![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerI like trying to figure out wizarding history from the few clues we're given, and tying to use real history which seems to fit to fill in some of the gaps.
For instance, how did they go about implementing the Statute of Secrecy? Imagine if they'd tried to not only "disappear" all witches and wizards and magical beasts and beings from public view (at least, as magical people), but also Obliviate every Muggle who'd ever seen magic? That would be a logistical nightmare. Because this isn't your average Obliviation, where you just vanish the last few minutes or hours of memories - you'd have to sort through their whole lives and delete specific memories, or just wipe most of their memories entirely and give them new ones, either of which sound much harder to do. Probably very few could actually manage that complex of a memory spell. And even if they were mostly trying to be discreet about magic beforehand due to the witch hunts, there could still be a lot of Muggles to Obliviate.
I've stitched together three essays (the first and third from several years ago, the second from yesterday) trying to figure out a progression of events and how this all actually worked.
So, first up, what finally convinced them that secrecy, not just discretion, was necessary.
The Inciting Events
One of Dumbledore's notes in The Tales of Beedle the Bard mentions that (contrary to Harry's textbook's assertions in PoA) while many witches and wizards escaped the witch-hunters, they weren't so superior to Muggles that it was only Wendolyn the Weird-style fun and games. Nearly Headless Nick had his wand taken from him, which is why he couldn't prevent his neck getting messily chopped. One assumes he's one of those wizards who never got the hang of Apparition. And - perhaps more significantly - many of those finally caught and executed were children, who couldn't control their magic yet. This disaster led to the establishment of the International Statute of Secrecy.
No wonder Harry's textbook takes such pains to convince the kiddies that Muggles are harmless. "Actually, they nearly wiped out wizardkind altogether in a genocidal attack on children like you, and we don't dare let them know about us or it could happen again" is hardly likely to inspire a desire for peaceful co-existence. Inspire them to join Grindlewald or the Death Eaters (depending on the era) to kill and rule over Muggles, more like. No wonder all kids are confined to Hogwarts, Middle of Nowhere, for most of the year instead of getting frequent field trips. (Surely the Muggle Studies class, at least, would benefit from visiting Muggle areas to practice blending in, but Hermione mentions no such thing.)
This also got me thinking: we know that Harry's trial before the Wizengamot was unusual, but maybe it was just unusual for the times. After a few generations had gone through Hogwarts being taught that Muggles weren't dangerous, they probably didn't take breaches of the Statute of Secrecy as seriously as their great-great-grandparents. But given how serious such breaches could be back in the day, maybe Fudge was just enforcing the full consequences as established back in 1689/1692 (not generally used in modern times, but still on the books). Even in ordinary circumstances, it is apparently normal procedure for a minor doing magic around Muggles to get one warning, then a snapped wand and expulsion, which is essentially being stripped of most of one's rights, social standing, and possibilities for employment. That's still a pretty tough punishment.
Also, the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery wasn't written until 1875. Now, on the surface it sounds like this decree further restricted minors' rights to do magic, but I wonder - could it have been the new and improved version of an older, harsher decree? Maybe 18th-century kids wouldn't have gotten a warning, but would have been expelled on the first offense. And so they eventually decided to be more reasonable about their restrictions. The one allowable exception we know of to the no-magic-before-Muggles rule is for self-defense - just what you'd expect if your goal was to keep the kids from bringing persecution on the magical community without taking away their ability to protect themselves.
This also might make sense of another Potterverse detail, if I remember my witch-craze history right. I think that it was more intense and long-lived on the Continent, and that the later phases focused on demonic/witch children at least in some places. This backs up Dumbledore's note, and the uneven intensity of the witch-hunts would explain why while Hogwarts is in a remote location and has Muggle-repelling charms, Durmstrang is so much more secretive that Karkaroff doesn't even want Krum talking about the school's general geographic surroundings to other wizards. How much can "trees and glaciers" narrow it down? Especially since Durmstrang seems to include both Germanic and Slavic populations? But perhaps historically, their experience was so much worse that they decided one can't be too careful.
I'm also now curious about exactly how many magical children did get caught and executed. We know the wizarding population isn't huge; it could have been a demographic catastrophe. Maybe the wizarding population was actually much higher, in proportion to the Muggle population if not in raw numbers, before this era.
Next, the life of a famous historical figure might give some clues to how they went about implementing the statute.
Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist
I was reading this article - Isaac Newton, World's Most Famous Alchemist - when an odd detail caught my eye. It says, "Principe notes that Newton suffered a mental breakdown a year after Boyle’s death [in 1691] and wonders if that episode might have been brought on by mercury poisoning... But Newman thinks that Newton’s breakdown is just as likely to be related to Locke’s trying to set him up with a well-to-do widow."
So. Newton's alchemy partner dies and he has a nervous breakdown. Sounds understandable enough, if he thought now he'd never manage to make a philosopher's stone and join the ranks of Nicholas Flamel and... well, Nicholas Flamel. But the timing leaves some interesting possibilities for the Potterverse!
Consider: the Statute of Secrecy was apparently drafted or maybe signed in 1689 and put into effect in 1692 - the year Newton had his breakdown. I would imagine that if he had close ties to both Muggles and wizards, the statute could be a major stressor. (Can you imagine having to Obliviate all those great conversations with the Muggle friends you had trusted to be discreet? Awful.) Plus, if Locke was pressuring him to marry a witch he didn't like simply because marrying a Muggle was not looked on favorably at the moment and he had a duty to propagate magical traits or whatever, that could be stressful even if Newton had been inclined to marry as a general principle. (Since iirc Cambridge required fellows to be ordained - which Newton managed to wriggle out of - and since I've heard fellows were unmarried before the 19th century, maybe his reluctance to marry had as much to do with liking his job as not liking women.) So, not only has he had a major setback to his chances at making a stone, he also has to live a double life and dodge his friend's attempts to marry him off to that awful Cornelia Black! It's no wonder he cracked a bit.
(He was discreet about his alchemical work even before this date, but that might have more to do with the King not being too keen on anyone learning how to make gold and thus screw with the economy, which is why some alchemical practices were technically illegal.)
Newton obviously remained prominent in Muggle society, so either he cut ties with wizards somehow, or he was allowed to keep his identity so long as he didn't do any actual magic where Muggles could see. Which actually makes sense from a strategic standpoint: what better way to get Muggles on the track of deciding magic isn't real than to have an actual wizard there distracting them with math and science? And what do you know, in 1693 he started publishing his work on calculus, which shortly led to the HEY GUYZ I TOTALLY DISCOVERED CALCULUS BEFORE LEIBNIZ controversy. And then he went on to run the Muggle mint. No goblins here, no, of course there's no such thing, your majesty! What ever gave you that idea? And I can assure you, those counterfeiters I caught absolutely were not using any supernatural methods of reproducing coinage, no way. And psst, wizard friends, you might want to explain again to Julius here about the not letting Muggles get ahold of magicked objects part again... Finally, some of his papers were destroyed in a laboratory fire, and others (the Portsmouth Papers) disappeared from view until the 1930s, when they could safely be passed off with, "Isn't it interesting how silly superstitions like alchemy paved the way for modern chemistry!"
So, they reduce their logistical nightmare to manageable proportions by only disappearing those witches and wizards they can at the moment, Obliviating the memories they can get ahold of, and leaving some magical people in the Muggle world to slowly get Muggles to believe that whatever their grandparents say they saw, it couldn't have been real.
And it seems to have made a difference within a few decades, based on what happened to the "godless children" of Augsburg.
The Child-Witches of Augsburg
This incident comes from Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze. To summarize: in the early decades of the 18th century in Augsburg and other German areas, the general fears turned from old women as witches to children as witches. Parents reported that their children sprinkled shards of glass and devilish powders in their beds to sicken them, held witch's sabbaths, and played all manner of Satanic games (among other things). Many of these children ended up incarcerated in a hospital for years.
Now, probably many cases were just disturbed children from dysfunctional families. However, in the Potterverse, the remainder of the cases may have been something more. The wizarding world had retreated into secrecy and seclusion around 50 years ago. By the early 1700s, any magical children born in the Muggle world most likely would be cut off from any magical training. However, wizards had lived openly recently enough that stories about them would still be circulating. Some children - magical or not - could well try to imitate the spells they had heard about from their older cousins or aunts or whomever. Some of them might even have succeeded. Regardless, their parents would have worried.
Fortunately, the practice of executing witches had pretty much died down by now (with a very few exceptions). Even though at least some of the children confessed to attending witches' sabbats - which would be plenty to have gotten you burned before - their hospital jailers went, "Well, we were watching and it looked like they were in the room the whole time they said they flew off to join that Black Mass, so maybe they're just crazy or making it up." The state eventually sent the kids home and told their parents to deal with it, and people started agreeing that the whole witch craze was perhaps a bit over the top. Belief in witches died down as (accurate) memory of openly practicing witches and wizards faded, and by the end of the century witches were little more than a fable to many Muggles. (Not all, but it was excellent progress.) Any magical children born in the Muggle world after that would only manifest magic spontaneously, not deliberately try to mimic traditions. Hogwarts (and perhaps Beaubatons) tried to locate and assimilate as many Muggleborn magical children as it could to keep even too much spontaneous magic away of Muggle eyes; whether or not they were on top of this from 1692 or whether they refined their techniques we don't know. Durmstrang seems to have decided that they don't want to risk Muggleborn children attending, with all those leaks about magic to their Muggle parents and who knows who else. (And some of them are pureblood fanatics for other reasons, of course.) We also don't know whether they decided the risk of Muggleborn magical children having spontaneous outbursts is simply less risky than trying to bring them into the magical world (and since Durmstrang apparently has students from Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, the concentration of magical births might be fairly low), or whether another, less prestigious and newer school in the same region takes the Muggleborns.
And so even with imperfect secrecy, within a few decades the wizarding world managed to convince the Muggle world that maybe they were being too credulous about this whole magic thing, and maybe they should have an Enlightenment and play with math and science instead.
For instance, how did they go about implementing the Statute of Secrecy? Imagine if they'd tried to not only "disappear" all witches and wizards and magical beasts and beings from public view (at least, as magical people), but also Obliviate every Muggle who'd ever seen magic? That would be a logistical nightmare. Because this isn't your average Obliviation, where you just vanish the last few minutes or hours of memories - you'd have to sort through their whole lives and delete specific memories, or just wipe most of their memories entirely and give them new ones, either of which sound much harder to do. Probably very few could actually manage that complex of a memory spell. And even if they were mostly trying to be discreet about magic beforehand due to the witch hunts, there could still be a lot of Muggles to Obliviate.
I've stitched together three essays (the first and third from several years ago, the second from yesterday) trying to figure out a progression of events and how this all actually worked.
So, first up, what finally convinced them that secrecy, not just discretion, was necessary.
The Inciting Events
One of Dumbledore's notes in The Tales of Beedle the Bard mentions that (contrary to Harry's textbook's assertions in PoA) while many witches and wizards escaped the witch-hunters, they weren't so superior to Muggles that it was only Wendolyn the Weird-style fun and games. Nearly Headless Nick had his wand taken from him, which is why he couldn't prevent his neck getting messily chopped. One assumes he's one of those wizards who never got the hang of Apparition. And - perhaps more significantly - many of those finally caught and executed were children, who couldn't control their magic yet. This disaster led to the establishment of the International Statute of Secrecy.
No wonder Harry's textbook takes such pains to convince the kiddies that Muggles are harmless. "Actually, they nearly wiped out wizardkind altogether in a genocidal attack on children like you, and we don't dare let them know about us or it could happen again" is hardly likely to inspire a desire for peaceful co-existence. Inspire them to join Grindlewald or the Death Eaters (depending on the era) to kill and rule over Muggles, more like. No wonder all kids are confined to Hogwarts, Middle of Nowhere, for most of the year instead of getting frequent field trips. (Surely the Muggle Studies class, at least, would benefit from visiting Muggle areas to practice blending in, but Hermione mentions no such thing.)
This also got me thinking: we know that Harry's trial before the Wizengamot was unusual, but maybe it was just unusual for the times. After a few generations had gone through Hogwarts being taught that Muggles weren't dangerous, they probably didn't take breaches of the Statute of Secrecy as seriously as their great-great-grandparents. But given how serious such breaches could be back in the day, maybe Fudge was just enforcing the full consequences as established back in 1689/1692 (not generally used in modern times, but still on the books). Even in ordinary circumstances, it is apparently normal procedure for a minor doing magic around Muggles to get one warning, then a snapped wand and expulsion, which is essentially being stripped of most of one's rights, social standing, and possibilities for employment. That's still a pretty tough punishment.
Also, the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery wasn't written until 1875. Now, on the surface it sounds like this decree further restricted minors' rights to do magic, but I wonder - could it have been the new and improved version of an older, harsher decree? Maybe 18th-century kids wouldn't have gotten a warning, but would have been expelled on the first offense. And so they eventually decided to be more reasonable about their restrictions. The one allowable exception we know of to the no-magic-before-Muggles rule is for self-defense - just what you'd expect if your goal was to keep the kids from bringing persecution on the magical community without taking away their ability to protect themselves.
This also might make sense of another Potterverse detail, if I remember my witch-craze history right. I think that it was more intense and long-lived on the Continent, and that the later phases focused on demonic/witch children at least in some places. This backs up Dumbledore's note, and the uneven intensity of the witch-hunts would explain why while Hogwarts is in a remote location and has Muggle-repelling charms, Durmstrang is so much more secretive that Karkaroff doesn't even want Krum talking about the school's general geographic surroundings to other wizards. How much can "trees and glaciers" narrow it down? Especially since Durmstrang seems to include both Germanic and Slavic populations? But perhaps historically, their experience was so much worse that they decided one can't be too careful.
I'm also now curious about exactly how many magical children did get caught and executed. We know the wizarding population isn't huge; it could have been a demographic catastrophe. Maybe the wizarding population was actually much higher, in proportion to the Muggle population if not in raw numbers, before this era.
Next, the life of a famous historical figure might give some clues to how they went about implementing the statute.
Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist
I was reading this article - Isaac Newton, World's Most Famous Alchemist - when an odd detail caught my eye. It says, "Principe notes that Newton suffered a mental breakdown a year after Boyle’s death [in 1691] and wonders if that episode might have been brought on by mercury poisoning... But Newman thinks that Newton’s breakdown is just as likely to be related to Locke’s trying to set him up with a well-to-do widow."
So. Newton's alchemy partner dies and he has a nervous breakdown. Sounds understandable enough, if he thought now he'd never manage to make a philosopher's stone and join the ranks of Nicholas Flamel and... well, Nicholas Flamel. But the timing leaves some interesting possibilities for the Potterverse!
Consider: the Statute of Secrecy was apparently drafted or maybe signed in 1689 and put into effect in 1692 - the year Newton had his breakdown. I would imagine that if he had close ties to both Muggles and wizards, the statute could be a major stressor. (Can you imagine having to Obliviate all those great conversations with the Muggle friends you had trusted to be discreet? Awful.) Plus, if Locke was pressuring him to marry a witch he didn't like simply because marrying a Muggle was not looked on favorably at the moment and he had a duty to propagate magical traits or whatever, that could be stressful even if Newton had been inclined to marry as a general principle. (Since iirc Cambridge required fellows to be ordained - which Newton managed to wriggle out of - and since I've heard fellows were unmarried before the 19th century, maybe his reluctance to marry had as much to do with liking his job as not liking women.) So, not only has he had a major setback to his chances at making a stone, he also has to live a double life and dodge his friend's attempts to marry him off to that awful Cornelia Black! It's no wonder he cracked a bit.
(He was discreet about his alchemical work even before this date, but that might have more to do with the King not being too keen on anyone learning how to make gold and thus screw with the economy, which is why some alchemical practices were technically illegal.)
Newton obviously remained prominent in Muggle society, so either he cut ties with wizards somehow, or he was allowed to keep his identity so long as he didn't do any actual magic where Muggles could see. Which actually makes sense from a strategic standpoint: what better way to get Muggles on the track of deciding magic isn't real than to have an actual wizard there distracting them with math and science? And what do you know, in 1693 he started publishing his work on calculus, which shortly led to the HEY GUYZ I TOTALLY DISCOVERED CALCULUS BEFORE LEIBNIZ controversy. And then he went on to run the Muggle mint. No goblins here, no, of course there's no such thing, your majesty! What ever gave you that idea? And I can assure you, those counterfeiters I caught absolutely were not using any supernatural methods of reproducing coinage, no way. And psst, wizard friends, you might want to explain again to Julius here about the not letting Muggles get ahold of magicked objects part again... Finally, some of his papers were destroyed in a laboratory fire, and others (the Portsmouth Papers) disappeared from view until the 1930s, when they could safely be passed off with, "Isn't it interesting how silly superstitions like alchemy paved the way for modern chemistry!"
So, they reduce their logistical nightmare to manageable proportions by only disappearing those witches and wizards they can at the moment, Obliviating the memories they can get ahold of, and leaving some magical people in the Muggle world to slowly get Muggles to believe that whatever their grandparents say they saw, it couldn't have been real.
And it seems to have made a difference within a few decades, based on what happened to the "godless children" of Augsburg.
The Child-Witches of Augsburg
This incident comes from Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze. To summarize: in the early decades of the 18th century in Augsburg and other German areas, the general fears turned from old women as witches to children as witches. Parents reported that their children sprinkled shards of glass and devilish powders in their beds to sicken them, held witch's sabbaths, and played all manner of Satanic games (among other things). Many of these children ended up incarcerated in a hospital for years.
Now, probably many cases were just disturbed children from dysfunctional families. However, in the Potterverse, the remainder of the cases may have been something more. The wizarding world had retreated into secrecy and seclusion around 50 years ago. By the early 1700s, any magical children born in the Muggle world most likely would be cut off from any magical training. However, wizards had lived openly recently enough that stories about them would still be circulating. Some children - magical or not - could well try to imitate the spells they had heard about from their older cousins or aunts or whomever. Some of them might even have succeeded. Regardless, their parents would have worried.
Fortunately, the practice of executing witches had pretty much died down by now (with a very few exceptions). Even though at least some of the children confessed to attending witches' sabbats - which would be plenty to have gotten you burned before - their hospital jailers went, "Well, we were watching and it looked like they were in the room the whole time they said they flew off to join that Black Mass, so maybe they're just crazy or making it up." The state eventually sent the kids home and told their parents to deal with it, and people started agreeing that the whole witch craze was perhaps a bit over the top. Belief in witches died down as (accurate) memory of openly practicing witches and wizards faded, and by the end of the century witches were little more than a fable to many Muggles. (Not all, but it was excellent progress.) Any magical children born in the Muggle world after that would only manifest magic spontaneously, not deliberately try to mimic traditions. Hogwarts (and perhaps Beaubatons) tried to locate and assimilate as many Muggleborn magical children as it could to keep even too much spontaneous magic away of Muggle eyes; whether or not they were on top of this from 1692 or whether they refined their techniques we don't know. Durmstrang seems to have decided that they don't want to risk Muggleborn children attending, with all those leaks about magic to their Muggle parents and who knows who else. (And some of them are pureblood fanatics for other reasons, of course.) We also don't know whether they decided the risk of Muggleborn magical children having spontaneous outbursts is simply less risky than trying to bring them into the magical world (and since Durmstrang apparently has students from Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, the concentration of magical births might be fairly low), or whether another, less prestigious and newer school in the same region takes the Muggleborns.
And so even with imperfect secrecy, within a few decades the wizarding world managed to convince the Muggle world that maybe they were being too credulous about this whole magic thing, and maybe they should have an Enlightenment and play with math and science instead.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-17 10:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-17 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-17 11:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-18 01:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-18 05:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-03 08:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 05:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 06:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 06:51 am (UTC)(She also bests St Peter and St Paul but that's another matter)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 03:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 04:38 pm (UTC)Newton and Alchemy
Date: 2011-05-19 05:20 am (UTC)I interpreted this differently, however.
I think Newton was a Muggle (UP MUGGLES!--okay, my racial prejudices are showing) who'd spent 30 years working in collaboration with wizards on alchemy (he developing theory, his partner running the tests), and who was then abruptly forcibly Obliviated. While he'd spent the same 30 years (Newton was never a one-horse show) concurrently working on experiments in opticks, mechanicks, and the rules governing the movements of heavenly & earthly bodies, which experiments required no magickal partner.
Will & Ariel Durant on Newton's psychotic break: His career was interrupted in 1692 by two years of physical and mental illness. He addressed to Pepys and Locke letters complaining of sleeplessness and melancholia, expressing fears of persecution, and mourning that he had lost “the former consistency of his mind.”
And the Principia Mathematica was published in 1686, six years prior to the, er, problem. Not after, as a sop or distraction for Muggles.
By the way, Jodel's musings on this issues are brilliant: see Wizards and Muggles, Parts One (pre-Seclusion):
http://www.redhen-publications.com/Wizards-Muggles1.html
As to the rest of your essay, and the development of worry over Child-witches (and does this correlate in any way with fears of Changelings?)--yee-ouch!
Re: Newton and Alchemy
Date: 2011-06-03 08:35 pm (UTC)The Principia was published before, but the CALCULUS IS MINE DAMMIT controversy didn't get started until after. And since I doubt the Statute was a surprise dumped on them all of a sudden during the 1689 legislative season, you could probably argue that he decided to publish then to start laying the groundwork for the Math Is Cooler Than Magic Which Totally Doesn't Exist Honest campaign. If he was a Muggle, maybe he hoped cooperating with the upcoming secrecy would convince them he didn't need Obliviating, poor guy.
The child-witches thing is just so... convenient, for Potterverse purposes. Lucky for them that development came at the tail end of the burning times, and some of them ended up getting off unscathed... but still, quite a catastrophe. And hm, will have to think about changelings!
Re: Newton and Alchemy
Date: 2011-06-04 06:24 pm (UTC)No idea who Muggle!Newton's wizard minder might have been, although there's probably plenty of candidates. Another candidate for a wizard keeping an eye on things, a century later, might be Salieri. He was in a position to hear what various royal courts were up to - "harmless music teacher for royalty and composer, honest" is a good cover for a spy. (They would have known the kind of devastation Muggles could cause, and I'd want to have a warning if any more Thirty Years Wars might bring armies tearing through my half-magical villages, anyway.) Also, possibly one additional reason he got the job as the Princess of Wurttemburg's tutor could be that she had been identified as a Muggleborn witch and, since she couldn't be whisked off to Durmstrang for numerous reasons, a private magical tutor under the cover of a music teacher would work as an alternative (because a princess having uncontrolled magical outbreaks would not be good for keeping magic secret). This of course also means Muggle!Mozart, which is the important point :D While Salieri appears not to have been quite the jealously evil schemer of the play/movie, you just know there's a wizarding version of Amadeus somewhere where he's pissed because it's just so unfair that this Muggle has such talent.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-25 07:59 pm (UTC)I don't have the best grasp on British history, but I think it's interesting that the Statute of Secrecy went into effect around the same time as the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite War. There was a major shift in the roles of the Monarchy and Parliament and Protestants gained control over all of Ireland and Scotland when William and Mary overthrew James II.
It might also be relevant that the Salem Witch trials began in 1692.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-03 08:43 pm (UTC)Possibly not related at all, but they were also going through periodic smallpox epidemics at the time - in fact, Queen Mary died of smallpox in 1695 or thereabouts. By the 1720s, you had Lady Mary Whortley Montagu and Zabdiel Boylston (in Boston) listening to old Greek and Turkish women in Constantinople and African slaves and ex-slaves about this inoculation procedure they used, and so off they all go experimenting. If not for the Statute, might they have relied on their magical friends for help (and given the sheer number of Muggles, not protected very many)? This might have been quite to the Muggles' benefit in the end.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-03 11:17 pm (UTC)My thought about the Salem trials were that they possibly provided impetus for magicals to go into hiding.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 05:47 am (UTC)at the ranchin England, they had the Pendle witches as a wakeup call in 1612, and plenty more on the Continent. Plus there was the Malleus Maleficarum in the 1480s, which, although condemned by the Inquisition, must have looked like a very bad sign when it gained popularity in the next century. It wasn't the only or even the most popular witch-hunting manual either - see the Compendium Maleficarum of 1608. The Salem Trials certainly might have been the last straw that convinced any doubters in New England that the Statute was a good idea (drat, we didn't get away from that nonsense by moving across the ocean after all!), but they look a bit late to be the impetus.There's a very interesting book on the smallpox epidemics called The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carroll. There's a fair amount of dramatized scenes to make it popularly accessible, but she explains in the notes in the back which bits she got from actual documented history and which were dramatic-if-plausible extrapolations, so you can come up with your own interpretation of the evidence as to people's motivations etc. And the actual actions everyone took are mostly solidly attested. /citation geekery
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 06:06 pm (UTC)I'd question that ANY magikal folk lived amongst the Puritans, either when they first came over, or subsequent influxes. I mean, what self-respecting witch or wizard would CHOOSE to leave England to move in with a bunch of religious fanatics whose fanaticism includes not only banning witchcraft, but excuting those convicted of practicing it?
Of course, there'd always be the occasional witch or wizard born into a nonmagikal Puritan family...but it seems to me that the kid would quickly learn not to show any magikal abilities, else they'd be severely punished. They'd either suppress their magikal abilities, or move away as soon as they were old enough to do so.
The Salem Trials certainly might have been the last straw that convinced any doubters in New England that the Statute was a good idea (drat, we didn't get away from that nonsense by moving across the ocean after all!), but they look a bit late to be the impetus.
Just my opinion, but I see it as just the opposite -- that the secrecy statute would have given certain wizards and witches a reason to immigrate to the New World that they otherwise would not have chosen. When it took months to travel by ship, and one can only apparate to a place one knows and can visualize, it seems to me that it would have been mighty hard to enforce the statute in the colonies.
Even if you had some sort of extension of the Ministry here in America, you'd only have a couple of wizards/witches in a couple of big cities, perhaps Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They'd still be hard-pressed to enforce the statute out in the wilderness/frontier. Again, they would not be able to apparate to where the offender lived, and it would take weeks, if not months, to travel there by foot or horse.
So I see the colonies -- and not just America, but Australia, India, Hong Kong, etc. -- being a refuge for magikal folk who didn't agree with the secrecy statute.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 11:50 pm (UTC)Each colony had it's own unique charter granted by the King, and the colonies outside of New England were fiercely independent of New England and each other. That's where you got the strong "State's Rights" thing, it originated with the original colonial charters. Each colony (and what would eventually become states or commonwealths) basically ran as their own independent political units, basically countries unto themselves.
No colonist living outside of New England would have worried about witch trials spreading outside of New England...and that was especially true of the New Amsterdam/New York colony.
Puritans viewed New York as Sin City; just like how they'd objected to the Dutch allowing religious freedom in the Netherlands, they also disapproved of that same tolerance in New Amsterdam, a tolerance that continued when the English took over and renamed it New York.
Well into the 19th century, Massachusetts and Connecticut banned the celebration of Christmas, and looked askance at all the holiday merriment shenanigans occuring in our neighbor to the southwest. So no, puritan prejudices stayed within the confines of New England, and southern New England at that. You didn't find nearly as many puritanical prohibitions in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine.
(A couple may have eventually run off and joined the Indians if they found an amenable nation, as some Muggle colonists also did - even further out of the Ministry's reach.)
I'd suspect that more than a few "mountain men", those early frontiersmen who spent most of their time trapping in and beyond the frontier, and spent more time amongst Indian tribes than with those of European extraction, were wizards... ;-)
But I stand by my assertion that many magikal folk could have been comfortable living in the more cosmopolitan colonial cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc.
I think Benjamin Franklin was a wizard. LOL
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-06 05:46 pm (UTC)I don't know, Franklin seems awfully sensible and inventive for a wizard from what we've seen :D Can you imagine anyone but Hermione telling everyone the benefits of "early to bed and early to rise"? (Well, maybe Dumbledore, but he wouldn't mean it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 03:53 pm (UTC)Only on the left side of the big pond.
People lose focus on the fact that the Puritans were a right-wing, ultraconservative, religious cult who originally left England for Holland because they didn't like the restoration of the monarchy in England (the Church of England, of which the King is head, was too "papist" for their tastes).
The Puritans then left Holland after a few years because even though they had gone there due to the Netherlands' religious freedom, the Puritans then objected to the Dutch being TOO permissive -- there were just too many Jews and Catholics around who were openly practicing their religion, don'tcha know? :-P
And so they came to America with the sole idea of establishing their own vision of God's Perfect Community. And to do so they enacted a lot of restrictive laws (such as a man not allowed to kiss his wife on the Sabbath), which included anti-witchcraft laws.
They really didn't want anything to do with with the folks back home, who in turn didn't give those weird religious cultists in New England a second thought.
The Salem Witch Trials would have made for an interesting "odd news" article in the back pages of the London newspapers, little more. The trials, and subsequent hangings (and one pressing-to-death) would have had absolutely NO influence on political and/or religious policy back in England.
Whatever was the impetus for the Secrecy Statue being passed in 1692, the Salem Witch Trials would NOT have been it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 06:34 pm (UTC)I think the key is in GoF...we don't see foreign wizards and witches apparating to the QWC game, they required the use of a portkey. Ditto later in the book, neither Durmstrang nor Beauxbatons apparated to Hogsmeade, they arrived via PHYSICAL means, magikal tho it may have been.
So there seems to be a distance-limit on apparation. Altho it is in the realm of possibility that the inability to apparate great distances has more to do with crossing international borders than any magikal constraint. IOW, the thing that keeps wizards and witches from apparating to other countries is solely political, and not physical.
But just like nonmagikal people illegally cross borders, you'd have magikal folk who didn't care about breaking laws apparating to other countries -- so I still lean to there being a distance limitation to apparation.
Which leaves travel via portkey. But in colonial times it would have taken months to deliver a portkey, and it could only be used once.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-04 11:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 05:09 pm (UTC)I just had one thought about the modern Durmstrang, and why Karkaroff would be so paranoid: is it possible that the Soviet Union had some influence? The USSR only stopped existing in 1991, after all.
It's very possible there was something like a Soviet Academy for Gifted Children which would have pretty much kidnapped muggleborns throughout the then-USSR away from their parents and taught them to be good little Communist witches and wizards. This would likely have resulted in a very divided magical community, since I can't imagine communist ideology meshing well with the traditional beliefs of the magical world, and possibly a long undeclared civil war.
It's also possible there was a vicious crackdown on all things magical as part of the Communists' crackdown on all forms of religion, including paganism, animism, and shamanism. The 1917 Revolution might have led to the complete destruction of whatever the Russians had as Ministry of Magic under the Tsars, shortly followed by Stalin sending everyone to Gulags, thus effectively wiping out a lot of magical communities or forcing them into complete secrecy throughout Russia and Eastern Europe.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-06 01:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-05 05:17 pm (UTC)Witches and wizards working with some leading figures in the Enlightenment to hide magic as superstition would likely also have been a subtle form of revenge against some of the wizarding world's enemies.
The Enlightenment also derided religion as superstition, criticised the corruption in many organised religions, and began to work against the divine right of kings, the aristocracy's right to rule, and to advocate for the rights of man and the rule of law. All of this together began to limit the powers of the ruling class and the church.*
Which would be an excellent slow revenge against the sort of superstitions, fanatics, and politicians who made the Secrecy necessary.
*Yes, this is extremely oversimplified, but I don't want to write a huge essay on it. ::g::
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-06 01:17 am (UTC)And elsewhere...
Date: 2011-10-04 05:15 pm (UTC)Can you imagine what it must have been like? *european wizards arrive to start discussing implementing the statute of secrecy*
Chinese wizards: Oh we took care of THAT Centuries ago.
Re: And elsewhere...
Date: 2011-10-05 05:13 pm (UTC)China did have a sorcery scare in 1768, though, and interestingly, one of the main fears was that sorcerers were stealing people's souls (one wonders just how many countries have Dementors). It was a relatively short-lived incident, but still quite interesting. (It seemed to be connected to tensions with the Qing regime - queue-clipping wasn't just a symbolic or magical attack, but could get you in trouble with the authorities because it was a government-mandated hairstyle - and economic stresses. Some of the main targets were wandering poor monks, notably.)