Luke's HP Site

Magical Contracts

Note As stated in Points of Divergence, Mrs. Rowling has set up a world in which magical contracts exist, and in which they can have unwilling participants. This has been explored in a number of other fan fiction works,1 and while I do not want to rehash them, the idea is far too useful and tempting for me to avoid. I am at heart more of a world builder than a story teller, so I am going to define magical contracts rather more than Mrs. Rowling did.

Definition, Scope, and Limitations

As has been stated in other works on the nephilim, with rare exceptions all modern nephilim have a widely mixed heritage that includes powers that we believe to be derived from fallen angels that can be classified as belonging to the order of Thrones. This inheritance makes these nephilim subject to what we call, for lack of a better term, “contract magic.” Despite this naming, it is imperative that one not let the word “contract” limit or misdirect one’s thinking. This is in fact a fairly large body of magic that pervades nephilim social life in a variety of ways. For example, the so called Unbreakable Vow is not really a contract, but clearly falls in this category. These are contracts in the sense that at least one party agrees

for, or with the other party, possibly, but not necessarily, in exchange for something.

A magical contract can thus be an unilateral, bilateral or multilateral exchange of goods, actions, and/or persons.

For obvious reasons it is difficult, even with the cooperation of one or more of the nephilim, to perform any real testing in a controlled way on the bounds of contract magic. Any such testing would quickly cross the lines of what could be ethically considered permissible, as ample observational data exists to demonstrate that these contracts can be subtle in their implications, brutal in their self-enforcement, and thus the risk to the test subjects would be very very real. This document then is largely the result of the Church’s collected observations on the ways in which the nephilim have used this magic, the ways they have attempted to do so and failed, and what we know of the situations that distinguish each case. The theories advanced here are those that fit all known observational data, every effort has been made to exclude any theory for which there is any contradictory evidence, no matter how small or unlikely. This is done to give the highest level of assurance to what we can put forth, even though the end result is that we know very limited amounts. Far too frequently the theories advanced raise more questions than they answer.

All magical contracts are originated by one or more of the nephilim, their descendant races, or some combination thereof. The individual or individuals creating the contract are called the “originating participants.” All magical contracts are created to effect some end. This end must be considered a net good by at least one of the originating participants, or the magic of the contract will fail. The end to be achieved must be possible, however it may require additional participants. If additional participants are required to achieve a proposed end, the additional participants are contractees. Originating participants cannot contract arbitrary persons as contractees, only those related to the originating participants in certain ways can be bound. All contractees must themselves also be of the nephilim or one of their descendant races. Researchers speculate that these restrictions represent laws enforced by either direct Divine action or indirect action mediated via that angelic choir known as the Powers.

Originating Participants and Contractees

When the set of Originating Participants represents either a distinct set from the set of Contractees, a subset of Contractees, or when the full set of Participants can only be represented as the union of the Originating Participants and the Contractees, there must exist one of a limited number of relationships between at least one Originating Participant and each Contractee.

That is, for each Contractee, an Originating Participant must be identifiable that meets the following conditions.

Delegated Originating Participant may be the most interesting of these. Many examples exist of these contracts behaving unexpectedly.

Needless to say, these are only a minuscule subset of the numerous data points examined that, overtime, has lead to the above formulation of the delegated authority rule.

Other Restrictions

Magical contracts need not be written on special paper, or even written at all, but they must be formalised agreements in some way. There are many ways to formalise an agreement. Common ones include, but are not limited to:

The key here is that Originating Participant (or their delegates) must intend to contract, even if they do not fully understand the scope or significance of the penalties or terms.

Effects

As noted above, magical contracts cannot force you to do something the way the Imperius curse does. Rather, they force behaviour through the existence of penalties. You can break an “Unbreakable Vow” but you die as a result. When a secret keeper “contracts” to keep a secret, in a sense everyone else is bound not to know that something.6

Contracts can force you feel things. Your emotions are just chemical effects, a contract can make you unnaturally happy or sad, incite or suppress physical attraction, make you hungry or nauseous, so on. A contract can also cause a coma or prevent restful sleep, as these are also physical reactions and do not (directly) involve the will. However, a contract is not going to (for example) magically transport you like a port key.7

Implications

Sin

In summary, a contract can, effectively, coerce, but not force sin. But in Catholic theology, the level of coercion a contract can easily induce is easily more than sufficient to meet the bar for impairing free will. Thus a contract can cause serious, but not mortal sin. That being said, the Church has struggled with this topic, some of which is summarised in Appendix G.

Marriage Contracts

A nephil entered into a marriage contract could be coerced to be faithful by magically suppressing his/her physical reactions to anyone except the intended spouse. This would not force you to actually go through with the marriage, but would provide a strong incentive to do so. A stronger contract might make you physically ill or even die if you failed to go through with the marriage.

This becomes problematic when a nephil finds himself/herself bound to multiple different marriage contracts each of which requires that the contractee live and act on the marriage. With penalties that can and frequently do include death for non-compliance, and contracts written in ways that do not include the monogamy proper to a true marriage, but rather allow for the pagan concept of multiple spouses, the contractee frequently experiences severe temptation. Careful and prudential judgement is needed to determine if, in any individual case, any of the nephilim in these relationships are operating under sufficient duress due to the contracts as to impair their free choice. Part of this prudential judgement must include the reality that one or more of the participants may be poorly catechised or even entirely uncatecised as regards to a true and proper understanding of marriage. They may have approached the Church having grown in this understanding only after having been in relationship for some time, or because some subset of the participants is more catechised than other participants and desires guidance. Each situation will present unique challenges and careful consideration will need to be made of the particular participants, the precise contract(s) involved, and the pressures on them.

The TriWizard Contract and the Goblet of Fire

Historically three of the biggest European schools of magic have used an artefact they name “the Goblet of Fire” to conduct a magical lottery of student volunteers who are entered into a contract by virtue of winning this lottery. The nephilim strongly believe that this contract involves, if violated, the loss of magic. They are inaccurate, the actual loss of being nephil is not a possible consequence of a contract. What it can do is prevent a Contractee who violates its terms from using their magic, or rather, cause their own magic to bind itself that way. The nature of the selection, built into the Goblet, ensures that the Contractee has the necessary magic, inherited from the Thrones, to be able to self-bind this way. Those without sufficient magic of this type are ineligible for selection. It is worth noting that the nephilim community has an inaccurate understanding of precisely how magic works, and thus how strength in magic is evaluated by magic, this is a large part of why the selections made by the Goblet are such a mystery to them.

Debt

This is the other very interesting situation that leads to all sorts of weird societal issues. Alice accepts, in some formal way, that she owes Bob. This can be thought of in one of two ways, either of which can lead to a magical contract. Alice has agreed to be in a state of debt until x occurs or alternately, Alice has agreed to pay Bob back. The first is a contract to be something, the second a contract to do something. If the debt can be paid, well and good. Alice pays her debt, and is free of the contract.

However, what if the debt cannot be paid? If Alice owes her life, or the life of her child (in extreme but still realistic cases)? Or in less extreme cases, what if she simply owes more money than she can earn while keeping herself alive?

Because these are unstated contracts, if they form at all, they form because of expectations that the nephil themselves have formed over the centuries. Some of these date back to times and places like the Roman Empire where debt slavery was a common legal practice. While the laws of the societies that the nephil live in have changed, the nephil have come to expect that magic can and does create these contracts for these situations. The terms of these contracts then are set unconsciously by the principles, in accord with these norms passed down as part of the body of folk lore, legend, history, and myth that they are raised with.

This kind of contract thus operates somewhat differently from other formal contracts that a nephil might carelessly or unwittingly enter into. In this modern era, someone outside the nephilim society, one of the so-called “muggle-born”, raised with no thought of slavery, would be incapable of unconsciously binding himself/herself into slavery by accepting a debt. One of the so-called “pure-blood” nephilim however, whose family lore is filled with stories of using debts in precisely this manner, is actually himself at greater risk of being so bound.

Occasionally one comes across a family of so-called “blood traitors” - nephilim whose genetic heritage is such that one would expect them to be raised steeped in and adhering to the lore, mythology, and traditions common to the nephilim society of their geographic locality, but who act more like the “muggle-born” in most practical ways. A family like this would fall somewhere in the middle. They are (at least peripherally) aware of the traditions they reject, and more, probably even aware that this magic does in fact work, but not predisposed to think in those terms. The fact that it is an outside their common patterns of thought gives them some level of protection from being bound while their knowledge that they can be bound raises their susceptibility to it.

Lastly, children, because they are more absolute in their thinking, more accepting of the idea that anything is possible, are more easily bound this way than adults. Thus nephil societies almost universally have a tendency to isolate their children from all but the most trusted of friends and relations. A nephil child aware of his/her heritage will frequently grow up knowing only his/her own extended family and one or two other families until it is time to enter an apprenticeship, join a magical secondary school (such as Hogwarts), or (if home schooled) join the workforce as an adult. This is because the nephilim have learned, through bitter experience, that children will do all sorts of foolish and unfortunately irreversible things if not carefully protected.

Spontaneous Magical Marriage

Note this does not always lead to slavery. It can also lead to what some call Spontaneous Magical Marriage (SMM), a form of marriage contract in which both parties may or may not have any power imbalance at all, but which old nephil families have learned, generally the hard way, usually caries particularly harsh penalties. One rather famous (in nephilim society) example of in recent times comes from magical Britain. A SSM event occurred between then 13 year old Pollux Black and his cousin Irma Crabbe.8 These two families with their history of dark dealings rightly feared the imaginations that the children might have had in creating penalties for their ill-defined contract. Neither family wanted to risk these possibilities.

This contract is famous in part due to the ages of the two contractees - both 13 at the time. A close observer might object that in our rules above, we said that a contract would fail if it required the marital act before the age of 14. Interestingly, this contract did not fail. Effectively, the children were contractually betrothed until the second child’s 14th birthday, they were not required to act before this. However, under the then (and still) current laws in magical Britain, there was (is) no legal distinction between a marriage and a betrothal - thus from a legal perspective the children were married. This fact probably actually contributed to the notoriety of the situation, as the families insisted the marriage remained unconsummated, and thus that they could break it but were holding back out of concern for the children’s welfare. While there is no reason to doubt the veracity of either family, researchers have expressed considerable doubt over whether or not any such attempt to break the contract would in fact have worked.

The SSM contract differs from other marriage contracts in several ways that make it a distinct category of event worth separate consideration.

  1. these include, but are not limited to:

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  2. per Appendix G, many of the restrictions appear arbitrary.↩︎

  3. per Appendix G, ‘contract’ magic was nearly useless until nephilim started to have widely mixed heritages.↩︎

  4. per Appendix G, angels interfering to create these restrictions act with good intentions, but not always wisely. You might think ‘contracts’ already do too much. You might be right.↩︎

  5. See the chart at https://web.archive.org/web/20210616023912/https://archphila.org/HHS/pdf/CoopEvilChart.pdf.↩︎

  6. This is why the Fidelius Charm is relatively unknown and uncommon. It is a combination of contract magic and area effect magic. One aspect of it protects the space from the perception from everyone magical or not (area effect magic). Another aspect of it creates an exception to the area effect magic for those who are parties to the contract. It can only protect a location that is in fact secret. Otherwise, one could share knowledge one obtained outside the contract without involving the contract. Thus a family hiding would need a new home, not a property historically associated with them or their family.↩︎

  7. I do not recall which TriWizard Fan Fiction I read this in.↩︎

  8. See the Black Family Tree, note from the dates of the next generation how old they must have been.

    Note Mrs. Rowling has not given any explanation at all of this timeline, this is the Author’s personal explanation.

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