Welcome back to another lesson of Charms! Before starting with the theoretical approach to the classification of spells that we will be dealing with in three weeks, today’s lesson will focus on mundane approaches to magic and spell research. While the latter aspect is without a doubt complex, it is nonetheless important and will give you a short insight into what it means to go into charms research and development, as I remember that some of you were thinking about pursuing that career.

I am sure that all of you have seen or heard of Muggle magic shows. There are many magicians who perform the most surprising acts of magic, at least to the untrained eyes of Muggles. For witches and wizards such as ourselves, their illusions that appear to be magical are often humorous, given what we can easily create with just a swish of our wand. Yet there are instances where mundane methods actually help us to understand how exactly a spell works, either because their attempts of recreating the effect mimic the magic within the spell, or because they apply methods that no witch or wizard has yet considered. A research department of the Ministry of Magic actually keeps a close eye on Muggle science so that they do not miss alternative approaches that may help them achieve their goals. Today, we will be discussing three different charms that all have a connection to non-magical science, as well as the counter to one of them.

The first spell that I am going to talk about today is the Refilling Charm. Especially popular at celebrations, it allows the caster to refill a goblet or glass with a beverage without having to get up and fetch a new drink. There are two theories on how exactly this spell works, and I will leave it up to you to decide which one is the most plausible.

There is a glass with only a little bit of water in it in front of all of you, and I am asking you to refill it. Be careful that you do not overpower the spell, as you only want to fill the glass and not flood the entire room.

The two theories on how the spell refills the glass were presented by Victorina Mottershead and Bardulf Coombs. Mottershead, a housewife and hobby researcher from Norfolk, presented her theory after researching Muggle circus magic in 1892 and seeing a refilling water jug. With the aid of a double wall, excess water is hidden and “magically” refills the jug.

According to Mottershead, this was the only feasible way that the spell could work, with the stored liquid being connected to kitchen supplies. This theory was widely accepted until Bardulf Coombs presented his theory in 1933, claiming that the Refilling Charm is a variation of the Doubling Charm . His theory closed a gap as it finally explained why it is impossible to magically refill a glass with a new beverage, but there are sceptics who do not believe that multiplications of that degree are indeed possible.

A Great Perturbation in Nature

Next, let us take a look at another spell with an interesting history. It is called “Bewitched Sleep,” and does exactly what its name indicates: the target person or creature is put into a deep sleep which may actually freeze them in time, not even allowing them to breathe. While under the most elaborate version of this spell, the subject does not age either. I am certain that you have all heard about the effects of Bewitched Sleep already, namely when reading about  the 1994 Triwizard Tournament at Hogwarts. The hostages in the second task were put into an enchanted sleep while waiting to be rescued from the bottom of the Black Lake. While underwater, they appeared statuesque, and did not breathe or move until they reached the lake’s surface. Triggering a spell’s ending point with a certain event, such as reaching the surface of a lake, requires an extreme amount of concentration, and not something you need to worry about today. What you do have to know is how to vary the time for which the target person will be asleep, as well as the depths of their slumber. The effect we are aiming at in school is a simplified version of this, namely deep sleep only. With enough practice however you will manage to fully freeze your target.

We need to briefly discuss different forms of sleep, so that you can get a feel for the amount of willpower you will need to create the desired effect on your target person or creature. At its most basic, there are two different types of sleep: REM and non-REM. The abbreviation REM stands for “rapid eye-movement” and indicates an active brain that is hallucinating (or dreaming) while one’s body is asleep. In non-REM sleep, it is the opposite: while the brain is idle, the body moves and one may observe a person turning in their sleep. Strangely enough, it is REM sleep which is most restorative. When observing your sleeping target, you will notice that they might be completely still and appear almost paralysed. If this occurs, you have succeeded in setting them in a REM sleep, which is the most advanced form of Bewitched Sleep that is required for your exams. With further training, it is possible to reach the stage that was witnessed during the Triwizard Tournament, being literally frozen in time, not being able to move or interact with the outside world at all. Non-REM sleep requires the least amount of willpower, whereas REM sleep requires considerably more. To succeed in literally freezing the target, you will step up your willpower even more.

You will also need to consider the person’s will to stay awake. When casting the spell on a sleepy creature, it will take hold much easier than with someone who is wide awake. The complexity of a target’s mind is important as well; the more complex the target’s mind, the more willpower you will need to apply. Strangely enough, we have also observed a difference between magical and non-magical beings. While the amount of willpower that needs to be applied stays just the same, you need to be especially careful with your concentration when casting on non-magical targets. Generally speaking, the spell will last longer, and if you are not sufficiently careful, it may get out of hand and endanger the Statute of Secrecy. This is by no means an exaggeration, and I am sure that at least the Muggle-born students among you will remember the incident of 1759 which nearly revealed the existence of magic to the world. The story is still recounted to this very day, and I believe that there are hardly any children who have not heard of it. Thankfully, fairytale stories are believed to be nothing more than folklore, a belief that has been encouraged by the Ministry of Magic with the help of obliviators’ applications of slight compulsion charms to make people believe that the occurrence was nothing more than a fancy story. I am talking about the fairy tale that is nowadays known as Sleeping Beauty.

Aurora Rose Morce, while certainly not a princess, was a beautiful young Muggle woman when a wizard, Climacus Ryder, met her in town and fell in love with her. Yet his feelings were not returned: by the time that he met young Aurora, Ryder was already an old man of 97 years. Believing that he was close to a breakthrough in creating his own Philosopher’s Stone, he decided to put Aurora in an enchanted sleep, only to be awoken by a kiss, intending that kisser to be a magically rejuvenated form of himself. While unethical, this plan might have worked, were it not for the fact that he miscalculated his odds in succeeding rather severely. First of all, Aurora’s family was fiercely protective of her and noticed her disappearance too quickly for the Obliviators to step in and do some direct damage control. Next, Ryder’s spell was oddly specific in its release conditions, which made it impossible to reverse for the contemporary wizards and witches of the Ministry. No one had heard of the spell that Ryder had invented in secret, and its limitations were unknown at the time. When he was sent to prison the very same year, Ryder’s notes were used to try to recreate the charm as well as a working negation charm. While a counter was found in 1859, it was a long wait of a century, and to this very day it is unknown whether the spell would have come to a natural end. It is said that a long-term experiment is being conducted in the Department of Mysteries, but this is only a rumour. The greatest misfortune connected to the unlucky fate of Aurora Morce is another coincidental meeting that ought to have never happened.

In the years to come, at least one researcher was responsible to search for a counter charm at all times. Their attempts remained unsuccessful until Andreas Pence started working on a counter in the 1850s. One day, when on his way to check on the young girl’s condition, Pence was followed by a young writer, David Aubert, who later-on published the fairytale known as “Sleeping Beauty” based on what he saw happening. Pence managed to reverse the spell’s effect, and witnessed the awakening of the young girl. It is only this much of Aubert’s story that corresponds to the facts; the supposed kiss that awakened Aurora was in fact Pence checking whether he could hear her breathing, as he did not believe the results of his diagnostic charm. Yet the fairytale which Aubert published nearly revealed the wizarding world to the public: people had been wondering about the mysterious fate of Aurora Morce, circulating rumours, and were quick to assume that the now re-awakened Aurora was the very same girl who had disappeared 100 years previously. Only area-wide compulsions which forced people to believe it to be nothing more than a story prevented a major catastrophe, yet the situation remained tense for several decades.

I ask you to practice this spell on animals only, and not on your fellow classmates. Hexing your classmates’ pets is not allowed either, Miss Arterberry, as you surely know. I will provide you with rats to practice on, and once you are more advanced and want to practice on more difficult beings, simply ask and I will organise other creatures for you to work with. None of you should have any problems with the counterspell, as it is rather simple to cast when compared to Bewitched Sleep. The spellcasting information is the following:

This counter is actually relatively close to the Reviving Spell, Rennervate, that you learned in your second year of Defense Against the Dark Arts. It is assumed that the creation of both spells goes hand in hand, as both their effects and their wand movements are similar. Yet it is known that the general Reviving Spell will not work on Bewitched Sleep, nor will the Reawakening Charm revive a person that has been hit with any other spell.

The only trouble that remains is that there is no direct way for you to check whether your target is in fact asleep, or just knocked out by an unintended side effect. As you will be reviving your creature rather quickly, as to not cause too much discomfort, it is impossible to see whether you actually managed to create an actual bewitched sleep, which is deep enough to make it impossible for the creature to awaken by themselves. For that, we need to introduce another spell. If your target creature is under the effects of Bewitched Sleep, you will be able to cast the Somnambulist Charm on them and make them move. If you weren’t successful in casting the previous spell, this one will not take effect. This enables us to check whether you managed to reach the desired depth of sleep.

Some of you may be familiar with the term somnambulism, but I want to clarify it nonetheless. More commonly known as sleepwalking, scientists have found that natural somnambulism only occurs in non-REM sleep phases. Yet the Somnambulist Charm allows us to overcome this hindrance and will in fact require the target to be in a REM sleep. If not, it simply will not take hold. You do not need to fear any backfires, but you will definitely notice whether you are successful or not by whether or not your target moves. Again, keep in mind that we are working with living, sentient creatures, you are expected to treat them properly. Anything other than this quick, simple test will not be tolerated, and I am sure that you do not intend to spend the next Hogsmeade weekend in the castle, mucking out the stables without magic. Do not say I did not warn you.

Toil and Trouble

The last spell that we will be discussing today is the Doubling Charm, Geminio. Though occasionally considered a curse, this enchantment, which causes an object to multiply, has many innocent uses. By the end of this lesson, I expect you to have mastered basic control over this spell, which means that you will be able to create a fixed amount of copies which will be, at first glance, indistinguishable from the original. I do not want you to get overly excited, though, for these copies will not mean that you will never have to buy another thing in your life. At first, it may seem as though the target and its copies are identical, yet the original object still retains a higher value. The duplicated object is almost worthless and, over time, it will rot more quickly than the original. Even the original object’s longevity is affected and diminished by creating a duplicate.

The history of Geminio is well documented, which is why I want to briefly discuss it. While it is unclear how exactly the charm was invented, it is known that the inventors were the Hyslop twins, Helixa and Syna. We do not know which of them invented it, whether it was a shared discovery or both of them found the charm simultaneously. What we do know is that the two women you can see in the portrait on the right were extremely close. Not a single account of the two of them being apart from each other exists. From the moment of their birth on June 19th, 1583, the two girls were inseparable and family accounts tell of accidental magic whenever one tried to split them. Yet it was this extreme closeness which created some problems, namely jealousy. It was essential for both girls to have the exact same things as their sister, and this is probably where the idea for the Doubling Charm came from. Upon their death, relatives were astounded to find exact copies of every single item in their mansion, wondering how they found replicas of pieces that were believed to be unique. It was only in the twin sisters’ last will that the real reason for the duplicated items was found, as they left an identical set of handwritten notes about it.

Note that the incantation and the charm’s name are not identical; the charm’s name differs from its incantation due to a spelling mistake. By the time that scholar’s noticed this fact, the name had already been well established and they decided not to change it.

A natural question is whether there is a limit on the amount of duplicates that may be created from a single application of Gemino. In simplest terms, there is none. According to spell researchers, the oddest thing about this spell is that only the caster can stop the multiplication process, whereas usually a counterspell is not unique to the person who cast the original spell. If the caster’s concentration is interrupted, it is possible that the replications may be repeated indefinitely. You may laugh now, but this is in fact a grave danger as you may be trapped, or even be crushed or suffocated, under thousands of duplicates. This is why it is essential that you uphold your concentration, and it is actually the reason why I am making you practice on small objects that are quickly vanished in the case of an accident. You are N.E.W.T. level students, so I am expecting a great level of responsibility from you. Unless you have mastered this spell and I have given you the go ahead, I do not want to see any of you practicing this spell unsupervised. It is a matter of safety, so I sincerely hope you are taking this seriously!

Anyway, given that you are studying conjuration in Transfiguration this year, you may assume that there is a close connection between the branch and this spell. Duplicating an object sounds rather like just conjuring a second object of the same sort, doesn’t it? Yet these spells are inherently different.

To demonstrate why Gemino is definitely not a conjuration, consider this: food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. You cannot conjure it, but there are still some ways of getting food by using magic: you can summon it, you can transform it, and you can increase the quantity if you have already got some. It is this last point that is important here: You can increase the quantity of food, while you cannot conjure it. This explanation by itself ought to prove that it is not a conjuration, but we will look more in depth at how it works now.

To fully explain this phenomenon, however, we would need a fair bit of time, as well as knowledge of number theory, which would be more complicated than the information you are required to know. Muggles discovered the theory of how Gemino works as early as 1924, through a popular proof which is known as the Banach-Tarski paradox. Unfortunately, they cannot see their theory in action, as they lack the magic necessary to bring it to life. While you only need to know the information presented below, it is a fascinating mathematical proof that I really recommend looking up. The paradox states that you can take a ball, break it into many pieces, move those pieces around, and end up with two versions of the original ball. Sounds like magic, doesn’t it?

How does it work though? Essentially, you are breaking up an object into multiple pieces. I am sure that you all agree that this is possible. You can make these pieces smaller and smaller by continuing to break up the objects further and further. In theory, you can go on until you have an infinite number of pieces. This is where our visualisation goes awry, as those pieces are too small to imagine. You split these tiny pieces up into two piles.

The most baffling point is that those piles of tiny pieces are very similar to one another. In fact, by moving them around a little, you can put the original ball back together from just one pile, and create a second ball from the second pile. I can see some of you squinting at me skeptically. Yes, I know, this does not make sense in the world as we know it. You cannot directly apply this practically. The pieces become too small for you to physically create. Another question that might come up: How does this work with regards to volume? If you aren’t adding anything, how is it possible that the volume doubles out of the blue? This is where Muggle science fails us and magic comes into play. In non-magical life, this is impossible. We are fortunate though that magic may bring to life the theoretically possible.

In fact, magic gives us this essential ability which makes this spell possible: we can split any object into the tiniest of pieces that we cannot even see. By doing so, the entire object is imbued with magic which dissolves after the spell is cast successfully. It is assumed that lingering traces of magic remain, which is why both the original and the duplicate tend to have a diminished longevity. Exact reasons for why the duplicate looks even worse for wear are still being researched, and the current theory is that it is more intensely subjected to magic.

Hopefully, this explanation has given you a better understanding of the mechanics behind this spell. If you find yourself wanting a more in-depth explanation, I highly recommend this video. While Muggles are certainly unable to perform the Doubling Charm, they are more than capable of conceiving of the idea, and have spent a fair amount of time and brainpower imagining it and explaining it to others.

I know that this lesson has been rather heavy on theory, especially the very last part, and that you are all more than exhausted by now. For next week, I ask you to do a compulsory quiz and, if you like, an extra credit essay. If you have any questions about the theoretical aspects that we have discussed today, feel free to send me an owl or to drop by during my office hours. See you next week!

Professor C. Virneburg

Image sources: here, here, here and here.