A Journey Through Potions & Herbology Read online

  CONTENTS

  POTIONS

  Part 1: From Apothecaries to Cauldrons

  Part 2: Leechbooks and Bezoar Stones

  Part 3: The Philosopher’s Stone – An Alchemist’s True Calling

  HERBOLOGY

  Part 1: Greenhouses, Gardening Tools and some ‘Herbals’

  Part 2: Flower Pressing, Flower Temples and Stink Lilies

  Part 3: Mandrakes and Gnomes

  INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

  The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.

  This series of eBooks will reveal the world of magic and unlock its secrets. It will go back thousands of years. It will travel to the far corners of the world. It will reach the stars. It will explore under the earth. It will decipher mysterious languages. We’ll encounter some of the most colourful characters in history. We’ll discover the curious incidents and truth behind legends. We’ll see how, in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.

  This series, structured around lessons from the Hogwarts curriculum, will show how this long and rich history has nourished the fictional world of Harry Potter.

  The starting point for these eBooks was the exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opened at the British Library in October 2017, twenty years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the UK in 1997. For the exhibition, curators spent over a year searching through the 150 million items that the British Library holds to find the most magical. Then they sourced special artefacts to be loaned from other notable institutions. In October 2018, the New-York Historical Society took on the British Library exhibition, adding books and artefacts from their own collection, as well as other fascinating loans.

  This series of four eBook shorts contains worldly wonders from both exhibitions, exploring J.K. Rowling’s magical inventions alongside their cultural and historical forebears. Throughout are links between ours and the wizarding world, told through extraordinary stories from the history of magic.

  POTIONS

  ‘As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses… I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’

  Professor Snape — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  We all know that Harry became a dab hand at Potions with a little help from the Half-Blood Prince; this was a fictional example of the handing down of knowledge over the centuries when it comes to mystical brews. Potions have been made for thousands of years – associated with bubbling pots and mysterious ingredients, they have been brewed to make medicines, drugs and poisons.

  Alchemists dabbled a lot in potions, as well as making the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, which could reportedly transform base metal into gold and held the key to everlasting life. Potions can even be concocted to conjure different weather events. Their use in the community was well established, which has been proven by the medical books handed down through history, advocating their use.

  Medieval apothecaries greatly contributed to the development of medical science; it is an art still practised to some extent in the pharmacies of today. Snape made Potions sound scary (he would, wouldn’t he?), but it’s also a fascinating subject.

  PART 1: FROM APOTHECARIES TO CAULDRONS

  Then they visited the Apothecary, which was fascinating enough to make up for its horrible smell, a mixture of bad eggs and rotted cabbages. Barrels of slimy stuff stood on the floor; jars of herbs, dried roots, and bright powders lined the walls; bundles of feathers, strings of fangs, and snarled claws hung from the ceiling.

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  When Harry and Hagrid visited the apothecary in Diagon Alley, they were met with an assortment of ‘slimy stuff’, herb jars, roots, powders, feathers and claws. Historically, an apothecary served as a sort of chemist or pharmacist, and texts recording symptoms and prescriptions have been found originating in the ancient societies of China, Babylon and Egypt.

  Apothecaries kept guides for supplying remedies. If you walked into an apothecary shop with a cough, migraine or headache, the owner would open their book of secrets. In a typical 14th-century manuscript, there would have been a lot of illustrations and recipes, which would point to lots of ingredients from the natural world. People from the Middle Ages had a much closer working relationship with these natural ingredients than we do today.

  One such manuscript once belonged to King Henry VIII of England, an avid book collector, and was eventually acquired by the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane, the man after whom Sloane Square in London is named. Because it would have cost so much to make the book originally, it would have been rarely opened but kept instead as a valuable possession, probably belonging to a monastery and other wealthy individuals before ending up in the royal collection.

  The manuscript was beautifully made, coloured with a combination of reds, golds and a dark yet vibrant blue pigment – one of the illustrations within it depicted the apothecary consulting with a client. The client sits while the apothecary stands, conveying the higher status of the customer. But apothecaries themselves were high status – at the top of the tree in society alongside lawyers and property owners. They were wealthy, too.

  It turned out that Hagrid knew quite as much about unicorns as he did about monsters, though it was clear that he found their lack of poisonous fangs disappointing.

  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

  One magical being strongly associated with apothecaries from the Middle Ages was the unicorn. It was not unusual to see spectacular signs hanging outside apothecary shops in the shape of a unicorn’s head.

  One such sign, dating from the 18th century, now resides at the Science Museum in London. Probably from England or the Nether­lands, the unicorn’s head is carved from oak. It appears happy, healthy and alert, with a hint of a smile and a bit of a goatee.

  Extravagant shop signs were common in cities like London. They acted like logos and were an early form of branding, as well as being a useful way of navigating the streets when much of the population was illiterate. The result was streets festooned with an array of gaudy and memorable signs made from heavy wood and wrought iron, in the shape of giant frying pans, keys and coffins.

  The health-and-safety conscious might spot a potential problem here, and on one particularly stormy night in London in 1718, this problem was brought home to the population. The powerful gusts of wind that whistled down the city’s streets caused a huge shop sign in Bride Street in the Spitalfields area of the city to collapse – four people were killed.

  This was one incident of many, but it seems that 18th-century London was slow to realise the potential dangers, because it wasn’t until 1762 that a government commission was undertaken to see what they could do about it. It was decreed that signs had to be laid or mounted flat against buildings, which is why most shops and restaurants have signs like that now. Pubs proved to be an exception to the rule – luckily for the Leaky Cauldron!

  Of course, the unicorn that was used to signpost the apothecary’s shop wasn’t real – but its horn was. Except for the fact that it was actually the tusk of a narwhal.

  Narwhals are whales and are known as ‘the unicorns of the sea’ on account of the spiral pattern on their tusk
and their rather elegant physical appearance (somewhere between a dolphin and a whale).

  These ‘unicorn horns’ were rumoured to have unique medicinal powers – from curing leprosy to being a potent aphrodisiac. But most intriguingly, they were considered to be a universal antidote to poison. Right up until the 1780s, the French royal family had unicorn horn (in the form of a narwhal tusk) dipped into their drinks to proof the drink against poison.

  Accordingly, the tusks were worth huge amounts of money and carried a lot of status. Queen Elizabeth I had two, one of which was part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. From today’s perspective, the idea of having a unicorn-horn cure might seem naïve, but even now most people don’t know how their medicines work, or how they are chemically composed. In that sense, to the majority of people, taking unicorn horn would not have been that different to taking most medicines today – you take it, hope for the best and don’t think twice about it when you get better.

  ‘And the steam rising in characteristic spirals,’ said Hermione enthusiastically, ‘and it’s supposed to smell differently to each of us, according to what attracts us, and I can smell freshly mown grass and new parchment and —’

  But she turned slightly pink and did not complete the sentence.

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  One of the major figures in the Harry Potter series is the Potions master, Severus Snape, who contains many conflicting qualities and provokes a range of emotions: from fear to respect to pity. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a new Potions master takes the reins – the founder of the ‘Slug Club’ himself, Professor Horace Slughorn. In an early working draft of Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling traded notes with her editor about a scene in which Hermione was impressing Slughorn with her knowledge of the love potion Amortentia. Hermione was keen to show that she knew that it smelt differently to each person and that the smell depended on what attracted that person. She said she smelt freshly mown grass and new parchment, before she abruptly checked herself.

  The other smell is never identified in the book, but it is implied these are smells that the subject loves. In 2007, J.K. Rowling revealed the unnamed Amortentia aroma that Hermione identified: the scent of Ron Weasley’s hair.

  In the real world, potions classes have been going on for a long time – hundreds of years, in fact. In the Ortus sanitatis (‘The Garden of Health’), a famous medieval textbook, there is a woodcut of a potions class held in Strasbourg over five hundred years ago. It shows inattentive students gazing at stones in their hands in front of their tutor – not so different from a Potions lesson at Hogwarts!

  This book is the earliest printed encyclopaedia of natural history, from 1491, but you might not recognise it as a typical reference book. In it, there are creatures we know, such as crocodiles, but also dragons, harpies and unicorns. The rivers it depicted contained both fish and mermaids and the book portrayed how the European scientific community saw the world in the late 15th century. It included plants and animals from the natural world and their medical uses, but also a world full of wonders and extraordinary creatures.

  Whereas in previous eras copies of the book would be limited and shared among a privileged few, the relatively new Gutenberg printing press revolutionised how ideas were being spread in Western Europe and allowed those in the Ortus sanitatis to be distributed among a much wider sector of the population.

  Print, like digital technology now, enabled information and knowledge to be standardised, set and disseminated faster than ever before. The more knowledge was shared, the more it was challenged, the more it was improved and the more the scientific revolution grew, especially during the Enlightenment of the 18th century. We’re sure Hermione would approve.

  The instruments of the apothecary trade also stretch back through time – the pestle and mortar (these names come from the Latin words for ‘pounding’ and ‘pounder’) might be in use in your kitchen just as they were for the Aztecs, Sioux, Ancient Greeks and Celts. Their oldest use was recorded in Egyptian papyri from 1500 BC and, along with other kinds of herb grinders, they remain closely associated with pharmacies today.

  Another tool of the trade is a place to store the ground results: apothecary jars. Apothecary jars from 17th-century Spain, with their hand-painted flower designs, are very beautiful and wouldn’t look out of place at Hogwarts. Their contents even sound as exotic as Felix Felicis and Amortentia:

  • Vitriol. Coerul.: ‘blue vitriol’, or copper sulphate, which was used in dyes and by apothecaries to induce vomiting!

  • Ocul. Cancr.: ‘crab’s eyes’, really a stony mass taken from the stomach of a putrefied crayfish. Used – ironically enough – to ease stomach ache.

  • Sang. Draco.: ‘dragon’s blood’ (you might remember that in the Harry Potter stories Albus Dumbledore was an expert in dragon’s blood), purportedly the blood of dragons or elephants, but actually a bright-red resin from a tree found in Morocco, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, Dracaena Draco – the dragon tree. Used to treat ailments like haemorrhoids, as an ingredient in 18th-century toothpaste and today as a varnish for violins.

  The next two days passed without great incident, unless you counted Neville melting his sixth cauldron in Potions.

  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

  Perhaps the most famous depictions of potion-brewing are of witches bent over a flaming pot or a bubbling cauldron. One of the earliest images like this can be found in De laniis et phitonicis mulieribu (‘On Witches and Female Fortune Tellers’) by Ulrich Molitor, in which the witches appear to be trying to summon a fearsome hailstorm. Molitor wrote his book in Cologne, Germany, following the collapse of a trial in which a woman called Helena Scheuberin was cleared of being a witch. Her prosecutor had been Heinrich Kramer, the author of an infamous witch-hunting manual, Malleus maleficarum (‘The Hammer of the Witches’).

  Unconvinced of Kramer’s claims and methods, Sigismund III, Archduke of Austria and Tyrol, commissioned Molitor as a top legal scholar to investigate and clarify the witchcraft issue. Molitor’s view was that witches were dangerous, but only if they were in league with the devil, and were ultimately few and far between. Molitor was a moderate and he wanted to cool the atmosphere of paranoia and confusion around the issue of witches. On Witches and Female Fortune Tellers is written as a dialogue between Molitor and the archduke, and although the words urged calm, the illustrations pulled in the other direction. A woodcut of two old witches throwing a cockerel and a snake into a flaming cauldron, triggering a hailstorm which destroys crops, is the earliest printed depiction of witches using a cauldron.

  Molitor’s book was published in 1489, two years after Kramer’s, and also became an influential bestseller, but not in the way it was intended. The images instilled fear in a largely illiterate public. The book remained in print for a hundred years, enough time to sear the trope of the witch and her cauldron into the popular imagination for ever after. When Hermione throws ingredients into a cauldron and begins to stir feverishly, it is an act continuing an artistic representation that has endured down the centuries.

  Hermione threw the new ingredients into the cauldron and began to stir feverishly.

  ‘It’ll be ready in a fortnight,’ she said happily.

  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  That is not to say that cauldrons were never used before they were depicted in Molitor’s book. One was recovered from the sludge of the River Thames in London when it was dredged in 1861 – amazingly, the artefact dated from between 800 and 600 BC. The ‘Battersea Cauldron’, as it came to be known (because it was found just downstream of Chelsea Bridge, near Battersea), was made of seven sheets of bronze riveted together with a corrugated rim that was extra strong and had free-moving handles attached. It was huge and the strips of metal that held the rim to the body were individually patterned. Around sixty Bronze Age cauldrons have been found in the UK, almost all of them in bodies of water; they may have been used to make offerings, or may
be they had some other purpose. Since there are no written records from this period, the precise use of the ‘Battersea Cauldron’ will have to remain a mystery, though it would probably have been used for feasting rather than potion-brewing (sadly).

  PART 2: LEECHBOOKS AND BEZOAR STONES

  Some potions-related artefacts have grown in stature over time, and Bald’s Leechbook is one of them. An old medical text from the 9th century, ‘Bald’ is actually the name of the owner of the book, which itself is named after leechdoms, a sort of medieval medicine. Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England was a mix of charms, remnants of classical theories and practice, folklore and faith-healing. As such, some of the ideas in the book appear bizarre.

  For example, a modern doctor wouldn’t advise mixing dog urine and mouse blood to get rid of warts, or that to counteract a snakebite you need to smear earwax around the wound and recite the Prayer of St John. Neither would your local vet suggest that pain in domestic animals might be caused by elves. And though midwives might still point out that a baby unborn after the tenth month could be fatal to the mother, they won’t add that this is especially true on Monday nights!

  ‘Now then, now then, now then,’ said Slughorn, whose massive outline was quivering through the many shimmering vapours. ‘Scales out, everyone, and potion kits, and don’t forget your copies of Advanced Potion-Making...’

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  Incredibly, however, some of Bald’s cures still hold true today. One of the recommended cures – involving leek, garlic, wine and part of a cow’s stomach – was tested in 2015 and found to be as effective against MRSA as modern antibiotics. Likewise, a nettle-based ointment for muscle pain and a herb-based cough treatment are similar to ones sold in chemists and health-food shops today. The book’s advice on how stitches will dissolve, what to use as an antiseptic and even how to perform surgery for a cleft lip indicate that in the Middle Ages people knew something about what they were doing and which herbs combatted which diseases. It was a well-travelled document, too, containing some of the best Mediterranean medicine from the 3rd to 9th centuries. Information was transmitted across borders and national boundaries that we know well today but that didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. Bald’s Leechbook would make a mean accompaniment to Advanced Potion-Making.