Do a Witchguard Ranger's patron spells count as divine or arcane?

Question

From Witchguard:

Patron (Su)

A witchguard learns something of arcane magic from the witches he defends. At 4th level, when a witchguard gains the ability to cast spells, he must also select a patron, as the witch class feature. This patron is usually the same as the patron of the witch he is sworn to protect, but the witchguard may choose any patron. The witchguard adds the first four spells from his patron’s spell list to his ranger spell list. The witchguard cannot cast patron spells of a level he is unable to cast.

Since Rangers are divine casters, but Witches (and by extension, their spells) are arcane, do these patron spells count as divine or arcane spells for the purpose of feats and effects that are dependent on that distinction?

Answer 1

Divine, but that might be a mistake or a cut corner

Nothing in the ability says that you cast your patron spells any differently from your other ranger spells; it just says you add those spells to your spell list. Since your ranger spells are otherwise divine, these spells are too.

On the other hand, the ability describes itself as “A witchguard learn[ing] something of arcane magic from the witches he defends.” So it might be that this was a mistake, and the intent was that these spells count as arcane. However, since a ranger typically wears light armor, arcane spell failure would be a problem if those spells became arcane. They could waive ASF for those spells, à la bard, but then maybe that becomes a lot of text to describe this ability, when it really doesn’t matter very much. The differences between arcane and divine spells are very few, and the biggest one—arcane spell failure—is one you’d expect to have waived for a ranger. So you could spend a whole lot of page space explaining that the spells are arcane, but they don’t trigger arcane spell failure, and therefore... what? There’s no particular difference at that point, so why spend that space? So my guess is they just didn’t bother because it wasn’t worth the effort, but they “should” be arcane, in some sense.

If you are looking to qualify for something that requires arcane spells, I would just ask your GM if you can take it. Most of the time, there’s no real reason for such things to be limited to arcane spells in the first place, and I, for one, would rarely have a problem allowing it even for characters that are unambiguously divine. For these witchguard rangers, who know “something of arcane magic,” I’d be quite surprised if any GM objected.