Original subtitles

"As there is little foolish wand-waving here,

"many of you will hardly believe this is magic."

"I don't expect you will really understand 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."

"I can teach you how to bottle fame,

"brew glory, even stop a death."

"If you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads

"as I usually have to teach."

In Harry Potter, JK Rowling created one of modern fiction's

most alluring and magical worlds.

But it's a vision based on more than mere make-believe.

A lot of the things that we read in fiction in Harry Potter were

actually believed in and enacted upon in history in the past.

What Jo has done is she's taken known values,

she's taken familiar stories

and added them in her own beautiful blend.

My mandrakes aren't quite like that.

The search for magical knowledge has obsessed humans since time began.

From the age-old quest to conquer death...

To master destiny...

And overturn fate...

Look at this. Oh, my lord!

I think it worked.

Human beings have dreamt up magical ways of thinking.

I don't think everyone should believe in magic

but I'm not sure I would trust anyone who doesn't in some way or another.

Accio.

This is the story of the real-life magic

at the heart of Harry Potter.

This year marks a special anniversary,

and some very strange celebrations are under way.

We came all the way from Brooklyn, New York.

This is my mum. This is my daughter.

And these are my granddaughters.

Obliviate.

I've come as Moaning Myrtle 'cause she has a lot of personality

- for a dead person. - Yes.

I'm Professor Minerva McGonagall and I can't do a proper accent

so I'm not really going to try.

Go on.

You're welcome to share my cubicle, Harry.

Aw...

It's been 20 years since an orphaned boy wizard made muggles

out of all of us.

There's something buried deep within all of us, I think,

that would like to get the owl and be told...

"You are not only unique and special,

"I'm going to take you to where your people are."

I mean, that's such a seductive idea, I think.

That's not just something that children crave,

it's something that all of us crave.

I've kind of loved to be in that world.

I'd just love to be in that world.

I wish I was a wizard!

But Rowling's wizarding world is closer to our own than we think.

As Harry's great friend Hermione Granger once said...

"Don't legends always have a basis in fact?"

In The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis,

there is one of the most beautiful fictional worlds

that I've ever read, which is the world between the worlds,

which is a place where you're in a forest and there are multiple pools

and every pool you jump into will take you to a different world,

and that to me has always been a library.

I was one of those bookish children

who never left the library if she could help it.

So, yeah, of course, to me, a library is truly a place of magic.

At the British Library,

all kinds of magical preparations are taking place.

And it's all to create a new exhibition

which aims to reveal the link between the real history of magic,

and JK Rowling's writing.

And it's all there from the very first book.

Most of the JK Rowling material has never been exhibited before.

It's the first time it's going on display.

So this is a typed synopsis of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.

In the early '90s,

this was written to be sent to agents and to publishers

to sell the story.

Yeah, she's having to sell Harry Potter.

You wouldn't think it, would you?

The conceit is that we muggles,

we sort of glimpse this hidden world because we know some of the mythology

but what we think we know is often wrong.

The real magic, as it were, is not quite as we believe it to be.

Using pre-existing myths or ideas of fantastic creatures, and so on,

was a way of giving texture to the world.

I think JK Rowling used magic,

and the history of magic in an exceedingly sophisticated way,

and possibly there are aspects of it that your general reader

just might not even see.

"The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making

"the Philosopher's Stone,

"a legendary substance with astonishing powers.

"The stone will transform any metal into pure gold.

"It also produces the elixir of life,

"which will make the drinker immortal."

The pursuit of immortality was a quest to which medieval alchemists

devoted their lives.

And one amongst them became the stuff of legend.

"There have been many reports of the Philosopher's Stone over the centuries,

"but the only stone currently in existence belongs

"to Mr Nicolas Flamel, the noted alchemist and opera lover.

"Mr Flamel, who celebrated his 665th birthday last year,

"enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife Perenelle, 658."

In the stories Nicolas Flamel,

he's the person who's actually discovered the key to eternal life,

and is alive and well.

I hate to spoil the story, but he is based on a real-life figure

who lived in Paris in the early 15th century

and obviously, sadly, he did die,

but we do actually have his tombstone.

It's quite a magical object in itself.

Nicolas Flamel may not have achieved immortality,

but alchemists continued their search for the elixir of life.

And some of their mysterious instructions survive

on a magical scroll.

Let's take this one out the box.

- So, this is the... Amazing... - Oh, my God.

Ripley Scroll. There you are.

- It's extraordinary. - I think it's made about the year 1600...

And it tells you how to make the Philosopher's Stone.

Oh, look.

Isn't that incredible? Oh, it's so gorgeous. Look at this.

And the colours are still so...

It's beautifully preserved.

Well, it's been rolled up for all that time,

so that partly preserves it.

We very rarely unscroll the whole thing.

I'm genuinely so honoured, look at this.

This is the first time I've had the chance to see these kind

of artefacts myself.

Obviously I've got a lot of reference books,

some of them are very cheap,

from 25 years old,

30 years old, that I was using as research materials.

So, selfishly, this was a chance to see the real deal.

I had a really vivid dream about Nicolas Flamel

during the writing of Philosopher's Stone.

I dreamt that I was in his alchemist studio

and this kind of symbolism was all over his walls.

I didn't even ask questions, I was just watching.

A typical writer, observing.

Didn't even ask.

And make them all but one,

lo here

is the Philosopher's Stone.

I've never seen

anything quite like this before.

I would imagine few people have.

What fascinates me about alchemy is you have this mixture of science,

actual science, right?

Because this was old chemistry,

so some of it is genuinely scientific.

They were observing phenomena that we recognise now as the basis

for chemistry. So it's just this fascinating hybrid, isn't it?

Yeah, combination of all these ideas.

And I'm really disappointed you haven't tried to make one.

Because the joke's on us, if this works!

We'll make sure it does work. Yeah.

Many scientific discoveries were actually made as a result of people

carrying out that alchemical process.

There's a very famous painting,

it's by Joseph Wright of Derby,

and it shows a German chemist, alchemist,

in the 17th century.

He's trying to create gold and he's boiling a flask of urine!

He doesn't create gold, but he discovers phosphorus in the process.

The relationship between magic and science,

particularly in the early modern period is extremely important.

What powers are there out there that we perhaps can't see,

but which we can harness and adapt for our own use?

And to some extent that is a form of magic.

Perhaps penicillin is a form of magic.

It's just magic that consistently works.

But even in our rational, enlightened age of today,

perhaps there's still a place for the old ways of thinking.

Magic is fascinating to me,

clearly, because I've spent a lot of time writing about it,

but I think that it connects to very important things about what it is to

be human and what human beings want and what they believe.

"When he had been younger, Harry had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown

"relation coming to take him away, but it had never happened.

"The Dursleys were his only family.

"Yet sometimes he thought, or maybe hoped,

"that strangers in the street seemed to know him.

"Very strange strangers they were, too."

Children believe in magic because they're starting to make sense of,

and control their world.

But I think we all have that inside us.

The world is complex and largely unknowable,

and although we've moved on to science,

I think that we all, at heart,

retain a certain amount of magical thinking.

Tarantellegra!

Locomotor Wibbly!

Evanesco!

Rictusempra!

I've got to do a whoosh sound,

it's the only way it makes it real to me.

To trace the real history of magic,

there can be few better places than the British Library.

It has 150 million items,

and the curators have been searching amongst them for over a year.

We're about four floors down underneath the British Library

in the strong rooms where we keep most of our rare books.

There's miles and miles of books down here,

so, yeah, it's a huge space.

You are going into sort of strange realms within the collection

that are not, perhaps, so easily understood, so easily catalogued.

They're sometimes sort of left aside because they don't perhaps speak to

our researchers in the way that they do people who practise magic.

As every Hogwarts student knows,

a good magical textbook can save your life or solve your problems.

But in the 16th century,

members of the British cultural establishment believed in them, too.

So, this is one of my favourite manuscripts in the exhibition.

It's an actual book of spells and is extremely beautiful to look at,

I think, and has a lot of interesting content.

A real magical textbook,

and it belonged to the Elizabethan poet Gabriel Harvey.

But this one is an experiment or a spell on how to be invisible

and how it must be prepared.

There's lots of text written about Gabriel Harvey,

but as far as I know, I don't think he ever disappeared.

"By the mercy which you bear upon mankind,

"make me to be invisible."

"He set off, drawing the invisibility cloak tight around him

"as he walked.

"The library was pitch-black and very eerie.

"Harry lit a lamp to see his way along the rows of books."

Conveying the rich imaginary world of JK Rowling is a huge challenge

for the curators.

To help them, they've enlisted Harry Potter illustrator Jim Kay,

whose drawings and paintings will bring to life the links

between literary fantasy and historical fact.

So I first started illustrating Harry Potter

back in 2013,

and back then I thought,

"Well, it'd take about six months to do all of book one,"

and it actually took me two and a half years working seven days a week,

usually 12 hours at once, a day.

It was terrible pressure and you don't want to mess up the world's

most successful children's book.

The British Library team are selecting examples of Jim's work

to feature in the show.

Who is this? McGonagall.

It's actually based loosely on my partner,

who I aged for this painting, I must stress.

Jim's most intriguing illustrations are these curious-looking specimens.

Mandrake roots and their seedlings.

Harmless enough, you might think,

but these roots must be handled with care.

"Harry snapped the earmuffs over his ears.

"They shut out sound completely.

"Professor Sprout put a pink, fluffy pair over her own ears,

"rolled up the sleeves of her robes,

"grasped one of the tufty plants firmly and pulled hard.

"Harry let out a gasp of surprise that no-one could hear.

"Instead of roots,

"a small muddy and extremely ugly baby popped out of the earth.

"The leaves were growing right out of his head!

"He had pale-green mottled skin

"and was clearly bawling at the top of his lungs.

"Professor Sprout took a large plant pot from under the table,

"and plunged the mandrake into it, burying him in dark, damp compost,

"until only the tufted leaves were visible.

"Professor Sprout dusted off her hands,

"gave them all the thumbs-up and removed her own earmuffs.

"'As our mandrakes are only seedlings, their cries won't kill

"'yet, ' she said calmly,

"as though she'd just done nothing more exciting than water a begonia.

"'However, they will knock you out for several hours.'"

In herbal folklore, the blood-curdling scream of the mandrake

was thought to kill or send its listener mad.

The British Library have uncovered an unusual illustration of the myth.

A very unusual illustration indeed.

My mandrakes aren't quite like that.

I'm seeing a little naked man

with leaves and...

With leaves coming out of his head

with dismembered hands on them, and a dog is dragging him

out of the earth.

Oh, this is so interesting.

This is no ordinary man.

He's a mandrake root.

Mandragora. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Harvesting a mandrake might be fraught with risk,

but this manuscript from 16th-century Italy

has an unusual method to keep a person safe.

"Tie the mandrake to a dog, stuff your ears with earth,

"then blow a horn.

"As the startled dog runs away,

"it'll pull up the mandrake without its scream causing you harm."

Broadly speaking, I adopted the myth with some tweaks.

Very similar, no dogs involved in mine, though.

Humans did actually pull them up and mandrake root was an essential

component in a restorative potion that was needed

at Hogwarts that year.

There are real mandrakes and the root is human-shaped,

so I think that's where the myth came from, isn't it?

As often happens,

people extrapolated from the real object.

The mandrake is no longer commonplace.

Yet the elaborate folklore that surrounds it all came down

to this rather small, grubby root.

There's definitely something in these roots that's...

Yeah, anthropomorphic.

It's almost like a sort of pot belly.

So you could have a more distended stomach

leading to legs...

Which I quite like.

There's always been a fascination around mandrake roots

by the fact that they have a very powerful chemical compound

in which has effects on people when you eat it

that can be hallucinogenic.

They can change your heart rate, they can make your eyes dilate,

they give you a dry mouth.

There's all sorts of terrible things, but it's the hallucinogenic

properties that have mystified people for a long time.

So the combination of this anthropomorphic, human-looking root

along with this really powerful psychoactive compound inside,

I mean, it's just inevitable that people would put one and the other

together and create this wonderful mythology around the plant.

Hallucinogenic. That figures, right?

Yeah. That definitely figures.

I tried to steer clear of hallucinogenic drugs in Hogwarts.

I just felt that was wisest.

Well, there was enough going on, honestly, they didn't need drugs

to make life exciting!

The mandrake didn't just provide drug-fuelled highs.

These severed hands symbolise its use as an anaesthetic

in amputations.

Medieval herbals like these reveal the wonder and mystery

inspired by plants.

This is a time when most people couldn't get access to any form of medicine.

A small cut could kill you, you know?

It's no wonder that people put so much stock in the potential life-saving

properties of the plants around them, really.

Plants are a key ingredient in JK Rowling's wizarding world,

where they're used to make potions, and supplies can be found

in the apothecary of a certain Mr Mulpepper.

His name might sound a little bit like another exhibit in the show,

the Complete Herbal by one Nicholas Culpeper.

So Culpeper really was a herbal hero.

He was the guy who revolutionised medicine in Britain.

He took the power from the physicians and gave it back

to the common people.

Nicholas Culpeper grew up in the Sussex countryside here

in Isfield.

So, this footpath here would've been the exact footpath

that the young Culpeper would have walked down from his grandfather's church

over to the village, and it's here he would've learned all about

the flowers and the plants of the English countryside.

This lovely plant here is willowherb.

Now, Culpeper says the plant is really good for a sore mouth

if you gargle with it. He also says it's good for secret parts.

Er, not entirely sure what he's referring to there!

Now, stinging nettles, they can hurt, of course, they can be very stingy

but they're also very good for your health.

They can cure dog bites, snakebites, gangrene, nosebleeds,

all sorts of things. There's a whole page of it in Culpeper.

You've got some yarrow here, which is similar to sneezewort,

which is used in Harry Potter.

Heals wounds, inflammation, ulcers.

But it's also very good for toothache.

Oh, good for piles, as well.

Remedies like these weren't known to everyone, just an elite few.

Those with a licence from the College of Physicians,

whose fees were extortionate.

Back in the 1600s, the physicians were in charge of all the medicine.

They had all the knowledge, all written in Latin in a big book.

It was out of bounds to all the common people.

What Culpeper did was he took that book, he translated it into English.

He told people they can get their own medicine and where to go and find it.

The physicians, of course, were outraged by this.

Their secrets were out.

However, it was too late.

For the first time, the people,

instead of relying on these physicians and paying lots of money,

could actually go out into the hedgerows,

into the fields and find their own cures.

And that's what they did.

The book was published almost 400 years ago,

and it's still in print today.

In the 1600s, you could buy it on a street corner.

You can buy it online today.

It's the book that's been in print for the longest apart from the Bible.

Culpeper's book has special significance for JK Rowling.

Oh, yes.

I know this book.

This is Culpeper's Complete Herbal,

and I own two copies of this.

Am I allowed to touch this?

I will be tremendously careful, I'm so scared.

Oh, wow, look.

It's not even the properties of the plants,

it's just the way that they wrote about the plants

and observed them and tied them to planetary movements and so on.

There's such a poetry to it.

"Oh, yes, it is fat, unctuous and temperate.

"Generated of that which is moist, aerius and moderately hot."

I love it.

"Midnight came and went while Harry was reading and rereading a passage

"about the uses of scurvy-grass,

"lovage and sneezewort, and not taking in a word of it.

"These plants are most efficacious in the inflaming of the brain

"and are therefore much used in confusing and befuddlement drafts,

"where the wizard is desirous of producing hot-headiness

"and recklessness."

Even when I didn't really use what they were saying,

I found it inspirational.

I found the way they talked about these plants inspirational.

This is a gorgeous book. Look at this.

And sometimes I would use old names to make my own names, you know?

You just look at the way that they put the words together.

Sea colewort... Love it.

Nicholas Culpeper was also accused of witchcraft about ten years before

he published his book.

In 1642, he was accused of being a practising witch.

Now, this is possibly because of antagonisms that he was creating

with the College of Physicians,

but it's also because I think people that are mixing up herbs,

creating potions, there's always going to be those questions about them.

"Non-magic people, more commonly known as muggles,

"were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times,

"but not very good at recognising it.

"On the rare occasion they did catch a real witch or wizard,

"burning had no effect whatsoever.

"The witch or wizard would perform a basic flame freezing charm

"and then pretend to shriek with pain

"while enjoying a gentle tickling sensation.

"Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burnt so much

"that she allowed herself to be caught no fewer than

"47 times in various disguises."

Witches and wizards in the Potterverse, they are morally neutral.

You are as good or as bad as you decide to be.

There's nothing inherently wrong about performing magic,

it's simply an ability that some people have.

Yet in history, most references to witches are resoundingly negative.

And the link between witches and powerful dark magic

was forged by a book.

So this is the earliest illustrated printed treatise on witchcraft.

It's called De Lamiis Et Phythonicis Mulieribus,

which roughly translate as "of witches and soothsayers".

This is the first time that you get a printed visual representation

of witches.

And it was published in 1489,

written by a man called Ulrich Molitor.

In the book, Molitor claims that witches were not as powerful as

people thought, but his illustrator clearly didn't read his text.

Because the drawings tell a different story.

So here you have two women, they're old,

they're haggard and they're evil-looking.

They're dangerous and they're powerful.

It shows them as able to create dangerous weather magic,

hailstorms, using cauldrons.

This is the earliest printed image of witches using a cauldron.

The book was published in 49 different editions

and was still in print a century later.

The whole text is written in Latin,

which wouldn't really be that accessible to your average person

even if they could read.

But the images are something that everyone can read,

and that is where the power of this book comes in,

and it cemented the iconography of how we understand witches to look.

At the edge of the Atlantic on the North Cornwall coast,

Boscastle is one of the most magical places in the land.

It even has its own museum of witchcraft.

So this broomstick belonged to Olga Hunt of Manaton.

She used to, on the night of the full moon,

scamper and leap about

on this broomstick on the rocks of Haytor, on Dartmoor.

Olga Hunt's broomstick is one of the artefacts that will feature in the show.

The British Library has been scouring the museum for other objects that might fit.

There are 3,000 to choose from.

This cauldron has a very unusual story attached to it

because it exploded,

much like the one in the stories of Harry Potter.

Ooh, this is interesting!

The tarred head.

I most definitely believe in magic.

Do I have to justify that?

The museum owns one of the largest collections of witchcraft artefacts

in the world.

So this is a dried cat.

They're often found in old buildings and they were used as a protection

charm to ward off infestation.

You'd think that a live cat would do a better job of it, but here we are.

There's a number of folk charms here.

And this is rather nasty toad curse.

Witchcraft is essentially the folk magic that was practised

by ordinary people.

The kind of things that the good witches did tended to be

day-to-day solutions.

Somebody comes to you, they've got a problem,

you say a charm, you get a herb and you solve that person's problem.

There's a particularly lovely love charm that will be featured

in the exhibition. Oh, it's moved!

Sorry. Where's it...

The charm was in there. Has some...

Where is it? Ah!

This love charm, and the items going on loan to the British Library,

all have counterparts in Harry Potter.

But these were used by real witches in the muggle world.

It's inscribed on an oyster shell,

oysters were, any shell, really, seen as symbols of fertility.

And then there are two conjoined hearts and the symbol for the female

and the male top and bottom.

So one or other of them would have commissioned the charm

from a cunning man or a cunning woman.

Magic, in some ways, it's a spiritual belief system

because it does depend on this idea that

there is a connection between all life, and that all life is sacred,

and that magic is a way of drawing on this creative energy

that is in the natural world all around us.

And here we've got a selection of wands.

One of which is going to feature in the exhibition.

Now, wands are subtle tools.

They're used to direct energy,

but they're also used for creating a magical space.

We have an example here of a very dark use...

Of the practice, which is a blasting rod.

And blasting rods are basically used to blast people and to direct

negative energy at them for a curse of some form.

Oh, it could kill somebody very easily, I should imagine,

so... Used by the right person in the right way.

So it's kept behind glass normally.

Every Hogwarts pupil needs their very own magic wand.

But no two wands are the same.

"'You talk about wands like they've got feelings, ' said Harry.

"'Like they can think for themselves.'

"'The wand chooses the wizard, ' said Ollivander.

"'That much has always been clear to those of us who have studied wandlore.'"

Wands are an essential part of casting a spell

and everyone has their favourite.

Expelliarmus!

Did that work?

If we could only use them in the muggle world,

they'd come in very handy.

I would cast a spell to make TJ in my class like me.

Oh, not on telly!

Obliviate!

But for the spell to work,

you need exactly the right flick or twist of the wrist.

Piertotum locomotor!

I couldn't find anything on wands, so I just made it all up.

That was all me and I had so much fun and actually I do remember

exactly where I was. I literally was sitting under a tree out in the open

on a very warm summer's day when I wrote that chapter,

the wand shop in the Philosopher's Stone.

And I just sat there and made up all these properties

and the cause and, yeah, I really enjoyed that.

So, yeah, no, I'm afraid I don't know anything about...

I don't know what anyone else has said about wands.

I made the whole thing up!

But there are folk out there who have been making wands for centuries.

Dusty Miller, father and son, come from a long line of wandmakers.

I'm Dusty XII.

-XIII, sorry. My father was XII. -Hello, Grandad!

My son is the XIII. XIV!

I like that, I got promoted then. Did you see that?

We work for the tree spirits,

so they tell us when to go and collect a piece of wood,

where to collect it,

which tree to collect it from.

It's all very complicated

and often means getting up in the middle of the night

to be in the forest at daybreak.

Why they always want daybreak, I don't know.

Why it can't be lunchtime...

- Another matter entirely. - Trees don't have lunch!

No, that's true, they don't.

The wood they collect is made into wands,

which they believe channel the sacred power of the trees.

Because we have this partnership with the tree spirits,

when they tell us to make certain tools, to create certain items,

for people to make changes in their lives...

And be able to... Maybe do healing on other people, or themselves,

then we're quite happy to do that,

and that's what we've spent our entire lifetimes doing.

How many have you made in your lifetime, you think,

you worked out the other day? Around 7,000-something?

7,500.

But I like making them, so he still makes the odd one or two, you know?

To us, it's the old-fashioned magic.

It's part of the magical wonder of the world.

Unfortunately, magic as we know it doesn't happen instantaneously.

The universe usually takes a little while to catch up

and make the changes.

In Rowling's wizarding world,

the effects of a spell can happen in an instant.

Expecto Patronum!

You just have to say the words the right way.

Take the doubling spell.

Geminio.

Geminio.

Geminio!

The spells often have their roots in classical languages and Rowling's

degree in French and Classics turned out to be useful.

Sometimes I just invented it.

It usually depended on the gravity of what I was inventing.

I often tended to give a richer provenance to things that were very

significant, like the Cruciatus Curse

or Avada Kedavra, whereas the more...

The fun things, Wingardium Leviosa is exactly what it sounds like

and it's flippant and it's fun.

Wingardium Leviosa!

It's only in fourth year that Harry encounters the most sinister spells

in the wizarding world.

The three unforgivable curses.

What are the unforgivable curses and what do they do?

Imperio!

There's Imperio, which is the controlling curse.

Crucio!

Crucio is a torture curse.

It makes whoever you're casting it at go into great pain.

So pretty bad.

And the final curse, the most dreadful of them all.

The killing spell.

"Avada Kedavra!

"A blast of green light blazed through Harry's eyelids

"and he heard something heavy fall to the ground beside him.

"The pain in his scar reached such a pitch that he retched

"and then it diminished.

"Terrified of what he was about to see, he opened his stinging eyes.

"Cedric was lying spread-eagled on the ground beside him.

"He was dead."

It sounds so powerful, doesn't it, Avada Kedavra?

It's got a real force to it.

It's Aramaic, I think.

Well, that is genuinely the derivation of abracadabra,

not many people know that. That's where abracadabra came from.

And literally translated it means, "May the thing be destroyed."

Abracadabra is today often thought of as a charm

which stage magicians use when they are pulling a rabbit out of a hat,

but actually it was first used in Roman times as a protection

against catching the disease malaria.

The manuscript tells you you should write out the word "abracadabra"

repeatedly on a small piece of parchment

and each time you write it out,

you're supposed to omit one of the letters

until you formed a small, triangular piece of text.

And when you've done that,

you tie it round your neck

and while you have it in place,

that actually acts as a protection against catching malaria.

Belief is also really important to magic.

If you believe in it, then it will happen.

I once read a great line that said,

"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

And that's absolutely true.

If you do believe in it, if you do believe that this wand has power,

if you do believe that this talisman will protect you,

then that does give you some form of comfort.

And I think all humans relate to that idea.

I think it's a universal within human experience.

"'Double divination this afternoon, '

"Harry groaned, looking down.

"Divination was his least favourite subject, apart from potions.

"Professor Trelawney kept predicting Harry's death,

"which he found extremely annoying."

A nice item relating to divination.

"On wonders past and present and to come."

About the prophecies of Old Mother Shipton,

who was a famous witch that made prophecies from Knaresborough.

A nice interesting image of a witch, which I think is...

Yes, in no way a cliche, with her enormous nose

and her chin that almost meets the tip of it!

That's great.

I have a lot of fun with divination in the Potter books

because I make it quite clear

that you get lucky once every million times.

Free will is the abiding principle of the Potter books, not prophecy.

"'Saturn was surely in a position of power in the heavens

"'at the moment of your birth.

"'Your dark hair, your mean stature.

"'Tragic losses so young in life.

"'I think I'm right in saying, my dear,

"'that you were born in midwinter.'

"'No, ' said Harry.

"'I was born in July.'"

These items are being sent to the British Library to be installed

in a section dedicated to divination.

Tea. Teacups.

Used for fortune-telling.

You'd use leaf tea, not a teabag. Won't work.

Typical magic mirror. You've got several, haven't you?

- Yes. - How long have you been collecting them?

- I've got three. - Three?

Three, but they don't come up very often.

I think Graham's got four.

The popular view of fortune-telling today

is that it's about foretelling the future,

and that definitely wasn't the original purpose of divination.

It was much more, in fact, largely,

about helping people to make decisions.

So it's sort of contacting the subconscious, in a way, isn't it?

-Yeah. -And then appealing to another force

in order to gain that knowledge.

Magic is...

I think it's simultaneously about empowerment,

but it's also an acknowledgement

that we are in a scary and unknowable world

because we know that these ritual practices

that go back to what we now would call primitive peoples,

and yet we still do a version of it today, you know,

many of us still have our own little rituals

that we don't even acknowledge as rituals,

but it's a way of trying to control what we secretly know

is uncontrollable, which is life.

This impulse to control the future by communicating with the dead

is one that spans millennia and crosses continents.

Reflecting the diversity of magic

is a task that's keeping the curators busy.

I think most of my friends would probably say I'm a Ravenclaw.

Bit of a nerd.

As soon as I heard that the Harry Potter exhibition was happening,

I was immediately excited.

These are some of our favourite items.

They're the oldest items in the British Library.

Once thought to be dragon bones,

they date back 3,000 years to the lost Shang dynasty.

They are the most ancient examples of Chinese writing.

So we are going to exhibit a total of four pieces

of a collection of 484 oracle bones

which entered the library in 1911.

They are animal bones and they were used for divination practices

in Bronze Age China.

Until the bones were discovered,

historians had little evidence that the Shang dynasty had ever existed.

But clues lay on the surface of the bones,

and with them, tiny, mysterious cracks.

They are clearly linked to a ritual

involved in order to divine the future.

The ancestors who are living in the heavens

were believed to know about human beings' future.

The diviners were interpreting the cracks

as the answer from the ancestors.

Bones were light, portable and, could be taken onto the battlefield.

The royal diviners prepared them for the king,

to ask the ancestors about the future.

To historians, reconstructing the work of the diviners

is a fascinating window into the world of the Shang.

Since the '60s, people have been trying to produce cracks and I think

after 30 hours of work, the two of us

produced the first crack, which was quite an achievement.

And then we produced further cracks.

They were very tiny and we are not yet fully in control of it.

This is a degree of sophistication which we aim to achieve,

but we need much more practice.

Nothing.

Snapping a bone might sound easy,

but to make the delicate cracks of an oracle bone,

you need care and precision.

- Let's have a look. - Oh, we do have a crack!

Oh, my God!

Look at this!

Oh, my God! I think it worked!

It worked!

Okay. Wow.

So, as you can see, the crack worked even though we didn't hear it.

But you have the two parts with the baseline here

and the other crack going away from it.

The Shang king interpreted this tiny crack as a message from the dead.

The fragments in the British Library tell us

exactly what was on his mind.

These two bones, these are all about the weather.

The bones are inscribed with the king's question and answer.

This is a particularly important bone because this is a bone

in which we see the reference to a lunar eclipse

that we've precisely dated

to the night of the 27th of December 1192 BC.

The fact that a lunar eclipse is mentioned is very interesting

because any kind of eclipse, lunar or solar,

was considered to be a bad omen.

So they would regularly perform these divinations

in order to establish whether they should prepare themselves

for any sort of disaster.

The structure of this one is very simplistic.

It simply says that the king read the cracks and said, auspicious,

we should perform the de-sacrifice.

So the first character here is king.

The bones give valuable insight into life in Shang dynasty China.

It's interesting because, from the questions posed,

we can understand what was very important

to the royal family at the time.

It was about battles.

It was about, is that marriage auspicious or not auspicious?

What can I do with this toothache that my royal sister has?

They talk about the human drive to try to understand their own life.

They are quite extraordinary, no?

"There was a lot more to magic, as Harry quickly found out,

"than waving your wand and saying a few funny words."

The exhibition will be divided

into subjects corresponding to the Hogwarts curriculum.

From divination to astronomy.

The most spectacular and bizarre exhibits

belong to a section on care of magical creatures.

So this is Edward Topsell's History Of Four-footed Beasts.

He describes a number of different beasts

that feature in Harry Potter, including the Sphinx.

Yes...

Yeah. She's interesting.

Yeah. Very unusual. It's not how we'd actually imagine a Sphinx

to look like from classical mythology, is it?

No. They are bred in India and Ethiopia.

Interesting.

When it comes to beasts, the hippogriff or the dragon,

there are certain beasts that absolutely must be in Potter

because they're so well known, you would just expect to see them there.

And I've played with them to an extent.

This one dates from probably the early 13th century.

First of all the phoenix is making its own funeral pyre

by picking twigs and leaves and branches from the trees.

-Oh, that's fantastic. I love that. -And there you are.

It's on fire and it's going to rise from the ashes.

-That's my favourite creature. Yeah. -He's gorgeous, isn't he?

Stunning. I also like this chap,

because that's like an Augerey, which I invented.

There's no such thing, but I call it the Irish phoenix.

These are so beautiful.

Incredibly human-looking owl.

In Harry Potter, JK Rowling refers to over 100 species

of mythical creature, drawn from across the globe.

In every society and every culture,

there is the practice of magic

or the understanding of the supernatural.

Magic is a universal language.

In the Department of African Studies,

one curator has made an exciting discovery.

It's a text written in Ge'ez, an ancient language of Ethiopia.

"If you wish to turn into a lion or transform yourself into a lion,

"read the above prayer

"and write it on a silk cloth

"and tie it around your head.

"Or if you wish to be

"a serpent, write this and tie it on your wrist."

This is a prayer for transformation or to turn...

You know, to change into something else.

So if I do try this prayer and I do turn into a lion,

I don't have the counter prayer to turn back into a human,

so for that reason I wouldn't read it.

Yes, I wouldn't read it, no.

It's... It's readable and it's straightforward, but, yeah...

This spell was found smuggled within the pages of a mysterious book.

It's from Gondar in Ethiopia.

Understanding this manuscript is trying to sort of understand

the history of magic from an African perspective.

So the owner of this manuscript would have been a debtera,

the equivalent of an alchemist.

And this particular manuscript would have been kept a secret.

By the 15th century,

this type of magic had been outlawed by Ethiopia's Christian king.

So manuscripts like these are exceptionally rare.

But despite its Ethiopian roots,

this branch of magic is very similar

to an important subject taught at Hogwarts.

This book is defence against the dark arts.

So the purpose of this talisman is to protect the client

from real or imagined harm.

In Defence against the Dark Arts,

Harry's magical ability shines

when he masters wizarding's most powerful protective charm.

"'Expecto Patronum, ' he yelled.

"And out of the end of his wand burst not a shapeless cloud of mist

"but a blinding, dazzling, silver animal.

"He screwed up his eyes to see what it was.

"It looked like a horse.

"It was galloping silently away from him

"across the black surface of the lake."

As the last few objects arrive from museums across Britain...

They're being joined by works that are rather more recent.

These date from the 1990s.

I chose them all because they had particular meaning to me.

They're all pieces of writing

or doodles that I could particularly remember.

And they come from very different stages in the process.

So some of it's on my very old manual typewriter.

Lots of hand-written stuff.

They just show what I was thinking.

This is a sketch of Hogwarts that JK Rowling sent to her publishers,

Bloomsbury, and it maps out all the key elements of Hogwarts

and she's given notes, as well.

My favourite bit about this one is

where she's drawn the squid that lives in the lake.

Recent British Library exhibitions include William Shakespeare,

John Milton and Jane Austen.

It's the first time a living writer

has been the focus of a major show here.

It's a huge honour and at the same time it feels quite surreal.

You know, to me, they're just my working materials, so...

And then you see them in a glass case and you think,

how on Earth did that happen?

It's a very peculiar sensation, yeah.

So this is one of mine.

So I don't feel quite so reverent about this one.

Professor Sprout is the herbologist.

Very lovable character.

I would say she's the most maternal, actually, or parental,

of the four Heads of House at Hogwarts.

So I drew this picture on December 30th, 1990.

And I can be very precise about when I drew this picture

because I was staying at a friend's house,

I'd been writing Potter for six months

and I stayed up when everyone else had gone to bed

because I was watching the movie The Man Who Would Be King.

And the reason I can be incredibly precise about

when I drew this is because...

At some point,

during the time I was watching that movie and drawing this picture,

my mother died 250 miles away

and I got the phone call the next day

to say that she had died.

So this obviously means a great deal to me, this picture.

But there was something quite extraordinary that I only realised

about 20 years later, so it seems very appropriate to say it now

in the context of this exhibition.

The Man Who Would Be King, for those who don't know,

is a story with Sean Connery and Michael Caine in it

and it's from an old Rudyard Kipling story.

And the Masonic symbol is very important in that movie.

And it was literally 20 years later

that I looked at the sign of the Deathly Hallows

and realised how similar they were.

The Deathly Hallows is comprised of the Elder Wand,

the Cloak of Invisibility and the Resurrection Stone.

And whoever possesses all three is said to be Master of Death.

When I saw the movie again and saw the Masonic symbol,

I sort of went cold all over and I thought...

"Is that why the Hallows symbol is what it is?"

And I've got a feeling that, on some deep subconscious level,

they are connected.

So I feel as though I sort of worked my way back over 20 years

to that night because the Potter series is hugely about loss...

And I've said this before, if my mother hadn't died,

I think the stories would be utterly different and not what they are.

Um... So, yeah.

So, this picture is very meaningful to me on a lot of different levels.

"Harry was so close to the mirror now

"that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection.

"'Mum?' he whispered.

"'Dad?'

"They just looked at him,

"smiling,

"and slowly Harry looked into the faces

"of the other people in the mirror

"and saw other pairs of green eyes like his,

"other noses like his,

"even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees.

"Harry was looking at his family for the first time in his life."

I meet people quite regularly who tell me...

What Potter meant to them

and I can only say that even they have no idea what it meant to me.

So I wrote Potter during what I hope will turn out to have been

the most turbulent period of my life

and I put a huge amount, more than people will ever know,

of my own life and experiences into those books

and it's not that lots of people liked it,

it's the fact that it meant that much to a few people even

is more than enough for a writer. It's an amazing feeling.

"Hermione, however, clapped her hand to her forehead.

"'Harry, I think I've just understood something.

"'I've got to go to the library.'

"And she sprinted away up the stairs.

"'What does she understand?' said Harry, distractedly,

"still looking around trying to tell where the voice had come from.

"'Loads more than I do, ' said Ron, shaking his head.

"'But why's she got to go to the library?'

"'Because that's what Hermione does, ' said Ron, shrugging.

"'When in doubt, go to the library.'"