Time Magic - Basics

The topic of Time Magic is as dangerous as it is obscure. Since the early days of the Department of Mysteries, Unspeakables have studied Time Magic and theoretical Time Travel while being closely monitored by the Ministry of Magic. The idea of altering timelines and possible alternate realities has since become its own sub-branch of research. To protect researchers, their creations and possible results of their studies, Unspeakables studying Time Magic have to provide additional vows of secrecy as well as confine their research within the so-called ‘Time Room’. This room is strictly off-limits to anyone not under the aforementioned vows.

All that is known by the public about the Time Room and its contents is that it once contained all Time-Turners, tools with which to travel back in time (see Time Magic - Spells and Tools for a more in-depth description). After the destruction of all Time-Turners during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries 1996, it is rumoured that the Time Room now contains the shards and sand of the Time-Turners, heavily guarded to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. This, however, is only speculation and has not been confirmed or denied by the Ministry of Magic itself.

As such, the following information is the only Ministry-approved statement on Time Magic ever given and lacks any in-depth explanation or studies with which to support the statements given. The writer of this article assumes it is to keep the public unaware and thus less likely to attempt a break-in into the Time Room, which could have catastrophic consequences for the world as we know it.
Additionally, here is the officially required reminder that any attempt of time-travel or alteration of reality in any way, both directly or as a result of one’s actions is met with a sentence to Azkaban for a minimum of 5 years.


The concept of Time Travel is a fascinating one. While it has been mostly proven that timelines cannot be changed through mortal means, there have been instances where time-travellers caused a paradox so severe that the consequences were feasible for the human mind and have thus been recorded in history.

The general consensus within the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Mysteries is that Niven’s law is in effect, which states that if the universe of discourse (meaning our reality as it is right now) permits the possibility of Time Travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will ever be invented in that universe.

Now, this explanation might seem confusing to the every-day witch or wizard, but it can be simplified by stating that, since Time-Turners have indeed been invented and people have successfully travelled back in time, it should (according to Niven’s law) be impossible to change past events.

Put even simpler: Time travels in a loop, alternate realities have neither been proven nor are accessible by mortal means, so you cannot change that which has already happened, nor are able to move into a timeline where there exists a different outcome.

Because, if one were to think about it logically, it would result in a paradox where, if you prevented something from happening by travelling back in time, then it wouldn’t have happened in the first place, so one would not have any motivation to travel back in time to change a past event.
If this explanation was too abstract for you, dear reader, then worry not. This text will provide a very easy example of a paradox, as well as its resolvability, further down.

For now, it should simply be said that, should you still attempt to change a past event, you will cause a paradox that ultimately results in the ceasing of your existence from the moment you disappeared from the present.

The most famous example of a paradox occurring in the case of Eloise Mintumble which resulted in a paradox so severe, it swallowed 26 people: Eloise herself, as well as 25 of her closest relatives.
The theory is that she did not simply time-travel so much as use Time Magic improperly, which resulted in her temporal displacement in time.

She remained stuck in the year 1402 as a consequence of this displacement and remained that way for a total of 5 days before seemingly experiencing nearly 500 years at once as the resulting paradox started taking effect.

While her body aged the 500 years, Eloise claimed (just moments before she died as a result of the extreme aging of her body) that no more than a few seconds had passed for her.

Once reconnecting with her own time, Eloise finished the loop the paradox had to erase, and, as a consequence, her body disappeared from existence shortly after her death, followed by no fewer than 25 of her closest relatives. It is strongly believed they fell victim to the paradox, which makes this case the only actively documented case of a paradox in effect in history.


But let us take a step back and ask ourselves:

“What is a Paradox?”

To simplify this concept in connection with Time Travel, let us look at this graph.



This arrow depicts our timeline continuously moving forward with t₀ marking the present.
Somewhere on this timeline, you eat an apple (this is an example, it can be any fruit or otherwise edible substance).
Now, in this example, you get your hands on a Time-Turner and decide to move backwards in time.


Let us now mark your arrival point in the past with t₁ while t₀ still marks your original present time.
Now, at this point in time, you might start to feel peckish (or maybe you travelled back in time with the intent to throw reality into chaos).
You find the apple you already ate in your original time ( t₀). You decide to eat it.



Now we face the problem that the apple you just ate in t₁ will no longer be there for the original eating of the apple ( t₀)
This feeling of an approaching migraine as these two thoughts bounce around your skull is the telltale sign of an approaching paradox.



The paradox at work is our reality trying to fix itself before it can break apart. It will find the origin of the paradox (the source of the current instability) and fix itself by the easiest, fastest means possible: Getting rid of whatever caused this paradox in the first place.



As you can see from this graph, t₁ has been moved away from the paradox point.
Where did it place you? We are unsure.

There are theories that suggest people that disappear while time-travelling is ejected into a sort-of parallel dimension where the paradox they created (or would have created) is not an issue. Either because they didn’t exist up until that point or because they ate a pear instead.
Regardless, people that are assumed to have created a paradox in the past disappear from reality, taking all knowledge of two instances of them existing at any point in time with them.

Time Magic - Spells and Tools

How does one travel in time? It is a question that has fascinated humans, magic and muggle alike, throughout nearly all of recorded history with the Mahabharata being one of the earliest examples, having been compiled approximately 400 B.C.
But before we can begin to determine just when witches and wizards began their attempts of time-travel, one has to keep in mind that there is a fundamental difference between active and accidental time-travel.
Active time-travel is the idea that, by either using an artefact or a spell, one is able to control the flow of time to one’s advantage, going either back or forwards in a semi-controlled fashion and with a clear goal in mind.
Accidental time-travel happens, as the name suggests, accidentally and remains a complete mystery to researchers. There is no discernible pattern as to how, when, and why someone gets thrown across time, but there have been multiple recorded events in history that suggest that accidental time-travel even affects Muggles. Most of these events took place between 300 B.C and 1000 A.D. and have since become little more than pieces of fiction to Muggle-society.

One such example is the tale of Abijah, a Jewish miracle-worker that fell asleep one day under a young carob-tree and woke up to find that over 70 years had passed and the tree had since begun to bear fruit. Although he was described as a miracle-worker, there exists no proof that the man was, in fact, a wizard with none of his descendants showing any sign of magical potential.

Another example are stone-tablets that tell tales from ancient Mesopotamia’s ashipu, experts of all non-private magic, that had a much deeper understanding of the workings of magic than we do today. According to these tablets, these magicians were well-versed in subjects such as arithmancy and astronomy and could predict when an event such as accidental time-travel would occur and even where the person would travel to in time.
The ashipu also were, according to the tablets, semi-successful in using this method to understand what was necessary to archive time-travel in order to actively make use of it.

While the tales are detailed and seemingly authentic to this time-period, the tales they depict appear more fictitious than factual and have since been dismissed by the Department of Mysteries as inconsequential to their own research.

Instead, a consensus has been reached in wizarding Britain that methods of active time-travel started appearing somewhere around the early 18th century where a member of the Department of Mysteries one day failed to appear to work. Given the sensitive nature of his research at that time, Aurors were immediately dispatched to his house where they found the man standing in the middle of his sitting room, still in nightclothes, and with a dazed expression on his face. In his hand was a golden Time-Turner.

When questioned, the man was unable to recall just how he had gotten the alien device. No Truth Serum or Legilimens could bring forth any useful information either. At the end of a week of questioning, all that anyone knew was that the man had woken up in the middle of the night to a terrible sense of dread looming in his house. When he went to investigate, he found that his wife had fallen asleep with a book in hand in front of the fireplace in the sitting room. When he had gone over to wake her so she could go to bed, the man was unable to recall ever having reached his wife. Instead, his next memory was of Aurors and Unspeakables staring him down in a small interrogation room with nothing to his name but the clothes he wore on his body and with a terrible case of déjà-vu.

This event would be a milestone for researchers of Time-Travel worldwide. The device, after researchers discovered its capabilities, was named ‘Time-Turner’, able to move a person across time at their leisure. Any attempts to copy the device was met with only mild success. The strongest wizard-made Time-Turners were able to move a person back in time 24 hours whereas the original did not have such limitations. However copying of the strange runic symbols that were etched into its golden rings of the original proved to be impossible and so researchers had to revert to arithmancy and other runes to serve as a replacement.

The strange event became the topic of many myths and fairy tales with the most well-known one being Arthur Bart’s ‘The Arcane Tale of the Time-Turner’. In this tale, the nameless protagonist (who originally had been named Alcott Peverell yet due to complaints from several families, that name had to be removed) received a Time-Turner from Death. This Time-Turner, carved by Death’s hand, would remain the only one of its kind, no matter how many copies witches and wizards would try to make. In this fairy tale, Death’s motivation is unclear, however, it is strongly suggested that the mysterious deity acted with the sole intention of meddling with other deities such as Fate and Time (depicted as female figures in this tale).

Despite the work being completely fictitious, people at the time were baffled at the parallels between the fairy tale and the research on the Time-Turner, which resulted in the astounding number of its copies being sold within the first year of publication.
The original Time-Turner has since been lost, most likely destroyed like the rest of them in the Battle of 1996.

A standard Time-Turner, at the time of their existence, was seen as the most well-known artefact concerning time travel. Two golden rings connected at an axis that allowed them to be spun and, suspended in the centre, rested a small crystalline hourglass. It was never fully revealed just what kind of sand the hourglass was filled with but with its nearly iridescent, golden hue, the public has since started calling it time-sand.

The standard Time-Turner was charmed with a series of so-called ‘Hour Reversal Charms’. How far back in time a Time-Turner could go was solely dependant on the accuracy of the runes etched into the golden rings and the number of Charms layered into the artefact.

A Time-Turner could only be used to travel back in time and there could only exist two instances of both the Time-Turner and the traveller. Trying to go back further in time with a different Time-Turner had, as far as the public has been informed, no effect.

With the Time-Turners, allegedly, all having been destroyed, a person wishing to go back in time would now have to depend on the Hour Reversal Charm, which can be cast onto a person as well as onto an object that had been designed to function as a Time-Turner.

The charm preceded the existence of Time-Turners, yet without a proper focus, the spell was deemed highly unstable and unpredictable.

If cast properly, the user would theoretically be able to move back in time (ranging from one hour and up to a maximum of five hours). However, the Hour Reversal Charm’s incantation and wand movement have never been revealed to the public.

Case example

The most notable example of Time Magic being used would be the year 1993, in which the use of a Time-Turner was granted to Hermione Granger in order to be able to visit all of her elected classes. This permit would be valid for the entire school year, after which she dropped enough classes to be able to visit them without the aid of Time Magic.

Before she was allowed to use the Time-Turner, however, she was given an intensive lecture about the proper use of a Time-Turner, as well as the dangers of Time Magic. She was also informed, so Miss Granger told us in an interview, what legal consequences the use of a Time-Turner would have for a witch or wizard. As long as she was registered to be in the possession of a functioning Time-Turner, any alibi she might have in case of an assumed criminal offense would be null and void. Any attempt at breaking a law (including, but not limited to those of time and space) would be met with the immediate removal of all rights to use a Time-Turner, a fine of 200 Galleons, as well as possible imprisonment in Azkaban in case of more severe criminal offenses.

Miss Granger was to keep the Time-Turner on her person at all times, not to impart knowledge of her possession of a functioning Time-Turner to others, as well as to avoid running into other instances of herself. She was also warned not to attempt to change past events to avoid creating a paradox
Miss Granger would, in the same interview, describe that she never fully understood the concept of finality, and that one could not change the past without creating a paradox. She admitted that, as a young child, she would often spend a lot of time thinking about certain paradox-scenarios (most memorable to her being the dead-grandfather paradox in which a man travels back in time to kill his own grandfather). Miss Granger said that the looping thoughts these paradoxes created in her young mind would often result in migraines, so she avoided thinking about them for too long.

However, so she informed us, when Harry Potter (boy-who-lived, vanquisher of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and her best friend) explained to her at the end of their shared Third Year, that he only was able to create a corporeal patronus (an astounding feat for a 13-year-old) because he’d already seen himself cast it in the future, Miss Granger gained a sort of deeper understanding of the complexities of time. She explained that in that moment, she understood that, while in the present we have the luxury of choice. In our choosing of an action or inaction, we form our reality and this reality is fixed. Neither past nor future can change this reality. It is Miss Granger’s belief, according to this interview, that one cannot change reality permanently and attempting to do so would either result in a paradox or one’s transfer from this reality into one where the desired outcome is already present.

Conclusion

Time Magic is as fascinating as it is dangerous. A witch or wizard should never attempt to mess with time. Yet despite the dangers, the loss of the Time-Turners also was a loss of possibility. Of potential. So, this author hopes that, in the future, the Department of Mysteries is able to recreate the Time-Turners as they had been before the events of 1996 to be able to continue our studies of time and reality, so we can learn and strive for greater and better things.