ratty Secret-Keeper / House Elves / Ffred's history of wizards

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 82758

Ravenclaw Bookworm Scoutmom wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/82474 :

<< The big question is who did Wormtail tell, and how did he hide the
fact he was the Secret-Keeper? >>

I figure that everyone that Wormtail told about the Potters' hiding
place, except Sirius and Voldemort, Wormtail told them via a written
note (as DD told HP about 12 Grimmauld Place) and he wrote the note
imitating Sirius's handwriting, so as to preserve the illusion that
Sirius was the Secret-Keeper.

Iggy McSnurd wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/82454 :

<< The illusion, of course, seems to be carefully maintained... such
as when Malfoy got angry that Harry had lost him his servant... not
slave... >>

It seems to me that in the 18th century there wasn't much distinction
made between the words 'servant' and 'slave', and the wizarding folk
could be conservative about word usage as well as about clothing
styles.   

I checked my beloved One-Look Dictionary (www.onelook.com) and it led
me to Smith's Bible Dictionary's definition of 'servant' as the one
word 'slave', and their definition of 'slave' has a long explanation
of the Bible's laws on Hebrew slaves, which uses the words 'slave' 
and 'servant' interchangeably, for example: "To the above modes of
obtaining liberty the rabbinists added, as a fourth, the death of the
master without leaving a son, there being no power of claiming the
slave on the part of any heir except a son. If a servant did not
desire to avail himself of the opportunity of leaving his service,"
http://www.biblestudytools.net/Dictionaries/SmithsBibleDictionary/smt.cgi?number=T4077

It also offered the lovely 1828 Webster's,
http://65.66.134.201/cgi-bin/webster/webster.exe?search_for_d:/inetpub/wwwroot/cgi-bin/webster/web1828=servant
"A person, male or female, that attends another for the pupose of
performing menial offices for him, ot who is employed by another for
such offices or for other labor, and is subject to his command. The
word is correlative to master. Servant differs from slave, as the
servant's subjection to a master is voluntary, the slave's is not.
Every slave is a servant, but every servant is not a slave."

Ffred Manawydan wrote a history of wizardy in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/82469 :

<< In such a world, there would be no guarantee that there would be
more than one person in the clan with the "talent", and thus no
likelihood that the shaman would have either a mentor in youth to 
pass on knowledge or a successor in old age to teach. >>

Unless the magic entered into all the people of one clan, who maybe
lived near a spring whose waters were full of magic, and all the
wizards in the world are descended from that one clan. If this
happened before humans left Africa, that clan could have intermarried
widely with other clans before people wandered off to other continents.

<< But the new wizardly community also discovered something so
spectacular that it was to change the world forever. That discovery
was that if two wizards had children, there was an extremely high
probability that that child would also have the "talent", and the
probability rose dramatically the more wizards there were in the
bloodline. >>

But surely they discovered that back in the days of villages of 200
people, not waiting until they had cities with many thousand
inhabitants and the first Schools of Wizardry and Witchcraft (of 
which surely the first was in Ur and the second, not much later, was
in Egypt).

<< Wizards removed themselves into a more secluded position in the
cities. Children born outside the wizard families with the "talent"
were taken in as apprentices to ensure that they had a grasp of what
was becoming an increasingly complex and separate world. ...  The
increased complexity of magic and the size of the corpus of knowledge
made it less and less easy for wizards to participate in the muggle
world, and more and more likely that they would associate only with
their fellows. >>

Surely they went through a phase of having an honored and feared 
place in the Muggle social structure, with wizards serving as 
advisors to kings, like Merlin to King Arthur, wizards working as
weapons inventors for generals, sort of like Archimedes inventing
those siege engines, and wizards selling their services to members of
the general public who could pay.