Religion, Wizard genesis, Mars is bright

[dfrankiswork at netscape.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 40771

Religion

Some listies have pointed out that Christmas and Easter are just the names of school vacations in Britain, and therefore don't necessarily have religious connotations.  For many British children, I am sure this is true.

However, at Hogwarts, they *do* celebrate Christmas (we don't really know about Easter).  Hagrid puts up a Christmas tree.  Peeves sings Christmas carols: that he makes up his own words doesn't change the fact that carols are part of the culture he is lampooning (side note: it is amazing how much JKR packs in, isn't it?  Even our list pastime of FILK writing has its parallel in the Potterverse).  It is misleading to say that the one has pagan origins and the other is now purely cultural: they are part of a culture profoundly influenced by Christianity.

Perhaps most crucially, the Weasley family exchange presents, and apparently make no effort not to call them Christmas presents.  More than anything else, this suggests to me that wizarding families are, in this respect as so many others, right in the British cultural mainstream.  Being a wizard doesn't affect your religion.  We may therefore expect to see wizards and witches from other than a Christian (cultural) background.

(I do have some ideas as to why on the one hand they are palpably British, while on the other they are apparently completely out of touch about things like escalators, but it touches on what Grey Wolf would call metathinking, and I will reserve them for another post.)
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Wizarding Genetics

I do not pretend to understand genetics beyond simple Mendelian BB and Bb type manipulations, so no doubt it is possible to work out schemes that account for the perceived numbers of Muggle-born wizards and Squibs, as well as, of course, the total numbers of wizards as a whole.  However, it has always struck me that a genetic explanation of how people come to be wizards or not may be barking up the wrong tree.

How about a developmental explanation? What makes you a wizard is not your genes, which make you human, but what happens in the womb.  Embryos developing in an environment where magic is present may themselves be likely, but not certain, to become magical themselves.  In addition, some developing in Muggle families may also inadvertently be exposed to magic and become wizards too.  Perhaps the Grangers spent much of a crucial period in Hermione's development in the vicinity of Diagon Alley - possibly in second hand bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, which have much of the atmosphere of Ollivander's about them.  There is a small amount of canon support for this, in that the Hogwarts Quill, IIRC, goes into action at birth, not conception.

I think, though, that any explanation has to contend with a pretty basic difficulty: the genesis of wizards is essentially a natural phenomenon, and therefore unlike most other magic, which is intentional in nature (the existence of magical beasts and plants is perhaps similar).  IOW, most magic reflects the intention of the wizard or witch.  This is apparently not the case with birth, in the sense that neither wizards nor Muggles have any way of influencing whether their offspring are magical.  (It has occurred to me that the reason Squibs are rare might be infanticide: what do you suppose the Malfoys would do if they had a Squib baby?  The Fudges?)

Given that (IMO) the essence of magic is that it represents abrogation of the laws of the physical world by human intention (even some magical beasts are the result of magical experimentation), in what sense is it a natural phenomenon?  Where do other beings (Dementors, merpeople, etc) come from?  Without a clear answer to this question it is IMO hard to address the genesis of individual wizards.
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Astronomy/Astrology - NOTE: my knowledge of astrology is pretty basic, so please correct any errors.

'Mars is bright tonight'.  This is puzzling if regarded as a sample of astrology.  The brightness of planets is not AFAIK a part of astrology as it is usually understood.  Trelawney gets her students to do the things one might expect: draw charts, look for conjunctions, calculate aspects, and so forth.

The centaurs' observation strikes me as just that: an observation.  Mars is bright *tonight*, and we have noticed it.  That is more like astronomy, which seeks to observe and understand the objects beyond the earth's atmosphere.  However, Muggle astronomy does not detect significant variations in the planets' brightness on a day to day basis.  If you go and look, the same planet will appear pretty mauch the same brightness from one night to the next.  Yes, over the course of a revolution from opposition to opposition, they vary considerably, but that doesn't sound like what the centaurs were referring to, and one presumes it is not something that would interest them greatly anyway, as it is both predictable and easy to understand.  It would be like saying 'the sun is high today'.

That suggests that they are witnessing a magical phenomenon, presumably not detectable to Muggles.  I think this means that interpretations based on general symbolism (Mars = war, Voldemort is about) are more plausible than precise astrological ones (Mars was in Aries in May 1991...).  Beyond that, I am running out of ideas.

BTW, if you have a passing knowledge of the constellations, it is very easy to see which one a planet is in.  However, for historical reasons, if a planet is visible among the stars of a constellation (say, Pisces) that means that astrologically speaking it is in the next one (in this case, Aries).  It's to do with the precession of the equinoxes: over about 2000 years, the vernal equinox advances along the ecliptic by one zodiacal sign, but astrologers don't advance with it (though I believe they take account of the phenomenon).

David


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