#pureblood is as pureblood does

There are histories and there are lies. The two are not mutually exclusive. The best lies are the ones which root themselves in history, no matter how apocryphal, and then proceed to repeat themselves over and over again until they become convincing truths. History is full of these lies, now taught as incontrovertible fact, when once upon a time some clever minds devised some lies to hide their own sordid parts in the telling of history.

There is a fact and that fact is the certain nature of human beings.

The history of the Statute of Secrecy is a history of lies and half-lies and apocryphal truths and a history of the certain nature of human beings. The story is always the same across Europe. Europe burned. The blood of witches and wizards turned their streams and rivers red. Old and young, weak and strong – the inquisitors and the confessors came for them all and with them, they brought the fires of hell and the wrath of a cruel and unfeeling god. Thou shalt not suffer the witch to live. To be tried for magic was to be condemned to death. Muggle villagers and muggle lords, they both looked on in cold disregard. This was the truth. This was history. This was a lie.

There is a better saying which governs the truths and half lies and apocrypha concerning the witch burnings. For the love of mammon is the root of all evil. The priests came and the priests went and in the middle, they changed their ragged cloths for trunks full of gold and silver. An alchemical miracle. The law, even the divine law, was a matter of business and Rome had had several centuries to perfect the art of peddling salvation and divine mercy. No other burgher  knew its intricacies half as well as the Pope. No other merchant knew better how to turn a profit from a war which threatened to unthrone him. No other banker knew better how to mint gold from the bodies of the dead.

If the person of the Pope had not been so inviolate, so high above suspicion, they might have even called them sorcerers. Magicians. Alchemists who had surpassed their god in their miraculous deeds by turning the blood of peasants into gold.

In Italy they stamped their sealing wax with their signet rings and helped the Pope on the way to fixing his name to a Bull which gave them free reign. Della Rovere, Medici, Sforza, d’Este, Zabini. They had their muggles and they had their wizards – but the magical and the mundane did not matter where gold was concerned. Theywere not the ones going to the stake. And once the flames settled, Rome got its cut and they, as representative of Rome, got their own cut. Blood-gold and blood-silver for the coffers of Italy’s oldest magic families, reaped from the blood soaking the fields of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

In Germany, they fell over themselves to fan the flames of their hysteria. Better, after all, that they burn muggles and their poor brothers and sisters than them, when famine and war wracked the land. In Trier and Bamberg and Würzburg it was always the same case: non-conformists went to the flames and pious Catholics, even if they had wands, prospered. The priests took their pay, a cut for themselves and a cut for Rome, and they – Welfs and Ammendorfs, Ludekas and Hexenheims – took their lands, homes and whatever was left behind.

In France, Louis Philippe de Malfoi and Artaud de L'Étrangé carelessly provided Charles IX with a list of ‘witches’ – some of them magical, some of them muggle; the only common denominator was the fact that their lands happened to fall justoutside the borders of their own land. Not content to stop just there, they accused them of lycanthropy and all of France fell on these people with relish. There were one hundred thousand witches and wizards, the rumours ran, and Louis Philippe de Malfoi and Artaud de L'Étrangé had delivered one hundred of them - oh, some were magic, some were mundane, it made no difference to a hysterical France - to Charles IX. In return for their service to their country, they were both made Comtes and given a tidy slice of land each, in Languedoc in the South of France.

In Russia, they followed the Tsar. Anna Glinskaya became a witch – and so too did the boyars, when the Oprichniki came for them. So too did the Romanovs, though the magic had not entered their blood yet. Godunov found his throne slipping away from him – and the Shuiskiis, though they carried wands, were only too happy to send the Romanovs on their way. Magic, after all, was only as good as the people accused of it. The truth was only as important as the effects it produced and the power it handed to its accusers.

In England and Scotland, the story was no different. Apollonius Malfoy I whispered in the ear of James II of England and Scotland and received free reign to conduct the trials of North Berwick as he pleased. For that, he received the sum of forty thousand galleons and an Earldom. The Scottish clans deny it now, but they were there when Apollonius Malfoy accused the Earl of Bothwell of high treason and conspiracy with witches. Which witches? Eighty poor muggles, a doctor and nineteen poor witches who insisted on interfering with the natural running of things. They had it coming, Dougal Macmillan would say much later, they had it coming to them. No wonder, that when the magical world chose to secede it was Dougal Macmillan who urged them to wait for the new king and Apollonius Malfoy who reminded Edmund Rosier of all he stood to lose if they chose to secede.

The numbers, at the end of that dark time, ran into the tens of thousands. In 1693, the Statute of Secrecy came into place and the magical world disappeared. Malfoys and Macmillans, Ammendorfs and von Hexes, Rostovs and Shuiskiis, Malfois and L'Étrangés, Miletianii and Zabini – they retreated with their wealth and their power and began the lie.

Apollonius Malfoy had never spoken to a muggle in his entire life.

Cosimo de Miletianii had never been a cardinal.

Alexei Popovich Rostov retreated into legend and became a hero, as though he had never lived at all and had never sent boyars to Ivan the Terrible for execution when they proved stiff necked. As though he did not live on long after the Statute was put in place.

Lothar von Ammendorf – well the Ammendorfs were extinct, weren’t they, even if their coffers rattled with muggle silver and gold?

Charles de Malfoi had never succeeded to a county.

Just like that, overnight, the muggles and the Jews and the gypsies who had been burnt at stake became ill-used witches. The witches who had been burnt remained only in name and the histories of their ‘crimes’ were hidden. Their crimes, after all, were very simple: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and angered the wrong kind of wizard. They all disappeared, devoured by the power of martyrdom and were canonized as victims of ‘those bloodthirsty muggles’. These were real wizards, after all, and with a casual sleight of hand, the certainty of human nature was vanished by apocryphal half-truths and fanciful lies which captured the imagination of a vulnerable and terrified public who saw blood and flames when they saw muggles. In the end, it was not the perfumes of Araby, but lies and more lies which turned their hands lily white.

And their tables and their coffers, when the dust settled, overflowed with the spoils of the hunt.

Ghosts, ghosts, everyone had ghosts – all the best families, the oldest families, the purestfamilies; they all had ghosts. Unhappiness in life, terror in death and all the wealth and status they could ever have almost inevitably went hand in hand. And so there were hallways, always, with ghosts drifting down them. Corridors and passages and wings that no one visited because that was where the ghosts of Christmas past lived, waiting to remind families of their sins and their unhappy pasts.

Those raised in these grand old houses learnt one simple lesson: the ghosts were part of the woodwork, the ghosts were invisible, the ghosts were nothing more than whispers and inconveniences to be endured.

But sometimes those large houses grew empty and cold and lonely. Sometimes in the lone hours of the morning, it was easy to go wandering and hope for something – anykind of contact, as long as it exceeded the politely traded words and delicate manners of their society’s parlours and soirees. Sometimes children’s eyes went prying. Sometimes they asked questions and sometimes, they talked with closeted skeletons and family ghosts. Sometimes when children find they have no one they can confess their fears, hopes and desires to they turn to ghosts.

Ghosts, after all, were just like the heavy wood-paneling on their doors.

Rodolphus Lestrange’s ghost was an old familiar face from his childhood. When he was thirteen, there had been a fire and she had died. No one mentioned the locked doors, or the screaming or the threats. No one mentioned the night Antinous Lestrange dragged her up the stairs to the attic by her hair, in a foul and drunken rage – how when the cool light of morning should have calmed him to reason, he had found himself unable to swallow his pride and had left her there. Rodolphus remembered it all very vaguely, happier memories from school supplanted it and then later, the endless dreariness of Azkaban was all that he could remember.

He found Dido Lestrange one day, nevertheless, and thirty-one years a ghost had not dimmed her fury or her memory though she could not match the proud young boy she knew as her nephew to the wild unkempt man on the stairway in front of her. Despite it, she alone understood the hatred he bore his father – how could she not? She had felt the weight of his pride and his wrath and if she, his sister, had died so that Antinous’ pride could be fulfilled, how much more his son?

“I am alive,” her nephew would repeat, but he was just as much a ghost as she was; broken and humbled for Antinous’ ambitions and pride.

“How I should like to kill him,” he would tell her and those were the times when Dido Lestrange could see something of the young boy she remembered from thirty-one years ago then.  

What they were not told, by their mothers and fathers, was that sometimes, the ghosts talk back.

“Kill him,” Dido would rasp one day, “For your sake. Save yourself before all you are is nothing more than yet another drop in the vast ocean of Antinous Lestrange’s ambitions.”

“Live,” she would say, “Live for both of us, my child.”

That last he could not do and he could not even kill his father though he was tempted, many times.

They did not tell you that you could fail ghosts either.

Theodore Nott’s ghost was not his mother as one might have supposed. His mother had died with the satisfaction that her son would be well-protected – had died contented and gentle, even on her deathbed.

He had been old enough to understand it. Death. Not old enough to understand her last words.

“They will come for you,” she said, “Your father will say no. Youmust say no.”

But then he begins to understand when he meets his ghost – a young man, no more than eighteen or nineteen, who tells him his name is Edward Tarquin Nott. Theodore is struck by the ghost’s likeness to the portrait of his father that hangs over the fireplace in their private dining room. He finds that mentioning this man’s name makes his father’s glass of wine slip from his hand to the floor – and his father turns white, as though he is in unspeakable pain.

His father flees the dinner table and Theodore Nott, age nine, wonders what on earth could have moved his father so.

Edward Tarquin Nott, he finds, was once the heir to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Nott. In 1943 the first summons had come from continental Europe – send help, any help you can find, we need every wand to fight the tyrant who styles himself Grindelwald – and Edward Tarquin Nott, like many others of his cohort, had answered. Very few of them had returned alive. Edward’s body was never found, but his spirit found its way back home to his birthplace somehow.

Theodore understands his mother’s words, a little, when he tells Edward of the mark on his father’s arm and he sees the pain in the ghost’s eyes.

“We died saving Europe from a madman,” his dead uncle tells him when he is fifteen and he tells him that the Dark Lord has returned, “I did not think that his madness would return and infect my country.”

Theodore wants to ask him how he could think it was madness when great-uncle Cantankerus was the one who wrote the Pureblood Directory, but before he can ask, the words start tumbling from Edward’s mouth and he tells Theodore of all the horrors he saw on his marches through Europe - the horror of his own death, drowned in the English channel as they helped muggles flee from Grindelwald’s approaching army.

“Whatever we may believe about the purity of our blood and all it engenders,” he tells Theodore, “War and death and a people ruined and broken is not worth it.”

And Theodore understands his mother’s words then. He could be a soldier, like his father and uncle, and lose his life to The Cause. Or he could choose peace and gain his life, instead.

Theodore Nott always did have a strong sense of self-preservation.

There is no ghost left behind when his father dies and that, at least, comforts Theodore through the silent burial he and the ghost of Edward Tarquin Nott hold for Charles Hadrian Nott in the autumn of 1997.

Draco Malfoy found his ghost when he was sixteen. Not at home, because Malfoy Manor had no ghosts, because Malfoy Manor was always warm and welcoming, to him at least, because no Malfoy had ever lived a truly unhappy life or died in fear.  Not even in Slytherin, because Slytherin was not a place for sharing secrets or for weaknesses to be acknowledged. Someone was always watching in Slytherin; always watching and reporting. There was no room to slip, to be anything other than perfect and to execute every step of the intricate little dances they did perfectly.

No, Draco Malfoy found his ghost in a bathroom and for the first time, he found he could admit that he, the silver prince, was lost, terrified and hurting.

For the first time, Draco thought he might have a friend. A realfriend, that is, and not a Slytherin friend. One could not relax with a Slytherin friend. One could not tell them if one was afraid, or how close one was to disgrace. Oh he trusted them well enough – loved them in his own peculiar way, even – but trust and love were fickle things where his fellow Slytherins were concerned; not enough for him to confess the burden he bore and stay safe in the knowledge that his confessor would keep it for him and not use it against him later.

Myrtle was a mudblood and a Ravenclaw. Maybe, he thought, that was why she was simple. Simple and uncomplicated, honest and gentle. For the first time, Draco found he had someone he could almost call a real friend. His secrets spilled out, one after the other, after so many months pretending they were a badge of pride and not a brand of near dishonor. It was strange, then, to see that there was no judgement in her eyes as there almost certainly would have been in Nott’s or Zabini’s if he had told them all of this, when she promised to keep his secrets for him - only sadness and understanding. They were friends, she told him, and this was what friends did: they shared their burdens and tried to soften the edges of this world for each other.

Slytherin was all hard edges and under the softening influence of Myrtle’s friendship, Draco began to wonder if he was the mask he had worn all these years.

(Not quite, no.)

(Maybe, maybe Myrtle, who understood him best despite the circumstances of her death and his own allegiance to the very man who murdered her, had the right of it.)

“We will find a way,” she would promise him one day and if the feeling blossoming in his chest was not hope, but a deepening sense of fragility and longing, then none but Draco needed to know that.

They did not find a way, but Draco could not banish her memory from his mind and when he raised Scorpius, he raised him to understand that it was who people were and not the circumstances of their birth or their lineage which mattered most – though that was what they had once been taught.

“Kindness,” he would tell Scorpius, “Love and compassion – they were what saved me all those years ago and made me a better man than I was.”

“I could have been sent to Azkaban,” he would tell Scorpius, “If a muggleborn ghost hadn’t been kind to me all those years ago and if I hadn’t realized, then, that I was right in suspecting that everything we had built our lives on back then was wrong in some way. Don’t underestimate anyone.”

Myrtle would conclude, when she met Scorpius years later, that Draco’s efforts were not in vain.

BRITAIN IN DENIAL: PUREBLOODS, SNAKES AND THE POSTWAR DREAM

The Wixenomist’s Editor for Britain, Mafalda Prewett, examines a growing strand of thought among Britain’s intellectual and social elite and pushes for a change in the direction of public thought.

LONDON

I FLUNG A GLASS of champagne in Draco Malfoy’s face at the Malfoy Yule Charity Ball on Christmas day, for some highly misjudged remarks of his, and the tabloid press called me an alcoholic who ought to lose her job. Eight years ago, Cho Chang wrote a history of the wizarding wars and called it the result of entrenched, structural pureblood supremacy. The Wixenomist, in its review of the book, wondered if Ms Chang had missed out on the finer points of the politics of the second wizarding war and The Daily Prophet thought it relied too much on hyperbole to make its points to be considered a factual history of the wars. Two years before that, Domitius Savage ruffled plenty of feathers with his unabashed praise of the militant faction of the Muggleborn Resistance. Several very angry anonymous witches and wizards wrote in to The Prophet scolding Mr Savage for endorsing violence of any sort.

Yet despite all of this, 2014 is undoubtedly the best time to be a muggleborn in Britain. According to recent rankings released by the international think-tank and activist group, International Alliance of Muggleborns for Parity (better known as “IMP”), Britain now ranks sixth in terms of rights for muggleborns. Discrimination is at an all-time low and violent hate crimes have been eliminated altogether. Tough new employment regulations have made it easier for muggleborns to press charges against superiors who have called them blood supremacist slurs. Legal aid and instruction have been made widely available to better enable the muggleborn population integrate with wizarding society. Indeed, a special court was set up specifically to deal with cases concerning discrimination, to prevent them from being put on the backburner and eventually forgotten. We’ve done so well, we’ve even begun meddling in the affairs of other countries with impunity; last year Britain was at the forefront of the ICW investigation into the rising number of hate crimes against muggleborns in Russia.

Clearly there is a schism in British society. On the one hand, the political establishment has enthusiastically campaigned for the rights of muggleborns and has created an infrastructure to support the legislations put in place following the second wizarding war. I receive nearly twenty invitations to some variation on a Muggleborn Charity Ball each year, without counting all the fundraisers and auctions, so obviously, the social establishment seems to have adopted this as a cause worth backing. However, Mr Malfoy’s sentiments are not really unusual; I promise you I’ve heard virtually the same thing at every Muggleborn Charity Ball. It’s a political cause and one that we’ve embraced in our public social lives, but have failed to ask ourselves why this is a “cause” in the first place.

Or indeed, why the slightest mention of pureblood supremacy or even the mildest hint that perhaps Slytherin is as guilty as it pretends not to be, raises so many hackles.

An obscene faith?

Of course, none of the outrage caused by either Mr Savage’s or Ms Chang’s works can really compare with the outrage that the French magianthropologist Jacques Gilles Derridault invited on his head when he published his work L’Eglise Perfide. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, being told that we have an unhealthy obsession with our house-founder bordering on religious cult-like fervour did not go down well with any of our more notable former house members. Mr Malfoy, if I recall, was personally offended by Mr Derridault’s unflinching assessment of Slytherin:

The obsession with purity is not unusual or even an anomaly as has been suggested in recent years; it is the founding principle, though not perhaps in the way we think it might be. There is no stricture, for example, which declares that a belief in the supremacy of purebloods is necessary to be sorted into Slytherin. That is not my meaning at all. This is a purity that is far more deeply entrenched. It is not merely a purity which focuses on blood, but one which is egotistical in nature and stems from a narcissistic worship of both the self and the self as defined in relationship to the founder – or should I perhaps say, father – Salazar Slytherin. Only those who conform to his image and his beliefs may be spared, or even be allowed the privilege of calling themselves true wizards. Of Salazar Slytherin’s own narcissism, we have at least an entire chamber buried in Hogwarts as incontrovertible proof. It is an empirical manifestation of the hypermasculine fantasy he centred around himself; one which he encouraged those who came after him to subscribe to. Is it any wonder that most of the terrorist Death Eaters should have come from Slytherin? Such narcissism, combined with a toxic belief in the immutability and desirability of a wizarding world built in the image of their father could only have borne itself out in violence of the deadliest kind – as we have seen ourselves. Has Slytherin cured itself of this illness? Judging by the release this year of a book titled Salazar Slytherin: Unabashed Villain or Misunderstood Hero? I think the answer is quite clear.

There have been many arguments over whether or not Mr Derridault goes too far in his analysis – I personally find his assessment concerning penis envy and the snake (or basilisk) a bit too jejune and unimaginative to give them as much weight as Mr Derridault does – and even more quarrels over whether a Frenchman has the right, or even the qualifications to make such an assessment about such a very venerable English institution. Of course, he never did his schooling in England, but perhaps an external observer is precisely what we need to evaluate ourselves.

By the time the book was translated and released in Britain, the press and the public had whipped themselves into such a fury that the Ministry was inundated with the book charged with crimes ranging from libel to obscenity. Britain’s pureblood elite patted themselves on their backs when the book was savaged by reviewers as this was a sure sign of just how false its contents were. Never mind that nearly all the journalists who reviewed the book were all former members of Slytherin.

Has Slytherin developed into a full-fledged cult centred around Salazar worship as Derridault puts it? Perhaps not intentionally, but the unwillingness of its former members to accede to the role they played in feeding Voldemort’s forces and in paving the way for him to establish his interim Ministry in the first and second wizarding wars is more than a little worrying.  Coriolanus Quibble’s survey of Salazar Slytherin’s life strays perilously close to the language of pureblood apologism in its insistence that Salazar Slytherin was responding to a real perceived threat when he declared that muggleborns be excluded from joining Hogwarts. A cursory survey of classic books on the subject, such as Ms Bagshot’s History of the Witch Hunts: from the Vikings to the Statute of Secrecy, amply demonstrate just how wrong Mr Quibble’s historiography is.

And yet, his book met with only a quarter of the outrage that Mr Derridault’s startling analysis met with, most of it from the active factions of the Muggleborn Resistance and  IMP. It was only when the editor-in-chief of The Wixenomist, in collaboration with noted Potions Master Horace Slughorn,published an editorial in this magazine drawing parallels between Mr Quibble’s theses and the rhetoric used to recruit the Death Eaters – in the process outing himself and Mr Slughorn as individuals that Voldemort himself had tried to recruit during the first wizarding war – that Britain’s elite ashamedly retired their copies of Mr Quibble’s books and looked elsewhere for material to cleanse their most beloved house’s stains to its reputation.

Lydia Burke’s own analysis of Slytherin, The Problem of Slytherin, published last month, promised to be such a book. Like Mr Malfoy, she places the blame for the overwhelmingly large number of Death Eater recruits from Slytherin squarely at the feet of Albus Dumbledore. Slytherin House, she argues, was alienated from the rest of the school; an alienation which was exacerbated by Dumbledore’s tendency to favour his house over the rest of the school. As touching and even convincing an analysis this might seem to be, it fails to account for why vast swathes of Slytherin house passed through the halls of Hogwarts unrecruited over the course of the second wizarding war, or even why, at the height of Britain’s civil war, Theodore Nott – the son of a notable Death Eater – chose to switch sides and support the struggle against Voldemort.

However, Ms Burke and Mr Quibble are hardly outliers. There is a small but vocal – and steadily growing, even – body of academics and writers who, in combatting the trend of immediate postwar commentary which blindly hung and quartered Slytherin, ignore the wrongs which canbe placed at Slytherin’s doorstep. Wrongs such as rampant blood supremacy; which I was protected from only by virtue of my family name, but others in my year were not; and a fondness for breaking the rules which inevitably ends with a number of house members turning to dark magic as a means for gaining an edge on those around them.

None of this is as disturbing, however, as Miriam Smith’s assessment of the wizarding wars through the lens of the Apate Imperius, presented in the foreword of the 50th Anniversary edition of Amanda Abbott’s seminal work, Grindelwald on Trial. What Mr Derridault takes and uses to condemn both Death Eaters and Slytherins, for allowing violent rhetoric and bloody self-worship to sway them, Ms Smith uses to absolve them of all guilt. And yet Ms Smith’s analysis has become a parlour favourite while Mr Derridault’s analysis is thought to be reaching – it is de rigeur to be able to talk about the effects of the Apate Imperius on British society, but the slightest mention of pureblood supremacy prompts only two reactions: profusely saccharine apologies or raised eyebrows and stone cold silences. Don’t expect any further invitations to soirees if you bring thatup.

The exception which proves the rule

I mentioned earlier that comments such as the ones Mr Malfoy made at his Yule Charity Ball were not unusual. I might go further and say that defending Slytherin has become something of a national past-time, especially among Britain’s pureblood elite. The instinct is understandable. Not every Slytherin sailed enthusiastically into the embrace of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Most of us were quite content to be left to our own devices without being dragged one way or the other when the war finally did come. Unfortunately for us, it is precisely those who made a fuss about going to war who end up being the ones we were remembered for.

It’s instinctive. Which true-blooded Slytherin wouldn’twant to defend their house from naysayers and slanderers? There’s been a lot of unnecessary talk of morality as though we’d never played by the rules in our entire lives. And of course, the infamous insinuation that we’re all dark witches and wizards, which is about as sensible and true as the claim that every Gryffindor is a hero; i.e. not at all. It’s a conflation of correlation and causation and naturally, we get tired every now and then of all the hoo-hahs who want to come around to our charity events in the hope of glimpsing someof the ghoulish dark artifacts we’re supposed to possess.

We’re not magical creatures on display for a gleefully sadistic public to consume, after all.

However, even harmless national past-times can become harmful, albeit unintentionally.  In this mad scramble to acknowledge that yes, not all Slytherins were Death Eaters or even dark wizards – and that most of us were quite content to slip into the woodworks of the Ministry and pursue our ambitions there – we may have strayed too far into the realm of blind apologism that comes from the language of exceptionalism. It is one thing to acknowledge the complexities of Slytherin’s role in the first and second wizarding wars. It is quite another to demand that if the Death Eaters were terrorists, so were the military faction of the Muggleborn Resistance. It is certainly disingenuous to suggest that the fact that the overwhelming majority of Death Eaters came from Slytherin was purely an accident – that these were only a few rotten eggs here and there.

A more fruitful conversation might be to examine just whySlytherin became a breeding ground for Death Eaters and blood supremacists, but as long as both sides remain on edge – one side still struggling with the bloody aftermath of the war and the other side, eager to defend and prove itself better than it has been made out to be – there can be no productive conversation either in academia or in the public sphere that can be of any use to anyone. But however natural the urge to defend and even explain one’s actions, I do not think that we Slytherins need to declare that purebloods were ever in fear for their lives, or to denywhat has taken place, or indeed to claim that we were just following orders or that these were an exceptional, terrible few who committed these crimes. 

I think, perhaps, that after all these years, a little bit of mental discomfort would not be entirely amiss if it leads to a careful re-evaluation and re-examination of the ideals we have built our ambitions on. We might, at the very least, dig ourselves out of the stasis the house is currently in and transform ourselves from the house of tradition to the house of progress – as the house of the ambitious and cunning should be. 

From:Quidnunc?January 20th - 27th, 2014.

(Shoutout to violetlucidity for coming up with the name ‘Derridault’.)