All he knew was that his legs were carrying him forward as though he was on castors and that he had shouted stupidly at the snake, ‘Leave him!’ And miraculously – inexplicably – the snake slumped to the floor, docile as a thick black garden hose, its eyes now on Harry.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Snakes slither through the wizarding world from start to finish. Snape, who finally achieves his ambition to land the jinxed job of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, is a Slytherin whose house emblem is a snake. Lord Voldemort has a special bond with his gigantic, terrifying snake Nagini. And Harry discovers he can mysteriously speak the language of snakes: Parseltongue.
Snakes have captured the imagination from the moment one slithered down a tree and tempted Eve with an apple. They have been worshipped and feared, sometimes defenders against the dark arts and sometimes instruments of it.
‘Dinner, Nagini,’ said Voldemort softly, and the great snake swayed and slithered from his shoulders onto the polished wood.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Snakes are mysterious and wonderful. They slither along the ground without limbs and regenerate whenever they shed their skin. They can be horrifying as well, opening their mouths so wide that they can swallow their prey whole. They have symbolised poison and they have represented medicine. In folklore and mythology, they represent the duality between good and evil, light and darkness.
One bestiary (a medieval volume that describes various animals) from 13th-century England depicts an emorrosis alongside a snake charmer – an asp so-called because its bite caused haemorrhages so horrific that the victim sweated out their own blood until they died. The asp could only be overcome if it was sung to sleep in its cave. Once asleep, the conjurer could remove the jewel which sat on top of the snake’s head and render it powerless.
‘Yes, thirteen and a half inches. Yew. Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember… I think we must expect great things from you, Mr Potter… After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great.’
Garrick Ollivander – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
An object that was historically known to incorporate the features of a snake, so that it would become more powerful in the way it channelled magic, was the wand. Wands are central to the world of Harry Potter. There are complex rules about how a wand is created and chosen, and how it channels magic. You might think this complexity emerges from J.K. Rowling’s knowledge of historical magical folklore, but in the case of wands, she invented it all.
Wands can be made of different types of wood, just like those at Ollivander’s, which gives them different characteristics. They then might be enhanced with other materials: feathers, precious stones, metals and even unicorn hair – if you can get hold of it – to enhance their abilities.
‘Every Ollivander wand has a core of a powerful magical substance, Mr Potter. We use unicorn hairs, phoenix tail feathers and the heartstrings of dragons. No two Ollivander wands are the same, just as no two unicorns, dragons or phoenixes are quite the same. And of course, you will never get such good results with another wizard’s wand.’
Garrick Ollivander – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Snakes are significant in the magical folklore of many cultures. Representations of them are found in wands as well as grander objects such as modern witches’ staffs, made of materials like black bog oak – oak that has been sitting in a bog for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The shedding of the snake’s skin represents rebirth, renewal and regeneration, while the coils of the snake portray the dualism in magic: good and bad, destruction and protection, life and death.
Back in the 18th century, Dutch apothecary Albertus Seba had a renowned collection of curiosities, which he kept in his house in Amsterdam – a city that was then one of the great maritime centres in Europe. Seba provided the port’s ships with medicine, and in return they brought him exotic finds from all over the world. If you went to Seba’s place, you’d see plants, birds, insects, shells, crocodiles, butterflies, even a hydra and a dragon!
Seba actually created two collections. The first he sold to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, for a huge amount of money. The second, created over a decade, was much larger. In 1731, he commissioned artists to draw every single item in precise detail. It was such a massive project that the book wasn’t finished until 30 years after his death, and its catchy title was Accurate description of the very rich thesaurus of the principal and rarest natural objects.
Though many of the specimens he collected were used for medical research, a lot of the writings that Seba created were not very scientifically accurate. He took a keen interest in the potential of snakes for use in life-saving cures, however – his collection contained many serpents, such as a reticulated python, native to Southeast Asia.
Voldemort looked away from Harry, and began examining his own body. His hands were like large, pale spiders; his long white fingers caressed his own chest, his arms, his face; the red eyes, whose pupils were slits, like a cat’s, gleamed still more brightly through the darkness. He held up his hands, and flexed the fingers, his expression rapt and exultant. He took not the slightest notice of Wormtail, who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground, nor of the great snake, which had slithered back into sight, and was circling Harry again, hissing.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Voldemort has a physical association with snakes, not least Nagini. But he didn’t always look the way he is described in the Harry Potter stories. J.K. Rowling rewrote the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone thirty times or more as a way of telling herself the story before she came up with the version that was published. An early draft featured a character called ‘Fudge’ – he’s not the Cornelius Fudge we know but a Muggle minister.
An early draft of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
In this early draft, Hagrid arrives in Fudge’s office and starts telling him about the awful things happening in the magical world – mainly concerning attacks and disappearances – without mentioning You-Know-Who by name. Hagrid warns the Muggle minister not to give out people’s addresses and locations to the strange ‘little red-eyed’ man wandering around. The red eyes remained as Voldemort morphed into his fully-formed incarnation in the published novels. Later on, it transpires that Mr Dursley works in Fudge’s office and is reluctant to take baby Harry home, lest he endangers his own son, ‘Didsbury’. The scene is reminiscent of Cornelius Fudge visiting the Muggle Prime Minister in the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As J.K. Rowling has said, ‘I often cut ideas and put them into later books. Never waste a good scene!’
Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken’s egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are most wondrous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death.
Page torn from a library book in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The basilisk is a giant serpent that can kill with a single glance. The most terrifying basilisk lurked in the Chamber of Secrets beneath Hogwarts. Salazar Slytherin’s monster was at the centre of the climax of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, coiling past Harry, so huge that it was hard to tell where its body began or ended.
Harry was on his feet, ready. The Basilisk’s head was falling, its body coiling around, hitting pillars as it twisted to face him. He could see the vast, bloody eye sockets, see the mouth stretching wide, wide enough to swallow him whole, lined with fangs long as his sword, thin, glittering, venomous…
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
As it happens, a basilisk appears in an Italian manuscript from 1595 called Historia animalium. It contains 245 unique illustrations by someone known as Idonius. Some of the beasts are real, some mythical, such as a jaculus (a flying serpent) or an onocentaur (half man, half donkey). The descriptions of the creatures far pre-date that book, though. Even in the 16th century, one of the main sources on animals was Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist who lived in the 1st century AD, and also Claudius Aelianus, a Roman author and teacher who died in 235 AD. According to Aelianus, the basilisk was only twelve inches long, but its touch, breath and stare were all deadly.
The existence of creatures like the basilisk became something of a joke over time, because as the stories of a creature that could kill you with a look circulated, they got more and more elaborate. In effect, people just liked to believe in fantastic beasts such as these. And, historically, you didn’t need the sword of Gryffindor to defeat a basilisk – a weasel would do!
A weasel in your pocket was said to be handy because its scent was believed to be fatal to the basilisk. Pliny and other Ancient Greek and Roman writers would have advised you to drop a weasel down the basilisk’s burrow and when the weasel encountered the basilisk they would fight to the death. Unfortunately they would both be killed – but at least it would solve the basilisk problem. If only Harry had done his homework properly and kept a weasel on him. He had a couple of Weasleys instead, and it all turned out fine…
How about a basilisk that was part serpent, part chicken? Jacobus Salgado, a Protestant refugee from Spain who was on the run from the Spanish Inquisition in around 1680, had made it to England when he was given a stuffed basilisk from a Dutch sea captain returning from Ethiopia. Short of money, he sold tickets for people to see the curiosity on display and made a pamphlet to sell to people who came to see the amazing beast, which described the basilisk as yellow with a crown-like crest, a serpent’s tail and the body of a cockerel. He claimed that in the time of Alexander the Great there was one of them lying hidden in a wall that killed a great troop of his soldiers just by ‘the poisonous glances of his eyes upon them’. The illustration on the pamphlet’s title page shows two men holding their hands up in front of their faces, desperately trying to shield themselves from the creature’s deadly stare. One unfortunate man has already fallen down dead after catching its eye. There is no mention of needing a weasel to kill it.