Seclusion and the Dark Arts
This was inspired by oryx_leucoryx’s reply to condwiramurs’s post “I would sell out the nation”; oryx was trying and not succeeding very well in fitting this new hypothesis, that the intrinsic crime of the Death Eaters was their stated intention to overturn Secrecy, with Albus and Tom’s conversation when Tom dropped by Hogwarts to ask for a job.
So I reread “Lord Voldemort’s Request” in HBP, and indeed, the objections Albus articulated to Tom there had to do with Tom’s magical research, not his political agenda. In fact Albus gives no sign of realizing that Tom and his (apparently newly so-called) Death Eaters had a political agenda. If indeed they did at that time; we don’t know whether Tom took over and extended the old organization of the Knights, or whether he’d formed a group separately and eventually merged it with the older group. In which case the merger may have taken place only after Tom and his followers adopted the Knights’ goals, which might have been quite some time after Tom first formed his group of friends.
It really does seem that what Albus objected to was Tom’s experiments in the Dark Arts. Which seems to contradict our argument that his Death Eaters’ primary offense had been to plot treason/heresy.
Because why should there be any correlation, in either direction, between an interest in studying or practicing the Dark Arts, and affiliation with a political group interested (treasonously) in undoing Secrecy?
Why should stalwart defenders of the status quo, such as Bartemius Crouch, Albus Dumbledore, James Potter, and Sirius Black (and, o gods, of course James and Sirius, those children of privilege, upheld the status quo-they were its primary beneficiaries!), trumpet loudly their unswerving opposition to the Dark Arts, while reserving to themselves the right to make, associate with, and use any particular Dark spells, creatures, or objects they happened to find useful or interesting?
“And I trust you remember the many proofs I have given, over a long career, that I despise and detest the Dark Arts and those who practice them?” said the man who authorized Aurors to use Unforgivables (GoF 9). “James-whatever else he may have appeared to you, Harry, always hated the Dark Arts,” affirmed Sirius: James’s partner-in-crime, fellow Animagus, magical bully, maker of the Marauder’s Map, werewolf-looser (and probable co-user of Death’s Cloak) (OotP 29). Then there was Albus, encouraging Harry in his naïve belief that Dark magic equated to deliberate evil while using the Deathstick daily, deploying Erised and the Deathcloak and the Suicide Stone, and surrounding himself (see end note; I didn’t catch this, Whitehound did) with silvery instruments that were apparently “artificial clairvoyance machines”-the man apparently tried to tame Prophecy Demons for his personal use!
One possible explanation for a positive (though not 100%) correlation between interest in the Dark Arts and interest in ending Seclusion might be Dark Arts Dementia. It might be the case that it not infrequently manifests, not as paranoia about the Muggles, but as delusions of grandeur: of being above Secrecy, of thinking oneself able to conquer Muggles, even of expecting to be worshiped if one revealed one’s glorious powers to them. In which case one might expect to see older Dark Arts practitioners, after a lifetime of sanely upholding Secrecy, fall prey in their dotage to the casuistries of the Knights of Walpurgis.
But there’s another possibility. Which would explain why inexperienced young hotheads interested in maximizing their magical power in general, and in the Dark Arts in particular, might find, ah, enticing, promises to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule over Muggles.
I mean, most Purebloods, and even probably most Halfbloods, don’t seem to interact with us Muggles even enough to have the remotest idea of how we dress. They don’t even know what money we use. Severus Snape might, perhaps, have harbored some vengeful fantasies of showing the Muggle bullies infesting Spinner’s End who’s now the boss, but Lucius or Bellatrix? Or Regulus? They can’t admit to having noticed Muggles, much less to being materially inconvenienced by us.
And who cares about ruling over people not actually quite real to oneself? Not even regarded as human, perhaps? At least, if one has nothing obvious to gain. The Wizarding world formally disdains our culture, and almost certainly doesn’t admit how much they borrow from it. (You think Molly acknowledges we had the wireless first?)
As to material goods… any magic-user who wants anything material we produce-food, shelter, raw ingredients-can with a minimum of ingenuity just steal it from us with no repercussions whatsoever under the status quo. Slughorn and The Three Campers establish that conclusively. No need to overturn the Statute to batten off us, any more than wizards need to overturn the Statute to harass us at their pleasure. Or even kill us, as long as they take minimal care to make the death look unsuspicious to the Muggles-no one from the Ministry investigated Frank Bryce’s “heart attack,” but three people dropping dead at dinner for no apparent reason made Muggle headlines and got Morfin arrested.
(As tiny as the number of magical folk is, their parasitism is probably an insignificant drain on our overall economy. Though the villagers in Ottery St. Catchpole might disagree with that assessment.)
But seriously. I don’t go around obsessing over how, if I worked things just right, I and a cabal of friends could take over Andorra and become its absolute dictators. Still less how I/we could subjugate the nearest ant hill! I don’t know anyone who does-and before you comment, yes, I do have some friends and acquaintances that have weird ideas. Including, yes, some who are teenage boys.
Okay, there’s the submerged threat of Muggle-on-magical violence. And of our overpopulation and its consequences, and pollution and global warming and the Bomb. But I can’t see Tom Riddle recruiting children on the grounds that we constitute an actual threat to the magical world, although we do. That’s exactly what they are conditioned never to admit directly, even to themselves. La la la, I can’t hear you, if someone tries to bring those issues up.
No, that fear will be the juice powering what the soon-to-be Death Eaters think and do, just as it’s the juice powering their elders’ ferocious enforcement of Seclusion-our way of life, our lives itself, are at stake here! Every time a witch or wizard encounters a new road in what had been forest, or a low-flying helicopter, or a piece of trash washed up on a beach, or hears of new technology, or even just encounters the vast hordes of Muggles infesting King’s Cross every September 1st like they own the damn place or something, that magic-user will feel encroached upon. Threatened.
But those real concerns are terrifying to think about, overwhelming, and so no one ever thinks about them. Among the Death Eater recruits either-they were not more rational, surely, than Molly and the Ministry. (They couldn’t have been, eh? They ended up with Tom!)
So what is the lure that the children Tom recruits are thinking about?
Well, what do witches and wizards in the Potterverse want? What are they brought up to think has paramount importance? What do they respect so exaggeratedly that, when it is present in high degree, they will offer the possessor their highest honors and all available leadership positions, even while agreeing, airily, that said possessor “is a bit mad, yes.” (PS 7). What does the relative lack of, induce Filch and other unfortunates to make the Qwikspell franchise rich, and persuade Neville that being murdered by his community, even by his nearest and dearest, is a plausible outcome, to be feared but never resented?
Because after all Neville’s Gran’s reaction, his family’s reaction, is perfectly understandable. Justifiable, even, from a certain point of view.
Magic is might.
*
The Dark Arts comprise many things; that’s part of the problem with defining them.
But we’ve hypothesized they include, 1), (all or most) Old Magic. Pre-wand, pre-domesticated magic.
And 2), (all or most) magic powered by emotion.
And who says the emotion must be the caster’s?
Think back to Old Magic, and to the situation of ancient (human) magic-users. Including most European magic-users pre-Seclusion. Of almost all of them, always, prior to the founding of all-magical schools such as Hogwarts and Wizarding-only enclaves such as Hogsmeade.
And of none of them now. By law.
The CLASSIC situation of the tribal shaman, of the village witch, of the court magician such as Merlin, is that there was usually just ONE of them. Or maybe a few, an alchemist plus his apprentice, or a witch-matriarch and a handful of her children and grandchildren. At most perhaps a great court magician, a rival striving for his post, and an avowed enemy or two.
But most of the cunning folk worked mostly alone, looking for some talent within their bloodline or outside in the wider community that they could train up as a replacement. The occasional extremely talented (and lucky) young one, a Nimue or an Agrippa, would sometimes go off to find a mentor who could train hir to something approaching hir full potential.
So when it came to developing and transmitting magical lore, how best to raise and use power … well, half the time, the teacher was dealing with an apprentice who might not be capable, magically, of using all that the elder could have taught. The other half, with an apprentice whose power was greater, and who might have been capable of learning more than, perhaps, the teacher had learned . (Not to mention differences in mental acuity and learning styles….)
In pre-literate cultures, well… the brightest and most powerful must have spent half their lives reinventing wheels.
Of course, many of the cunning folk were among the earliest literati, probably exactly for that reason.
But. We humans are good at making a virtue of necessity.
The standard situation of the early shamans, witches, whatever, was that there was normally only one fully-empowered magic-worker at a time in any given small community. Hopefully training up a successor, if they’d found anyone with the barest spark of talent. Working for, and with, (and sometimes against,) the less magically-talented people-their families, their villages, their tribes, their cities-that they lived with. Fully integrated, holding integral roles in their community.
Having on tap a good healer, or a successful weatherworker, or a consistent luck-turner, would make a serious difference to a tribe’s or a village’s or a city-state’s fortunes.
Some of what these cunning folk did always involved the solitary use of their powers for the good of the community (or to the detriment of elements thereof)-the shaman on a vision quest unshared by his warrior peers; the witch, alone in her hut, brewing up philtres and cures and poisons.
But some of it did not.
Beltane fires. Scapegoating rites. The sacrifice of the year-king.
In which the intrinsic power of the officiating magic-user(s) played a part, but so too did the power raised by the mass of less-magically-powerful (Muggle) participants. Their emotions, will, and belief.
So the traditions that the early magic-users passed on to their successors, the traditions that were robust enough to survive, had to include how best to use the emotions and will of the community to enhance one’s one magical powers. At least, to do so at direst need.
To amplify them.
Since, on average, half the time the incumbent was less powerful than hir teacher… and the other half had been taught by someone lacking their degree of inherent power and possibly not knowing how best to channel and use more.
So the traditions that survived to be transmitted were those that could best compensate for a particular magic-using individual’s magical weakness. Whether momentary or intrinsic.
So.
Why should practitioners and students of the Dark Arts be preferentially attracted to ending Secrecy, or be suspected of doing so?
Because the Dark Arts include magic spells and rituals that can no longer be used under Seclusion (or that are believed to be now unusable). Because that magic was originally designed to be used with, and either for or against, Muggles. To draw on Muggle crowd emotions.
To amplify the power available to the magic-user, at least temporarily.
Possibly to a huge extent.
For, after all, WHY, out of all those wizards since the medieval Peverells who have hungered for an unbeatable wand or a resurrection stone or a deathcloak, has none of the greedy bastards ever just tried to make a new one?
Why are Xeno and his fellows feverishly searching for three objects made and lost, rather than simply reverse-engineering the Peverells’ original spells?
Indeed, trying to improve on them?
(HA! A wand that will, in principle, totally whup the Elder Wand! Take that, tradition!)
Why do we see witches and wizards venerating and using all these apparently OLD artifacts-the Sword of Gryffindor, the Goblet of Fire, the Veil, the Mirror of Erised, the Hallows, Helga’s goblet, Rowena’s diadem, Salazar’s locket….
How come none of those, unlike mobile phones or racing brooms, has been superseded by a new and improved model?
It’s not like magical folk are so tradition-bound as to have no interest in innovation-we see three new brooms take top-of-the-line honors during the seven years we watch, and the Weasley twins’ shop, of NOVELTIES, is wildly successful.
So if no one is replicating the most powerful Dark artifacts of ancient times, one inference might be that no one can.
Maybe because there was magic available then that just can’t be used now.
Not knowledge per se; knowledge can be recreated.
But, see, the reverse does not hold; what’s known, can’t just be wand-waved to be unknown.
Not for a whole culture.
And most Muggles now know, irrevocably, that magic just doesn’t work. Or not as well as science, so we shouldn’t place all our trust in it.
However many individuals one might scrape together who believe (sorta) in astrology or faith-healing or Voodoo dolls.
There must be magic that simply can’t be worked now that crowds of Muggles are no longer available to help feed in the power of our belief to amplify the intrinsic power of the magic-user standing at the focal point of the rite.
And what’s been lost is considered, among the cognoscenti, to be among the some of the most powerful magic there is, or ever has been.
Perhaps even, that there can be.
Because, created to be used by magic-users of indifferent power to overcome their magical weakness-if used by an innately powerful mage, it will then magnify that strength. (Just as the Elder wand, perhaps created through such a ritual, is supposed to make its user’s spells extraordinarily powerful, “unbeatable.”)
So that’s what Tom told the children he recruited: if we undo Secrecy and regain the belief and obeisance of the Muggles, we can reclaim that power. And it will be yours.
(Or at least, mine. But the kids didn’t hear that subtext, at least at the time.)
*
So of course any Dark Lord worth his salt is eventually going to be tempted to overthrow Secrecy. Anyone seriously interested in maximizing his personal magical power (and who knows his history, which Hogwarts tries quite desperately to ensure that no-one will) will in time start wondering what power might be his if he could only resurrect some of the Old Ways.
*
This brings us back, finally, to that old slur that what makes magic Dark is that it is intrinsically evil, a matter of torture and death.
Jo implies this, in the reactions of some of her characters; she never demonstrates it, instead choosing to demonstrate that anti-Dark-magic fanatics (like Barty Sr., the Ministry in general [Dementors as civil servants, anyone?] & James and Harry Potter) are guilty of at least equal atrocities.
But now we can split the difference.
No, the Dark Arts have NO necessary relationship to torture or murder or depravity.
But-as practiced by Tom himself, they quite probably do.
Because in the old Dark Arts cornucopia, out of all the ancient spells which relied on raising power from the emotions of others, those are the only rituals and spells that a modern magic-user could practice upon random unconsenting kidnap victims. (As well as being the ones most congenial to a psychopath’s taste, so here inclination and practical considerations were happily aligned for Tom.)
All the rest, the ones that relied upon willing cooperation, communal goals, religious devotion, or truly voluntary self-sacrifice out of love, were closed to Tom. Beyond Tom’s imagination.
Truly beyond his imagination-Tom forced self-serving Peter Pettigrew into parodying the role of a loyal servant willingly giving his flesh to restore his master, not even recognizing that Peter’s having been coerced could make a difference! With the results we saw in canon.
(Hmm. Total sideline here, but wouldn’t it be fun if Peter himself had guessed? Hoped, even?)
But then, it’s been a thousand years since European witches and wizards could count on an entire community’s open assent, and belief, and willing cooperation, with power-raising rituals that overtly involved either sex or death.
*
Let’s listen in on Albus and Tom in “Lord Voldemort’s Request.”
”You call it ‘greatness,’ what you have been doing, do you?” asked Dumbledore delicately.
“Certainly,” said Voldemort, and his eyes seemed to burn red. “I have experimented; I have pushed the boundaries of magic further, perhaps, than they have ever been pushed-“
“Of some kinds of magic,” Dumbledore corrected him quietly. “Of some. Of others, you remain… forgive me… woefully ignorant.”
For the first time Voldemort smiled. It was a taut leer, an evil thing, more threatening than a look of rage.
“The old argument,” he said softly. “But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncement that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore.”
Well, yeah. Exactly. Nothing Tom could possibly see, or any wizard within the Secluded WW. They’ve all cut themselves off from us, and there is nothing to see.
Of the power available from love rather than fear.
The Aztecs offered hundreds of torn-out human hearts in a single ritual to bring luck to their next war; the Illyrians asked for one volunteer to step forward to serve and die as their year-king. But that ritual has not been performed in twenty-five centuries…
One only wonders what Albus had ever seen, to make that “old argument.” But then, Albus’s obsession with immortality and perfected power started with Alchemy, which traditionally requires the purification of the practitioner. Which Albus himself evidently failed at-he never made a Stone. The Flamels did.
But then, Albus did do something else-acquire one of the Deathly Hallows. The Deathstick. From Gellert. How?
Rita said scornfully in interview, “All I’ll say is, don’t be so sure that there really was the spectacular duel of legend. After they’ve read my book, people may be forced to conclude that Grindelwald simply conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and came quietly!” (DH 2)
There was a “legend” of a spectacular duel. Which means no one actually saw it. Nor does Rita have actual information to impart-her readers may conclude that something different may have happened, but they won’t come away from her book with firm knowledge on that point.
Item, Gellert never trashed Albus’s name. Either by suggesting that Albus might have killed his own baby sister, or by letting on-after Albus made it clear he wanted to forget their midsummer madness-that Albus had been the source, though he now disavowed it, of some of Gellert’s most compelling ideas.
Item, Gellert tried to protect Albus’s tomb from Tom’s depredations-he lied to Tom to Tom’s face! That’s extraordinary; canon shows us only two other people who did that. S. Snape and N. Malfoy. Both motivated by what, again? Remind me.
Item, Albus took the wand and its mastery from Gellert. When he finally faced him. And yet the wand is supposedly unbeatable, and the two wizards, said Albus, of nearly equal strength and skill.
Item, Gellert’s disarmament apparently marked the immediate end of the Grindelwald War. Which makes no sense-even Riddle’s organization, as Tom-centric as it was, fought on for a bit after Tom himself had been vanquished! I’m sorry, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, however great a shock and sorrow for the Americans he’d led through Depression and war, did not bring about the war effort’s collapse. Nor would Churchill’s have done, I make bold to say. Wartime Britain would NOT have honored Churchill’s memory by surrendering instantly to the Nazis. Much less if Winston had simply been disarmed in a one-on-one duel with a German schoolteacher-is anyone daft enough to posit such a thing? I’ve read some crazy alternate histories, but never that.
More to the point, given Jo’s heavy-handed Dark Wizard/Nazi parallels, Germany did not lose World War II because Hitler committed suicide. Hitler killed himself because he was losing the war.
So. It makes more sense if the war had already been lost, definitively. Except that Gellert himself, armed with the Deathstick, remained too powerful for any of the European Aurors to apprehend. And then he let it be known he’d surrender only if defeated in single combat, privately, by Britain’s most powerful wizard, who’d previously stayed strictly out of the conflict being fought among Europe’s Wizarding elite. (Though for five years now he’d been asked to help….)
(The above isn’t my idea, but I don’t remember where I first read it. Jodel, perhaps?)
In which case perhaps Gellert handed the Deathstick to his old lover with the wry injunction, “Here it is, Albus, what we always dreamed of. You see how it has served me; I had power, unbeatable power; no one could stand against any spell I cast. But it availed me naught in achieving the dream we once shared.
“Use it better, my first and only love. If you can.”
Didn’t Jo say something in interview some time, about someone, I forget who, being more culpable even than Tom Riddle, because unlike Tom, he had once been loved?
*
I just hope that Severus and the other kids didn’t understand before they joined why Tom called his group of followers the Death Eaters. I’m really rather hoping that Tom hoarded his power jealously, and didn’t actually offer them a cut of it, any more than he offered any of his followers the benefit of his personal research into achieving immortality. (I’d already thought that this was probably so, just based on Tom’s general approach to using sticks rather than carrots, but now I earnestly hope as well….)
In fact, I hope he didn’t explain the term, even. I’d like to think it was more his private joke. That does seem his style, if he was indeed withholding that information (and power) from them.
But of course if any potential recruit did have doubts because they’d heard unsavory rumors about the Dark Lord’s experiments, Tom would probably have told them at first exactly what he told Albus: “Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.”
To be eventually followed, perhaps, if a follower showed unease again once he knew or suspected more about Tom’s “research,” with the explanation that Seclusion was to blame. Once Secrecy has been ended, the Death Eaters will have the full range of the ancient power-enhancing rituals at their command, but for now, the only ones available are, well, the ones that don’t require willing participants. And experiments must be made; the Dark Lord has been resurrecting and extending knowledge that has been buried for centuries, and some tests must be performed. And the test subjects were only Muggles, and at that, selected from those that the Muggles themselves consider dregs, and who were unlikely to live long anyhow, or to be missed-homeless drug addicts and the like….
So the harm has been minimized, and the increase of knowledge has been great, and really Seclusion is to blame that any such measures must, most reluctantly, be taken.
I could really see Tom enjoy making such an argument. I like the idea of his blaming the Statute of Secrecy for his secret research into the evil spectrum of the Dark Arts.
And it rescues the fanon idea of Dark Magic atrocities, which canon paradoxically both strongly suggests and explicitly contradicts, while giving further support to the idea that someone could be fascinated by the Dark Arts (as a whole) without ever having any intention of becoming a party to any evil-doing.
To relate this back to my old essay, “Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper”: within the set of disciplines called, by the old families, the Dark Arts, there is a subset of very ancient rituals and spells designed to raise power through the emotions and belief of Muggle participants, and to channel this power in a way that augments or amplifies the abilities inherent to the magic-user(s) involved. Magic-users were thereby enabled to perform spells and create objects far more powerful than their unaided magic could ever have managed. Those who become interested in that branch of the Dark Arts may quite easily come to feel that it’s a pity that Seclusion precludes the use of such spells; if seriously interested (whether frustrated because of having weak inherent power, or powerful already but ambitious to gain more), they would eventually join subversive organizations such as the Knights in disproportionate numbers.
This would naturally feed into the general public’s vague prejudice in modern times against the Dark Arts-look, people who get into “that kind” of magic too heavily end up going bad and mad. On the other hand, there’s lots of stuff sold in Nocturne Alley that I find useful, and curses I like to use on them damn gnomes, and nothin’ wrong with that. That’s not really Dark, just, um, not sold in Diagon. Dark magic is that other stuff.
So the uninformed members of group two really do have some evidence backing up their prejudice. As does group three.
For there IS one subset of that branch of the Dark Arts that is, in fact, evil. Using pain and death to raise power. Tom Riddle obviously would have gravitated towards that knowledge, and mastered what he could of it. And invented more; we are talking about the little boy who’d created a version of the Cruciatus while still in infant school. (“I can make them hurt if I want to.”)
And if, like Albus, you knew from the start that Tom Riddle was a psychopath, you’d fully expect him to. If you were a Dark Arts expert and reformed Secrecy-overthrower yourself, and a historian’s lifelong associate, and therefore knew of their existence. Which most people do not. So when you heard rumors that Tom was experimenting, maybe with pain or death, you would believe them. And you’d promote among your own followers the belief that that’s what Lord Voldemort was pursuing, and therefore that that’s what anyone interested in following him, in learning about his kind of magic, must be interested in. Dark magic is inherently evil.
If, on the other hand, you knew nothing about Tom except what he presented to you, you wouldn’t automatically believe the rumors. Especially as you already know that the naïve belief that the Dark Arts are evil is simply rot. The rumors would seem mere spite, or uninformed. When he started talking to you about power-augmenting ancient magic that might be available if Seclusion were lifted, you wouldn’t know which specific branch of such magic the Dark Lord had been playing with…. And if you started to suspect, if you started to wonder if the rumors might have some basis, he’d have the justification all ready. This won’t be necessary, once we’ve changed the world and led the wizards out of hiding. If you think it wrong, then help to make it unnecessary!
The contradiction reconciled….
***
Note: Here’s Whitehound on Albus’s silver instruments (“Fanon versus Canon,” from the section “Dumbledore is either very saintly or very evil”)
“Another complication is that the plot is written in such a way that even wild schemes by Dumbledore usually turn out all right. One could say that the fact that his schemes usually do (by the grace of the author) turn out OK does not absolve him from having taken stupid risks with other people's lives. On the other hand, we are shown that at least some of the mysterious silver instruments in his office are artificial clairvoyance machines. We do not know how effective or accurate these are, but if they work well then the risks Dumbledore takes are probably much smaller than they seem, because he has a method of choosing schemes which he knows are likely to succeed, however wild they may appear.”
Urk. Urk. You mean, Whitehound, that Albus has spent much of his adult life subjecting himself, not only to the influence of the Deathstick, but to near-constant contact with Prophecy Demons? Which he imagines he has domesticated? And of course, the more desperate the situation the more he will rely on them….
Can you say, Dark Arts Dementia? It’s a miracle the man can speak in complete sentences by his death, much less produce joined-up writing! As for producing actual, real, empathy, that ability must be long eroded. Though he still remembers how to fake it, when he can remember cause to do so…..
So I reread “Lord Voldemort’s Request” in HBP, and indeed, the objections Albus articulated to Tom there had to do with Tom’s magical research, not his political agenda. In fact Albus gives no sign of realizing that Tom and his (apparently newly so-called) Death Eaters had a political agenda. If indeed they did at that time; we don’t know whether Tom took over and extended the old organization of the Knights, or whether he’d formed a group separately and eventually merged it with the older group. In which case the merger may have taken place only after Tom and his followers adopted the Knights’ goals, which might have been quite some time after Tom first formed his group of friends.
It really does seem that what Albus objected to was Tom’s experiments in the Dark Arts. Which seems to contradict our argument that his Death Eaters’ primary offense had been to plot treason/heresy.
Because why should there be any correlation, in either direction, between an interest in studying or practicing the Dark Arts, and affiliation with a political group interested (treasonously) in undoing Secrecy?
Why should stalwart defenders of the status quo, such as Bartemius Crouch, Albus Dumbledore, James Potter, and Sirius Black (and, o gods, of course James and Sirius, those children of privilege, upheld the status quo-they were its primary beneficiaries!), trumpet loudly their unswerving opposition to the Dark Arts, while reserving to themselves the right to make, associate with, and use any particular Dark spells, creatures, or objects they happened to find useful or interesting?
“And I trust you remember the many proofs I have given, over a long career, that I despise and detest the Dark Arts and those who practice them?” said the man who authorized Aurors to use Unforgivables (GoF 9). “James-whatever else he may have appeared to you, Harry, always hated the Dark Arts,” affirmed Sirius: James’s partner-in-crime, fellow Animagus, magical bully, maker of the Marauder’s Map, werewolf-looser (and probable co-user of Death’s Cloak) (OotP 29). Then there was Albus, encouraging Harry in his naïve belief that Dark magic equated to deliberate evil while using the Deathstick daily, deploying Erised and the Deathcloak and the Suicide Stone, and surrounding himself (see end note; I didn’t catch this, Whitehound did) with silvery instruments that were apparently “artificial clairvoyance machines”-the man apparently tried to tame Prophecy Demons for his personal use!
One possible explanation for a positive (though not 100%) correlation between interest in the Dark Arts and interest in ending Seclusion might be Dark Arts Dementia. It might be the case that it not infrequently manifests, not as paranoia about the Muggles, but as delusions of grandeur: of being above Secrecy, of thinking oneself able to conquer Muggles, even of expecting to be worshiped if one revealed one’s glorious powers to them. In which case one might expect to see older Dark Arts practitioners, after a lifetime of sanely upholding Secrecy, fall prey in their dotage to the casuistries of the Knights of Walpurgis.
But there’s another possibility. Which would explain why inexperienced young hotheads interested in maximizing their magical power in general, and in the Dark Arts in particular, might find, ah, enticing, promises to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule over Muggles.
I mean, most Purebloods, and even probably most Halfbloods, don’t seem to interact with us Muggles even enough to have the remotest idea of how we dress. They don’t even know what money we use. Severus Snape might, perhaps, have harbored some vengeful fantasies of showing the Muggle bullies infesting Spinner’s End who’s now the boss, but Lucius or Bellatrix? Or Regulus? They can’t admit to having noticed Muggles, much less to being materially inconvenienced by us.
And who cares about ruling over people not actually quite real to oneself? Not even regarded as human, perhaps? At least, if one has nothing obvious to gain. The Wizarding world formally disdains our culture, and almost certainly doesn’t admit how much they borrow from it. (You think Molly acknowledges we had the wireless first?)
As to material goods… any magic-user who wants anything material we produce-food, shelter, raw ingredients-can with a minimum of ingenuity just steal it from us with no repercussions whatsoever under the status quo. Slughorn and The Three Campers establish that conclusively. No need to overturn the Statute to batten off us, any more than wizards need to overturn the Statute to harass us at their pleasure. Or even kill us, as long as they take minimal care to make the death look unsuspicious to the Muggles-no one from the Ministry investigated Frank Bryce’s “heart attack,” but three people dropping dead at dinner for no apparent reason made Muggle headlines and got Morfin arrested.
(As tiny as the number of magical folk is, their parasitism is probably an insignificant drain on our overall economy. Though the villagers in Ottery St. Catchpole might disagree with that assessment.)
But seriously. I don’t go around obsessing over how, if I worked things just right, I and a cabal of friends could take over Andorra and become its absolute dictators. Still less how I/we could subjugate the nearest ant hill! I don’t know anyone who does-and before you comment, yes, I do have some friends and acquaintances that have weird ideas. Including, yes, some who are teenage boys.
Okay, there’s the submerged threat of Muggle-on-magical violence. And of our overpopulation and its consequences, and pollution and global warming and the Bomb. But I can’t see Tom Riddle recruiting children on the grounds that we constitute an actual threat to the magical world, although we do. That’s exactly what they are conditioned never to admit directly, even to themselves. La la la, I can’t hear you, if someone tries to bring those issues up.
No, that fear will be the juice powering what the soon-to-be Death Eaters think and do, just as it’s the juice powering their elders’ ferocious enforcement of Seclusion-our way of life, our lives itself, are at stake here! Every time a witch or wizard encounters a new road in what had been forest, or a low-flying helicopter, or a piece of trash washed up on a beach, or hears of new technology, or even just encounters the vast hordes of Muggles infesting King’s Cross every September 1st like they own the damn place or something, that magic-user will feel encroached upon. Threatened.
But those real concerns are terrifying to think about, overwhelming, and so no one ever thinks about them. Among the Death Eater recruits either-they were not more rational, surely, than Molly and the Ministry. (They couldn’t have been, eh? They ended up with Tom!)
So what is the lure that the children Tom recruits are thinking about?
Well, what do witches and wizards in the Potterverse want? What are they brought up to think has paramount importance? What do they respect so exaggeratedly that, when it is present in high degree, they will offer the possessor their highest honors and all available leadership positions, even while agreeing, airily, that said possessor “is a bit mad, yes.” (PS 7). What does the relative lack of, induce Filch and other unfortunates to make the Qwikspell franchise rich, and persuade Neville that being murdered by his community, even by his nearest and dearest, is a plausible outcome, to be feared but never resented?
Because after all Neville’s Gran’s reaction, his family’s reaction, is perfectly understandable. Justifiable, even, from a certain point of view.
Magic is might.
*
The Dark Arts comprise many things; that’s part of the problem with defining them.
But we’ve hypothesized they include, 1), (all or most) Old Magic. Pre-wand, pre-domesticated magic.
And 2), (all or most) magic powered by emotion.
And who says the emotion must be the caster’s?
Think back to Old Magic, and to the situation of ancient (human) magic-users. Including most European magic-users pre-Seclusion. Of almost all of them, always, prior to the founding of all-magical schools such as Hogwarts and Wizarding-only enclaves such as Hogsmeade.
And of none of them now. By law.
The CLASSIC situation of the tribal shaman, of the village witch, of the court magician such as Merlin, is that there was usually just ONE of them. Or maybe a few, an alchemist plus his apprentice, or a witch-matriarch and a handful of her children and grandchildren. At most perhaps a great court magician, a rival striving for his post, and an avowed enemy or two.
But most of the cunning folk worked mostly alone, looking for some talent within their bloodline or outside in the wider community that they could train up as a replacement. The occasional extremely talented (and lucky) young one, a Nimue or an Agrippa, would sometimes go off to find a mentor who could train hir to something approaching hir full potential.
So when it came to developing and transmitting magical lore, how best to raise and use power … well, half the time, the teacher was dealing with an apprentice who might not be capable, magically, of using all that the elder could have taught. The other half, with an apprentice whose power was greater, and who might have been capable of learning more than, perhaps, the teacher had learned . (Not to mention differences in mental acuity and learning styles….)
In pre-literate cultures, well… the brightest and most powerful must have spent half their lives reinventing wheels.
Of course, many of the cunning folk were among the earliest literati, probably exactly for that reason.
But. We humans are good at making a virtue of necessity.
The standard situation of the early shamans, witches, whatever, was that there was normally only one fully-empowered magic-worker at a time in any given small community. Hopefully training up a successor, if they’d found anyone with the barest spark of talent. Working for, and with, (and sometimes against,) the less magically-talented people-their families, their villages, their tribes, their cities-that they lived with. Fully integrated, holding integral roles in their community.
Having on tap a good healer, or a successful weatherworker, or a consistent luck-turner, would make a serious difference to a tribe’s or a village’s or a city-state’s fortunes.
Some of what these cunning folk did always involved the solitary use of their powers for the good of the community (or to the detriment of elements thereof)-the shaman on a vision quest unshared by his warrior peers; the witch, alone in her hut, brewing up philtres and cures and poisons.
But some of it did not.
Beltane fires. Scapegoating rites. The sacrifice of the year-king.
In which the intrinsic power of the officiating magic-user(s) played a part, but so too did the power raised by the mass of less-magically-powerful (Muggle) participants. Their emotions, will, and belief.
So the traditions that the early magic-users passed on to their successors, the traditions that were robust enough to survive, had to include how best to use the emotions and will of the community to enhance one’s one magical powers. At least, to do so at direst need.
To amplify them.
Since, on average, half the time the incumbent was less powerful than hir teacher… and the other half had been taught by someone lacking their degree of inherent power and possibly not knowing how best to channel and use more.
So the traditions that survived to be transmitted were those that could best compensate for a particular magic-using individual’s magical weakness. Whether momentary or intrinsic.
So.
Why should practitioners and students of the Dark Arts be preferentially attracted to ending Secrecy, or be suspected of doing so?
Because the Dark Arts include magic spells and rituals that can no longer be used under Seclusion (or that are believed to be now unusable). Because that magic was originally designed to be used with, and either for or against, Muggles. To draw on Muggle crowd emotions.
To amplify the power available to the magic-user, at least temporarily.
Possibly to a huge extent.
For, after all, WHY, out of all those wizards since the medieval Peverells who have hungered for an unbeatable wand or a resurrection stone or a deathcloak, has none of the greedy bastards ever just tried to make a new one?
Why are Xeno and his fellows feverishly searching for three objects made and lost, rather than simply reverse-engineering the Peverells’ original spells?
Indeed, trying to improve on them?
(HA! A wand that will, in principle, totally whup the Elder Wand! Take that, tradition!)
Why do we see witches and wizards venerating and using all these apparently OLD artifacts-the Sword of Gryffindor, the Goblet of Fire, the Veil, the Mirror of Erised, the Hallows, Helga’s goblet, Rowena’s diadem, Salazar’s locket….
How come none of those, unlike mobile phones or racing brooms, has been superseded by a new and improved model?
It’s not like magical folk are so tradition-bound as to have no interest in innovation-we see three new brooms take top-of-the-line honors during the seven years we watch, and the Weasley twins’ shop, of NOVELTIES, is wildly successful.
So if no one is replicating the most powerful Dark artifacts of ancient times, one inference might be that no one can.
Maybe because there was magic available then that just can’t be used now.
Not knowledge per se; knowledge can be recreated.
But, see, the reverse does not hold; what’s known, can’t just be wand-waved to be unknown.
Not for a whole culture.
And most Muggles now know, irrevocably, that magic just doesn’t work. Or not as well as science, so we shouldn’t place all our trust in it.
However many individuals one might scrape together who believe (sorta) in astrology or faith-healing or Voodoo dolls.
There must be magic that simply can’t be worked now that crowds of Muggles are no longer available to help feed in the power of our belief to amplify the intrinsic power of the magic-user standing at the focal point of the rite.
And what’s been lost is considered, among the cognoscenti, to be among the some of the most powerful magic there is, or ever has been.
Perhaps even, that there can be.
Because, created to be used by magic-users of indifferent power to overcome their magical weakness-if used by an innately powerful mage, it will then magnify that strength. (Just as the Elder wand, perhaps created through such a ritual, is supposed to make its user’s spells extraordinarily powerful, “unbeatable.”)
So that’s what Tom told the children he recruited: if we undo Secrecy and regain the belief and obeisance of the Muggles, we can reclaim that power. And it will be yours.
(Or at least, mine. But the kids didn’t hear that subtext, at least at the time.)
*
So of course any Dark Lord worth his salt is eventually going to be tempted to overthrow Secrecy. Anyone seriously interested in maximizing his personal magical power (and who knows his history, which Hogwarts tries quite desperately to ensure that no-one will) will in time start wondering what power might be his if he could only resurrect some of the Old Ways.
*
This brings us back, finally, to that old slur that what makes magic Dark is that it is intrinsically evil, a matter of torture and death.
Jo implies this, in the reactions of some of her characters; she never demonstrates it, instead choosing to demonstrate that anti-Dark-magic fanatics (like Barty Sr., the Ministry in general [Dementors as civil servants, anyone?] & James and Harry Potter) are guilty of at least equal atrocities.
But now we can split the difference.
No, the Dark Arts have NO necessary relationship to torture or murder or depravity.
But-as practiced by Tom himself, they quite probably do.
Because in the old Dark Arts cornucopia, out of all the ancient spells which relied on raising power from the emotions of others, those are the only rituals and spells that a modern magic-user could practice upon random unconsenting kidnap victims. (As well as being the ones most congenial to a psychopath’s taste, so here inclination and practical considerations were happily aligned for Tom.)
All the rest, the ones that relied upon willing cooperation, communal goals, religious devotion, or truly voluntary self-sacrifice out of love, were closed to Tom. Beyond Tom’s imagination.
Truly beyond his imagination-Tom forced self-serving Peter Pettigrew into parodying the role of a loyal servant willingly giving his flesh to restore his master, not even recognizing that Peter’s having been coerced could make a difference! With the results we saw in canon.
(Hmm. Total sideline here, but wouldn’t it be fun if Peter himself had guessed? Hoped, even?)
But then, it’s been a thousand years since European witches and wizards could count on an entire community’s open assent, and belief, and willing cooperation, with power-raising rituals that overtly involved either sex or death.
*
Let’s listen in on Albus and Tom in “Lord Voldemort’s Request.”
”You call it ‘greatness,’ what you have been doing, do you?” asked Dumbledore delicately.
“Certainly,” said Voldemort, and his eyes seemed to burn red. “I have experimented; I have pushed the boundaries of magic further, perhaps, than they have ever been pushed-“
“Of some kinds of magic,” Dumbledore corrected him quietly. “Of some. Of others, you remain… forgive me… woefully ignorant.”
For the first time Voldemort smiled. It was a taut leer, an evil thing, more threatening than a look of rage.
“The old argument,” he said softly. “But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncement that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore.”
Well, yeah. Exactly. Nothing Tom could possibly see, or any wizard within the Secluded WW. They’ve all cut themselves off from us, and there is nothing to see.
Of the power available from love rather than fear.
The Aztecs offered hundreds of torn-out human hearts in a single ritual to bring luck to their next war; the Illyrians asked for one volunteer to step forward to serve and die as their year-king. But that ritual has not been performed in twenty-five centuries…
One only wonders what Albus had ever seen, to make that “old argument.” But then, Albus’s obsession with immortality and perfected power started with Alchemy, which traditionally requires the purification of the practitioner. Which Albus himself evidently failed at-he never made a Stone. The Flamels did.
But then, Albus did do something else-acquire one of the Deathly Hallows. The Deathstick. From Gellert. How?
Rita said scornfully in interview, “All I’ll say is, don’t be so sure that there really was the spectacular duel of legend. After they’ve read my book, people may be forced to conclude that Grindelwald simply conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and came quietly!” (DH 2)
There was a “legend” of a spectacular duel. Which means no one actually saw it. Nor does Rita have actual information to impart-her readers may conclude that something different may have happened, but they won’t come away from her book with firm knowledge on that point.
Item, Gellert never trashed Albus’s name. Either by suggesting that Albus might have killed his own baby sister, or by letting on-after Albus made it clear he wanted to forget their midsummer madness-that Albus had been the source, though he now disavowed it, of some of Gellert’s most compelling ideas.
Item, Gellert tried to protect Albus’s tomb from Tom’s depredations-he lied to Tom to Tom’s face! That’s extraordinary; canon shows us only two other people who did that. S. Snape and N. Malfoy. Both motivated by what, again? Remind me.
Item, Albus took the wand and its mastery from Gellert. When he finally faced him. And yet the wand is supposedly unbeatable, and the two wizards, said Albus, of nearly equal strength and skill.
Item, Gellert’s disarmament apparently marked the immediate end of the Grindelwald War. Which makes no sense-even Riddle’s organization, as Tom-centric as it was, fought on for a bit after Tom himself had been vanquished! I’m sorry, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, however great a shock and sorrow for the Americans he’d led through Depression and war, did not bring about the war effort’s collapse. Nor would Churchill’s have done, I make bold to say. Wartime Britain would NOT have honored Churchill’s memory by surrendering instantly to the Nazis. Much less if Winston had simply been disarmed in a one-on-one duel with a German schoolteacher-is anyone daft enough to posit such a thing? I’ve read some crazy alternate histories, but never that.
More to the point, given Jo’s heavy-handed Dark Wizard/Nazi parallels, Germany did not lose World War II because Hitler committed suicide. Hitler killed himself because he was losing the war.
So. It makes more sense if the war had already been lost, definitively. Except that Gellert himself, armed with the Deathstick, remained too powerful for any of the European Aurors to apprehend. And then he let it be known he’d surrender only if defeated in single combat, privately, by Britain’s most powerful wizard, who’d previously stayed strictly out of the conflict being fought among Europe’s Wizarding elite. (Though for five years now he’d been asked to help….)
(The above isn’t my idea, but I don’t remember where I first read it. Jodel, perhaps?)
In which case perhaps Gellert handed the Deathstick to his old lover with the wry injunction, “Here it is, Albus, what we always dreamed of. You see how it has served me; I had power, unbeatable power; no one could stand against any spell I cast. But it availed me naught in achieving the dream we once shared.
“Use it better, my first and only love. If you can.”
Didn’t Jo say something in interview some time, about someone, I forget who, being more culpable even than Tom Riddle, because unlike Tom, he had once been loved?
*
I just hope that Severus and the other kids didn’t understand before they joined why Tom called his group of followers the Death Eaters. I’m really rather hoping that Tom hoarded his power jealously, and didn’t actually offer them a cut of it, any more than he offered any of his followers the benefit of his personal research into achieving immortality. (I’d already thought that this was probably so, just based on Tom’s general approach to using sticks rather than carrots, but now I earnestly hope as well….)
In fact, I hope he didn’t explain the term, even. I’d like to think it was more his private joke. That does seem his style, if he was indeed withholding that information (and power) from them.
But of course if any potential recruit did have doubts because they’d heard unsavory rumors about the Dark Lord’s experiments, Tom would probably have told them at first exactly what he told Albus: “Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies.”
To be eventually followed, perhaps, if a follower showed unease again once he knew or suspected more about Tom’s “research,” with the explanation that Seclusion was to blame. Once Secrecy has been ended, the Death Eaters will have the full range of the ancient power-enhancing rituals at their command, but for now, the only ones available are, well, the ones that don’t require willing participants. And experiments must be made; the Dark Lord has been resurrecting and extending knowledge that has been buried for centuries, and some tests must be performed. And the test subjects were only Muggles, and at that, selected from those that the Muggles themselves consider dregs, and who were unlikely to live long anyhow, or to be missed-homeless drug addicts and the like….
So the harm has been minimized, and the increase of knowledge has been great, and really Seclusion is to blame that any such measures must, most reluctantly, be taken.
I could really see Tom enjoy making such an argument. I like the idea of his blaming the Statute of Secrecy for his secret research into the evil spectrum of the Dark Arts.
And it rescues the fanon idea of Dark Magic atrocities, which canon paradoxically both strongly suggests and explicitly contradicts, while giving further support to the idea that someone could be fascinated by the Dark Arts (as a whole) without ever having any intention of becoming a party to any evil-doing.
To relate this back to my old essay, “Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper”: within the set of disciplines called, by the old families, the Dark Arts, there is a subset of very ancient rituals and spells designed to raise power through the emotions and belief of Muggle participants, and to channel this power in a way that augments or amplifies the abilities inherent to the magic-user(s) involved. Magic-users were thereby enabled to perform spells and create objects far more powerful than their unaided magic could ever have managed. Those who become interested in that branch of the Dark Arts may quite easily come to feel that it’s a pity that Seclusion precludes the use of such spells; if seriously interested (whether frustrated because of having weak inherent power, or powerful already but ambitious to gain more), they would eventually join subversive organizations such as the Knights in disproportionate numbers.
This would naturally feed into the general public’s vague prejudice in modern times against the Dark Arts-look, people who get into “that kind” of magic too heavily end up going bad and mad. On the other hand, there’s lots of stuff sold in Nocturne Alley that I find useful, and curses I like to use on them damn gnomes, and nothin’ wrong with that. That’s not really Dark, just, um, not sold in Diagon. Dark magic is that other stuff.
So the uninformed members of group two really do have some evidence backing up their prejudice. As does group three.
For there IS one subset of that branch of the Dark Arts that is, in fact, evil. Using pain and death to raise power. Tom Riddle obviously would have gravitated towards that knowledge, and mastered what he could of it. And invented more; we are talking about the little boy who’d created a version of the Cruciatus while still in infant school. (“I can make them hurt if I want to.”)
And if, like Albus, you knew from the start that Tom Riddle was a psychopath, you’d fully expect him to. If you were a Dark Arts expert and reformed Secrecy-overthrower yourself, and a historian’s lifelong associate, and therefore knew of their existence. Which most people do not. So when you heard rumors that Tom was experimenting, maybe with pain or death, you would believe them. And you’d promote among your own followers the belief that that’s what Lord Voldemort was pursuing, and therefore that that’s what anyone interested in following him, in learning about his kind of magic, must be interested in. Dark magic is inherently evil.
If, on the other hand, you knew nothing about Tom except what he presented to you, you wouldn’t automatically believe the rumors. Especially as you already know that the naïve belief that the Dark Arts are evil is simply rot. The rumors would seem mere spite, or uninformed. When he started talking to you about power-augmenting ancient magic that might be available if Seclusion were lifted, you wouldn’t know which specific branch of such magic the Dark Lord had been playing with…. And if you started to suspect, if you started to wonder if the rumors might have some basis, he’d have the justification all ready. This won’t be necessary, once we’ve changed the world and led the wizards out of hiding. If you think it wrong, then help to make it unnecessary!
The contradiction reconciled….
***
Note: Here’s Whitehound on Albus’s silver instruments (“Fanon versus Canon,” from the section “Dumbledore is either very saintly or very evil”)
“Another complication is that the plot is written in such a way that even wild schemes by Dumbledore usually turn out all right. One could say that the fact that his schemes usually do (by the grace of the author) turn out OK does not absolve him from having taken stupid risks with other people's lives. On the other hand, we are shown that at least some of the mysterious silver instruments in his office are artificial clairvoyance machines. We do not know how effective or accurate these are, but if they work well then the risks Dumbledore takes are probably much smaller than they seem, because he has a method of choosing schemes which he knows are likely to succeed, however wild they may appear.”
Urk. Urk. You mean, Whitehound, that Albus has spent much of his adult life subjecting himself, not only to the influence of the Deathstick, but to near-constant contact with Prophecy Demons? Which he imagines he has domesticated? And of course, the more desperate the situation the more he will rely on them….
Can you say, Dark Arts Dementia? It’s a miracle the man can speak in complete sentences by his death, much less produce joined-up writing! As for producing actual, real, empathy, that ability must be long eroded. Though he still remembers how to fake it, when he can remember cause to do so…..