The Fountain of Magical Brethren explained.

Hey, brother!

Let's talk about the Fountain of Magical Brethren, the gleamy golden statue of witch, wizard,

centaur, goblin, and house elf located at the very heart of the Ministry of Magic.

It towers above every ministry employee as they arrive to work each day and despite us the readers not spending much time with it

The statue is highly significant and carries a lot of symbolism and metaphorical weight for the entire story and also like a lot of you know

physical weight because it's made of, uh, gold.

The statue, of course, does not survive Dumbledore and Baltimore's duel at the end of book 5 and is later replaced in book 7 by a truly horrifying replacement of wizards sitting on thrones made of disfigured muggles in their rightful place, as Hermione describes it,

which out of context sounds like Hermione is in favor of it, but she's not.

And when you read about the new statue, it leaves you appalled and like wanting for the old one

and its depiction of peace between magical beings.

And yet, the closer you look, the more you come to realize that while the fountain of

magical brethren was certainly, you know, a vast improvement to Voldemort's, you know,

domination over muggles, in reality, it was just the lesser of two evils.

A convenient lie, the ministry told itself and its people

about the true state of interspecies relationships within the wizarding world. Which, well,

comment is no real surprise when you learn where the statue came from to begin with. A question,

I bet you didn't think you cared about, but believe me, it's wild.

So let's delay no more and dive into the secret meaning and origins of the fountain of magical breath.

Hey, brother!

Okay, so let's start off with the statue itself so we all know what we're dealing with here. It is first introduced to us in Order of the Phoenix and Harry describes it like this.

Halfway down the hall was a fountain, a group of golden statues, larger than life-size, stood in the middle of a circular pool.

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