A Journey Through Potions & Herbology

by Pottermore Publishing

It depicts a poverty-stricken alchemist having one last throw of the dice at turning base metal into gold by using his last penny, taken from the now-empty purse his wife is holding. A scholar dressed in Italian clothes is reading books and giving instructions to the failing alchemist, but out of the window is a vision of the future as the alchemist’s family is welcomed into the workhouse.

  The print might be about the foolishness of the whole alchemical enterprise, but it was also a broader critique on people being taken for a ride by charlatans. Bruegel was showing how alchemy was being misinterpreted as a short-term drive for wealth and immortality. In an age when there were many problems with the Catholic church, the Reformation was beginning and Protestantism was emerging, the Philosopher’s Stone represented the secrets of the universe and the essence of life’s energy; a source of salvation. Alchemy was about the higher truth, but it was often misused to low ends.

  A second, huge painting called The Alchymist (with its subtle spelling difference) was an image of magic meeting science and was painted in the late 18th century by Joseph Wright of Derby in the UK. Resembling a religious painting, the grey-haired, bearded man at its centre could be a prophet bathed in celestial light, but his church is a laboratory and the heavenly glow is actually light from the chemical element he has discovered. It was based on a real historical event: the alchemist is Hennig Brandt in Hamburg, 1669, and he was attempting to discover gold. He was trying to do this by boiling urine of all things. Gold wasn’t the result, but the element he did discover was phosphorous.

  As glorious as the painting appears, the process was pretty disgusting. Brandt took 50 large buckets of urine (a thousand litres!) and let it sit for a few weeks before boiling it down to a paste the size of a bar of soap. When the substance met the air it created the brilliant light and flame of the painting. The discovery took place a hundred years before Wright was born, but the instruments and clothing of the painting are contemporary with Wright: the setting was the past, but the science belonged to the future. The painting seems to deliberately create a tension between the religion in the surroundings, the science in the discovery and the magic in the alchemical search to transmute base materials to gold. Brandt’s experimentation marked a significant step in the development of chemistry, through the workings of mystical alchemy.

  ‘Hmm… What do you think, Harry?’ said Luna, looking thoughtful.

  ‘What? Isn’t there just a password?’

  ‘Oh no, you’ve got to answer a question,’ said Luna.

  ‘What if you get it wrong?’

  ‘Well, you have to wait for somebody who gets it right,’ said Luna. ‘That way you learn, you see?’

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

  Of course, Harry Potter can count himself among the legions who sought the Philosopher’s Stone, in order to stop it falling into the hands of Voldemort. Its most fierce gatekeeper was the massive, monstrous three-headed dog, amusingly called Fluffy.

  It was standing quite still, all six eyes staring at them, and Harry knew that the only reason they weren’t already dead was that their sudden appearance had taken it by surprise, but it was quickly getting over that, there was no mistaking what those thunderous growls meant.

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  J.K. Rowling illustrated the scene in 1991, six years before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as she worked out her plan for the book. Harry meets Fluffy when he is tricked by Draco Malfoy into being in the school corridor after hours with Argus Filch on his tail. Slipping out through a locked door into an out-of-bounds part of Hogwarts, he comes face to face with the petrifying pooch. The illustration captures the terrified looks on their faces at the moment when Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville and Gary encounter the dreadful dog. But who’s Gary?

  He was actually an early incarnation of Dean Thomas, who, in turn, got dropped from this scene entirely (as did Neville). J.K. Rowling’s working drafts and early illustrations of the Harry Potter series bear a lot in common with recovered manuscripts from other points in history. Sometimes, as in this case, they point to a deviation or a change, and sometimes (as in the case of the early working draft of ‘The Man with Two Faces’, the chapter that concludes the first novel) they show just how complete her detailed vision was to begin with, and how little it changed on its journey to publication. These early drafts were never intended for preservation, but like the development of science in the alchemical treatises, J.K. Rowling’s work-in-progress shows the development of her wizarding world.

  Pen and ink drawing of Harry and his friends by

  J.K. Rowling (1991)

  Fluffy is a call-back to Cerberus, the Classical three-headed mythological beast and guard dog to the gates of hell, which Hercules had to capture as one of his twelve labours. The depiction of Cerberus and Hercules by Aegidius Sadeler II, engraver in the court of Rudolf II in Prague (made some time between 1586 and 1629), made the gates of hell look like a flaming brick prison. What’s interesting about the image of Hercules dragging the dark, muscular, fanged beast in his left hand and the way it is composed is the angle. You’re compelled to follow the action from right to left, as opposed to the conventional Western habit of reading left to right. This inversion could be because we are in the underworld, where logic, physics and, indeed, art are turned on their head.

  What also links Cerberus to Fluffy and the Philosopher’s Stone is that in capturing Cerberus and taking him to King Eurystheus (who was so terrified he immediately jumped into a large jar to escape), Hercules gained immortality by completing his penance. And just like Harry in his epic struggle to find the Philosopher’s Stone, Hercules did so less through physical effort than through courage and strength of mind.

  The Potions classroom is a pivotal setting in the Harry Potter novels for the development of the characters’ brewing skills and also their own self-knowledge. Alchemy throughout history was about the transformation of base metals into gold and the promise of eternal life, but really it is about the journey of making something of your life and becoming who you are supposed to be.

  Growing up and entering your teenage years is a tumultuous time for anyone, full of fears and desires, but this was particularly so for Harry, Hermione and Ron as they embarked on their journey into the wizarding world.

  HERBOLOGY

  Herbs are familiar to all of us. We grow them in gardens, see a dizzying array of them on supermarket shelves and use them to add all manner of flavours to recipes. But in the past, when most people lived in the countryside, the plants and herbs that grew all around them were nature’s medicine cabinet. Herbology, the study of folk remedies and the use of plants, herbs and fungi as medical treatments, was practised and documented in scholarly books in many places on the planet. In this journey through herbology we’ll see how this knowledge was compiled into a series of books called herbals, how these helped develop the science of modern medicine, and also how the myths around the magical properties of certain plants, such as mandrakes, persisted for many, many years.

  Herbology is an important subject in the Harry Potter books, and becomes more central as the stories develop: from the Wolfsbane potion that alleviates the symptoms of Lupin’s werewolf problem in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to the Gillyweed Harry uses to breathe underwater in Goblet of Fire. In order to make Polyjuice Potion (which, you’ll remember, enables you to take on the appearance of another person), you need to pay attention in Herbology class, after all.

  PART 1: GREENHOUSES, GARDENING TOOLS AND SOME ‘HERBALS’

  Professor Sprout was a squat little witch who wore a patched hat over her flyaway hair; there was usually a large amount of earth on her clothes, and her fingernails would have made Aunt Petunia faint.

  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  Professor of Herbology, Pomona Sprout, was actually illustrated by J.K. Rowling in 1990, some years before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In the dra
wing, Sprout is surrounded by all kinds of plants and cradles a cactus in one arm, while tendrils sneak out from a pot on the table. They might be sneaking around, looking for something to nibble.

  Pen and ink drawing of Professor Pomona Sprout by J.K. Rowling (30 September 1990)

  The plants are reminiscent of those you might find in gardens or around the English countryside, but with little twists that make them appear ever so slightly not of this world. The spider hanging off the witch’s hat perhaps indicates how welcoming Sprout was to lots of different flora and fauna.

  ‘Four to a tray – there is a large supply of pots here – compost in the sacks over there – and be careful of the Venomous Tentacula, it’s teething.’

  Professor Sprout – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  If you want to grow magic plants in your garden, then you need magical gardening tools. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, in Southwest England, has some examples of gardening implements made for magical sowing and harvesting. These are made of bone and antler, the latter in particular being a material that has huge symbolic importance. Tools shaped from antlers, which rise upwards, were thought to connect the earth with the higher spirit world, and because antlers shed and regrow, they also symbolised the magic of regeneration and renewal.

  When it came to harvesting and digging up special and magical plants, it was important that the tools were formed from natural resources so that they didn’t corrupt the plants being harvested. There are many folktales about gardening: from making hot peppers hotter by planting them when angry, to guaranteeing a bountiful bean harvest by getting a pregnant woman to do the planting. Ritual and magic have an intimate connection with sowing and harvest, one born of a close relationship with nature.

  At its most basic level, by finding out which plants were best ground or cooked together, people learnt about the processes of the natural world. A successful result often led to the process becoming ritualised, with people looking at the world around them and trying to understand how it related to them. Science and magic came out of the same search for knowledge about how the world worked.

  Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where they learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for.

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

  Herbals have been around for centuries. They describe the appearance and properties of plants that can be used for preparing medicines. Back in the 12th century, medical practitioners would have been using a manuscript to study medicinal plants, but a medieval herbal included more than just plants and medicines; it occasionally gave you the myths and legends associated with how they got their names – embellishments which gave them more flavour and character. The illustrations could also be pretty extraordinary, depicting battles with rabid dogs and men urinating into cups.

  One such 12th-century herbal advises those afflicted with snakebite. It recommends Centauria major and Centauria minor – the ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ centaury – which were plants named after the Ancient Greek centaur Chiron, renowned as a physician and an oracle, too. The Ancient Greek poet Homer described Chiron as the ‘wisest and justest of all the centaurs’. Chiron was also famous for his knowledge of botany, pharmacy and herbology. In this herbal, a beautiful line drawing depicts him handing the herb centaury to Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. The herb’s healing properties for snakebite were represented in the diagram, as well as beneath the feet of the centaur and the god, as you can see a long snake slithering away.

  They had their Herbology exam on Wednesday (other than a small bite from a Fanged Geranium, Harry felt he had done reasonably well) […]

  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

  Another example of a herbal, from around about 1440 and made in Lombardy, has illustrations so rich in their form and decoration that it was clearly made for a very wealthy patron. These illustrations include, among other things, a demon, a mouse, a cat above a corpse in a coffin, a horse castrating itself, an aphrodisiac, a hairy elephant and another man urinating into a pot.

  One illustration is of snakeroot, and it’s a beautiful descriptive painting of the plant. Beside it are some of the species’ Latin names – ‘dragontea’, ‘serpentaria’ and ‘viperina’ – which tell of the plant’s ability to cure snakebites. All of these were names for the same plant. There is an image of a hissing green serpent curling around the plant’s root and a snarling dragon with a forked tongue and elaborately knotted tail. More lavish books were made, intended less for use by the original owner than for ostentatious display, as a thing of wonder and magic.

  John Gerard’s herbal, also known as the The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, was first published in 1597. It was used by botanists and medical practitioners for over two hundred years.

  Even though it bears Gerard’s name, the book was largely based on the work of others – the text was a translation from a Flemish botanist and hundreds of illustrations are from a German work – only sixteen of the 1,800 woodcuts printed inside were original. Even while alive, Gerard was being accused of plagiarism. It was entertainingly written and a huge success, adding in the local colour of Gerard’s observations of his own garden in Holborn, London. The botanical illustrations had all kinds of advice and information: marjoram can help people ‘given to much over-sighing’ and basil ‘taketh away sorrowfulness and maketh a man merry and glad’.

  Some of the book’s botany seems pretty off-the-mark to the modern reader. For example, the theory that Barnacle geese didn’t come from eggs but grew on Scotland’s island of Orkney might not stand up to too much questioning! People didn’t know how migration worked, so it’s an understandable hypothesis, testing out how the world might operate.

  One of Gerard’s sixteen new woodcuts was the potato – thought to be the earliest published picture of one. The then-strange and newly discovered plant generated plenty of excitement. It was a delicacy that only the rich could afford and there was talk about its potential medicinal uses: one being that carrying a potato in the pocket would cure rheumatism.

  The copy of Gerard’s book held by the British Library is full of fascinating annotations written by hand in the margins, much like Harry’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making in Half-Blood Prince. Because the book was principally about describing plants, and not a medical book, the owner added notes about the plants’ medical uses, including mention of jaundice, worms and the like, which seem more detailed than someone using it merely as a home-remedies book. But we’ll never really know the true identity of this mystery person in the margins.

  Nobody else was looking. Harry bent low to retrieve the book and, as he did so, he saw something scribbled along the bottom of the back cover in the same small, cramped handwriting as the instructions that had won him his bottle of Felix Felicis, now safely hidden inside a pair of socks in his trunk upstairs.

  This Book is the Property of the Half-Blood Prince

  Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  Harry, Ron and Hermione left the castle together, crossed the vegetable patch and made for the greenhouses, where the magical plants were kept.

  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  There are medical texts throughout history that could happily have sat in Professor Sprout’s greenhouses or on the shelves in Madam Pomfrey’s hospital wing, but probably the most famous herbal medicine book in history is Nicholas Culpeper’s.

  Culpeper’s herbal was first published in 1652, in English rather than Latin, to reach a wider audience: there have been over 100 editions and it has never been out of print. It was taken by pilgrims to the New World and was the first medical book published in North America. J.K. Rowling owns two editions: a beautiful copy gifted to her by her publisher Bloomsbury and a well-thumbed second-hand version she used while writing and researching the Harry Potter serie
s. The book provided a comprehensive list of native medicinal herbs, indexed against specific illnesses, and prescribed the most effective forms of treatment and when to take them.

  Nicholas Culpeper – botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer – had an extraordinary life. He was shot during the English Civil War while fighting for the Parliamentarians, his lover was struck dead by lightning as they tried to elope and he was put on trial for witchcraft. He is remembered for being a radical medical revolutionary.

  He set up as an apothecary in London, creating potions and medicines based on plants and herbs that could be found in the English countryside. He shared his knowledge of natural remedies freely, putting him into conflict with the College of Physicians. They had a monopoly on practising medicine within the City of London and disliked Culpeper’s interventions.

  Culpeper set up just outside the City walls in the Spitalfields area (outside the jurisdiction of the College of Physicians) and worked incredibly hard – seeing up to forty patients in a morning and charging little or no money for it. He pioneered an early kind of free health service.

  He was scathing of other physicians’ methods. A lot of their diagnoses relied on examining urine, sometimes without even seeing the patient personally. He wrote that proper investigation ‘is a better way to find the disease than viewing the piss, though a man should view as much piss as the Thames might hold’.

  Culpeper advocated natural remedies, but also turned to astrology, believing that the planets could cure different parts of the body: Saturn the spleen, Jupiter the liver and Mars the gall, and, of course, Venus ‘the instruments of Generation’. In doing so, he innovated a form of medical astrology: he listed the types of herbs and plants to be used for certain cures and in turn related those to the stars, to say what time of year or month was best to take them for the best effect. He saw traditional medicinal practices and astrology as intertwined.