Potions and Alchemy
Roger Highfield is the Director of External Affairs at the Science Museum Group, and author of The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works. Former Editor of New Scientist and Science Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Roger was the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He has written two bestsellers and won various prizes for journalism, notably a British Press Award.
‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making.’
Surrounded by wooden desks, steaming cauldrons, potions bottles, apothecary jars and brass scales in the dungeons of Hogwarts, Harry Potter learned much during Severus Snape's classes about wormwood, puffer-fish eyes, wolfsbane and other peculiar ingredients.
The cauldrons used to concoct potions are one of the most potent symbols of witchcraft. Snape himself was entranced by 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’. They have been used for a long time – one magical example, dredged out of the Thames in 1861, was forged from riveted bronze sheets dating from the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age, between 600 and 800 BC. It would take the publication of On Witches and Female Fortune Tellers in 1489 however, the earliest illustrated treatise on witchcraft, to demonstrate one in use by witches. Two elderly women are shown using a cauldron to conjure up a hailstorm with the help of a snake and a cockerel. The treatise influenced attitudes to nature and women, even more so when it was reproduced widely as a result of a relatively newfangled technology known as printing.
Even in the Muggle world, there are many old books packed with the kind of recipes favoured by witches and wizards, reflecting how, though polar opposites, the worlds of science and magic shared the same inspiration long ago, in this case through the quest for cures. Strange treatments dating back a millennium can be found in Bald's Leechbook (nothing to do with hair restoration but the name of the original owner, a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon physician). Written in Old English, you can browse all sorts of ‘Potions and leechdoms against poison’. There is a handy antidote to snakebite, for example – simply smear earwax around the puncture wounds left by the reptile's fangs and recite the prayer of St John. One can get an intuitive grasp of how treatments which sound bizarre today could take hold long ago – of all the people bitten by snakes every year only a tiny fraction end up as fatalities, so if every one of them had smeared earwax and chanted prayers, the vast majority would have survived to tell their friends that this prescription really had worked.
In the wizarding world, Snape mentioned another way to counter poisons that would have been familiar to Muggles long ago, and a few still use them today. A ‘stone’ consisting of a hairball or mass of indigestible material found in the stomach of an animal such as a goat or antelope was thought to be an antidote. Called a bezoar after the Persian word for ‘counter poison’, its potency depends on the animal that produced it, according to A Compleat History of Druggs (1694). The best stones of all were hoarded by popes, kings and noblemen. From the 18th century onwards, the bezoar's magical healing properties were increasingly questioned, but a recent study conducted at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, suggested the stones might have the capacity to bind arsenic poison to the minerals and degraded hair they contain. Harry Potter's graffitied copy of Advanced Potion-Making gave the following succinct advice on how to deal with poisoning:
Just shove a bezoar down their throats.
If you wanted to become immortal, you required something more powerful. Only the Philosopher's Stone had transformative properties also capable of turning base metals into gold. Voldemort craved this Elixir of Life, but thanks to Harry's intervention, the Dark Lord would end up joining a legion of disappointed people who tried and failed in the age-old quest for the Stone, ranging from Chinese rulers to Holy Roman emperors, with armies of alchemists in between.
Just as astrologers focused on humanity's relationship with the stars, alchemists focused on our relationship with terrestrial nature, blending chemistry with magic. Lacking a common language for their concepts and processes, they borrowed signs and symbols from mythology and astrology, so that even a basic recipe read like a magic spell. The one used to create the Philosopher's Stone was a closely guarded secret that early alchemists kept deliberately obscure.
The endeavour to find the Elixir of Life was not entirely in vain, however. Through careful study of alchemical formulae, pictures and codes, and by attempting to recreate those early experiments, historians and scientists have discovered that some leading alchemists helped lay the foundations of scientific chemistry.
One of the most beautiful and symbolic representations of the alchemical process can be seen in the intricate Ripley Scroll. The scroll was named after the English alchemist George Ripley, a canon at Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire. Only 23 are known to exist – one was only identified as recently as 2012 by the Science Museum – and all are thought to be copies and variations upon a lost 15th-century original. When the entire scroll is unfurled one can see dragons, toads and a robed, bearded figure (perhaps Ripley himself?), clutching an alchemical vessel.
J.K. Rowling deftly draws on historical fact with the character of Nicolas Flamel. Flamel was a real person who lived in the 14th century. His work was known to influential 17th-century alchemists such as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton. He supposedly prepared the Philosopher's Stone (it did eventually become clear that the idea of one element being turned into another was not so potty after all in 1932, when atom splitting apparatus was used to carry out the first true transmutation by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge). The real-world Flamel was also believed to have made the Elixir of Life. Alas the elixir did not seem to do him much good, however – history tells us that Nicolas actually died in around 1418. His gravestone now belongs to the Musée national du Moyen Âge.
The German alchemist Hennig Brand also spent years in search of the Philosopher's Stone. That quest was a stretch too far, but in around 1669 he did manage to isolate phosphorus from urine. He decided to name the element after the Greek word for ‘light-bearer’. The find made a deep impression at the time. Such was the impact of Brand's feat that, more than a century later, English artist, Joseph Wright of Derby, captured the breakthrough in his painting The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher's Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers.
Alchemy began to give way to chemistry with the publication of The Sceptical Chymist by Boyle in 1661, suggesting that matter consists of atoms. After this came pioneering work by French nobleman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev, who created a periodic table in 1869. As if to underline how chemistry had by then eclipsed alchemy, Mendeleev's table could be used to predict the properties of elements that had yet to be discovered.
In the centuries since, Muggles have thrived on the scientific culture of evidence-gathering, scepticism, testing and provisional consensus-forming. Just take a moment to think about what we take for granted today in terms of life expectancy, for example. We can predict important chemical reactions, such as how a drug will work in the body. We can anticipate eclipses, plot the course of a spacecraft across the Solar System, and forecast the weather. We can apply science in many diverse and incredible innovations, from iPads and DNA tests to reusable rockets and the Web. This is true wizardry for, as Arthur C. Clarke once remarked, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
