Closing Their Eyes
Sep. 2nd, 2015 01:26 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
condwiramurs.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockMore thoughts on the ICW, Secrecy, wizarding isolationism, and the rise of the Death Eaters. This was sparked by a long reply to sweetalkeress' comment on I Would Sell Out the Nation, which will be posted separately soon.
This is somewhat half-formed thinking, working as I go and edited a bit. Influenced mainly by swythyv, jodel, and terri. I steal shamelessly from the masters; forgive me.
There’s a little bit of Snape stuff at the end, but mostly this is historical musings and speculation. I used mostly Wikipedia and the HP-Lexicon, especially its master timeline, as references.
1 - The Reach of the International Confederation of Wizards
The ICW, whatever the Lexicon's impression, isn't the wizarding equivalent of the United Nations. It's more like the wizarding EU - if that. I've come to doubt that the Americas and Oceania have any seats on it, though their organizations may be modeled on it, influenced by it, and have close relations with it. The fundamental historical political tensions in those areas aren't going to match up neatly with the very specific ones driving the formation of European wizarding isolation - though Europe may have been the first area to impose it and the one to do so most thoroughly, leading it to ripple outward from there.
Let's borrow terri's strategy from Upon the Matter of Britain and look at quidditch for a moment.
It's a mainly British game that's caught on most heavily in Europe, spreading across it in the early 1400s. There are ten non-British or Irish European teams; the World Cup was established in 1473 and was played exclusively by European teams until 1652, when the first non-European team competed and the European Cup was established. We know of teams across western, central and northern Europe, including Spain, but interestingly nothing for southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean.
(The sole apparent exception to this lack of quidditch involvement is EGYPT, host for the playoff games leading up to that 1994 World Cup. But, in addition to heavy British invovement from the mid-1800s on, note, during the period surrounding formal Secrecy's imposition it was only nominally under control of the region's major power, the Ottoman Empire. Instead it was ruled by a dynasty of Albanians, who established themselves there after having been taken over by the Ottoman Empire and serving as the Ottomans' mercenaries. We've, er, encountered a few references to Albania, haven't we?)
We know of ten teams altogether for the Americas, including the US National team, and that there's a US Cup. The game was introduced in the early 1600s, when Europeans were beginning the process of settling the continents, but never caught on, and was accompanied by "a lot of anti-wizard sentiment, unfortunately." (lexicon main timeline) Indications of, er, greater political tensions? Instead a local game called quodpot was developed.
It was successfully introduced to New Zealand by the British in the 1700s, and spread either from there or from European influence to Australia, but the two countries combined have only three teams and they have their own quidditch association.
There are four known teams for all of Africa, and one for Japan.
*
The ICW, like the International Quidditch Association, serves the population for the catchment areas of the three major historical European wizarding centers: Hogwarts (the British isles), Beauxbatons (southwestern Europe), and Durmstrang (northern and central-eastern Europe). NOT the wizarding populations for specific sets of contemporary muggle nation-states, mind you, but the wizarding populations according to the cultural and political map of the subcontinent as it was in the late 17th century, when they split off from the muggle world.
Or even earlier, actually. In 1419 the Wizard's Council was already forbidding quidditch to be played within sight of muggles. terri's right in UTMOB: isolation was a gradual process occuring over centuries. Formal Secrecy was just the last - and I suspect most hotly contested - stage of development. This process began in the late 900s, with the foundation of Hogwarts – and most likely rather soon thereafter, if not roughly concurrently, that of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. (Which was first and which last, actually, I wonder? And where DID dear Salazar's family come from, and then that whole conflict with the other Founders...)
The ICW is not even really a pan-European organization, in our understanding of the term. Rather, it serves a historical-cultural area in which a range of local pressures gradually broke up the power of the Western Roman Empire's successor, the Roman Catholic Church, which had provided a degree of both political and cultural-linguistic unification before then (Latin!) and whose loss of power produced violent religious-political conflicts. In the British isles, of course, we have the rise of the Anglican church, the dissolution of the monasteries and the Ireland issue; in western, central and northern Europe, the breakdown of the first and later establishment (in 962) of the second Holy Roman Empire and the rise of Protestant Christianity; in southwestern Europe (Spain and Portugal), the conflict between Catholic and Islamic political powers; and in parts of central to southeastern Europe the conflict between Catholicism, Orthodox Christian powers (Byzantine and Russian), and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Hence references to Bulgaria and Albania: at the time parts of the former Roman provinces that later became Albania were part of the second Bulgarian Empire, but between the 14th and 17th centuries the Ottoman Empire's increasing pressure on and takeover of the mixed Catholic and Orthodox area sent Catholics moving westward, broke up the Bulgarian Empire, and sparked an unsuccessful attempt at a European coalition against the Ottomans by Albanian national hero Skanderbeg.
Wizards who were pushed northward and westward by the religious-political conflicts and violence from these pressures over a few centuries adopted, first isolation from muggles, then enforced secrecy from them, as a survival strategy. Because they kept getting swept up as scapegoats perhaps. By varying, and sometimes all, sides.
Italy, on the other hand, was controlled by a variety of Catholic powers in the center and south, including the Papal States under direct control of the Pope, and in the north by the mighty, long-independant, but eventually Byzantine-oriented merchant power of the Republic of Venice, which controlled the Mediterranean. Whose geographical location between them and the territories of the present-day ICW, perhaps, forced Italian wizards in Catholic areas further south to have to come to some arrangement of their own regarding religious and muggle-wizard pressures.
Note now, please, that the only explicitly religious wizarding figure we meet, the Hufflepuff House ghost, is a Friar. And that one of the heresies punished most consistently by the Inquisition (which existed primarily to combat heresy) was the belief in witchcraft and witches. Especially in northwestern Europe, early protestants were often the drivers of the witch-hunts. And while there was later a period in which belief in witchcraft was sanctioned by the Church, and witchcraft itself usually seen as involvement with the Devil, Inquisitorial courts only became involved in witch-hunts systematically in the 15th century, and confessions of acts of more benign/'white magic' got more tentative handling from, for example, the Inquisition of Milan. Nor did all Inquisitorial courts acknowledge witchcraft's existence. And in Spain in 1610, after a spasm of witch-hunting occurred there, the Suprema (leading council) of the Spanish Inquisition issued an Edict of Grace, granting amnesty to confessing witches. The lone dissenting inquisitor was put in charge of the later investigation, with the result that witches were never again pursued by the Spanish Inquisition, though they continued hunting heretics and Jews.
(The name of that inquisitor, incidentally? Alonso de Salazar Frias. You can't make this stuff up.)
It was the hardline protestants who eventually started hanging witches in Salem, also.
I really, really have to wonder what the wizarding political map of Italy and the Mediterranean in general looks like, and also what the Vatican's political and diplomatic branch looks like for those in the know about the existence of magic. Because I think the Potterverse's Vatican is going to have a rather more interesting relationship with wizards than some common fan assumptions might allow.
((I must admit that I have long played around with a tempting little headfic plotbunny: in 1979 Severus flees to Italy when he realizes his only viable options are to leave Britain or end up one way or the other with the DEs. Sixteen years later he returns, sent to Britain’s Ministry officially as Britain’s new wizarding Papal Legate for the Vatican, overseeing the needs of those remaining still quietly-Catholic wizards living in the isles, and quietly to be a more or less unofficial observer on the Voldemort conflict for the increasingly concerned Mediterranean Magical League, which is at best uneasy bedfellows with the ICW...))
2 - Formation of the ICW
The past and present governmental institutions of the European Wizarding World and their various roles can be a little tricky to properly identify at first. We get a number of similar but non-identical terms tossed around at different points – swythyv talked some about this.
We’ve got the three original wizarding centers established at the beginning of the period of isolation: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang. Then we have a Wizards’ Council (mentioned as early as the 1200s), which has a Chief and keeps issuing decrees regarding where quidditch may be played; a Warlocks’ Council, which also has a Chief; an International Warlocks’ Convention (taking place in 1289, and then in 1709, when it outlawed dragon breeding); an International Confederation of Wizards, which established the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in either 1689 or 1692 and was first headed by Pierre Bonaccord; and an International Confederation of Warlocks, of which Albus Dumbledore was once Supreme Mugwump.
We also have two slightly different terms regarding that famous law the ICW passed: the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, and the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy, amended in 1750 to require national Ministries to handle the concealment of magical creatures within their jurisdictions.
We even have a curious doubling of an individual’s name: Elfrida Clagg. Born in the in the 1300s (the century that also saw the birth of Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel in its first third) and ascending to be Chief of the Wizards’ Council, she declared the Golden Snidget endangered and outlawed its use in quidditch. She also tried but failed to establish a legal standard by which creatures could gain legal rights as “beings.”
And then Elfrida Clagg, Chieftainess of the Warlocks’ Council, is born in 1612, and dies in 1687.
What’s going on here?
These aren’t slight misstatements of the name of the same things and people or confusion about dates. These are traces of the historical development of the EWW’s governing bodies during the period of isolation from the muggle world and its structures, including one of the EWW’s most quietly important historical figures.
This is also the record of the conflict that eventually gave rise to the individual problems that Dumbledore, and then Harry and company, faced in the form of Grindelwald, and Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
I have two more names for you, one a nearly forgotten one: the Order of Merlin, and the Knights of Walpurgis.
The Order of Merlin seems canonically to be a muggle-protection-oriented organization, though not just that; it’s an ORDER. One that one of Sirius’ ancestors was made member of, that several important political figures of Harry’s day are part of, and one that Severus Snape almost got a First-Class membership in for delivering to Fudge one escaped convict Sirius Black tied up like a Christmas present, together with three non-werewolf-eaten children, including one BWL.
The Knights of Walpurgis are a little harder to make out, except that they were apparently the earlier pre-existent organization that JKR claims Tommy took over and turned into his Death Eaters. Interestingly, let us consider that real historical knights were, as well as being elevated to a particular political-legal rank, often members of various religiously-militant Orders as well. And that knighthood often also is used more broadly as a suggestive metaphor for membership in groups of various kinds.
Swythyv proposed that ‘warlock’ is simply a technical term for members of the Order of Merlin, recipients of the honor for their actions protecting muggles. I think that’s mostly correct, except a little broader. Warlocks are and always have been those witches and wizards officially selected – via meritous action or sustained ideological commitment leading to election by one’s local magical government – to deal with questions around wizard-muggle relations in general, once it became clear back in the late 900s that wizards would need to band together as such. And it’s only in the post-Secrecy Potterverse of Harry’s day that that seems to reduce to ‘protecting muggles’ and the like. A delegation of said warlocks would then be nominated and sent by each wizarding center to the international governing bodies and their official conventions, to handle and formally adjudicate muggle-related matters there.
I’ll come back to the Knights of Walpurgis later.
*
First a brief aside regarding Ministries and wizarding centers: I think Britain is unique in seeming to have a fairly straight match-up between CENTER and present-day MINISTRY – the other two centers likely have to deal with and adjudicate disputes between multiple Ministries, though each may have taken a formal patron Ministry as needed. Perhaps instead of centers I should use the precise term wizengamots? Which likely originally met in those buildings now seen only, and used mainly, as schools: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, Durmstrang. The British wizengamot may then have a special section of Irish seats, where the others have sections for each national Ministry and the like under their domain. And each regulates wizengamot-Ministry relations and official positions as best fits local needs. Let’s not forget that the British Minister for Magic is appointed by the British wizengamot, which has its own head. (No, it’s not Dumbledore; he’s the leader of the wizengamot’s warlock section, I think swythyv’s quite right there.)
Which then leads us back to that list of organizations. The International Confederation of Warlocks, headed for a time by Dumbledore, is a subset of the International Confederation of Wizards, dealing with matters pertaining directly to wizard-muggle relations. Including maintaining and amending the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy, the official name for the entire body of law relating to the elaboration and implementation of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy strictly speaking, the original single legal provision that was voted on and passed back in 1689.
The International CODE – the additional body of law needed to spell out the requirements and means of implementation of the STATUTE, but commonly folded implicitly in with the original Statute in daily speech – is what was formally passed in 1692, which is when the Statute then formally TOOK EFFECT. It took seven weeks alone just to hammer out the details regarding treatment of goblins, centaurs, merpeople, and other non-human magical creatures at the “summit meeting” of the ICW; the process of arguing over and drafting out the full original law would easily have filled those three years.
A process overseen and mainly handled by the International Confederation of Warlocks, the ICWa – though likely with input from the full Confederation of Wizards, the ICW, given that it was going to affect everyone.
What about those other bodies, the Wizards’ Council and the Warlocks’ Council?
The precursor, pre-modern organizations, of course. Standing in the same relation: the Warlocks’ Council a sub-unit of the full Wizards’ Council, dealing with the crucial issue of muggle-wizard relations. It may have existed previously, unofficially, as simply a gathering of people concerned with wizard-muggle relations during official Council meetings or the like (er, when was the Order of Merlin itself established?). But in 1289 it met officially for the International Warlock Convention. This I suspect was its founding meeting, occurring during that year’s meeting of the full Wizards’ Council. Indeed, this may also be, or come soon after, the founding of the Order of Merlin as such, giving official recognition of and duties to a specific group of people, tackling an issue now recognized to be of longstanding importance.
Merlin, after all, was historically what sort of figure? Oh, right. An advisor on magical matters to a muggle political ruler.
All right. And who then met at the Wizards’ Council?
Well, for smaller matters during the year there may have been meetings of representatives from the three wizengamots at various times, including warlocks where appropriate. But for what I think was the annual meeting – the summit, if you will – of the full Council? During this time period there would only have been a few hundred to a few thousand wizards in all of the territories in question. I suspect the Wizards’ Council was just that: a full council of all adult qualified witches and wizards able to attend and of sound enough mind to vote on matters put before it, and led by its own elected Chief. To whom and whom alone the Warlocks’ Council’s Chief was subordinate. If he or she was – I’m not sure yet.
*
Now, this meeting likely took more than a day or so; I suspect a fortnight or something similar. And for this many wizards and witches to gather safely for that long, they would have needed an established, defensible space, away from muggles and not located at the heart of any territory directly controlled by any of the wizengamots or their dominant muggle-political territories. Centrally located but neutral.
Maybe somewhere in what is today central or northern Germany? On a nice, defensible mountain summit? Placed perhaps for easy physical and magical defense between two rivers…
Allow me to introduce you to the Brocken, aka the Blocksberg. The highest peak of the Harz mountain range, it’s also the highest peak in northern Germany and is flanked at its base by the Elbe and Weser rivers. Mist and fog usually shroud it for up to 300 days a year, and are known for creating eerie optical effects to climbers who venture high enough, known as the Brocken spectre.
It has also for centuries been associated with potent legends of witches, devils, and magic; the German poet Goethe referenced it in his famous play Faust for precisely that reason.
Indeed, in German folklore the Brocken has long traditionally been regarded as the location of the famous May-Day-eve meeting of witches known, particularly during the 17th century, as Hexennacht or Walpurgisnacht – “witches’ night” or “Walpurga’s night,” after the 8th-century Germanic abbess Saint Walpurga whose feast day is April 30, May Day eve.
I think we have just found the traditional date of the opening evening festivities for the annual full summit of the Wizards’ Council, who would then take up adjudicating official wizarding business on May first. Beltane. The official start of summer by the traditional European folk calendar. (Though the strict eightfold year of contemporary Wicca is a modern gloss on a much more patchwork and complicated historical reality, a festival of some sort on this date in particular is attested to well both across a wide swathe of Europe from Ireland eastward, and for a long historical period).
Business including especially, as time went on, the increasingly central issue of wizard-muggle relations. One imagines that the convention of the Warlocks’ Council came to be the central event of this summit after a time, and its decisions and the matters it laid before the full Wizards’ Council some of the most hotly-debated topics each year. Indeed, the formation of the Warlocks’ Council and its first Convention back in the 1200s may mark the time when the Brocken became the official permanent home of the summit, though likely it had been used before then.
One wonders what the present-day headquarters of the ICW and its sub-body the ICWa look like, perched up there on the mountaintop. To wizarding eyes, of course; to the eyes of muggle tourists using the Brocken Railway to visit the famous Sender Brocken hotel and restaurant, they probably only look only like, say, a combined FM-radio and television broadcasting tower. Something like that, anyway. Or the HQ may not be visible at all, and ICW wizards might complain about the muggle apparatus spoiling the view.
Or – just possibly – the ICW met only once or for a limited time at that particular mountain summit. They might have moved their base to another location. But I doubt it. It’s too well-established, too well-suited to the purpose, and the link to tradition too strong, to make that likely, I think.
Besides. Now they’ve got a railway up there. It’s cold, and getting to the top of a mountain peak is hard on a broom even without the fog, you know? Why not just take the train and try to ignore all the muggles crowding onto their own train platform…
3 – The Council and the Confederation
Speaking of the ICW: when exactly did it take over from the Wizards’ Council, and why?
Perhaps back at the date of the most profound and long-lasting – and now for practical purposes virtually irresolvable – political split in the European wizarding population. The three-year emergency and founding summit of the International Confederation of Wizards, helmed by its new leader Pierre Bonaccord and dominated by the International Confederation of Warlocks (which he may have also headed or handed off to a trusted confederate at its formation), that emerged out of and took place off and on after the 1689 annual fortnight summit of the Wizards’ Council. The last meeting of that Council’s and its Warlocks’ Council’s formal existence.
An emergency summit dedicated to hammering out the details and implementation of the statute drawn up and laid before the full Wizards’ Council for a final vote by the now-defunct Warlocks’ Council in the two years following the death of its penultimate, and perhaps most historically significant, Chieftainess, the second Elfrida Clagg. Named after that long-ago Elfrida Clagg, Chief of the Wizards’ Council, protector of the Snidget, and would-be proponent of legal wizarding standards according named and recognized rights to those creatures to be classified as beings rather than beasts.
Her later namesake, sadly, only lived to the for wizards fairly young age of 75, though we have no idea of the cause of her death. It may have been illness, or accident, or something else. We can only speculate. But at that age it is likely she could have been still functioning as Chieftainess, or have recently stepped or been forced down for some reason. At any rate, she must have had a powerful influence on the Warlocks’ Council she headed, and thus some in the Wizards’ Council too, to judge by the swiftness of the drastic measures taken a mere two years after her death under the leadership of her WaC successor, and I suspect strong rival, Pierre Bonaccord. (What an interestingly symbolic, and ironic, name for HIM, considering...)
*
Here’s what I think happened.
Over the course of the last century or so, it had become increasingly clear that muggle-wizard relations were only becoming more tense, conflicted, and divisive, even with the strong isolation of wizards and of the practice of overt magic. The violence was getting worse, and wizards feared they might in fact find themselves eventually wiped out if something didn’t change drastically.
We know what they eventually decided upon as a solution: not mere isolation, but official secrecy. Disclaiming the very existence of magic to the wider world, erasing wizards from overt history, and retreating into a fragile and vigourously-defended bubble of law and illusion. A bubble founded upon and maintained by a continuous – but understood as necessary – program of mental and other violence against all muggles not directly related to any wizard. Quite likely meant, it seems, to be permanent and irrevocable. A point of no return.
The issue and idea must have been raised some time well before that decisive 1689 summit, and debated repeatedly. And hotly, one imagines, given the scope and drastic nature of it; one wonders what the Flamels thought of it, and on which side they ultimately in their hearts landed on it. It may have been Bonaccord’s own idea, or he may have simply been the most effective proponent of it. But in Elfrida Clagg he’d apparently met someone with even greater influence than he and his powerful faction had, for it was only after her death that he was able to bring the issue to a final resolution and carry the day.
She, and that section of the wizarding population standing behind her on the issue, had rejected the idea of enforced Secrecy, for reasons we can only speculate on. Though, given her suggestive namesake, might it have had something to do with the implicit and required shift in wizard thinking about muggles and their rights? We don’t know.
What we do know is that Bonaccord must have acted swiftly, in order to get that Statute drawn up and passed by the Wizards’ Council a mere two years after her death. Clagg may have been the last major holdout against it with significant influence to bring to bear, however; wizards were terrified by then.
Now, I suppose it is possible to read the dates another way. Perhaps Clagg and Bonaccord were in agreement, compatriots. And they spent a long time considering and drafting the Statute together, but Clagg’s death – perhaps by illness, and so foreseen – meant that Bonaccord had to take the reins and lead the charge by himself.
But. We do have the suggestiveness of her namesake, and the lingering but carefully-cloaked bitterness over the issue present in the whole mess of blood mania and dark lords. It would have been a divisive issue – many wizards, possibly still most back then, would have had muggle relatives of their own. And it was an incredibly drastic and far-reaching shift; I very much doubt that it was a time of peaceful and orderly transition and adoption of the statute.
Plus there’s that leftover puzzle piece we still need to slot in, remember? The Knights of Walpurgis. And their curious name.
I’ll get to that. Let’s go back to Bonaccord and the Council, and the proposition of Secrecy for a minute.
Whatever the relationship between Clagg and Bonaccord, the proposition to impose full Secrecy didn’t pass the very next year, in 1688. Likely the matter was brought up by the Warlocks’ Council but eventually tabled without resolution, to wait for the following year.
Or, possibly: following Clagg’s death the pieces soon enough fell together such that it was clear that Bonaccord could or even likely would eventually find enough support for his measures, particularly with the full Wizards’ Council – which would have to vote on any measure as all-encompassing as this. Those delegated to deal directly with the complexities of wizard-muggle relations – among whom must have been some committed muggle-friendly wizards and witches – had the relative position and knowledge to likely foresee some of the potential fallout and issues that such a move would cause, but among the population at large, there may have been a higher percentage in favor of the proposition by then than there was on the WaC. They just wanted to live their lives safely, and if their muggle relatives would be brought in with them under Secrecy…
Whatever the exact political mix, it might have become clear that Bonaccord and his faction would eventually likely carry the day in some way. But that the issue would need to be dealt with properly and carefully, not rushed through. So it was agreed at the 1688 summit - either by the WaC alone as part of its continuing agenda, or by the WaC and voted on with approval by the full Council - that Bonaccord’s faction would draw up a formal draft of their proposed statute, and any associated other major changes to wizarding governance, and then lay it before the full Council at the following year’s summit for full debate and a formal vote.
Which is what happened. In 1689 the Wizards’ Council met again – and for, it turned out, the last time under that name – and the WaC headed by Bonaccord laid before it for debate and vote their proposal for an International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, with the details of its implementation to be hashed out subsequently by emergency summit. And so it was debated, hotly I suspect. And by the end of the summit it had been voted on, and it passed.
4 – The ICW and the KOW
Possibly the shift from a full Wizards’ Council to an – immediately or ultimately representative body called the – International Confederation of Wizards, and from the WaC to the ICWa, was an inherent part of their formal proposal from the beginning, dating either from an already-present idea or the results of that 1688 discussion. Possibly it was addition made during the process of debate during that 1689 summit itself, when the debate grew hottest and tempers flared and factions formed, reformed, allied and clashed most heavily.
However it precisely happened, and exactly when the two most fundamental positions crystallized in tension over that central divide and made the decisions to go forward as they did, what occurred in outline was this:
European wizarding society split. Not quite down the middle – at the end there was a majority and a minority, though the exact ratio we don’t know – but at its heart. Bonaccord’s faction won the day. And with his victory at the Wizards’ Council summit the wizarding world’s existing governing ranks and institutions also cracked right across. By the end of the 1689 Wizards’ Council summit meeting things had shaken out such that, from that point henceforth the only acknowledged legitimate, public governing face of the wizarding world was Bonaccord’s new ICW and ICWa. And so, by the very design of the law he had won the day with, his faction’s view became, not only the majority view, but the necessarily default and compulsory view of the wizarding world from that point on.
But there was – there must have been – opposition to the law. Then and afterward. For a variety of reasons, from a variety of points of view. But all of these variations upon the principle of opposition to enforced Secrecy were more or less equally disenfranchised and driven, in part or in whole even then, essentially underground.
Here, I think, is where we find the birth of the organization that named itself the Knights of Walpurgis, and an explanation for the name they chose. They picked a name recalling the traditional start of the old Wizards’ Council meeting on the mountain.
An implicit claim to the same legitimacy the ICW successfully claimed for itself there, but not via the formal structure of modern bureaucratic rules that came to fundamentally characterize both the ICW and the EWW it shaped with its Statute.
Rather, they chose the image of an order of knights: chivalric militancy under the banner of a felt cultural-moral authority and shared mission. Knights dedicated to their goal under the name of the saint whose feastday is also called Witches’ Night. Saint Walpurga. (Also sometimes spelled ‘Walburga.’) An 8th-century abbess and missionary, highly educated for a woman in her day, who famously travelled with her male relatives to the Holy Land before becoming a nun and wrote an account of their travels, a virtual first for a woman in her particular time and place. She’s also sometimes credited with introducing Christianity to the area known today as Germany.
It’s not strictly necessary to suppose, but it would be an appropriate touch if she had also been a witch. A fact, of course, that Bonaccord’s law would necessarily erase from overt history.
We do know that she was educated from the age of eleven(!) by the nuns of Wimborne Abbey in Dorset, where she spent twenty-six years as a member of the nuns’ community before beginning her travels and then settling in what is present-day Germany, to begin her career as an abbess.
Wimborne has a quidditch team, doesn’t it?
*
The Knights of Walpurgis was the (un)official, organized, but necessarily politicially-excluded wing of the broader lingering opposition to the ICW and the imposition of Secrecy. Depending on how the initial Statute was written, it may have been in essential purpose illegal and thus necessarily secret from the beginning; or that may have come later, amendments to the law forcing them ever deeper underground.
Eventually, though, the group and its purpose – BY its purpose – was outlawed. Because it had one unifying and foundational goal from the beginning: end Secrecy. By whatever means were left to it to do so. And sooner or later that came to mean, could now only mean, by force.
Again, we’re talking about the organized center of commitment to a broader but much more variably-held principle. Not every witch or wizard who disagreed with Secrecy in some way was a member of the KOW. Probably only ever a minority of them, the very most committed, and not every anti-Secrecy wizard would have necessarily agreed with the KOW about why or what to do.
But every member of the KOW was, by definition, anti-Secrecy and committed to its revocation. And thus, after some unknown point at which the relevant language was put into law, they were, by virtue of their membership in an officially anti-Secrecy group, legally traitors. Criminals, and of the worst class. And, moreover, being thus excluded from legitimate means of working toward their goals, increasingly driven to illegitimate and violent means.
The KOW may not have been an inherently anti-muggle group at its founding, or indeed necessarily at any point thereafter while it existed as the KOW. It may have been. Or it may have had a mix of views regarding that point present in its continuing membership, or have shifted on that over time. It may even, originally and possibly continuing for a long time, have been pro-muggle-rights. The remnants of Elfrida Clagg’s faction and her most dedicated supporters perhaps, unable to maintain enough influence after her death to halt Bonaccord’s takeover but determined not to quit the field for good.
However, whatever its initial or later political makeup on the question of muggles, and later the growing questions of muggleborns, blood purity, and the like, as an underground and eventually necessarily militant organization the KOW would have been pushed further and further away from the levers of overt legitimate power and legal redress, and from moderating influences.
Leaving it vulnerable, even if it had started with and tried to maintain the best ideals and intentions, to potential use as a profoundly destructive force.
Which is what eventually did happen, when Tom Riddle came calling.
We don’t know what how he initially found out about the organization, though it’s likely they knew about him first. Nor do we know what the initial impressions and relationships there were like, nor what precisely happened between them, or why.
What we do know is that, at some point between the time Tom first entered the wizarding world under the wary but neglecting aegis of Albus Dumbledore, and the time a few decades later when he popped up back in Britain under the name Lord Voldemort and began his campaign of destruction, Tommy and the KOW came together at least once.
And in the end Tommy walked away with a brand-new set of Death Eaters as his committed followers, pawns, and eventual toys and slaves, while Walpurga’s knights walked away either as Death Eaters or not at all.
Whatever its then goals, I don’t quite think the KOW was the ultimate winner in that exchange. Do you?
*
Speaking of the KOW and dark lordlings…
I know I’m not the first to suspect that Gellert Grindelwald and Tom Riddle might have both been, er, nurtured, or at least influenced, by a common hand, likely the Knights. This I’m pretty sure is jodel’s theory.
I do wonder, however, about one Albus Dumbledore’s knowledge of, view of, and relationship to them. It was recently proposed here on DTCL that ALBUS was the one who first proposed DOMINATING the muggles to dear Gellert in that letter, seizing on Gellert’s “for their own good” line as a way of rationalizing and persuading him into considering the concept…
Gellert, who had been expelled from Durmstrang and sent to Britain for vaguely-stated crimes and experiments, to stay with his aunt there. Neighbor to the Dumbledores, that poor family, what with Ariana’s condition and her muggleborn mother left to care for her magically-epileptic daughter by herself after “muggle-maiming” Percival got himself sent to Azkaban. Because she was a danger to Secrecy and if they sent her to the healers at St. Mungo’s she’d be locked away there, of course.
Until she died, killed by Ariana, and brilliant Albus, correspondent with many influential people even while at school, had to cancel his planned grand tour of wizarding Europe and stay home to look after his siblings.
Whose life had been so badly sent astray from his vision of it by the demands of Secrecy, and the conflict resulting from the discussion and then argument over what to do about that and the whole unclear set of relationships and events between Gellert and Ariana and Aberforth and Albus himself. Albus, who dithered for five years, terrified of himself and his own knowledge, before being pressed (WHY?) by the wizarding public(?) into confronting and defeating Gellert, and imprisoning him in his own prison tower. Finally marking, publicly and indubitably, his commitment to preserving wizarding Secrecy and the reality of his self-proclaimed earlier turn away from everything he had conspired to do with Gellert.
Refusing the thrice-offered Minister for Magic position in Britain, but stacking up other important ranks and powers there and internationally, and eventually gaining sole decades-long control of Hogwarts castle. Final bastion of defense for the anti-Voldemort crowd.
As well as sometime home, under him, of an irresponsible werewolf, repentant and unrepentant Death Eaters, various Azkaban escapees and releasees, Voldemort’s possessed agent, a Death-Eater-linked Ministry sadist, the Boy Who Lived, the Mirror of Erised, the Room of Requirement and Room of Hidden Things, the Philosopher’s Stone, wizarding Britain’s probable only non-privately-owned magical library, three artifacts of the founders, a hidden basilisk in a Chamber of Secrets, and a phoenix. Among other things.
I really would rather like to know where Albus got the bright idea to become a teacher, and later headmaster, and who recommended him, first to Dippet as a professor and then later to the Governors’ Council for the headmastership. The same Governors’ Council we’ve later seen one Lucius Malfoy, imperius-defense-winning free Death Eater, lifelong friend or patron of Severus Snape, sometime advisor to Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge, and decided critic of Albus Dumbledore, at various times sit on and wield significant influence over.
I don’t quite see how the whole pattern fits together there yet, but there is quite a bit of suggestive material.
*
I’ll end with a few further notes and questions on a set of related images.
"They don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they're trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks."
Remus Lupin, giving us our first proper description of the wizarding prison Azkaban, guarded by the terror-inducing, soul-sucking, strictly rule-governed demons known as dementors. Home, naturally, of all convicted and unrepentant Death Eaters and their ilk.
And also, ironically, a rather potent metaphor for the post-Secrecy wizarding world, no? Azkaban turned inside-out; the wizarding world turned outside-in. A physical structure on an isolated outpost in the middle of the international waters of the North Sea, for those exiled from a nation of internal exiles that exists with no physical borders to itself, but within and across the borders of north-central Europe. The inhabitants terrified either into numbness covered over with jokes and pleasing fantasies or into raving despairing psychosis, depending on whether they are the threat or the eternally threatened; the soul sucked out of their most fundamental embodying principles, no matter their intent; everything judged with the greatest strictness according to legalistic rules, by which all matters even of life, death, magic, and spiritual existence itself are governed.
Note that Azkaban is always described to us as the “wizarding prison.” It’s not run by any one Ministry, wizengamot, or other local body; it is, I suspect, the responsibility of the – rule-bound, ruling, and existing via legislative fiat – ICW. Which is, quite probably, the body that created it, once Secrecy meant that wizards could never be dealt with through any muggle-linked institution of justice, and international common wizarding concerns would need to take precedence over local and regional ways of handling things.
Plus they had just created a whole new class of – to the new post-Secrecy wizarding mindset extraordinarily dangerous – criminals that would need to be housed and dealt with. Secrecy violators and anti-Secrecy conspirators.
So where did the dementors come from, and who brought them in? Kingsley supposedly removed them from the governance and guarding of Azkaban after Voldwar II (in which, note, Voldemort successful suborned them away from Ministry/ICW control), but I doubt they have been entirely disposed of.
We aren’t told exactly what their origins are or who introduced them, though some have suspected they were bred out of boggarts somehow, which seems quite…fitting. (Jodel I think proposed this?)
The drain a magic user of their powers when left in their company too long, by inducing a continuous state of helpless terror and despair fed by one’s worst memories. Muggles can feel, but not see, them. They are eyeless, strictly sightless physically, but have no difficulty navigating in the physical world and have cloaked physical bodies of some sort that can manipulate physical objects. Their worst and singularly-characteristic power is their literally soul-sucking Kiss.
In addition to whatever sorts of wizarding criminals get sent to Azkaban, they guard, restrain, and when necessary consume the souls of those terrible criminals who violate Secrecy, particularly Death Eaters. Whose capacity for violence, according to terri’s precise analysis, they seem to drastically worsen. Oh, and they also likely have historically been used to control unmedicated werewolves before the introduction of Wolfsbane, driving them off from inhabited areas where people – particularly ignorant muggles – might be bitten by the human-mind-lacking, helplessly violent creatures. (I can’t recall who first proposed that idea, it’s not mine, but it’s fitting and works quite well with what we see in POA.)
JKR was inspired to create them by her experience of depression; specifically, the “absence of hope” that is one of its most profound characteristic symptoms.
(I think it was either swythyv or jodel who proposed that Voldemort’s all-encompassing fear of death over any pain, including possibly irreversible soul mutilation, and his psychopathy, might have been inspired by a childhood encounter with a dementor at his muggle orphanage…)
Their effects can be withstood to some degree for some indefinite time by use of magic such as the animagus charm – feeling more animal than human – and occlumency. But they can be driven off only, or apparently most effectively, with one particular spell.
The patronus charm.
A powerful, and I suspect inherently DARK but morally good, piece of magic that requires the use of a cored wand (invented way back in ancient Rome) to focus, but no clever wandwork to cast properly. Rather, from what we can see it requires strength of will, proper emotional resonance, and belief in oneself. An emotional resonance today mistakenly understood as deriving from “happy memories,” but what mary and I among others suspect is instead feelings of powerful love. Connection and protection joined together, that can be used to save oneself and others, cast in the symbolic form of one’s deepest heart or, supposedly but weakly, truest personal love. Cast not to destroy the dementor and the possibility of fear, but to drive it away.
“Expecto patronum!” An expectation and demand for protection, for a PROTECTOR, addressed to no specific source or authority. A radiant, non-physical but tangibly present protector – and, if needed, GUIDE – powerful enough to act against even the incarnation of soul-destroying fear itself and unable to be harmed or consumed by it.
A charm which most Death Eaters are supposedly incapable of, though we see more than one DE-linked person manage it (one Ministry and directly involved with controlling them; another the barman of their favorite hangout with some interesting implicit views on Albus and muggles; the third a literal halfblood I need not name….), while the average wizard on the street thinks it incredibly difficult to cast. A charm which we see Harry Potter first struggle with, when taught by a self-conflicted and self-deceiving werewolf, then successfully cast upon realizing he already has done so to protect himself and others, and teach later to a bunch of teenagers as part of an anti-Voldemort and anti-Ministry secret defense group.
A very, very curious set of images, no?
Some of this will be very important to the remaining portions of Indestructible that I am in the midst of completing, as well. I’ve become convinced, even against my own initial judgments and desire not too read too far into things, that Severus Snape really is fundamentally both a figure at, and an incarnation of, the heart of both the books and the moral-spiritual (not necessarily religious, but fundamentally human) issues of the European wizarding world in the Voldemort era. In some way he is touched by, bound up with, and/or riven by every single essential theme, question, or major issue I can find. It’s fascinating to keep unfolding. Loved and loathed, our most controversial figure, point of eternal tension and ground of innumerable conflicts. Betrayer and protector, faithless and faithful, Death Eater and Phoenix, halfblood wizard living in the muggle world...
Severus Snape, the secret heart of and hidden-in-plain-sight key to everything here.
So four final suggestive words for you to consider, in regard to the WW, its problems, magic, the books, and our professor:
Secrecy. Fidelius. Sectumsempra. Always.
This is somewhat half-formed thinking, working as I go and edited a bit. Influenced mainly by swythyv, jodel, and terri. I steal shamelessly from the masters; forgive me.
There’s a little bit of Snape stuff at the end, but mostly this is historical musings and speculation. I used mostly Wikipedia and the HP-Lexicon, especially its master timeline, as references.
1 - The Reach of the International Confederation of Wizards
The ICW, whatever the Lexicon's impression, isn't the wizarding equivalent of the United Nations. It's more like the wizarding EU - if that. I've come to doubt that the Americas and Oceania have any seats on it, though their organizations may be modeled on it, influenced by it, and have close relations with it. The fundamental historical political tensions in those areas aren't going to match up neatly with the very specific ones driving the formation of European wizarding isolation - though Europe may have been the first area to impose it and the one to do so most thoroughly, leading it to ripple outward from there.
Let's borrow terri's strategy from Upon the Matter of Britain and look at quidditch for a moment.
It's a mainly British game that's caught on most heavily in Europe, spreading across it in the early 1400s. There are ten non-British or Irish European teams; the World Cup was established in 1473 and was played exclusively by European teams until 1652, when the first non-European team competed and the European Cup was established. We know of teams across western, central and northern Europe, including Spain, but interestingly nothing for southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean.
(The sole apparent exception to this lack of quidditch involvement is EGYPT, host for the playoff games leading up to that 1994 World Cup. But, in addition to heavy British invovement from the mid-1800s on, note, during the period surrounding formal Secrecy's imposition it was only nominally under control of the region's major power, the Ottoman Empire. Instead it was ruled by a dynasty of Albanians, who established themselves there after having been taken over by the Ottoman Empire and serving as the Ottomans' mercenaries. We've, er, encountered a few references to Albania, haven't we?)
We know of ten teams altogether for the Americas, including the US National team, and that there's a US Cup. The game was introduced in the early 1600s, when Europeans were beginning the process of settling the continents, but never caught on, and was accompanied by "a lot of anti-wizard sentiment, unfortunately." (lexicon main timeline) Indications of, er, greater political tensions? Instead a local game called quodpot was developed.
It was successfully introduced to New Zealand by the British in the 1700s, and spread either from there or from European influence to Australia, but the two countries combined have only three teams and they have their own quidditch association.
There are four known teams for all of Africa, and one for Japan.
*
The ICW, like the International Quidditch Association, serves the population for the catchment areas of the three major historical European wizarding centers: Hogwarts (the British isles), Beauxbatons (southwestern Europe), and Durmstrang (northern and central-eastern Europe). NOT the wizarding populations for specific sets of contemporary muggle nation-states, mind you, but the wizarding populations according to the cultural and political map of the subcontinent as it was in the late 17th century, when they split off from the muggle world.
Or even earlier, actually. In 1419 the Wizard's Council was already forbidding quidditch to be played within sight of muggles. terri's right in UTMOB: isolation was a gradual process occuring over centuries. Formal Secrecy was just the last - and I suspect most hotly contested - stage of development. This process began in the late 900s, with the foundation of Hogwarts – and most likely rather soon thereafter, if not roughly concurrently, that of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. (Which was first and which last, actually, I wonder? And where DID dear Salazar's family come from, and then that whole conflict with the other Founders...)
The ICW is not even really a pan-European organization, in our understanding of the term. Rather, it serves a historical-cultural area in which a range of local pressures gradually broke up the power of the Western Roman Empire's successor, the Roman Catholic Church, which had provided a degree of both political and cultural-linguistic unification before then (Latin!) and whose loss of power produced violent religious-political conflicts. In the British isles, of course, we have the rise of the Anglican church, the dissolution of the monasteries and the Ireland issue; in western, central and northern Europe, the breakdown of the first and later establishment (in 962) of the second Holy Roman Empire and the rise of Protestant Christianity; in southwestern Europe (Spain and Portugal), the conflict between Catholic and Islamic political powers; and in parts of central to southeastern Europe the conflict between Catholicism, Orthodox Christian powers (Byzantine and Russian), and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Hence references to Bulgaria and Albania: at the time parts of the former Roman provinces that later became Albania were part of the second Bulgarian Empire, but between the 14th and 17th centuries the Ottoman Empire's increasing pressure on and takeover of the mixed Catholic and Orthodox area sent Catholics moving westward, broke up the Bulgarian Empire, and sparked an unsuccessful attempt at a European coalition against the Ottomans by Albanian national hero Skanderbeg.
Wizards who were pushed northward and westward by the religious-political conflicts and violence from these pressures over a few centuries adopted, first isolation from muggles, then enforced secrecy from them, as a survival strategy. Because they kept getting swept up as scapegoats perhaps. By varying, and sometimes all, sides.
Italy, on the other hand, was controlled by a variety of Catholic powers in the center and south, including the Papal States under direct control of the Pope, and in the north by the mighty, long-independant, but eventually Byzantine-oriented merchant power of the Republic of Venice, which controlled the Mediterranean. Whose geographical location between them and the territories of the present-day ICW, perhaps, forced Italian wizards in Catholic areas further south to have to come to some arrangement of their own regarding religious and muggle-wizard pressures.
Note now, please, that the only explicitly religious wizarding figure we meet, the Hufflepuff House ghost, is a Friar. And that one of the heresies punished most consistently by the Inquisition (which existed primarily to combat heresy) was the belief in witchcraft and witches. Especially in northwestern Europe, early protestants were often the drivers of the witch-hunts. And while there was later a period in which belief in witchcraft was sanctioned by the Church, and witchcraft itself usually seen as involvement with the Devil, Inquisitorial courts only became involved in witch-hunts systematically in the 15th century, and confessions of acts of more benign/'white magic' got more tentative handling from, for example, the Inquisition of Milan. Nor did all Inquisitorial courts acknowledge witchcraft's existence. And in Spain in 1610, after a spasm of witch-hunting occurred there, the Suprema (leading council) of the Spanish Inquisition issued an Edict of Grace, granting amnesty to confessing witches. The lone dissenting inquisitor was put in charge of the later investigation, with the result that witches were never again pursued by the Spanish Inquisition, though they continued hunting heretics and Jews.
(The name of that inquisitor, incidentally? Alonso de Salazar Frias. You can't make this stuff up.)
It was the hardline protestants who eventually started hanging witches in Salem, also.
I really, really have to wonder what the wizarding political map of Italy and the Mediterranean in general looks like, and also what the Vatican's political and diplomatic branch looks like for those in the know about the existence of magic. Because I think the Potterverse's Vatican is going to have a rather more interesting relationship with wizards than some common fan assumptions might allow.
((I must admit that I have long played around with a tempting little headfic plotbunny: in 1979 Severus flees to Italy when he realizes his only viable options are to leave Britain or end up one way or the other with the DEs. Sixteen years later he returns, sent to Britain’s Ministry officially as Britain’s new wizarding Papal Legate for the Vatican, overseeing the needs of those remaining still quietly-Catholic wizards living in the isles, and quietly to be a more or less unofficial observer on the Voldemort conflict for the increasingly concerned Mediterranean Magical League, which is at best uneasy bedfellows with the ICW...))
2 - Formation of the ICW
The past and present governmental institutions of the European Wizarding World and their various roles can be a little tricky to properly identify at first. We get a number of similar but non-identical terms tossed around at different points – swythyv talked some about this.
We’ve got the three original wizarding centers established at the beginning of the period of isolation: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang. Then we have a Wizards’ Council (mentioned as early as the 1200s), which has a Chief and keeps issuing decrees regarding where quidditch may be played; a Warlocks’ Council, which also has a Chief; an International Warlocks’ Convention (taking place in 1289, and then in 1709, when it outlawed dragon breeding); an International Confederation of Wizards, which established the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in either 1689 or 1692 and was first headed by Pierre Bonaccord; and an International Confederation of Warlocks, of which Albus Dumbledore was once Supreme Mugwump.
We also have two slightly different terms regarding that famous law the ICW passed: the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, and the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy, amended in 1750 to require national Ministries to handle the concealment of magical creatures within their jurisdictions.
We even have a curious doubling of an individual’s name: Elfrida Clagg. Born in the in the 1300s (the century that also saw the birth of Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel in its first third) and ascending to be Chief of the Wizards’ Council, she declared the Golden Snidget endangered and outlawed its use in quidditch. She also tried but failed to establish a legal standard by which creatures could gain legal rights as “beings.”
And then Elfrida Clagg, Chieftainess of the Warlocks’ Council, is born in 1612, and dies in 1687.
What’s going on here?
These aren’t slight misstatements of the name of the same things and people or confusion about dates. These are traces of the historical development of the EWW’s governing bodies during the period of isolation from the muggle world and its structures, including one of the EWW’s most quietly important historical figures.
This is also the record of the conflict that eventually gave rise to the individual problems that Dumbledore, and then Harry and company, faced in the form of Grindelwald, and Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
I have two more names for you, one a nearly forgotten one: the Order of Merlin, and the Knights of Walpurgis.
The Order of Merlin seems canonically to be a muggle-protection-oriented organization, though not just that; it’s an ORDER. One that one of Sirius’ ancestors was made member of, that several important political figures of Harry’s day are part of, and one that Severus Snape almost got a First-Class membership in for delivering to Fudge one escaped convict Sirius Black tied up like a Christmas present, together with three non-werewolf-eaten children, including one BWL.
The Knights of Walpurgis are a little harder to make out, except that they were apparently the earlier pre-existent organization that JKR claims Tommy took over and turned into his Death Eaters. Interestingly, let us consider that real historical knights were, as well as being elevated to a particular political-legal rank, often members of various religiously-militant Orders as well. And that knighthood often also is used more broadly as a suggestive metaphor for membership in groups of various kinds.
Swythyv proposed that ‘warlock’ is simply a technical term for members of the Order of Merlin, recipients of the honor for their actions protecting muggles. I think that’s mostly correct, except a little broader. Warlocks are and always have been those witches and wizards officially selected – via meritous action or sustained ideological commitment leading to election by one’s local magical government – to deal with questions around wizard-muggle relations in general, once it became clear back in the late 900s that wizards would need to band together as such. And it’s only in the post-Secrecy Potterverse of Harry’s day that that seems to reduce to ‘protecting muggles’ and the like. A delegation of said warlocks would then be nominated and sent by each wizarding center to the international governing bodies and their official conventions, to handle and formally adjudicate muggle-related matters there.
I’ll come back to the Knights of Walpurgis later.
*
First a brief aside regarding Ministries and wizarding centers: I think Britain is unique in seeming to have a fairly straight match-up between CENTER and present-day MINISTRY – the other two centers likely have to deal with and adjudicate disputes between multiple Ministries, though each may have taken a formal patron Ministry as needed. Perhaps instead of centers I should use the precise term wizengamots? Which likely originally met in those buildings now seen only, and used mainly, as schools: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, Durmstrang. The British wizengamot may then have a special section of Irish seats, where the others have sections for each national Ministry and the like under their domain. And each regulates wizengamot-Ministry relations and official positions as best fits local needs. Let’s not forget that the British Minister for Magic is appointed by the British wizengamot, which has its own head. (No, it’s not Dumbledore; he’s the leader of the wizengamot’s warlock section, I think swythyv’s quite right there.)
Which then leads us back to that list of organizations. The International Confederation of Warlocks, headed for a time by Dumbledore, is a subset of the International Confederation of Wizards, dealing with matters pertaining directly to wizard-muggle relations. Including maintaining and amending the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy, the official name for the entire body of law relating to the elaboration and implementation of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy strictly speaking, the original single legal provision that was voted on and passed back in 1689.
The International CODE – the additional body of law needed to spell out the requirements and means of implementation of the STATUTE, but commonly folded implicitly in with the original Statute in daily speech – is what was formally passed in 1692, which is when the Statute then formally TOOK EFFECT. It took seven weeks alone just to hammer out the details regarding treatment of goblins, centaurs, merpeople, and other non-human magical creatures at the “summit meeting” of the ICW; the process of arguing over and drafting out the full original law would easily have filled those three years.
A process overseen and mainly handled by the International Confederation of Warlocks, the ICWa – though likely with input from the full Confederation of Wizards, the ICW, given that it was going to affect everyone.
What about those other bodies, the Wizards’ Council and the Warlocks’ Council?
The precursor, pre-modern organizations, of course. Standing in the same relation: the Warlocks’ Council a sub-unit of the full Wizards’ Council, dealing with the crucial issue of muggle-wizard relations. It may have existed previously, unofficially, as simply a gathering of people concerned with wizard-muggle relations during official Council meetings or the like (er, when was the Order of Merlin itself established?). But in 1289 it met officially for the International Warlock Convention. This I suspect was its founding meeting, occurring during that year’s meeting of the full Wizards’ Council. Indeed, this may also be, or come soon after, the founding of the Order of Merlin as such, giving official recognition of and duties to a specific group of people, tackling an issue now recognized to be of longstanding importance.
Merlin, after all, was historically what sort of figure? Oh, right. An advisor on magical matters to a muggle political ruler.
All right. And who then met at the Wizards’ Council?
Well, for smaller matters during the year there may have been meetings of representatives from the three wizengamots at various times, including warlocks where appropriate. But for what I think was the annual meeting – the summit, if you will – of the full Council? During this time period there would only have been a few hundred to a few thousand wizards in all of the territories in question. I suspect the Wizards’ Council was just that: a full council of all adult qualified witches and wizards able to attend and of sound enough mind to vote on matters put before it, and led by its own elected Chief. To whom and whom alone the Warlocks’ Council’s Chief was subordinate. If he or she was – I’m not sure yet.
*
Now, this meeting likely took more than a day or so; I suspect a fortnight or something similar. And for this many wizards and witches to gather safely for that long, they would have needed an established, defensible space, away from muggles and not located at the heart of any territory directly controlled by any of the wizengamots or their dominant muggle-political territories. Centrally located but neutral.
Maybe somewhere in what is today central or northern Germany? On a nice, defensible mountain summit? Placed perhaps for easy physical and magical defense between two rivers…
Allow me to introduce you to the Brocken, aka the Blocksberg. The highest peak of the Harz mountain range, it’s also the highest peak in northern Germany and is flanked at its base by the Elbe and Weser rivers. Mist and fog usually shroud it for up to 300 days a year, and are known for creating eerie optical effects to climbers who venture high enough, known as the Brocken spectre.
It has also for centuries been associated with potent legends of witches, devils, and magic; the German poet Goethe referenced it in his famous play Faust for precisely that reason.
Indeed, in German folklore the Brocken has long traditionally been regarded as the location of the famous May-Day-eve meeting of witches known, particularly during the 17th century, as Hexennacht or Walpurgisnacht – “witches’ night” or “Walpurga’s night,” after the 8th-century Germanic abbess Saint Walpurga whose feast day is April 30, May Day eve.
I think we have just found the traditional date of the opening evening festivities for the annual full summit of the Wizards’ Council, who would then take up adjudicating official wizarding business on May first. Beltane. The official start of summer by the traditional European folk calendar. (Though the strict eightfold year of contemporary Wicca is a modern gloss on a much more patchwork and complicated historical reality, a festival of some sort on this date in particular is attested to well both across a wide swathe of Europe from Ireland eastward, and for a long historical period).
Business including especially, as time went on, the increasingly central issue of wizard-muggle relations. One imagines that the convention of the Warlocks’ Council came to be the central event of this summit after a time, and its decisions and the matters it laid before the full Wizards’ Council some of the most hotly-debated topics each year. Indeed, the formation of the Warlocks’ Council and its first Convention back in the 1200s may mark the time when the Brocken became the official permanent home of the summit, though likely it had been used before then.
One wonders what the present-day headquarters of the ICW and its sub-body the ICWa look like, perched up there on the mountaintop. To wizarding eyes, of course; to the eyes of muggle tourists using the Brocken Railway to visit the famous Sender Brocken hotel and restaurant, they probably only look only like, say, a combined FM-radio and television broadcasting tower. Something like that, anyway. Or the HQ may not be visible at all, and ICW wizards might complain about the muggle apparatus spoiling the view.
Or – just possibly – the ICW met only once or for a limited time at that particular mountain summit. They might have moved their base to another location. But I doubt it. It’s too well-established, too well-suited to the purpose, and the link to tradition too strong, to make that likely, I think.
Besides. Now they’ve got a railway up there. It’s cold, and getting to the top of a mountain peak is hard on a broom even without the fog, you know? Why not just take the train and try to ignore all the muggles crowding onto their own train platform…
3 – The Council and the Confederation
Speaking of the ICW: when exactly did it take over from the Wizards’ Council, and why?
Perhaps back at the date of the most profound and long-lasting – and now for practical purposes virtually irresolvable – political split in the European wizarding population. The three-year emergency and founding summit of the International Confederation of Wizards, helmed by its new leader Pierre Bonaccord and dominated by the International Confederation of Warlocks (which he may have also headed or handed off to a trusted confederate at its formation), that emerged out of and took place off and on after the 1689 annual fortnight summit of the Wizards’ Council. The last meeting of that Council’s and its Warlocks’ Council’s formal existence.
An emergency summit dedicated to hammering out the details and implementation of the statute drawn up and laid before the full Wizards’ Council for a final vote by the now-defunct Warlocks’ Council in the two years following the death of its penultimate, and perhaps most historically significant, Chieftainess, the second Elfrida Clagg. Named after that long-ago Elfrida Clagg, Chief of the Wizards’ Council, protector of the Snidget, and would-be proponent of legal wizarding standards according named and recognized rights to those creatures to be classified as beings rather than beasts.
Her later namesake, sadly, only lived to the for wizards fairly young age of 75, though we have no idea of the cause of her death. It may have been illness, or accident, or something else. We can only speculate. But at that age it is likely she could have been still functioning as Chieftainess, or have recently stepped or been forced down for some reason. At any rate, she must have had a powerful influence on the Warlocks’ Council she headed, and thus some in the Wizards’ Council too, to judge by the swiftness of the drastic measures taken a mere two years after her death under the leadership of her WaC successor, and I suspect strong rival, Pierre Bonaccord. (What an interestingly symbolic, and ironic, name for HIM, considering...)
*
Here’s what I think happened.
Over the course of the last century or so, it had become increasingly clear that muggle-wizard relations were only becoming more tense, conflicted, and divisive, even with the strong isolation of wizards and of the practice of overt magic. The violence was getting worse, and wizards feared they might in fact find themselves eventually wiped out if something didn’t change drastically.
We know what they eventually decided upon as a solution: not mere isolation, but official secrecy. Disclaiming the very existence of magic to the wider world, erasing wizards from overt history, and retreating into a fragile and vigourously-defended bubble of law and illusion. A bubble founded upon and maintained by a continuous – but understood as necessary – program of mental and other violence against all muggles not directly related to any wizard. Quite likely meant, it seems, to be permanent and irrevocable. A point of no return.
The issue and idea must have been raised some time well before that decisive 1689 summit, and debated repeatedly. And hotly, one imagines, given the scope and drastic nature of it; one wonders what the Flamels thought of it, and on which side they ultimately in their hearts landed on it. It may have been Bonaccord’s own idea, or he may have simply been the most effective proponent of it. But in Elfrida Clagg he’d apparently met someone with even greater influence than he and his powerful faction had, for it was only after her death that he was able to bring the issue to a final resolution and carry the day.
She, and that section of the wizarding population standing behind her on the issue, had rejected the idea of enforced Secrecy, for reasons we can only speculate on. Though, given her suggestive namesake, might it have had something to do with the implicit and required shift in wizard thinking about muggles and their rights? We don’t know.
What we do know is that Bonaccord must have acted swiftly, in order to get that Statute drawn up and passed by the Wizards’ Council a mere two years after her death. Clagg may have been the last major holdout against it with significant influence to bring to bear, however; wizards were terrified by then.
Now, I suppose it is possible to read the dates another way. Perhaps Clagg and Bonaccord were in agreement, compatriots. And they spent a long time considering and drafting the Statute together, but Clagg’s death – perhaps by illness, and so foreseen – meant that Bonaccord had to take the reins and lead the charge by himself.
But. We do have the suggestiveness of her namesake, and the lingering but carefully-cloaked bitterness over the issue present in the whole mess of blood mania and dark lords. It would have been a divisive issue – many wizards, possibly still most back then, would have had muggle relatives of their own. And it was an incredibly drastic and far-reaching shift; I very much doubt that it was a time of peaceful and orderly transition and adoption of the statute.
Plus there’s that leftover puzzle piece we still need to slot in, remember? The Knights of Walpurgis. And their curious name.
I’ll get to that. Let’s go back to Bonaccord and the Council, and the proposition of Secrecy for a minute.
Whatever the relationship between Clagg and Bonaccord, the proposition to impose full Secrecy didn’t pass the very next year, in 1688. Likely the matter was brought up by the Warlocks’ Council but eventually tabled without resolution, to wait for the following year.
Or, possibly: following Clagg’s death the pieces soon enough fell together such that it was clear that Bonaccord could or even likely would eventually find enough support for his measures, particularly with the full Wizards’ Council – which would have to vote on any measure as all-encompassing as this. Those delegated to deal directly with the complexities of wizard-muggle relations – among whom must have been some committed muggle-friendly wizards and witches – had the relative position and knowledge to likely foresee some of the potential fallout and issues that such a move would cause, but among the population at large, there may have been a higher percentage in favor of the proposition by then than there was on the WaC. They just wanted to live their lives safely, and if their muggle relatives would be brought in with them under Secrecy…
Whatever the exact political mix, it might have become clear that Bonaccord and his faction would eventually likely carry the day in some way. But that the issue would need to be dealt with properly and carefully, not rushed through. So it was agreed at the 1688 summit - either by the WaC alone as part of its continuing agenda, or by the WaC and voted on with approval by the full Council - that Bonaccord’s faction would draw up a formal draft of their proposed statute, and any associated other major changes to wizarding governance, and then lay it before the full Council at the following year’s summit for full debate and a formal vote.
Which is what happened. In 1689 the Wizards’ Council met again – and for, it turned out, the last time under that name – and the WaC headed by Bonaccord laid before it for debate and vote their proposal for an International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, with the details of its implementation to be hashed out subsequently by emergency summit. And so it was debated, hotly I suspect. And by the end of the summit it had been voted on, and it passed.
4 – The ICW and the KOW
Possibly the shift from a full Wizards’ Council to an – immediately or ultimately representative body called the – International Confederation of Wizards, and from the WaC to the ICWa, was an inherent part of their formal proposal from the beginning, dating either from an already-present idea or the results of that 1688 discussion. Possibly it was addition made during the process of debate during that 1689 summit itself, when the debate grew hottest and tempers flared and factions formed, reformed, allied and clashed most heavily.
However it precisely happened, and exactly when the two most fundamental positions crystallized in tension over that central divide and made the decisions to go forward as they did, what occurred in outline was this:
European wizarding society split. Not quite down the middle – at the end there was a majority and a minority, though the exact ratio we don’t know – but at its heart. Bonaccord’s faction won the day. And with his victory at the Wizards’ Council summit the wizarding world’s existing governing ranks and institutions also cracked right across. By the end of the 1689 Wizards’ Council summit meeting things had shaken out such that, from that point henceforth the only acknowledged legitimate, public governing face of the wizarding world was Bonaccord’s new ICW and ICWa. And so, by the very design of the law he had won the day with, his faction’s view became, not only the majority view, but the necessarily default and compulsory view of the wizarding world from that point on.
But there was – there must have been – opposition to the law. Then and afterward. For a variety of reasons, from a variety of points of view. But all of these variations upon the principle of opposition to enforced Secrecy were more or less equally disenfranchised and driven, in part or in whole even then, essentially underground.
Here, I think, is where we find the birth of the organization that named itself the Knights of Walpurgis, and an explanation for the name they chose. They picked a name recalling the traditional start of the old Wizards’ Council meeting on the mountain.
An implicit claim to the same legitimacy the ICW successfully claimed for itself there, but not via the formal structure of modern bureaucratic rules that came to fundamentally characterize both the ICW and the EWW it shaped with its Statute.
Rather, they chose the image of an order of knights: chivalric militancy under the banner of a felt cultural-moral authority and shared mission. Knights dedicated to their goal under the name of the saint whose feastday is also called Witches’ Night. Saint Walpurga. (Also sometimes spelled ‘Walburga.’) An 8th-century abbess and missionary, highly educated for a woman in her day, who famously travelled with her male relatives to the Holy Land before becoming a nun and wrote an account of their travels, a virtual first for a woman in her particular time and place. She’s also sometimes credited with introducing Christianity to the area known today as Germany.
It’s not strictly necessary to suppose, but it would be an appropriate touch if she had also been a witch. A fact, of course, that Bonaccord’s law would necessarily erase from overt history.
We do know that she was educated from the age of eleven(!) by the nuns of Wimborne Abbey in Dorset, where she spent twenty-six years as a member of the nuns’ community before beginning her travels and then settling in what is present-day Germany, to begin her career as an abbess.
Wimborne has a quidditch team, doesn’t it?
*
The Knights of Walpurgis was the (un)official, organized, but necessarily politicially-excluded wing of the broader lingering opposition to the ICW and the imposition of Secrecy. Depending on how the initial Statute was written, it may have been in essential purpose illegal and thus necessarily secret from the beginning; or that may have come later, amendments to the law forcing them ever deeper underground.
Eventually, though, the group and its purpose – BY its purpose – was outlawed. Because it had one unifying and foundational goal from the beginning: end Secrecy. By whatever means were left to it to do so. And sooner or later that came to mean, could now only mean, by force.
Again, we’re talking about the organized center of commitment to a broader but much more variably-held principle. Not every witch or wizard who disagreed with Secrecy in some way was a member of the KOW. Probably only ever a minority of them, the very most committed, and not every anti-Secrecy wizard would have necessarily agreed with the KOW about why or what to do.
But every member of the KOW was, by definition, anti-Secrecy and committed to its revocation. And thus, after some unknown point at which the relevant language was put into law, they were, by virtue of their membership in an officially anti-Secrecy group, legally traitors. Criminals, and of the worst class. And, moreover, being thus excluded from legitimate means of working toward their goals, increasingly driven to illegitimate and violent means.
The KOW may not have been an inherently anti-muggle group at its founding, or indeed necessarily at any point thereafter while it existed as the KOW. It may have been. Or it may have had a mix of views regarding that point present in its continuing membership, or have shifted on that over time. It may even, originally and possibly continuing for a long time, have been pro-muggle-rights. The remnants of Elfrida Clagg’s faction and her most dedicated supporters perhaps, unable to maintain enough influence after her death to halt Bonaccord’s takeover but determined not to quit the field for good.
However, whatever its initial or later political makeup on the question of muggles, and later the growing questions of muggleborns, blood purity, and the like, as an underground and eventually necessarily militant organization the KOW would have been pushed further and further away from the levers of overt legitimate power and legal redress, and from moderating influences.
Leaving it vulnerable, even if it had started with and tried to maintain the best ideals and intentions, to potential use as a profoundly destructive force.
Which is what eventually did happen, when Tom Riddle came calling.
We don’t know what how he initially found out about the organization, though it’s likely they knew about him first. Nor do we know what the initial impressions and relationships there were like, nor what precisely happened between them, or why.
What we do know is that, at some point between the time Tom first entered the wizarding world under the wary but neglecting aegis of Albus Dumbledore, and the time a few decades later when he popped up back in Britain under the name Lord Voldemort and began his campaign of destruction, Tommy and the KOW came together at least once.
And in the end Tommy walked away with a brand-new set of Death Eaters as his committed followers, pawns, and eventual toys and slaves, while Walpurga’s knights walked away either as Death Eaters or not at all.
Whatever its then goals, I don’t quite think the KOW was the ultimate winner in that exchange. Do you?
*
Speaking of the KOW and dark lordlings…
I know I’m not the first to suspect that Gellert Grindelwald and Tom Riddle might have both been, er, nurtured, or at least influenced, by a common hand, likely the Knights. This I’m pretty sure is jodel’s theory.
I do wonder, however, about one Albus Dumbledore’s knowledge of, view of, and relationship to them. It was recently proposed here on DTCL that ALBUS was the one who first proposed DOMINATING the muggles to dear Gellert in that letter, seizing on Gellert’s “for their own good” line as a way of rationalizing and persuading him into considering the concept…
Gellert, who had been expelled from Durmstrang and sent to Britain for vaguely-stated crimes and experiments, to stay with his aunt there. Neighbor to the Dumbledores, that poor family, what with Ariana’s condition and her muggleborn mother left to care for her magically-epileptic daughter by herself after “muggle-maiming” Percival got himself sent to Azkaban. Because she was a danger to Secrecy and if they sent her to the healers at St. Mungo’s she’d be locked away there, of course.
Until she died, killed by Ariana, and brilliant Albus, correspondent with many influential people even while at school, had to cancel his planned grand tour of wizarding Europe and stay home to look after his siblings.
Whose life had been so badly sent astray from his vision of it by the demands of Secrecy, and the conflict resulting from the discussion and then argument over what to do about that and the whole unclear set of relationships and events between Gellert and Ariana and Aberforth and Albus himself. Albus, who dithered for five years, terrified of himself and his own knowledge, before being pressed (WHY?) by the wizarding public(?) into confronting and defeating Gellert, and imprisoning him in his own prison tower. Finally marking, publicly and indubitably, his commitment to preserving wizarding Secrecy and the reality of his self-proclaimed earlier turn away from everything he had conspired to do with Gellert.
Refusing the thrice-offered Minister for Magic position in Britain, but stacking up other important ranks and powers there and internationally, and eventually gaining sole decades-long control of Hogwarts castle. Final bastion of defense for the anti-Voldemort crowd.
As well as sometime home, under him, of an irresponsible werewolf, repentant and unrepentant Death Eaters, various Azkaban escapees and releasees, Voldemort’s possessed agent, a Death-Eater-linked Ministry sadist, the Boy Who Lived, the Mirror of Erised, the Room of Requirement and Room of Hidden Things, the Philosopher’s Stone, wizarding Britain’s probable only non-privately-owned magical library, three artifacts of the founders, a hidden basilisk in a Chamber of Secrets, and a phoenix. Among other things.
I really would rather like to know where Albus got the bright idea to become a teacher, and later headmaster, and who recommended him, first to Dippet as a professor and then later to the Governors’ Council for the headmastership. The same Governors’ Council we’ve later seen one Lucius Malfoy, imperius-defense-winning free Death Eater, lifelong friend or patron of Severus Snape, sometime advisor to Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge, and decided critic of Albus Dumbledore, at various times sit on and wield significant influence over.
I don’t quite see how the whole pattern fits together there yet, but there is quite a bit of suggestive material.
*
I’ll end with a few further notes and questions on a set of related images.
"They don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they're trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks."
Remus Lupin, giving us our first proper description of the wizarding prison Azkaban, guarded by the terror-inducing, soul-sucking, strictly rule-governed demons known as dementors. Home, naturally, of all convicted and unrepentant Death Eaters and their ilk.
And also, ironically, a rather potent metaphor for the post-Secrecy wizarding world, no? Azkaban turned inside-out; the wizarding world turned outside-in. A physical structure on an isolated outpost in the middle of the international waters of the North Sea, for those exiled from a nation of internal exiles that exists with no physical borders to itself, but within and across the borders of north-central Europe. The inhabitants terrified either into numbness covered over with jokes and pleasing fantasies or into raving despairing psychosis, depending on whether they are the threat or the eternally threatened; the soul sucked out of their most fundamental embodying principles, no matter their intent; everything judged with the greatest strictness according to legalistic rules, by which all matters even of life, death, magic, and spiritual existence itself are governed.
Note that Azkaban is always described to us as the “wizarding prison.” It’s not run by any one Ministry, wizengamot, or other local body; it is, I suspect, the responsibility of the – rule-bound, ruling, and existing via legislative fiat – ICW. Which is, quite probably, the body that created it, once Secrecy meant that wizards could never be dealt with through any muggle-linked institution of justice, and international common wizarding concerns would need to take precedence over local and regional ways of handling things.
Plus they had just created a whole new class of – to the new post-Secrecy wizarding mindset extraordinarily dangerous – criminals that would need to be housed and dealt with. Secrecy violators and anti-Secrecy conspirators.
So where did the dementors come from, and who brought them in? Kingsley supposedly removed them from the governance and guarding of Azkaban after Voldwar II (in which, note, Voldemort successful suborned them away from Ministry/ICW control), but I doubt they have been entirely disposed of.
We aren’t told exactly what their origins are or who introduced them, though some have suspected they were bred out of boggarts somehow, which seems quite…fitting. (Jodel I think proposed this?)
The drain a magic user of their powers when left in their company too long, by inducing a continuous state of helpless terror and despair fed by one’s worst memories. Muggles can feel, but not see, them. They are eyeless, strictly sightless physically, but have no difficulty navigating in the physical world and have cloaked physical bodies of some sort that can manipulate physical objects. Their worst and singularly-characteristic power is their literally soul-sucking Kiss.
In addition to whatever sorts of wizarding criminals get sent to Azkaban, they guard, restrain, and when necessary consume the souls of those terrible criminals who violate Secrecy, particularly Death Eaters. Whose capacity for violence, according to terri’s precise analysis, they seem to drastically worsen. Oh, and they also likely have historically been used to control unmedicated werewolves before the introduction of Wolfsbane, driving them off from inhabited areas where people – particularly ignorant muggles – might be bitten by the human-mind-lacking, helplessly violent creatures. (I can’t recall who first proposed that idea, it’s not mine, but it’s fitting and works quite well with what we see in POA.)
JKR was inspired to create them by her experience of depression; specifically, the “absence of hope” that is one of its most profound characteristic symptoms.
(I think it was either swythyv or jodel who proposed that Voldemort’s all-encompassing fear of death over any pain, including possibly irreversible soul mutilation, and his psychopathy, might have been inspired by a childhood encounter with a dementor at his muggle orphanage…)
Their effects can be withstood to some degree for some indefinite time by use of magic such as the animagus charm – feeling more animal than human – and occlumency. But they can be driven off only, or apparently most effectively, with one particular spell.
The patronus charm.
A powerful, and I suspect inherently DARK but morally good, piece of magic that requires the use of a cored wand (invented way back in ancient Rome) to focus, but no clever wandwork to cast properly. Rather, from what we can see it requires strength of will, proper emotional resonance, and belief in oneself. An emotional resonance today mistakenly understood as deriving from “happy memories,” but what mary and I among others suspect is instead feelings of powerful love. Connection and protection joined together, that can be used to save oneself and others, cast in the symbolic form of one’s deepest heart or, supposedly but weakly, truest personal love. Cast not to destroy the dementor and the possibility of fear, but to drive it away.
“Expecto patronum!” An expectation and demand for protection, for a PROTECTOR, addressed to no specific source or authority. A radiant, non-physical but tangibly present protector – and, if needed, GUIDE – powerful enough to act against even the incarnation of soul-destroying fear itself and unable to be harmed or consumed by it.
A charm which most Death Eaters are supposedly incapable of, though we see more than one DE-linked person manage it (one Ministry and directly involved with controlling them; another the barman of their favorite hangout with some interesting implicit views on Albus and muggles; the third a literal halfblood I need not name….), while the average wizard on the street thinks it incredibly difficult to cast. A charm which we see Harry Potter first struggle with, when taught by a self-conflicted and self-deceiving werewolf, then successfully cast upon realizing he already has done so to protect himself and others, and teach later to a bunch of teenagers as part of an anti-Voldemort and anti-Ministry secret defense group.
A very, very curious set of images, no?
Some of this will be very important to the remaining portions of Indestructible that I am in the midst of completing, as well. I’ve become convinced, even against my own initial judgments and desire not too read too far into things, that Severus Snape really is fundamentally both a figure at, and an incarnation of, the heart of both the books and the moral-spiritual (not necessarily religious, but fundamentally human) issues of the European wizarding world in the Voldemort era. In some way he is touched by, bound up with, and/or riven by every single essential theme, question, or major issue I can find. It’s fascinating to keep unfolding. Loved and loathed, our most controversial figure, point of eternal tension and ground of innumerable conflicts. Betrayer and protector, faithless and faithful, Death Eater and Phoenix, halfblood wizard living in the muggle world...
Severus Snape, the secret heart of and hidden-in-plain-sight key to everything here.
So four final suggestive words for you to consider, in regard to the WW, its problems, magic, the books, and our professor:
Secrecy. Fidelius. Sectumsempra. Always.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}