A History of Magic- a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum

by Pottermore Publishing

  ‘Never,’ said Hagrid irritably, ‘try an’ get a straight answer out of a centaur. Ruddy star-gazers. Not interested in anythin’ closer’n the moon.’

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  PART 2: AN ASTROLABE, AN ORRERY AND A CELESTIAL GLOBE

  Astronomy can be studied by looking up to the heavens, but it can also be achieved through nifty machines, clever gadgets and even books with wheels!

  An astrolabe could tell the time, provide your location, even help make your horoscope, and it was small enough to slip easily into your bag. In fact, a famous 10th-century astronomer called Al Sufi wrote a detailed thesis with over 380 chapters listing 1,001 uses of an astrolabe – from working out the time of the sunrise to calculating the height of a building. It sounds like a smartphone but is actually an ingenious astronomical device that has been around for over a thousand years.

  The word ‘astrolabe’ is from the Greek and means ‘star taker’. It was a tool developed in the early centuries AD, used to find the correct latitude, as well as the exact positions of stars and planets. It was a handy device if you were lost at sea. Astrolabes could be used to create two-dimensional maps of the heavens, similar to the star charts that Harry and his classmates were expected to plot in their Astronomy exams.

  One exquisite example was made by Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr almost 800 years ago, and was found in modern-day Iran. The astrolabe – with its marked calibrations, symbols and intricate moving parts within it – is about six inches in diameter and could be hung around the neck or shoulder. Its three apertures include one showing the lunar phase and another showing the positions of the sun and the moon in the zodiac. The astrolabe was generally used a lot in the Arabic world to help people find the exact location of Mecca in order to pray. Astrolabes found in the households of Europeans who had never been to sea were status symbols of scientific knowledge.

  An astrolabe worked by showing how the sky looked at a specific place at a given time. The moveable components were there so one could draw the sky on the face of the astrolabe, then mark it, so that positions in the sky were easy to find. Once set, much of the sky (both visible and invisible) was represented on the astrolabe, enabling a great many astronomical problems to be solved in a visual way. It was one of the oldest geared instruments, as well as highly complex, and it would have understandably been beyond the comprehension of Harry in his first year at Hogwarts.

  By contrast, there’s a book that could calculate the movement of the solar system using ingenious moving parts, only using paper. Astronomicum Caesareum was written by Petrus Apianus, the son of a shoemaker, born in Saxony in 1495. Apianus was a mathematician, cartographer and astronomer, and, like his previous books, this one showed his considerable talents in those fields. It was the first book to announce that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun. But it was the complexity and beauty of the printing itself, made less than 100 years after printing came to the West, that made the book so celebrated.

  The book contained a series of rotating paper models known as volvelles. It is almost like a pop-up book, but with a scientific application. Volvelles had been used in medieval manuscripts for astrological workings, but it was very labour intensive to cut out the different shapes, especially if there were twenty-one leaves with moving parts, as was the case with Astronomicum Caesareum. The movement of the discs pinned at their centre mimicked the movement of the planets. It was a massive undertaking and it’s thought to have taken Apianus years to produce it.

  The volvelles meant that readers could do practical experiments with the mathematical ideas introduced in the book. With the aid of the stacked revolving paper discs and a long piece of thread coming from the centre of the volvelle, readers could predict the positions of planets or solve calendar problems. For example, if you had the time of someone’s birth and the phase of the moon at the time, you could theoretically work out the hour someone was conceived.

  Astronomicum Cæsareum looked spectacular. The volvelle that described how to determine the latitude of the moon was not just paper wheels and thread. The reader spun a stunning, brightly coloured dragon towards the different signs of the zodiac. The book was a huge success – but it wasn’t cheap. It was so complex, detailed and packed with hand-painted artworks that probably only a hundred or so were made. It’s no surprise that the book was eye-wateringly expensive: several thousands of pounds in today’s money.

  Apianus dedicated the book to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The title translates as ‘Astronomy of the Emperor’. Even the examples that he used to teach the reader how to work the volvelles related to Charles’s birthday. The flattery worked: the Emperor ended up appointing Apianus as court mathematician and made him an Imperial Count Palatine. The book made his fortune and sealed his fame, giving Apianus (a shoemaker’s son) huge social standing. It remains one of the greatest achievements in Renaissance printing.

  … there were cabinets full of little lacquered boxes, cases full of gold-embossed books, shelves of orbs and celestial globes and many flourishing pot plants in brass containers: in fact, the room looked like a cross between a magical antique shop and a conservatory.

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  Born in Venice in 1650, Vincenzo Coronelli was a bright scholar who excelled in the study of astrology and cartography. He published 140 separate works in his lifetime, the first when he was just sixteen years old, but he is revered today as the most celebrated globe-maker of all time. The leading society devoted to the study of globes – the Coronelli Society – is even named after him.

  Coronelli was a Franciscan monk and also the cosmographer to the Serene Republic of Venice, with workshops there and in Paris. His work placed him at the centre of public life and proved a successful commerical enterprise. Venice in particular was a leading maritime state in need of this type of mapping, and it had the wealth necessary to produce such globes. Coronelli’s workshop was located in his convent.

  Coronelli’s globe-making fame was assured after he made two massive, ornate globes for Louis XIV in the 1680s; they were so large that they were fitted with doors and over a dozen people could fit inside them. He made smaller globes, but some were still huge, requiring six muscly men to move them; others were suitable for a table-top. He often collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Nolin, engraver to the French Crown. Nolin took Coronelli’s draft maps and engraved beautiful baroque figures of animals, men and mythical creatures shown in constant dialogue as they moved across the sky. Some even contained information about the wind direction.

  A celestial globe often accompanied a terrestrial globe and was a mark of intelligence and curiosity: membership of a scientific circle. But celestial globes predated terrestrial globes by many years. Before there was consensus on the shape of the earth, people looked up and thought the stars seemed to form a sphere around the earth.

  Coronelli’s globes tended to be astronomically accurate, with the constellations in the correct position in relation to the equinoxes for the given year. Sometimes, though, Coronelli added a few extra constellations for good measure, such as ‘the Dolphin’ or ‘Dauphin’. This is a reference to the Dauphin of France, the dynastic title given to the heir apparent to the French throne.

  She waved her wand and the lamps went out. The fire was the only source of light now. Professor Trelawney bent down, and lifted, from under her chair, a miniature model of the solar system, contained within a glass dome. It was a beautiful thing; each of the moons glimmered in place around the nine planets and the fiery sun, all of them hanging in thin air beneath the glass.

  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

  An orrery is a moving mechanical model of the solar system – an early version of a planetarium. Orreries were first developed in the early 18th century by Englishman George Graham, who named them after his patron, the Earl of Orrery.

  Orreries held a clockwork mechanism composed of a series of arcs, which measured the celestial longitude and latitude
around the earth. They depicted the earth and the moon and the way the moon goes around the earth in relation to two other planets. There was a handle for people to turn in order to get the planets to rotate around the earth in a beautiful clockwork motion. It gave people a new perspective on the earth and the solar system; a view which has otherwise only ever been seen by astronauts and satellites in modern times.

  These fascinating models of the solar system were used to teach people about the motion of the moon and stars and planets around the earth.

  An orrery encapsulates the move away from a pre-Enlightenment obsession with the supernatural, and things somehow beyond nature, to understanding nature (and the rules of nature) to develop something new. The stars were being observed for practical purposes rather than to harness any supernatural powers. Orreries are so beautiful in their design and operation that they have a certain magic of their own.

  He was sorely tempted, too, by the perfect, moving model of the galaxy in a large glass ball, which would have meant he never had to take another Astronomy lesson.

  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  PART 3: HEADS IN THE STARS

  Back in the 1300s, Sir John Mandeville was purported to have been an English knight who travelled in Egypt, India and China. His book Mandeville’s Travels documented strange lands where he encountered cannibals, Amazonian tribes and people who had the heads of dogs. This was entirely fictitious, as was Mandeville, but the story was so fascinating that it was translated into many different languages and copied out repeatedly, becoming renowned throughout medieval Europe. The story is thought to have actually been written by a Frenchman called Jehan la Barbe, or a Fleming called Jan de Langhe.

  The book was so popular that it is said to have been used by Christopher Columbus and to have influenced writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One version of the Czech translation contains a fascinating illustration of astronomers standing on the peak of Mount Athos in Greece, gazing at the night sky and holding what look like astrolabes and quadrants. Below them are a different set of people, probably astrologers, holding sticks and writing magical signs in the sand in a type of script that nobody can interpret.

  The astonishingly beautiful manuscript would have taken a huge amount of effort to create, using the skills of illuminators, artists and scribes before the invention of the printing press in Western Europe. The process would have taken months and months, probably even longer, but it resulted in something whose beauty is undiminished 600 years later.

  The quality of illustration and portraiture contained within medieval manuscripts defies the idea that portraiture as we know it from galleries began in the 15th century. These books contain hundreds of illustrations which, taken on their own, would be regarded as great works of art – all of which have survived in extraordinarily good condition.

  The walls were covered with portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses, all of whom were snoozing gently in their frames.

  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  From a fictitious teller of tales to one of the world’s greatest ever minds: Leonardo da Vinci. One of his surviving notebooks contains hundreds of pages of notes and working drawings, representing his various observations, relating to all kinds of subjects like engineering and hydraulics. There are also early sketches that were used as templates for later portraits and drawings.

  The great inventor, scientist and artist made copious notes on everything throughout his life: underwater breathing apparatus, musical organs with mechanical voices and theories on the flight of birds – even shopping lists. Da Vinci gathered information and was trying to make sense of the world around him. What makes the notes even more interesting is that he made them in mirror handwriting, written back to front. No one knows why he chose to record his notes in mirror writing. Some thought it was because he wanted to hide controversial views from the church, others that – because he was left-handed – writing backwards meant he wouldn’t smudge his ink. No one knows for sure.

  Once he’d mastered the skill, perhaps it was obvious to him that he should continue that way; private notes for his own purposes. Why would he care if they were difficult to read? Nevertheless, they give an incredible insight into the mind of one of the greatest thinkers of all time.

  In medieval Europe the mainstream astronomical theory was that the sun and the moon circled the earth. With the Renaissance, many scientists and thinkers (including Leonardo) were questioning what was going on in the night sky. How big was the moon? Was its surface smooth and rough – and why did it shine?

  In one of his notes, da Vinci drew a diagram and it showed the earth at the centre of the system, around which orbits the moon and the sun. It is understandable that, before the invention of the telescope, da Vinci would get this wrong. An accompanying illustration showed a view from above of the earth and the moon, and the moon is covered with water, a little like a convex mirror, because he believed it would reflect light, and one of the motivations for him doing the diagrams was that he was observing the reflective properties of light.

  The notebooks represent a highly creative and highly scientific process: da Vinci used his artistic prowess as part of a process of learning about the solar system and the earth’s position in relation to other stars and planets. It might be easy, as with other areas of the history of magic, to simply dismiss his work as ‘wrong’, but that overlooks how vital it is to the development of our knowledge to experiment and speculate in a scientific way – to think things through in a logical way by using our creativity.

  Harry watched the cloudy sky, curves of smoke-grey and silver sliding over the face of the white moon. He felt light-headed with amazement at his discoveries.

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

  Another great thinker, and one of the true giants of astronomy, is Johannes Kepler, creator of the Rudolphine Tables. Kepler’s life was dominated by the struggle between science and superstition: his patron was obsessed with alchemy, his contemporaries with astrology, and his mother was even accused of witchcraft.

  Born 125 years after the birth of da Vinci, in Germany in 1571, Johannes Kepler was a student when a controversial new theory put forward by a Polish astronomer called Copernicus began to gain ground. Copernicus claimed that the earth orbited the sun, and that planets’ paths were not in perfect circles, nor at constant speeds. Kepler’s findings confirmed this theory and subsequently became known as Kepler’s Laws.

  Today, his laws not only describe planetary motion, but also determine the orbits of satellites and space stations. Kepler lived during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, and was the astronomer at his court. Rudolf II also happened to be very interested in the occult and the supernatural.

  Like other notable people dabbling in science and magic during this period, the Emperor Rudolf was on a quest to find the Philosopher’s Stone, and had a private laboratory in which to conduct experiments. His interest in astrology led him to hire the famous seer Nostradamus to prepare his horoscope – at a time when astrology and astronomy were almost the same thing: magic mixed with science.

  In this mysticism-obsessed court in Prague, Kepler also met Tycho Brahe, often described as the greatest and most accurate astronomer to make observations without a telescope. It was Brahe’s recording of the position of 777 of the brightest stars that formed the basis of what has become known as the Rudolphine Tables.

  Although the star tables Brahe created were being researched for supernatural purposes, they still had a tangible scientific importance. After Brahe died in 1601, Kepler took over: the astronomical catalogue had created worldwide interest, and the tables were seen as their most important work. But writing the book was an uphill struggle…

  Constantly travelling, and in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, Kepler struggled to get paid for his work: trying to get close to court at a time of great upheaval was difficult. He ended up with a fraction of what he was owed and paid
for a large portion of the original printing himself. He ended up having this situation depicted in the frontispiece of the book, which has the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire at the top of the temple of Urania. Coins are dropping slowly out of its mouth, showing the patronage of the Holy Roman Empire, with poor old Kepler working alone by candlelight. The money isn’t quite reaching him, but he is still working very diligently.

  Getting money out of the emperor wasn’t Kepler’s only problem. Just as his work on the stars stood at the intersection of science and magic, his next challenge was the clash of superstition and reason. When Kepler’s mother was accused of witchcraft it started a six-year ordeal for a crime which was punishable by execution. For the last fourteen months of her imprisonment she was chained to the floor of a prison cell. With his mother accused of poisoning, paralysing a child’s arm by touching it and turning herself into a cat, Kepler had to use logic and reason to win the case and free her.

  In 1627, twenty years after the death of Tycho Brahe, the Rudolphine Tables were finally published. It was a massive achievement, containing the position of 1,005 stars, and is the most accurate star catalogue of the pre-telescope era. Kepler’s extremely eventful and complicated life stands as a testament to developing a scientific method in the face of superstition.

  ‘Lie back on the floor,’ said Firenze in his calm voice, ‘and observe the heavens. Here is written, for those who can see, the fortune of our races.’

  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

  The study of the stars has fascinated people for centuries and has found its way into many beautiful records of the night sky: from the ancient Dunhuang star atlas to the celestial globes made in 17th-century Venice. Astronomy also holds a special place in the wizarding world, since it is such a rich source of inspiration and identity in Harry Potter’s life at Hogwarts, and beyond.