Harry Potter: A Journey Through Charms and Defence Against the Dark Arts (Harry Potter: A Journey Through, #1)

by Pottermore Publishing

To become invisible, to make someone fall in love with you, to transform into another creature – these are all things that people have believed in, yearned for or feared throughout history. There’s nothing more magical than a magic charm.

Known today for its use by stage magicians when they perform illusions, ‘Abracadabra’ is probably familiar to us all. But it has more sinister connotations as well. Londoners used to paint it on their doors to ward off the plague in the 17th century. The infamous 20th-century English occultist Aleister Crowley believed it to be a word that held great power.

We’ve seen how charms could be used for transfiguring into other creatures and transporting yourself into new magical places, but there were also charms that could be used for more malign purposes, such as getting the upper hand over your enemies. There was a charm from the Egyptian city of Thebes, dating from the 4th century AD, which let you do just that. In the papyrus document later found that described it, there were seven pages of incantations, which included charms to discover thieves and to reveal the secret thoughts of men. The spells and charms were written in Ancient Greek and one page showed you how to transform a ring into a charm.

Spells like these weren’t supplications or prayers, but commands to demonic entities. To get a demon to obey you, you needed two things: the demon’s full and exact name, and a physical way to make sure it did as it was told. So, in this case, the magical papyrus recipe book gave you the demon’s name and the correct incantation, while the iron ring was the target of the magic that established a physical bond. It was intended that the ring be hidden in the ground in order to prevent something from happening. By inscribing and burying the ring, the owner could specify, for example, that they did not want a rival to be lucky in love.

But the attitude in history towards witchcraft has been overwhelmingly negative, and often used as a means of persecuting women in society. Accusations of witchcraft were particularly widespread in the 17th century. Back in 1621, the three daughters of a famous English scholar called Edward Fairfax became ill and his youngest daughter, Anne, died. The two surviving sisters then accused some local women of practising witchcraft and causing Anne’s death. The women were taken to trial at the local assizes (old English county courts). Fairfax wrote a manuscript, setting out his case for the prosecution: A Discourse of Witchcraft as it was Acted in the Family of Mr Edward Fairfax of Fuystone.

Fairfax described cavorting with devils, big black dogs, people struck dumb and wax effigies. Often the devil appeared in the guise of a witch’s familiar (accompanying demon) – a cat or sometimes a bird or something even stranger. The account was later published a century after it was written (the original has been lost, but it was copied and distributed among interested scholars), and the printed book had additional numbered illustrations to accompany Fairfax’s text. The witches are depicted as old and hunched, carrying a stick alongside their familiars: birds, goats, a many-legged sort of fish-cat and the devil himself.

In the 17th century and beyond, women were often disenfranchised and vulnerable within wider society, along with the disabled and mentally ill. They were easy targets and that’s what we’ve seen in the iconography of witchcraft ever since: the witch with a walking stick is really a vulnerable old woman. The women accused by Fairfax were tried twice, but, despite his best efforts, they were acquitted each time. His daughters eventually admitted that they had invented their dreams in which the witches were performing dangerous acts and trying to kill Anne. It was possibly no surprise that, in this male-dominated society, they had done so to get the attention of their father.

Mather was a respected member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where Salem was situated. The area was populated by Puritans – a devoutly religious group that had emigrated from England. They wished to ‘purify’ the Church of England of its Catholic practices, and the New World they found themselves in was a harsh one. With smallpox spreading and the Native American peoples hostile towards them, there was a struggle to maintain their pious, ordered religious community. Mather represents a period of time in New England that was rife with hysteria and accusation. There were many natural phenomena occurring that could not be explained: bad harvests, freak storms, flooding and drought all left people stumped as to their cause. As a devoutly Puritan minister with authority and influence in the community, whose father had also been a minister, Mather thought it was his responsibility to find a reason for these various disasters.

The reasons why family, neighbours and acquaintances were accused have been debated many times over the centuries. Fear and paranoia played their part, but so did financial exploitation. In these close-knit communities, many people were related to each other and an accusation of witchcraft was a convenient way to bypass a line of inheritance. The misogyny of the period ensured a son never accused a father. Accusations of witchcraft were a way for societies to control what they viewed as ‘disruptive’ female behaviour. What often started as an opportunistic way of getting a woman out of the way became a cultural contagion with little or no rational explanation.