The Statute of Secrecy

[JD]

No: HPFGUIDX 158888

>Carol (158864): she has to create a means of enabling those readers
>to believe that the WW exists unseen right in London itself (among
>other places).

JD: Not necessarily. There are plenty of juvenile fantasy stories that
don't offer any "ordinary person access" to the magical world they
describe: The Hobbit; Star Wars; Eragon; Deltora Quest. It's not a
cast-iron rule that children's fantasy includes contemporary children
who find their way into a magical world, although many do: Alice in
Wonderland; The Wizard of Oz; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe;
Peter Pan; The Dark Is Rising; Artemis Fowl. Who's to say that if
Harry Potter was written about an orphan living in a completely
magical world it would have been any less successful? Of course, the
clash of cultures and the distrust between the two worlds creates
certain amounts of humor and conflict that wouldn't otherwise exist.
However, it could strengthen other elements of the story- I can't help
but feel that muggles really are inherently inferior to wizards and
that Voldemort's hatred of all this related to muggles contains a very
small grain of truth. But a blood-war in a world where there wasn't
any actual difference between the humans in it besides some empty
claim to being descended from a nobler stock makes Voldemort's racist
war all the more evil.

>Carol (158864): It seems to me that the whole premise of secrecy
>
snip
 depends on the Statute of Secrecy, along with the equally
>suspect device of Muggles not seeing what they don't want to see
>("They don't see nuffink, do they?")

JD: The general denial of magic that muggles exhibit could have been
developed so it was more believable. If all muggles were more fully
characterised as logical, rational, dependent on science, lacking
imagination, constantly disregarding magical events and creating
mundane explanations for the most magical activities then their
ignorance of the magical world would be more appropriate. At the start
of the series we might have seen magic existing constantly around the
Dursleys, although going unnoticed by all except by Harry- Vernon
loses his keys but Harry sees them shrink and reappear, Harry sees a
man on a broomstick fly passed and Petunia rationalizes it as a large
bird, Dudley sees a woman apparate but thinks he's falling asleep and
so on. If we saw all this before we really understood anything about
the magical world then we would be more likely to believe that Muggles
just didn't pay enough attention to magic.

>Carol (158864): how JKR could have solved the problem of
>believability (a magical world that Muggles can't see existing right
>under our noses) without resorting to the Statute of Secrecy and
>Obliviators

JD: It's a quite common plot device to have magic that only _children_
can perceive. If the magical world of Harry Potter was written in this
way it could be that all children were able to see parts of the
magical world, but after their eleventh birthday the ability decreased
unless they were a wizard. In such a story, it might be magically
possible to create a potion that revealed the magical world to a
non-magical adult, but the process was too difficult or expensive to
be practically given to every muggle all the time. In this way, there
would still be the separation between the deeply intertwined magic and
muggle worlds and a way for the average muggle reader to access the
Wizarding World. This sort of separation wouldn't have required a
conscious or ongoing effort from the wizards and couldn't have
presented the prospect of muggles discovering the Wizarding world as a
real threat. (Wizards might be actively working to remove the
separation between the two worlds, which could ruffle a few
purebloods' feathers, who knows?)

It's also a common plot device to have magic that only _believers_ can
perceive. If Harry Potter was written using this plot device then
Muggles wouldn't see what was right in front of them because magic is
naturally invisible and stays that way unless a person accept the
impossible and believes in it. In such a story the wizards might try
very hard to convince muggles that they exist, only to fail repeatedly.

Another very common plot device is natural _forgetfulness_. There are
many instances of magical worlds that you begin to forget all about as
soon as you leave them. This is often presented as an intrinsic
quality of the magic or the land and not as a purposely designed
feature created by the people. That is, it is not necessary to have
obliviators zapping everyone's memories if there is some
uncontrollable quality of magic or magical land that makes non-magic
people forget all about it (unless they carry a magical artefact with
them at all times or something similar). If Harry Potter was written
as such a story then there would be no need to trick muggles- a wizard
could explain to them about magic, get whatever they needed and them
moments later the memory naturally dissolves.

Another way to keep the world separate but entwined without resorting
to so much memory modification would be to reduced the number of
gateways and the amount of traffic between the two worlds. That is,
make the separation between the two worlds more effective. If there
was only four or five gateways across the whole of Britain that
connected the two worlds and wizards only very rarely went into the
muggle world then there wouldn't be such a need to zap muggles's
memories right, left and centre. Dumbledore's meeting with Mrs Cole
would be considered an exceptional circumstance.

It's also possible that schools and other institutions in the magical
world create some sort of muggle front. For instance, if Hogwarts
freely advertised itself as an ordinary boarding school then when
Dumbledore approached Mrs Cole he wouldn't have to make anything up.

JD