Wizardry

As above, so below. The planet Mars, fire, iron, blood, summer, diamonds, garlic, and horses are all linked. Understanding and internalizing these connections is the soul of wizardry. - Heinrich von Köln of the University of Skjalf

All magical spells and effects exist as conceptual units, the building blocks of the arcane.

Each bit of knowledge, tradition, superstition or ritual creates part of a great web that exists in the collective consciousness. Everyone knows that dragons breathe flame, and so they do. It is good to see in darkness, and so mages can call light. These ideas are said to exist in a higher state of existence than the Elemental Realm of physical matter that we inhabit. This is called the Empyrean or Arcane Realm, a place more real than the real world and yet less real than the world above it.
Wizardry is the structural analysis and literary use of these concepts. The units of cultural concepts that describe objects and actions, called virtues or motifs that can be used to create a poetic or rhetorical argument. Wizards write out connections between ideas and link them to guide power into tangible shape. For example, blood contains iron. Blood and iron are linked, and so a wizard may in their incantation invoke the virtue of blood as part of a spell to influence a piece of steel. Unlike other mage traditions, wizardry dispenses with as many props as possible; though many wizards dabble in sorcery and will bolster their skills with staves, orbs, and talismans, pure wizardry needs only a writing instrument and a keen writer's grasp of the often fluid world of imagery.
The iconic wizard draws a slim stylus, pen or brush from their robes and quickly writes flowing hieratic script or angular runes in firey letters in the air, composing a powerful spell effect using their vast familiarity with the minds and words of mages past. They write out incantations that bind the power inherent in the world around them to their will.
Power in wizardry comes from aether. A highly attuned mage gets a sense of what kind of aether flows in the earth and air around them and can respond accordingly. Wizards catalog the locations, strengths, and virtues of leylines the way sailors chart the ocean. Unlike animists, who can draw power along leylines, tapping into connections with specific locations, wizards primarily impose the motifs of their own imagination on the aether they are given. When this means trying to force a fire spell from a cold leyline or a spell of aggression out of a leyline tinged with sorrow, wizards must struggle like a man swimming upstream. For this reason, wizards will seek out a broad base of spells so that they can fall back to something more easily used in the moment, plan their locations as to find more ritually appropriate places to cast, or hone the precision of their craft to better focus a spell when at a disadvantage.
Wizardry is both highly structured and individualistic; because it relies so heavily on shared concepts across cultures, wizards function best when steeped within a tradition with generations of other wizards. However, a wizard who can only repeat rote spells memorized from previous generations is often stunted as a true master of the craft. Understanding someone else's spell is often a dissection of another person's mind.
The principals of wizardry inform most other magical traditions. It is no accident that wizards, often condescendingly, refer to themselves as the true or foremost mages. Though in theory, a master wizard should easily be at least a journeyman in witchcraft or sorcery, in practice, this is somehow rarely the case. Still, because their craft requires they record the principles of magic, rather than simply execute the practice of it, they are rightly known as the experts on how magic works.