MAGICAL PLANTS IN LITERATURE

Chapter 102

This chapter we will be looking at the role of magical plants in literature, including within muggle literature where magical plants are known as mythical plants. The Ministry of Magic endorses the use of the term mythical when having conversations about magical things in public areas, as muggles mistake such conversations to be about literature, creative universes, and the like. When the Statue of Secrecy was originally instituted, the Wizengamot came to the decision that muggles needed some bank of wonderment knowledge to equip them for occasions when the Ministry needed time to gather intelligence about situations breaching the statue. For example, what if a muggle ran into a sphinx? The muggle would either be terrified out of their wits, think it was a strange dream, or decide that they had gone crazy. Given knowledge of a sphinx as a mythical creature who asks riddles and will maul you if you answer incorrectly, the muggle would more likely act according to that knowledge (and make the logical choice to remain silent and walk away) and therefore not get killed by the sphinx while waiting for the Ministry of Magic to arrive. Clearly giving muggles some knowledge of the magical world was necessary. In order to give them a bank of information without revealing the actual existence of our world, several genius wizards came up with the idea of introducing 'mythology' to the muggle culture. See, just because something is deemed a myth, doesn't mean that it is completely untrue. Some myths are completely false, and only tell a truth in the sense of the moral in the story, but other myths tell some actual truths, and are written to pass down information to the community. The commonly accepted definition of myth in the wizarding world is a story which allows transcendent truths to be expressed in intelligible form (naturally, some wizards believe muggles are incapable of grasping these transcendent truths at all). This would be another good time to introduce a warning to you all; when someone wants to burn stories, or eradicate certain knowledge from the world, it probably means that there is something true in those stories which makes them uncomfortable. After all, if the story is all a lie, then can't the reader realize that for themselves, or can't the offended person write their own book explaining why that isn't true? No, if someone aims to destroy literature, it is because they are frightened by the power of it. Stand by your rights, students, don't let other people tell you what you can't read, and erase knowledge from our world forever. Anyhow, there are so many wonderful witches and wizards who wrote beautiful works of mythology to pass down through muggle generations. Dragons, unicorns, and giants are the most popular objects of these literatures, as it takes the most preparation to keep muggles from acting rashly and foolishly in such situations as running into these creatures. The Ministry monitors closely what wizarding literature is released on magical creatures; however, wizarding writers have largely been able to go unnoticed in accounts of magical plants in mythical literature. This is excellent, as it means not only are descriptions of the plant more accurate, but that there is a healthy variety of magical plants noticed in mythical writings. If the Ministry were to take notice, they might say, for example, that muggles have no need to be warned about the Fern Flower. Yet, because the Ministry does not closely monitor the use of magical plants in literature for muggles, plants such as the Fern Flower receive a place on muggle bookshelves.