Upon the Existence of Muggles
“Any woman can weep without tears, and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound.” Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
If there is anything certain about the Potterverse, it is that there is an absolute gulf between Us and Them. There are Muggles and their opposites: Witches and Wizards.
This is not, like real-world “races”, a matter of mere cultural definitions which scientific attempts to validate come up negative. “Race,” after all, is a cultural designation: one learns to distinguish the “races” that are relevant within one’s own culture. (Tony Hillerman gives a great fictional example, where he has an elderly Navaho firmly identify a briefly-glimpsed man as a belagana-that is, as not Dineh, not Pueblo, not Apache, and not Mexican. So, white. Or light-skinned black, or Asian-they all look alike, you know. Unlike Hopis and Navahos, who can be distinguished at a glance in semi-darkness.)
But the Wizarding World’s belief that Muggles are inferior is different from real-life racism, because there really is an intrinsic and important difference between Muggles and magicals. The “racism” of the Wizarding World against Muggles is justified. (Not against Muggleborns, bleat the good guys, that prejudice is bad and unjustified. Because Muggleborns are wizards and witches Just Like Us, really.)
There is a definable difference, and it matters. They have magic, we do not. That’s the definition of Muggle that Hagrid gives Harry (PS4): “nonmagic folk.” It’s binary, like a switch-it’s off or it’s on. And you can tell (or at least, they can) if it’s present or absent.
Not like race, which is an artificial construct about groups of people whose characteristics (from hair textures to blood types) may vary as much within the groups as between them, and which in any given individual might tend towards the defining characteristics of the other group. (Including skin color--Steven Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, uses a black and white photo of the GW Bush cabinet to demonstrate that we Americans “see” the skin color of an individual we identify by other cues as “black” as darker than a nearby “white’s” even when it’s actually lighter. In my own family, it took me a long time to notice that my “Indian” dad’s and grandma’s skins were much paler than my “white” mother’s and grandmother’s. I couldn’t see this for a long time, because it made no sense: weren’t the two sides supposed to be “redskins” and “palefaces”?)
But with magic we don’t have those ambiguities. With magic, unlike with skin color and hair texture and those other markers we use to judge race, we don’t have intermediates.
Folk are magic or nonmagic, end of story.
But magic is not just unlike the physical markers we use to assign “race” in this regard; it’s also unlike any normal human talent.
With most human talents-athletic ability, say, or intelligence, or musical talent-most (normal) people have some capacity to perform, and a few have a high innate ability that, with discipline, with training and much practice, they can turn into extraordinary performance. On the other hand, a highly-trained and disciplined normal-range person, or even one with mediocre talent, might well outperform an utterly untrained natural genius.
Everyone can walk and run, unless there’s a reason why one can’t. But only a few thousand people in the world can ever be good enough runners to think of competing in the Olympic races. Everyone can sing “Happy Birthday”-unless of course one can’t, being deaf or mute or tone-deaf-but very, very few people in the entire world have the voice and the requisite training to sing Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria. (And a person with a decent voice, close to the range, and intense operatic training, could probably make a better stab at performing it than someone with a perfect voice but no training at all.)
But magic is different. Hardly anyone in the world has any magical talent whatsoever. Only a few have any magical ability at all. Most of us, of the world’s population, lack magical talent entirely. We’re Muggles.
Or so the wizards tell us.
Well, no. What they tell us is that magic isn’t real. Trying to do magic won’t work. Then they Obliviate us any time we notice otherwise. And if one of our children has such natural talent that s/he keeps on doing magic anyway, they hustle the kid off to a magical boarding school and indoctrinate hir to assimilate into the WW. (To such an extent, as I had pointed out before, that in DH wandless Muggleborns were begging on the street-the street being Diagon Alley-and risking DE harassment, rather than simply returning to their families of origin and making their way as anonymous Muggles.)
(And the wizards keep wands out of our Muggle hands, because, if I remember Jo’s interview correctly, we could make something happen with one but not control the effects. But that’s interview, not canon.)
And, of course, it’s been theorized that it’s harder to do magic against a background of disbelief (one’s community’s, AND especially one’s own), which means being Muggle-raised-in the modern Western world-would inhibit magical demonstrations.
Which doesn’t matter, after all, because magic is different from any other talent. Hardly anyone in the world has any innate capacity to perform magic. Muggles have no magic; we, the wizards, the few, the proud, are superior. Intrinsically different from them.
That’s the story that wizards tell themselves.
What’s a Squib, then? “A Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers.” (Ron, Pureblood informant, CoS 9)
Except, of course, they do. Arabella can sense if not see Dementors; Argus can see Hogwarts Castle as it is, and see and interact with ghosts. So a Squib is someone whose magical powers are weak. Too weak to allow hir to use common spells with consistent success.
Erm. And there are enough people around whose magical powers are that weak-within the TINY British magical community-to provide a market for the Qwikspell course. “Feel out of step in the world of modern magic? Find yourself making excuses not to perform simple spells? Ever been taunted for your woeful wandwork? There is an answer!”
A mass-market mail-order course. Targeted at the people at the bottom of Wizarding society-for the weakness of their magic. There’s no money to be made catering to that group, unless there are a lot of them.
“Quite unusual,” huh, Ron?
So within the Wizarding World, which worships magical power above all, there’s a continuum of magical talent (and
training) ranging from Argus to Stan Shunpike to Dolores to Molly to … well, up to Tom. Outside it, there’s no continuum: there’s only Muggles. Who have, one and all, no magical powers at all.
Repeat it after me: this part is important. The Muggles have no magical powers at all.
Within the Wizarding World… perform magic few others can, and people within the Wizarding World will respect you, even revere you, whatever your other claims to respect. Fail to master many common spells, and people within the Wizarding World will laugh at you. Fail at too many, they’ll call you a Squib and hound you unmercifully. Even exile you. To live among the Muggles (faints alternately on the sopha at the harshness of that penalty).
Among the Muggles Who have no magic.
Not just who perform none, or who choose not to perform any regularly, or whose magical attempts are weak or mostly unsuccessful. Who have none. Muggles are, by definition, “nonmagic folk.”
Er. Glad to have that cleared up.
So, then. What would the Wizarding World call a Muggleborn witch who is a Squib? Who has the magical powers of Arabella or Argus? She can see ghosts, but maybe not Dementors, and she probably couldn’t master much if any foolish wandwaving.
Well, she’s called a Muggle, of course. She won’t be getting a Hogwarts letter. Or a wand to play with, or any training in using such powers as she has.
In fact, if she eventually manages to train herself to do anything that attracts outside notice as clearly “magical”, she’ll be forcibly untrained.
By a well-cast Obliviate.
If she simply has a green thumb, and grows peonies that are the envy of her garden club-or becomes a nurse, whose patients feel a bit better just for her touch-or a psychiatrist with a reputation for hearing what her clients aren’t quite saying-or an auto mechanic with a knack for diagnostics-or a dog-trainer with an uncanny success rate-or tends to win at cards-or just has the luck of a real-life friend of mine, who ALWAYS finds a parking space opening up when she needs one-well.
Those things aren’t magic. They’re just, uh, knacks. Or luck, or chance. So her family says, and her neighbors, and she herself. Because magic doesn’t exist.
The wizards say, she’s a Muggle, and Muggles have no magic.
It’s a magical incantation: repeat it enough, and it is true. Or, at least, accepted. Like any other piece of propaganda.
There is no such thing as a Muggle in the Potterverse. There is no group of “nonmagic” people, of people who entirely lack ALL aptitude for magic. There’s no off switch for magic in the human genome. It’s not that wizards are qualitatively different from us; it’s a quantitative difference. They are, even Stan, the Olympic athletes, the operatic divas, of magic. (Okay, Stan was never in line to bring home even a bronze medal or to sing except at the back of the chorus-but being an Olympic racer who finished at the very back of the pack is still running a LOT faster than I ever could.)
Being able to use a wand and get consistent results is just so hard, only one in a hundred thousand (or whatever) can do it.
But then, how many people can run a five-minute mile? Much less a four?
Now we can have Potterverse magical ability subject to normal evolutionary pressures. Because obviously a low-grade ability to heal with one’s hands, or influence animals, or affect luck, would give one-and one’s family/tribe/village-a slight edge over the competition.
And a slightly greater ability, a slightly greater edge.
(Modified by the concern that the magic-user hirself might eventually succumb to Dark Arts Dementia-and the greater the power, and the greater the use of it, the greater that risk. Still, the genome doesn’t care how young I die; it cares how many partial copies of itself survive to reproduce. If it gives enough of an advantage to my siblings and cousin’s reproduction, the trait will spread.)
Until the early modern period in Europe, which threw a spanner in the works.
Under early Christianity magic continued to be respectable-as long as one said the power came from God. I mean, all the best saints performed miracles through medieval times.
And even if one couldn’t convincingly present oneself as a saint, one could still openly make one’s living from magic with a little ingenuity. One could, for instance, be a peddlar of potions and amulets, so long as one claimed the active ingredient to be a saint’s shinbone or a fragment of the True Cross or Mary’s tears or something. (Or even, possibly accurately, a unicorn horn….)
The medieval Catholic church declared it heresy to believe in witches’ powers. But it was also heresy NOT to believe that God’s saints could perform miracles.
Until the Reformation. Some sects didn’t believe in saints graced by God to perform miracles, and decided that any and all uncanny powers must instead be the result of trafficking with demons. That such powers (witch’s powers) must come from making a pact with the devil.
(And the Black Death must have had the same effect on belief in the power of beneficial magic as smallpox did on the New World’s trust in its shamans. If most healing magic simply strengthened and accelerated the body’s natural healing mechanisms, then it would be helpless against a new disease which the immune system had NO defenses against. Evil magic must be powerful-surely it was malicious magic that brought about the Death?-but beneficial magic is helpless, therefore it cannot be of God. So the only magic left to believe in is that of the devil.)
Which idea was eventually adopted by most of Christianity, and is still prevalent in some circles today.
Before the witch hunts, a European with slightly above-average magical talent probably had an above-average chance of advancement and reproduction. Once the Church (or churches) and magistrates started seeking out and killing suspected witches, being seen as magical was strongly counter-survival.
The first modern witch trial was in 1324, but it was in the early 15th century that the ball really got rolling, with hundreds killed for being witches or werewolves in the Valais hunts (1428- 1447). For about three centuries, then, being believed to be a witch (in Europe or the European colonies) could dramatically reduce one’s life expectancy and chances of reproductive success. The highest powered witches and wizards, the ones good enough to be trained up at Hogwarts and the other schools, could fly away and hide with their families, and even they eventually got desperate enough to hide permanently-to implement Secrecy. The others, the weaker or untrained ones… could not.
So the ones who were caught and executed as witches were mostly noticeable magic-workers from not-particularly-magical families.
Then Secrecy was imposed and the wizards persuaded the rest of us not to believe in magic at all. At some point, canon doesn’t state when, it became Wizarding World policy to actively recruit (and co-opt) all of the “Muggle-borns”-those members of the Muggle population who have high enough intrinsic talent to be likely to be able to wield a wand.
But their weaker sisters and brothers?
What’s going to be the fate of someone who has above-average magical abilities but not enough to make the Hogwarts cut? Who can see ghosts, say, and real estate warded with “Muggle”-repelling charms like Hogwarts is?
Well, first off, hir peers are likely to think hir either insane or just weird if s/he keeps talking about things no one else can see and doing things s/he shouldn’t be able to do. (It’s not just because of Dudley that freaky Harry has no friends….)
And then if the kid does anything that attracts the attention of the Ministry of Magic, s/he (and family and friends, as necessary) will be Obliviated.
Repeatedly, if need be.
We saw with Mr. Roberts what effect that can have. Merry Christmas! A gift from the Ministry….
Ack. What’s the clichéd defense of a crazy person caught in a crime? “The voices told me to.” In the Potterverse, that might be literally true! If you think of it, Confunding a Muggleborn Squib to do things that would get hir locked up as insane would be the easiest way of permanently discrediting hir. Much easier than following people around incessantly and cleaning up after them with Obliviates.
So, pre-witch hunts, having a little above-average magical ability in a mostly non-magical milieu would be pro-survival. During the witch hunts, it would get you killed if noticed. Post witch hunts, it would get you thought weird. Or mind-wiped, possibly to the point of idiocy. Or designated as insane.
Any or all of which would decrease your reproductive potential.
While just being a green thumb or a dog whisperer would not.
So-for the last 600 years, the evolutionary pressure among European Muggles has been against noticeable magical displays. While for the same period of time, more or less, most of the old powerful magical families have been isolating themselves and breeding for power. Well, they said for “blood purity,” but pureblood Squibs-magical weaklings-are kicked out of the reproductive pool, and powerful crossbreds are eventually accepted in-c.f. the MacMillans.
Twenty generations of partial genetic separation, under exact opposite evolutionary pressures.
One could regard this as the Wizarding World doing its best to make its lies true-to breed the magic completely out of Muggles.
*
An Addendum about the Pottermore Hogwarts Book of Admittance:
I was about to post this, and then I read the post on the Pottermore entry for the Hogwarts Book and Quill. Many thanks to penguinsuzie and danajsparks!
At first I thought, for those who take Pottermore as an addition to canon, my theories had just been canon-shafted. That Quill senses magic, and for most inhabitants of the British Isles it never quivers. So most people ARE Muggles, with no magic at all. Doom!
And then I looked more closely.
Firstly, the Pottermore entry confirmed what I had just posited: that children are declared to be Squibs, and excluded absolutely from magical education, not because they LACK magic absolutely-but because they are judged (by an artifact) to have magic too weak too allow them to learn to cast wanded spells consistently.
The Pottermore entry further confirmed my supposition that Muggleborns with low but discernable magical talent are never offered any magical education.
But we’re left with a question: Why the heck would the Founders create TWO artifacts (neither of which can apparently be replicated in modern times, hah!), working some of the time against each other, when one (or an organic pair) would do? Why create a Quill that’s so sensitive that some of its entries are refused by the Book? Why not just a Quill-Book pair, activated only when a worthy entry is scented?
Here’s Jo’s explanation on Pottermore:
“In fact, the Book’s sternness has a purpose: its track record in keeping Squibs out of Hogwarts is perfect. Non-magic children born to witches and wizards occasionally have some small, residual aura of magic about them due to their parents, but once their parents [sic] magic has worn off them it becomes clear that they will never have the ability to perform spells. The Quill’s sensitivity, coupled with the Book’s implacability, have never yet made a mistake.”
Which is nonsense: why not just set the Quill’s sensitivity to that of the Book, so that it doesn’t even TRY to record a name until “it receives sufficiently dramatic evidence of magical ability”?
But we’re also told, “Neville’s family persistently missed faint signs of magic in him and not until he was eight years old did either his disappointed great aunts and uncles, or the old stickler of a Book, accept that he was truly a wizard, when he survived a fall that should have killed him.”
So we’re to imagine that the Quill “persistently” tried to trace Neville’s name in the Book at each of Neville’s exhibitions of “faint signs of magic,” and that the Book snapped shut against him.
Again and again and again.
How many other children does the Quill “persistently” try to inscribe? To be refused, over and over and over, until the importunate child finally internalizes that s/he CAN’T DO THAT?
Either because magic isn’t real, everyone KNOWS that (now)-
Or the medieval version, that everyone-except kids born into magical families-KNOWS that miracles can only be performed by God’s blessed saints-of which I myself clearly am not among the number.
I hate to say this, but I think Salazar-who had serious security concerns about educating Muggleborns-had a LOT of input into the design of this Book and Quill.
There seems to be a two-tier system from the start, if one accepts Pottermore into one’s personal canon: some people manifest such a strong burst of magic that the Book accepts that single manifestation as proof that that child deserves magical education, and allows inscription of the name. Others perform magic strong enough to register with the Quill, but are refused by the Book.
Until-well, until what, we don’t quite know. It might be that the Book keeps a tally for each individual whose “faint signs” of magic it rejects for immediate acceptance. In which case, it might just be persistence that wins out-that those individual “faint” signs of magic, repeated enough times, persuade the Book that this child does have potential worth training. At seven, or three-times-seven, or twenty-seven (Dante’s perfect three times three times three) faint signs, the child is finally accepted.
Or it might be age-that if a child, given NO encouragement to believe hirself magical, still persists in performing small magics to age seven, or after age seven (to age eight) the Book accepts that s/he is worth training.
Or it might be something else.
But it almost certainly ISN’T that Neville produced a qualitatively different response to a death-threat at age eight than he had when he saved himself from drowning ½ mile offshore in the North Atlantic when Uncle Algie shoved him off Blackpool Pier. Or any of the other times (unspecified) that Uncle Algie “tried to scare magic out of” him.
Because if that was all there was to it, there was no reason for the Founders to set the Quill’s sensitivity so much higher than the Book’s. (Or, alternatively, the Quill’s standards so much lower.)
But any way you interpret it, the Pottermore entry on the Quill validates the view that there are people in the Potterverse who have demonstrably performed verifiable magic, yet who were never invited to partake of a Hogwarts education. And that these people were uniformly regarded, by Hogwarts’ alumni, as absolutely “non-magical”-though they had demonstrated to a magical artifact, set up explicitly to test them, that they WERE entirely capable of performing magic.
Heh.
But in fact it’s worse than that.
If Neville were ultimately accepted into Hogwarts, not because he produced a single burst of strong magic that persuaded the Book that he was worthy of training, but because Neville repeatedly, when threatened with his life, produced small bursts of weak magic that added up to worthiness….
Then we might wonder what would have happened had Uncle Algie just let Neville alone.
And it works out to that maybe, at age eleven, Neville would have been killed, or permanently exiled from his family. Depending on how seriously the Longbottoms took the stain on their Pureblood pride of producing a demonstrated Squib.
If exiled, leading a worthwhile life as a decent human being, perhaps. Maybe working as an accountant, or as a noted horticulturalist.
If anyone living as a Muggle can be said to lead a worthwhile life.
Which cannot be said, in the WW. So the reviled Uncle Algernon was just being cruel to be kind.
And… the old Pureblood families have had a millennium to LEARN this. The Hogwarts Quill and Book have been training them: if your kids don’t show up on the Registry at birth, ABUSE ‘em. That’ll force ‘em to prove themselves magic (if anything can)….
Putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional,” right. Or at least, if not fun, a strong and immediate reward.
Meanwhile the borderline-powerful Muggleborns are all learning-and being leaned on strongly by their families to learn-to disavow anything weird or uncanny.
AARGH.
If there is anything certain about the Potterverse, it is that there is an absolute gulf between Us and Them. There are Muggles and their opposites: Witches and Wizards.
This is not, like real-world “races”, a matter of mere cultural definitions which scientific attempts to validate come up negative. “Race,” after all, is a cultural designation: one learns to distinguish the “races” that are relevant within one’s own culture. (Tony Hillerman gives a great fictional example, where he has an elderly Navaho firmly identify a briefly-glimpsed man as a belagana-that is, as not Dineh, not Pueblo, not Apache, and not Mexican. So, white. Or light-skinned black, or Asian-they all look alike, you know. Unlike Hopis and Navahos, who can be distinguished at a glance in semi-darkness.)
But the Wizarding World’s belief that Muggles are inferior is different from real-life racism, because there really is an intrinsic and important difference between Muggles and magicals. The “racism” of the Wizarding World against Muggles is justified. (Not against Muggleborns, bleat the good guys, that prejudice is bad and unjustified. Because Muggleborns are wizards and witches Just Like Us, really.)
There is a definable difference, and it matters. They have magic, we do not. That’s the definition of Muggle that Hagrid gives Harry (PS4): “nonmagic folk.” It’s binary, like a switch-it’s off or it’s on. And you can tell (or at least, they can) if it’s present or absent.
Not like race, which is an artificial construct about groups of people whose characteristics (from hair textures to blood types) may vary as much within the groups as between them, and which in any given individual might tend towards the defining characteristics of the other group. (Including skin color--Steven Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, uses a black and white photo of the GW Bush cabinet to demonstrate that we Americans “see” the skin color of an individual we identify by other cues as “black” as darker than a nearby “white’s” even when it’s actually lighter. In my own family, it took me a long time to notice that my “Indian” dad’s and grandma’s skins were much paler than my “white” mother’s and grandmother’s. I couldn’t see this for a long time, because it made no sense: weren’t the two sides supposed to be “redskins” and “palefaces”?)
But with magic we don’t have those ambiguities. With magic, unlike with skin color and hair texture and those other markers we use to judge race, we don’t have intermediates.
Folk are magic or nonmagic, end of story.
But magic is not just unlike the physical markers we use to assign “race” in this regard; it’s also unlike any normal human talent.
With most human talents-athletic ability, say, or intelligence, or musical talent-most (normal) people have some capacity to perform, and a few have a high innate ability that, with discipline, with training and much practice, they can turn into extraordinary performance. On the other hand, a highly-trained and disciplined normal-range person, or even one with mediocre talent, might well outperform an utterly untrained natural genius.
Everyone can walk and run, unless there’s a reason why one can’t. But only a few thousand people in the world can ever be good enough runners to think of competing in the Olympic races. Everyone can sing “Happy Birthday”-unless of course one can’t, being deaf or mute or tone-deaf-but very, very few people in the entire world have the voice and the requisite training to sing Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria. (And a person with a decent voice, close to the range, and intense operatic training, could probably make a better stab at performing it than someone with a perfect voice but no training at all.)
But magic is different. Hardly anyone in the world has any magical talent whatsoever. Only a few have any magical ability at all. Most of us, of the world’s population, lack magical talent entirely. We’re Muggles.
Or so the wizards tell us.
Well, no. What they tell us is that magic isn’t real. Trying to do magic won’t work. Then they Obliviate us any time we notice otherwise. And if one of our children has such natural talent that s/he keeps on doing magic anyway, they hustle the kid off to a magical boarding school and indoctrinate hir to assimilate into the WW. (To such an extent, as I had pointed out before, that in DH wandless Muggleborns were begging on the street-the street being Diagon Alley-and risking DE harassment, rather than simply returning to their families of origin and making their way as anonymous Muggles.)
(And the wizards keep wands out of our Muggle hands, because, if I remember Jo’s interview correctly, we could make something happen with one but not control the effects. But that’s interview, not canon.)
And, of course, it’s been theorized that it’s harder to do magic against a background of disbelief (one’s community’s, AND especially one’s own), which means being Muggle-raised-in the modern Western world-would inhibit magical demonstrations.
Which doesn’t matter, after all, because magic is different from any other talent. Hardly anyone in the world has any innate capacity to perform magic. Muggles have no magic; we, the wizards, the few, the proud, are superior. Intrinsically different from them.
That’s the story that wizards tell themselves.
What’s a Squib, then? “A Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers.” (Ron, Pureblood informant, CoS 9)
Except, of course, they do. Arabella can sense if not see Dementors; Argus can see Hogwarts Castle as it is, and see and interact with ghosts. So a Squib is someone whose magical powers are weak. Too weak to allow hir to use common spells with consistent success.
Erm. And there are enough people around whose magical powers are that weak-within the TINY British magical community-to provide a market for the Qwikspell course. “Feel out of step in the world of modern magic? Find yourself making excuses not to perform simple spells? Ever been taunted for your woeful wandwork? There is an answer!”
A mass-market mail-order course. Targeted at the people at the bottom of Wizarding society-for the weakness of their magic. There’s no money to be made catering to that group, unless there are a lot of them.
“Quite unusual,” huh, Ron?
So within the Wizarding World, which worships magical power above all, there’s a continuum of magical talent (and
training) ranging from Argus to Stan Shunpike to Dolores to Molly to … well, up to Tom. Outside it, there’s no continuum: there’s only Muggles. Who have, one and all, no magical powers at all.
Repeat it after me: this part is important. The Muggles have no magical powers at all.
Within the Wizarding World… perform magic few others can, and people within the Wizarding World will respect you, even revere you, whatever your other claims to respect. Fail to master many common spells, and people within the Wizarding World will laugh at you. Fail at too many, they’ll call you a Squib and hound you unmercifully. Even exile you. To live among the Muggles (faints alternately on the sopha at the harshness of that penalty).
Among the Muggles Who have no magic.
Not just who perform none, or who choose not to perform any regularly, or whose magical attempts are weak or mostly unsuccessful. Who have none. Muggles are, by definition, “nonmagic folk.”
Er. Glad to have that cleared up.
So, then. What would the Wizarding World call a Muggleborn witch who is a Squib? Who has the magical powers of Arabella or Argus? She can see ghosts, but maybe not Dementors, and she probably couldn’t master much if any foolish wandwaving.
Well, she’s called a Muggle, of course. She won’t be getting a Hogwarts letter. Or a wand to play with, or any training in using such powers as she has.
In fact, if she eventually manages to train herself to do anything that attracts outside notice as clearly “magical”, she’ll be forcibly untrained.
By a well-cast Obliviate.
If she simply has a green thumb, and grows peonies that are the envy of her garden club-or becomes a nurse, whose patients feel a bit better just for her touch-or a psychiatrist with a reputation for hearing what her clients aren’t quite saying-or an auto mechanic with a knack for diagnostics-or a dog-trainer with an uncanny success rate-or tends to win at cards-or just has the luck of a real-life friend of mine, who ALWAYS finds a parking space opening up when she needs one-well.
Those things aren’t magic. They’re just, uh, knacks. Or luck, or chance. So her family says, and her neighbors, and she herself. Because magic doesn’t exist.
The wizards say, she’s a Muggle, and Muggles have no magic.
It’s a magical incantation: repeat it enough, and it is true. Or, at least, accepted. Like any other piece of propaganda.
There is no such thing as a Muggle in the Potterverse. There is no group of “nonmagic” people, of people who entirely lack ALL aptitude for magic. There’s no off switch for magic in the human genome. It’s not that wizards are qualitatively different from us; it’s a quantitative difference. They are, even Stan, the Olympic athletes, the operatic divas, of magic. (Okay, Stan was never in line to bring home even a bronze medal or to sing except at the back of the chorus-but being an Olympic racer who finished at the very back of the pack is still running a LOT faster than I ever could.)
Being able to use a wand and get consistent results is just so hard, only one in a hundred thousand (or whatever) can do it.
But then, how many people can run a five-minute mile? Much less a four?
Now we can have Potterverse magical ability subject to normal evolutionary pressures. Because obviously a low-grade ability to heal with one’s hands, or influence animals, or affect luck, would give one-and one’s family/tribe/village-a slight edge over the competition.
And a slightly greater ability, a slightly greater edge.
(Modified by the concern that the magic-user hirself might eventually succumb to Dark Arts Dementia-and the greater the power, and the greater the use of it, the greater that risk. Still, the genome doesn’t care how young I die; it cares how many partial copies of itself survive to reproduce. If it gives enough of an advantage to my siblings and cousin’s reproduction, the trait will spread.)
Until the early modern period in Europe, which threw a spanner in the works.
Under early Christianity magic continued to be respectable-as long as one said the power came from God. I mean, all the best saints performed miracles through medieval times.
And even if one couldn’t convincingly present oneself as a saint, one could still openly make one’s living from magic with a little ingenuity. One could, for instance, be a peddlar of potions and amulets, so long as one claimed the active ingredient to be a saint’s shinbone or a fragment of the True Cross or Mary’s tears or something. (Or even, possibly accurately, a unicorn horn….)
The medieval Catholic church declared it heresy to believe in witches’ powers. But it was also heresy NOT to believe that God’s saints could perform miracles.
Until the Reformation. Some sects didn’t believe in saints graced by God to perform miracles, and decided that any and all uncanny powers must instead be the result of trafficking with demons. That such powers (witch’s powers) must come from making a pact with the devil.
(And the Black Death must have had the same effect on belief in the power of beneficial magic as smallpox did on the New World’s trust in its shamans. If most healing magic simply strengthened and accelerated the body’s natural healing mechanisms, then it would be helpless against a new disease which the immune system had NO defenses against. Evil magic must be powerful-surely it was malicious magic that brought about the Death?-but beneficial magic is helpless, therefore it cannot be of God. So the only magic left to believe in is that of the devil.)
Which idea was eventually adopted by most of Christianity, and is still prevalent in some circles today.
Before the witch hunts, a European with slightly above-average magical talent probably had an above-average chance of advancement and reproduction. Once the Church (or churches) and magistrates started seeking out and killing suspected witches, being seen as magical was strongly counter-survival.
The first modern witch trial was in 1324, but it was in the early 15th century that the ball really got rolling, with hundreds killed for being witches or werewolves in the Valais hunts (1428- 1447). For about three centuries, then, being believed to be a witch (in Europe or the European colonies) could dramatically reduce one’s life expectancy and chances of reproductive success. The highest powered witches and wizards, the ones good enough to be trained up at Hogwarts and the other schools, could fly away and hide with their families, and even they eventually got desperate enough to hide permanently-to implement Secrecy. The others, the weaker or untrained ones… could not.
So the ones who were caught and executed as witches were mostly noticeable magic-workers from not-particularly-magical families.
Then Secrecy was imposed and the wizards persuaded the rest of us not to believe in magic at all. At some point, canon doesn’t state when, it became Wizarding World policy to actively recruit (and co-opt) all of the “Muggle-borns”-those members of the Muggle population who have high enough intrinsic talent to be likely to be able to wield a wand.
But their weaker sisters and brothers?
What’s going to be the fate of someone who has above-average magical abilities but not enough to make the Hogwarts cut? Who can see ghosts, say, and real estate warded with “Muggle”-repelling charms like Hogwarts is?
Well, first off, hir peers are likely to think hir either insane or just weird if s/he keeps talking about things no one else can see and doing things s/he shouldn’t be able to do. (It’s not just because of Dudley that freaky Harry has no friends….)
And then if the kid does anything that attracts the attention of the Ministry of Magic, s/he (and family and friends, as necessary) will be Obliviated.
Repeatedly, if need be.
We saw with Mr. Roberts what effect that can have. Merry Christmas! A gift from the Ministry….
Ack. What’s the clichéd defense of a crazy person caught in a crime? “The voices told me to.” In the Potterverse, that might be literally true! If you think of it, Confunding a Muggleborn Squib to do things that would get hir locked up as insane would be the easiest way of permanently discrediting hir. Much easier than following people around incessantly and cleaning up after them with Obliviates.
So, pre-witch hunts, having a little above-average magical ability in a mostly non-magical milieu would be pro-survival. During the witch hunts, it would get you killed if noticed. Post witch hunts, it would get you thought weird. Or mind-wiped, possibly to the point of idiocy. Or designated as insane.
Any or all of which would decrease your reproductive potential.
While just being a green thumb or a dog whisperer would not.
So-for the last 600 years, the evolutionary pressure among European Muggles has been against noticeable magical displays. While for the same period of time, more or less, most of the old powerful magical families have been isolating themselves and breeding for power. Well, they said for “blood purity,” but pureblood Squibs-magical weaklings-are kicked out of the reproductive pool, and powerful crossbreds are eventually accepted in-c.f. the MacMillans.
Twenty generations of partial genetic separation, under exact opposite evolutionary pressures.
One could regard this as the Wizarding World doing its best to make its lies true-to breed the magic completely out of Muggles.
*
An Addendum about the Pottermore Hogwarts Book of Admittance:
I was about to post this, and then I read the post on the Pottermore entry for the Hogwarts Book and Quill. Many thanks to penguinsuzie and danajsparks!
At first I thought, for those who take Pottermore as an addition to canon, my theories had just been canon-shafted. That Quill senses magic, and for most inhabitants of the British Isles it never quivers. So most people ARE Muggles, with no magic at all. Doom!
And then I looked more closely.
Firstly, the Pottermore entry confirmed what I had just posited: that children are declared to be Squibs, and excluded absolutely from magical education, not because they LACK magic absolutely-but because they are judged (by an artifact) to have magic too weak too allow them to learn to cast wanded spells consistently.
The Pottermore entry further confirmed my supposition that Muggleborns with low but discernable magical talent are never offered any magical education.
But we’re left with a question: Why the heck would the Founders create TWO artifacts (neither of which can apparently be replicated in modern times, hah!), working some of the time against each other, when one (or an organic pair) would do? Why create a Quill that’s so sensitive that some of its entries are refused by the Book? Why not just a Quill-Book pair, activated only when a worthy entry is scented?
Here’s Jo’s explanation on Pottermore:
“In fact, the Book’s sternness has a purpose: its track record in keeping Squibs out of Hogwarts is perfect. Non-magic children born to witches and wizards occasionally have some small, residual aura of magic about them due to their parents, but once their parents [sic] magic has worn off them it becomes clear that they will never have the ability to perform spells. The Quill’s sensitivity, coupled with the Book’s implacability, have never yet made a mistake.”
Which is nonsense: why not just set the Quill’s sensitivity to that of the Book, so that it doesn’t even TRY to record a name until “it receives sufficiently dramatic evidence of magical ability”?
But we’re also told, “Neville’s family persistently missed faint signs of magic in him and not until he was eight years old did either his disappointed great aunts and uncles, or the old stickler of a Book, accept that he was truly a wizard, when he survived a fall that should have killed him.”
So we’re to imagine that the Quill “persistently” tried to trace Neville’s name in the Book at each of Neville’s exhibitions of “faint signs of magic,” and that the Book snapped shut against him.
Again and again and again.
How many other children does the Quill “persistently” try to inscribe? To be refused, over and over and over, until the importunate child finally internalizes that s/he CAN’T DO THAT?
Either because magic isn’t real, everyone KNOWS that (now)-
Or the medieval version, that everyone-except kids born into magical families-KNOWS that miracles can only be performed by God’s blessed saints-of which I myself clearly am not among the number.
I hate to say this, but I think Salazar-who had serious security concerns about educating Muggleborns-had a LOT of input into the design of this Book and Quill.
There seems to be a two-tier system from the start, if one accepts Pottermore into one’s personal canon: some people manifest such a strong burst of magic that the Book accepts that single manifestation as proof that that child deserves magical education, and allows inscription of the name. Others perform magic strong enough to register with the Quill, but are refused by the Book.
Until-well, until what, we don’t quite know. It might be that the Book keeps a tally for each individual whose “faint signs” of magic it rejects for immediate acceptance. In which case, it might just be persistence that wins out-that those individual “faint” signs of magic, repeated enough times, persuade the Book that this child does have potential worth training. At seven, or three-times-seven, or twenty-seven (Dante’s perfect three times three times three) faint signs, the child is finally accepted.
Or it might be age-that if a child, given NO encouragement to believe hirself magical, still persists in performing small magics to age seven, or after age seven (to age eight) the Book accepts that s/he is worth training.
Or it might be something else.
But it almost certainly ISN’T that Neville produced a qualitatively different response to a death-threat at age eight than he had when he saved himself from drowning ½ mile offshore in the North Atlantic when Uncle Algie shoved him off Blackpool Pier. Or any of the other times (unspecified) that Uncle Algie “tried to scare magic out of” him.
Because if that was all there was to it, there was no reason for the Founders to set the Quill’s sensitivity so much higher than the Book’s. (Or, alternatively, the Quill’s standards so much lower.)
But any way you interpret it, the Pottermore entry on the Quill validates the view that there are people in the Potterverse who have demonstrably performed verifiable magic, yet who were never invited to partake of a Hogwarts education. And that these people were uniformly regarded, by Hogwarts’ alumni, as absolutely “non-magical”-though they had demonstrated to a magical artifact, set up explicitly to test them, that they WERE entirely capable of performing magic.
Heh.
But in fact it’s worse than that.
If Neville were ultimately accepted into Hogwarts, not because he produced a single burst of strong magic that persuaded the Book that he was worthy of training, but because Neville repeatedly, when threatened with his life, produced small bursts of weak magic that added up to worthiness….
Then we might wonder what would have happened had Uncle Algie just let Neville alone.
And it works out to that maybe, at age eleven, Neville would have been killed, or permanently exiled from his family. Depending on how seriously the Longbottoms took the stain on their Pureblood pride of producing a demonstrated Squib.
If exiled, leading a worthwhile life as a decent human being, perhaps. Maybe working as an accountant, or as a noted horticulturalist.
If anyone living as a Muggle can be said to lead a worthwhile life.
Which cannot be said, in the WW. So the reviled Uncle Algernon was just being cruel to be kind.
And… the old Pureblood families have had a millennium to LEARN this. The Hogwarts Quill and Book have been training them: if your kids don’t show up on the Registry at birth, ABUSE ‘em. That’ll force ‘em to prove themselves magic (if anything can)….
Putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional,” right. Or at least, if not fun, a strong and immediate reward.
Meanwhile the borderline-powerful Muggleborns are all learning-and being leaned on strongly by their families to learn-to disavow anything weird or uncanny.
AARGH.