The Department of Mysteries is a secretive department within the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter. Employees, called “Unspeakables,” research advanced magic and potentially dangerous items. The department is accessed through a rotating circular room with multiple doors, and contains rooms dedicated to researching complex designs and prophecies. One pivotal room is the Hall of Prophecies, containing archived prophecies about the wizarding world.
In the Harry Potter books, the Department of Mysteries is a department within the Ministry of Magic that focuses on covert research and possibly development as well. Little is known about the workings of the Department of Mysteries within the general wizarding community, making the department analogous to other top secret government departments around the world. Readers are introduced to the Department of Mysteries in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Employees of the Department of Mysteries are called “Unspeakable”. Like other employees of underground organizations, they appear to lead largely closed and private lives, and are not friendly or outgoing with other Ministry employees. The qualifications to be an Unspeakable are unknown, but presumably the Unspeakables are very talented researchers and wizards.
To access the Department of Mysteries, wizards take a Ministry elevator up to the ninth level of the massive underground complex. A single door opens into a large circular room flanked by multiple doors. When you close a door, the circular room rotates, making it impossible to know where you came from. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hermione Granger very cleverly uses a spell to make large flaming ‘X’s’ on the doors, allowing the group of young wizards to keep track of which doors they have already tried.
Numerous different rooms are found within the Department of Mysteries. They seem to be set aside to research complex designs and very advanced magic. It’s also possible that the Department of Mysteries is hiding potentially dangerous items. Within one of the rooms is a power “at once more wondrous and more terrible than death,” according to Albus Dumbledore, and this room is always kept locked. Some of the rooms are explored in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series.
One of the pivotal rooms within the Department of Mysteries is the Hall of Prophecies, which contains archived prophecies about the wizarding world, encased in small glass spheres. Prophecies can only be claimed by wizards involved in them. Another room contains a large reservoir of brains with connected thoughts, while one contains an assortment of planets floating in space. Time-turners and other time-related devices are stored in a large room and are mostly destroyed during the battle in the Ministry. The characters also visit a room that seems to center around death in book five, with a mysterious veil hanging from a large arch.
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