USAmerican 'Wizards' and 'Witches'?

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C3075
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: USAmerican 'Wizards' and 'Witches'?
Reply To: [Yahoo! #2956] Re: USAmerican 'Wizards' and 'Witches'?
Date: 6/29/00 10:28 pm  (ET)

> Well, I don't know if ALL wizard have that same attitude, after all
there are a lot of mixed marriages and muggle born wizards.

Yes, there are a lot of muggle-born students, who spend summer vacation
with their muggle families and presumably their muggle childhood friends,
and there's no reason to think that they break up with all those people
later on. If they marry a wizard spouse and have wizard children,
surely the children would still go visit grandma and grandpa and the
aunts and uncles.

And we have heard of a number of mixed marriages. Of course, it wouldn't
be unusual for a person to go visit her old schoolfriend and fall in love
and marriage with her old friend's brother or brother's best friend. But
we were told that Tom Riddle Sr didn't know his wife was a witch until
they'd been married for months, and if she had been his best friend's
sister's friend, he'd have known that both girls were witches before he
even met them.

So there must be some way that mages and muggles meet and marry in which
the mage is incognito. I'm inclined to think that a number of mages
'earn' their livings in the muggle world (the place in Diagon Alley that
changes money, muggle to magic, is not just for muggle-born students to
buy their textbooks). Surely wizardry would be a great help to an auto
mechanic or copy machine technician -- he can fix all kinds of problems,
with his wand disguised as some sort of electronic test tool, and people
think it's just that he's so good at his job.

But my guess is that quite a number of them work as charlatans. It's
easier for the three-card monte man when he doesn't have to
sleight-of-hand the cards, he just transfigures them. Wizard
fortune-tellers trained by Professor Trelawney are not likely to be
more accurate that muggle fortune-tellers. And of all those people who
want to sell us love potions, curse our enemies, and cure our ailments,
a few are For Real (but we have no way of knowing which ones). While
this is all terribly illegal, the Ministry of Magic turns a blind eye,
because there is no danger that this will lead Muggles to know about
magic, as Muggles are so firmly certain that it is fraud, and besides,
people need to make a living.

And if the wizards are living/working among the Muggles, the wizards
may well have emigrated to the New World with the Muggles. But I think
it's cuter that they didn't, thus leaving 'The American (half) Century'
with USA as far behind Britain and Europe in wizardry as it was ahead
in technology.

> I would think, that unless all the USA wizards are (or were) native,
then they had to have immigrated from somewhere....

I was thinking, if no wizards emigrated to the New World, the only wizards
in the New World would be muggle-born or descended from muggle-born
wizards. The Native Americans were here long enough for their wizards
to have developed a tradition of wizardry and a training program for
their own children and Native American muggle-born wizard children, but
I can see why in North America they wouldn't want to reveal themselves
to Euro-Americans by offering to teach Euro-American muggle-born wizard
children. (I have been given to understand that Latin America is so
mestizo that maybe the puebla indigena wizards would be willing to teach
Ladino children.) And I am thinking that the Euro-Americans haven't been
here long enough to have developed a tradition of wizardry from scratch.