In the world of the Earthsea archipelago, magic, dragons, and dark spirits abound. Though the fantastical setting of the novel suggests that Earthsea is a world in which anything might happen, Le Guin makes clear that there is a cosmic balance that must be maintained, and that to use spells to conjure great riches, to quickly and miraculously heal deep wounds, or to remove consequences from one’s actions is forbidden. Drawing on the tenets of Taoism—an ancient Chinese philosophical tradition that advocates humility, simplicity, and harmony—Le Guin uses A Wizard of Earthsea to argue that there is a cosmic balance in all life that must be maintained. To upset this balance by pursuing materialism, ego, and power is not just to destabilize the universe, but to doom oneself to a life of fear, jealousy, and dissatisfaction.
There are several instances throughout the novel in which Le Guin indicts greed, materialism, ego, and all the negative, self-serving actions that accompany the pursuit of greatness and riches—and that throw off the delicate rightful balance of the universe. First, Le Guin argues that irresponsible pursuit of materialism corrupts the natural beauty and balance of the universe. When Ged first arrives on the isle of Roke to attend a school for wizards, he finds that he is easily able to keep up with his classmates in the arts of illusion and spell-building. Ged, however, wants more: he can easily turn a pebble into a diamond through illusion, but when he attempts to find a way to make the change permanent, the school’s Master Hand points out that to change the rock into a jewel, Ged would have to change its essence—its true name. To do so, the Master Hand warns, “even to a small scrap of the world, is to change [and] shake the balance of the world.” “A rock is a good thing, too, you know,” the Master Hand goes on to say, suggesting that Ged learn to appreciate the careful balance of the objects in the universe for what they are rather than attempting to convert them into what they are not. This instance is significant because Le Guin suggests that to upset the balance of the universe in pursuit of material things is dangerous. Things are what they are, she implies, and to change a plain rock into a glittering jewel is a dishonest and unnatural act that upsets the careful harmony of the universe’s beauty.
Next, Le Guin suggests that the desire to glorify one’s ego—and the steps one might take in pursuit of that goal—threaten the careful balance of the universe. When Ged, attempting to best his schoolmate Jasper in a duel, summons forth a dark creature—a shadow—from realms unknown, the shadow attacks Ged and nearly kills him. Ged doesn’t know the true power or significance of what he has loosed onto the world. Yet as Ged heals from his wounds and recovers from the trauma of the episode, he understands that his quest for power, glory, and fame—his attempt to inflate his own ego—has upset the balance of the universe in a profoundly dangerous way. The shadow, Ged will later learn, is and always was a dark part of himself. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow,” the Master Hand once told Ged—and now, Ged sees that in the pursuit of his own ego’s glorification, he has brought a great shadow into the world and shaken loose the balance not just of the universe but of his own inner equilibrium. Ged’s journey will become a quest to repair this balance—no matter the cost to his reputation, his health, or his legacy. Ged begins to understand the consequences of upsetting the world’s cosmic balance through his own pain and suffering.
Lastly, Le Guin shows how the pursuit of limitless power and knowledge disrupts the balance of the cosmos. After an encounter with his shadow, Ged loses consciousness and wakes up deep in the kingdom of Osskil, a guest of the lady Serret at the Court of Terrenon. Ged slowly realizes during his stay at court that Serret, now grown, is the same girl who once tempted him to perform dangerous magic back on Re Albi. Serret is now married to the lord Benderesk, who has been charged with protecting the precious and powerful stone called Terrenon. Serret brings Ged to the stone, urging him to recognize that he is the only one who can harness its great power—yet Ged senses a terrible aura coming from the stone and refuses to seek its powers or its answers. Ged knows that to ignore his instinct and commune with the stone—and the terrible, powerful spirit he knows is trapped inside of it—would be to profoundly (and perhaps irreversibly) upset the balance of the world. While Serret and her husband long to harness the stone’s limitless power for themselves, Ged knows that absolute power corrupts absolutely. “In our hands [the Old Powers] will work only ruin,” Ged warns Serret. “Ill means, ill end.” Ged has learned that he cannot upset the balance of the universe without bringing great harm and calamity not just to himself but to those around him. His rejection of the power the stone offers him shows that he has learned well his lesson about upsetting the careful balance of the world in which he lives.
Le Guin’s suggestion that there is balance to all things—not just in the world of Earthsea, but by extension, in our own universe—reverberates throughout Ged’s journey as he wrestles with the concepts of materialism, balance, power, and ego. Ultimately, through Ged’s eventual acceptance of the need to maintain balance, Le Guin shows how humility and harmony are essential to maintaining the web of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual interaction that defines the world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cosmic Balance ThemeTracker
Cosmic Balance Quotes in A Wizard of Earthsea
"You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along. […] Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?"
[…]
"I don't know."
"Fourfoil, they call it." Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, "What is its use, Master?"
"None I know of."
“Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”
“To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. […] You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. […] It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
If the student complained the Master might say nothing, but lengthen the list; or he might say, "He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea."
Only for a moment did the spirit glimmer there. Then the sallow oval between Ged’s arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged's face.
"Lord Gensher, I do not know what it was—the thing that came out of the spell and cleaved to me—"
"Nor do I know. It has no name. You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?”
No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. […] If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man’s name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.
"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do..."
“It will speak of things that were, and are, and will be. It told of your coming, long before you came to this land. Will you ask a question of it now?"
“No."
"It will answer you."
"There is no question I would ask it."
"It might tell you," Serret said in her soft voice, "how you will defeat your enemy."
Ged stood mute.
"Do you fear the stone?" she asked as if unbelieving; and he answered, "Yes."
“But I know this: the Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing. I cannot help you."
"I have no strength against the thing," Ged answered.
Ogion shook his head… […] "Strange," he said: "You had strength enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had strength enough to stand up to a dragon."
"It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength," Ged replied, and he shivered again as he thought of the dreamlike deathly cold of the Court of the Terrenon. “As for the dragon, I knew his name. The evil thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name."
“All things have a name," said Ogion.
"You must turn around."
"Turn around?"
"If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter."
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
On the course on which they were embarked, the saying of the least spell might change chance and move the balance of power and of doom: for they went now toward the very center of that balance, toward the place where light and darkness meet. Those who travel thus say no word carelessly.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.
“The wound is healed,” [Ged] said, “I am whole, I am free.” […]
And [Vetch] began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
