Societas Magica

Many of us have series that we love that had a profound impact on us growing up. This love might even follow us into adulthood. For me that was the Harry Potter series.[1] Love is powerful. Indeed, what initially saves Harry, the boy who lived, is his mother’s love and ultimately Lord Voldemort’s downfall is his inability to love which is only fueled by his backstory. But, what distinguishes good love from bad love? How do we find it and can love be fabricated? These questions are indirectly addressed in the series but it is not the first place such themes appear. I write to you as a medievalist trained in Iberian Studies with one of my main research focuses being the representation and use of magic in Castilian-produced literature as appropriated and influenced by Andalusi and Morisco sources. As such, some central questions I explore are what constitutes good or bad love and whether or not magic can be used to create it.

While I am not specialized in Harry Potter, it is a large part of who I am—as both a person and a scholar. It is also worth mentioning that the quotes I use from the series themselves I pulled from my original copies that I read growing up. In fact, the first four were released before I was eleven, the age young witches and wizards start attending Hogwarts. As such, upon their first read I was still eagerly waiting for my owl post inviting me to attend the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. When that did not arrive I wrote myself my own letter, enjoyed the films, perused Mugglenet, and awaited the sequels at midnight book-release parties hosted by the local Borders. 

Whenever I am asked what peaked me interest in what I study, the answer in large part is Harry Potter. Though of course not the only push towards medieval studies, a handful of my generation of medievalists have shared similar stories of inspiration: be it the magic of the world or the Latin derived spells. It is this love of the series that makes me even more excited to write this blog during the weeks leading to the publication of my first monograph developed from my dissertation, available July 2021 through Routledge and entitled Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberian Literature. While Harry Potter is not credited in the acknowledgements of my book itself, it is in my dissertation and it is for this reason I am eager to write this blog on medievalism and representation of love and magic within the series.

Since the start of the series over twenty years ago, multiple companion editions flooded bookstores inviting readers to consider possible antecedents and modern variations to the many magical references. This curiosity was not limited to Potterheads (the in-group term for Harry Potter fans) but also piqued academic interest in exploring the possible medieval allusions and inspirations present in the text through articles on the Arthurian echoes, pedagogical approaches, Latinisms, and fantastic beasts. As Heather Arden and Kathryn Lorenz state, “[a]lthough the non-wizard (Muggle) society outside Hogwarts has moved into the twenty-first century—with automobiles, telephones and trains—and the wizards occasionally move in that world, Hogwarts itself is still rooted in the Middle Ages” (55). In fact, as the character professor Cuthbert Binns shares with his students during the 1993-1994 academic year, Hogwarts was founded “over a thousand years ago,” which would be in the tenth century (Chamber of Secrets 150). A year later the reader encounters Harry working on a summer written assignment on fourteenth-century witch-burning, drawing from Bathilda Bagshot’s A History of Magic (Azkaban 1-2, 5). This fictional textbook states that Muggles “were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognizing it” (2). There was fear but, particularly in our-world’s medieval Iberia, there was simultaneous admiration and desire for magic as well. I would modify Bagshot’s statement by suggesting that magic was particularly difficult to pinpoint as a whole, thus explaining Muggles’ supposed trouble in properly recognizing it. Within my monograph, I define magic, and particularly love magic in Iberia, as “an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power, and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees” (Menaldi 9). Essentially what determined if something was to be punished or praised depended on who you asked and the result of the intervention. Indeed, there was fear but there was also admiration and a desire to control this illusive power. 

Returning to the series and Harry’s summer assignment, as Alessandra Petrina highlights, “Rowling, and this is greatly to her credit, does not strive for historical accuracy” as that essay should have been more focused on “heretic-burning” though perhaps this accuracy would have been “less interesting to a young reader” (98).[2] In fact, as suggested above with my own definition of magic, this interest in spotting deviance via heresy (particularly through the cultural and religious contact of the three main Abrahamic religions) is a large focus of my book. In accordance with Petrina, the balance between “the fascination of medievalism and the unobtrusive presence of modern comforts” is what makes Harry Potter’s world so compelling (100). Just as Muggles cannot see Hogwarts—“if a Muggle looks at it, all they see is a moldering old ruin with a sign over the entrance saying DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, UNSAFE” (Goblet 166)—so too can this boundary reveal the power of imagination and our collective interest in the mysterious that so many conveniently relegate to an unreachable past. Perhaps, just like how Hogwarts has two faces, so too can the liminal divide exist between the ordinary and the extraordinary or between the medieval past and the contemporary. 

Wendy Doniger credits Rowling with the “magic art of bricolage” of being able to create new stories from older ones as indeed “[m]yths survive for centuries, in a succession of incarnations, both because they are available and because they are intrinsically charismatic.” Whether or not Rowling deliberately drew on medieval sources is irrelevant, as the lingering presence of certain themes, characters, and references is palpable with each of its reincarnations if one knows where to look and, like Doniger’s title suggests, can “spot the source”.[3] For instance, Arden and Lorenz compare the use of magical objects in the series with those used in the surviving fictions of French twelfth-/thirteenth-century authors, Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France (56-61). Coincidentally, I too discuss these two authors and some of their works in Chapter Two of my book as earlier examples that may have influenced a fourteenth-century Castilian romance, the Libro del caballero Zifar. Petrina also views Harry Potter himself as a “modern-day Perceval” (106). All this to say, connections can be everywhere, whether they are deliberate or not. The Harry Potter series also frequently references Merlin and Nicholas Flamel (familiar figures to medievalists) and many of the characters’ names have possible medieval or astrological echoes as highlighted by some scholars. 

One such reference I have not seen mentioned elsewhere however is the singer Celestina Warbeck who is first referenced in the Chapter of Secrets (34). Later in the Half-Blood Prince, Mrs. Weasley, one of Warbeck’s fans, listens to her latest song at Christmas.[4] The song in question is one of her jazzy numbers—“A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love”—and the reader even gets snippets of her lyrics which allude to the singer’s ability to concoct love in her cauldron (Half-Blood Prince 330). I would stipulate that her first name may be a reference to one of the more famous Iberian fictional witches, Celestina, as imagined by late fifteenth-/early sixteenth-century Fernando de Rojas tragicomedy La tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea or more commonly known as the Celestina. Chapter 4 of my book is devoted to exploring this text. While his only extant published work, the Celestina experienced great fame and was translated into multiple languages throughout Europe including some contemporaneous English versions. 

Rojas’s work, and this character in particular, continued to inspire further adaptations throughout the twenty-first century supporting the possible allusion or inheritance in this singer’s name. What cements this connection even further for me is the choice of lyrics in Warbeck’s song suggesting that she can create “some hot strong love to keep you warm tonight” (Half-Blood Prince 330). Rojas’s Celestina has many professions, but most notably she is a go-between, a mediator for sexual encounters. Throughout the drama she facilitates the liaisons between her client Calisto and his previously unrequited target Melibea, whom she—I argue though there is some debate among scholars as to whether or not her actions are indeed magical—enchants to fall in love. With Celestina’s intervention the now-lovers would often meet at night, playing into the singer’s lyrics. As a well-known witch figure, perhaps this Celestina inspired this singer’s name and song. Though of course her name could be a mere connection to the celestial as many names in the series are drawn from the stars, but I would argue it could also be in reference to this famous “witch.”[5]

Discussions similar to those above have been present in panels of the International Congress of Medieval Studies and major themes of the series themselves provoke conversations at the annual academic Harry Potter Conference hosted by the Chestnut Hill College. There have even been recent museum displays like the British Library’s and New York Historical Society’s Harry Potter: A History of Magic exhibition, which later published a book on their curated objects. These exhibitions were held in 2017 and 2018 marking twenty years since the publication of the first book in the series (the UK and US versions were published a year apart). This exhibition coupled instances from the series with historical counterparts spanning centuries including examples not only from Europe but elsewhere across the globe. Despite there being potential Iberian examples of almost all the items on display—as there could be with nearly any region—there are only two Iberian references in this collection (with neither a concrete certainty). These objects are: a set of apothecary jars for crab eyes, dragon’s blood, and copper sulphate from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries (likely from Spain), and an eighteenth-century folio of the plant adonis hellebore, possibly from Portugal (History of Magic 49, 92). The exhibition, and later book, are divided into the subjects studied at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, namely: Potions, Herbology, Charms, Astronomy, Divination, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Care of Magical Creatures allowing the “exhibition curators to delve deeper into the theme of enchantment throughout the ages” (Harrison 13). It is designed not only for first-generation Harry Potter readers (like myself) but any visitor, as it was meant to showcase “a new and perhaps unexpected lens through which to understand Harry Potter’s world” (Mirrer 7). What makes this world so exciting is its dependence on “centuries of popular tradition” and the ever-present “human enterprise and endeavor” of finding solutions to universal concerns (Harrison 13, 17). 

Like the Iberian examples, there are only two instances of love magic in this exhibition alongside other practices and objects like tarot, palmistry, mandrake root, phoenixes and unicorns. The love references are from the nineteenth and twentieth century with a Thai divination manual that dictates possible successes and failures of romantic pairings based on Chinese zodiacal signs describing which constellations are favorable, and a love charm from the Netherlands as exemplified with an oyster shell adorned with star signs (154-155, 125). As one could guess, while neither of these examples are medieval there are many premodern examples of such practices as well. Some examples like philocaptiolove spells or wax images I explore throughout my monograph, though indeed without the explicit tie to the Wizarding World. Following in this exhibition’s footsteps, for this blog post let us read through certain passages of the series highlighting possible links to premodern Iberian examples and the question of love.

Throughout the series we learn multiple ways in which Harry is similar to Lord Voldemort, or rather Tom Riddle junior. Harry is repeatedly reassured by Professor Albus Dumbledore that what matters is not how they are alike, but how they are not: “[i]t is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (Chamber of Secrets 333). Given that love (or the lack thereof) can be argued to be fundamental in one way or another to both of these characters, this dichotomy could bring us to the distinction between supposed good and bad love. In Chapter 3 of my book, I discuss Juan Ruiz Archpriest of Hita’s fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor. Throughout its pages the Christian author explains to his readers in his semi-autobiography the difference between good and foolish (or bad) love through his supposed personal experience. Ultimately, for him, good love is spiritual and enhances one’s connection to God while bad love is more physical and leads to sins. Throughout the text he implies that, despite his actions, good love is the answer. He warns his readers that if their take-away from his anecdotes is the opposite, that they should not fault him as everything depends on how you interpret it. Things boil down to how one understands them, explaining how a concept like “love” can have both good and bad variations. This concern about love is not unique to Juan Ruiz as many other contemporaneous authors debate this in the Christian, Islamicate, and Jewish spheres.

While this distinction between types of love is never directly discussed in the series, I see love as the center to Harry’s success and Lord Voldemort’s ultimate failure. At the end of the first book when young Harry confronts Lord Voldemort via Quirrell, he realized that merely his touch saves him. After, as he recovers in the hospital wing, Dumbledore tells Harry that:

If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.(Sorcerer’s Stone 299)

Margaret Mauk sees this as the first example of how a mother’s love, “felt by her very absence” allows Harry to embody the role of hero, in this case passively (133). Here Harry relies on no spell or active movement, he “simply holds on, hoping for survival, while his mother’s absent love defeats Voldemort—temporarily but violently” thus establishing the first way in which mothers are “elevated throughout the texts, creating a pseudo-hagiography of motherhood” (133, 124). Continuing on the similar divides of medieval authors, I would suggest this would fall under the category of “good love,” a love inaccessible to Voldemort no matter what he tries.

In fact, in the Goblet of Fire when he finally returns to full corporal form, he uses Harry’s blood, the “blood of the foe” as he wanted to “rise again more powerful” than before (657). He wanted Harry’s blood so that “the lingering protection his mother once gave him would then reside in [his] veins too” (Goblet of Fire 657). While this does make physical contact between the two now possible, since this love is not used properly it does not ultimately lead to Voldemort’s victory. 

Perhaps this is due to his backstory which we learn alongside Harry through memory snippets and guesswork with Dumbledore’s Pensieve in the Half-Blood Prince. Merope Gaunt, Voldemort’s mother, and descendant of Salazar Slytherin—a familial line dating back to the Middle Ages—is depicted as an abused and misunderstood young woman who is infatuated with the attractive Muggle Tom Riddle senior in the village of Little Hangleton. Her brother, Morfin Gaunt, constantly teases her for “peering through the hedges at him” and is later reprimanded for hexing the Muggle, thus producing this memory from Ministry employee Bob Ogden (210). 

While there is no concrete proof, Dumbledore’s theory is that she used a love potion as during a hot summer day it would not have been difficult to get him to drink something. This led to “a tremendous scandal” due to the gossip produced by these two running off to marry only a few months after the memory Harry—and the reader—had just witnessed (213). Dumbledore fills in the gaps in order to explain Tom’s reappearance in the village without his wife some time later as he told the village he had been “hoodwinked” or, rather, bewitched (214).[6] Dumbledore views this as his enchantment being lifted because Merope, convinced that “he would by now have fallen in love with her in return” or  “thought he would stay for the baby’s sake,” stopped giving him the potion (214). She was wrong as she (nor Tom Riddle junior) heard from him again.[7] Out of despair Merope Riddle, abandoned by her husband, no longer used magic—whether a deliberate choice or a consequence of her broken heart, as once again Dumbledore speculates, remains unclear (262). Her death shortly after her son’s birth, lead to Lord Voldemort’s childhood in Wool’s Orphanage. 

It is his backstory that lays the groundwork for his ultimate demise, which I see as intrinsically tied into love. Unlike Harry, it would appear as if his mother did not gift him with love. Merope’s love was forever directed to Tom Riddle senior and it is the lack of reciprocated love that lead to her death and Lord Voldemort’s parentless upbringing. He was not made out of love nor was he later loved in any form during his formative years. As such, not receiving this protective “good love” he remained incapable of understanding love and its universal power. It is important to note that love can come in all shapes and forms with various origins—Divine, maternal, paternal, fraternal, or even from the self. Despite his own challenges, Harry finds love in many ways whereas Lord Voldemort does not. Indeed, he is rather arrogant and (one could argue) has a type of self-love, but it is better understood as self-aggrandizement and a will to, like his fabricated name suggests, fly from death with what he falsely perceives to be the ultimate power. Contrary to this, time and time again we are told how love, “good love,” is what bridges the divide between the imaginary and the real, between life and death. I would stipulate that love is the ultimate magic, that which transcends divides.

Some fans have pointed out the parallels between love potions and date-rape drugs, and rightfully cringe at the notion of Lord Voldemort’s flaws stemming from his love magic conception.[8] What I suggest it that, while this is a factor, it is even more significant that he was neither truly loved by either parent, nor did he never find love anywhere else. While not in the original books, in the film adaptation of The Order of the Phoenix Harry tells Lord Voldemort that “[he is] the weak one and [he’ll] never know love or friendship.” This scene occurs shortly after Voldemort momentary takes over Harry’s body in the hopes that Dumbledore would sacrifice the boy to try and kill him. In the book, it is at this moment that Harry’s “heart fills with emotion” just as the pain in his forehead, and subsequently Voldemort, leaves (Phoenix 816). This occurs just before Dumbledore reminds Harry that Voldemort’s “failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been [his] greatest weakness” (Phoenix 814). Voldemort’s fear of death is ultimately due to his misunderstanding and misuse of love. 

During Harry’s conversation with a deceased Dumbledore in limbo at the King’s Cross station near the end of the series, Dumbledore calls Harry the “true master of death” as he does not run away from it but rather knows that there are worse things (Deathly Hallows 720). As he reminds Harry, he must not “pity the dead” but should rather “[p]ity the living, and above all, those who live without love” (Deathly Hallows 722). This suggests that love is the ultimate power, that which can transcend death and ultimately remove the fear of death altogether. Love bound Lily to Harry and protected him. Voldemort tried to harness this for himself by binding himself further with Harry in sharing his blood, and by extension his mother’s protection, but he “misunderstood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice” for, had he truly understood it, he would not be who he was and “might never have murdered at all” (Deathly Hallows 710). Ultimately, Voldemort feared the supposed finality of death, rejected any form of love, and thus failed to grasp how it is through love that one’s essence lives on beyond the veil through which he sent so many. 

Love is that which can transcend death but, as Professor Horace Slughorn reminds his students in the Half-Blood Prince, “[i]t is impossible to manufacture or imitate love” (186). As such, it remains the one greatest force Voldemort could never possess, no matter how many murders he committed or followers he recruited. Earlier in the series, Rita Skeeter slanderously suggests that Hermione Granger used a love potion on Viktor Krum and reminders her readers that “Love Potions are, of course, banned at Hogwarts” (Goblet 512). While not the case in that particular instance, the prohibition of anything never means that people do not partake in it but, rather, usually the opposite. Acquiring love potions at Hogwarts became even easier once Fred and George created their joke shop, Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, which sold “an array of violently pink products” which, according to Fred, worked for up to twenty-four hours and were the “best range of love potions you’ll find anywhere” (Half-Blood Prince 120). In Professor Slughorn’s Advanced Sixth Year Potions class, he invites his students to identify potions, one of which is Amortentia, “the most powerful love potion in the world” (185).[9] Due to its effects Slughorn suggests that “[i]t is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room” (186). While indeed, actual love cannot be fabricated, this claim of its supposed dangers further reinforces the notion regarding the power of love as well as the consequences of some of its misuses.

Some months later, just before Slughorn’s Christmas party, Hermione tells Harry how she overheard a dozen girls, including Romilda Vane, “trying to decide how to slip [Harry] a love potion” in order to score an invitation to the party as they had all purchased some from Fred and George (Half-Blood Prince 305). Ultimately, Harry is warned to “be careful [of] what [he] drink[s]” and that despite the ban on Weasley products at the school, they are still entering the grounds “disguised as perfumed and cough potions” (306). Harry manages to avoid Romilda’s advances by never consuming any gift she gave him, however an unopened box of Christmas chocolates is mistakenly consumed by Ron on his birthday on March first, rendering him completely infatuated with Romilda. It is then that Harry and the reader learn that love potions strengthen with time “the longer they’re kept” as they turn to Slughorn for an antidote (395). 

Throughout the series there is no mention of a love potion being planted on an unsuspecting person through the help a mediator. Granted, one could argue that the Weasley twins function as mediators for the clients who purchase these potions, but it is still the clients themselves who are responsible for getting their love interest to consume the concoction. While they may not be creating the spell themselves, they are actively involved. This is not the case with many of the examples I explore in my book on love magic. Historically the would-be lover usually depends not only upon the products but also the skills of the magic practitioner, taking a more passive role in their target’s ensorcellment. 

For instance, in my previously mentioned third chapter, regarding the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor, I focus on Don Melon’s employment of Trotaconventos, a go-between often credited as the inspiration for the Celestina I mentioned earlier (both of them also likely indebted to earlier Andalusi manifestations). Through her strategic manipulations Don Melon secures some alone time with Doña Endrina, after which they wed. Another example I discuss in Chapter Five is don Diego’s lighting of a specially crafted candle that entrances doña Inés into wandering to his bedroom each night only to wake up the next morning in her room unaware of what had happened, relegating any details she retains to a bad nightmare. 

While food items are occasionally mentioned in the concoction of these spells, at least in my examples, the target does not need to consume anything (as is the case in the series) in order to be bewitched, nor do they necessarily need to be in direct contact with the object(s) used—the go-between simply had to have some object of the victim in order to complete the spell. Unlike the love potions in the series, the historical examples I explore had indefinite shelf-lives, did not strengthen with time, and needed to be actively disabled. The magical interventions are, however, often placed in stark contrast to more “desirable” alternatives (for instance, the will of God or the norms of society), further playing on this divide between “good” and “bad” behavior or love.

With all of this, I do not mean to suggest that Rowling included these parallels intentionally, and I absolutely do not mean to suggest that she was directly familiar with the premodern Iberian sources I reference, but rather that there is an interconnectivity to it all. Just as the recent exhibitions have done, there is a palpable debt to the past and its numerous manifestations of love magic. Considering how certain instances of love and love magic in the series connect to historical parallels can enrich our reading of each. No, the Harry Potter series is not an updated version of the Castilian Libro de buen amor attempting to distinguish between right and wrong or good versus bad love. Nor is it a how-to guide for the practice of love magic. However, the Harry Potter series does invite its readers to consider the universal power of love and the dangers associated with its misunderstandings and misuses. Time and time again, in both my premodern examples and those from the series, we see how when magic is used to control and manipulate another, it eventually fails. It fails not because it does not work, but rather because that which it tries to imitate—various forms of love—is more powerful. No matter how hard one tries, it is love that transcends confinement, difference, enchantment, and even death.

Parallels can be everywhere—even across time or cultures. All forms of magic have a way of fascinating us (Muggles and witches/wizards alike) and no matter the attempts at containing it, it finds a way to flourish and (particularly when used in fiction) ignite our minds to think about our society and its dominant powers. Whether or not those we love, or love us, continue to be physically present, it is that love—divine, familial, romantic, or self—which protects us, as Harry exemplifies. Only when it is deformed, twisted, or otherwise altered through hatred or selfishness does it fester and break. No matter how magical we are, some things cannot be made.

If you would like to learn more about how magic was censured, imitated, and appropriated throughout the centuries and across various languages and cultures in Iberia, as showcased through the literary representation of love magic, check out Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberia.[10] I may not mention Harry Potter in its pages, but know that the series is in part responsible (albeit indirectly) for the research I now do.