Because there's simply too much of it. They don't have anywhere near the manpower or the organization to destroy documentation spread across the entire world that goes all the way back to the Holy Roman Empire, and arguably to before the time of Christ. They just don't. A small group of renegades, even with superpowers, can't just erase two thousand years of records and the hundreds of thousands of people that venerates them. Not without committing genocide.

Plus, doesn't it seem kind of odd that, while the official church stance on magic hasn't changed, suddenly the witchhunts just, end? If you just made them forget about it, they would eventually start up again with the same thing.

 

Too much of it in an age where most people couldn't read and information spread at a crawl compared to wizards who could instantly apparate between two points and race along trade routes in the sky on brooms. That would certainly be an issue today but back then?

 

They don't have to erase all of the records, though. As long as they get the people/records pointing to anything important, the rest is just random crap that becomes myth.

Edit: What ashura said, as well.

 

The records aren't just material. The entire clergy would know. Everyone with any authority in the church would know. And this was a time where it was common, even required, for men of the cloth to memorize entire books, and be able to recite them word-for-word. Destroying the material records wouldn't put the church in the dark, it would just piss them the hell off.

The only way is to either destroy all records AND Obliviate everyone who knows, or to cut a deal with them. The first one is arguably not even possible, let alone feasible, while the second is much more feasible, and has the added benefit of making sure there are no more witchhunts. I'm assuming the wizards would go with the easier option with long-term benefits, as opposed to the insanely difficult option that probably won't work and is basically a declaration of war. I don't consider that to be an unreasonable assumption.

 

Suppose you have a group of clergymen, let's say 50, in one location who all know about wizards. Suppose wizards obliviate just half that number while using them, via Imperius or whatever method have you, to destroy as many records of magic on premises as possible. How in the world would the un-obliviated half convince the rest that wizards are real?

This seems like such a simple task for a group of people who can wipe memories, be invisible, teleport, etc. They've got motherfucking magic!

 

I was trying so hard to stay out of this. But you had to keep going.

Why? Why would all of the clergy have to know? All they have to know is that higher-ups say magic and wizards = satan and should be killed. There is absolutely no reason they have to know that a whole society of wizards exist. In fact, given the predilection of higher-ups in any organization to keep these things secret, its more likely that they don't.

That's just not true. The vast majority of clergy at this time were uneducated, illiterate peasants. Some could recite books and were educated, but so fucking what? There really aren't that many of them. Obliviate them, Imperious them and move the fuck on.

Again, to quote Taure, why? You give no compelling reasons.

Yes. Because reasoning with religious zealots and power hungry bigots has historically proven to be so easy. :facepalm And who the fuck cares if there are witchhunts? Canon makes it clear that they were ineffective. Because wizards have y'know magic and there is absolutely nothing that medieval muggles can do to stop them or even effect them.

TL;DR. You're an idiot. Just stop.

Sesc had the right of it.

 

Sounds like an interesting reason for the Black Plague to sweep Europe. Sure, it took a while to straighten things out and centuries to discredit/Obliviate the fanatics, but the Statute may have simply been the end of that effort, with a core resolution of 'Never Again, Anywhere'.

As to modern royalty operating in Potter's world, I'd assume they keep folks like Kingsley near the PM so that he won't be able to make records they can't find, and Obliviate him at the end of term. The Royals would have no need to know.

Why? Because if the policy was to inform the local political leader of the existence and power of magic without safeguards, nutjobs like Pol Pot, Qaddafi, Marcos, and Stalin would have been obsessing over it (I didn't mention Hitler because he actually DID obsess about it).

I think Fudge was breaking Statute protocol because he's an idiot, and Scrimgeour followed through because he thought it was policy.

 

We already know from canon that small numbers of wizards can Obliviate large numbers of Muggles in short amounts of time: when a dragon attacked a Muggle beach, one wizarding couple Obliviated the entire beach before the Obliviators could arrive.

You should also consider that wizards have a lot of time to go about Obliviating the Catholic church (and Muggles in general). The don't have to do it in one night. They could spend years doing it. It's not like the Church could do anything to stop it.

You should also consider that wizards don't have to look through documents to search for references to wizards - they can just burn the entire archive down. You could even have fun with this. Library of Alexandria, anyone?

Also, I'm not sure if wizards need to burn documents at all. It doesn't matter if documents refer to wizards, so long as the accounts are fantastical/religious in nature, rather than a detailed account of genuine wizarding practices (and it's not clear how much knowledge Muggles had of wizards even before the Statute of Secrecy, other than fairy tales. Just consider how much they failed at burning wizards from what we're told in PoA).

So long as you obliviate the people, when they read the documents about the existence of wizards they won't be really gaining any genuine knowledge - just the kind of "knowledge" that the IRL Catholic church had about magic.

 

It isn't even really a tricky discussion like the normal Wizard vs. Muggle argument seems to be.

Even if you think present day Muggles would beat wizards, this is the 1600s we're talking about.

 

Why can't someone like Thalarian or Thor Nairda come back from the dead instead? :facepalm

 

Or Trag.

R.I.P. man.

 

Lol?

It's called the Statute of Secrecy, not the Wizarding World / Catholic Treatise.

Secrecy being the operative word. As in, it's signed and within 2 years there's no trace of wizards anywhere on the planet. Two generations later, they're a myth. Dusty old 'records' are signs of a past time, when the church was more paranoid and certainly committed a lot more evil. The occasional breaches in the Statute are treated with a swift Obliviate. End of story. Worlds separated.

There's just no point reading further into this idea.

 

Arguable, especially for Chris Hitchens, but whatever.

And Lord Raine? Just shut up now.

 

Yeah, really fucking depressing. Now there's only this Coyote fucker.

 

Something else to consider:

JKR comments in Fantastic Beasts (I think. A side book, at any rate) that by the time the statute came in to effect it was only making official what had been general practice for a long time. By 1692 wizards had pretty much entirely retreated from interactions with Muggles and had been largely forgotten about, except through myth.

 

Because this isn't a secret. They're trying to make it a secret. As it stands, they're living in a world with magic and dragons and centaurs and elves running around. In the open.

Do you have any idea how hard it would be to hide that on your own? Even with magic, the plan still hinges on dealing with everyone who could remind anyone and removing all the evidence. This wasn't some secret to begin with. Magic was in the open. Everyone in the church knows because they're living in a fucking Dungeons & Dragon's campaign. You would have to be deaf, blind, and functionally retarded to not know that magic exists pre-Statute. There are dragons flying around.

The fact that the entire operation didn't fall through immediately is kind of a minor miracle in and of itself, and a testament to the wizards and the capacity of magic to hide things. Adding in the simultaneous destruction of all records and all evidence just makes elevates the entire thing into the realm of total impossibility. If the wizards had the manpower to do that, they wouldn't have needed to hide in the first place.

The only way the idea works is if you assume the wizards had help from established authorities. That's the only way the withdrawal could have been feasibly pulled off. So now it's just a matter of figuring out who.

The royalty? Possible, and that's certainly within the scope of this thread topic. It's an easy explanation for why the royal family matters and why the wizards should give a damn about anyone who isn't on the Wizengamot or the ICW, should you choose to go that route.

I personally see the church as the other viable option. Because back then, there was no greater power. Even the royalty were at the beck and call of the church, because it was the church who put the crown on someone's head.

I would also like to note that this is strictly a thread in regards to speculatory discussion, and not actually dealing with established canon. We're talking opinions here, not canon facts, so there are bound to be differences of opinion. I personally don't think the wizards could do it without help, and see the fact that it's standard operating procedure to bring elected leaders in on the secret as a modern day remnant of that. Some of you obviously disagree. It really depends on how you interpret the competence of the overall magical community at the time. Seeing how they felt it was necessary to hide at the time, I don't rate them very highly on the competence scale. If they were that good, they could have just fought back and killed everyone who hated them.

 

Everything else has been rebutted already, I think, so I'll just respond to this:

Even were this true, they could just use the Imperius on whatever leader they needed to do their will. No negotiation required.

 

Why would this be the state of things? It's patently ridiculous to believe that this is how the world was pre Statute of Secrecy. If this was the case, assistance from the Church would not help at all in hiding. They would have to obliviate every single human being the entire world. I don't care how much influence the church has, if dragons and unicorns etc. are so common that everyone knows of them, no pronouncement or action by the Church is going to change that belief.

This is possibly the worst argument you've posited yet. Every point you've made has been rebutted multiple ways and multiple times, in greater detail and with more logic than you've exhibited. In short, we're forced to conclude that you are functionally retarded.

Have a nice day.