CHRM-601 Lessons

Welcome to another lesson of Charms! By now you will be familiar with the usual flow of our lessons - we begin with some theory, and afterwards learn some spells to go along with the theory. However, today’s lesson will do the opposite. We will start with the spells, as unconnected as they may seem at first glance, and will afterwards discuss the theoretical aspects that justify why exactly they belong in the same lesson. The three spells we will be learning today transform vinegar into wine, grow legs on a teacup, and summon water.

Vinegar to Wine

Let’s begin with turning vinegar into wine. To be more precise, we are talking about acetic acid, also called ethanoic acid, a component of vinegar; and alcohol, or ethanol, which is contained in wine. As you are Sixth Year students by now, I expect you to understand some basic chemistry. While I am sure that all of you know the difference between vinegar and wine on a basic level, it is important to consider them on a structural level as well. Take a look at the two representations of the molecules in question:

As you can see, both structural formulas are very similar, and science can actually perform and explain the transformation from alcohol to vinegar, i.e. from ethanol to ethanoic acid, rather easily. They take the alcohol (ethanol) and add some oxygen. The reaction produces acetic acid and water, giving us vinegar. I won’t be teaching you the actual reaction in depth, but I do want to stress some key parts of it. First of all, it is a redox reaction. The name ‘redox’ is actually an abbreviation of the two complementary processes that take place: an oxidation and a reduction. These chemical reactions involve the transfer of electrons. More specifically, an oxidation reaction is when an electron has been taken away. A reduction reaction involves the addition of an electron to a molecule. Both reactions must happen, one to each of the starting molecules. We say that the molecule from which the electron is stripped has been oxidised, and the molecule to which the electron is added has been reduced. The part of our redox reaction that we are most interested in is the oxidation process - keep in mind though that despite its name, it is only mere chance that we are adding oxygen in this process. An illustration of said reaction can be found below.

No need to worry, I don’t expect you to fully understand it. The only thing that is essential for you to remember is that it is a redox reaction - and that theoretically speaking, all redox reactions are reversible. In science, these reversals are a mere theoretical construct though as the amount of energy required for a reversible reaction usually prevents it from actually occurring.

Now, why did we take a look at all this theory? The aim of our spell is to transform vinegar into wine. While reversing the chemical process of alcohol to acetic acid is impossible with Muggle means, our magic gives us the energy required to perform the feat. If cast correctly, this spell will take the acetic acid in your vinegar and turn it back into alcohol, creating wine. You will all receive a small vial of vinegar to practice on. The spellcasting details are the following:

Naturally, we need to talk about possible backfires as well. There is no need to worry, they are all rather harmless. Typical problems I see in class are usually caused by applying a wrong amount of willpower: If you use too much, the vial will explode, or the vinegar might freeze. Given your prowess in charms, I am sure that you won’t encounter too many problems though.  

Would you like to taste the wine you created? Don’t believe I didn’t notice some of you trying to slip those vials into your bags. Drinking alcohol is not permitted on Hogwarts grounds, and even if it was - if I were you, I wouldn’t attempt to drink that wine. It may be drinkable and may not be hazardous to your health, but it is not comparable to proper wine. The problem is that you have no way to check whether the wine you have created is actually harmless to consume, or whether it may prove to be a health risk. While the charm ensures that you create alcohol, it creates more than just drinkable alcohol (ethanol). I am sure that most, if not all, of you have already been warned about the dangers of homemade alcohol. Using magic to create it doesn’t lower the risks - wine created from vinegar, as with non-magical home brews, often contains methanol. While technically an alcohol, methanol is highly toxic. Even small amounts lead to headaches and blurred vision, while dosages of as little as a few teaspoons may lead to blindness or can even be fatal. While this charm certainly sounds like a cheap and easy way to get some alcohol, do consider the risks carefully. Magical healing is much more advanced than non-magical medicine, but methanol-induced blindness and death are conditions that even magic cannot cure.

Water-Making Spell

The second spell we will learn today is apparently unrelated to the previous one except for the fact that both of them are dealing with liquids. However, there is another connection that you will understand by  the end of the lesson. We will be dealing with the Water-Making Spell now, which is better known by its incantation, Aguamenti. There is a glass in front of you, and I want you to try casting that spell in a way that puts water into the glass and nowhere else. If there are any accidents in the form of an uncontrolled bout of water, let me quickly remind you of the Quick-Drying Charm you learned in Year Three.

You can clearly see a calibration mark roughly at the middle of the glass. I expect you to not only cast the charm, but also to control it meticulously. Depending on the caster’s concentration, similar to the two versions of the Fire-Making Charm that you learned in Year One, one may conjure a certain amount of water into a glass from a distance or “pour” the water from one’s wand, creating anything from a small jet to a wave-like amount. The latter is something that you may practice outside, but not within my classroom. For now, it is far more important that you practice your control, as we will be focussing on the dynamic version. As you can guess, your aim is it to fill your glass of water exactly to that calibration mark. I fully expect that you will need multiple attempts to achieve this feat, yet I require you to be able to do so by the beginning of the next lesson.

Next, to the amount of water and its flow, there are even other parts that you can tweak if you apply a sufficient amount of concentration. Spell variation is a topic we haven’t discussed in Charms yet as there are not many applications for it, but I am sure that you remember it well enough from your Transfiguration lessons. As we are not casting Aguamenti on an object, it is the end product that may be varied - that is to say, the water we are conjuring. Not all in-depth variations are required for you to pass your N.E.W.T. exams, but you will need some basic ones. Additionally, it is a great way for you to practice your control on the spell. I highly recommend you to try and cast some variations to see whether you can actually get them to work!

While not a true variation, one thing you can change is the water temperature. Unless you concentrate on what you want it to be, your jet of water will be around room temperature. Yet it is easy to change it a bit - either to make it comfortably warm to wash your hands, or icy cold to scare away a wild animal. Those work fairly easily. Considerably harder, though still working with temperature, are variations such as attempting to produce either steam or ice when casting Aguamenti. While I am sure that you can all visualise steam well enough, it is hard to imagine ice at first, given that it is a dynamic spellcasting process. The trick here is called supercooling, which means lowering the water’s temperature below the freezing point without it actually freezing. Like that, the jet of water coming out of your wand will still be liquid, but turn into an icy slush as soon as it hits another object. If you haven’t seen supercooled water, check out this video as a visualisation aid. Remember that only producing steam or ice count as proper variations, yet changing the water temperature is a good way of getting there.

Thinking about other changes, take a moment to consider other forms in which you encounter water. For example, you can carbonise the water. Theoretically, there are no limits, for as long as you can concentrate on the effects and stay within the laws of magic. Carbonating water works as carbon-dioxide is available in the atmosphere. Creating lemonade wouldn’t due to Gamp’s Law - for further information, take Transfiguration! Additionally, you can combine these variations to create snow or hail.

Growing Legs on a Teacup

Compared to the other two spells, this last spell for today appears to be even harder to connect. Growing legs on an object and animating it to walk around may seem more like a transformation than a charm, but I’ll explain that difference in a bit. By itself, the spell appears to have rather limited uses. You can use it to fetch some objects, but summoning is a far more effective alternative. In duels, you could use surrounding objects to attack your opponent, but it would require a massive amount of concentration, and the spell can easily be blocked with a shield charm. Even if you did manage to cast it, it is easy to counter with an Effect-Cancelling Charm. Why are we teaching this spell, then, if there aren’t any real uses for it? It’s a small step, but an essential one when it comes to figuring out animation charms. It isn’t creating the legs that is the hardest part of the spell - it is making the teacup walk.

An essential aspect to consider are the limitations of this spell. You mustn’t attempt to cast it on living things. This includes sentient creatures of any kind as well as plants. If you were to attempt to cast the spell on a being that already has legs, anything could happen. Most of the time, the backlash caused by these attempts is massive and kills both the caster and the being the spell was cast on. In the rare cases that the backfired spell did not lead to the immediate death of the caster, damage was not done physically, but it severely affected the caster’s mental capacity instead. I urge each and every one of you to take this warning seriously. You are playing with your lives, and once cast, we cannot reverse these effects.

Casting the spell on plants isn’t forbidden due to the laws of magic, but rather regulated by magical law. Generally speaking, the life force of the plant interferes with the spell and hence leads to unexpected results that might prove to be catastrophic. Casting the spell by itself is harmless - yet the consequences are often severe. By growing legs on the plant, you enable it to move around freely. Due to its inherent magic, this effect is frequently permanent - and it will keep occupying a part of your magic to uphold said spell. Other repercussions include the plant developing additional abilities or changing its characteristics. Sometimes, those mutant plants are spell-resistant. Just imagine having a carnivorous plant that is able to move of its own accord! As long as it is tiny, it is still rather harmless. Yet a freak accident when casting the charm on a plant could lead to it growing considerably to the point that it is big enough to consume humans. I am sure that you can see the dangers there!

To sum it up - don’t ever do this! It may cost you your life or sanity, or create dangers that you cannot possibly hope to control. Those wizards and witches who did try and create their own armies of animated plants are incarcerated for life, a fate which I am sure none of you want to share.  

This lesson’s aim is for you to make your teacup walk around. You’ll need to focus on making the legs strong enough to support the teacup’s weight. And they’ll need to be long enough to actually reach the table’s surface! Keep that in mind before you start casting. If your teacup’s legs end up in a way that doesn’t support the animation, simply cancel the spell with a Finite Incantatem and start again! As a visualisation aid, I brought some already charmed teacups to class.

Given those three teacups, which one do you believe will have the best chance of actually walking? The first one looks pretty enough, but it’s legs are far too spindly to support the teacup’s weight. If you were to try and move that teacup, the legs would break immediately. The last one presents a different problem: the legs do not reach the ground and are placed in a way that would not allow for much movement anyway. It is only the teacup in the middle that has a good chance of actually working with the animation part of the spell: the legs are sturdy enough to support the teacup’s weight, yet they still allow for sufficient movement. It is important to note that you only need to concentrate on the legs supporting the weight of the object you are trying to charm. You do not need to go into detail, but you must see the legs before your inner eye and magic will create them just in the way that they are needed.

Now it’s time for you to practice - and in case of mishaps, don’t forget that you may easily reverse everything that may happen: the Effect-Cancelling Charm counters the creation of legs, and you have learned how to repair any broken objects in Year One.

As you practice this spell, feel free to experiment a little. While the direction of the teacup’s movement with your concentration appears to make this a dynamic spell, the establishment of the prior mental connection means that it is indeed a static spell. You must not stop focusing on the teacup movements as you are trying to direct it, else it will move erratically. As you have learned in Transfiguration, you only control one of the spell’s effects: the movement You may even try and make it move at different speeds: the only thing that you need to achieve today is to make your teacup move, but it is a nice exercise to make it try to run, tiptoe, skip …

Classification of Spells

If you take a look at those three spells we discussed today, there is no obvious connection between them. We dealt with both dynamic and static spells, they are seemingly unconnected to any certain element, and there is no real application of all three charms on one object at the same time. Yet there is an important reason why I chose to discuss those three charms in one lesson. Consider the core subjects that you were obliged to take during your first five years of Hogwarts education. When it comes to spellcasting, three subjects are much more interwoven than the others: Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Charms. While Defense lessons cover both transfigurations and charms, the other two subjects allow for a partially clear classification of their contents. In the terms of spell uses, we may distinguish between those spells that are hurtful and those that help, such as the distinction between Dark spells like jinxes or curses and healing spells like Episkey. Another classification, the one which is more interesting for our subject matter, is that of spell effects, namely transfigurations and charms.

A transfiguration is defined as the alteration of an object’s form or appearance. As you learned in Transfiguration, there are even more categories of these spells, which are unimportant for this discussion. This alteration pertains to the form of an object, which may be changed or altered. To be more precise, these are changes on an atomic level. The new object is, usually, something completely different.

A charm, on the other hand, is used to alter an object’s inherent qualities. These qualities include, but are not limited to its behaviour and capabilities. Given this definition, a charm deals with an object’s function. Charming it may change this function completely, or add new features to an existing object.

The distinction between transfigurations and charms is not always clear and may require an in-depth analysis of a spell’s effects. In Year Three, you studied colour changing charms. At first glance, this appears to be a change of appearance, which would contradict its classification as a charm. Yet it might not be the colour that is changed, but rather the way in which the object reflects light, the way it is perceived. We do not know for sure which of these theories is the correct one, meaning that colour changes might be classified as both a transfiguration or a charm, depending on which theory you support. If you were to simply assign categories based on what a spell’s effects appear to be, you would be able to properly allocate most spells, yet it is important to pay attention to details.

As a simplified mnemonic, just consider the following statement: A transfiguration changes what an object is, a charm adds to an object and changes the way it is (inter)acting with the world.

Charms vs. Transfiguration Spells

To analyse the difference of classification for each of these spells, we will be discussing all of them in depth once more. Pay close attention now, as this will be the only time I will go into such detail with these spells. In the future, I expect you to be able to make the observations and fill in the details yourselves. I am sure that you will do marvellously, yet feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Let’s start with the first spell you learned today, the Vinegar to Wine Charm. At first, this may seem like a transfiguration spell. The words that I used were slightly misleading, I admit - as it is natural to talk about ‘transforming’ acetic acid into alcohol - but the spell is in fact not a transformation at all. This is actually the reason why we covered the chemical reactions that are necessary for turning wine into vinegar. As you are sure to remember, it is an oxidation. While this process isn’t reversible using mundane science due to the amount of energy required for it, applying magic enables witches and wizards to undo this mechanism and revert the process. As this is not a transformation, but rather a reversion of a previous natural process, it is indeed a charm as opposed to a transfiguration spell.

Next, we conjured water using Aguamenti. Again, as it is a classical term from transfiguration, conjuration is, generally speaking, not a part of Charms class. As we know from the Book of Spells, “the Water-Making Charm conjures clean, drinkable water from the end of the wand.” It is this aspect that creates a myriad of discussions amongst researchers in the area of charms and transfiguration. It has been proven that the water conjured with Aguamenti is safe to use. Both animal tests and some rather risky experiments by the Welsh researcher Iago Kendricks have proven conclusively that it is indeed possible for a human to survive only on conjured water for at least three months. Some researchers argue that this contradicts the claim that Aguamenti is in fact a conjuration, as this would mean that the water would dissipate eventually with possibly fatal effects for the wizard or witch who drank it. As Kendricks survived his experiment without any apparent secondary damages, that is unlikely. Current research tries to prove or refute the hypothesis that Aguamenti is in fact a varied summoning charm: Water is summoned from the surrounding atmosphere or some closeby freshwater reservoir and multiplied. This would explain why the water is in fact drinkable - it is just as if you had summoned some water from a nearby freshwater reservoir. Yet as of this day, there has been no way of proving it. It is widely assumed that it is harder to cast the spell in an arid area. However, there is no unit to measure how hard or simple it is to cast a spell, and it is most questionable whether there ever will be a way to analyse this assumption. Current research deals with trying to enable people to cast spells in a vacuum. If it were still possible successfully cast Aguamenti, we would know that our current theory isn’t correct, yet we still have to figure out how to perform these experiments without endangering our researchers.

Lastly, we practiced growing legs on inanimate objects. At first, this appears to be a transfiguration spell. After all, growing legs on an object is first and foremost an alteration of appearance. While this is partly changing what the teacup is with regards to its form, we are not altering its atomic makeup. On the contrary, the standing theory is that we are making it grow legs, growing as opposed to conjuring is. Hence, we are adding something to the existing teacup without changing it on a molecular level. This is why it is indeed a charm, and not a conjuration of legs in the classical sense of transfiguration.

That’s it for today’s lesson. Please review the classification of spells carefully and practice the spells we learned today. Before the next lesson, you will need to write a short essay and complete a quiz. Additionally, there is some extra credit spellcasting practice that you may choose to complete. If you have any questions, just drop me an owl or come and talk to me during my office hours. Until next week!

Professor C. Virneburg

Image sources: here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.