The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (33 page)

The final section of this chapter lists the common potions you’ll find in the wizarding world, most of which clean something, cure some ailment, or cause wizards to behave in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. Each of the following sections describes the purpose of the potion, lists its ingredients (if known), and discusses any additional mythological, Biblical, or literary background.

Muggles spend billions of dollars on creams, injections, and surgery to make a person appear younger. Even in fairy tales, witches and hags make themselves appear much younger (and beautiful), but never intentionally age themselves. So fixated are we, in fact, on making ourselves younger and in promoting youth that the term “ageism” was coined in the late 1960s, and has now come into common usage in the English language: an action indicating or portrayal that assumes a person is lesser because of age.

Yet this wizarding potion does the opposite, temporarily aging the potion drinker, either ever-so-slightly (say, by a few weeks or months) or a great deal (years or decades). An Age Line spell, however, can block an Aging Potion, so that no one is fooled by the new, older age.

This potion would get a lot of mileage in the Muggle world among 8-year-olds who really want to go on that roller-coaster ride and 20-year-olds who really want to go into that bar. Of course, one would expect powerful anti-aging spells (including the Age Line spell) at both types of locations.

From the Latin
amor
(love) and
tentamen
(attempt or effort), Amortentia is a powerful love potion, one that’s described as “most dangerous and powerful.” The potion doesn’t actually create love, but instead causes the taker to be strongly attracted to, and perhaps even obsessed with, a particular witch or wizard. Both Muggles and wizards can fall under the spell of Amortentia.

The danger of all love potions is that they eventually wear off, leaving the affected person no longer moony over his or her love object—much like a crush in the Muggle world. And even while the potion is in effect, the couple is not really in a relationship, because the one affected by Amortentia is completely befuddled by his or her infatuation. This potion, then, creates more of a temporary crush or infatuation than anything resembling true love. Not even wizards can create that!

This potion causes someone to babble nonsensically. Its ingredients— and, admittedly, its purpose—are a mystery. However, the opposite potion, a non-Babbling Beverage, would be mighty popular among people with verbose spouses/girlfriends/boyfriends and among exhausted parents of toddlers and tweens.

The word “babble” is found in a number of languages, including Latin (
balbulus
), Dutch (
babbelen
), Icelandic (
babbla
), and Sanskrit (
balbala-kr
). Because the word is associated with the sounds babies make before they learn to talk, babies likely make those same sounds (that is, “ba, ba, ba”) in all cultures; hence the same word is used the world over.

This potion acts like a blood transfusion, putting lost blood back into the body. The ingredients are unknown, but leeches—which are known for the opposite quality, called
bloodletting
—are probably not on the ingredients list.

Bloodletting, through the use of leeches, was a medical practice started by Ancient Egyptians and continued as late as the 1960s. Leeches were placed strategically on a patient’s body and allowed to feed on the patient’s blood until satiated—roughly a half hour. Recently, the practice has been revived to help patients who have insufficient blood drainage following surgeries. The leeches’ saliva produces an anti-clotting compound, a local anesthetic, and a good bacterium that kills harmful bacteria. University of Wisconsin scientists have even recently invented a synthetic leech.

Bulbadox Powder is one of those really awful potions that can be used only to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting user—it causes boils, which are large, painful infections on the skin. The name is likely derived from the word “bulbaceous” (a synonym for “bulbous”), which means bulb-shape (as, unfortunately, a raging boil is!). The ingredients of Bulbadox Powder are unknown, but a potion to cure boils contains nettles (see Chapter 10), snake fangs, stewed horned slugs, and porcupine quills. Stinging nettles, porcupine quills, and snake fangs are not the sort of soothing, calming ingredients you might expect to see in an anti-boil potion, but nettle tea has long been used as a treatment for boils, especially in Great Britain.

A Confusing and Befuddlement Draught is meant to befuddle and, therefore, distract the user. This potion is likely used on Muggles who have seen possible wizard activities, but think of how a rather evil wizard could find it useful in other situations: pouring a smidgeon into his dad’s nightcap just before he checks the clock to see how late he got home; sharing a little with a police officer as he or she is writing him a ticket or to a bank teller or store clerk who is counting out his change; slipping a little to a witnesses in a court case. A good wizard could easily go bad with powers such as these.

Confusing potions aren’t unique to the wizarding world. George Eliot wrote about a “confusing potion” in her 1876 novel,
Daniel Deronda
(her last). Long before that, Sophocles wrote that Athena tricked Ajax into confusing sheep with men—which is highly inconvenient during war-time! Key ingredients include lovage (historically used as a medicinal tea), scurvy-grass (once a treatment for scurvy or vitamin C deficiency), and sneezewort (a form of yarrow to which many people are allergic). See Chapter 10 for more on these ingredients, all of which you can grow in your backyard.

Forget what you know (or can look up) about the word “doxy.” This potion is
not
intended to get rid of women of ill repute (a “doxy”) as the name might suggest; in the wizarding world, a doxy is an evil, fairy-like animal with four arms, four legs, sharp teeth, and wings. Doxycide, derived from the word “doxy” and the suffix -cide, which means “to kill” (as in the word “pesticide”), is a black liquid that paralyzes doxies with just one squirt. Its ingredients are unknown.

To be “oblivious” is to be unaware, and “unction” refers to an oil or salve, usually a soothing or comforting one, used for religious or medicinal purposes. (“Unction” also refers to rubbing into or sprinkling oil onto the body; thus, Extreme Unction is the term used by the Catholic Church for the Anointing of the Sick, also called Last Rites.) Because we don’t know the ingredients for this potion, nor do we know anything about Dr. Ubbly, we can only assume that it is a salve of some sort that’s intended to make people oblivious to the world around them (and could, therefore, have a strong connection to—or even be the same potion as— a Confusing Concoction) or forget something uncomfortable or terrifying they’ve seen.

One note, however: doctors don’t exist in the wizarding world, so this potion may have originated in the Muggle world. “Healer Ubbly” would be more likely, if this were, indeed, a uniquely wizard potion. Ubbly, on the other hand, evokes a strong sense of a bubbling cauldron (ubbly-bubbly).

The Draught of Living Death is a sleep potion unlike any other—it produces a sleep so powerful that it mimics death. Could this be what Sleeping Beauty was given? Or Juliet?

This complicated potion—which starts off as a black-colored potion and eventually changes to a pale pink—contains all the best sleep aids.