Magic Is Might: The Dark Arts and the Workings of Human Magic

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

I was going to post an excerpt from my half-finished Severus and Voldemort essay, but instead it became an essay of its own.

Magic Is Might: The Dark Arts and the Workings of Human Magic

In her latest post, “Seclusion and the Dark Arts,” terri brilliantly brings together the two main strands of Voldemort’s and the Death Eaters’ interests, overturning Secrecy and dark magic, theorizing that they were seeking to make useable again the old communal magics that shamans and village magic-workers would have used to tap into the emotion-driven power of muggles to boost their own magical ability.

In my comment in reply I wrote, “You've also anticipated an argument I'll be making in Indestructible when I talk about Severus and Voldemort and flight being one of the dark arts.”

My thinking about the nature of unsupported human flight, the reasons it may have taken so long to be developed, and what role it played in Severus and Voldemort’s relationship led me to formulate some ideas about the nature of the dark arts more generally. And now terri’s essay has pushed it all into much clearer focus for me.

We’ve got a number of terms for the working of human magic, and they all mean something specific. Which has implications for understanding what Tom might have thought regarding the nature of human magic and the relationship of muggles to magic-users. Whether or not he was even correct in his suppositions.

Though he may have been.

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