but we should definitely see if one of the other theories can as well because they could potentially tell us more about personal identity.

The somatic approach faces problems immediately. One of the first things we learn about Raistlin in the Chronicles is how his body has been drastically changed as a result of his experience with the Test of High Sorcery. After the Test of High Sorcery Raistlin’s health is shattered (though always sickly he was never as bad as this), his hair has turned completely white, his skin is now a metallic gold, his skin tends to give off a feverish heat, and he now has hourglass-shaped pupils which cause him to see things as they age and decay. One might question how in the world Raistlin could be thought to have the same body before and after this experience. Even if we grant that somehow Raistlin’s experiences in the Tower of High Sorcery didn’t amount to his now having a different body, the somatic approach is still in trouble. When Raistlin travels through time to Istar at the time of the Kingpriest and then to Palanthas right after the Cataclysm, his body is different. He no longer has white hair, gold skin, and hourglass pupils – instead he has pale skin, brown hair, and brown eyes! As he himself exclaims “This face … His face! Not mine!”¹² According to the somatic approach, personal identity consists of either having the same body or being the same animal/physical creature. However, it is clear that when Raistlin travels through time he doesn’t have the same body. Thus, the same-body version of this approach would pronounce that the Raistlin after his Test of High Sorcery is not identical to the person who existed back in the time of the Kingpriest. The body version of the somatic approach fails our test!

Can the animalist version of the somatic approach fare any better? One might try to make the case that although Raistlin’s body goes through drastic changes, so much so that it isn’t correct to say that he has the same body at different times, he is still the same animal/physical creature at these different times. This is very implausible. If Raistlin’s body is completely different, it is very difficult to see how he could be the same physical animal. To make matters worse there is reason to think that at least sometimes Raistlin exists without a body at all. For example, when Caramon is trying to close the portal to the Abyss at the end of Test of the Twins he is unable to get the Staff of Magius to work – he simply can’t get the portal to close. However, Raistlin’s shadowy form appears next to him and touches the staff closing the Abyss while his body remains in the Abyss.¹³ Here it seems that Raistlin exists without being a physical thing at all! Also, toward the end of the War of Souls it seems that it is Raistlin’s spirit that helps the gods find Krynn. Since Raistlin exists at least at sometimes without a physical form at all, the somatic approach simply cannot pass our test.

The psychological approach can avoid the problems facing the somatic approach. According to the psychological approach, psychological continuity is both necessary and sufficient for a person to persist through time. So, the facts that Raistlin’s body is very different at various times, that he has different bodies at different times, and that he seems to exist at some times without a body at all pose no problem for this approach. All that is required for Raistlin to be the same person throughout all of the various adventures he has is that there is psychological continuity between him at any given time with how he was at earlier times. So long as the mental states that Raistlin has at a particular time are the way they are largely because of mental states he had at earlier times he remains the same person throughout. This approach seems to have a good shot of passing the test.

But there may be a dark elf waiting to hurl a fireball at it. One of the most interesting things that Raistlin does is battle Fistandantilus and not only destroy him, but take his life force, all of his knowledge, and all of his magic powers. This creates a bit of a puzzle for the psychological approach, however. After Raistlin defeats Fistandantilus, his mental states are very different – so different that he asks, “Who am I?”¹⁴ In fact Raistlin has some difficulty distinguishing between his original memories and those of Fistandantilus. As he says, “I see people that I’ve never seen, yet I know them!”¹⁵ He also explains, “I have never been here, yet I have walked these halls … I am a stranger, yet I know the location of every room.”¹⁶ Can Raistlin’s mental states really have the continuity required in order for the Raistlin before his final confrontation with Fistandantilus to be numerically identical with the Raistlin that absorbs Fistandantilus’ life-force, knowledge, and magical might? Though it might sound strange, it does seem that his mental states can have the requisite continuity. After all, what is required on the psychological approach is that Raistlin’s mental states after his victory be the way they are largely because of his earlier mental states. It seems that his mental states do have this feature – he still knows things from his childhood, the things that he did growing up, his actions during the War of the Lance, and, further, he still has similar emotional reactions toward people he knows like his brother Caramon and the priestess, Crysania. Thus, although there are some challenges for the psychological approach, it seems like it can account for what makes Raistlin the same person throughout his adventures. Perhaps this approach doesn’t quite make it through the test without some burns, but no one does.

Unfortunately, like the Test of High Sorcery, things are not always how they at first seem. There is a major problem for the psychological approach. Raistlin after his final encounter with Fistandantilus is psychologically continuous with Raistlin before their battle, so on the psychological approach they are numerically identical. So far, so good. However, Raistlin after the battle with Fistandantilus is also psychologically continuous with Fistandantilus before the fight. Raistlin’s mental states after this encounter are the way they are largely because of the way Fistandantilus’ mental states were before the encounter. After all, Raistlin absorbs all of Fistandantilus’ knowledge and memories! So, the psychological approach would say that Fistandantilus before the battle and Raistlin after the battle are numerically identical. At first this may not seem to be a problem because many question who really won this battle – some even think that Fistandantilus won (they’re wrong, of course, but there’s no need to get into that here). Yet there is a significant problem. We know that Raistlin before the battle and Fistandantilus before the battle are not numerically identical. They are clearly two different people. The psychological approach is committed to claiming that Raistlin after the battle is numerically identical to both Fistandantilus before the battle and Raistlin before the battle. But, clearly Fistandantilus before the battle and Raistlin before the battle are not identical. So, we have one thing, Raistlin after the battle, which is identical to two other things that are not identical to one another. In other words the psychological approach is committed to claiming that A = B and A = C, but B ≠ C. This cannot be correct! So, unless there is some way for the psychological approach to plausibly maintain that Raistlin after the battle is not numerically identical to Fistandantilus before the battle, it cannot pass our test. It is not clear that there is such a way.

The Master of Past and Present

We have seen that the somatic approach clearly cannot pass our test. We have seen that the psychological approach doesn’t seem to be able to pass the test either. So we are left with anticriterialism. However, anticriterialism doesn’t really give us much of an answer to our question. Perhaps that is all we can hope for – certain things are evidence that Raistlin persists throughout his many achievements. Likewise, certain things are evidence that you are the same person now as you were five years ago, but there simply aren’t necessary and sufficient conditions for numerical identity. Where does this leave us with respect to our question? Who is Raistlin Majere? Perhaps all we can say is that he is the Master of Past and Present. He is the greatest D&D character ever (deal with it!). Perhaps that is all we can say. Perhaps it is enough.

Appendix
Tales of Raistlin

This is a list of the novels in which Raistlin plays a role. There are also short stories about him, but these are the core of the canon written by creator Margaret Weis.

Key

• *Raistlin is the main character of the work
• #Raistlin is discussed significantly in the work, but also significantly shares the spotlight
• ! Raistlin plays an important role (of course!), but is not mentioned a lot in the work

Before the War of the Lance

The Raistlin Chronicles

• *The Soulforge by Margaret Weis
• *The Brothers Majere by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin

War of the Lance

Chronicles

• #Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• #Dragons of Winter Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• #Dragons of Spring Dawning by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

The Lost Chronicles

• #Dragons of the Dwarven Depths by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• #Dragons of the Highlord Skies by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• *Dragons of the Hourglass Mage by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Post-War of the Lance

Legends (this is the heart of the story of Raistlin)

• *Time of the Twins by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• *War of the Twins by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• *Test of the Twins by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

War with Chaos

• ! Dragons of Summer Flame by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

War of Souls

(Raistlin doesn’t really play much of a role in the first two books, but he is in the third)

• Dragons of a Fallen Sun by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• Dragons of a Lost Star by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• ! Dragons of a Vanished Moon by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Notes

1. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Time of the Twins (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2011); Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, War of the Twins (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2011); and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Test of the Twins (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2011). All references to these books are to the e-book format.

2. Test of the Twins, p. 72.

3. Ibid., p. 145.

4. If you don’t know about Raistlin, then I recommend that you immediately (that’s right immediately!) get started on reading the items listed above in the appendix to this chapter.

5. In order to really appreciate the importance of this it is necessary to realize that DragonLance is not like the Forgotten Realms. In the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, while it is not common that a mortal arises to godhood, it is not unheard of and it has happened many times. In the DragonLance campaign setting this simply doesn’t happen – no mortal becomes a god. Well, no mortal, other than Raistlin Majere.

6. These terms for the categories of responses are from Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Winter 2010 edn.). Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/identity-personal/. Accessed March 23, 2014. The interested reader is encouraged to consult Olson’s article for a more detailed discussion of the general issues of personal identity.

7. For more on this view see A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936).

8. For development and defense of this view see Eric T. Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

9. As Olson (ibid.) notes, this view is sometimes attributed to John Locke, but it is doubtful that Locke actually held this view of personal identity.

10. This view has been developed to a large extent by Sydney Shoemaker, “Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account,” in Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 67–132.

11. This view has been defended by Trenton Merricks, “There Are No Criteria of Identity Over Time,” Noûs 32 (1998), pp. 106–124.

12. War of the Twins, p. 149.

13. Test of the Twins, p. 265.

14. War of the Twins, p. 43.

15. Ibid., p. 149.

16. Ibid., p. 320.