Spells in Silence (Harry Potter)
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IllegibleScream
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Ugh.
Wizard Liberals.
Those things were probably made when the mundane technology was cutting edge stuff.
That's actually my favorite interpretation. It interferes with technology that arced, and non arcing/modern transistors are so new by the time of canon that nobody has tested them yet.
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
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On thing often forgotten is that Harry Potter was written with the first year taking place over 30 years ago now.
For example, during the entirety of the war with Voldemort commercially available computers were making the incredible and heretofore impossible leap to multiple gigabytes of storage capacity.
The decade started with a 2.5" HDD storing less than 500 megabytes and ended with breaking into the double digits with IBM's Titan, a 16.8 gigabyte drive.
For processing power the decade was dominated by the Pentium, the first chip of its line and its run lasted the decade. Which its max clock rate a whopping 300 MHz and able to cache an incredible 32 Kilobytes.
Modern electronics aside from radio would have been at best quaint to a wizard because if you wanted to hear music you just tuned into the radio or used your magic to have some instruments play a song. Battery operated Walkman were all the rage and would have had minimal issue because you didn't recharge such devices at the time you just bought new batteries or had a stack of them on hand.
The world of Harry Potter starts the literal year the internet was made public, so no one around would have any reason to even have heard of it if they're not into technology. A full two years before the first real web browser, Mosaic, even existed.
The Wizarding World as it's presented to us is a world that doesn't have the internet, lacks mass adoption of cellphones and vastly predates the invention of smartphones, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery was only just commercially released by Sony that year.
It's fun to poke fun at Wizards not advancing with technology but for the better part of centuries until literally the period after the one presented in the text of the books Wizards could be argued to have been ahead in a majority of information spaces what with their text-to-speech quills, mass transit floo-system and government sponsored teleportation courses, the Owl Post is incredibly efficient and accurate, and their libraries are proofed against the ravages of time.
FictionPack
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First HP book is in 1991 when H goes to their first school year.
The World Wide Web became available to the broader public on April 30, 1993.
January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other.
Cecylene
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The "internet" came became public in '91 but I did mention that the first real web browser didn't come into being until '93. Hence why I had in the following sentence said most people wouldn't be aware of it unless they were big into tech news.
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@Cecylene:
Interesting point! Thanks for laying it out like that.
And following on from that...
Well, they have the Hogwarts Express, don't they? Sure, no other trains... but most of the population has access to multiple forms of personal flight and teleportation. The Hogwarts Express meets what is quite possibly by far their most high-density transit need, for the two to four days a year when that need exists; really, given how easily they could do without the train, using more magical methods, and how much of its actual purpose appears to be a ritualistic separation of Hogwarts from the rest of the world for the students and an opportunity to socialise with their peers and switch mindset and such, it's more surprising they went as far as using a train for it.
And there's the knight bus, another adoption and adaptation of muggle technology... which, thanks to the magic involved, can meet pretty much the entire remainder of Wix Britain's non-teleportation/personal flight transportation needs with one single bus.
And they did, as you say, adapt the radio.
So what have they really been missing? Pens? Long history of magical quills, could do pens, but quills have been made to work and are in fashion. They've got lighting, heating and cooling, sanitation, cooking, medical technology...
Interesting point! Thanks for laying it out like that.
And following on from that...
Well, they have the Hogwarts Express, don't they? Sure, no other trains... but most of the population has access to multiple forms of personal flight and teleportation. The Hogwarts Express meets what is quite possibly by far their most high-density transit need, for the two to four days a year when that need exists; really, given how easily they could do without the train, using more magical methods, and how much of its actual purpose appears to be a ritualistic separation of Hogwarts from the rest of the world for the students and an opportunity to socialise with their peers and switch mindset and such, it's more surprising they went as far as using a train for it.
And there's the knight bus, another adoption and adaptation of muggle technology... which, thanks to the magic involved, can meet pretty much the entire remainder of Wix Britain's non-teleportation/personal flight transportation needs with one single bus.
And they did, as you say, adapt the radio.
So what have they really been missing? Pens? Long history of magical quills, could do pens, but quills have been made to work and are in fashion. They've got lighting, heating and cooling, sanitation, cooking, medical technology...
My headcanon is that there is no interference between magic and technology. I don't remember there being an example in canon to prove it, only rumors. As far as I am concerned the whole thing is caused by Dumbledore not wanting students to listen to normal people's radio, thus maintaining the cultural rift between the magical and mundane societies.
To discover that would require exactly the kind of experimentation that the magical community tries its best to prevent.
To discover that would require exactly the kind of experimentation that the magical community tries its best to prevent.
Cecylene
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The magical interference largely came as fanon from the early-mid Aughts when the movies were coming out and many newer and thus younger fans at the time forgot how much technology had advanced since the early 90's. Many people in modern times can be forgiven for forgetting that we never see the Wizarding World make it past the year 1999 save for the snippet of the epilogue, the dotcom crash hadn't happened yet and the internet still arrived at your home in CD's from AOL.
It's really this. The Wizarding world isn't actually that far behind. At that point, what was going to be useful for them? They have a spell that does anything a convenience technology does at no cost. They have a small economy, so mass production isn't gonna help them much. Guns are better at killing sure, but a wand has a non lethal setting and can also clean your dishes. A calculator could be helpful, but it's not like they need to do much advanced math.
I've been re-reading, and not seeing (or maybe no longer seeing) the "only a little bit" part. McGonagall is a hypocrite, too: what Hazel can do McGonagall calls "parlour tricks", yet what are mouse to snuffbox, beetle to button, and hedgehog to pincushion transformations if not parlor tricks? (Match to needle is marginally useful.) They may be stepping stones to something useful, but Hazel's spells are actually useful (all being created out of necessity).
If Hazel is a little shit, then McGonagall's a big shit in my book.
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Dumbledore wanting to maintain that rift, to that extent? Huh. You and I appear to have interestingly different impressions of the character of Baseline Standard Dumbledore (that is, the sort of Dumbledore we assume a given universe has until/unless more information on the local Dumbledore is available).coalcat said:
It has less to do with Dumbledore and more to do with the general culture of wizards.
The separation between the wizards and the muggles is not just a consequence of the Statute of Secrecy. It's its goal.
Assuming the wizards and witches practiced the normal level of exogamy and had the normal number of children, it wouldn't take more that a few generations before magic is no longer special rare thing, but rather common in the human population. And that doesn't take into account the effect of magical healing on child mortality.
What I am trying to say is that without artificial separation, the magical community would have been assimilated into mainstream society long ago.
That and not mobs of peasants with torches and pitchforks have alway been the main threat to the wizards' way of life.
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Ah, and Dumbledore is just the locally in charge wizard and at least willing to go along with that for the time being?coalcat said:
Right.
That's an interesting hypothesis and one I don't think I'd pondered before, so thanks, but pondering it now, I don't think it holds up. There were thousands of years of history before the Statute of Secrecy went into effect. Some cultures in some places and times may still have enforced some degree of barrier preventing reproduction, but not all, surely, and even without considering the possibility of having magical descendants, a wix would be an attractive partner for their own magical abilities. If magical ability could be spread throughout a population like that, it seems almost certain that it would have in at least one culture, probably more than one, and that culture would then have had a considerable advantage in competition with cultures that prevented such reproduction.
It seems, therefore, very improbable that a version of the Harry Potter world where magical ability could be spread that way would get to the point of enacting the Statute of Secrecy in the first place, since most of the human population of the planet would have been magical for quite some time by then; neither does it seem likely that a world where even, say, 80% of the human population was composed of wix which decided to enact the Statute of Secrecy anyway would succeed, or try or be able to concoct and implement a false history so different from their own in which magical ability was far more limited.
It's still possible, within the limits of what information we have, that there's some magical reason it was done and way it was possible, but it seems far more likely that there's just some reason the inheritance of magical ability doesn't work like that and is inherently far more limited.
In short, if it worked like that, they would, as you say, have been assimilated into mainstream society long ago -- but since they weren't, it appears that it doesn't.
Ehh. Even beyond the above, though, I think I disagree here -- at least, treating "mobs of peasants with torches and pitchforks" as representative rather than strictly literal.
The Statute of Secrecy hid the wix world from the muggle world, but it did not do the reverse. Muggleborn and muggle-raised children still go to Hogwarts and mingle with their non-muggle-raised peers, and adult wix seem to be able to generally quite freely just go out into the muggle world whenever they want, providing they're keeping to the secrecy and such. There don't seem to be any hard barriers to wix adopting muggle customs, at least in Wix Britain; as mentioned earlier, some muggle technologies also seem to have been adopted and integrated fairly well. Indeed, it's even still possible for an adult wix to just live a muggle lifestyle full-time. The Statute was also only enacted a few hundred years ago; why so recently, if it was about voluntary cultural change, or indeed genetics? This does not seem to support the hypothesis that the Statute of Secrecy's primary purpose is preventing voluntary cultural change (or wix and muggles voluntarily reproducing with each other).
What the Statute does make more difficult is muggles attempting to force involuntary cultural changes, or other impositions, upon wix, given they now don't even know wix exist as a potential target. I can very much see wix looking at the world in 1689 and thinking that it was only a matter of time, unless something was done, before increasingly large and capable muggle militaries turned the struggle for Gold, God, and Glory on them en masse, and the Statute of Secrecy was seen as the best available alternative out of a set containing it, waiting and hoping things improved, or trying to launch a preemptive strike. And it's not like the following history between 1689 and 1991 would readily improve the outlook much, either, though it seems plausible enough that some optimistic and/or ill-informed wix might think otherwise.
IllegibleScream
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It honestly seems unlikely to be a purely genetic factor, but still displays things at least resembling heredity.
We have Muggle, Squib, Magical, and Muggleborn.
If magic is genetic in some way, then Muggleborns should be very rare, since having the same mutation occur over and over again in unrelated people isn't something super common.
It might be fanon, but don't Squibs have enough magic to brew potions and craft things, while Muggles do not?
Given what I've seen so far, it seems like the most reasonable answer to How Is Magic Passed On, is hereditary factors unrelated to genetics. Which is a goofy phrase to write.
Edit: I forgot one idea that works with a more genetic basis. Squibs getting ejected or adopted out of magical society, introducing magical factors to muggles, which creates Muggleborns a generation or two down, or when two different lines of squibs intersect.
Basically if your maternal great grandfather and your paternal great grandfather just appeared in their respective orphanage's one day, you have a non-zero chance to be a Muggleborn.
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Aye; both it being purely genetic and it having nothing to do with heredity seem extremely unlikely, based on what we observe.IllegibleScream said:
I'm not sure just what the canon on squibs is either, sorry.
Why, in this context?
I believe at least some stories use that sort of thing, yeah.
I mean, they are, there's only like 6 confirmed muggleborns in Harry's year vs 12+ confirmed pure/half bloods (and several may not actually be muggleborn given they are 11 after a civil war where rape was a distinct plausibility from Deatheaters and a non-insignificant proportion of the magical population doesn't see "muggles" as people), and consider the much larger population of the mundane vs magic
Except before the status there wouldn't be a forcing of cultural change, since wizards and non-magical were part of one culture (in the same country). There would be a natural cultural change/growth. It would be as involuntary as any other change caused by youth doing stuff differently. The real forced involuntary change was the rich wizards forcing the status on everyone else so that they could have more wealth and power.
So what really is happening is the rich wizards forcing everyone else to think/follow their rules. Destroying thousand of years of culture and traditions. Then they cry about people trying to force them not to torture non-magical because it's their tradition and culture!
IllegibleScream
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Because in a lot of ways Genetics is purely the study of hereditary factors.
It's like saying the study of materials, except all the ones made of matter. I'm sure you could find or manufacture an edge case that would fit the definition, but it's so hideously unnatural as to be a nearly useless avenue of research.
We run into an issue where definitions only exist for things that are conceivable, and hereditary traits completely unrelated to anything heritable are inconceivable.
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If that was what happened, though, why in 1689? By 1689, that sort of cultural exchange would have been going on for thousands of years; it would itself be normal. And the Statute of Secrecy had global support; even if there was enough opposition to it that there was actually a war over it or the like, the pro-Statute side was strong enough to win that war. That seems unlikely to be the case for a small minority of wix wanting to dominate the rest, when the rest wanted to not have that happen and in addition to already outnumbering the minority could also draw on muggle support. Force multipliers only go so far, especially since we also know that whatever conflict there was didn't do too much damage to be covered up.DragonWyrm said:
Ah, I think this might be a definition issue, yes; I'd say genetics is specifically about genes. The hereditary aspects of genes, the role of genes in reproduction, etc. are part of that, but more... emergent, I suppose it could be called? That is, genetics is about genes, genes are significant in reproduction and heredity, therefore genetics includes a significant aspect of studying hereditary factors, rather than genetics being more directly study of hereditary factors.IllegibleScream said:
(I suppose, strictly speaking, one could also say that since the genetics of other organisms in a child's environment or the past thereof determine so much about that environment, genetics are related to all hereditary factors, but that line of argument could work for a lot of things common in the environment.)
Whereas there are a variety of hereditary factors not (directly) related to genes (the inheritance of a title of nobility by a designated potentially-adopted heir, for instance, the passing on of skills...), and potentially even more of magical sorts in a setting like this.
Imperio and oblivate. If someone is actually smart about using it, no one would notice. Especially if they don't have a strong feeling about the subject, therefore they wouldn't try to fight the imperio with all their strength. Target the Lords that would disagree with the status, and make them vote. (That is if you don't have a hostage or blackmail already)
Then you could use some Jinx that makes you feel disgust or fear when a certain subject is mentioned. If you do it for long enough, brainwashing would occur.
That is without using good old fashioned propaganda.
Send out notices that only say what those in power want to be heard. Scare the population about how evil the muggles are. They want vengeance! Didn't one of your ancestors' torture some of them? What about your youthful indiscretions?
"Now look at this inquisition. I certainly am not part of them, stealing the gold of those we kill. Anyways, have you heard about how the ANTI STATUS LORD GOT KILLED due to an anonymous tip? I also now SAVED his mansion and 50% of his wealth from the EVIl muggles. DON'T TRUST those FOREIGN wizards. They do DARK magic! We should make them support the status! My good Friend, Lord Qi is going to help us on that side. He has identified those DARK mages who would try to stop us!"
Then you must consider what spells the population knows. We already have evidence that the Lords/Patriarchs had private servants who worked as their soldiers (at least in this fanfic). Meanwhile look at Hogwarts education, one bad defence teacher would ruin a couple generations (and that is if the subject even exists). Additionally, wizards that finish their education concentrate on spells that they need. So the majority of the wizards would know more cleaning spells than combat ones. Their combat spells would remain unpracticed and weak. Unless their family had some library, they probably didn't know any more esoteric or complex combat spells.
Then you must consider how spread out they were. If there is one or two wizard families per small town, they won't really be able to stop a group of trained wizard fighters coming in and telling them "Status or else". Trying to organise a resistance would have been too late at that point. Since the rich would have already "voted" on it and send out their hitmen to kill or take hostages for those that would disagree.
So I would see this as more of a slow attack. That brainwashes, mind controls or blackmails the rich lords. Assassinated community leaders that wouldn't agree with it. Controls the information spread. And most importantly targets everyone while they are seperate and ignorant of the danger. So that by the time the people that wouldn't agree with what is happening notice, they are either killed, controlled or it's too late to organise with others like them.
If you are trying to argue the Statue was created through some sort of global conspiracy you need better evidence than a mind control spell which teenagers can resist, a mind wipe spell whose strength is variable, and a Jinx with zero evidence its existence (and if it did would likely be the single most powerful example of magic in the entire series). Especially when the idea hinges on the global Statue cabal somehow finding every single person who would disagree with their actions else their entire house of cards falls because one person starts teleporting from major city to major city and setting unicorns loose.
The thing is, it makes sense to do if there was any real way to manage it. Magic in HP has no real limitations outside of like resurrection, and even that has loopholes.
Wizards coming out the world can end in utopia, horrible war crimes committed on one side or the other, or the collapse of civilization. They have the ability to teleport and fly at no cost. They can mind control, shapeshift, remove memories, time travel. They either uplift humanity into a post scarcity society, get hunted down and pushed back into hiding but this time they are being hunted, or have to basically end civilization to go back into hiding.
Wizards don't need anything from the non magical world, and stand to lose everything.
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@DragonWyrm:
I still find it hard to believe that they could simultaneously be a small minority trying to force this on everyone else, wix, muggle, and nonhuman, in the world, and have such overwhelming force on their side that not only do they win, they do so quietly and completely enough that it can all be covered up.
Sure, most of the wix population probably isn't skilled in combat spells -- but there'd be a lot of them, and they could be trained. I mean, look what Harry does in canon with the DA. Also, though, the population that is skilled in combat to start with is far from guaranteed to all start out on the minority's side. This lord is good friends with some muggles, that lady has business interests heavily entagled with the muggle world, the Duke of Soandso doesn't care about the muggles one way or another but has a family rivalry with a leading member of the minority...
Sure, starting out with a slow, creeping attack might get them more than they'd otherwise have gotten, but their enemies aren't stupid and have more chances to just plain get lucky when it comes to noticing what's going on. The conspirators, after all, have to win every single time, while their much more numerous opposition only has to win once to blow the conspiracy into the open.
I still find it hard to believe that they could simultaneously be a small minority trying to force this on everyone else, wix, muggle, and nonhuman, in the world, and have such overwhelming force on their side that not only do they win, they do so quietly and completely enough that it can all be covered up.
Sure, most of the wix population probably isn't skilled in combat spells -- but there'd be a lot of them, and they could be trained. I mean, look what Harry does in canon with the DA. Also, though, the population that is skilled in combat to start with is far from guaranteed to all start out on the minority's side. This lord is good friends with some muggles, that lady has business interests heavily entagled with the muggle world, the Duke of Soandso doesn't care about the muggles one way or another but has a family rivalry with a leading member of the minority...
Sure, starting out with a slow, creeping attack might get them more than they'd otherwise have gotten, but their enemies aren't stupid and have more chances to just plain get lucky when it comes to noticing what's going on. The conspirators, after all, have to win every single time, while their much more numerous opposition only has to win once to blow the conspiracy into the open.
And it's far from certain they're actually capable of that sort of uplift/utopia creation.Bladeruler said: