The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter (61 page)

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photo credit 67.1
)

Opinion on the true nature of poltergeists is divided. Some investigators claim that poltergeists are really “psychic disturbances” caused by youngsters with extraordinary abilities. Skeptics claim that these disturbances are actually hoaxes staged by imaginative teenagers. True believers insist that the hauntings are the genuine manifestations of a uniquely petty and childish breed of ghost. Just how juvenile some poltergeists can be is apparent from a popular nineteenth-century English story called “The Case of the Stockwell Ghost,” in which the spirit in question likes to knock over beer kegs and hurl rotten eggs at cats. It is best, however, never to underestimate the potential malice of a poltergeist. More than one of them has been known to burn down houses with the unfortunate occupants still inside.

In recent years, poltergeists have received a great deal of exposure on television and in the movies, and alleged poltergeist sightings remain common throughout Europe and North America. Fortunately, most poltergeist hauntings last only a few days before the troublesome spirits vanish on their own.

otions, remarkable brews with remarkable ingredients, have always been an essential part of the magician’s toolkit. The
witches
of classical mythology cooked up potions to restore youth, turn men into animals, and make themselves invisible. Medieval legends and fairy tales tell of sleeping potions, love potions, potions of forgetfulness, and potions to cause jealousy and strife. Alice, in her journey through Wonderland, drinks one potion that makes her small and another that makes her tall. And it’s a potion that transforms Harry and Ron, at least outwardly, into two of their least favorite people: Crabbe and Goyle.

Legends about the magical powers of potions (from the Latin
potio
, meaning “drink”) no doubt evolved from the very real effects that many substances can have on the body and mind. Tonics that bring on sleep, induce hallucinations, cause paralysis, speed up or slow down the heart, and intoxicate or cloud the brain, have long been known and used both to heal and to harm. It is not hard to imagine that with the right combination of ingredients, a potion might cause the body to change shape or turn the emotions of the drinker from hate to love.

A striking thing about many potions, including those in the Hogwarts recipe book, is the revolting ingredients they often contain. This venerable tradition is traceable to ancient Greece and Rome, where real potions, used as medicines as well as for their supposed magical effects, typically called for bats’ blood, crushed beetles,
toads
, feathers, pulverized lizards, bird and animal claws,
snake
skeletons, and animal entrails, as well as many kinds of dried and fresh herbs. Other popular ingredients, as immortalized by the witches of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, include eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.

Why beetles? Why toads? There seems to be no explaining many potion ingredients in a way that makes sense to our modern minds. It’s clear, however, that the common use of certain animal parts reflected the ancient belief that the desirable qualities of an animal could be gained by eating that animal. For example, since bats were believed to be able to see in the dark, drinking a potion containing bats or bats’ eyes (or rubbing your own eyes with bats’ blood) was thought to improve vision. Similarly, the legs of a hare would convey speed and the flesh or shell of a tortoise (which lives to an old age) would increase longevity. Ron and Harry exploit a similar principle by adding hairs from the heads of Crabbe and Goyle to Polyjuice Potion in order to transfer their foes’ physical features to themselves. (An ancient superstition warns of leaving your clipped hair or nails around where an evil witch or
wizard
might find them and use them against you.) The frequent use of toads in potions may have come about because of the very real effects of a nasty substance that toads secrete when frightened—as they must have been on the way to the
cauldron
. This toxic chemical, sometimes known as “toad’s milk,” can cause hallucinations and has an effect on the heart similar to that of the drug digitalis, which strengthens the contractions of the heart muscle while lowering the heart rate.

Affecting the heart, in quite a different way, is the purpose of love potions. Love potions are banned at Hogwarts, but—as Ron knows only too well—this doesn’t stop students from ordering them from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. Also known as philters, these brews have been part of magical lore and actual practice since antiquity, when they were as common as chewing gum is today. Manufactured and sold by local wise women and fortune-tellers, love potions were reputed to make the drinker fall instantly in love with the giver. They were used primarily although not exclusively by women (men preferred using
spells
) and were usually slipped into the beloved’s favorite beverage. As usual, ingredients were bizarre; one authentic recipe calls for the pulverized bones from the left side of a toad that had been eaten by ants. In ancient Rome so many people became sick from drinking love potions that early emperors decreed the sale of philters illegal. This apparently did little to deter their use, which continued for centuries.

Aristocratic ladies were not above purchasing love potions, either for their own use or to win the right spouse for a son or daughter
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photo credit 68.1
)

By the Middle Ages, love potions had become more palatable, and most were made of herbal rather than animal ingredients. A typical formula might include oranges,
mandrake
root, vervain, and fern seed, mixed in water, tea, or wine. Love potions began to go out of fashion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when spells and
charms
became the preferred method of wooing by magic. Today’s most favored love potions work in a different way, and are known as perfumes.

The African boomslang, whose skin is found in Polyjuice Potion, is one of the most lethal snakes in the world. The lacewing fly, found in the same nasty brew, is a fragile, delicate-looking creature—yet it has been described as an “insect predator extraordinaire” for its ability to sink its venomous jaws into more than two hundred aphids and caterpillars in a single week. Many of the ingredients used in potions, both at Hogwarts and throughout history, have associations with poison or injury. Others, like the common weed knotgrass (another Polyjuice ingredient, historically used to stop nosebleed), have medicinal uses, or, like the scarab beetles used in Wit-Sharpening Potion, have been used as
amulets
to guard against evil. Here are a few more of our favorites:

ASPHODEL/WORMWOOD
Even as a beginning first-year, Hermione knows that powdered root of asphodel, added to an infusion of wormwood, creates a powerful sleeping potion known as the Draught of Living Death. She’s probably read that although asphodel was used in ancient times to treat jaundice, eczema, swollen feet, cracked skin, and gas, this tall white-flowered plant was also cultivated near tombs, where it was regarded as the food preferred by the dead. Wormwood is one of the most bitter plants known. Used in ancient medicine to fight against infection and to treat disorders of the stomach, liver, heart, and brain, it was also believed to counteract the effects of poisoning by hemlock and the bite of the sea dragon! However, habitual or excessive consumption of wormwood (which was once the essential flavoring in the drink absinthe) can result in stupor, delirium, and paralysis.