A History of Magic- a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum

by Pottermore Publishing

  This curiosity continued into the 20th century for those such as Smelly Nelly, a scryer and ‘witch’ from Paignton in Devon, Southwest England, who used a small, black and rather battered crystal ball to take readings in the wilds of the Devon countryside.

  The small crystal ball she used was a moon crystal, specifically used to catch the reflection of the moon on its surface. She then gazed into the moon’s mirrored surface and got her reading that way. Smelly Nelly got her name from the very strong perfume she wore to attract the spirits, which Cecil Williamson (the neo-pagan founder of Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft) claimed you could smell a mile downwind. We’re sure the spirits enjoyed the rich aroma upon the bare rocks of Devon’s wild countryside.

  As a result of the popularity of crystallomancy, books were produced instructing people how to use crystal balls: A Practical Guide to Crystal Gazing by John Melville was written at the end of the 19th century as the craze for crystal divination reached its peak. It gave advice on proper crystal-ball technique, and advised taking an infusion of the herb mugwort, or of the herb succory, during the increase of the moon to help you interpret what you saw in the ball.

  This was down to some doubtful chemical and biological reasoning (and the magnetic conditions of the blood), which suggested that these herbs and techniques helped obtain the perfect powers of concentration and lucid sight needed to make you a clairvoyant. But, since most of the people peering into crystal balls were hobbyists, it was probably hard for them to see anything most of the time!

  Another book by a man who knew all about crystals was The Magic of Jewels and Charms by George Fredrick Kunz, published in 1915. Whereas A Practical Guide to Crystal Gazing encouraged readers to eat herbs and keep an eye out for the full moon, The Magic of Jewels and Charms was a different kind of book, which discussed the legends of stones and the powers different cultures attributed to them. His writing ran the gamut of history and covered stories from all over the globe, exploring the many different cultures in which stones were endowed with a special quality – from the rain-making stones that were part of the special rites among central African tribes, to the quartz beach pebbles that Native Americans prized as talismans.

  Kunz wasn’t a mystic – he was a gemmologist and an expert in the folklore of stones. He wasn’t so much interested in their purported magical powers as he was by the stones themselves, and his enthusiasm popularised all manner of gems and semi-precious stones.

  His obsession began at a young age: Kunz was selling stones to overseas collectors by the age of fourteen. At twenty, he sold four thousand specimens to the University of Minnesota – a job lot that weighed over a ton. He was an intrepid, adventurous type: he collected were-jaguar religious objects (which depicted a supernatural entity from the Olmec civilisation from Mesoamerica) in Mexico and carried a pistol in his lap while hunting for amethysts in Russia. Foreign honours bestowed upon him included being elected as an officer of the Legion of Honour of France, a Knight of the Order of St Olav of Norway and an officer of the Rising Sun of Japan.

  He landed a job at Tiffany and Co., the famous New York jewellers, and with his drive, enthusiasm and knowledge, he became the company’s vice-president by the time he was twenty-three. At that time there were four precious stones that anyone cared about – diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires – but Kunz introduced many semi-precious stones that were beautiful and also prized by various cultures for their features. Stones such as garnet, tourmaline and aquamarine were introduced into the marketplace by him and he can be credited with fostering public interest in them.

  PART 3: PALMS, CARDS AND CUPS OF TEA

  The first Divination lesson of the new term was much less fun; Professor Trelawney was now teaching them palmistry, and she lost no time in informing Harry that he had the shortest life-lines she had ever seen.

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  If you look at your hand, do you just see a few meaningless lines, fingers and a thumb? Or do you see the story of your life laid out before you? For thousands of years, in many different cultures, people have believed just that, as part of the art and science of palmistry.

  Palmistry, or chiromancy, first became popular in Western Europe in the 12th century. There is a fortune-telling manuscript from the 14th century that was made in England, but written in Latin, which has a double-page spread of impressively detailed hands – it explains how to interpret your fortune, using the signs we know as palmistry. The lines of the hands are mapped out and each is interpreted in its own way, some of which are rather positive. There are familiar lines like the love line, but there’s also a line that runs between your middle and index finger which ‘signifies a bloody death’. A line that reaches the middle of a finger signifies a sudden death. Now stop looking at your hands!

  There are lines to predict ailments and diseases, such as eye problems and the plague, and others to reveal personality traits, such as courage. Every hand is different and, as such, open to a multitude of interpretations. Based as it is on observation, there is something scientific about palmistry. But how realistic those observations are is completely open to question.

  ‘Here you are,’ said the manager, who had climbed a set of steps to take down a thick, black-bound book. ‘Unfogging the Future. Very good guide to all your basic fortune-telling methods – palmistry, crystal balls, bird entrails…’

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  A good example of palmistry can be found in a book called The Old Egyptian Fortune-Teller’s Last Legacy, published in 1775. It purported to be a collection of old Egyptian fortune-telling techniques that far preceded its 18th-century publication date. It was cheaply made, including some crude woodcut illustrations. According to this book, some of the lines of the hand denoted good fortune and prosperity, while others ‘predict a woman to be a strumpet’.

  The writer was British but seemed keen to exploit Ancient Egypt’s mysterious reputation at the time. Alongside palmistry, the book included other unconventional divination methods, such as ‘The Wheel of Fortune’, which involved pricking a wheel with a pin and interpreting the symbol you picked. Then there was throwing a dice to find out who to marry. And moles on the skin were very important to the person who wrote the book – if you had a mole on your left rib, for a man it meant that he was very cruel and for a woman that she was vain and proud. Even better, a mole on the buttock was said to denote honour for a man and riches for a woman.

  Almost inevitably, the book moved into the interpretation of dreams. It stated that if you dreamt of fighting with and destroying serpents, this denoted victory over your enemies. Watch out, Nagini!

  Reminiscent of the emergence of criminal phrenology in the 19th century, this book had a section on the ‘Art of Physiognomy’, about the significance of lines on the face. The idea was that by reading wrinkles, you might find out what kind of person you were.

  This book’s combination of analysing moles on buttocks, reading the lines on someone’s forehead and divining whether someone is a strumpet from a line in their hand seems pretty ridiculous now. But the book was popular and appealed to readers in the 18th century who didn’t have a lot of disposable income and didn’t own many books.

  ‘Don’t complain, this means we’ve finished palmistry,’ Harry muttered back. ‘I was getting sick of her flinching every time she looked at my hands.’

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  Like crystal-ball gazing, palmistry became very popular in the 19th century, leading to the creation of lots of palmistry-related items such as life-sized ceramic palmistry hands. These could be used as a teaching aid, with the various black lines and mounts on the palm and wrist explaining their significance. These china hands became popular at home with people who were trying to work out things like what the future would hold or how many children they would have.

  The production of ceramic hands showed the desire to turn palmistry from a strange sideshow attraction to a scienti
fic discipline. The reading of palms was part of the broader 19th-century trend for reading the body as a way of telling the future and making judgements of character. It coincided with the rise of phrenology and dubious studies of the shape of criminals’ heads as a way of analysing whether criminality could be identified in certain facial features and head shapes. This was all part of the idea that your future and personality were somehow written into your body.

  One of the great popularisers of Victorian palmistry was William John Warner, who sometimes went by the name Count Louis le Warner Hamon, though he was even better known as ‘Cheiro’. A great self-publicist, he told riveting stories of how he gained his mystic powers, such as when he travelled as a penniless young man to India and met a mystic who took him in and taught him everything he needed to know about the ‘Study of the Hand’. He returned to England as a self-styled ‘Missionary of Occultism’ and pledged he would spend a ‘period of three sevens’ (twenty-one years) imparting his knowledge.

  This story, as recorded in Cheiro’s Confessions: Memoirs of a Modern Seer, might seem like melodramatic showmanship, but his client list was like a who’s who of the great and good of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Mark Twain, Mata Hari, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Edison and the Prince of Wales. Palmistry was taken seriously and Cheiro was its acclaimed celebrity.

  Belief in palmistry is not limited to the past, however. In the 21st century its believers and practitioners have adopted even stranger habits, with stories of people having plastic surgery on their palms, extending their life lines and adding a marriage line, in an effort to ensure that their future is overflowing with luck and riches.

  … Professor Trelawney appeared round a corner, muttering to herself as she shuffled a pack of dirty-looking playing cards, reading them as she walked.

  ‘Two of spades: conflict,’ she murmured, as she passed the place where Harry crouched, hidden. ‘Seven of spades: an ill omen. Ten of spades: violence. Knave of spades: a dark young man, possibly troubled, one who dislikes the questioner –’

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  One popular method of divination is using a simple pack of cards. Playing cards have been used to tell the future for centuries. The four suits of a standard pack of cards can be used to represent the four seasons: there are fifty-two cards like the fifty-two weeks of the year, and the pips (the symbols that represent the suit) add up to 364 – the same number of days in the year – as long as you add the joker.

  But tarot cards are different and are particularly special.

  Tarot cards weren’t used for fortune-telling until the 18th century – before then, people would use normal playing cards. Or, alternatively, John Lenthall, a stationer in Fleet Street in London (who was the predominant seller of playing cards in London during the first half of the 18th century), sold divination cards. He sold dozens of types of cards, but the most popular set was advertised as ‘Fortune Telling – pleasantly unfolding the good and bad luck attending human life’.

  The cards were incredibly popular and sold well for decades. They had portrayals of famous and archetypal figures. Some were mystical like Merlin, Doctor Faustus and Nostradamus. Others, such as Herod and Clytemnestra, didn’t have such a magical reputation.

  Using tarot cards is a little like a ‘Magic 8’ ball. You begin with a question that you want to answer and then end up with a sentence, somehow generated from one of the cards, that gives you the answer. Some of them come across as just plain weird. For example, if you ask if you are well loved and the cards respond with, ‘Children you’ll have most for the grave,’ it’s difficult to know how to interpret that as an answer to that particular question!

  As for a classic deck of tarot cards – the kind that feature the Magician, the Hanged Man, the Tower, the Lovers, the Fool and Death – these were used from the mid-15th century onwards, not for divination per se but just for playing games. Even today in southern Europe a tarot deck is still primarily used for entertainment, not divination. The opposite is true in English-speaking countries, where they have been tools of divination since around the 18th century.

  There are various types of tarot cards, but they are generally more ornate than standard playing cards, with different, more complex symbols, and usually have seventy-two cards in a pack rather than fifty-two.

  The pack is divided into two distinct parts. One part is often called the minor arcana – or lesser secrets – which is made up of fifty-six cards. Like a standard deck, there are four suits, but instead of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs, tarot might have swords, wands, cups and pentacles.

  Then there’s the major arcana – the greater secrets. This is what tarot cards are famous for. These twenty-two cards don’t have suits – each card is a symbol in its own right: the Empress, the Lovers, the Chariot, Strength, the Hermit, Justice or the Tower.

  In more elaborate, hand-made packs of cards from the mid-18th century, each card might have been an impressive artwork in its own right. They would have been hand-coloured and made of cardboard on one side, with a similarly detailed design on the back. The designs for the major cards were more intricate than the designs for the minor cards and were aimed at an expert reader to tell the story of someone’s future life. The deck was to be shuffled and laid out.

  How the cards played out and were interpreted depended on how they were chosen from the deck and whether they were facing you or the tarot reader. If they were facing you, it meant they were face up, which was good. If they faced the tarot reader, that meant they were face down, which was not as good. Certain cards were said to speak to major ideas and themes in your life, and the smaller cards to specific times and events.

  After all this hard-to-believe palmistry, searching for moles in intimate areas and avoiding the grim reaper in a tarot reading, you might fancy a nice cup of tea. And there are books just for that, too…

  The shelves running around the circular walls were crammed with dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls and a huge array of teacups.

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  It was only in the 20th century that the teabag was created – before then, tea leaves were loose, and tasseomancers believed they could see the future in the used leaves in the bottom of a teacup. In cultures without tea, people have had to be more inventive. In the coffee-drinking cultures of Greece or Turkey, diviners studied leftover coffee grinds. Before tea, the curious could also find meaning through molybdomancy (molten metal), carromancy (hot wax) or haruspicy (animal entrails).

  When it was initially imported from China to Europe, tea was the preserve of the very rich, but as trade routes grew and tea was cultivated in new countries, prices lowered. This brought tea leaves, and the art of tasseomancy, to the masses. Tea-Cup Reading and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea-Leaves, by a Highland Seer, was published in 1920, when reading tea leaves was an established popular pastime.

  The book was clearly very popular, because there were multiple versions published under its mysterious author name. As well as very detailed descriptions of how to read tea leaves, there were illustrations of sample cups, including some pretty indistinguishable black lumps shown in the middle of them. For example, if a leaf ended up near the handle, it suggested that the prediction was going to happen sooner, rather than later. It also advised that owls were evil omens and to avoid rats running in front of you for similar reasons. Reading tea leaves was so popular that people started hosting tea-leaf reading parties, and big ceramics manufacturers even started to make fortune-telling teacups just for that purpose.

  When Harry and Ron had had their teacups filled, they went back to their table and tried to drink the scalding tea quickly. They swilled the dregs around as Professor Trelawney had instructed, then drained the cups and swapped them.

  ‘Right,’ said Ron, as they both opened their books at pages five and six. ‘What can you see in mine?’

  ‘A load of so
ggy brown stuff,’ said Harry.

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  One kind of fortune-telling cup and saucer was made by the prestigious maker of bone china Paragon, in the home of quality British ceramics, Stoke-on-Trent. Even in the 1930s, it was clear that this method of divination continued to be popular. Some teacups had signs of the zodiac inscribed on them, some had playing cards and others had a variety of symbols, such as a bell, a baby’s dummy, an umbrella and a skull. You’d often need to read an accompanying booklet to decipher the symbols. One example was particularly on-message around its rim: ‘Many curious things I see when telling fortunes in your tea’.

  ‘My turn…’ Ron peered into Harry’s teacup, his forehead wrinkled with effort. ‘There’s a blob a bit like a bowler hat,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re going to work for the Ministry of Magic…’

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  If the Highland Seer didn’t work for you, or the leaves weren’t landing on the right symbols in your specialist teacup, then you could get serious with How to Read the Future with Tea Leaves, published in the 1920s and claiming to be translated from Chinese.

  The book told an ancient story of a Chinese princess who rejected star-gazing and made amazing predictions with the newly popular beverage, tea. It was 229 BC and a student had apparently suggested she might like to try a new technique of fortune-telling – which worked so well that she raised him to the status of a mandarin. The thin volume was another handy guide to decrypting a range of shapes formed by leaves in the bottom of the user’s cup, many of which supposedly resembled Chinese characters. A lot of the meanings were either bizarrely specific (signifying that you’d be interested in the navy) or incredibly vague (you’ll meet an old friend).