Content warning: This article contains discussion of suicide.

There is no shortage of mysterious magical items in the Harry Potter universe, but one of the items most often used by Harry Potter himself (played by Daniel Radcliffe in the film franchise) is the Invisibility Cloak, which - true to its name - allows the For Harry to disappear under him at all times when he needs to move discreetly around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (Harry, to be honest, does this all the time, which is probably why he gets detention and regularly loses Gryffindor points.) In the final book (and final two-part film), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the cloak comes to us as Harry and his two best friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) travel across the wizarding world to find Voldemort's (Ralph Fiennes) Horcruxes - magical objects containing pieces of the Dark Lord's very soul - and to destroy them. So what's the deal with the cape?

It's never fully explained how the Cloak works, but that's not what's important here. How did Harry get the cloak and how does it relate to his family line (and the famous children's story)? What journey did this magical artifact take before Harry was born, and why does it end up with him when all is said and done? Let's dive in.

Before Harry officially begins his studies at Hogwarts—and gets sorted into Gryffindor along with Ron and Hermione in the process—he picks up some essentials for his education, including a wand, a pet owl named Hedwig, and tons of magical textbooks and potions ingredients. . Like all his peers, he does not arrive for his first year at Hogwarts wearing an invisibility cloak, but during his first Christmas at the castle, he receives a mysterious package containing one along with a cryptic note: "Dad I left you this cloak in my possession before she died, it's time to give her back to you.

Harry does just that, using the cloak to wander Hogwarts at night to try to discover the identity of Nicholas Flamel, a man who makes passing mention of Harry's friend and Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid (the late Robbie Coltrane in the films ) in relation to wealth. hidden in the depths of the school (which is, of course, The Sorcerer's Stone - or the Philosopher's Stone, depending on where you live). One night, during his wanderings, Harry discovers the Mirror of Erised and sees the reflections of his family inside; when he is discovered there by the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris in the first two films), Dumbledore advises him not to "dwell on your dreams". All this is to say that Dumbledore and the cloak are connected - and Dumbledore is the one who left Harry a cloak at Christmas. But why?

Dumbledore tells Harry, at the end of the first book and film, that he put the cloak under the tree - and this is why he had it in the first place. In the book version of Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore—who dies in the previous installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but appears to see Harry in some sort of liminal space after Harry allows Voldemort to "kill" Him— takes a deep dive into why he had the cloak, which belonged to Harry's father, James Potter. (Michael Gambon plays Dumbledore in these films; Richard Harris died in 2002.)

"You guessed, I know, why the cloak was in my possession the night your parents died," Dumbledore tells Harry in the novel, explaining that he was inspired to seek out the Death Legends after hearing about them for years:

"James had shown it to me only a few days before. It explained a lot of his undetected misdeeds at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of a Hallows reunion , but I couldn't resist, I couldn't help but take a closer look... It was a robe like I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every way... and then your father died, and I finally had two relics, all to myself!”

On the other Hallow Dumbledore invokes is the Elder Wandwhich he won in the duel against Grindelwald years before.

In the "Deathly Hallows" novel and the first half of the film adaptation, Harry, Ron and Hermione head to the home of Xenophilius Lovegood (Rhys Ifans) - editor of the extraordinary publication "The Quibbler" and father of their Hogwarts classmate Luna (Evana Lynch) - to find out the mysterious Deathly Hallowsat which point Xenophilius tells them that the truth lies in the children's book left to Hermione in Dumbledore's will. In The Tales of Beadle the Bard, there is a story called "The Tale of the Three Brothers" which Hermione reads aloud, where three (ghost) brothers walk together one evening and, thanks to their magical ability, build a bridge to cross a dangerous river. When Death appears before them, furious that they stopped him, he grants each of them a wish.

The oldest brother is looking for an invincible wand, the middle one is looking for a stone that can raise the dead, and the youngest is looking for a cloak to protect him from death. Unfortunately for the first two brothers, their arrogance eventually gets the better of them; The eldest brother has his throat cut by a stick, and the middle one takes his own life after tormenting the weak spirit of the woman he once loved using the stone. Meanwhile, the youngest brother remains invisible to Death until he reaches the end of his life - and when he feels ready, he hands the cloak to his son and embraces Death.

When Hermione points out that many cloaks can make the wearer invisible, Xenophilius retorts, "We're talking about a cloak that really and truly makes the wearer completely invisible and lasts forever, providing constant and impenetrable concealment no matter what spells are cast." . on that." As it happens, it is exactly how does harry's cloak work ... meaning he has had one of the Hallows in his possession since he was 11 years old.

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Wait, so how does James Potter factor into all of this? As Dumbledore explains to Harry when they hang out in the bottomless void at the end of Deathly Hallows, the three brothers from the story were real - and their surname was Peverell. "Whether they met Death on a lonely road... I think it's more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who managed to create these powerful objects," Dumbledore tells Harry. “The story of them being deathly hallows seems to me like a legend that might arise around such creations. The cloak, as you now know, has traveled through the ages, father to son, mother to daughter, to the last living offspring of Igotus, who was born, as Igotus was, in the village of Godrich Hollow.'

So there you have it: James Potter is descended from the Peverleys, a fact Harry realizes much earlier in The Deathly Hallows as he and Hermione visit Godric's Hollow at Christmas to see where his parents are buried. Ignotus happens to be the youngest of the brothers - with Antioch as the eldest and Cadmus as the middle child - and as the only one who lived a naturally long life, he was the only brother with descendants... one of them being Harry.

So what does Harry do with the invisibility cloak during his time at Hogwarts? A many thingsactually! In "Sorcerer's Stone" alone, Harry uses it to visit a restricted section of the Hogwarts library, find the Mirror of Erised, smuggle a baby dragon to the top of the Astronomy Tower on Hagrid's behalf, and get close to Fluffy, the three-headed. a dog guarding a door leading to the Stone itself. In the third book and film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry is not allowed to visit the village of Hogsmeade with his friends after his evil aunt and uncle refused to sign a permission slip - so guess how he sneaks into the village to hang out with his friends? (That's right: The Cloak.) In the same episode, Harry, Ron, and Hermione use it to sneak into the Shrieking Shack, uncover the truth about James' former friends Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black (Timothy Spall and Gary Oldman), and later , sneak around with a Time-Turner to help Sirius escape execution.

I could go on and on, but the point is that Harry uses the Invisibility Cloak to sneak around and eavesdrop and trick people... and as a narrative device, it's undoubtedly brilliant when you consider that it allows Harry to learn information that the reader also needs. (The books are told from Harry's point of view, so with that in mind, the cloak is basically necessary from a storytelling perspective.) If you want to watch Harry slouch around in the Invisibility Cloak on screen, the movies are streaming on Peacock now .