Defense Against the What???

Summary

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Critical Magic Theory: "Defense Against the What???"

Host: Prof. Julian Womble

Date: May 6, 2026
Podcast: Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast
Episode Theme:
A deep, critical exploration of Hogwarts’ Defense Against the Dark Arts class as a metaphor for power, morality, and the politics of “darkness” in the Harry Potter universe—and our own world.

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Episode Overview

Professor Julian Womble invites listeners to go beyond fandom nostalgia to critically examine the role, evolution, and failures of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts. Using this class as an allegory, he dissects how institutions define "darkness," who benefits from those definitions, and draws parallels to real-world moral and political ambiguities. Womble argues that the class, far from being a mere plot device, becomes a mirror reflecting power, prejudice, and the dangers of unexamined binaries of good and evil.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolving Purpose of Defense Against the Dark Arts

[03:14–09:30]

• Early Years: Barely registers as important; taught by forgettable or incompetent teachers.
• Third Year (Lupin): First time practical, useful skills are taught, but darkness remains theoretical.
• Goblet of Fire (Moody): Stakes rise; urgency and danger become palpable.
• Order of the Phoenix: Students recognize institutional failure, form Dumbledore’s Army.
• Insight: The class begins as background, only gaining importance as real threats emerge—paralleling institutional tendencies to prioritize defense only in crisis.
• Quote:

  “In Harry’s first year, it’s barely on the radar...by the third year with Lupin, the class finally starts to feel like something useful...But even then, it doesn’t feel urgent. The darkness that they’re defending themselves against feels more theoretical than it does real.” — Prof. Womble [05:40]

2. Institutional Failure & Defining Darkness

[09:31–11:45]

• Recurring theme: Wizarding institutions ill-prepared for crisis, lacking proactive philosophy or infrastructure.
• Notable exchange: The Muggle Prime Minister questions why wizards can’t solve magical threats; Fudge responds, “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too.”
  • Highlights a lack of genuine strategy, preparedness, or moral framework.
• Quote:

  “These two are the most powerful men in Wizarding Britain...and what they’re admitting is that at the end of the day, they don’t actually know how to defend themselves.” — Prof. Womble [10:58]

3. The Curse of the Classroom: The DADA Professor Problem

[15:56–24:34]

• Dumbledore knowingly leaves the “curse” unaddressed, failing to protect or warn staff.
• Every DADA teacher embodies some form of the darkness the class purports to defend against:
  • Quirrell: Possession & cowardice.
  • Lockhart: Manipulation with “acceptable” spells for unethical ends.
  • Lupin: Stigmatized by prejudice (werewolf), highlighting societal darkness.
  • Moody/Crouch Jr.: Deception and manipulation.
• Argues: The class and its curse act as metaphors for the deeper, systemic incapacity to address or even name evil within institutions.
• Quote:

  “The reality is that curse is real. And Al BD said, you want the job. It doesn’t pay very well, but it is interesting...every Defense against the Dark Arts professor up through Harry’s fourth year somehow is [the] Dark Arts.” — Prof. Womble [16:43]

4. Good, Evil, and the Masks They Wear

[25:29–31:10]

• The danger of appearances and assumptions: Evil is not always loud or grotesque; civility and innocence can mask harm.
• Institutional and social blindness to subtle forms of darkness (performance, policy).
• Parallels between Umbridge/Fudge and real-world “banal” evil—harm in the name of order or tradition.
• Quote:

  “It’s much easier to hide one’s true nature and one’s true intention behind the appearance of goodness than it is to recognize that evil is standing right in front of us.” — Prof. Womble [26:15]

5. What Counts as a Dark Art? Intention vs. Design

[31:44–42:00]

• Binary definitions break down—many spells reside in moral “gray space.”
  • Unforgivable curses are evil by design; others (love potions, memory charms, Expelliarmus) depend on context, intent, and effect.
  • Love potions, often treated as jokes, are coercive; memory charms erase autonomy.
• The same spell can be “defense” or “harm” depending on who wields it, and why.
• The real horror: Horcruxes, where meaning and morality collapse into pure selfishness and control.
• Quote:

  “A good intention can’t redeem a spell created solely for harm. But a bad intention can absolutely corrupt a spell that wasn’t meant for good.” — Prof. Womble [39:14]

6. Moral Relativism & the Danger of Righteousness

[42:00–53:09]

• Protagonists also use “dark” magic when convenient (Harry using the Imperious/Cruciatus Curse; Hermione drugging classmates).
  • The reader is complicit: Cheering for these actions due to context and intent.
• Reflection on how moral codes are bent to serve protagonists and institutions, perpetuating cycles of harm under the guise of necessity or order.
• Quote:

  “The story frames all of it as resourceful. And that’s the first glimpse of what morally gray behavior looks like in this world—doing something wrong for what feels like the right reasons.” — Prof. Womble [44:37]

• Quote:

  “The real defense is what happens after. When you ask yourself what it took to make you believe that that was the only way. The Dark Arts don't just tempt you with power, they seduce you with necessity.” — Prof. Womble [51:47]

7. Ministry of Magic and the Politics of Darkness

[54:50–65:39]

• Institutional power uses fear to define darkness—policies maintain their own supremacy more than provide safety or justice.
  • Memory charms and creatures classified as “dangerous” often function to protect the status quo, not innocence.
  • Simultaneously, the Ministry will sanction dark magic (“forbidden” spells used by Aurors in wartime).
• Real-world Parallels:
  Womble connects this to laws that restrict the marginalized or condone cruelty in the name of security, e.g., trans health bans vs. cisgender rights.
• Quote:

  “A Death Eater erases a witness and it's evil. The Ministry erases memories. It's governance. Same act, different storyteller.” — Prof. Womble [56:51]

• Quote:

  “That’s what happens when power gets to decide what is dark. The act itself doesn’t change, but the narrative around it does.” — Prof. Womble [61:59]

8. What Should a Real Defense Against the Dark Arts Teach?

[67:28–end]

• Self-awareness, ethics, empathy—not just counter-curses.
• Darkness is located not in spells, but in the hearts wielding them.
• The real danger: Teaching power (“how”), but not conscience (“why”).
• Proposes that morality should be woven into all magical education, not segregated to a single “defense” class.
• Quote:

  “Maybe a real Defense against the Dark Arts course wouldn’t teach us how to fight monsters. Maybe it would teach us how to not become monsters.” — Prof. Womble [73:24]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On shifting urgency:

  “Moody’s mantra, ‘constant vigilance’...it rings out like a warning siren throughout the castle. And for the first time, students see what dark magic can actually do.” [07:41]

• On the curse of the position:

  “It's like the position itself is cursed to reveal what the institution refuses to name. Evil isn't just about the spells you cast. It's about power. Who has it, who uses it, and who gets to decide what counts as dark.” [18:40]

• On dark magic’s ambiguity:

  “The line between the dark arts and the defense against them isn’t necessarily a wall, it’s a mirror.” [40:46]

• On the Ministry’s logic:

  “The Ministry decides which spells are unforgivable, which creatures are classified as beasts, which communities are seen as threats. It defines order not as the presence of justice, but as the absence of disruption.” [55:11]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:18 | Introduction and the importance of critical engagement | | 03:14–09:30 | Chronology: Defense Against the Dark Arts through Harry’s years | | 09:31–11:45 | The Muggle Prime Minister and institutional unpreparedness | | 15:56–24:34 | Who’s teaching the class? & the cursed role of DADA professors | | 25:29–31:10 | Masks of evil and the limits of appearances | | 31:44–42:00 | Defining “dark arts”: intent, effect, and context | | 42:00–53:09 | Moral grayness, protagonists’ use of “dark” magic | | 54:50–65:39 | Ministry power, bureaucratic darkness, and real-world analogies | | 67:28–End | Reimagining DADA: Moral imagination, empathy, and the “real lesson” |

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Conclusion

Prof. Womble’s incisive analysis dismantles the myth that evil is always “outside,” and that institutions or spells can be easily sorted into “good” and “bad.” Instead, he advocates for a kind of education—and thinking—that acknowledges complexity, scrutinizes who wields definitions of darkness and to what end, and centers the ethical self-examination absent from both Hogwarts and, all too often, the real world.

“The class was supposed to teach him to defend himself against darkness, but no one ever taught him that sometimes the thing you need to defend yourself from is your own certainty.” — Prof. Womble [72:47]

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Be critical and stay magical, friends.

Transcript

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Welcome to Critical Magic Theory, where we deconstruct the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Because loving something doesn't mean we can't be critical of it. I'm Professor Julian Womble and today, y', all, today I'm supposed to have these edits for this book in. And they're not in. Why aren't they in? Because I'm a procrastinator, friends. That's why I procrastinate. And what I love is that I know that I'm not alone and that I'm with a community of people who recognize and appreciate the art, the subtle art of procrastination. And to that end, I couldn't give you Seamus. I couldn't even get the survey out to the people on the listserv. I know, I know, I know. I'm, I'm. I'm trying to get it together, y'. All. I'm really trying to pull it together. And so here we are. And so you might ask, so what does this mean for us? Why are you talking to us, sir? Why aren't you working? Now that is a wonderful and incredible question that you're asking and I'm so glad that you asked. I'm not working right now because I care about you and I want to make sure that you have something to just let your mind go to for a spell. And so I was going back in the Annals. And I was looking and thinking and going and thinking and doing and thinking and not doing and thinking. And I came across a bonus episode that I did for the Chronic Overthinkers and the Deep Divers. And I said, it's been a while, it's been a minute. I think it's time we can bust this one out. Because my original plan was, after consultation with the Chronic Overthinkers, I was going to do an episode on Half Bloods in commemoration of the Battle of Hogwarts, which has been also lovingly retitled as Diva Down Day Part two. Diva down because Voldiva down because, well, he goes down Part two because, well, the first one was when Harry was one years old. Anyways, you get it, everyone's here. We understand. However, simultaneously, concurrently, and turns out that also took more brain power and energy than I had because I'm currently editing a chapter on Hermione and her navigation of the Patriarchy and well, that's a lot of work for my brain. I was going to read a chapter of the book but then I thought, I think that's illegal. So anyways, we're not going to do that yet. But what I can do is give you this episode, this bonus episode on Defense against the Dark Arts, which was a lot of fun and I think you will enjoy and I think there will be enough for us to have a conversation about because this class goes from being a throwaway class to being one of the most important things that the students at Hogwarts learn. But also it invites us to think about the structural ways that we understand the Dark Arts as a concept. What are the Dark Arts? And who gets to decide what Dark Arts are? And how do we reconcile some of the other things that we experience in the magical world, like love potions, like memory charms that have nefarious implications depending on how they're used. We are getting into all of it today. We will be back to our regularly scheduled program. If you have not done the Sheamus subscribe survey, it is available to you on Patreon patreon.com Criticalmagic theory I will also as soon as this draft is put into the Internet of the people of the press of the publisher of the editor. I will be posting it on my social media at Prof. J.W. on Instagram, ROFW on TikTok. You will see it there. It will be there for you. It will even be on the website criticalmagictheory.com and if you are on the listservice you will also get it you will. I promise. I swear. As soon as I do the thing that I'm expected to do. Until then, I'll say it now because I want you to get it. A real live version, not the one that's coming from what I already did. Be critical and say magic, my friends, but also get ready to bop. You thought I wasn't gonna let you bop? Things are dire, but they're not that dire. We will always bop because we. Once you bop, the fun don't stop, huh? You know that, friends, don't be silly. You know that. Okay, so enjoy the bop and I'll see you in a bit. We need to talk about Harry Potter, Sam. Anyways, you already know. You know. You know that. I hope you danced. Let's not even take our time to dilly or dally. Here's the thing. We've got to get into the conversation about Defense against the Dark Arts because if I'm being honest, I really don't think the Defense against the Dark Arts should. Should have been the most important class at Hogwarts. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that for the vast majority of the beginning of Harry's time there, it wasn't. In Harry's first year, it's barely on the radar. It's just another course on a schedule filled with charms and potions and transfiguration. The professor is nervous and forgettable, stuttering through lessons we never actually see. In Harry's second year, it's a spectacle. Gilderoy Lockhart is signing books and performing self congratulation more than actual spells. And by the third year with Lupin, the class finally starts to feel like something useful. He's teaching students how to face Boggarts and red caps and hinky punks, giving them practical knowledge for the first time. But even then, it doesn't feel urgent. The lessons are valuable, yes, but there's no real sense of threat. The darkness that they're defending themselves against feels more theoretical than it does real. Goblet of Fire changes that. When Fo Mad Eye Moody, also known as Barty Crouch Jr. Steps into that classroom, the tone of the entire course shifts. Suddenly, Defense against the Dark Arts feels dangerous. It feels like training. Moody's mantra, constant vigilance. That's how I imagine he says. It rings out like a warning siren throughout the castle. And for the first time, students see what dark magic can actually do. He shows them the unforgivable curses. He forces them to watch. He puts them under the imperious curse. And even Though the man teaching them isn't really Moody at all. What's happening in that classroom is the first true introduction to the gravity of the subject. The reader feels it, too, that quiet anxiety that something larger is moving beneath the surface. We as readers know that Voldemort is returning. We've seen it in Harry's dreams. We've heard the name spoken again. We're seeing people talking about Dark Marks. And so by the time Moody tells them to be on guard, it doesn't feel like paranoia anymore. It feels like a prognostication. And then, in order of the Phoenix, when Voldemort is back, when the ministry is lying about it, when fear has already taken root, defense against the Dark Arts starts to mean something else. Suddenly, students realize they actually don't know how to defend themselves. And they take matters into their own hands by starting Dumbledore's army. And in many ways, this all begs a larger what is the purpose of this class when dark wizards aren't afoot? If the Dark Arts aren't knocking at your door, what exactly are you defending against? Because in theory, this should be the kind of course that prepares students not just for battle, but for moral discernment. How to recognize harm, how to protect, how to set boundaries around power. But as with most things in the wizarding world, in practice, defense against the Dark Arts is reactive. It's not about prevention, it's about panic. It only becomes real when people start dying. And that tells us something bigger about the wizarding world, and, honestly, about any world. Institutions rarely take the idea of defense seriously until they're forced to. And when that happens, what we get isn't education, it's indoctrination. One of my favorite moments is in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and it drives this point home. When the Mughal Prime Minister meets Cornelius Fudge and Rufus Scrymgeour, he finally says what we've all been thinking. As they've been explaining to him the state of things, he looks at them and says, but for heaven's sake, you're wizards. You can do magic. Surely you can sort out, well, anything. And Scrymgeour turns to Fudge, and Fudge smiles and says kindly, the trouble is, the other side can do magic, too. Prime Minister. That line has always stuck with me because it's such a simple statement, but it tells you everything about the state of the magical world and about the failure of this class, the failure of defending oneself against the Dark arts. These two are the most powerful men in Wizarding Britain. One A seasoned politician, the other a celebrated Auror. And what they're admitting is that at the end of the day, they don't actually know how to defend themselves. They have no plan, no infrastructure, no philosophy of defense. So what then is Defense against the Dark Arts really teaching? The name itself sounds self evident, but the closer we look, the more questions it raises. What are the Dark Arts defending? Against whom? And who gets to decide what's worth defending? Because that moment, that exchange with the British Prime Minister exposes a truth the series keeps hinting at. The magical world is catastrophically ill prepared to defend itself, and not just against dark wizards, but against its own complacency. Part of why Voldemort is able to rise again isn't only because people share his pure blood ideology. It's because there's no system in place to stop him. There's nothing to defend the citizens of the magical world against him. No institutional defense against the very darkness the wizarding world claims to understand. Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic have built an entire class around defending against Dark arts. And yet when those arts appear, the people who taught the class have no idea what to do. So when we think about how we're going to unpack this idea of Defense against the Dark Arts as a subject, a metaphor, or a moral framework, I want us to keep that in mind. Because maybe the problem actually isn't that Hogwarts never taught students how to defend themselves, but rather they actually never defined what they were defending.

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So the next thing that I want to talk about is who the hell is teaching this class. Now, I will begin by talking about the fact that this class is cursed. And Jazz brought this up to me in a message on the Discord and was basically like. So to be clear, Dumbledore just was like, yeah, I know about that curse. But, well, you know, sometimes things are cursed and sometimes we just don't do anything about it because we just hope for the best. And, you know, who am I? Yeah, some people are saying that I am the most powerful wizard of the age. However, simultaneously, concurrently. And what am I supposed to do about a curse? I can't really do anything. And I think that there's something really fascinating about that particular reality when we think about who is placed in charge of this class. And what's more is the fact that Dumbledore sat down and said, let's interview you for the job. I'm not going to disclose that there's a curse. Some of you may die. Something bad is going to befall pretty much all of you. Like, I think only a couple of them make it out alive. Two. Two make it out alive. Technically, three, if we think of Faux Moody having his soul sucked out as still being alive. But that's up to you. The reality is that curse is real. And Al BD said, you want the job. It doesn't pay very well, but it is interesting. And what's fascinating about this is the fact that every Defense against the Dark Arts professor up through Harry's fourth year somehow is the Dark Arts in his first year. You have Professor Quirrell, timid, nervous, stuttering, who turns out to literally have the Dark Lord living on the back of his head. The class that's meant to defend against the Dark Art is literally being taught by someone who is possessed with corruption and all kinds of other things, including Vuldiva on the back. Baldiva. The idea that evil isn't always out there. Sometimes it's right behind you, literally whispering in your ear. In second year, there's Gilderoy Lockhart, a celebrity fraud, self promotion personified. He's not using dark magic in obvious ways, but every single one of his accomplishments was stolen. He uses Obliviate, a memory charm, to erase the truth and claim it as his own. And that's what's so wild about it? The thing he's doing is socially acceptable magic, but he's using it for deeply unethical ends. The Ministry doesn't call that dark. But it's manipulation, it's theft, it's harm. He's performing the light quote unquote. But living in shadow third year brings Remus Lupin, easily the most competent, the most compassionate of all the teachers Harry has. But he's marked as dangerous because he's a werewolf. He can't even exist in that position without stigma. His very body becomes a lesson in how the wizarding world defines darkness as something biological, contagious, or something to be excluded rather than understood. And the irony is that Snape literally teaches the class how to identify werewolves. That's institutional prejudice, literally baked into and a course. Then in fourth year, we get Mad Eye, Moody, Foe Moody, Barty Crouch, Jr. BCJ, whatever you want to call him a Death Eater using Polyjuice Potion to impersonate the famed Auror. It's deception all the way down. The teacher who's supposed to train students to recognize and resist evil is himself an imposter who, using one of the most complex and invasive magical transformations in existence, the classroom becomes a performance, a manipulation of reality. So for four straight years, when this class is supposed to be a kind of background course, something like charms or transfiguration, every single teacher embodies the very darkness that class is meant to protect against. Possession, manipulation, stigma, deception. It's like the position itself is cursed to reveal what the institution refuses to name. Evil isn't just about the spells you cast. It's about power. Who has it, who uses it, and who gets to decide what counts as dark. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the reason none of the teachers last is because they expose too much truth about the wizarding world. Or maybe it's because Voldiva isn't having it. The line between good and evil isn't clean. And Hogwarts keeps hiring people who prove. Really isn't until Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge arrives that the class becomes openly political and until Half Blood Prince that it actually starts preparing students for what's coming. Which brings us back to the bigger what is the actual purpose of this class? Is it about defense? Or is it about containment? Because up until now, it's been doing a better job defending the institution's image than teaching students how to survive. And the more you think about it, the more you realize these professors don't just embody the dark arts, they reveal how Difficult it is to recognize them, because here's the truth. For most of the series, we don't actually recognize the Dark Arts when we see them. Quirrell looks timid, harmless, but he's literally carrying a noseless fiend on his body. Lockhart looks charming and heroic, but he's erasing people's memories to build a lie. Lupin appears dangerous by reputation, but he's the safest teacher. Haeri has moody looks, vigilant, but he's an imposter in disguise. Every single one of them is performing something. Cowardice, competence, goodness, authority. And each of those performances hides something else underneath. What that tells us is that the Dark Arts aren't just about spells. They're about illusion. They depend on people not knowing what they're looking at. They depend on masquerade. And that's the most dangerous thing of all. Darkness doesn't announce itself. It smiles. It teaches. It hides behind a Defense against the Dark Arts classroom door. And once you see that, the same dynamic plays out across the wizarding world. People masquerade as good all the time. Politicians, teachers, even the Ministry itself. We're told certain acts are noble and others are forbidden. But those categories don't always hold up. Because when manipulation wears a mask of protection and control wears a mask of order, and bias wears a mask of tradition. That is how the Dark Arts survive. Not through curses, but through stories about who's allowed to cast them. So when we talk about defense against the Dark Arts, we can't just ask what spells are forbidden. We have to ask what stories we've been told about what counts as dark in the first place.

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What is darkness? I think what makes Defense against the Dark Arts a perfect allegory is the fact that. That it allows for us to think about what is good and what is evil. One of the things that we've spent a lot of time talking about on this podcast is intention and good and bad. And one of the realities of these books is that we love the morally gray characters, but we are not presented with a bunch of them. Many of the characters that we meet, especially through the eyes of Harry, are kind of cast through this kind of good and bad lens. And I think that there's something so interesting about that, because we expect evil to look like evil, and for good to look like good, evil should be loud and obvious and grotesque. But in reality, it's much easier to hide one's true nature and one's true intention behind the appearance of goodness than it is to recognize that evil is standing right in front of us. And that's what this class shows us again and again and again. Each of the professors reminds us that what we think we're defending ourselves against isn't always what we should be. Deception and performance are part of the dark arts, too. It's why Snape is so good at dark arts. It's why he's such a good double agent. It's also why Dumbledore is so effective at getting done what he needs to get done in order to bring Voldemort down. When you think about defense against the Dark Arts as a concept, it becomes this incredible metaphor for how we as people understand goodness and. And evil in the real world. Because we all have these expectations or templates for what good and bad are supposed to look like. We expect goodness is gentle and calm and respectable and well spoken. And we assume evil is loud and angry and irrational and monstrous. So if someone doesn't look evil, if they don't sound evil, we tend to default to good. And I think in many ways, and we spend a little time talking about this for Umbridge, we can see how, at least at the onset, one might assume this of her or even Cornelius. Who? Cornelius Fudge. These individuals who present a very particular way. There's something very uncular about Fudge, something about him that feels he's just kind of that dopey uncle. Context shifts, things change, and all of a sudden he's someone else. And that's how darkness moves. It moves so easily because it can hide behind what we've been told goodness looks like. Quirrell literally is a bumbling idiot. And all the while, no one expects anything of him that's nefarious or untoward or because he seemingly comes off as so innocuous. All the while Voldemomma is on the back of his head underneath the turban how is he breathing? I don't know. Voldemort doesn't return in a blaze of fire. He comes back quietly. Every single time. Under a turban. In a diary. Well, the graveyard, when he got his body done, that was less quiet. But still no one was there. No one knows. No one believes. Other than the Death Eaters and Harry. The wizarding world doesn't erupt into panic. It actively looks away. Because it is easier to believe that evil announces itself than to admit that it can exist in plain sight. And that, I think, is the deeper truth of this class. Defense against the Dark Arts isn't about counterspells and hexes and jinxes. It's about discernment. It's about learning to recognize harm, even when it's wearing the face of civility or policy or love. It's about understanding that evil rarely looks like the thing we're told to fear. It looks like the thing we've been taught to trust. And that's the lesson Hogwarts never manages to teach. Because the institution, like most institutions, is more invested in maintaining the illusion of goodness than confronting the reality of evil. Which is why it's so fitting that the very class designed to teach defense keeps getting infiltrated by the thing it's supposed to protect us against. So if the Dark arts aren't always easy to spot if they can be polite or bureaucratic or even well intentioned, then what makes something actually dark? What makes something a dark art? What draws that line? And that's the question we're going to ask.

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So let's have that conversation. What is a dark art? I think the easy answer is one that gets printed in Hogwarts textbooks. It says something like, it's any form of magic intended to cause harm, control or death. But like everything in the wizarding world, that definition only works until you start to look at it too closely. Because once you do, the borders between what's considered dark and what isn't start to blur real fast. There are, of Course, spells that are inherently evil. The unforgivable curses are ones that are designed with the only purpose to do harm. Avada Kedavra kills. There is no defensive version of that spell. Its sole function is to end a life. The Cruciatus Curse exists to torture. Its entire purpose is suffering, not subduing, not controlling, but pain for pain's sake. Then there's the Imperious Curse, which takes away the most sacred thing a person, their autonomy. It rewires will, erases choice, and turns people into extensions of someone else's power. These spells are evil by design. They violate life, agency and dignity at the most fundamental level. And then there are spells that can become dark. The ones that exist in the gray space where intent and context kind of decide which is which and what is what. Think about for a second. One of my favorite things to rant and rave about. Love potions. Perfectly legal, Sold at joke shops, including Weasley's Wizard Wheezes by some of Yalls. Faves handed out in dormitories, treated as harmless teenage mischief, particularly for girls. But what are they really? They're a magical means of control. They take away choice, manipulate affection and manufacture desire. In any other context, we'd call that exactly what it is. Coercion. And if they were being administered by men, we know what we would call that. And it wouldn't be a love potion. Take, for example, another one of the faves that we see used a lot. Obliviate. It's a memory charm that literally erases the mind. And the Ministry uses this one on Muggles all the time under the auspices of protection. As if the obliteration of memory is somehow safer than truth. And then you have Gilderoy Lockhart, who uses that same spell for self promotion and steals the stories and makes himself a hero. We also have Bertha Jorkins, whose mind is destroyed and addled by Barty Crouch Sr's memory charms. Once she realizes that BCJ is still alive, these things are presented to us as necessary. And when Gilderoy Lockhart does it, we recognize it as evil. Because he is an evil person. We find out. But when Barty Crouch Sr. Does it, there is no justice for Bertha Jorkins. In fact, the books end with her not really having any say, any final say. Rather, in terms of how this occurred. The act is the same, but the context changes the judgment, but the harm remains. And then there's Sectumsempra. Snape's invention, labeled plainly for enemies. A spell with what? What did I just become A Southern person. I was born in Texas. But we don't talk about it. Huh? We don't talk about it. A spell with no healing purpose, no defensive value, no redemption. It exists to wound. There's no way to use it righteously. But then we see Harry use it as a defensive spell against the inferior. We see him use it again during the. The battle. Does he use it in the books? I know in the movies he does use it. I don't think he uses it in the book. In the books, though, in the battle when they're flying. Because I know some of us will want to check this moment when they're flying above, when he's on his way to Ted and Andromeda Tonks House in the last book. These examples make it clear that morality in magic isn't just about intent. It's about design and effect. A good intention can't redeem a spell created solely for harm. But a bad intention can absolutely corrupt a spell that wasn't meant for good. Which brings us to a third category I'd like to call contextual or instrumental magic spells that live on the moral fault line. Spells like Petrificus Totalis can save someone from running into danger or paralyze them while they're helpless. Like what Hermione did to Neville. It was a brutal spell used on a very, very, very defenseless Neville. Long may he reign. And it was necessary in a lot of ways because she needed to get him out of the way. But then we also see it used in other contexts. We see it used against Death Eaters in the last book. And it doesn't erase the harm that was caused or stupefy, which can disarm a threat or knock out a person, but also be used in terrible ways. We see that spell used by Death Eaters, even Harry's favorite, the spell that pisses me off the most, Expelliarmus. It can defend or destroy depending on the moment. And one of the things that really gets me about the last book is when Lupin's like, you gotta start using other spells that aren't defensive. And I'm like, to be clear, if Harry uses Expelliarmus against a wizard while they're flying on a broom and it hits that person in the right spot, they're flying off that broom. Like, the wand may go, but that person's going with it off the bloom, the bloom, the broom tumbling down. So again, it's the same wand, the same movement, the same incantation. But intention matters. Darkness is not a fixed category. It's a spectrum of power and intention and consequence. And the mistake I think Hogwarts makes, and the one that the Ministry of Magic reinforces is that it pretends as if it's a binary. It's presented to us by JKR as a binary that there are good spells and bad ones, safe ones and forbidden ones. But morality does not work like that. Power does not work like that. You can't defend against the dark arts if you can't recognize when you're using them. And of course, the most chilling example of magic that requires evil, that is inherently evil, is the process of making a Horcrux. Because a Horcrux isn't just an object, it's a wound. It's the physical manifestation of someone's selfishness and self obsession. To create one, you have to commit murder. Not in self defense, not in war, not as a tragic necessity, but deliberately for the purpose of preserving yourself. That's not about survival. It is about control and refusing the natural order. It's about refusing to die or be held accountable. It's killing someone as a means of avoiding mortality. Dumbledore says that Horcruxes mutilate the soul. But what he's really talking about is what happens when whenever someone decides that their own existence matters more than another person's life. That is a violation of magic, of morality. It's the same logic we see echoed in subtler spells in Obliviate or Imperio. In all those charms that erase or override another person's will. They may not leave blood on the floor, but they leave a scar internally on someone. Maybe it's their mind, maybe it's their autonomy, maybe it's their will to do a thing or not do a thing. The difference is that Horcrux making shows us the end of that path where power without constraint leads when it's stripped of any empathy. And this I think is where it gets very complicated. Because if we look at the Death Eaters and what they actually use, very rarely is it forbidden magic or dark arts as it would be called. Most of the time they're using the exact same spells as the students at Hogwarts. Stupefy. Expelliarmus. Petrificus Totalis. Basic defensive and offensive spells which I find to be annoying just as a aside because I'm like, you mean y' all have been out of school for who knows how long and you haven't learned anything new? You haven't learned enough to be able to handedly defeat a bunch of 15, 16, 17 year olds. They're putting up a good fight against you. Okay. The Death Eaters don't wield some higher, darker, secret form of sorcery. They use everyday magic, the kind that most people can cast. But they use it with cruelty and the intent to harm. Which means that the line between the dark arts and the defense against them isn't necessarily a wall, it's a mirror. Both sides are using the same tool. The moral difference isn't in the incantation, it's in the purpose. It's in the heart of the person holding the wand. So when we talk about defending against the dark arts, maybe what we're really talking about is defending against a way of thinking, a belief that power justifies anything. Once you accept that, once you start deciding that your reason for harm is righteous, even the simplest spells can become dark. And maybe that is the truest test. Not the spell, not the classification, but the question of why. Why are you casting it? Who benefits? Who pays the price? Because at the end of the day, darkness doesn't live in a spellbook. It lives in the choices we make about how to use what we know. And I think that that's what Hogwarts never quite manages to teach. Because if the same institutions that define good and evil are the ones benefiting from those definitions, then the real question isn't what is dark? But rather who says it's dark? Once we move beyond the Ministry's definitions and start looking at the people we love, the heroes, the students, the so called quote unquote light, the line about who gets to decide what is dark gets a lot harder to see. Let's take Chamber of Secrets for example. To get into the Slytherin common room, Harry, Ron and Hermione hatch a skein and Hermione makes a sleeping potion and uses it to drug Crabbe and Goyle. They are literally knocked out. They take their hair, they steal their forms and they do all of it without consent. And as readers, we don't even blink. We're on their side. We want them to succeed. We know their intentions are good. They're trying to stop the attacks, to save lives. But that doesn't make what they did any less invasive. Our morally dubious Queen Hermione, who some might call the most rule abiding, the most justice oriented in the trio, literally contributes to the drugging of two students and the stealing of their identities. And the story frames all of it as resourceful. And that's the first glimpse of what morally gray behavior looks like in this world doing something wrong for what feels like the right reasons. It doesn't stop there though. If we look at Deathly Hallows, we see Harry using the Imperious Curse. An unforgivable curse. A curse at the beginning of this episode that we agreed, or at least I said was evil on one of the goblins in Gringotts so that they can get into Bellatrix Lestrange's vault. Yes, he does it out of necessity to complete the mission to destroy the Horcruxes. And again, we don't condemn him for it. We cheer him on because we've been conditioned to believe that intent can cleanse any act and that anything that Harry does is inherently right because what the reason why he is doing it is, is for the greater good. But the moral question doesn't go away just because we like the protagonist. When Harry casts the Cruciatus Curse on one of the Karrows, when he tortures someone who spat on McGonagall, it feels justified. Righteous even. Many of us were like, hell yeah, that's right, you deserve it, caro person. But it's still the Cruciatus Curse. It's still torture. And the text tells us he has to go to a dark place inside himself to make it work. He didn't need to do that spell. He could have done something else. I didn't require him to go to that place. But that was the spell that came to him and that's the one that he decided to use. And he even he remembers, wow, Moody was right. You really need to feel it. So then what are we looking at? There is there darkness in the spell itself, in the person, in the space you have to mentally go to in order to wield it effectively. Because that's the thing about these curses. Some of them literally require you to access cruelty to function. The Cruciatus Curse, you can't just cast that half heartedly. In Goblet of Fire fo Moody tells them, you all could say the words of Vada Kedavra and nothing would happen. You couldn't even kill a fly. You can't imperious someone and still entirely believe in free will. Sometimes magic demands that you compromise something inside of yourself. So even when we call it justified, even when it's for the mission, for good, the question how much darkness is acceptable in the name of good? And that's the paradox of the good side. The people we root for, Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, they all cross the line at some point. They all do things the System itself would classify as dark if someone else did them. But in the world of Harry Potter, like our own, it's built on relativism. Darkness is forgivable when it's done by the right people for the right cause. Which means that what we call dark isn't about the act, it's about the actor. It's about power and legitimacy. About who's allowed to break the rules and still be seen as good. The Ministry uses Obliviate on non magical people every day and it's called Order. Hermione uses it on her parents and it's called Love. Lockhart uses it for fame. And it's evil. Same spell, different story. The question isn't what's dark? It's whose narrative gets to make that darkness palatable. And that's why the notion of Defense against the Dark Arts is such a dangerous title. Because who are we defending against? The death leaders are easy villains. They announce themselves, they wear masks, they go and do terrible things. But what about the smaller violations? The coercion? We excuse the harm. We rationalize the things that we call necessary. What happens when defending the good side requires you to use the very magic you claim to oppose? I think I've talked about this before, but this is a big question that comes up a lot in Manacled. Because in Manacled, Hermione, our morally dubious queen, is advocating for the usage of Dark Arts in this war. In a war that is considerably more brutal and more devastating than the one that actually takes place in the canonical text. And I think that there's something to that, because Harry is like, we are not going to do that, because we're not going to be as bad as them. And the truth is that every time Harry or Hermione step into the space of moral ambiguity or to the Dark side, the story reminds us how easy it is to justify crossing that line. Because in the moment, the cause feels righteous. But what the Dark Arts reveal and what this class fails to teach is that the line itself as to what is good and bad isn't external, it's internal. You can use the Imperious Curse once and tell yourself it's for good. But the real defense is what happens after. When you ask yourself what it took to make you believe that that was the only way. The Dark Arts don't just tempt you with power, they seduce you with necessity. Everyone feels that when they have to make these decisions, it's something that they must do. And that is where the Ministry, and by extension the entire Wizarding World fails because they're not actually teaching morality. They're teaching power. And it's legislation. Darkness, in their view, is whatever threatens their control. So they criminalize certain spells, creatures, people. But they leave loopholes wide enough for sanctioned cruelty to slip through. Which is why the question of who decides what's dark and what isn't isn't just theoretical. It's also social. It's political, it's. It's interpersonal. Because once you start realizing that the morality in this world is dictated by those in charge, you start to see that Defense against the Dark Arts isn't just a course. It is like the other courses that we've been talking about, particularly History of Magic propaganda. It's a lesson in obedience masquerading as ethics.

[D]

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[B]

We've spent a lot of time talking about Hogwarts, which makes sense because we're talking about Hogwarts classes. But the reality is, is that the Ministry of Magic also plays a part in this, as they do in all things that happen in the wizarding world. If the definition of darkness is subjective, if it depends on the person, the motive or the story, then we have to ask ourselves who benefits from those definitions staying blurry? Because the reality is is that when it comes to moral ambiguity, someone always benefits. And in the wizarding world, that someone is the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry decides which spells are unforgivable, which creatures are classified as beasts, which communities are seen as threats. It defines order not as the presence of justice, but as the absence of disruption. And that's the same logic we see in the Muggle world too. Power protects itself by deciding what counts as danger. Let's return to Obliviate. The Ministry, as I've said before, constantly uses it on non magical people who witness magic, on people who know too much or anyone who threatens the masquerade. It's institutionalized erasure. But what we also see time and time again is that it's not uniformly applied. There are what my students would call magically aware Muggles all throughout the uk. The Dursleys are some of them. We imagine that this is true for many of the magical parents. They're not Obliviated. They are constantly around magic. They are very much aware of it. And so we again see this lack of uniformity in the application of memory modification. And they don't even call what they do to other Muggles like what happens to Aunt Marge. They don't call it dark, they just call it policy. Because it maintains secrecy, it maintains safety, it maintains control. A Death Eater erases a witness and it's evil. The Ministry erases memories. It's governance. Same act, different storyteller. And that is what I mean when I say that the Ministry doesn't legislate morality. It is in control of power. It tells you what to fear. It tells you who to fear. Werewolves are feared by not because they're evil, but because they make people uncomfortable. Giants are feared not because they're dangerous but because they don't fit into the social order. Goblins are mistrusted because they control wealth but not politics. Centaurs because they refuse to be ruled. Darkness becomes a label for anything that challenges the hierarchy. Which makes Hogwarts the perfect reflection of that hierarchy. The curriculum mirrors the Ministry's values. Domesticate danger, sanitize history and call it education. History of magic taught by a ghost literally refuses to change. It presents the past as fixed, objective, bloodless Defense against the Dark Arts, on the other hand, pretends to be about safety. But what it teaches really is Fear. Fear of creatures, fear of curses, fear of the unknown. It's a pedagogy of containment, not empowerment. And it's no coincidence that the year the Ministry decides to assert control over Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix, they do it through this class. They send Umbridge, a bureaucrat in pink cardigans, to turn the idea of defense into an exercise in obedience. She bans practical magic, replaces practice with theory. She tells students that the world is safe, that they don't need to prepare for a war that's already happening. And when students resist, she calls it rebellion. When they practice defense, she calls it sedition. What she's doing is a classical institutional strategy. Redefine safety so it serves the status quo. Don't teach people to defend themselves. Teach them to depend on authority. Don't let them recognize real darkness, real evil. Give them an approved list of monsters to fear instead and a class that helps them define it. And that's how the system keeps reproducing itself. Because the moment you start controlling definitions of safety, of evil, danger, you don't need to control people's actions anymore. You just have to control their imagination. You make them believe that the worst thing that can happen is chaos, not injustice. That's why Defense against the Dark Arts becomes such a fascinating microcosm of the entire wizarding world. It's not just a class. It's a reflection of how power hides itself. Every teacher is either corrupt, complicit or compromised. Quirrell is possessed. Lockhart, fraudulent. Lupin is marginalized. Moody is an impostor, umbrage, authoritarian. Snape is conflicted. Each one exposes a different way. Institutions collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Because if you can't teach people to tell the difference between fear and power, they'll always mistake control for protection. And maybe that's the actual curse of the job, not Voldemort's jinx, but the structural one. The class is doomed because the institution itself can't survive the truth. It's supposed to be teaching these students. You can't defend against the Dark Arts when the darkness is built into the foundation of the world that's teaching you. So if the Ministry's version of defense is really about control, and if it teaches fear instead of discernment, then what would a real Defense Against a Dark Arts class look like? What would it mean to actually prepare students for moral, psychological and political complexities rather than just spells that they cast as evil? And here's the thing about the idea of darkness and the way it's justified. It's never born in a vacuum. It's born out of pre existing ideas. Socially constructed hierarchies that teach us what we're supposed to fear. Take the Ministry's favorite justification for Obliviate. They erase Muggle memories under the guise of protection. As if non magical people are somehow dangerous, volatile, unpredictable. But that fear is centuries old, built on a myth and prejudice. There's no evidence of danger in the contemporary magical world. There's just the residue of a narrative that once made wizards feel superior. The same logic drives house elf enslavement. Or the ban on goblins and centaurs using wands. Those restrictions don't protect anyone, but they do protect power. They keep magic consolidated in a few sanctioned hands. And they tell everyone else that their gifts, their identities are a threat. We even see it in the Ministry's own walls. Remember when BC SR during the first War authorized the use of unforgivable curses against Death Eaters? The very spells once labeled dark became legal because people were afraid. And fear makes almost any cruelty sound like policy, sound like safety. A few people called it out, but most didn't care. They wanted to feel safe. They wanted to believe that the ends justified the means. And honestly, we in our own world have seen the same pattern over and over and over again. Governments deciding that torture is acceptable when the target is someone they've labeled a threat. People being taken off the streets, separated from families, disappeared in the name of national security. Entire communities being stripped of rights because of their existence. Which challenges the comfort of the majority. Right now, around the world, we are watching trans people lose access to gender affirming care while CIS people's equivalent procedures remain untouched. The same treatments, the same doctors. But one group is demonized while the other is normalized. That's what happens when power gets to decide what is dark. The act itself doesn't change, but the narrative around it does. And that's what the Ministry of Magic does so well. It builds an illusion of safety that depends on other people's suffering. It convinces the public that restriction equals protection. And the magical populace, like so many of us, accepts it. Because the promise of safety feels comforting. Even when it's costing someone else their freedom. Darkness is rarely about the spell. It's about the story power tells to justify harm. And the story almost always starts with a lie about safety. That's why Defense against the Dark Arts as it's taught at Hogwarts can't actually work. It's teaching students to fear external monsters While ignoring the institutional ones. The policies, prejudices and rationalizations that make harm invisible. Because whether it's the ministry or our own governments, the tactic is the same. Redefine cruelty as caution, oppression as order, and call it defense. So if that's the curse of the system to keep repeating these cycles of fear and justification, then what would it look like to break it? What would a real Defense against the Dark Arts class teach us? Maybe it wouldn't train the students to block a curse, but it would teach them how to recognize when they're participating in one.

[D]

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[E]

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[B]

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[B]

At the end of the day, I think a true Defense against the Dark Arts class would teach us exactly what Sirius told Harry. That the world isn't divided into good people and Death Eaters. Because the truth is that we all live in shades of gray. As many of you reminded me during our Severus Snape Scene series. And as many of you will probably remind me during our Dumbledore series. And magic, like anything, carries both light and shadow. There's no Such thing as an inherently good spell. Every single piece of magic can be turned towards harm if the heart behind it allows for it. The real question, the one this class should have always been asking, isn't what the dark arts are, but why people turn to them. What pushes someone from using magic to heal to using it to dominate. What makes cruelty so seductive? What makes righteousness blinding? You can't answer that with dueling drills or disarming charms. You have to answer it with self awareness, ethics, and with empathy. And those are all things that can be cultivated and taught in a classroom. It's why I don't think defense against the dark arts should even be its own class. It should be part of every single class. It should be woven through charms and potions and transfiguration and even history of magic. Because this isn't about a category of spells. It's about the character of the caster. Every single lesson in magic should come with a lesson in morality. In the recognition that the person on the other end of your wand has the same right to dignity, to autonomy, to existence. So many of these students that we meet at 11 years old are given utmost power in the form of a wand, and yet they seemingly are expected to already have a grasp on what is right and what is not. And they blindly trust that this institution, this school, is going to teach them the right thing, as if somehow that's going to save them from. But we also recognize that there are students who make choices that go the wrong way. Vldiva is one of them. And that's what happens when you end up teaching power without conscience. Yes, of course there are curses worth defending against. Imperius cruciatus, Avada kedavra. Those are necessary to study because they exist and they're used. But those are the exception. They're not the rule. They're the outer limit of what happens when morality collapses. The rest of it, the real danger lives in the everyday spells. The charm that becomes coercion, or a potion that begets manipulation. The protection that becomes. And maybe that's what Harry's story teaches us. Clearly, his moral compass is both his greatest strength but also his greatest weakness. His refusal to cast certain spells. His attachment to expelliarmus as the symbol of who he wants to be. All of it is noble, but it also traps him in the kind of moral absolutism that sometimes costs him. He believes that magic itself self holds morality when the reality is, is that it's in him. He is the harbinger of morality and that's the paradox of goodness. It can blind you just as easily as evil can corrupt you. The class was supposed to teach him to defend himself against darkness, but no one ever taught him that. Sometimes the thing you need to defend yourself from is. Is your own certainty. So if I had to come up with a new syllabus, if I had to redefine and redesign Defense against the Dark Arts, it wouldn't be just about counter curses or practical defense. It would be about moral imagination. We would be looking at things like the ethics of power, the psychology of fear, the difference between defense and dominance. It would be a class about humanity, not just magic. Because in the end, the dark arts aren't about the art. They're about the artist. They're about what happens when people forget that every spell, act or word carries weight. That darkness doesn't always look like evil. Sometimes it looks like justification. Sometimes it looks like order. Sometimes it looks like us. So maybe a real Defense against the Dark Arts course wouldn't teach us how to fight monsters. Maybe it would teach us how to not become monsters. This has been another episode, a bonus episode of Critical Magic Theory. I'm Professor Julian Womble, and if you liked this episode, feel free. First of all, thank you. There will be no, like, rating or subscribing because this is just for you. Okay. A little vocal for you. I hope that you enjoy this episode and I hope that we can talk about it, because I don't know about you, but I did not expect to get that deep with Defense against the Dark Arts. But there's a lot there for us to unpack. I know that we will be having a conversation about it in the Discord. If you have not joined us there, please feel free to do so. If that is your vibe. If you. The instructions are on the Patreon. Speaking of the Patreon, y', all, where you can have this conversation in the Patreon as well. Also, if you have not submitted your thoughts on Dumbledore, please feel free to do that as soon as possible. I can't wait to hear what you think. Until then, be critical and stay magical, my friends. Bye.

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