bramblepatch:

whetstonefires:

eighthdoctor:

eighthdoctor:

there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history

@ofloveandmedea said:
please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sources

and also @saphura

well since you asked so nicely

here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:

first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.

second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.

so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.

why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.

there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)

couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:

• the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
• priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
• scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity

so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.

(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)

but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?

i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.

quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:

By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.

in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.

(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)

additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)

there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)

so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.

in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–

hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.

(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why)

This is plausible and overlaps interestingly with my rant about how considering Hogwarts was founded that far north in ~the tenth century by persons with mostly Saxon names,

the admissions-policy dispute Salazar is most likely to have flounced over not only is unlikely to have been about ‘muggleborns’ in the modern sense (since the secrecy policy didn’t exist so it would have been a mere status issue at that point)

but is quite likely to actually have been over the political/military question of admitting Danes. (Potentially also Scots.)

Scotland, shockingly enough, was not ruled by the English in the 10th century. With enough assumptions about dates and locations we can get Hogwarts having been founded in the kingdom of Northumbria, which was English but also fell not that long after the earliest plausible date for the founding of Hogwarts to invading Danish forces, which settled in and colonized the place.

(Because they did not entirely overwhelm and drive out the previous wave the Vikings are surprisingly often left out of the list of ‘people that took over England’ but they really shouldn’t be.)

So. Salazar Slytherin: probably patriotically opposed to educating young aspiring magicians whose family loyalties lay with the Great Pirate Army.

A tangent, but I think a compatible one to the Monastic Hogwarts theory: I think it’s reasonable to assume that at various points in history the castle housed more than just the school.

Some of the magical sites in London doubtlessly date to antiquity – the Veil chamber seems ancient enough that I suspect the rest of the Ministry complex was built on that site specifically to contain and protect the Department of Mysteries, and while it’s hard to say without a geographical location, it’s possible that the Diagon/Knockturn/Gringotts area represents an older wizarding settlement that was engulfed by the primarily muggle city. But Saint Mungo’s? The facade is decades old at most, and based on the dates on the famous wizards card of its founder, the hospital itself was probably founded only very shortly before the statute of secrecy went into effect.

And Mungo is a Scottish saint.

For a significant portion of British Wizarding history, Hogwarts was probably not only the main educational institution for children, it was probably the major academic and medical center for witches and wizards of all ages. The castle certainly seems to be larger than is necessary for the ambiguously several hundred children who currently make up the student body, and presumably when the muggle population of the British Isles was much lower, the magical population was smaller as well. Which implies that at some point at or after Hogwarts’ founding, someone had a use for all that space other than the education of wizarding children. This could have included one or more monastic orders, possibly carrying out missions or vocations later absorbed by the secular wizarding government.