A History of Magic- a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
A JOURNEY THROUGH CHARMS AND DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS
A JOURNEY THROUGH POTIONS AND HERBOLOGY
A JOURNEY THROUGH DIVINATION AND ASTRONOMY
A JOURNEY THROUGH CARE OF MAGICAL CREATURES
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.
This series of eBooks will reveal the world of magic and unlock its secrets. It will go back thousands of years. It will travel to the far corners of the world. It will reach the stars. It will explore under the earth. It will decipher mysterious languages. We’ll encounter some of the most colourful characters in history. We’ll discover the curious incidents and the truths behind legends. We’ll see how, in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.
This series, structured around lessons from the Hogwarts curriculum, will show how this long and rich history has nourished the fictional world of Harry Potter.
The starting point for these eBooks was the exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opened at the British Library in October 2017, twenty years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the UK. For the exhibition, curators spent over a year searching through the 150 million items that the British Library holds to find the most magical. Then they sourced special artefacts to be loaned from other notable institutions. In October 2018, the New-York Historical Society took on the British Library exhibition, adding books and artefacts from their own collection, as well as other fascinating loans.
This series of four eBook shorts contains worldly wonders from both exhibitions, exploring J.K. Rowling’s magical inventions alongside their cultural and historical forebears. Throughout are links between the wizarding world and our own, told through extraordinary stories from the history of magic.
CONTENTS
CHARMS
Part 1: From Abracadabra to Amortentia
Part 2: A Coven of Witches
Part 3: The Sorting Hat and Invisibility Cloak
DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS
Part 1: Snakes, Snakes, Snakes
Part 2: Casting Out the Evil Eye and Drawing a Magic Circle
Part 3: Mythical Monsters
CHARMS
PART 1: FROM ABRACADABRA TO AMORTENTIA
Harry Potter simply wouldn’t be Harry Potter without spells and charms. There would be no Wingardium Leviosa, no Riddikulus and no charmed objects like the Marauder’s Map – not even a flying broomstick.
To become invisible, to make someone fall in love with you, to transform into another creature – these are all things that people have believed in, yearned for or feared throughout history. There’s nothing more magical than a magic charm.
And perhaps one of the most powerful magic words of all is ‘Abracadabra!’
‘Avada Kedavra!’ Moody roared.
There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air — instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Known today for its use by stage magicians when they perform illusions, ‘Abracadabra’ is probably familiar to us all. But it has more sinister connotations as well. Londoners used to paint it on their doors to ward off the plague in the 17th century. The infamous 20th-century English occultist Aleister Crowley believed it to be a word that held great power. Its power is certainly felt in the Harry Potter stories.
Its origins stretch back to Roman times. The word is first documented in the Liber Medicinalis (‘The Book of Medicine’), written by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, who lived in the 2nd century AD and was physician to the Roman Emperor Caracalla. Sammonicus was actually executed by Caracalla in 212 AD, as part of a broader purge, but before then he’d suggested using the term he had coined as a cure or prevention against catching malaria, which he called hemitritaeos. Sufferers were instructed to write down the ‘Abracadabra’ charm repeatedly, leaving out one letter each time. This would create a ‘cone-shaped’ text, which looked like an inverted triangle standing on its point. The charm was then worn as an amulet designed to drive out fever. Who would have thought that battling mosquitoes would set the stage for the most dangerous spell in the wizarding world?
While ‘Abracadabra’ is a famous word that we know from a historically significant text, some charms have almost been lost to history. One of these was found on a tiny fragment of paper tucked inside an 18th-century magical text from Ethiopia, but it has the potential to be particularly powerful: it tells you how to turn yourself into a lion.
It was quite common in Ethiopia for magical practitioners to make collections of charms, spells and names of plants and their properties, which were copied down. The invocation to turn yourself into a lion was found hidden in one of the resulting handbooks. It was written in an ancient Ethiopian language – Ge’ez – and it’s hard to tell just how old the fragment is. It might date from the same time, or from even earlier than the manuscript in which it was found.
Although Ethiopia was declared a Christian country in the 3rd century AD, it didn’t lose its Babylonian, Egyptian and Islamic influences. The indigenous African magic tradition was vying with new influences from outside the culture. This particular talisman to change yourself into a lion or serpent is an early example of the type of Transfiguration that we know so well from Professor McGonagall’s classes.
Changing yourself into a lion was not a straightforward process: it required outside assistance. This came in the form of specialised Ethiopian magic practitioners called Däbtäras. Why you might seek them out varied, but if you wanted to transform yourself into a lion or a similar beast, it might be because you were at war – or in need of an aggressive, attacking presence.
Whether the magic worked or not was said to depend on outside circumstances. Sometimes the magic was interfered with by a witch or a counter-prayer against the spell itself. We might think today that the idea of a charm working like this is a little hard to believe, but Däbtäras have practised in Ethiopia for centuries and continue to do so.
‘Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts,’ she said. ‘Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned.’
Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again.
Professor McGonagall – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Charms have the power to allow entry into Diagon Alley, and are also key to keeping its secrets. The bustling centre of wizarding retail therapy is where Harry acquires his holly and phoenix-feather wand (and other necessities) before setting off for his first term at Hogwarts.
When J.K. Rowling was planning how a wizard or witch would access Diagon Alley, she created a six-stage drawing, like a cartoon strip. The first stage shows an ordinary brick wall with an old metal dustbin in front of it. In the second, an umbrella touches a brick in the middle of the wall. In the third, the bricks start to spin. In the fourth and fifth, a round opening forms and you can begin to see the old-fashioned street. Finally, there is a fully formed archway, and Diagon Alley is revealed.
Drawing of the opening to Diagon Alley by J.K. Rowling (1990)
The brick he had touched quivered – it wriggled – in the middle, a small hole appeared – it grew wider and wider – a second later they we
re facing an archway large enough even for Hagrid, an archway on to a cobbled street which twisted and turned out of sight.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Underlying this delightful magical process is carefully crafted logic. It’s not simply a case of flicking a wand and, Lo! Here appears Diagon Alley. There is a specific brick that needs to be tapped, a little like a combination lock.
J.K. Rowling rooted Harry Potter in historical and folkloric traditions and brought it all into the modern world. She created a magic world that co-exists with our own, and specified the careful boundaries and techniques of how its magic worked. Her process was to figure this out visually as much as in the drafts of her writing, making the magic more vivid and real, and allowing us vanishing glimpses into what wizarding life might look like. It was clear early on that this was not your typical magical story.
We’ve seen how charms could be used for transfiguring into other creatures and transporting yourself into new magical places, but there were also charms that could be used for more malign purposes, such as getting the upper hand over your enemies.
There was a charm from the Egyptian city of Thebes, dating from the 4th century AD, which let you do just that. In the papyrus document later found that described it, there were seven pages of incantations, which included charms to discover thieves and to reveal the secret thoughts of men. The spells and charms were written in Ancient Greek and one page showed you how to transform a ring into a charm.
Spells like these weren’t supplications or prayers, but commands to demonic entities. To get a demon to obey you, you needed two things: the demon’s full and exact name, and a physical way to make sure it did as it was told. So, in this case, the magical papyrus recipe book gave you the demon’s name and the correct incantation, while the iron ring was the target of the magic that established a physical bond. It was intended that the ring be hidden in the ground in order to prevent something from happening. By inscribing and burying the ring, the owner could specify, for example, that they did not want a rival to be lucky in love.
Summoning demons was a high-risk activity. Egyptian mythology in the 4th century AD saw a huge number of gods vying with each other. Greek and Roman gods were worshipped, Christianity was starting to spread across the Roman Empire and the Ancient Egyptian gods were still in the picture. The result was that people believed in many things simultaneously and practised magic alongside their religious observance. Summoning demons into the resulting mêlée was considered perfectly normal.
‘Amortentia doesn’t really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room — oh yes,’ he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking sceptically. ‘When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love...’
Professor Slughorn – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
It’s much more fun to summon Cupid than to summon a demon. Love charms are the oldest charms of all. There are love rituals scratched on cuneiform tablets from four thousand years ago and there seem to be love charms in every place on the planet and in every moment in history.
Love charms have stretched well into the 20th century. One example found in the Netherlands is a charm between two people painted onto a beautiful oyster shell; oysters strongly symbolise love. One of the initials is ‘J’ and the other is ‘R’, with two hearts in between, connected at the tip. One of the initials is accompanied by the astrological symbol for Gemini, and the other one the symbol for Taurus. A red thread connects the two letters as well – a symbol of the couple’s love. Let’s hope the ‘R’ doesn’t stand for Ron Weasley, given his history with magical love concoctions...
‘Professor, I’m really sorry to disturb you,’ said Harry as quietly as possible, while Ron stood on tiptoe, attempting to see past Slughorn into his room, ‘but my friend Ron’s swallowed a love potion by mistake. You couldn’t make him an antidote, could you?’
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
PART 2: A COVEN OF WITCHES
Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognising it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burnt so much that she allowed herself to be caught no fewer than forty-seven times in various disguises.
A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Any reader of Harry Potter knows that witches should not be stigmatised for their magical abilities, unless they use them for wicked ends. But the attitude in history towards witchcraft has been overwhelmingly negative, and often used as a means of persecuting women in society. Accusations of witchcraft were particularly widespread in the 17th century.
Back in 1621, the three daughters of a famous English scholar called Edward Fairfax became ill and his youngest daughter, Anne, died. The two surviving sisters then accused some local women of practising witchcraft and causing Anne’s death. The women were taken to trial at the local assizes (old English county courts). Fairfax wrote a manuscript, setting out his case for the prosecution: A Discourse of Witchcraft as it was Acted in the Family of Mr Edward Fairfax of Fuystone.
Fairfax pursued his argument against the accused by describing the witchcraft performed against his daughter. He drafted the manuscript as a way of giving credence to his belief that local witches plotted against his daughter, ultimately killing her. He documented the accused women’s behaviour in great detail.
Fairfax described cavorting with devils, big black dogs, people struck dumb and wax effigies. Often the devil appeared in the guise of a witch’s familiar (accompanying demon) – a cat or sometimes a bird or something even stranger. The account was later published a century after it was written (the original has been lost, but it was copied and distributed among interested scholars), and the printed book had additional numbered illustrations to accompany Fairfax’s text. The witches are depicted as old and hunched, carrying a stick alongside their familiars: birds, goats, a many-legged sort of fish-cat and the devil himself.
The illustrations in Fairfax’s book established the image of the bent-over, haggard witch that endures to this day. In the 17th century and beyond, women were often disenfranchised and vulnerable within wider society, along with the disabled and mentally ill. They were easy targets and that’s what we’ve seen in the iconography of witchcraft ever since: the witch with a walking stick is really a vulnerable old woman.
The women accused by Fairfax were tried twice, but, despite his best efforts, they were acquitted each time. His daughters eventually admitted that they had invented their dreams in which the witches were performing dangerous acts and trying to kill Anne. It was possibly no surprise that, in this male-dominated society, they had done so to get the attention of their father.
Regardless, Fairfax stood by his book as the truth of what had happened. The accused women’s ordeal has been credited as one of the last gasps of the witchcraft trials that plagued England that century, and made infamous legends of historical figures such as the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. Hopkins had stalked the fenlands of England’s East Anglia during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, and took advantage of the upheaval to execute around 300 women between 1644 and 1646, charged with making covenants with the devil.
But perhaps the most infamous witch trials of all happened fifty years later across the Atlantic, in the village of Salem, Massachusetts…
In 1693, the year the Salem witch trials ended, a book was published called The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-Engla
nd, written by Cotton Mather.
Mather was a major influence in the frenzied witch hunt that broke out in February 1692, when two girls – nine-year-old Betty and eleven-year-old Abigail, daughter and niece of Salem’s new reverend respectively – became ill and started to have fits. A doctor was called. His diagnosis was bewitchment. Two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged, others died in prison and one man was pressed to death by rocks.
Mather was a pastor and a prolific writer, who graduated from Harvard when he was only fifteen years old. He was a highly educated man. He studied hybridisation in corn, lobbied for smallpox inoculation and wrote over four hundred books and pamphlets. He even authored a children’s book.
By 1692 he had already published writings on the dangers of witchcraft. He’d even taken a young woman, whose mother had been hanged as a witch, into his house, so he could closely observe how witchcraft manifested itself.
Mather was a respected member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where Salem was situated. The area was populated by Puritans – a devoutly religious group that had emigrated from England. They wished to ‘purify’ the Church of England of its Catholic practices, and the New World they found themselves in was a harsh one. With smallpox spreading and the Native American peoples hostile towards them, there was a struggle to maintain their pious, ordered religious community.
Mather represents a period of time in New England that was rife with hysteria and accusation. There were many natural phenomena occurring that could not be explained: bad harvests, freak storms, flooding and drought all left people stumped as to their cause. As a devoutly Puritan minister with authority and influence in the community, whose father had also been a minister, Mather thought it was his responsibility to find a reason for these various disasters.