[HPforGrownups] history of wizards

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 82782

Catlady wrote:
> 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.

I don't think I'd have a problem with that (except to wonder what happened
to the magical spring afterwards) except to note that once the intermarriage
had happened and the original clan dispersed, the same process of isolation
would have taken place.

> 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).

It depends on where you'd put the ratio of wizard:muggle (something which I
deliberately soft-pedalled, given the lack of consensus on-list and the lack
of a definitive answer in canon!)

I tend to work on a personal rule-of-thumb ratio of 1:100, so that a village
of 200 would have indeed had an average of 2 people with the "talent". But I
still don't think that would have been enough to lead to the "discovery",
because unless there was some reason for the "talented" ones to have
children together for a sustained period, the penny wouldn't have dropped
that it was inheritance rather than divine intervention.

There are of course canon references to ancient Egyptian wizardry.

> 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.

That's an interesting area to explore, of course.  I don't think the
withdrawal would have happened at a stroke, because wizardry was an evolving
thing and the _ability_ to live separate lives would have been equally
gradual. So for a while, the muggle inhabitants of a city would have known
who the wizards were, and could well have used their services (alas, almost
certainly for love charms, if the Greek magical papyri in our own world are
anything to go by!) As far as weapons go, the problem would have been
whether the general wanted a wizard actually standing there AKing the
opposition (or using some other sort of spell such as concealment) or
whether they wanted technology (something that always seems to seduce
generals) - technology of course doesn't sit well with wizardry, given that
if wizards have a technical problem they tend to solve it with a spell
rather than a technical solution, and this in turn means that you've always
got to have a wizard along to keep the magic going.

The other side to the discussion, of course, is that some wizards would have
actively _wanted_ to meddle with muggles, to hold power over them, to
enslave them. I'm sure that that tradition is equally ancient as the
tradition of holding aloof, though definitely a minority tradition.

Cheers

Ffred

O Benryn wleth hyd Luch Reon
Cymru yn unfryd gerhyd Wrion
Gwret dy Cymry yghymeiri