The Sealing Charm is another highly practical and useful charm. It can be traced back to about 715 A.D. and those who are sharp will notice that it was invented just after the Unlocking Charm was. When it was discovered that the Unlocking Charm could unlock every door, soon robbery was widespread and the Ministry was called to ban the spell immediately.

 While Ivnor, the inventor of the Unlocking Charm, worked on a way to personalise the potentially dangerous spell, another young wizard called Gritlack worked on a way to permanently lock doors with a charm that would not yield to the Unlocking Charm. Urged by the disturbingly steep trend of robberies and the Ministry’s offer of reward, Gritlack invented the charm in a shockingly quick three weeks.

 The Sealing Charm could seal anything that could be opened, such as all doors, windows, and chests. Most importantly, the Unlocking Charm was impervious to the Sealing Charm. Knowing that the spell was useless without a way to unlock itself, Gritlack included an extension to the charm that allowed all objects which had been sealed to be unlocked, but only from within.

 That meant that anyone casting the Sealing Charm upon their house had to have someone within the house to open the door for them to enter again. The solution was perfect and people of the magical world used it for months before Ivnor developed the personalised Unlocking Charm. Gritlack collected the reward money from the Ministry and went back to his studies. Unwilling to attract attention, he hid from the public eye, but the public unanimously nominated that his Sealing Charm be entered in the Ministry’s contest for the best original spell, the same contest that had inspired Ivnor to create the Unlocking Charm.

 Despite the few weeks of trouble that it had cost, the Unlocking Charm won first place in the contest, for it turned out to revolutionise magical safety and privacy, and the Sealing Charm won a close second. Gritlack, who had not even entered his spell into the contest, won a sizeable amount of money and fame and went on to develop defensive and offensive spells for Aurors in a special division of the Ministry.

 The incantation of the Sealing Charm is Colloportus (co-lo-POR-tus), which Gritlack derived from another language to mean “to close forever.” The basic Sealing Charm, which you will be taught, renders that an object cannot be opened from within; however, this charm may be revisited upon in further years to learn the variations of the spell.

 The wand movement is similar to drawing a symbol that looks like “#” in the air. The movements involve two horizontal strokes, starting from the left and going to the right, which should be synchronised with the syllables “co-lo,” and two vertical strokes, starting from the bottom and going upwards, which should be synchronised with the syllables “por-tus.”

 When the spell is cast, there should be a squelching sound, which shows that the spell has been successfully cast and that the object has been sealed. If one does not hear the sound, the spell may have been too weak to seal the object, and the spell should be cast again.