Читать онлайн «A Journey Through Divination and Astronomy»

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic.

This series of eBooks will reveal the world of magic and unlock its secrets. It will go back thousands of years. It will travel to the far corners of the world. It will reach the stars. It will explore under the earth. It will decipher mysterious languages. We’ll encounter some of the most colourful characters in history. We’ll discover the curious incidents and truth behind legends. We’ll see how, in the quest to discover magic, practitioners laid the foundations of science.

This series, structured around lessons from the Hogwarts curriculum, will show how this long and rich history has nourished the fictional world of Harry Potter.

The starting point for these eBooks was the exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opened at the British Library in October 2017, twenty years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in the UK in 1997. For the exhibition, curators spent over a year searching through the 150 million items that the British Library holds to find the most magical. Then they sourced special artefacts to be loaned from other notable institutions.

This series of four eBook shorts contains worldly wonders from both exhibitions, exploring J. K. Rowling’s magical inventions alongside their cultural and historical forebears. Throughout are links between ours and the wizarding world, told through extraordinary stories from the history of magic.