How magical are magical beings?
May. 13th, 2023 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalker posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockInspired by Red Hen’s “History of Magic” essay, in which she hypothesizes the following:
Now, I don’t think I can categorically disprove any of these. On the other hand, there are alternative possibilities. I addressed the question of whether human magic is an aberration in “Heritability of Potterverse Magic.” (Short answer: not exactly. Wizards are extreme outliers, but their abilities are due to rare combinations of rare alleles of magic-related genes all humans have in some form.) And I provided an alternative to the “impacted flow” theory in “Magical Outbursts.”
Now I have questions about Point #3. Namely, do we know that the no other species has magical outbursts or Dark Arts-induced dementia?
We can be reasonably sure that the group average level of magical ability in some species is higher than the average in the human population as a whole. No one has any concern about ending up with a house-elf unable to perform useful magic. We have less solid information about goblins and Veela, but Veelas’ very form seems to depend on channeling a lot of magic. I suppose if there were such a thing as goblin Muggles and Squibs, they would try to hide that fact — but it’s hard to believe there wouldn’t be some suspicion by now. So even if more goblins are magically weak than is commonly known, they can all probably perform some magic. In that narrow sense, these species are more magical than humans.
But it doesn’t follow that therefore no house-elf, goblin, or Veela children ever have magical “accidents.” At least, not if you are willing to entertain the possibility that wizarding children’s outbursts might be the magical equivalent of not yet having full control over their bodily functions or emotions rather than their magic backing up until it finally bursts the dam, as it were. We certainly can’t say it follows based on observation, because we never see any children from these species.
Also, while the group average magical ability of these beings may be higher than the group average of humans, we don’t know that any individual beings are vastly more powerful than individual wizards. (With the possible exception of house-elves, but wizards may have imposed artificial selection for higher magical ability on them.) How much magic do we actually see goblins perform, after all? That vault-opening spell might rely on a trigger embedded in the door itself, requiring a powerful goblin to cast it but not necessarily to open the door. For that matter, goblins in public-facing jobs might be selected partly for higher-than-average magical ability to give wizards the impression that all goblins can perform effortless wandless magic.
Most of the goblin magic we hear about involves imbuing metal artifacts with magical properties. We don’t know how much magic this takes. It’s possible that most goblin crafting is no more magically demanding than, say, brewing potions — wandless magic most wizards are capable of performing. Really powerful artifacts, like the sword of Gryffindor, might be rare precisely because few goblins have the magical ability to make them.
We know even less about the average magical ability of Veela (we have no way of knowing whether the Bulgarian team’s flame-throwing mascots are representative or exceptional), let alone merpeople or centaurs. Their forms and that of giants probably requires magic to sustain, but not consciously. I don’t think we know of any magic performed by centaurs other than divination, and wizards don’t use wands for that either.
So it’s entirely possible that magical beings’ average magical ability is comparable to that of wizards (again, with the possible exception of house-elves, and possibly because of selective breeding). We just can’t tell because we see very little magic of any sort performed by magical beings and wizards aren’t trained in wandless spellcasting.
Similarly, we have no idea whether magical beings suffer from Dark Arts-related dementia after decades of performing wandless magic. Maybe Sirius’s understanding that his family beheaded their elves when they got too old to carry tea trays was slightly off target. Maybe that’s what the Blacks told the children, rather than openly admit that they beheaded elves who became dangerously paranoid and impulsive. If they save that delicate discussion until the kids are of age, Sirius would have missed out. He apparently only knows about the beheading at all because Elladora thought it would be sweet to mount the heads on the wall as memorials; he probably wouldn’t know if it’s standard practice in other rich pureblood households to kill unstable old elves and not mount their heads. That isn’t something they’d discuss at dinner parties, is it? And if the Hogwarts elves are keeping a few elderly relatives restrained — or give those relatives very special cups of cocoa laced with something painlessly lethal — would any of the humans at school ever know?
Goblins may have excellent reasons for wanting wands beyond symbolic equality. Maybe lacking wands really does dramatically hamper how much magic they can perform safely (both by frequency and by the magnitude of any given working). And maybe however cautious they are, many of them develop some degree of Dark Arts-induced dementia. Times they fail to restrain one of those afflicted elders, perversely, would reinforce wizards’ belief that goblins are inherently violent and therefore shouldn’t be allowed wands.
As I said, none of this proves that JOdel’s propositions can’t be true, if they’re your preferred model. But they don’t have to be true.
- Magical ability in humans is an aberration.
- We see this partly in the way that the flow of children’s magic is impacted and bursts out at unpredictable intervals.
- We see further support in the fact that no other magical species experiences such magical outbursts, needs wands, or suffers from the hypothetical Dark Arts-induced dementia.
Now, I don’t think I can categorically disprove any of these. On the other hand, there are alternative possibilities. I addressed the question of whether human magic is an aberration in “Heritability of Potterverse Magic.” (Short answer: not exactly. Wizards are extreme outliers, but their abilities are due to rare combinations of rare alleles of magic-related genes all humans have in some form.) And I provided an alternative to the “impacted flow” theory in “Magical Outbursts.”
Now I have questions about Point #3. Namely, do we know that the no other species has magical outbursts or Dark Arts-induced dementia?
We can be reasonably sure that the group average level of magical ability in some species is higher than the average in the human population as a whole. No one has any concern about ending up with a house-elf unable to perform useful magic. We have less solid information about goblins and Veela, but Veelas’ very form seems to depend on channeling a lot of magic. I suppose if there were such a thing as goblin Muggles and Squibs, they would try to hide that fact — but it’s hard to believe there wouldn’t be some suspicion by now. So even if more goblins are magically weak than is commonly known, they can all probably perform some magic. In that narrow sense, these species are more magical than humans.
But it doesn’t follow that therefore no house-elf, goblin, or Veela children ever have magical “accidents.” At least, not if you are willing to entertain the possibility that wizarding children’s outbursts might be the magical equivalent of not yet having full control over their bodily functions or emotions rather than their magic backing up until it finally bursts the dam, as it were. We certainly can’t say it follows based on observation, because we never see any children from these species.
Also, while the group average magical ability of these beings may be higher than the group average of humans, we don’t know that any individual beings are vastly more powerful than individual wizards. (With the possible exception of house-elves, but wizards may have imposed artificial selection for higher magical ability on them.) How much magic do we actually see goblins perform, after all? That vault-opening spell might rely on a trigger embedded in the door itself, requiring a powerful goblin to cast it but not necessarily to open the door. For that matter, goblins in public-facing jobs might be selected partly for higher-than-average magical ability to give wizards the impression that all goblins can perform effortless wandless magic.
Most of the goblin magic we hear about involves imbuing metal artifacts with magical properties. We don’t know how much magic this takes. It’s possible that most goblin crafting is no more magically demanding than, say, brewing potions — wandless magic most wizards are capable of performing. Really powerful artifacts, like the sword of Gryffindor, might be rare precisely because few goblins have the magical ability to make them.
We know even less about the average magical ability of Veela (we have no way of knowing whether the Bulgarian team’s flame-throwing mascots are representative or exceptional), let alone merpeople or centaurs. Their forms and that of giants probably requires magic to sustain, but not consciously. I don’t think we know of any magic performed by centaurs other than divination, and wizards don’t use wands for that either.
So it’s entirely possible that magical beings’ average magical ability is comparable to that of wizards (again, with the possible exception of house-elves, and possibly because of selective breeding). We just can’t tell because we see very little magic of any sort performed by magical beings and wizards aren’t trained in wandless spellcasting.
Similarly, we have no idea whether magical beings suffer from Dark Arts-related dementia after decades of performing wandless magic. Maybe Sirius’s understanding that his family beheaded their elves when they got too old to carry tea trays was slightly off target. Maybe that’s what the Blacks told the children, rather than openly admit that they beheaded elves who became dangerously paranoid and impulsive. If they save that delicate discussion until the kids are of age, Sirius would have missed out. He apparently only knows about the beheading at all because Elladora thought it would be sweet to mount the heads on the wall as memorials; he probably wouldn’t know if it’s standard practice in other rich pureblood households to kill unstable old elves and not mount their heads. That isn’t something they’d discuss at dinner parties, is it? And if the Hogwarts elves are keeping a few elderly relatives restrained — or give those relatives very special cups of cocoa laced with something painlessly lethal — would any of the humans at school ever know?
Goblins may have excellent reasons for wanting wands beyond symbolic equality. Maybe lacking wands really does dramatically hamper how much magic they can perform safely (both by frequency and by the magnitude of any given working). And maybe however cautious they are, many of them develop some degree of Dark Arts-induced dementia. Times they fail to restrain one of those afflicted elders, perversely, would reinforce wizards’ belief that goblins are inherently violent and therefore shouldn’t be allowed wands.
As I said, none of this proves that JOdel’s propositions can’t be true, if they’re your preferred model. But they don’t have to be true.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-15 12:22 am (UTC)That makes a lot of sense when we look at Kreacher. Kreacher's action led to Sirius' death. Not that Kreacher knew that would happen, but only knew he was doing everything he could to undermine Sirius.
Also when Hepzibah Smith dies it would explain why it was believed that her elder house elf had poisoned her accidentally. If as you suggest the purebloods at the ministry would say that shows what happens when you wait to long.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-18 02:19 am (UTC)But I think you're right about Hepzibah and Hokey! If the Ministry knew or suspected that older elves tend to get paranoid and violent, they wouldn't let Hokey off with "maybe her eyesight was going and she couldn't tell the difference between the rat poison canister and the sugar canister, tragic but not her fault." They'd go yep, Hepzibah was too sentimental to do the necessary thing, and we're throwing that dangerous elf in Azkaban!
If we want to be real sticklers, Dark Arts-induced dementia is hypothetical anyway, so we could also ignore that line of argument entirely. But if we choose to accept it, I think you're right that Hokey is another circumstantial hint (along with the Black's beheading practices) that elves might suffer it just as humans do.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-15 09:30 pm (UTC)I wonder if we approach this kind of discussions from the wrong angle. Maybe it isn't that humans are unicorns of the magical world who have both members who can't do magic and members who can. Perhaps it's the opposite- all humans just like other magical beings can do magic, but wizards are extra special (and because of that specialness more unstable). After all, most of the traditional magical branches we see in the books don't explicitly need wand-waving magic.
Yes, there could be a counterargument of muggles not being able to see dementors or thestrals, but those two always struck me as effects of some crazy wizards' experiments. And Harry not knowing that in theory muggle could for example cast weather controlling spell via ritual in place of a high concentration of magic, could be easily explained by the same brand of WW propaganda we see in text about witch burnings. It also would explain the unhinged idea we see in DH that somehow muggleborns stole magic . I know that JKR wrote it this way so DEs and Voldemort would look more fascist, but from Watsonian POV wizards who live in a reality where you are either born with magic or not, thinking a non-magical person can steal magic from someone else and make it their own suggests that split between wizards and muggles is nowhere near as clean as Rowling wants us to think.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-18 03:17 am (UTC)The difference between humans and, say, goblins, is the group average: most goblins fall in the "powerful Squib to powerful wizard" range (we don't know with what distribution), with vanishingly few in the "effectively no ability to control magic" range. It's kind of like how in some subpopulations of humans, everyone has adaptations for getting plenty of oxygen at high altitudes or absorbing more Vitamin D. They've been living in conditions where people with those adaptations survived and reproduced much more than people without them for thousands of years. Presumably at some point, goblins hit a genetic bottleneck at a time when for some reason their living conditions made it more likely for goblins with more control of magic to survive and reproduce. As a result, their group average magical ability is higher than for humans. But magic is still just as natural for humans as high-altitude adaptations are, even though only small subpopulations have either, and that doesn't change no matter how common the adaptations are for some other species. "This trait is rare" or "this trait to this degree is rare" doesn't equal "this trait is unnatural," basically.
Anyway, the Red Hen argument isn't just "this degree of magical ability is rarer among humans, therefore it is unnatural to humans" argument. It's also that the lack of children's magical outbursts and Dark Arts-induced dementia in magical beings proves that it's more natural to them (and therefore less so for humans). Except we don't know that they don't experience magical outbursts and Dark Arts-induced dementia (the latter of which is hypothetical anyway). So we can't use the supposed lack to prove anything. Plus there are just enough hints that house-elves could experience Dark Arts-induced dementia to argue that magic being just as natural or unnatural for them as it is for humans (only, again, with a different group average).