Definition Of The Dark Arts

Hermione Granger

Defence Against the Dark Arts

6^th Year

Professor S. Snape

 

Assignment: Define and Describe the Dark Arts

 

Normally when we think of the dark arts, immediately pictures of scary men and women in masks performing blood rituals and curses come to mind. To truly answer the question, "What are the dark arts," one must start with events that happened over two thousand years ago.

In approximately 45 BCE, a Jewish witch named Mary was born, and, at a very young age, began showing signs of her magical gifts. Within the Hebrew community, magic was strictly forbidden to common citizens and had been for so long that very few people still held magical abilities. Those who possessed strong magical powers were either killed for the good of society, or deemed messengers of the one true God*. Mary, being a girl, would have been stoned. Her parents decided it was best to isolate the girl and teach her to control her powers.

Sometime later, it is said that the same girl was brought to a group of rabbis, having become pregnant. Finding her maidenhead intact (some form of the viergas charm, presumably), the rabbis declared a miracle, and the unborn child was called the child of God. Mary, fearing for her life, said nothing to contradict this. The child was born and raised as though he were the son of God.

The birth, life, and death of the so-called Messiah caused a rift within the Jewish society. Being a powerful wizard, himself, he was able to freely practice his wizardry, passing it off as miracles (as it would surely seem to those who were not magically inclined). What started as a sect of the Jewish community became a movement after a century or so. It finally became a true religion with its adoption by the Roman Emperor, Constantine, in the fourth century**.

Before Christianity became the state religion of Rome, muggles and wizards lived together harmoniously. People, in fact, were not classified based on their magic abilities, so common it was for nearly everyone to possess these abilities to some degree. As the Christian movement gained ground in the empire, however, certain traditions were placed into question. One of the most attacked was, of course, the practice of orgia, or "secret worship," involving sexual rituals. The Christian tradition views these traditions as immoral and degenerate.

Little by little the Christian movement began to adopt certain aspects of the traditional pagan religions into their own doctrines. The feast days, for example, such as the Saturnalia festival held on December 25, were taken as Christian holidays. When finally Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the state religion, Christianity, itself, little resembled its original Judaic roots.

In 325 CE, Constantine called for the Council of Nicea to resolve the questions which were circulating about the actual divinity of Jesus. Whether the Council itself actually resolved the question we will never know; however, publicly it was announced that Jesus was, in fact, not only the son of God, but God himself. In 392 CE, pagan worship was outlawed, and in 435 the punishment for heresy became death. Within a century, Christianity began to take hold among the lower tiers of society. And with the colonization of other nations, and the expansion of the Roman Empire, Christianity quickly spread and the conversion of foreign peoples was strictly enforced.

Within these former pagan societies, only those lesser magic peoples converted easily. Since these people were those who were in accordance with the laws, they became those in power. The various wizarding peoples banded together to form secret societies; thus, it passed that we make today the distinction between muggles and wizards (a distinction which, in fact has no basis since magic abilities are not inherited, as is commonly thought; but I digress).

As Christianity spread throughout Europe, the wizarding communities, although largely separate from the greater Christian society, were inundated by the Christian value system. As time passed, the wizarding communities moved away from their more tradition forms of worship and ritual.

In 1285, Bénis Augustus, head of the European Council of Wizards, secretly met with a delegation from the Roman Catholic Church, and signed an agreement to stop all pagan worship within the wizarding community for reasons still unknown today. From this point, a division was set between the light arts, or those which have been brought to the light of Jesus, and the dark arts, for those who remained under the shadow of tradition. As there were few wizards who still practiced traditional methods of magic, the greater part of society accepted these distinctions without batting an eye.

Those who were labelled "Dark Mages," reacted with the creation of the Dark Arts Diplomacy Society (DADS) which attempted to bridge the widening gap within the wizarding world. The society was no sooner begun than was disbanded due to the dubious disappearance of their leader Jacques Viellart.

The church broke the agreement in 1317, when Pope John XXII declared that all peoples must conform to the church’s spiritual order and sent several people to burn at the stake (which of course, did no harm to the actual magic community). Before this time the various inquisitions set up by the church were directed toward its own people. When the church set an eye on the magic community, wizards and witches began to fully retreat into the shadows of the muggle world.

However, absurd as the Church’s behaviour was, the greater part of the wizarding world was indoctrinated by the distinctions of good and evil—light and dark. The Dark Arts, therefore, became something that was feared and misunderstood. Gregory Malfoy in 1401 wrote a manifesto entitled (translated from Latin) "The Dark Arts, Our Link to Tradition." The writing sent waves through the wizarding society and proved to be very effective in regaining understanding. He founded the Twilight Society, in 1408, to further bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. However, one year later, the Council of Wizards ordered that the writing be destroyed and with it the Twilight Society, declaring it dangerous to the stability to muggle-wizard relations. A stability that didn’t really exist in those times, anyway.

Successfully repressed the dark communities mutated. That which we call the Dark Arts today, through some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, has become harmful, but still retains some of those lost traditions. As any oppressed society, they have risen up and declared a sort of civil war. It’s kind of sad really, if Mr. Malfoy had succeeded, we may not be facing the problems we are facing today.

 

*With the exception, of course, of the Cabbalists, who are a sort of magical religious school of thought.

* * * * *

Severus Snape let the parchment roll up in his hands. He had to hand it to her, she was thorough. He knew of no other student who would have gone through so much trouble. He took a sip of his tea, which had cooled considerably since he’d begun reading. Placing the cup down, a sadistic smile crossed his lips. He unrolled the parchment, took up his quill, dipped the tip into red ink and wrote:

 

Miss Granger,

A very ambitious paper. I am astonished at the extent to which you were able to digress so far away from the actual point of the assignment that you did not even come close to completing it. I asked for a three inch definition and a brief description. You handed me a research paper fit for Professor Binns. Ten points from Gryffindor for wasting my time. I expect the actual assignment handed to me no later than 5 o’clock.

S. Snape