Corpomancy

Field notes on Corporate Thaumaturgy, recorded in the only vocabulary any of us found precise enough: level, school, casting time, range, components, duration, classes.

The archive is live: gothosvc.github.io/corpomancy

Corpomancy is a shared grimoire kept by a loose, largely unaccredited fellowship of researchers — we call ourselves the Working Group, mostly because none of us could agree on anything more dignified — who arrived independently, at different companies, in different years, at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the modern corporate environment is not merely dysfunctional. It is animate. Standups, budget cuts, reorgs, all-hands — we no longer believe these are metaphors for magic. We believe they are magic, competently disguised as management practice, and this volume is our attempt to document it with the rigor we would bring to any other plane of study.

We do not know whether corporate environments generate this magic, or whether something already magical simply found corporate environments to be excellent camouflage. We have not ruled out the second possibility. Several of us would prefer not to think about it further. The observations keep arriving regardless, and Corpomancy is where we keep them, entry by entry, so that no two of us record the same phenomenon twice under different names.

A note on method, since a few early contributors asked: not every spell here is a corporate translation of a specific incantation from other traditions. Most are original findings that simply happen to fall within a discipline's territory. "Fireball (Mass Layoff)" is a fine joke, when it happens to fit; a wholly original finding that only makes sense inside an office is equally welcome, and considerably more common.

The Disciplines

Eight disciplines have been confirmed so far — the same eight schools of magic every other tradition already recognizes, which we take as mild evidence that whatever we're studying still obeys some older structure underneath the fluorescent lighting. Each discipline maps to exactly one corporate domain:

Corporate Domain	Classical Tradition	Flavor
Compliance & Risk	Abjuration	Wards, shields, blocking — legal, HR, audit, insurance
Procurement & Resourcing	Conjuration	Summoning headcount, budget, and vendors from nothing
Analytics & Forecasting	Divination	Dashboards, KPIs, market research, seeing the roadmap
Sales & Stakeholder Management	Enchantment	Persuasion, buy-in, negotiation as mind control
Finance & Cost-Cutting	Evocation	Burn rate, budget axes, scorched-earth cuts
Marketing & Optics	Illusion	Spin, greenwashing, brand narrative, "the numbers look fine"
Legacy Systems & Zombie Projects	Necromancy	Reviving dead initiatives, maintaining code no one understands
Org Design & Process Change	Transmutation	Reorgs, pivots, "digital transformation"

The full record of how we arrived at each mapping — including lines of inquiry we opened and abandoned — lives in SCHOOLS.md, which also serves as the field's working taxonomy.

How the Archive Is Organized

corpomancy/
├── README.md              this file — pitch + taxonomy table (GitHub-facing)
├── CONTRIBUTING.md         how to submit a finding for peer review
├── SCHOOLS.md              the taxonomy: chartered disciplines, abandoned inquiry, how to propose a new one
├── TEMPLATE.md              the standard format for recording a finding
├── MECHANICS.md              lexicon of phenomena observed across more than one finding
├── index.md                site homepage content (site-facing, distinct from this README)
├── _config.yml             Jekyll site config
├── _data/schools.yml        machine-readable mirror of SCHOOLS.md's chartered table, for site templates
├── _layouts/               site page templates (default, home, domain, spell)
├── assets/css/             site stylesheet
├── .github/                PR/issue templates, CI validation, Pages deploy workflow
└── spells/
    ├── compliance-risk/
    ├── procurement/
    ├── analytics-forecasting/
    ├── stakeholder-management/
    ├── finance/
    ├── marketing-optics/
    ├── legacy-systems/
    └── org-design/

Directories are named for the corporate domain, not the underlying school — the school is recorded as metadata (in SCHOOLS.md and in each finding's own stat block), not the organizing axis. We tried it the other way once and several of us got lost in our own archive. Each spells/<domain>/ directory carries its own README.md with field notes on that discipline's tone and a jargon bank worth mining for future findings, plus one file per confirmed spell.

Effects that keep reappearing across otherwise unrelated findings — saving throw types, resource pools, conditions — are logged centrally in MECHANICS.md, so two of us don't independently name the same phenomenon twice.

Status

68 findings recorded and awaiting peer review, spanning levels 0-9 across all eight disciplines:

• Compliance & Risk: Indemnification, Cease and Desist, Golden Parachute
• Procurement & Resourcing: Conjure Headcount, Vertical Integration, Acquihire
• Analytics & Forecasting: Dashboard, The Algorithm, Leak the Roadmap
• Sales & Stakeholder Management: Charm Stakeholder, All-Hands, Poach
• Finance & Cost-Cutting: Burn Rate, Reduction in Force, IPO
• Marketing & Optics: Greenwash, Crisis Management, Viral Tweet
• Legacy Systems & Zombie Projects: Animate Legacy System, Bus Factor, Power Word: Forced Restart
• Org Design & Process Change: Reorg, Hostile Takeover, Move HQ to Austin

The full list lives in each discipline's own spells/<domain>/ directory. A subset of findings — logged in MECHANICS.md — target a rival organization directly, using the standard phrase "one organization you can identify as a competitor."

The Archive & Correspondence

The grimoire is live: gothosvc.github.io/corpomancy. We debated keeping this in the locked drawer indefinitely and eventually concluded that a discovery of this size doesn't stay useful if the only people checking it are the ones who already believe it. The archive is public now, and so is correspondence.

Findings can be submitted for peer review as a pull request — see CONTRIBUTING.md. An automated check confirms a submission is structurally sound (front matter, required fields, discipline consistency); it cannot and does not judge whether a finding is actually funny, true, or advisable to have written down. That remains a human — well, a wizard — judgment call, made in the open now, by whoever shows up.