Like Flesh in Flame: Tom's Avoidance of Harry's Mind
The Twinkly One very kindly explained to Severus (and Jo to the inquiring reader) why Tom, after the debacle at the Ministry at the end of OotP, would never again voluntarily open his mental connection to Harry.
“…. Do not think I underestimate the constant danger in which you place yourself, Severus. To give Voldemort what appears to be valuable information while withholding the essentials is a job I would entrust to nobody but you.”
“Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency, whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
“Voldemort fears that connection,” said Dumbledore. “Not so long ago he had one small taste of what truly sharing Harry’s mind means to him. It was pain such as he has never experienced. He will not try to possess Harry again, I am sure of it. Not in that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
“Souls? We were talking of minds!”
“In the case of Harry and Lord Voldemort, to speak of one is to speak of the other.” (DH 33)
Soon after in universe (although we readers encountered the scene first, in HBP 23), Albus gave Harry a very similar explanation.
“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly. “The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches.… You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but then, he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.”
“But sir,” said Harry, making valiant efforts not to sound argumentative, “it all comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? “
Does it all come to the same thing?
Several questions suggest themselves. First, was Albus right in saying that Tom was reluctant (or unable) to further exploit his direct connection into Harry’s mind? If so, was Albus’s explanation for this, that the innocence and love irradiating Harry’s mind were unbearably painful to Tom’s maimed soul, the only possible explanation, or the correct one?
Third, did Albus himself actually believe what he told Severus and Harry?
Let’s look at the last question first, though we won’t try for a full answer yet.
If we’re wondering whether Albus told the strict truth, we might first establish whether our beloved Twinkles had reason to dissimulate. It’s true that pathological liars will lie merely to keep their hands in, as it were, but most of the lies we’ve ever caught Albus in were purposeful.
So would any of Albus’s purposes be served by convincing either Harry or Severus that Harry’s putative purity of soul rendered him, post-possession attempt, exempt from Voldemort’s continued mental molestation?
It’s hard to come up with a benefit to Albus in convincing anyone that Harry was protected from all further mental intrusions if Albus knew him not to be. Besides, Albus might eventually be caught in that lie. But what if Albus thought Harry was safe, but for another reason? Would he have reason to ascribe a false cause to the protection?
Let’s look at the case of Harry first. Was there a reason for Albus to tell the boy, probably truthfully (or at least sincerely), that Harry was protected from further mental intrusions by Tom, but falsely that Harry’s purity of soul formed that protection?
Well, yes, there was. We’ve talked before about Albus’s last stage in reconciling Harry to his role as a good little suicide bomber against Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Albus seemed to have believed (incorrectly, but that’s a separate issue), that Harry, unlike Severus, might not be willing to sacrifice himself merely to protect those he loved, but that Harry would do so to exact vengeance for his murdered family. Yet the Twinkly One was, alas, on record as having repeatedly insisted that love was supposed to be the antithesis of Voldemort’s power, to be the “power that the Dark Lord knows not.”
It was Albus’s art, therefore, to encourage Harry to conflate love and revenge: to convince the boy that a passionate desire to “finish” Voldemort was the purest possible expression of the fabled capacity for love that was supposed to differentiate Harry from Tom.
Moreover, by encouraging Harry in his binary “our-side-is-good, joining-the-other-side is the very DEFINITION of evil” thinking, by insisting that purity of soul EQUALLED never wanting to follow Voldemort, Twinkles pushed the boy to become a good little child-soldier, the unhesitating slayer of Death Eaters whose actions we so admired in the Seven Potters chapter.
So, yes. Telling Harry that Tom’s failure to continue mental contact was attributable to Harry’s extraordinary innocence, reinforced the idea that Harry was still innocent, unsullied by his acts of torture, manslaughter, and near-murder, and that Harry’s desire for vengeance, his hatred, was actually his truest expression of Love.
Orwellian Albus would have strong reason to misattribute Tom’s reluctance to attack mentally to Harry’s supposed goodness and light. Harry must be made to believe, after all, that Love is Hate, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength… and eventually that Harry must die himself to destroy the Doubleplusungood One.
What about Severus? What would be the point of Albus informing the man whose superlative (and hard-won) mental discipline was keeping some of Albus’s hottest secrets safe, that purity of soul protected Harry’s mind better than the best Occlumency could?
Well, that last question answers itself, doesn’t it? False or true, that insinuation was the latest veiled installment of “You disgust me:” the latest salvo in the war of moral superiority that Albus used to dominate and control that particular faithful but restive minion.
Kindly note that Severus’s soul and mind were never so pure as to repel the Dark Lord’s very touch! No, Voldemort positively relished raping Snape’s mind. Every scrap of Severus’s immense skill, deviousness, courage, and strength of will were called upon to keep his deepest heart (and Dumbledore’s secrets) inviolate.
But if Snape had only ever been truly pure of heart, see, none of the cunning and strength on which he had, perhaps, dared sometimes to pride himself would have been necessary.
An unmaimed soul would have been intrinsically inviolate.
So Snape’s entire fifteen-year history of laboring (at great effort and cost, agonizingly, and successfully) to deceive Voldemort was converted, in a few offhand words, into further proof of Snape’s fundamental unworthiness.
This exchange about Harry was thus Albus’s ultimate answer to Severus’s earlier bitter query: “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?”
If your tattered soul merited consideration, you wouldn’t NEED Occlumency, Severus. That you do, is proof positive that it does not.
That’s our Twinkles! Offering Severus trust and praise with one phrase, damnation with the next.
Note moreover that Albus pulled this on Severus (and casually dropped the crucial idea of a soul-connection) a few hours before he intended to rip the rug out from under Severus’s whole post-Lily service by revealing that “protecting Lily’s son” had been a fraud all along. Albus was preparing for his big reveal: that he had always fully intended Lily’s child to die, and that he meant now to force Harry’s chief protector to send the boy to his death.
Even Jo admitted that her sainted Albus could possibly be seen as a bit morally inferior to his prodigal-son servant in that conversation.
So Albus needed every advantage he could wangle. Starting off by wrong-footing Severus was the obvious thing to do, in the circumstances.
Regard Dumble’s response when Severus did finally start to realize that in this matter he might stand on the moral high ground:
Snape looked horrified. “You have kept him alive so he can die at the right moment?”
“Don’t be shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?”
[Er-and how many of those deaths were in obedience to your orders, Albus, that he “act his part convincingly”?]
“Lately, only those whom I could not save,” said Snape. He stood up. ‘You have used me.”
“Meaning?”
“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter-“
“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it pointed out that that snide little question was a way of transforming Severus’s righteous outburst to yet another “You disgust me” display of contemptible selfishness on Snape’s part.
Albus’s subtext was, “You’re far too morally stunted, Severus, to have any principled objection to the gross deception and betrayal of a child. You could only care that someone had gained an orphan’s trust and affection whilst coldly plotting the child’s death if you took an, ah, personal interest in the child in question. So tell me, what’s your real interest in Harry? Have you grown to, ah, care for the boy?”
And the veiled accusation worked. Severus instantly refuted that he objected to Albus’s gross betrayal only because he had transferred his “greedy” interest in Lily to her son:
“For him? ” shouted Snape. “Expecto Patronum!”
But Snape apparently accepted that any further protest would count as a petty insistence on his personal feelings (his obsession with Lily, if not her son), not a principled objection to deliberately twisting an unprotected child’s love and trust into a willingness to suicide on order.
And so Albus turned Snape’s moment of clear moral superiority into an opportunity to condemn Severus, yet again, for indecent selfishness.
*
So.
Albus had had reason to say what he did to Severus and Harry, regardless of whether he believed it to be true.
On the other hand, Albus was apparently correct in believing that Tom would shy from voluntarily invading Harry’s mind after that possession attempt in the Ministry; Tom never again made such an attempt.
Might Albus have been correct that Tom was now afraid to, and if so, when did Albus decide this? And was Tom afraid of Harry’s purity of soul, or of something else?
What did Albus think was true, and what was the truth?
*
“In fact, being-forgive me-rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” HPB, 10
I don’t flatter myself that I’m Twinkles’ intellectual equal, but I did make an Albus-sized mistake in my essay “Greater Love”: I averred,
“Fortunately, Tom so disliked his attempt to possess the boy he used his own Occlumency to hold their connection firmly closed ever since.
But then, during Harry’s sixth year Tom wouldn’t have had much reason to want the connection re-opened. Tom was busy preparing for the aftermath of Dumbledore’s demise (the fall of both the Ministry and Hogwarts), his best agent had the boy under observation, and his schemes didn’t require any immediate information or action from Harry.
But isn’t it fortunate that the following year, when Tom had no spy-eyes on the boy, urgently wanted to find him, and would have liked to have influenced Harry’s actions, it still didn’t occur to Tom that his repeated partial entries into Harry’s mind fifth year had never been intolerable (as the final possession-attempt had been)?
Nor that his own mind might still be open to Harry’s when Tom’s self-discipline slipped in extreme emotion?
Lucky, that double oversight. Real lucky.”
*
Luck. (Spits at the thought of how luck is purchased in the Potterverse.)
What I overlooked entirely was that Tom DID have strong reason to re-open the connection during Harry’s sixth year, BEFORE the luck from Snape’s sacrifice of Dumbledore kicked in.
We may still choose to attribute the connection opening only in Harry’s favor throughout DH to sacrifice-bought luck. (Or, if we want to be Doylists rather than Watsonians, to JKR’s abominable “Dei ex machinae” plotting in that book. But I’m trying to provide Watsonian explanations here.)
But I was wrong in thinking HBP Tom to be too absorbed in his schemes for gaining a foothold at the Ministry to care about connecting with Harry’s mind during the whole of Harry’s sixth year.
“…his schemes didn’t require any immediate information or action from Harry”?
No, not from ickle Harry.
Er, remind me again: what was Albus’s stated reason for avoiding Harry’s eyes-and company-for all of Harry’s fifth year, and for not himself trying to teach Harry Occlumency?
Oh yeah:
“I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was-or had ever been-closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me…. On those rare occasions when we had close contact, I thought I saw a shadow of him stir behind your eyes….” (OotP, 37)
Headdesk.
Jodel speculated that Tom might have been lurking behind Harry’s eyes during the debriefing scene in OotP-and that Albus expected Tom to be, and was deliberately using Harry to leak the Prophecy to Tom. (On the “too little too late” principle: the whole point of the Prophecy, by then, was that Tom had already invoked its working out by “marking” Harry in his ill-considered attempt to avert it. It was too late for knowing the FULL text to do Tom any good; he’d made his real fatal error years earlier and could not now undo it.)
I myself no longer credit that Tom was lurking behind Harry’s eyes in that scene. But I do think Albus had originally expected him to be. Or at least (if Tom didn’t dare ride along in real time) to probe Harry’s memories later.
I now think that that scene, and the whole beginning of HBP, consisted of Albus’s attempting to use Harry to feed Tom selected information and disinformation.
And/or, shortly on, to test the hypothesis that Tom was no longer accessing Harry-that Tom must have cut the connection.
It was Tom’s continued obstinate failure to make any use of the information that Albus kept feeding Harry that eventually made Albus determine that Tom must have become afraid to enter Harry’s mind.
(An obvious thing that might have awakened Dumble’s suspicions would have been if Snape reported that Tom had tasked him to determine the contents of the last half of the Prophecy. Why ask Severus to find it out, when Tom could simply read it from Harry’s mind? It’s not like Harry wouldn’t have been brooding on the matter!)
But that something had caused Albus to suspect that Tom had become unwilling to enter Harry’s mind again, and that Albus was testing this hypothesis, seems a good explanation of Dumbledore’s actions in the first half of HBP.
First, Twinkles wrote Harry three days in advance of fetching him from the Dursleys. Contrast this to the year before, when Harry found out about Albus’s plan to move him when the Order members were actually in the house.
This letter gave Harry several days in which to think nonstop about his impending rescue from the Dursleys. Why? On previous occasions, Harry had established that he was able (indeed, eager) to leave Privet Drive at a moment’s notice.
Nor has Albus ever previously been noted for being forthcoming with advance advertisements of his plans.
Note, moreover, that Albus did not merely tell Harry that Albus would stop by “this coming Friday” to take Harry to a new residence.
No.
Albus pre-informed Harry of his destination (the Burrow, which Tom’s spies in the Ministry could verify had received beefed-up security), of how long Harry would stay there (the rest of the summer), AND further that he wanted Harry’s “assistance in a matter to which I hope to attend on the way to the Burrow.”
If Tom wanted to attack Harry that summer, his best opportunity would be in transit from the protected Privet Drive to the protected Burrow.
It would be INSANE to give so much information to someone “who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
Unless one were either already convinced the connection were utterly closed, or were trying to set up a sting.
Or, of course, both. Or rather, either. If Twinkles thought the connection might be closed, and wanted to make sure, tempting Tom into setting up an ambush--physical or mental-would be a way of verifying that hypothesis.
(Even if Tom were wary of taking Albus on personally again-even injured as Albus now was-surely Tom would want to listen in on Albus’s private conversation with the boy, and find out about the mysterious “matter” with which Albus wanted Harry’s assistance?)
So, bait. That damned letter was bait. Albus was staking out Harry’s unprotected mind, as a tiger trapper out of Kipling would stake out a defenseless goat yearling: to try to entice the tiger to pounce.
The louder the kid bleats, the better it serves its purpose.
Look at Albus’s actions that night. He didn’t just take Harry to the Burrow.
First, Albus established that Kreacher was indeed bound in obedience to Harry’s direct orders, and suggested that Harry should send Kreacher to serve at Hogwarts. In the kitchens. Where the elf wouldn’t be able to initiate contact with any students, but where students with initiative could gain access to him. And where Kreacher wasn’t under Harry’s direct supervision. What could Kreacher’s beloved Mistress Cissy’s son have done with the services of a house-elf, had he know one personally devoted to him was serving one pear-tickle away?
Next, Twinkles allowed Harry to know that the Order would indeed continue to use 12 Grimmauld as its headquarters.
But most of all, Twinkles flaunted his injured hand and new ring in Harry’s face. If Tom were riding along in the back of Harry’s consciousness, or if he subsequently visited another of Harry’s dreams or daydreams, what would Tom have made of that?
Finally, Albus took Harry along on the recruiting trip to Horace-who was suspected by Albus to be the one man, besides Tom himself, who knew how many Horcruxes Tom originally planned to make.
And incidentally, Albus revealed Horace’s (as well as Harry’s) current location, and let Harry (and any mental riders on) know that Horace, like Harry, might soon be safe behind the walls of Hogwarts.
And Twinkles did all this before asking about Harry’s scar.
Only when they were actually in Horace’s village of refuge did he finally stop to ask if Harry’s scar had been hurting.
And then he feigned assurance that he’d expected all along that it had not been, and that he’d expected Tom to have started to employ Occlumency to shut out Harry.
Except shouldn’t Albus have verified this belief first, before starting to throw Harry information that might be crucial to the outcome of the war?
Put it like this: If Dumbles were indeed absolutely confident that Tom had utterly closed his connection to Harry, why ask at all? If he’d hoped but wasn’t sure, why not ask about the scar before betraying potentially damaging intelligence to Harry?
The timing makes most sense as someone paying lip service to verification while using the possibly-open connection to set up a sting.
(Also, if anyone were paying really close attention: that scar responded to Tom’s more intense emotions, positive and negative. When Tom was deliberately twisting Harry’s dreams to manipulate the boy-but with little emotional involvement of his own-Harry woke with no telltale pain-OotP 26, p 377. So the scar not hurting didn’t infallibly mean that the connection was closed from Tom’s side-that Tom was not invading Harry’s mind.)
And in fact Albus did not claim then, as he did later, that Tom would never again dare to try to open the connection. Here’s the discussion:
“Your scar… has it been hurting at all?”…
“No,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering about that. I thought it would be burning all the time now Voldemort’s getting so powerful.”
He glanced up at Dumbledore and saw that he was wearing a satisfied expression.
“I, on the other hand, thought otherwise,” said Dumbledore. “Lord Voldemort has finally realized the dangerous access to his thoughts and feelings you have been enjoying. It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you.”
“Well, I’m not complaining,” said Harry, who missed neither the disturbing dreams nor the startling flashes of insight into Voldemort’s mind.
Let’s parse this a little. Back up, first, to OotP, and Harry’s perception that his Occlumency lessons with Snape opened his mind further to Tom rather than the reverse.
“Nowadays, however, his scar hardly ever stopped prickling, and he often felt lurches of annoyance or cheerfulness that were unrelated to what was happening to him at the time, which were always accompanied by a particularly painful twinge from his scar. He had the horrible impression that he was slowly turning into a kind of aerial that was tuned to tiny fluctuations in Voldemort’s mood, and he was sure he could date this increased sensitivity from his first Occlumency lesson with Snape. What’s more, he was now dreaming about walking down the corridor toward the entrance to the Department of Mysteries almost every night, dreams that always culminated with him standing longingly in front of the plain black door.”(OotP 25)
Back up a chapter earlier, to Hermione’s sending Ron in to check on Harry after Harry’s very first Occlumency lesson: “She says your defenses will be low at the moment, after Snape’s been fiddling around with your mind….”
So Hermione’s research on Occlumency predicted that effect, though the extent to which it was occurring later concerned her and convinced her (correctly) that Harry wasn’t really trying hard enough to close his mind.
Dumbledore, too, confirmed (OotP 37) that Occlumency lessons would predictably “open your mind even further to Voldemort” at the least while said lessons were in session. That’s why he wouldn’t teach Harry, right?
Well.
Why?
Why, as a matter of magical theory, should Occlumency lessons reliably open the student’s mind further?
If they were also, and inevitably, passive Legilimency lessons-regardless of whether either teacher or student wanted them to be.
And we saw this!
We saw Harry eventually enter Snape’s memories without consciously trying to do so.
Moreover, the mental flow between Tom and Harry mostly ran in the opposite direction from what Master Legilimens!Tom usually preferred and arranged with his victims, hadn’t it?
Concerning Harry’s connection with Tom, we readers haven’t fully been distinguishing who was really doing what to whom.
Legilimency, Snape told us (OotP 24), “is the ability to extract feelings and memories from another person’s mind… to delve into the minds of their victims and to interpret their findings correctly…. Only those skilled at Occlumency are able to shut down those feelings and memories….”
Harry never DID gain any facility at shutting down his feelings and memories in order to close his mind and lie to Tom (or to Severus, or to Albus…).
But he did, demonstrably, get better and better at extracting ephemeral feelings and images from Tom’s mind and at interpreting them correctly.
Indeed, he complained about this increasing facility!
So the Scar-o-Vision was Harry unconsciously using the soul-connection to Legilimize Tom. (Which also makes sense of why doing so should make Harry’s scar hurt-Tom’s soul-fragment was trying to defend Tom against what it correctly perceived as an outsider’s attack.)
Until Tom finally realized what was going on, and started deliberately shutting Harry out.
Yet Tom could, in principle, have used Occlumency to shield himself while continuing to try to Legilimize Harry-that’s presumably what Tom did as a matter of course with Severus, and Bellatrix, and Draco, and any others of his servants or victims who had any facility at Occlumency/Legilimency.
The difference between what Albus said in the summer after fifth year to Harry, and what he said the following spring to both Harry and Severus, suggests that, originally, that’s what Albus expected Tom to be doing.
“It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you,” hedged Twinkles shortly after the possession attempt in the Ministry; eight months later, he asserted confidently, “Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s.”
But on this note, observe that Albus settled Harry into the Burrow, physically well-guarded but mentally with no more shields than before. Albus himself, or Moody, or Remus, could have perfectly well come by during the rest of the summer to give Harry further Occlumency lessons.
But no, this was never offered. Either Albus was utterly sure that Tom, not just was Occluding (shutting off Harry’s access to Tom’s feelings), but that he would never again, for any reason whatsoever, make the least attempt to read, influence, or possess the boy…. Or Albus didn’t care if Tom did…. Or Albus had laid plans contingent on Tom’s doing so.
On the latter supposition, what Albus was doing at the beginning of HBP was using Harry to drop hints, and then settling in to observe Tom’s reaction. (Recall Sherlock Holmes using a fire-alarm to stampede Irene Adler into revealing her secret cache’s location.) To see how Tom would react to the news that Albus was either hunting Tom’s Horcrux(es) or had completed (or at least furthered) his Hallows collection, depending on what Tom thought Albus knew and was up to.
Yet Tom did not rise to any of the baits Albus had scattered in Harry’s mind. He stayed focused on other concerns, while Harry brooded over Dumbledore’s revelations.
It might almost seem that Tommy never saw the bait to take it.
But Albus did not depend on that interpretation. Not at first.
We can infer this by looking at those first “special lessons” with Harry: at how they were set up, and at what they revealed. Or did not.
First, Harry had been given all summer to expect them. Then, he was issued the invitation to the first one by a note. Delivered to him by Jack Sloper (a Gryffindor Quidditch player ranking as Harry’s casual acquaintance) just after Harry’s first class with Snape. Just outside Snape’s classroom. And, just as with Dumbledore’s letter advising Harry of his prospective removal from the Dursleys, delivered days in advance.
Snape could perfectly plausibly have told Tom he’d “overheard” the children talking about the appointment-especially since Harry gloated aloud to his friends, “Ha! Snape’s going to be pleased… I won’t be able to do his detention!”
This is how one keeps a secret? It looks much more like a gauntlet flung down directly before Tom’s truncated nose.
Then, look at how useless Harry’s initial lessons really were. And how misleading.
What did Albus promise Harry about these all-important lessons? Twinkles promised to take Harry “journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.… It has a very great deal to do with the prophecy … and I certainly hope that it will help you to survive.” (HBP 10)
Er. Right. Evaluating this promise from the standpoint of knowing the entire course of Albus’s four (five, if you count Horace’s memories twice) “lessons” is fascinating. In retrospect we can see that the “lessons” were designed to give Harry clues for the Horcrux-Hunt (if not necessarily any useful information on Horcrux-destroying). They were designed to impress upon Harry Albus’s notion that Tom’s multiple Horcruxes were made from significant (to Tom) objects and stored in significant (to Tom) locations, and to give Harry an idea of what Albus thought Tom would consider significant.
But, excuse me? Information about a few significant events in Tom’s life that might be associated with Horcrux-making or safekeeping had nothing directly to do with the prophecy, and nothing at all to do with preserving Harry’s life.
It’s natural that Albus would have found it prudent, at this juncture, to tell Harry the lie that the “lessons” would ultimately help him to survive. It was not yet time to let Harry know that his beloved mentor coldly plotted his death. But why emphasize the prophecy, which had nothing to do with any of the series of memories Albus planned to impart?
Well. It really rather looks like Albus designed one half of his lying promise as bait to arrest Harry’s attention (self-preservation), while the other appealed to Tom (still obsessed, presumably, with that prophecy).
Next, consider: what in fact did Harry learn in his first “lesson,” from the trip down Bob Ogden’s Memory Lane?
A bombshell that perhaps would have shocked and confounded Bellatrix (and some of the other Pureblood Supremacists among the Death Eaters): that Tom was the offspring of a Muggle father and of a Parselmouth Pureblood witch whose family claimed to be the last descendents of Slytherin.
Which Tom himself had told Harry four years earlier.
The only new information to Harry was the family’s name (which Hermione easily could have researched had Harry ever given her the keywords “Marvolo” and “Little Hangleton”), the Peverell connection (which Harry had no context to evaluate), and the apparent fact that the Gaunt family was even more inbred, degenerate, and unpleasant than Sirius Black’s was.
And the only “thicket of guesswork” into which Twinkles led Harry this time was the conclusion that Merope (and by extension her son) hadn’t deserved Harry’s immediate impulse of sympathy, because she had raped Tom Senior.
Nothing in Bob Ogden’s memory (or any of the others later shown Harry) had anything to do with the prophecy. And no information that Twinkles proposed to impart to Harry, then or in any subsequent “lesson,” had anything to do with ensuring that Harry might survive.
But if Tom were listening in, or if he made Harry revisit the “lesson” later (and if he believed Twinkles to be telling Harry the truth), Tom might well assume that there was some clue in his ancestry to a weakness Harry could exploit… or that something corresponding in Harry’s ancestry would prove a strength.
A lure and a red herring.
(How many readers made up stories along the lines that Harry was the Heir of Godric, fated to defeat Slytherin’s heir? Was Albus trying to lure Tom into doing the same?)
And note the final flourish: Dumbles drew Harry’s attention to the ring, made sure that Harry identified that ring with its cracked stone with the intact ring that Marvolo had brandished under Bob Ogden’s nose. And then, Twinkles told Harry that he’d acquired that ring “very recently… a few days before I came to fetch you from your aunt and uncle’s, in fact.
“That would be around the time you injured your hand, then, sir”
“Around that time, yes, Harry.”
Anyone want to wager whether Albus had set the equivalent of a tripwire at the remains of the Gaunt hovel, to see whether Tom ever came to check on his Horcrux/Hallow?
Which Tom, clearly, never did.
Here endeth the First Lesson.
What was the second?
Over six weeks later (during which time the headmaster ostentatiously absented himself from school), Albus sent a note to Harry that they were to have a second lesson. Please observe that Albus this time sent the note by Ginny at breakfast in the Great Hall on the Saturday morning of the October Hogsmeade outing, appointing a meeting two days later.
Which our Harry, always famous for his discretion, reads aloud to his friends.
In the Great Hall at breakfast, did I remember to mention that?
Thus ensuring that, potentially, any Hogwarts student or staff member remotely interested in Harry could have learned of the appointment, or any Hogsmeade resident to whom such a student might have spoken.
That the Headmaster, who’d been much absent from school recently on some secret business, was meeting privately with Harry Potter the following Monday night, was essentially broadcast to all of Wizarding Britain.
That particular Hogsmeade outing, of course, was enlivened by Draco’s first murder attempt, and Harry was offended that Albus thought his “lesson” more important than discussing the attack on Katie. So what vital, consummately important information did Dumbledore impart?
Well. Harry first learned about Burke cheating Merope when she hocked her heirloom locket-and Dumbledore once more squelched Harry’s flash of sympathy by instructing him that Merope cravenly abandoned her baby by dying. No Lily she, to die to save her baby! Nope, dying in childbirth was a contemptible act of cowardice….
Then Albus toured Harry through his own first encounter with Tom. And told Harry what to think about it, afterwards. He drew Harry’s attention specifically to several aspects of Tom’s personality: “his obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination… his contempt for anything that tied him to other people, anything that made him ordinary… he preferred to operate alone…. And lastly, Tom Riddle liked to collect trophies.”
Let me put it this way: if Tom had raided Harry’s mind the night after this lesson, what new information would Tom have gained about Albus’s knowledge, beliefs, and intentions?
Nothing at all. The only possible hint that Albus might be considering the possibility of more than one Horcrux was that awful “the mouth organ was only ever a mouth organ” line.
Everything else Albus gave Harry was information Tom already knew Albus knew.
So when did Albus finally get down to giving Harry any information that might be considered hot? Not until January, when he showed Harry Morfin’s memory and Horace’s altered one. That’s the first time he gave Harry authentically new information that might conceivably be used against Tom (parricide and Pureblood-framing), and also the first firm indication that Albus might be looking into the idea of Tom making a Horcrux. Much less Horcruxes.
(I remind you, the ring was also a Hallows, the Suicide Stone, and might have been stolen-and to appearances destroyed-to prevent Tom’s becoming Master of Death, while the Diary was destroyed to kill revenant!Tom, not adult Voldemort.)
So only after six months of testing and probing did Albus finally gave Harry any information that if relayed to Voldie might actually clue Tom in to what lines of investigation Albus might really be pursuing.
Note that this third meeting was arranged by a note passed by Hermione in the Gryffindor dorm, not one waved ostentatiously in front of the whole school. The next note, in March, was given to Luna to give Harry in the Hospital Ward (though she caught up with him outside it). And the final “lesson,” the one where the number of Horcruxes was finally theorized, was arranged by Harry himself when he’d gotten Horace’s memory.
*
Finally, consider Albus’s volte-face regarding the prophecy: in late spring in HBP he tells Harry that the prophecy is only important because Tom’s set such store by it. Did he ever before give Harry any hint he thought that? No, always previously he encouraged Harry in believing the prophecy to be all-important. Let’s put it this way-while he thought Tom might be guided by what Harry was told by his mentor, Albus encouraged Harry to believe the Prophecy of paramount importance. Once he believed Harry unlikely to leak to Tom, he said the exact opposite.
So there’s evidence that Albus did eventually conclude that Tom must be terminally reluctant to enter Harry’s mind again. (In addition to Tom’s quite reasonable determination to stop his involuntary leakage to Harry, once he was aware of it.)
Did Albus really think that what deterred Tom was that Harry’s soul was so pristine as to be agonizing for Tom to share?
And is that really why Tom stayed out? Because it’s clear that Tom did actually avoid deliberately entering Harry’s mind after the Ministry, and he must have had some reason.
Let’s briefly address the issue of the purity of soul of the Boy-Who-Lived.
You know, Harry Potter.
The boy who, at the tender age of eleven, tortured an enemy to death.
Now, I do fully accept that Harry, if charged in a court of law, would have been (and should have been) acquitted of murder in that case. Leaving aside the question of his age and ability to understand the consequences of his actions, killing Quirrell was clearly justified as self-defense.
However, the child didn’t actually kill for that reason, to protect himself. No, Harry was trying to keep Voldemort from getting the Stone, and he was willing to burn both himself and Voldemort’s host to death in order to do so.
Except actually, the boy probably didn’t comprehend fully at the time that he was killing Quirrell, nor how near he came to killing himself.
So, first, I am emphatically not saying that Harry should not have done it.
However, it’s interesting that Twinkles should have used the words “flesh in flame” to describe Tom’s supposed agony at encountering the ascribed purity of Harry’s soul.
Because that’s precisely how Harry killed Quirrell. Harry burned Quirrell up, using the mother’s-death curse on inimical physical contact, while his mortal foe screamed and tried to escape Harry’s torturing grasp.
While the immortal foe eventually managed to escape by discorporating again.
Sorry, Harry’s actions may have been entirely necessary and justifiable. I don’t argue against that.
But I don’t accept that deliberately burning a man to death while his screams of agony echo in your ears can conceivably leave the killer’s soul unsullied and pristine.
Surely there’s a little bitty stain left after that?
Or, in Jo’s terms, a teensy little rent?
Even if your mentor does afterwards downplay your responsibility for that horrific death, and encourage you never to dwell on (or feel remorse for) that killing.
And others of Harry’s actions haven’t immediate self-defense to excuse them.
Harry was the boy who connived at, and covered up, the release of a Class XXXXX monster at a school. Even after said monster had seriously injured a fellow student.
You know, like Tom Riddle did.
Who, the following year, covered for an accomplice’s theft of controlled substances by arranging a massive assault on his school rivals (which might have killed or blinded some had Snape been slower to respond or the luck bad).
And who laughed at their panic and suffering.
Who, at fourteen, responded to his first sight of the effects of the Cruciatus by fantasizing about casting it on a teacher who, he felt, picked on him.
(I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to….)
Who, at fifteen, cast the Torture Curse in reality. Successfully. And who smashed a wall down upon a man who’d threatened but not harmed his friends, seriously injuring or killing him.
Who, at sixteen, cheated repeatedly in class, connived at cheating in sports by both his best friends, and hexed people he knew to be defenseless against him.
That Harry. The one Jo wrote.
Killer. Torturer. Thief. Cheat. Bully.
I’m sorry, but I think that Tom Riddle’s soul would have been entirely comfortable with that level of purity.
The only thing that would have given Tom pause, was: Tom Riddle held his own survival as his most sacrosanct goal. Harry instead gave pride of place to the ultimate destruction of his hated enemy.
Moreover, Harry cared about his friends, while Tom never quite grokked the f-word.
Therefore, Harry was entirely as willing to endanger or hurt himself as his foe, if that’s what it took to destroy his enemy (vide that encounter with Quirrell). Moreover, Harry was willing to endanger himself to save a friend.
Tom couldn’t comprehend either concept, though he registered (on a theoretical level) that Harry did.
*
So all of Albus’s blustering that “In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart” is bosh.
But even if it weren’t, it would still be nonsense.
Tom had already been in Harry’s mind, not once but multiple times, and there’s no sign it ever caused Tom any distress before the possession attempt in the Ministry. So why should it afterwards? Even if full possession did hurt Tom (and for the reasons Albus claimed), why should merely entering Harry’s mind to implant false ideas or to read Harry’s memories cause pain now, if it didn’t before?
More accurately, it might have been the case that deliberately entering Harry’s mind to implant dreams and visions DID cause Tom pain during the six months that he did so regularly (almost nightly between January and June in OotP). We aren’t given information on Tom’s feelings during that time, only Harry’s, so we can’t rule out the possibility that his attacks on Harry caused Tom pain.
What we do know, for sure, is that if it did hurt Tom to enter Harry’s mind to implant dreams and visions (or to read Harry’s memories, if he did that as well-and why wouldn’t he?), then that pain never once deterred him.
Because the most important point of all may be, that Tom was never afraid of pain.
He didn’t like pain, no. Who does?
But this is the wizard who spent a decade as a wraith in unceasing agony, and yet who never once loosened his grasp on life to escape that pain.
The way any reasonable person would have.
Let’s back up a moment, and consider Tom’s statements at the graveyard in GoF. He claimed that the process of discorporating when his killing curse rebounded had been agonizingly painful. He claimed that the decade he spent discorporate was painful and effortful.
Anyone who’s watched loved ones dying of a painful, incurable disease, knows that we normal people usually reach a point where we give up. Where continued existence (especially without hope of ultimate amelioration) is not worth continued agony. Where we’re ready to let go, and linger only to make farewells to our loved ones.
Tom, however, wasn’t normal. However much it hurt, however little reward he was currently experiencing in his “life,” he avoided death at any cost.
At any cost.
Because, you know, that’s the part we’re inclined to slide over: that Tom would pay any price himself to stay alive.
I mean, we readers always remember that Tom would visit any cost, however unimaginably horrific, upon others.
But he also paid himself.
That’s proved by his holding himself together in the Albanian forest, in utmost desperation, powerlessness, and pain, with nothing apparently to hope for but continued bare consciousness of agony and loss and betrayal by both his followers and his own powers….
To Tom, such a bitter consciousness was still better than letting go and slipping into death.
Which most people (sane people, normal people) would have welcomed as a sweet release at some point.
Um. So. Someone who spent a decade holding his discorporate and shredded soul together in unremitting agony with no hope of respite would avoid ever again entering Harry’s mind because he feared doing so might hurt a bit?
Especially when, demonstrably, he’d repeated done so and it (probably) usually hadn’t?
Yeah, right. That makes perfect sense to me.
So why might Tom have been afraid to enter Harry again? Why would he never again enter that mind of his own volition? Yes, it was probably Harry’s monstrous luck behind the serendipitous plot-dump breaks in Tom’s Occlumency in book 7, but why did Tom never again ever try to enter Harry deliberately, either to read him for information or to play him again for a sucker?
Even when Albus dangled his private plotting as bait before Tom’s nose throughout the summer and fall after Tom’s possession/murder attempt at the Ministry? How did Tom manage to resist that?
More importantly, why?
Not because Tom feared pain. Someone who feared pain would have frayed into a ghost or a whiff of ill-luck by 1982 at the latest.
Well, so what DID Tom fear fundamentally? Not agony, not humiliation, not defeat, not despair. What was the one thing, really, that Tom feared?
Tom wasn’t afraid of pain.
What Tom feared was death.
See, that wasn’t so hard.
*
Harry thought he was dying there on the Ministry floor under Tom’s soul-attack. And he welcomed that prospect, because he hoped that death would reunite him with Sirius.
Harry thought he was dying. He was utterly willing to die. And Tom was right there with him, entwined with Harry’s mind and soul, in his bid to force Dumbledore to kill his protégé Harry.
What would have happened to Tom’s consciousness and mangled soul, if it were entangled with a dying but intact one and couldn’t pull itself loose in time?
Oops. At least, maybe.
*
We were told in book one (by Dumbles, so the information is suspect-but still, not even Twinkles always lies) that Tom, possessing Quirrell soul and body, abandoned his possession when Quirrell was dying. at Harry’s hands.
If a person were dying, and worse, eagerly embracing their death (whether as an escape from physical agony or as a reunion with the beloved dead)…. when the dying soul flees this world, what happens to any soul-rider?
Maybe that other soul (or soul-fragment) is pulled along.
(I’m reminded of how divines of the Bastard in Bujold’s Paladin of Souls banish demons who’ve escaped into the world of the living back to the gods-send ‘em with a soul that’s going. And of how to kill a Horseman in Bull’s Bone Dance: kill the mount, while keeping the Horseman from jumping to a fresh one. This is not a new idea in fantasy.)
And indeed, this possibility doesn’t even need to be true. Just believed, or merely feared, by Tom.
If Tom had trouble dismounting again in the Ministry, if he feared being caught if he were possessing Harry when the boy died, that would have provided him with strong motivation to avoid ever again possessing the boy.
Or possibly, given Harry’s terrier-nature, even touching him mentally.
If Tom thought Albus had figured out this weak point and passed it on to Harry-well, Harry had demonstrated conclusively when he was only eleven that Harry would kill himself to take out his foe.
If Tom so much as touched Harry’s mind and Harry noticed, what if Harry responded by doing mentally what he’d previously done physically: grabbing hold and trying to suicide to force his enemy with him into death?
Tom might, indeed, find himself inadvertently trapped if he were touching the boy’s mind in even the lightest manner when the boy finally came to be killed….
(Issued orders that no one but you was to kill the boy, did you, Tom?)
Now that’s actually a reason for Tom to avoid entering Harry’s mind. Ever.
*
Let’s return, finally, to the last question. What did Albus think was the truth? He apparently eventually decided, correctly, that Tom would leave Harry’s mind alone. Did Albus believe his stated reason, that Harry’s soul was so pure as to repel Tom?
Jo, I think, did. She seemed not to register that her creation, at sixteen, was no longer so pure of heart as the little boy who’d entered the Wizarding World with such eager hopes of finally finding a place to belong-and willing to do whatever he must to earn that place.
Was Albus equally deluded? Did he really believe Harry to be so pure and innocent that the touch of his soul was painful to Tom?
Well, look at the final lesson, the one in which Albus coached Harry to commit to his destiny.
As I’ve pointed out before, Albus there conflated being good==in fact, incorruptible-with being uninterested in serving Tom, which surely he did not truly believe. (Even Sirius was wiser than that!) He further conflated love with revenge. He appealed for Harry to commit to kill Tom (and/or die) out of “a furious desire for revenge.”
“I’d want him finished…. And I’d want to do it,” his puppet affirmed obediently.
Whereas Twinkles’ appeal to another grieving young man had been to ask him to give another “anything” to help protect the child his love had died to save.
Surely Albus himself could see the difference, however he fudged with Harry?
Or could he?
Was he lying to Harry and Severus, or to himself?
We saw that Twinkles had reason to lie with each of his pawns, if deliberate falsehood it was. Further, what Albus said matches his usual pattern of deception: that is to say, he didn’t outright state the falsehood, but instead led his listener gently to the desired conclusion. Look again, very closely, at the exchange with Severus:
“Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency, whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
“Voldemort fears that connection,” said Dumbledore. “Not so long ago he had one small taste of what truly sharing Harry’s mind means to him. It was pain such as he has never experienced. He will not try to possess Harry again, I am sure of it. Not in that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
“Souls? We were talking of minds!”
“In the case of Harry and Lord Voldemort, to speak of one is to speak of the other.” (DH 33)
Note first that Albus’s answer misdirected Severus’s attention from the legitimate issue he’d raised. Severus had not expressed a concern that Voldemort might make another full-on attempt to possess Harry. Indeed, we don’t know that Severus was ever apprised of the first such attempt. (We don’t know that Albus, Tom, or Harry ever told anybody exactly what happened between the three of them.)
No, Severus was expressing the worry that Harry, like anyone else not protected by solid Occlumency shields, might inadvertently betray secrets to the Dark Lord, and that their known mental connection made this possible even though Tom hadn’t (yet) captured the boy.
Whether or not Tom ever again tried to possess Harry, Tom was demonstrably capable of pulling feelings and memories from his victims without “truly sharing” their minds. So Albus’s stated surety that Tom “will not try to possess Harry again…. Not in that way” in no way addressed Snape’s concern that Harry might unintentionally leak classified information.
Note secondly that while Albus strongly suggested to Severus that what would repel Tom was Harry’s supposed integrity of soul, Albus did not actually so state.
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
A “maimed” soul versus “a soul like Harry’s.” (Like Harry’s, how? A killer from age eleven, instead of from age fifteen?) And then those great images which evoke, but do not actually explain, or even assert, an overwhelming instinct to flinch away at the lightest contact… Dumbledore didn’t actually TELL Severus Harry’s soul was purer than his, pure enough to repulse Voldemort’s touch-he merely led him to infer that.
And that is the absolutely classic Dumbledorean mode of deception.
Albus did tell Harry outright that he was pure of heart, but then Harry was less reflective than Severus.
Not to mention susceptible to flattery.
And even so, look at Albus’s misdirections.
“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!... In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort… You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but then, he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.”
Ugh. Let me wipe a little of that grease off before I parse this further. In fact, I think I need a shower.
Even if it were true (or Albus thought it were true) that Harry was “pure”… are we to understand that the prized ability to love is functionally interchangeable with incomparable purity of heart? If so, then all the rest of us are S.O.L. If we cannot claim to be utterly “untarnished,” we must all resign ourselves to being unloving psychopaths on the order of Tom Riddle. So long, society!
Next, observe how Albus segues again from “You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself,” to “he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony.”
Note that Albus confirms that the Scar-o-Vision is Harry (unwittingly) performing Legilimency on Tom. But more importantly, as I pointed out before, even if Tom wouldn’t possess Harry, what about Tom’s mental tricks short of possession: whether feeding Harry false intel, or ransacking Harry’s memories for true? The untarnished wholeness of Harry’s soul would not, by Twinkles’ own theory, save Harry from that.
Albus’s assurances must be read once more as deliberately misleading, this time with the oil laid on, rather than the salt rubbed in.
So it’s possible to read both scenes as our Twinkly One lying to his dupes. It matches the pattern of Albus’s other detected deceptions. And the fact that in both cases Albus stressed that pain would prevent Tom from attempting possession, while sliding over the fact that the supposed reason he was giving would not prevent other forms of mental assault, does suggest strongly that Albus knew that his argument was bogus.
However, if Albus had indeed figured out the truth, that Tom was afraid of being caught in Harry’s mind if (when) Harry died, then concealing that truth from Harry carries an interesting implication.
It’s the only indication I can think of that Albus really did care about the boy as more than a pawn. Because if Albus had figured out what Tom really feared, then as leader of the anti-Voldemort forces, he ought to have told the boy about it as a possible last-ditch, all-else-failing, ploy to take out Tom.
But if Harry had, in desperation, used their connection to grab onto Tom’s mind deliberately and then suicided to try to drag Tom’s soul along with his into death…
Well, I can’t imagine that Harry would then have been afforded a chance to come back. I think he would have been held to his bargain. If he’d died to take his enemy with him into death, I think he would have stayed dead.
So refusing to tell the boy of that last-possible-measure, would have shown Albus choosing the chance of Harry’s ultimate survival over giving Harry one final possible means to snatch victory from defeat.
If, that is, Albus was consciously lying when he claimed Harry’s purity as the reason for Tom to start avoiding entering Harry’s mind.
But he might not have been. Twinkles might have believed his own unctuous propaganda.
He might have urgently wanted to believe it.
Because if it were true that sixteen-year-old Harry Potter-killer, torturer, bully, thief and cheat-possessed such innocence of soul that evil literally could not touch him, then that would make Albus, too, ultimately innocent.
Of having corrupted the child in his care.
“…. Do not think I underestimate the constant danger in which you place yourself, Severus. To give Voldemort what appears to be valuable information while withholding the essentials is a job I would entrust to nobody but you.”
“Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency, whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
“Voldemort fears that connection,” said Dumbledore. “Not so long ago he had one small taste of what truly sharing Harry’s mind means to him. It was pain such as he has never experienced. He will not try to possess Harry again, I am sure of it. Not in that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
“Souls? We were talking of minds!”
“In the case of Harry and Lord Voldemort, to speak of one is to speak of the other.” (DH 33)
Soon after in universe (although we readers encountered the scene first, in HBP 23), Albus gave Harry a very similar explanation.
“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly. “The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches.… You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but then, he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.”
“But sir,” said Harry, making valiant efforts not to sound argumentative, “it all comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? “
Does it all come to the same thing?
Several questions suggest themselves. First, was Albus right in saying that Tom was reluctant (or unable) to further exploit his direct connection into Harry’s mind? If so, was Albus’s explanation for this, that the innocence and love irradiating Harry’s mind were unbearably painful to Tom’s maimed soul, the only possible explanation, or the correct one?
Third, did Albus himself actually believe what he told Severus and Harry?
Let’s look at the last question first, though we won’t try for a full answer yet.
If we’re wondering whether Albus told the strict truth, we might first establish whether our beloved Twinkles had reason to dissimulate. It’s true that pathological liars will lie merely to keep their hands in, as it were, but most of the lies we’ve ever caught Albus in were purposeful.
So would any of Albus’s purposes be served by convincing either Harry or Severus that Harry’s putative purity of soul rendered him, post-possession attempt, exempt from Voldemort’s continued mental molestation?
It’s hard to come up with a benefit to Albus in convincing anyone that Harry was protected from all further mental intrusions if Albus knew him not to be. Besides, Albus might eventually be caught in that lie. But what if Albus thought Harry was safe, but for another reason? Would he have reason to ascribe a false cause to the protection?
Let’s look at the case of Harry first. Was there a reason for Albus to tell the boy, probably truthfully (or at least sincerely), that Harry was protected from further mental intrusions by Tom, but falsely that Harry’s purity of soul formed that protection?
Well, yes, there was. We’ve talked before about Albus’s last stage in reconciling Harry to his role as a good little suicide bomber against Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Albus seemed to have believed (incorrectly, but that’s a separate issue), that Harry, unlike Severus, might not be willing to sacrifice himself merely to protect those he loved, but that Harry would do so to exact vengeance for his murdered family. Yet the Twinkly One was, alas, on record as having repeatedly insisted that love was supposed to be the antithesis of Voldemort’s power, to be the “power that the Dark Lord knows not.”
It was Albus’s art, therefore, to encourage Harry to conflate love and revenge: to convince the boy that a passionate desire to “finish” Voldemort was the purest possible expression of the fabled capacity for love that was supposed to differentiate Harry from Tom.
Moreover, by encouraging Harry in his binary “our-side-is-good, joining-the-other-side is the very DEFINITION of evil” thinking, by insisting that purity of soul EQUALLED never wanting to follow Voldemort, Twinkles pushed the boy to become a good little child-soldier, the unhesitating slayer of Death Eaters whose actions we so admired in the Seven Potters chapter.
So, yes. Telling Harry that Tom’s failure to continue mental contact was attributable to Harry’s extraordinary innocence, reinforced the idea that Harry was still innocent, unsullied by his acts of torture, manslaughter, and near-murder, and that Harry’s desire for vengeance, his hatred, was actually his truest expression of Love.
Orwellian Albus would have strong reason to misattribute Tom’s reluctance to attack mentally to Harry’s supposed goodness and light. Harry must be made to believe, after all, that Love is Hate, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength… and eventually that Harry must die himself to destroy the Doubleplusungood One.
What about Severus? What would be the point of Albus informing the man whose superlative (and hard-won) mental discipline was keeping some of Albus’s hottest secrets safe, that purity of soul protected Harry’s mind better than the best Occlumency could?
Well, that last question answers itself, doesn’t it? False or true, that insinuation was the latest veiled installment of “You disgust me:” the latest salvo in the war of moral superiority that Albus used to dominate and control that particular faithful but restive minion.
Kindly note that Severus’s soul and mind were never so pure as to repel the Dark Lord’s very touch! No, Voldemort positively relished raping Snape’s mind. Every scrap of Severus’s immense skill, deviousness, courage, and strength of will were called upon to keep his deepest heart (and Dumbledore’s secrets) inviolate.
But if Snape had only ever been truly pure of heart, see, none of the cunning and strength on which he had, perhaps, dared sometimes to pride himself would have been necessary.
An unmaimed soul would have been intrinsically inviolate.
So Snape’s entire fifteen-year history of laboring (at great effort and cost, agonizingly, and successfully) to deceive Voldemort was converted, in a few offhand words, into further proof of Snape’s fundamental unworthiness.
This exchange about Harry was thus Albus’s ultimate answer to Severus’s earlier bitter query: “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?”
If your tattered soul merited consideration, you wouldn’t NEED Occlumency, Severus. That you do, is proof positive that it does not.
That’s our Twinkles! Offering Severus trust and praise with one phrase, damnation with the next.
Note moreover that Albus pulled this on Severus (and casually dropped the crucial idea of a soul-connection) a few hours before he intended to rip the rug out from under Severus’s whole post-Lily service by revealing that “protecting Lily’s son” had been a fraud all along. Albus was preparing for his big reveal: that he had always fully intended Lily’s child to die, and that he meant now to force Harry’s chief protector to send the boy to his death.
Even Jo admitted that her sainted Albus could possibly be seen as a bit morally inferior to his prodigal-son servant in that conversation.
So Albus needed every advantage he could wangle. Starting off by wrong-footing Severus was the obvious thing to do, in the circumstances.
Regard Dumble’s response when Severus did finally start to realize that in this matter he might stand on the moral high ground:
Snape looked horrified. “You have kept him alive so he can die at the right moment?”
“Don’t be shocked, Severus. How many men and women have you watched die?”
[Er-and how many of those deaths were in obedience to your orders, Albus, that he “act his part convincingly”?]
“Lately, only those whom I could not save,” said Snape. He stood up. ‘You have used me.”
“Meaning?”
“I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter-“
“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore seriously. “Have you grown to care for the boy, after all?”
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it pointed out that that snide little question was a way of transforming Severus’s righteous outburst to yet another “You disgust me” display of contemptible selfishness on Snape’s part.
Albus’s subtext was, “You’re far too morally stunted, Severus, to have any principled objection to the gross deception and betrayal of a child. You could only care that someone had gained an orphan’s trust and affection whilst coldly plotting the child’s death if you took an, ah, personal interest in the child in question. So tell me, what’s your real interest in Harry? Have you grown to, ah, care for the boy?”
And the veiled accusation worked. Severus instantly refuted that he objected to Albus’s gross betrayal only because he had transferred his “greedy” interest in Lily to her son:
“For him? ” shouted Snape. “Expecto Patronum!”
But Snape apparently accepted that any further protest would count as a petty insistence on his personal feelings (his obsession with Lily, if not her son), not a principled objection to deliberately twisting an unprotected child’s love and trust into a willingness to suicide on order.
And so Albus turned Snape’s moment of clear moral superiority into an opportunity to condemn Severus, yet again, for indecent selfishness.
*
So.
Albus had had reason to say what he did to Severus and Harry, regardless of whether he believed it to be true.
On the other hand, Albus was apparently correct in believing that Tom would shy from voluntarily invading Harry’s mind after that possession attempt in the Ministry; Tom never again made such an attempt.
Might Albus have been correct that Tom was now afraid to, and if so, when did Albus decide this? And was Tom afraid of Harry’s purity of soul, or of something else?
What did Albus think was true, and what was the truth?
*
“In fact, being-forgive me-rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” HPB, 10
I don’t flatter myself that I’m Twinkles’ intellectual equal, but I did make an Albus-sized mistake in my essay “Greater Love”: I averred,
“Fortunately, Tom so disliked his attempt to possess the boy he used his own Occlumency to hold their connection firmly closed ever since.
But then, during Harry’s sixth year Tom wouldn’t have had much reason to want the connection re-opened. Tom was busy preparing for the aftermath of Dumbledore’s demise (the fall of both the Ministry and Hogwarts), his best agent had the boy under observation, and his schemes didn’t require any immediate information or action from Harry.
But isn’t it fortunate that the following year, when Tom had no spy-eyes on the boy, urgently wanted to find him, and would have liked to have influenced Harry’s actions, it still didn’t occur to Tom that his repeated partial entries into Harry’s mind fifth year had never been intolerable (as the final possession-attempt had been)?
Nor that his own mind might still be open to Harry’s when Tom’s self-discipline slipped in extreme emotion?
Lucky, that double oversight. Real lucky.”
*
Luck. (Spits at the thought of how luck is purchased in the Potterverse.)
What I overlooked entirely was that Tom DID have strong reason to re-open the connection during Harry’s sixth year, BEFORE the luck from Snape’s sacrifice of Dumbledore kicked in.
We may still choose to attribute the connection opening only in Harry’s favor throughout DH to sacrifice-bought luck. (Or, if we want to be Doylists rather than Watsonians, to JKR’s abominable “Dei ex machinae” plotting in that book. But I’m trying to provide Watsonian explanations here.)
But I was wrong in thinking HBP Tom to be too absorbed in his schemes for gaining a foothold at the Ministry to care about connecting with Harry’s mind during the whole of Harry’s sixth year.
“…his schemes didn’t require any immediate information or action from Harry”?
No, not from ickle Harry.
Er, remind me again: what was Albus’s stated reason for avoiding Harry’s eyes-and company-for all of Harry’s fifth year, and for not himself trying to teach Harry Occlumency?
Oh yeah:
“I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was-or had ever been-closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me…. On those rare occasions when we had close contact, I thought I saw a shadow of him stir behind your eyes….” (OotP, 37)
Headdesk.
Jodel speculated that Tom might have been lurking behind Harry’s eyes during the debriefing scene in OotP-and that Albus expected Tom to be, and was deliberately using Harry to leak the Prophecy to Tom. (On the “too little too late” principle: the whole point of the Prophecy, by then, was that Tom had already invoked its working out by “marking” Harry in his ill-considered attempt to avert it. It was too late for knowing the FULL text to do Tom any good; he’d made his real fatal error years earlier and could not now undo it.)
I myself no longer credit that Tom was lurking behind Harry’s eyes in that scene. But I do think Albus had originally expected him to be. Or at least (if Tom didn’t dare ride along in real time) to probe Harry’s memories later.
I now think that that scene, and the whole beginning of HBP, consisted of Albus’s attempting to use Harry to feed Tom selected information and disinformation.
And/or, shortly on, to test the hypothesis that Tom was no longer accessing Harry-that Tom must have cut the connection.
It was Tom’s continued obstinate failure to make any use of the information that Albus kept feeding Harry that eventually made Albus determine that Tom must have become afraid to enter Harry’s mind.
(An obvious thing that might have awakened Dumble’s suspicions would have been if Snape reported that Tom had tasked him to determine the contents of the last half of the Prophecy. Why ask Severus to find it out, when Tom could simply read it from Harry’s mind? It’s not like Harry wouldn’t have been brooding on the matter!)
But that something had caused Albus to suspect that Tom had become unwilling to enter Harry’s mind again, and that Albus was testing this hypothesis, seems a good explanation of Dumbledore’s actions in the first half of HBP.
First, Twinkles wrote Harry three days in advance of fetching him from the Dursleys. Contrast this to the year before, when Harry found out about Albus’s plan to move him when the Order members were actually in the house.
This letter gave Harry several days in which to think nonstop about his impending rescue from the Dursleys. Why? On previous occasions, Harry had established that he was able (indeed, eager) to leave Privet Drive at a moment’s notice.
Nor has Albus ever previously been noted for being forthcoming with advance advertisements of his plans.
Note, moreover, that Albus did not merely tell Harry that Albus would stop by “this coming Friday” to take Harry to a new residence.
No.
Albus pre-informed Harry of his destination (the Burrow, which Tom’s spies in the Ministry could verify had received beefed-up security), of how long Harry would stay there (the rest of the summer), AND further that he wanted Harry’s “assistance in a matter to which I hope to attend on the way to the Burrow.”
If Tom wanted to attack Harry that summer, his best opportunity would be in transit from the protected Privet Drive to the protected Burrow.
It would be INSANE to give so much information to someone “who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
Unless one were either already convinced the connection were utterly closed, or were trying to set up a sting.
Or, of course, both. Or rather, either. If Twinkles thought the connection might be closed, and wanted to make sure, tempting Tom into setting up an ambush--physical or mental-would be a way of verifying that hypothesis.
(Even if Tom were wary of taking Albus on personally again-even injured as Albus now was-surely Tom would want to listen in on Albus’s private conversation with the boy, and find out about the mysterious “matter” with which Albus wanted Harry’s assistance?)
So, bait. That damned letter was bait. Albus was staking out Harry’s unprotected mind, as a tiger trapper out of Kipling would stake out a defenseless goat yearling: to try to entice the tiger to pounce.
The louder the kid bleats, the better it serves its purpose.
Look at Albus’s actions that night. He didn’t just take Harry to the Burrow.
First, Albus established that Kreacher was indeed bound in obedience to Harry’s direct orders, and suggested that Harry should send Kreacher to serve at Hogwarts. In the kitchens. Where the elf wouldn’t be able to initiate contact with any students, but where students with initiative could gain access to him. And where Kreacher wasn’t under Harry’s direct supervision. What could Kreacher’s beloved Mistress Cissy’s son have done with the services of a house-elf, had he know one personally devoted to him was serving one pear-tickle away?
Next, Twinkles allowed Harry to know that the Order would indeed continue to use 12 Grimmauld as its headquarters.
But most of all, Twinkles flaunted his injured hand and new ring in Harry’s face. If Tom were riding along in the back of Harry’s consciousness, or if he subsequently visited another of Harry’s dreams or daydreams, what would Tom have made of that?
Finally, Albus took Harry along on the recruiting trip to Horace-who was suspected by Albus to be the one man, besides Tom himself, who knew how many Horcruxes Tom originally planned to make.
And incidentally, Albus revealed Horace’s (as well as Harry’s) current location, and let Harry (and any mental riders on) know that Horace, like Harry, might soon be safe behind the walls of Hogwarts.
And Twinkles did all this before asking about Harry’s scar.
Only when they were actually in Horace’s village of refuge did he finally stop to ask if Harry’s scar had been hurting.
And then he feigned assurance that he’d expected all along that it had not been, and that he’d expected Tom to have started to employ Occlumency to shut out Harry.
Except shouldn’t Albus have verified this belief first, before starting to throw Harry information that might be crucial to the outcome of the war?
Put it like this: If Dumbles were indeed absolutely confident that Tom had utterly closed his connection to Harry, why ask at all? If he’d hoped but wasn’t sure, why not ask about the scar before betraying potentially damaging intelligence to Harry?
The timing makes most sense as someone paying lip service to verification while using the possibly-open connection to set up a sting.
(Also, if anyone were paying really close attention: that scar responded to Tom’s more intense emotions, positive and negative. When Tom was deliberately twisting Harry’s dreams to manipulate the boy-but with little emotional involvement of his own-Harry woke with no telltale pain-OotP 26, p 377. So the scar not hurting didn’t infallibly mean that the connection was closed from Tom’s side-that Tom was not invading Harry’s mind.)
And in fact Albus did not claim then, as he did later, that Tom would never again dare to try to open the connection. Here’s the discussion:
“Your scar… has it been hurting at all?”…
“No,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering about that. I thought it would be burning all the time now Voldemort’s getting so powerful.”
He glanced up at Dumbledore and saw that he was wearing a satisfied expression.
“I, on the other hand, thought otherwise,” said Dumbledore. “Lord Voldemort has finally realized the dangerous access to his thoughts and feelings you have been enjoying. It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you.”
“Well, I’m not complaining,” said Harry, who missed neither the disturbing dreams nor the startling flashes of insight into Voldemort’s mind.
Let’s parse this a little. Back up, first, to OotP, and Harry’s perception that his Occlumency lessons with Snape opened his mind further to Tom rather than the reverse.
“Nowadays, however, his scar hardly ever stopped prickling, and he often felt lurches of annoyance or cheerfulness that were unrelated to what was happening to him at the time, which were always accompanied by a particularly painful twinge from his scar. He had the horrible impression that he was slowly turning into a kind of aerial that was tuned to tiny fluctuations in Voldemort’s mood, and he was sure he could date this increased sensitivity from his first Occlumency lesson with Snape. What’s more, he was now dreaming about walking down the corridor toward the entrance to the Department of Mysteries almost every night, dreams that always culminated with him standing longingly in front of the plain black door.”(OotP 25)
Back up a chapter earlier, to Hermione’s sending Ron in to check on Harry after Harry’s very first Occlumency lesson: “She says your defenses will be low at the moment, after Snape’s been fiddling around with your mind….”
So Hermione’s research on Occlumency predicted that effect, though the extent to which it was occurring later concerned her and convinced her (correctly) that Harry wasn’t really trying hard enough to close his mind.
Dumbledore, too, confirmed (OotP 37) that Occlumency lessons would predictably “open your mind even further to Voldemort” at the least while said lessons were in session. That’s why he wouldn’t teach Harry, right?
Well.
Why?
Why, as a matter of magical theory, should Occlumency lessons reliably open the student’s mind further?
If they were also, and inevitably, passive Legilimency lessons-regardless of whether either teacher or student wanted them to be.
And we saw this!
We saw Harry eventually enter Snape’s memories without consciously trying to do so.
Moreover, the mental flow between Tom and Harry mostly ran in the opposite direction from what Master Legilimens!Tom usually preferred and arranged with his victims, hadn’t it?
Concerning Harry’s connection with Tom, we readers haven’t fully been distinguishing who was really doing what to whom.
Legilimency, Snape told us (OotP 24), “is the ability to extract feelings and memories from another person’s mind… to delve into the minds of their victims and to interpret their findings correctly…. Only those skilled at Occlumency are able to shut down those feelings and memories….”
Harry never DID gain any facility at shutting down his feelings and memories in order to close his mind and lie to Tom (or to Severus, or to Albus…).
But he did, demonstrably, get better and better at extracting ephemeral feelings and images from Tom’s mind and at interpreting them correctly.
Indeed, he complained about this increasing facility!
So the Scar-o-Vision was Harry unconsciously using the soul-connection to Legilimize Tom. (Which also makes sense of why doing so should make Harry’s scar hurt-Tom’s soul-fragment was trying to defend Tom against what it correctly perceived as an outsider’s attack.)
Until Tom finally realized what was going on, and started deliberately shutting Harry out.
Yet Tom could, in principle, have used Occlumency to shield himself while continuing to try to Legilimize Harry-that’s presumably what Tom did as a matter of course with Severus, and Bellatrix, and Draco, and any others of his servants or victims who had any facility at Occlumency/Legilimency.
The difference between what Albus said in the summer after fifth year to Harry, and what he said the following spring to both Harry and Severus, suggests that, originally, that’s what Albus expected Tom to be doing.
“It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you,” hedged Twinkles shortly after the possession attempt in the Ministry; eight months later, he asserted confidently, “Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s.”
But on this note, observe that Albus settled Harry into the Burrow, physically well-guarded but mentally with no more shields than before. Albus himself, or Moody, or Remus, could have perfectly well come by during the rest of the summer to give Harry further Occlumency lessons.
But no, this was never offered. Either Albus was utterly sure that Tom, not just was Occluding (shutting off Harry’s access to Tom’s feelings), but that he would never again, for any reason whatsoever, make the least attempt to read, influence, or possess the boy…. Or Albus didn’t care if Tom did…. Or Albus had laid plans contingent on Tom’s doing so.
On the latter supposition, what Albus was doing at the beginning of HBP was using Harry to drop hints, and then settling in to observe Tom’s reaction. (Recall Sherlock Holmes using a fire-alarm to stampede Irene Adler into revealing her secret cache’s location.) To see how Tom would react to the news that Albus was either hunting Tom’s Horcrux(es) or had completed (or at least furthered) his Hallows collection, depending on what Tom thought Albus knew and was up to.
Yet Tom did not rise to any of the baits Albus had scattered in Harry’s mind. He stayed focused on other concerns, while Harry brooded over Dumbledore’s revelations.
It might almost seem that Tommy never saw the bait to take it.
But Albus did not depend on that interpretation. Not at first.
We can infer this by looking at those first “special lessons” with Harry: at how they were set up, and at what they revealed. Or did not.
First, Harry had been given all summer to expect them. Then, he was issued the invitation to the first one by a note. Delivered to him by Jack Sloper (a Gryffindor Quidditch player ranking as Harry’s casual acquaintance) just after Harry’s first class with Snape. Just outside Snape’s classroom. And, just as with Dumbledore’s letter advising Harry of his prospective removal from the Dursleys, delivered days in advance.
Snape could perfectly plausibly have told Tom he’d “overheard” the children talking about the appointment-especially since Harry gloated aloud to his friends, “Ha! Snape’s going to be pleased… I won’t be able to do his detention!”
This is how one keeps a secret? It looks much more like a gauntlet flung down directly before Tom’s truncated nose.
Then, look at how useless Harry’s initial lessons really were. And how misleading.
What did Albus promise Harry about these all-important lessons? Twinkles promised to take Harry “journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.… It has a very great deal to do with the prophecy … and I certainly hope that it will help you to survive.” (HBP 10)
Er. Right. Evaluating this promise from the standpoint of knowing the entire course of Albus’s four (five, if you count Horace’s memories twice) “lessons” is fascinating. In retrospect we can see that the “lessons” were designed to give Harry clues for the Horcrux-Hunt (if not necessarily any useful information on Horcrux-destroying). They were designed to impress upon Harry Albus’s notion that Tom’s multiple Horcruxes were made from significant (to Tom) objects and stored in significant (to Tom) locations, and to give Harry an idea of what Albus thought Tom would consider significant.
But, excuse me? Information about a few significant events in Tom’s life that might be associated with Horcrux-making or safekeeping had nothing directly to do with the prophecy, and nothing at all to do with preserving Harry’s life.
It’s natural that Albus would have found it prudent, at this juncture, to tell Harry the lie that the “lessons” would ultimately help him to survive. It was not yet time to let Harry know that his beloved mentor coldly plotted his death. But why emphasize the prophecy, which had nothing to do with any of the series of memories Albus planned to impart?
Well. It really rather looks like Albus designed one half of his lying promise as bait to arrest Harry’s attention (self-preservation), while the other appealed to Tom (still obsessed, presumably, with that prophecy).
Next, consider: what in fact did Harry learn in his first “lesson,” from the trip down Bob Ogden’s Memory Lane?
A bombshell that perhaps would have shocked and confounded Bellatrix (and some of the other Pureblood Supremacists among the Death Eaters): that Tom was the offspring of a Muggle father and of a Parselmouth Pureblood witch whose family claimed to be the last descendents of Slytherin.
Which Tom himself had told Harry four years earlier.
The only new information to Harry was the family’s name (which Hermione easily could have researched had Harry ever given her the keywords “Marvolo” and “Little Hangleton”), the Peverell connection (which Harry had no context to evaluate), and the apparent fact that the Gaunt family was even more inbred, degenerate, and unpleasant than Sirius Black’s was.
And the only “thicket of guesswork” into which Twinkles led Harry this time was the conclusion that Merope (and by extension her son) hadn’t deserved Harry’s immediate impulse of sympathy, because she had raped Tom Senior.
Nothing in Bob Ogden’s memory (or any of the others later shown Harry) had anything to do with the prophecy. And no information that Twinkles proposed to impart to Harry, then or in any subsequent “lesson,” had anything to do with ensuring that Harry might survive.
But if Tom were listening in, or if he made Harry revisit the “lesson” later (and if he believed Twinkles to be telling Harry the truth), Tom might well assume that there was some clue in his ancestry to a weakness Harry could exploit… or that something corresponding in Harry’s ancestry would prove a strength.
A lure and a red herring.
(How many readers made up stories along the lines that Harry was the Heir of Godric, fated to defeat Slytherin’s heir? Was Albus trying to lure Tom into doing the same?)
And note the final flourish: Dumbles drew Harry’s attention to the ring, made sure that Harry identified that ring with its cracked stone with the intact ring that Marvolo had brandished under Bob Ogden’s nose. And then, Twinkles told Harry that he’d acquired that ring “very recently… a few days before I came to fetch you from your aunt and uncle’s, in fact.
“That would be around the time you injured your hand, then, sir”
“Around that time, yes, Harry.”
Anyone want to wager whether Albus had set the equivalent of a tripwire at the remains of the Gaunt hovel, to see whether Tom ever came to check on his Horcrux/Hallow?
Which Tom, clearly, never did.
Here endeth the First Lesson.
What was the second?
Over six weeks later (during which time the headmaster ostentatiously absented himself from school), Albus sent a note to Harry that they were to have a second lesson. Please observe that Albus this time sent the note by Ginny at breakfast in the Great Hall on the Saturday morning of the October Hogsmeade outing, appointing a meeting two days later.
Which our Harry, always famous for his discretion, reads aloud to his friends.
In the Great Hall at breakfast, did I remember to mention that?
Thus ensuring that, potentially, any Hogwarts student or staff member remotely interested in Harry could have learned of the appointment, or any Hogsmeade resident to whom such a student might have spoken.
That the Headmaster, who’d been much absent from school recently on some secret business, was meeting privately with Harry Potter the following Monday night, was essentially broadcast to all of Wizarding Britain.
That particular Hogsmeade outing, of course, was enlivened by Draco’s first murder attempt, and Harry was offended that Albus thought his “lesson” more important than discussing the attack on Katie. So what vital, consummately important information did Dumbledore impart?
Well. Harry first learned about Burke cheating Merope when she hocked her heirloom locket-and Dumbledore once more squelched Harry’s flash of sympathy by instructing him that Merope cravenly abandoned her baby by dying. No Lily she, to die to save her baby! Nope, dying in childbirth was a contemptible act of cowardice….
Then Albus toured Harry through his own first encounter with Tom. And told Harry what to think about it, afterwards. He drew Harry’s attention specifically to several aspects of Tom’s personality: “his obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination… his contempt for anything that tied him to other people, anything that made him ordinary… he preferred to operate alone…. And lastly, Tom Riddle liked to collect trophies.”
Let me put it this way: if Tom had raided Harry’s mind the night after this lesson, what new information would Tom have gained about Albus’s knowledge, beliefs, and intentions?
Nothing at all. The only possible hint that Albus might be considering the possibility of more than one Horcrux was that awful “the mouth organ was only ever a mouth organ” line.
Everything else Albus gave Harry was information Tom already knew Albus knew.
So when did Albus finally get down to giving Harry any information that might be considered hot? Not until January, when he showed Harry Morfin’s memory and Horace’s altered one. That’s the first time he gave Harry authentically new information that might conceivably be used against Tom (parricide and Pureblood-framing), and also the first firm indication that Albus might be looking into the idea of Tom making a Horcrux. Much less Horcruxes.
(I remind you, the ring was also a Hallows, the Suicide Stone, and might have been stolen-and to appearances destroyed-to prevent Tom’s becoming Master of Death, while the Diary was destroyed to kill revenant!Tom, not adult Voldemort.)
So only after six months of testing and probing did Albus finally gave Harry any information that if relayed to Voldie might actually clue Tom in to what lines of investigation Albus might really be pursuing.
Note that this third meeting was arranged by a note passed by Hermione in the Gryffindor dorm, not one waved ostentatiously in front of the whole school. The next note, in March, was given to Luna to give Harry in the Hospital Ward (though she caught up with him outside it). And the final “lesson,” the one where the number of Horcruxes was finally theorized, was arranged by Harry himself when he’d gotten Horace’s memory.
*
Finally, consider Albus’s volte-face regarding the prophecy: in late spring in HBP he tells Harry that the prophecy is only important because Tom’s set such store by it. Did he ever before give Harry any hint he thought that? No, always previously he encouraged Harry in believing the prophecy to be all-important. Let’s put it this way-while he thought Tom might be guided by what Harry was told by his mentor, Albus encouraged Harry to believe the Prophecy of paramount importance. Once he believed Harry unlikely to leak to Tom, he said the exact opposite.
So there’s evidence that Albus did eventually conclude that Tom must be terminally reluctant to enter Harry’s mind again. (In addition to Tom’s quite reasonable determination to stop his involuntary leakage to Harry, once he was aware of it.)
Did Albus really think that what deterred Tom was that Harry’s soul was so pristine as to be agonizing for Tom to share?
And is that really why Tom stayed out? Because it’s clear that Tom did actually avoid deliberately entering Harry’s mind after the Ministry, and he must have had some reason.
Let’s briefly address the issue of the purity of soul of the Boy-Who-Lived.
You know, Harry Potter.
The boy who, at the tender age of eleven, tortured an enemy to death.
Now, I do fully accept that Harry, if charged in a court of law, would have been (and should have been) acquitted of murder in that case. Leaving aside the question of his age and ability to understand the consequences of his actions, killing Quirrell was clearly justified as self-defense.
However, the child didn’t actually kill for that reason, to protect himself. No, Harry was trying to keep Voldemort from getting the Stone, and he was willing to burn both himself and Voldemort’s host to death in order to do so.
Except actually, the boy probably didn’t comprehend fully at the time that he was killing Quirrell, nor how near he came to killing himself.
So, first, I am emphatically not saying that Harry should not have done it.
However, it’s interesting that Twinkles should have used the words “flesh in flame” to describe Tom’s supposed agony at encountering the ascribed purity of Harry’s soul.
Because that’s precisely how Harry killed Quirrell. Harry burned Quirrell up, using the mother’s-death curse on inimical physical contact, while his mortal foe screamed and tried to escape Harry’s torturing grasp.
While the immortal foe eventually managed to escape by discorporating again.
Sorry, Harry’s actions may have been entirely necessary and justifiable. I don’t argue against that.
But I don’t accept that deliberately burning a man to death while his screams of agony echo in your ears can conceivably leave the killer’s soul unsullied and pristine.
Surely there’s a little bitty stain left after that?
Or, in Jo’s terms, a teensy little rent?
Even if your mentor does afterwards downplay your responsibility for that horrific death, and encourage you never to dwell on (or feel remorse for) that killing.
And others of Harry’s actions haven’t immediate self-defense to excuse them.
Harry was the boy who connived at, and covered up, the release of a Class XXXXX monster at a school. Even after said monster had seriously injured a fellow student.
You know, like Tom Riddle did.
Who, the following year, covered for an accomplice’s theft of controlled substances by arranging a massive assault on his school rivals (which might have killed or blinded some had Snape been slower to respond or the luck bad).
And who laughed at their panic and suffering.
Who, at fourteen, responded to his first sight of the effects of the Cruciatus by fantasizing about casting it on a teacher who, he felt, picked on him.
(I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to….)
Who, at fifteen, cast the Torture Curse in reality. Successfully. And who smashed a wall down upon a man who’d threatened but not harmed his friends, seriously injuring or killing him.
Who, at sixteen, cheated repeatedly in class, connived at cheating in sports by both his best friends, and hexed people he knew to be defenseless against him.
That Harry. The one Jo wrote.
Killer. Torturer. Thief. Cheat. Bully.
I’m sorry, but I think that Tom Riddle’s soul would have been entirely comfortable with that level of purity.
The only thing that would have given Tom pause, was: Tom Riddle held his own survival as his most sacrosanct goal. Harry instead gave pride of place to the ultimate destruction of his hated enemy.
Moreover, Harry cared about his friends, while Tom never quite grokked the f-word.
Therefore, Harry was entirely as willing to endanger or hurt himself as his foe, if that’s what it took to destroy his enemy (vide that encounter with Quirrell). Moreover, Harry was willing to endanger himself to save a friend.
Tom couldn’t comprehend either concept, though he registered (on a theoretical level) that Harry did.
*
So all of Albus’s blustering that “In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart” is bosh.
But even if it weren’t, it would still be nonsense.
Tom had already been in Harry’s mind, not once but multiple times, and there’s no sign it ever caused Tom any distress before the possession attempt in the Ministry. So why should it afterwards? Even if full possession did hurt Tom (and for the reasons Albus claimed), why should merely entering Harry’s mind to implant false ideas or to read Harry’s memories cause pain now, if it didn’t before?
More accurately, it might have been the case that deliberately entering Harry’s mind to implant dreams and visions DID cause Tom pain during the six months that he did so regularly (almost nightly between January and June in OotP). We aren’t given information on Tom’s feelings during that time, only Harry’s, so we can’t rule out the possibility that his attacks on Harry caused Tom pain.
What we do know, for sure, is that if it did hurt Tom to enter Harry’s mind to implant dreams and visions (or to read Harry’s memories, if he did that as well-and why wouldn’t he?), then that pain never once deterred him.
Because the most important point of all may be, that Tom was never afraid of pain.
He didn’t like pain, no. Who does?
But this is the wizard who spent a decade as a wraith in unceasing agony, and yet who never once loosened his grasp on life to escape that pain.
The way any reasonable person would have.
Let’s back up a moment, and consider Tom’s statements at the graveyard in GoF. He claimed that the process of discorporating when his killing curse rebounded had been agonizingly painful. He claimed that the decade he spent discorporate was painful and effortful.
Anyone who’s watched loved ones dying of a painful, incurable disease, knows that we normal people usually reach a point where we give up. Where continued existence (especially without hope of ultimate amelioration) is not worth continued agony. Where we’re ready to let go, and linger only to make farewells to our loved ones.
Tom, however, wasn’t normal. However much it hurt, however little reward he was currently experiencing in his “life,” he avoided death at any cost.
At any cost.
Because, you know, that’s the part we’re inclined to slide over: that Tom would pay any price himself to stay alive.
I mean, we readers always remember that Tom would visit any cost, however unimaginably horrific, upon others.
But he also paid himself.
That’s proved by his holding himself together in the Albanian forest, in utmost desperation, powerlessness, and pain, with nothing apparently to hope for but continued bare consciousness of agony and loss and betrayal by both his followers and his own powers….
To Tom, such a bitter consciousness was still better than letting go and slipping into death.
Which most people (sane people, normal people) would have welcomed as a sweet release at some point.
Um. So. Someone who spent a decade holding his discorporate and shredded soul together in unremitting agony with no hope of respite would avoid ever again entering Harry’s mind because he feared doing so might hurt a bit?
Especially when, demonstrably, he’d repeated done so and it (probably) usually hadn’t?
Yeah, right. That makes perfect sense to me.
So why might Tom have been afraid to enter Harry again? Why would he never again enter that mind of his own volition? Yes, it was probably Harry’s monstrous luck behind the serendipitous plot-dump breaks in Tom’s Occlumency in book 7, but why did Tom never again ever try to enter Harry deliberately, either to read him for information or to play him again for a sucker?
Even when Albus dangled his private plotting as bait before Tom’s nose throughout the summer and fall after Tom’s possession/murder attempt at the Ministry? How did Tom manage to resist that?
More importantly, why?
Not because Tom feared pain. Someone who feared pain would have frayed into a ghost or a whiff of ill-luck by 1982 at the latest.
Well, so what DID Tom fear fundamentally? Not agony, not humiliation, not defeat, not despair. What was the one thing, really, that Tom feared?
Tom wasn’t afraid of pain.
What Tom feared was death.
See, that wasn’t so hard.
*
Harry thought he was dying there on the Ministry floor under Tom’s soul-attack. And he welcomed that prospect, because he hoped that death would reunite him with Sirius.
Harry thought he was dying. He was utterly willing to die. And Tom was right there with him, entwined with Harry’s mind and soul, in his bid to force Dumbledore to kill his protégé Harry.
What would have happened to Tom’s consciousness and mangled soul, if it were entangled with a dying but intact one and couldn’t pull itself loose in time?
Oops. At least, maybe.
*
We were told in book one (by Dumbles, so the information is suspect-but still, not even Twinkles always lies) that Tom, possessing Quirrell soul and body, abandoned his possession when Quirrell was dying. at Harry’s hands.
If a person were dying, and worse, eagerly embracing their death (whether as an escape from physical agony or as a reunion with the beloved dead)…. when the dying soul flees this world, what happens to any soul-rider?
Maybe that other soul (or soul-fragment) is pulled along.
(I’m reminded of how divines of the Bastard in Bujold’s Paladin of Souls banish demons who’ve escaped into the world of the living back to the gods-send ‘em with a soul that’s going. And of how to kill a Horseman in Bull’s Bone Dance: kill the mount, while keeping the Horseman from jumping to a fresh one. This is not a new idea in fantasy.)
And indeed, this possibility doesn’t even need to be true. Just believed, or merely feared, by Tom.
If Tom had trouble dismounting again in the Ministry, if he feared being caught if he were possessing Harry when the boy died, that would have provided him with strong motivation to avoid ever again possessing the boy.
Or possibly, given Harry’s terrier-nature, even touching him mentally.
If Tom thought Albus had figured out this weak point and passed it on to Harry-well, Harry had demonstrated conclusively when he was only eleven that Harry would kill himself to take out his foe.
If Tom so much as touched Harry’s mind and Harry noticed, what if Harry responded by doing mentally what he’d previously done physically: grabbing hold and trying to suicide to force his enemy with him into death?
Tom might, indeed, find himself inadvertently trapped if he were touching the boy’s mind in even the lightest manner when the boy finally came to be killed….
(Issued orders that no one but you was to kill the boy, did you, Tom?)
Now that’s actually a reason for Tom to avoid entering Harry’s mind. Ever.
*
Let’s return, finally, to the last question. What did Albus think was the truth? He apparently eventually decided, correctly, that Tom would leave Harry’s mind alone. Did Albus believe his stated reason, that Harry’s soul was so pure as to repel Tom?
Jo, I think, did. She seemed not to register that her creation, at sixteen, was no longer so pure of heart as the little boy who’d entered the Wizarding World with such eager hopes of finally finding a place to belong-and willing to do whatever he must to earn that place.
Was Albus equally deluded? Did he really believe Harry to be so pure and innocent that the touch of his soul was painful to Tom?
Well, look at the final lesson, the one in which Albus coached Harry to commit to his destiny.
As I’ve pointed out before, Albus there conflated being good==in fact, incorruptible-with being uninterested in serving Tom, which surely he did not truly believe. (Even Sirius was wiser than that!) He further conflated love with revenge. He appealed for Harry to commit to kill Tom (and/or die) out of “a furious desire for revenge.”
“I’d want him finished…. And I’d want to do it,” his puppet affirmed obediently.
Whereas Twinkles’ appeal to another grieving young man had been to ask him to give another “anything” to help protect the child his love had died to save.
Surely Albus himself could see the difference, however he fudged with Harry?
Or could he?
Was he lying to Harry and Severus, or to himself?
We saw that Twinkles had reason to lie with each of his pawns, if deliberate falsehood it was. Further, what Albus said matches his usual pattern of deception: that is to say, he didn’t outright state the falsehood, but instead led his listener gently to the desired conclusion. Look again, very closely, at the exchange with Severus:
“Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency, whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord’s mind!”
“Voldemort fears that connection,” said Dumbledore. “Not so long ago he had one small taste of what truly sharing Harry’s mind means to him. It was pain such as he has never experienced. He will not try to possess Harry again, I am sure of it. Not in that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
“Souls? We were talking of minds!”
“In the case of Harry and Lord Voldemort, to speak of one is to speak of the other.” (DH 33)
Note first that Albus’s answer misdirected Severus’s attention from the legitimate issue he’d raised. Severus had not expressed a concern that Voldemort might make another full-on attempt to possess Harry. Indeed, we don’t know that Severus was ever apprised of the first such attempt. (We don’t know that Albus, Tom, or Harry ever told anybody exactly what happened between the three of them.)
No, Severus was expressing the worry that Harry, like anyone else not protected by solid Occlumency shields, might inadvertently betray secrets to the Dark Lord, and that their known mental connection made this possible even though Tom hadn’t (yet) captured the boy.
Whether or not Tom ever again tried to possess Harry, Tom was demonstrably capable of pulling feelings and memories from his victims without “truly sharing” their minds. So Albus’s stated surety that Tom “will not try to possess Harry again…. Not in that way” in no way addressed Snape’s concern that Harry might unintentionally leak classified information.
Note secondly that while Albus strongly suggested to Severus that what would repel Tom was Harry’s supposed integrity of soul, Albus did not actually so state.
“Lord Voldemort’s soul, maimed as it is, cannot bear close contact with a soul like Harry’s. Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame-”
A “maimed” soul versus “a soul like Harry’s.” (Like Harry’s, how? A killer from age eleven, instead of from age fifteen?) And then those great images which evoke, but do not actually explain, or even assert, an overwhelming instinct to flinch away at the lightest contact… Dumbledore didn’t actually TELL Severus Harry’s soul was purer than his, pure enough to repulse Voldemort’s touch-he merely led him to infer that.
And that is the absolutely classic Dumbledorean mode of deception.
Albus did tell Harry outright that he was pure of heart, but then Harry was less reflective than Severus.
Not to mention susceptible to flattery.
And even so, look at Albus’s misdirections.
“You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!... In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort… You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but then, he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole.”
Ugh. Let me wipe a little of that grease off before I parse this further. In fact, I think I need a shower.
Even if it were true (or Albus thought it were true) that Harry was “pure”… are we to understand that the prized ability to love is functionally interchangeable with incomparable purity of heart? If so, then all the rest of us are S.O.L. If we cannot claim to be utterly “untarnished,” we must all resign ourselves to being unloving psychopaths on the order of Tom Riddle. So long, society!
Next, observe how Albus segues again from “You have flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself,” to “he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony.”
Note that Albus confirms that the Scar-o-Vision is Harry (unwittingly) performing Legilimency on Tom. But more importantly, as I pointed out before, even if Tom wouldn’t possess Harry, what about Tom’s mental tricks short of possession: whether feeding Harry false intel, or ransacking Harry’s memories for true? The untarnished wholeness of Harry’s soul would not, by Twinkles’ own theory, save Harry from that.
Albus’s assurances must be read once more as deliberately misleading, this time with the oil laid on, rather than the salt rubbed in.
So it’s possible to read both scenes as our Twinkly One lying to his dupes. It matches the pattern of Albus’s other detected deceptions. And the fact that in both cases Albus stressed that pain would prevent Tom from attempting possession, while sliding over the fact that the supposed reason he was giving would not prevent other forms of mental assault, does suggest strongly that Albus knew that his argument was bogus.
However, if Albus had indeed figured out the truth, that Tom was afraid of being caught in Harry’s mind if (when) Harry died, then concealing that truth from Harry carries an interesting implication.
It’s the only indication I can think of that Albus really did care about the boy as more than a pawn. Because if Albus had figured out what Tom really feared, then as leader of the anti-Voldemort forces, he ought to have told the boy about it as a possible last-ditch, all-else-failing, ploy to take out Tom.
But if Harry had, in desperation, used their connection to grab onto Tom’s mind deliberately and then suicided to try to drag Tom’s soul along with his into death…
Well, I can’t imagine that Harry would then have been afforded a chance to come back. I think he would have been held to his bargain. If he’d died to take his enemy with him into death, I think he would have stayed dead.
So refusing to tell the boy of that last-possible-measure, would have shown Albus choosing the chance of Harry’s ultimate survival over giving Harry one final possible means to snatch victory from defeat.
If, that is, Albus was consciously lying when he claimed Harry’s purity as the reason for Tom to start avoiding entering Harry’s mind.
But he might not have been. Twinkles might have believed his own unctuous propaganda.
He might have urgently wanted to believe it.
Because if it were true that sixteen-year-old Harry Potter-killer, torturer, bully, thief and cheat-possessed such innocence of soul that evil literally could not touch him, then that would make Albus, too, ultimately innocent.
Of having corrupted the child in his care.