Creating spells

[Miles]

No: HPFGUIDX 186065

Geoff Bannister wrote:
> There surely must be some way that new spells are
> "registered" by the magic environment of the
> Wizarding World for want of a better term. There
> must have been a time when spell creation was in
> its infancy. For instance, is it to do with the
> will of the wizard to really want the result, to
> really mean what the spell was for - as Bellatrix
> pointed out to Harry in the  battle at the Ministry
> when he tried to use Crucio on her?

Miles:
I fear that Geoff will blame me for ducking the question as well ;), but I 
think there is no answer to this question within Potterverse, because 
Rowling never thought of one.

We discussed before that Harry is curiously uninterested in anything 
"theoretical" concerning magic. The only incident we hear of any such thing 
is in HBP, when Slughorn introduces Golpalott's Third Law:

"the antidote for a blended poison will be equal to more than the sum of the 
antidotes for each of the separate components."

While this is pretty easy to understand, Harry does not. Now, if Rowling 
wants this Law to be something really complicated and advanced, so that only 
few students of potion making will understand it, why didn't she come up 
with something really difficult?

If you ask me, she has no "theory" of her magic at all. She has some basic 
ideas what magic can do and what not, but she hasn't planned her magical 
world bottom up. There is not much more to it than what we see.

Just look at the language question. Why are most spells using Latin? What is 
magical about Latin? Did manhood have no magic before Latin was spoken? How 
could there be ancient wizards in Egypt, before there was something like 
"Latin" at all? Aren't there indigene wizards in America and Africa, who 
will not know of Latin at all? And if Latin is important, why is this Latin 
so messed up? And if the language is not important, why aren't there working 
spells in English?

If we try to find the rules of potion making or spell creating from what we 
know from the books, we can only be successful if there are such rules in 
Rowling's notebook or in her head in the first place. Which I doubt ever 
existed. Rowling is not Tolkien.

I don't want to be the killjoy. This discussion can be as entertaining as 
the HP books are, despite their flaws (and this lack of theoretical 
background is one, IMO).

Miles