Five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration

So should death be the fifth exception? Or should life and death be together? You know, because life and death are forever intertwined. *mysticalsparkly*

But I think they should be considered as one, because of similarity when it comes to Transfiguration.

With this particular subtopic my head is spinning. I'll just throw out some stuff I know.

Death can be animated, yes? Isn't that what Inferi are? Or they're imitating life. They're blind but they knew where Harry was and wanted to drag him with them in Voldemort's cave. Or perhaps Voldemort enchanted them and put that sole purpose in them. Otherwise, Inferi could be made to do other things. And a dead body can be transfigured in other ways, like the shell (Bathilda Bagshot) for Nagini in DH.

But I think Sarah and Carole are right. The living things one conjures might fade away, just as if you cast a spell it's effects might fade (with the exceptions of some charms and enchantments, or spells that are designed to strengthen). And the Summoning thing makes sense, as well. Perhaps it is possible to do both with magic, as I don't know how Hermione would know where exactly to get yellow canaries.

And don't time and space matter in magic? McGonagall was able to Summon a plate of sandwiches for Harry and Ron at the beginning of CoS because she knew they were nearby.

And Summoned stuff wouldn't fade, but conjured things would. Everybody be careful with this in your stories.;)


Hayden

perhaps there is a "death" exception, in that a dead thing will decay even if it is transfigured. The shell of Bathilda was giving away that it was a dead body with the horrible smell, if Harry and Hermione had any experience with dead bodies it would have tipped them off right away, I'd imagine that Voldemort would have thought to transfigure the shell in such a way that it would not rot if that were at all possible. The other body we've seen transfigured was Crouch Sr.'s, and it was turned into a bone, which would also decay in time.

What a morbid theory I'm contributing!

The general consensus seems to be: Love, "True" Life, Food, Money/Precious metals, and Information.

It seems to me that you can't conjure a living thing possessing a soul. It's widely believed amongst many major world religions that animals don't have a soul, and so could be conjured. You figure on a carcass and then the collection of specialized cells that make up a brain and, yeah, why wouldn't you be able to conjure such a thing. Canaries and dogs and serpents are all sentient beings, but they have no concept of right or wrong. Their behavior is based upon instinct or, in the case of Hermione's canaries, upon the conjurer's commands.

That's it! Lttlebird! Information! That was the fifth one. The only ones I want to discuss a little more are Life/Death and Money.

Should the untransfigurable money be limited to gold? I don't know/remember what remarkable qualities gold possesses. And what about Knuts and Sickles? They're not gold, which makes me agree with Minna that there must be some sort of secret code or spell on legitimate wizarding coins.

I've a question. Wouldn't duplicating be much easier and seem more genuine with spells than Muggle forging? Harry could make more of that wine when he was at Hagrid's with Slughorn for Aragog's funeral. He didn't know the ingredients, but he was able to make more. And I'm guessing the extra wine didn't vanish inside Hagrid's and Slughorn's stomachs. Couldn't you do the same with other things, including money? Forget wizarding gold for a moment; what if you duplicated a Muggle note? They have these code thingies hidden in them, but with a spell, couldn't you use a duplicated one and get it by currency experts?

As for animals and their souls, I'm not really sure. But perhaps conjured ones would not have souls and would follow the conjurer's commands or their instints, as Lttlebird said.

With Life/Death, dead objects can be transfigured, but I'm not sure death itself even falls into the category of Transfiguration. You can kill someone. That's the Dark Arts. I think it should just be Life. Thoughts?


Hayden

I'm not sure what you mean by information. Information how? There are things like Viritaserum that force someone to tell the truth, the Marauder's Map that shows wherever someone is in Hogwarts, newspapers, textbooks. All that could be considered information. What sort of information and how is it an exception?

Quote:

---

I've a question. Wouldn't duplicating be much easier and seem more genuine with spells than Muggle forging? Harry could make more of that wine when he was at Hagrid's with Slughorn for Aragog's funeral. He didn't know the ingredients, but he was able to make more. And I'm guessing the extra wine didn't vanish inside Hagrid's and Slughorn's stomachs.

---

Lol, disgusting images right now. With the wine, I'd always assumed it was a spell like Aguamenti, but would drink be classed as food? I've just remembered something about a fountain of wine being shot out of a wand (was that Olivander?) and something about a flask of water being turned into vinegar (a charms lesson perhaps?). Where would these have come from? Can you conjour edible liquids but not more solid things, or did these come from somewhere else? With the wine at Aragog's funeral, perhaps there was a little bit left at the bottom of the bottle and Harry just increased the quantity.

Quote:

---

Couldn't you do the same with other things, including money? Forget wizarding gold for a moment; what if you duplicated a Muggle note? They have these code thingies hidden in them, but with a spell, couldn't you use a duplicated one and get it by currency experts?

---

You could probably duplicate it, yes. Without magical intervention, I guess everything would be copied down to the codes and that picture of the Queen you get if you hold one up to the light. I wonder if wizards have charmed Muggle banknotes so that they can't be replicated by magic. If they were able to replicate them, I can see a lot of potential for crime and such.

Life and death are probably intertwined. No spell can bring someone back from the dead, including the Resurection Stone. You cannot give them back life. You cannot create life.

Sarah x

Again, this is my own conclusion, but I don't think one can conjure information of which no one has prior knowledge. Ex: one can't speak into existence a book about Voldemort and his Horcruxes which will tell whatever it is one might need to know. Information, knowledge,if you will, must first be collected and processed through a human brain and translated into some medium. One could summon the appropriate media if it existed, presumably.

I had an idea at work today, what about potions? If you could conjure them out of thin air, there would be no need to brew them...

In one of the books, isn't Snape able to just vanish one of Harry's potions that goes wrong? Would that lie under the law?

Other than that instance though, it seems perfectly plausible that potions would be one of them, it makes a lot of sense, otherwise it would be easy for all werewolves to just conjure up some wolfsbane potion, or for anyone to get some Felix Felicius.

I don't know if vanishing is part of the law, because I'm thinking you could vanish food...

According to Prof. McGonnagal, when you Vanish something it "goes into everything, which is to say non-being." I interpret this to mean that the molecules disperse and bind themselves into whatever is around. Whether or not they ever reassemble in another place, say a drain in the case of a potion, I don't know.


I don't think that potions would be one of the Five Exceptions because they are but an amalgam of seperate ingredients. One could always Conjure the ingredients for the potion, assuming one had a right to them. Ownership does seem to be one caveat for Conjuring. Say you brewed up a large batch of Wolfsbane potion and then stored it somewhere (assuming one of the properties of Wolfsbane potion is that it does not degrade over time, which I bet it does-why else would Snape have brewed a new cauldron-full every full moon?), you could then Conjure said potion from where ever it is stored, but no-one else could Conjure up your potion. Or maybe it has nothing at all to do with ownership and it's simply bad etiquette to Conjure away someone else's possessions. I've never been able to find a concrete answer to any of this, so it's all conjecture, really.

I think about the rules and laws of conjuring all the time. It is the bane of my existence and the reason why many of my stories never get finished.