You call something. It comes, it does the job, you dismiss it. Then what? It went somewhere, and the somewhere is not down the road.
The eighth trade is the one that knows the address. Planemasters are described as the ones who know where does a particular deity live, where does a particular creature is found, and in which plane of existence are found certain types of spiritual races or beings.1 Not what they can do — where they are. And the footnote that defines the territory is worth having up front: the Other Planes are the realities where higher intelligences exist on a level of consciousness and evolution beyond the physical realm. Higher than here, on the consciousness axis rather than the geographical one.
The division is the trade's central piece of doctrine and it is unlike any other sorting in this curriculum. In general they consider only two planar variations: the Planes of Form and the Planes of Existence. The Planes of Form come first and they are empty. They are described as the primary infinite number of planes constituted by truths, constants, forces, principles, laws and axioms — and those, in turn, shape up the Planes of Existence. So one set of planes is made of rules and the other is made of places where things live.
The Planes of Existence are defined by their inhabitants: they refer particularly to the many places where supernatural beings and creatures exist. Which puts the whole arrangement in a definite order. Rules first, then the realities the rules produce, then the beings in those realities. Nobody lives in a Plane of Form. It is what the other planes are made out of.
The Planes of Existence divide into three named groups and the sorting is by who lives there. The Interior Planes are the realms where elemental creatures make their abode. That is where the water elemental, the gnomes and the forest spirits of the conjuration material are when nobody has called them.
The Planes of Transition are the Astral, the Mental, the Etheric and the Vital. Four of them, named and not described. The group name does the describing: these are the ones you pass through.
The Exterior Planes are the realities where the majority of supernatural entities and creatures exist — and the examples given are the two you would expect: angels or devils. So the map is elementals below, four transit layers in the middle, and the great mass of everything else at the far end. Which matches the seven-band spectrum given in the physics discipline exactly where it matters: elementals first, celestials further out.
Stop on the Planes of Form, because they are the strangest thing in the trade and the entry gives them one sentence. They are constituted by truths, constants, forces, principles, laws and axioms. Six kinds of thing, none of them an object, and every one of them the sort of thing you would normally say is about the world rather than in it.
Then the operative clause: these at the same time shape up the Planes of Existence. Read that as a claim about causation and it is a large one. The reason the astral plane is the way it is, on this account, is that a set of laws somewhere else is making it that way — and those laws have a location. There is a plane where the constant sits.
Which changes what a Planemaster's expertise is for. Knowing where an angel lives is a directory. Knowing that the place the angel lives is being shaped by a plane made of axioms is the beginning of a claim about what could be altered and from where. Nothing in the entry goes there. The sentence is stated, the consequence is not drawn, and the trade's described work stays entirely inside the Planes of Existence.
The defining capacity is stated as an ability that is developed rather than granted, and the method is named. A Planemaster's knowledge is paramount for they are masters of plane-travelling. They develop this ability by employing incantations, formulas and planetraveling techniques that allow them to move from one plane to the other effortlessly.
Three tools — incantations, formulas, techniques — and one adverb. Effortlessly, which is the endpoint rather than the starting condition. The reading is specified too: ancient cosmologies, divine pantheons, the study of what exists and how anybody establishes it, and material on the planes and on planar travel. It is a reading list about geography and about what is real, which is the right pairing for a trade whose subject is places that cannot be visited by walking.
One capacity is shared with another trade and the overlap is stated outright. Like Conjurers, Planemasters develop a wonderful ability to detect gateways, boundary zones and planar intersection sites with great ease. Three names for the same kind of thing: a gate, an edge, and a crossing point.
What they do with it is the difference. The Conjurer's version comes with an alternative — use the gate or shut it down for good. The Planemaster's has no such option. They employ these abilities to further their magical work and to continue their wonderful explorations across the planes.
Exploration. Which is the only place in the ten trades where the stated purpose of a capacity is going to look.
Two methods of movement are named and they are not the same thing. The first is direct. Planemasters accrue the ability to move out of their bodies, moving freely into the Astral and Ethereal Planes. Two of the four Planes of Transition, and the ones an out-of-body practice would reach first.
The second is manufactured. They also master the ability to construct magical vessels in which to travel to other realms — and the vessels take two forms: magical bodies, and particularly magical constructs. The stated benefit is safety: with these they travel the planes in a safer way.
So going out of your body is the unprotected version and a built vessel is the protected one. Which implies a hazard and never names it. Nothing says what happens to an unhoused traveller, what the danger is, or what a magical construct is made from.
That last point is worth flagging. Two trades in this list build something out of nothing and give no materials — the Kabbalist constructs a Merkabah to ascend temple by temple, and the Planemaster constructs a vessel to travel plane by plane. Both are described as constructions, and neither has a single component named.
Learn the map before anything else. Two kinds of plane. Three groups inside the inhabited kind. Four named Planes of Transition. That is the whole frame and it fits on a card.
Then build the directory. For every being you deal with, record which plane it belongs to. Elementals go in the Interior Planes; angels and devils go in the Exterior. This is the piece other trades come to you for.
Read cosmologies and pantheons, plus the material on what exists and how it is established. That is the reading named, and it is aimed at the frame rather than at the technique. Practise the gate sense. Gateways, boundary zones, planar intersection sites — the skill is detection, and the Planemaster's use for it is exploration rather than closing anything.
Then travel in the two modes and know which is which. Out of the body into the Astral and the Etheric, unprotected. Or in a built vessel — a magical body or a construct — which is named as the safer way. The safety difference is stated; the danger it protects against is not.
The two planar variations, the three groups, the travel methods and the vessels are all in the Planemaster entry of the ten Wizardly Trades. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
⚠ The four Planes of Transition — Astral, Mental, Etheric, Vital — are named and not described. The first three are standard Theosophical terms and Vital is used here in a fourth slot where that stream would usually put the physical or the causal. ⚠ The Planes of Form are given one sentence, are said to shape the Planes of Existence, and are never returned to in the ranges read in this build. ⚠ The Ethereal Planes appear in the travel sentence where the Etheric Plane appears in the list; whether these are the same is not stated.
Unresolved: magical vessels are constructed and are said to make travel safer. What they are made of, how long they take, and what the danger is are all absent.
Follow the map and this is a trade about structure. Two kinds of plane, one made of laws and one made of places, with the laws shaping the places — a scheme in which the interesting question is what the constants are and where they sit. Follow the described work and the structure is never touched. Everything a Planemaster actually does happens among the inhabitants: knowing where a deity lives, finding gateways, leaving the body, building a vessel, exploring. The plane made of axioms is stated to be causing all of it and is not visited, altered, or mentioned again.
Both are printed in the same entry, three paragraphs apart. The trade holds the one piece of doctrine in the volume that would explain why any of the other realms are the way they are, and does nothing with it.
Zero handshakes on this page. The material is one system's internal map of its own cosmos plus a travel method, and the honest partners — leaving the body, and the constructed vehicle — are carried inside this build by the projection and thought-form pages, where the same operations are shown with procedures attached rather than named in passing.
Sharpest implication. There is a class of planes made of nothing but truths, constants, forces, principles, laws and axioms, and those planes are said to shape every realm where anybody actually lives. That is the causal floor under the whole cosmology, stated in one sentence, in the eighth of ten trade descriptions, and never mentioned again.
Generative questions.