Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have started their first day in Hogwarts. First, they have assisted to the Hat's ceremony where a magic Hat has sent every one of them to a House.
The Sorting Ceremony occurs at the start of every new Hogwarts year, sorting the fresh cluster of first-year students into their Hogwarts houses.
At the start-of-term feast, the ceremony invites students to wear the Sorting Hat, an ancient piece of sentient headwear that determines if the pupils should belong to Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin. Once sorted, the student will join their house table, while the festivities continue.
All of them have been chosen to be members of Gryffindor under the orders of Professor Minerva McGonagall.
Before meeting Ms McGonagall, the family has studied some English vocabulary about Personal Details, Family Matters and Free Time.
During the books, the Head of this house is the Transfiguration Professor and Deputy Headmistress, Minerva McGonagall
until she becomes headmistress, and the house ghost is Sir Nicholas de
Mimsy-Porpington, more commonly known as Nearly Headless Nick. According
to Rowling, Gryffindor corresponds roughly to the element of fire. The founder of the house is Godric Gryffindor.
The Gryffindor common
room is in one of the castle's highest towers, and its entrance is on
the seventh floor in the east wing of the castle and is guarded by a
painting of The Fat Lady, who is garbed in a pink dress.
She permits entry only after being given the correct password, as was established in the third book, when Sirius Black tried forcing entry into the tower, only to be blocked by The Fat Lady after he could not give the correct password.
In the first book, Neville Longbottom tends to forget the password and must wait near the painting until other Gryffindors arrive to open the way.
The Stones have started to search the Philosopher's Stone, which grants its user immortality as well as the ability to turn any metal into pure gold.
The Grandma has told them the story of this magic stone.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a fantasy novel written by British author J. K. Rowling.
The first novel in the Harry Potter series and Rowling's debut novel, it follows Harry Potter, a young wizard who discovers his magical heritage on his eleventh birthday, when he receives a letter of acceptance to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Harry makes close friends and a few enemies during his first year at the school, and with the help of his friends, Harry faces an attempted comeback by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents, but failed to kill Harry when he was just 15 months old.
The book was first published in the United Kingdom on 26 June 1997 by Bloomsbury. It was published in the United States the following year by Scholastic Corporation under the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It won most of the British book awards that were judged by children and other awards in the US.
The book
reached the top of the New York Times list of best-selling fiction in
August 1999 and stayed near the top of that list for much of 1999 and
2000. It has been translated into at least 73 other languages, and has
been made into a feature-length film of the same name, as have all six
of its sequels.
Most reviews were very favourable, commenting on Rowling's
imagination, humour, simple, direct style and clever plot construction,
although a few complained that the final chapters seemed rushed.
The writing has been compared to that of Jane Austen, one of Rowling's favourite authors; Roald Dahl, whose works dominated children's stories before the appearance of Harry Potter; and the Ancient Greek story-teller Homer.
While some
commentators thought the book looked backwards to Victorian and
Edwardian boarding school stories, others thought it placed the genre
firmly in the modern world by featuring contemporary ethical and social
issues, as well as overcoming obstacles like bullies.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, along with the rest of the Harry Potter
series, has been attacked by some religious groups and banned in some
countries because of accusations that the novels promote witchcraft
under the guise of a heroic, moral story.
Other
religious commentators have written that the book exemplifies important
viewpoints, including the power of self-sacrifice and the ways in which
people's decisions shape their personalities. The series has been used
as a source of object lessons in educational techniques, sociological
analysis and marketing.
The book, which was Rowling's debut novel, was written between approximately June 1990 and some time in 1995.
In 1990 Jo Rowling, as she preferred to be known, wanted to move with her boyfriend to a flat in Manchester and in her words, One weekend after flat hunting, I took the train back to London on my own and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head... A scrawny little black-haired bespectacled boy became more and more of a wizard to me... I began to write Philosopher's Stone that very evening. Although, the first couple of pages look nothing like the finished product.
Then Rowling's mother died and, to cope with her pain, Rowling transferred her own anguish to the orphan Harry. Rowling spent six years working on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and
after it was accepted by Bloomsbury, she obtained a grant of £8,000
from the Scottish Arts Council, which enabled her to plan the sequels.
By mid-2008, official translations of the book had been published in 67 languages. By November 2017, the book had been translated into 80 languages,
the 80th being Lowland Scots. It was translated by Matthew Fitt, who
said that he was honoured to be the Scots translator, and that he wanted to do it for a long time.
The translation is considered significant by Heart, who described it as probably the most incredible version so far, The Guardian, who believed that it may just be the best of all, and Stylist. Bloomsbury have published translations in Latin and in Ancient Greek, with the latter being described as one of the most important pieces of Ancient Greek prose written in many centuries.
The Philosopher's Stone, more properly philosophers' stone or stone of the philosophers, in Latin lapis philosophorum, is a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (chrysopoeia, from the Greek χρυσός khrusos, gold, and ποιεῖν poiēin, to make)
or silver. It is also called the elixir of life, useful for
rejuvenation and for achieving immortality; for many centuries, it was
the most sought goal in alchemy.
The Philosophers' Stone was the central symbol of the mystical terminology of alchemy, symbolizing perfection at its finest, enlightenment, and heavenly bliss.
Efforts to discover the Philosophers' Stone were known as the Magnum Opus (Great Work).
The earliest known written mention of the Philosophers' Stone
is in the Cheirokmeta by Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300 AD). Alchemical
writers assign a longer history. Elias Ashmole and the anonymous author
of Gloria Mundi (1620) claim that its history goes back to Adam
who acquired the knowledge of the stone directly from God. This
knowledge was said to be passed down through biblical patriarchs, giving
them their longevity. The legend of the stone was also compared to the
biblical history of the Temple of Solomon and the rejected cornerstone
described in Psalm 118.
The
theoretical roots outlining the stone's creation can be traced to Greek
philosophy. Alchemists later used the classical elements, the concept of
anima mundi, and Creation stories presented in texts like Plato's
Timaeus as analogies for their process.
According
to Plato, the four elements are derived from a common source or Prima
Materia first matter, associated with chaos. Prima Materia is also the
name alchemists assign to the starting ingredient for the creation of
the Philosophers' Stone. The importance of this
philosophical first matter persisted throughout the history of alchemy.
In the seventeenth century, Thomas Vaughan writes, the first matter of the stone is the very same with the first matter of all things.
Early
medieval alchemists built upon the work of Zosimos in the Byzantine
Empire and the Arab empires. Byzantine and Arab alchemists were
fascinated by the concept of metal transmutation and attempted to carry
out the process. The 8th-century Muslim alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan
(Latinized as Geber) analyzed each classical element in terms of the
four basic qualities. Fire was both hot and dry, earth cold and dry,
water cold and moist, and air hot and moist.
He theorized that every metal was a combination of these four principles, two of them interior and two exterior.
From this premise, it was reasoned that the transmutation of one metal
into another could be affected by the rearrangement of its basic
qualities. This change would be mediated by a substance, which came to
be called xerion in Greek and al-iksir in Arabic from which the word
elixir is derived.
It was
often considered to exist as a dry red powder also known as al-kibrit
al-ahmar, red sulfur made from a legendary stone -the Philosophers' Stone.The elixir powder came to be regarded as a crucial component of transmutation by later Arab alchemists.
In the
11th century, there was a debate among Muslim world chemists on whether
the transmutation of substances was possible. A leading opponent was the
Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who discredited the theory of
transmutation of substances, stating, Those of the chemical craft know well that no change can be effected in the different species of substances, though they can produce the appearance of such change.
According to legend, the 13th-century scientist and philosopher Albertus Magnus is said to have discovered the Philosophers' Stone. Magnus does not confirm he discovered the stone in his writings, but he did record that he witnessed the creation of gold by transmutation.
The 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus believed in the existence of alkahest, which he thought to be an undiscovered element from which all other elements (earth, fire, water, air) were simply derivative forms. Paracelsus believed that this element was, in fact, the Philosopher's Stone.
We teachers are rather good at magic,
you know.
Minerva McGonagall
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