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.
