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DIVINATION
Part 1: From Runes to Oracle Bones
Part 2: Crystal Balls, Possessed Mirrors and a Fragrant Witch
Part 3: Palms, Cards and Cups of Tea
ASTRONOMY
Part 1: From a Star Chart to a Dog Star
Part 2: An Astrolabe, an Orrery and a Celestial Globe
Part 3: Heads in the Stars
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.
This series of eBooks will reveal the world of magic and unlock its secrets. It will go back thousands of years. It will travel to the far corners of the world. It will reach the stars. It will explore under the earth. It will decipher mysterious languages. We’ll encounter some of the most colourful characters in history. We’ll discover the curious incidents and truth behind legends. We’ll see how, in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.
This series, structured around lessons from the Hogwarts curriculum, will show how this long and rich history has nourished the fictional world of Harry Potter.
The starting point for these eBooks was the exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opened at the British Library in October 2017, twenty years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the UK in 1997. For the exhibition, curators spent over a year searching through the 150 million items that the British Library holds to find the most magical. Then they sourced special artefacts to be loaned from other notable institutions. In October 2018, the New-York Historical Society took on the British Library exhibition, adding books and artefacts from their own collection, as well as other fascinating loans.
This series of four eBook shorts contains worldly wonders from both exhibitions, exploring J.K. Rowling’s magical inventions alongside their cultural and historical forebears. Throughout are links between ours and the wizarding world, told through extraordinary stories from the history of magic.
DIVINATION
Wanting to see into the future seems to be built into human nature. The person who knows their future can control it, and become the commander of their destiny. Some of the most prized magical objects have been tools for divination and attempting to see the future. People who are purported to have second sight have been consulted by everyone, from celebrities to shoe sellers.
If you can see the future (and, quite frankly, if you can’t), you’ll have seen that we are about to enter the world of prediction, fortune-telling and the Hogwarts subject of Divination. The practice of divination stretches back thousands of years, and has used natural instruments like bones and turtle shells. More recently, it had a renaissance in the front parlours of Victorian England, using everyday objects like teacups for peering into the future. Some people will use anything to see what fate and fortune holds!
Part 1: From RUnes to Oracle Bones
So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you. Books can take you only so far in this field…’
In 19th-century Siam (now Thailand), important life choices were made by consulting a divination manual called a phrommachat. It couldn’t be read by just anyone – it had to be taken to a divination specialist called a Mor Doo to be interpreted.
Because the manuals were used so much, they were often worn out and recopied multiple times, which makes dating their use in history quite difficult. The oldest known copies are from the 18th century, but parts of the manuals were probably adopted when Buddhism was introduced in mainland Southeast Asia, about a thousand years ago. Their Hindu and Chinese elements might date them to even before that.
In a typical phrommachat the paper was concertinaed, and accordingly it was called a folding book. It would have been handwritten in ink and would typically have contained wonderful illustrations of courting couples, big cats and men riding an assortment of animals: chickens, dragons and elephants. The Mor Doo was needed to interpret the multiple belief systems that were merged in the book, requiring both literacy and numeracy to do so.
For Buddhist monks leaving the order, a career as a Mor Doo was a viable way of casting yourself as a lay specialist with access to the necessary secret knowledge the job required. There are links with Hindu and Indian traditions, and the zodiac employed in the manuals is derived from Chinese tradition. Like Southeast Asia and Thailand itself, the manuals reflect a melting pot of traditions and cultures.
When would you consult your Mor Doo? For any difficult decision that had to be made, or for a major life choice, a trip to the Mor Doo was in order: questions might include whether to marry someone, start a business or build a new house, and if so where to build it. Travelling was dangerous back then, so people would even consult on taking trips. Falling ill was seen as a symptom of mental sickness as much as physical. Emotional strains on relationships could all add up to making someone ill, so the Mor Doo consulted on how to sort out issues with relationships in the community. Feelings of guilt and remorse, or any extreme emotions, were thought to make one sick. A divination specialist would tell you exactly what to do.
How the Mor Doo would interpret the book is complex. The twelve animals in the zodiac were combined with five elements: water, fire, earth, wood and metal. And multiplied together, this would give you sixty possible years. To make it more complicated, each of these sixty years was combined with a female or male avatar, or sometimes a different figure, to take it to 120 options. The idea was that you could determine someone’s birth year within the range of 120 years, and if you added the reign of a king, you could hone in on which particular year was mentioned.
Since the minefield of relationships was one of the main reasons why people consulted a Mor Doo, there was even a special relationship section. Matchmaking and checking the future compatibility of two individuals in a relationship (particularly marriage) would warrant seeing the Mor Doo. And not just for the individuals concerned, but both families, too – it was a family affair.
They hurried back down to the Gryffindor common room, which was half-empty, and joined Hermione, who was sitting alone, reading a book called Ancient Runes Made Easy.
Runes were an ancient Germanic writing system – the earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD. As Christianity spread, the characters were replaced by the Latin alphabet. After the early 16th century, runes were no longer in practical use, but their association with magic continues. Famously, The Tales of Beedle the Bard – the children’s book for wizards first mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – was written in runes. The need to interpret runes (and the difficulty in doing so) means they have an air of magic and
