Indestructible - Part VI - Dark Marks and Dark Arts
Indestructible - Part VI - Dark Marks and Dark Arts
Ok, let’s get back to talking about the books themselves for a bit, shall we?
We’ve talked about Albus, and alchemy, so perhaps we should skip ahead in the alphabet a bit and head on over to D. D for Dark; D for Death.
Dark Marks, Dark Arts, Dark Creatures, Dark Lords… Death, and Death Eaters.
Then we can get to occlumency and to Severus and Voldemort.
I should note at the outset that ‘dark’ is something of a fuzzy term to use when talking about moral and spiritual things and about that big ball of wibbly-wobbly vaguely-defined magical stuff we get in the Potterverse. In general, ‘dark’ should not necessarily be taken as a strict synonym for ‘evil’ - far from it. Darkness is natural and necessary and a part of life and it has great lessons to teach. Nor is ‘light’ the same as ‘good.’ Severus - our resident Dark Wizard - would be the first person to tell you that. For all that the HP books, and even Tolkien, like to conflate the two spectra.
But. Darkness does make it easy to do evil, because it allows one to hide. From others, and from oneself. Spiritual blindness, ignorance, forces that overwhelm one and prevent true sight or perspective… Things can be hidden to good ends or bad, and while sometimes we need to close our eyes, we also do need to open them again, as we see and see anew.
Right?
Ok. Onward.
*
Consider the Dark Mark.
Terri theorizes over on snapedom that in his little display before Fudge at the end of GOF, Severus subtly but fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of the Dark Mark. Go read that essay, if you haven’t already. I think terri nailed it, particularly when she notes that the Mark responded directly to Tom’s will (visible only when he wishes), that it was a potential means of causing physical as well as psychological torture for his errant servants, and that Voldemort’s awareness of his Marked followers may have been such that “Tom is aware of every call,” even those between sublinked members, and also aware of “quite possibly every location of his slaves, when he wants to be.”
This is Tom’s tool, and it’s meant to be a leash on his followers, another means of control. A direct connection, controlled by Voldemort, between them and their magic, and he and his.
Which makes me wonder about the possible effects of bearing one. Especially considering how we’ve been shown that traces of Tom tend to be, ah, psychologically stimulating, if I can put it like that. Emotionally, mentally, magically and morally affecting those within range, if sometimes only to a limited degree. And usually not in positive ways, no? So what must it be like to carry his Mark on you, for years, day after day after day? Especially after his re-embodiment?
These are brands, remember. Tom’s touch, burnt into the very bodies - and possibly souls - of his followers, and lingering there through every distance and discorporation until he is actually sent completely beyond the Veil. Marks of his ownership of them, meant to last unto death.
I really don’t think carrying one is good for your mental health. Or moral health.
We’ve seen multiple ways in the Potterverse in which exposure to external magical forces can have an emotionally- and/or morally-corrupting effect on people regardless of their own initial will and inclination: dementors and their little cousins the boggarts, horcruxes, the Deathly Hallows, the Mirror of Erised. Sunnyskywalker theorizes that the true horror of horcruxes is that the creation of one necessarily reduces one’s capacity for self-restraint, empathy, and right behavior. Jodel speculates that the very practice of magic itself, before the development of controlled wizardry, may have been morally and psychologically corrupting, blunting the capacity for empathy and one’s ability to clearly evaluate oneself: dark-arts dementia, she called it.
I imagine that one of the effects of carrying a Dark Mark for any extended period of time - and particularly when Voldemort is embodied and nearby - is a subtle but constant low-level impulse toward corruption. A slight dulling of the capacity for empathy, perhaps, together with a low pull toward one’s own worse inclinations that, if not identified early and rigorously (self-)monitored, might lead one, not only into behaving more and more from one’s worse self, but also into ceasing to care so much about the issue in the first place.
What is Voldemort’s moral philosophy, after all?
“There is no good and evil, there is only power…and those too weak to seek it.
Ah. Said shortly before he demanded that Harry - Harry Potter, his ultimate nemesis! - submit to him and, not surrender to be killed, but to give himself over to him, and thereby preserve himself physically:
"Better save your own life and join me…or you'll meet the same end as your parents…they died begging me for mercy."
Voldemort doesn’t care what form your moral principles take. They’re all expressions of weakness, to him. Whatever line he spouts for the purebloods in order to gain their cooperation notwithstanding, he’s not ultimately interested in persuading you, or compelling you, to a different view of what’s right or wrong, what’s best for wizards, what’s permissible in the name of the Greater Good.
He’d like to eradicate your principles altogether. Destroy your cor, your heart, your center. Hollow you out. So he can use you ruthlessly, once you have no other solid sense of anything to attach yourself to or to look to outside yourself. Helpless, whether terrified or gleeful in your moral abandon, to see anything else but him and his power.
No wonder he starts reeling them in young. Much easier to influence and take over those who have not yet fully formed a solid moral center for themselves, after all. Possession. It’s a term with multiple meanings, isn’t it? And we do know that one of Tom’s indisputable talents - one he seems possibly unique in, from what we see of the Potterverse - is the capacity to possess, overwhelm, and control other beings. Animals in the forest, Quirrell, Ginny, Nagini. Harry, partially throughout OotP and fully in the DOM. A move to tempt Dumbledore into killing Harry, and which he was persuaded to abandon only by Harry’s welcoming of physical death - in the name of love, the core connection - that threatened to drag Tom along with him into death. Taking away his mastery and control, as well as his own remaining shredded sense of self. He’d much rather be the one dragging you into death, you know.
So his Mark? The - magical and moral, as well as psychological - reminder of his ownership of you. I possess you. Submit. Let me into your heart. Stop caring. Eat spiritual death. Die into me.
No more than a quiet whisper, I’m sure, a subtle nudge. It’s not the imperius. But it is insidious.
As Severus can tell you from bitter experience. Though the self-knowledge and self-discipline required by high-level occlumency may provide something of a bulwark, I suspect.
Still. It makes things that much more difficult. Especially when the clear moral vision and defined mission you’ve been using to stabilize and orient yourself gets swept away and the terms of your moral categories switched around - by the very man you’ve been looking to as a reliable guidepost in these things for all these years, no less. A man who, no matter what you choose do to, will soon be gone.
Jodel calls Severus a man on a tightrope. Well, what happens when you’re in the midst of your act and one of the anchors of your tightrope gives way?
If you don’t, as Dumbledore put it, wish to die a most painful death, you had better be able to fly, now hadn’t you?
Good thing Severus taught himself how to.
*
On the topic of morality, let’s go back to that little description of the Dark Arts that Severus gave us in HBP. The one we theorized was more of a moral lesson than just a bit of magical theory dressed up in fancy metaphors:
"The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible. Your defences must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the Arts you seek to undo."
We’ve never really been able to establish a solid idea of what JKR meant to imply the nature of dark magic is, in canon. But we have some coherent theories by fans - jodel, terri, swythyv, and others - that manage to make some sense of what we see. And one idea that crops up repeatedly, both in canon and outside it, is that the dark arts have some intrinsic relationship to moral questions - whether it be that practicing dark magic is inherently morally corrupting, that ‘dark’ necessarily means ‘morally-questionable spells,’ that dark magic has to do with the caster’s inner will and intention rather than outward form, that there is a ‘crude’ moralistic as well as a ‘not-crude’ sense of the term…
We’ve theorized that alchemy is a Dark Art. Unsupported flight may also be dark magic, I suspect, though that’s not strictly necessary to suppose.
What is key to note is that, when we are dealing with questions about dark magic, we are also moving into the territory of moral understanding in some form. The Defense Against the Dark Arts position is the one that Voldemort chose to curse, after all, as well as the one he sent his agents into when he was attempting to access to subvert Hogwarts. Including one young Severus Snape, before he was offered the Potions position (interesting juxtaposition, that, upon reflection…). And Severus kept up a front of desiring that position while being refused it, until it suited his other master’s needs to install him in it. And Albus, that exemplar of shoddy, self-serving, hollow moral platitudes, has in response to that curse repeatedly brought in all manner of morally-questionable one-hit wonders to teach DADA. Literal and metaphorical monsters. None of whom gave Harry and company either a solid understanding of dark magic and defenses against it, or any sort of decent moral education, now did they? And all of whom kept ending up hoist by their own petard. (Consider dear Gilderoy...)
I think it's no accident that Severus is the first, and only, DADA teacher we see to attempt to give any sort of theoretical understanding of the subject to his students. He’s the only teacher we see who attempts to give them any solid moral guidance that he backs up with action, after all, however limited and however stern the expression of it. Lupin, like his mentor Albus, was a spineless hollow shell when it came to moral action. Severus was not - hence his contempt for the werewolf and for Tonks’ patronus. (It looks weak.) Clear lines, clear expectations about how you will and will not behave when in his care, with certain unpleasant but not harmful consequences should you cross a line. Think before you act. Control yourself - and your magic (Neville’s big issue). That goes for everyone - even his Slytherins. (They’ve just figured out not to let themselves get caught by him, whereas the Gryffindors have a bit of trouble with that self-control bit and keep acting out in front of him. Go read terri’s “Rumors of Snape’s Unfairness.”)
And one of his overriding frustrations in handling the Boy Who Lived was Albus’ repeated undermining of his attempts to hold him to the same standards as everyone else, wasn’t it?
I keep remembering that the scales are both a key tool for a brewer, and one of the symbols of Lady Justice. Your heart, weighed against the feather of truth…
I think that, especially in the last books, the mention of Dark Arts should clue us in to the presence of less-overt but important moral dimensions to what is going on. And that Severus’ installation as DADA professor right when the moral terms of his universe are being upset by Dumbledore is no accident. This marks a stepping-up in intensity and importance of Severus’ overall grappling with questions of moral growth. It’s no longer enough for him to be the Potions master, focused on refining his talent for giving. Now he’s called to be the master of the moral arts himself, and to as part of that more openly assert himself as a moral teacher as well.
And that speech about the ever-changing nature of the Dark Arts, the need for flexible defenses and awareness that cutting off the immediate visible head of the monster is not enough to win the battle, tells us quite a bit about the sort of questions and realizations Severus was working through, I think. Learning that ma’at is dynamic, and that one needs to learn to live at the edge, as it were, to go back to those metaphors I set up previously…
Harry really should have listened to him that year. As Draco should have too. (And maybe he did, a little. We have that display of helpless empathy at the table with Charity, his squeamishness with torturing Rowle, his odd refusal to firmly identify the trio, his strange neglect to reveal the DA’s communication method in DH… The inability to kill Dumbledore face to face; the tears in the bathroom. That boy’s not a lost cause.)
But Harry is too busy lying and cheating, and then attempting to use Severus’ own earlier little morally-interesting forays into dark magic against Filch and Draco, and against Severus himself when Severus smacks him down for that Unforgivable, to realize that adult Severus knows exactly what he’s talking about, and that he ought to listen to this Severus. To his DADA teacher, not the Half-Blood Prince.
*
Moving on…
From Dark Arts we get to Dark Creatures.
What do you suppose Severus’ boggart was? Harry dead, Voldemort, Severus himself are some of the theories I’ve seen floated. But a werewolf is also a popular one, particularly a specific werewolf - one he met in a certain Shack, lured by haughty Sirius Black's lies, and nearly lost his life or humanity to, before being saved at the last minute by James Potter. Remus Lupin, Marauder, professor of DADA (or more precisely Dark Creatures, from what we see), failed spy, and definitely not Severus’ all-around favorite person, for all that he brews that Wolfsbane for him.
It’s a compelling image, isn’t it? And I think there might be more truth to the idea than we realize. Severus is a complicated man, after all.
I’ll come back to that.
*
Dark Lords and Death Eaters.
When you think about it, it’s quite bizarre that Severus ever ended up a Death Eater in the first place. We fans have twisted ourselves in knots attempting to explain why an impoverished halfblood raised in a “Muggle dunghill,” in Bella’s oh-so-charming phrase, with an actual Muggle for a father and a passionately-declared friendship for a Gryffie Muggleborn to boot, would ever have looked to be one of the Death Eaters or have been accepted by them. JKR’s extra-textual attempts to explain this haven’t much helped, either.
When Lily throws that “you all just can’t wait to be Death Eaters!” line at him outside the portrait, Severus is struck speechless. In utter confusion, perhaps? I think that may have been the first time the idea that associating with and being friendly with his housemates, and acclimating to their views whatever his own inner convictions, might be seen as necessarily leading to joining up with the DEs was ever explicitly put to him in those terms.
So how did he go from that to, a few years later, signing on with the Dark Lord’s inner circle? Apparently genuinely, from all the evidence we have - and yes, I do believe that it was at first a genuine commitment, however briefly and whatever misapprehensions he may have been under about exactly what he was signing up for. I think that’s important for his arc. But it’s a very curious thing to have happened.
What the hell is Severus doing as a Death Eater? What did he see, or think he saw, in them, and in Voldemort?
And what did Voldemort ever see in him?
And just what is a Death Eater, anyway, that Severus got the bright idea to become one?
Well, that last one’s easy, right? Death Eaters are Voldemort’s followers. Purebloods (for the most part) who think wizards are inherently superior to Muggles and that being descended from non-magic-users makes one inferior, that wizards of pure magical ancestry ought to either rule openly over, or simply eliminate, Muggleborns and Muggles, that Dark Arts like those nasty Unforgivables (cue spooky music) should be openly taught…
Er, what does any of this have to do with “eating death,” whatever that means?
Voldemort has a hobby of playing around with attempts at overcoming death. And he seems to have boasted once or twice to his followers about going further than anyone in achieving this goal. But we never hear of any of his followers either desiring, or attempting, to follow suit themselves - though nothing strictly rules out the idea that some had joined up in hopes of learning such magics for themselves. Nor do we have any indication that he would have welcomed this from them, if they had. Much less making this any sort of large-scale thing. Voldemort-fanboy Regulus Black wasn’t putting up newspaper clippings celebrating his lord’s promises to create a race of physically immortal pureblood wizarding overlords.
But he did, as terri points out, react rather quickly and decisively against Voldemort once he heard about the desecration of Merlin’s grail cave. And we have swythyv’s insight that the whole blood purity thing that drove Walburga Black, descendant of an Order of Merlin recipient, to frothing at the mouth may have been a corruption of an ancient injunction to spiritual purity, wrongly focusing upon physical ancestry and the minutiae of blood (traditionally though to be the carrier of the spirit, after all, and a substance with, ah, interesting magical properties that we see in canon) and ignoring the moral, inward character of the people selected for marriage into the most illustrious houses.
I think we, and the wizarding world, got swindled. Hornswoggled by some play with fancy terminology we thought we understood, because we never questioned it or looked deeper.
Mistakenly conflating the physical and the spiritual, and leading others to do the same, is rather a hallmark of Voldemort’s, isn’t it?
A fundamental misunderstanding, if not to say perversion, of the principles of alchemy. Self-transmutation and transcendence leading to immortality and immense powers, after an initial period of decay and dissolution… Well, from a certain perspective, considering the classic alchemical image of the ouroboros - the serpent devouring itself - it kind of sounds like eating death, doesn’t it? Taking death into oneself in order to triumph over it.
What kind of immortality, though? Nobody ever seems to ask that question. At least not in the Potterverse.
More on this when we come back to Severus in the next installment. His journey toward the Death Eaters has a couple of layers, I suspect, as does his relationship with Voldemort. The orbital patterns to trace out here are a bit complex.
I mean, nobody ever accuses Severus of being simple, now do they?
Ok, let’s get back to talking about the books themselves for a bit, shall we?
We’ve talked about Albus, and alchemy, so perhaps we should skip ahead in the alphabet a bit and head on over to D. D for Dark; D for Death.
Dark Marks, Dark Arts, Dark Creatures, Dark Lords… Death, and Death Eaters.
Then we can get to occlumency and to Severus and Voldemort.
I should note at the outset that ‘dark’ is something of a fuzzy term to use when talking about moral and spiritual things and about that big ball of wibbly-wobbly vaguely-defined magical stuff we get in the Potterverse. In general, ‘dark’ should not necessarily be taken as a strict synonym for ‘evil’ - far from it. Darkness is natural and necessary and a part of life and it has great lessons to teach. Nor is ‘light’ the same as ‘good.’ Severus - our resident Dark Wizard - would be the first person to tell you that. For all that the HP books, and even Tolkien, like to conflate the two spectra.
But. Darkness does make it easy to do evil, because it allows one to hide. From others, and from oneself. Spiritual blindness, ignorance, forces that overwhelm one and prevent true sight or perspective… Things can be hidden to good ends or bad, and while sometimes we need to close our eyes, we also do need to open them again, as we see and see anew.
Right?
Ok. Onward.
*
Consider the Dark Mark.
Terri theorizes over on snapedom that in his little display before Fudge at the end of GOF, Severus subtly but fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of the Dark Mark. Go read that essay, if you haven’t already. I think terri nailed it, particularly when she notes that the Mark responded directly to Tom’s will (visible only when he wishes), that it was a potential means of causing physical as well as psychological torture for his errant servants, and that Voldemort’s awareness of his Marked followers may have been such that “Tom is aware of every call,” even those between sublinked members, and also aware of “quite possibly every location of his slaves, when he wants to be.”
This is Tom’s tool, and it’s meant to be a leash on his followers, another means of control. A direct connection, controlled by Voldemort, between them and their magic, and he and his.
Which makes me wonder about the possible effects of bearing one. Especially considering how we’ve been shown that traces of Tom tend to be, ah, psychologically stimulating, if I can put it like that. Emotionally, mentally, magically and morally affecting those within range, if sometimes only to a limited degree. And usually not in positive ways, no? So what must it be like to carry his Mark on you, for years, day after day after day? Especially after his re-embodiment?
These are brands, remember. Tom’s touch, burnt into the very bodies - and possibly souls - of his followers, and lingering there through every distance and discorporation until he is actually sent completely beyond the Veil. Marks of his ownership of them, meant to last unto death.
I really don’t think carrying one is good for your mental health. Or moral health.
We’ve seen multiple ways in the Potterverse in which exposure to external magical forces can have an emotionally- and/or morally-corrupting effect on people regardless of their own initial will and inclination: dementors and their little cousins the boggarts, horcruxes, the Deathly Hallows, the Mirror of Erised. Sunnyskywalker theorizes that the true horror of horcruxes is that the creation of one necessarily reduces one’s capacity for self-restraint, empathy, and right behavior. Jodel speculates that the very practice of magic itself, before the development of controlled wizardry, may have been morally and psychologically corrupting, blunting the capacity for empathy and one’s ability to clearly evaluate oneself: dark-arts dementia, she called it.
I imagine that one of the effects of carrying a Dark Mark for any extended period of time - and particularly when Voldemort is embodied and nearby - is a subtle but constant low-level impulse toward corruption. A slight dulling of the capacity for empathy, perhaps, together with a low pull toward one’s own worse inclinations that, if not identified early and rigorously (self-)monitored, might lead one, not only into behaving more and more from one’s worse self, but also into ceasing to care so much about the issue in the first place.
What is Voldemort’s moral philosophy, after all?
“There is no good and evil, there is only power…and those too weak to seek it.
Ah. Said shortly before he demanded that Harry - Harry Potter, his ultimate nemesis! - submit to him and, not surrender to be killed, but to give himself over to him, and thereby preserve himself physically:
"Better save your own life and join me…or you'll meet the same end as your parents…they died begging me for mercy."
Voldemort doesn’t care what form your moral principles take. They’re all expressions of weakness, to him. Whatever line he spouts for the purebloods in order to gain their cooperation notwithstanding, he’s not ultimately interested in persuading you, or compelling you, to a different view of what’s right or wrong, what’s best for wizards, what’s permissible in the name of the Greater Good.
He’d like to eradicate your principles altogether. Destroy your cor, your heart, your center. Hollow you out. So he can use you ruthlessly, once you have no other solid sense of anything to attach yourself to or to look to outside yourself. Helpless, whether terrified or gleeful in your moral abandon, to see anything else but him and his power.
No wonder he starts reeling them in young. Much easier to influence and take over those who have not yet fully formed a solid moral center for themselves, after all. Possession. It’s a term with multiple meanings, isn’t it? And we do know that one of Tom’s indisputable talents - one he seems possibly unique in, from what we see of the Potterverse - is the capacity to possess, overwhelm, and control other beings. Animals in the forest, Quirrell, Ginny, Nagini. Harry, partially throughout OotP and fully in the DOM. A move to tempt Dumbledore into killing Harry, and which he was persuaded to abandon only by Harry’s welcoming of physical death - in the name of love, the core connection - that threatened to drag Tom along with him into death. Taking away his mastery and control, as well as his own remaining shredded sense of self. He’d much rather be the one dragging you into death, you know.
So his Mark? The - magical and moral, as well as psychological - reminder of his ownership of you. I possess you. Submit. Let me into your heart. Stop caring. Eat spiritual death. Die into me.
No more than a quiet whisper, I’m sure, a subtle nudge. It’s not the imperius. But it is insidious.
As Severus can tell you from bitter experience. Though the self-knowledge and self-discipline required by high-level occlumency may provide something of a bulwark, I suspect.
Still. It makes things that much more difficult. Especially when the clear moral vision and defined mission you’ve been using to stabilize and orient yourself gets swept away and the terms of your moral categories switched around - by the very man you’ve been looking to as a reliable guidepost in these things for all these years, no less. A man who, no matter what you choose do to, will soon be gone.
Jodel calls Severus a man on a tightrope. Well, what happens when you’re in the midst of your act and one of the anchors of your tightrope gives way?
If you don’t, as Dumbledore put it, wish to die a most painful death, you had better be able to fly, now hadn’t you?
Good thing Severus taught himself how to.
*
On the topic of morality, let’s go back to that little description of the Dark Arts that Severus gave us in HBP. The one we theorized was more of a moral lesson than just a bit of magical theory dressed up in fancy metaphors:
"The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible. Your defences must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the Arts you seek to undo."
We’ve never really been able to establish a solid idea of what JKR meant to imply the nature of dark magic is, in canon. But we have some coherent theories by fans - jodel, terri, swythyv, and others - that manage to make some sense of what we see. And one idea that crops up repeatedly, both in canon and outside it, is that the dark arts have some intrinsic relationship to moral questions - whether it be that practicing dark magic is inherently morally corrupting, that ‘dark’ necessarily means ‘morally-questionable spells,’ that dark magic has to do with the caster’s inner will and intention rather than outward form, that there is a ‘crude’ moralistic as well as a ‘not-crude’ sense of the term…
We’ve theorized that alchemy is a Dark Art. Unsupported flight may also be dark magic, I suspect, though that’s not strictly necessary to suppose.
What is key to note is that, when we are dealing with questions about dark magic, we are also moving into the territory of moral understanding in some form. The Defense Against the Dark Arts position is the one that Voldemort chose to curse, after all, as well as the one he sent his agents into when he was attempting to access to subvert Hogwarts. Including one young Severus Snape, before he was offered the Potions position (interesting juxtaposition, that, upon reflection…). And Severus kept up a front of desiring that position while being refused it, until it suited his other master’s needs to install him in it. And Albus, that exemplar of shoddy, self-serving, hollow moral platitudes, has in response to that curse repeatedly brought in all manner of morally-questionable one-hit wonders to teach DADA. Literal and metaphorical monsters. None of whom gave Harry and company either a solid understanding of dark magic and defenses against it, or any sort of decent moral education, now did they? And all of whom kept ending up hoist by their own petard. (Consider dear Gilderoy...)
I think it's no accident that Severus is the first, and only, DADA teacher we see to attempt to give any sort of theoretical understanding of the subject to his students. He’s the only teacher we see who attempts to give them any solid moral guidance that he backs up with action, after all, however limited and however stern the expression of it. Lupin, like his mentor Albus, was a spineless hollow shell when it came to moral action. Severus was not - hence his contempt for the werewolf and for Tonks’ patronus. (It looks weak.) Clear lines, clear expectations about how you will and will not behave when in his care, with certain unpleasant but not harmful consequences should you cross a line. Think before you act. Control yourself - and your magic (Neville’s big issue). That goes for everyone - even his Slytherins. (They’ve just figured out not to let themselves get caught by him, whereas the Gryffindors have a bit of trouble with that self-control bit and keep acting out in front of him. Go read terri’s “Rumors of Snape’s Unfairness.”)
And one of his overriding frustrations in handling the Boy Who Lived was Albus’ repeated undermining of his attempts to hold him to the same standards as everyone else, wasn’t it?
I keep remembering that the scales are both a key tool for a brewer, and one of the symbols of Lady Justice. Your heart, weighed against the feather of truth…
I think that, especially in the last books, the mention of Dark Arts should clue us in to the presence of less-overt but important moral dimensions to what is going on. And that Severus’ installation as DADA professor right when the moral terms of his universe are being upset by Dumbledore is no accident. This marks a stepping-up in intensity and importance of Severus’ overall grappling with questions of moral growth. It’s no longer enough for him to be the Potions master, focused on refining his talent for giving. Now he’s called to be the master of the moral arts himself, and to as part of that more openly assert himself as a moral teacher as well.
And that speech about the ever-changing nature of the Dark Arts, the need for flexible defenses and awareness that cutting off the immediate visible head of the monster is not enough to win the battle, tells us quite a bit about the sort of questions and realizations Severus was working through, I think. Learning that ma’at is dynamic, and that one needs to learn to live at the edge, as it were, to go back to those metaphors I set up previously…
Harry really should have listened to him that year. As Draco should have too. (And maybe he did, a little. We have that display of helpless empathy at the table with Charity, his squeamishness with torturing Rowle, his odd refusal to firmly identify the trio, his strange neglect to reveal the DA’s communication method in DH… The inability to kill Dumbledore face to face; the tears in the bathroom. That boy’s not a lost cause.)
But Harry is too busy lying and cheating, and then attempting to use Severus’ own earlier little morally-interesting forays into dark magic against Filch and Draco, and against Severus himself when Severus smacks him down for that Unforgivable, to realize that adult Severus knows exactly what he’s talking about, and that he ought to listen to this Severus. To his DADA teacher, not the Half-Blood Prince.
*
Moving on…
From Dark Arts we get to Dark Creatures.
What do you suppose Severus’ boggart was? Harry dead, Voldemort, Severus himself are some of the theories I’ve seen floated. But a werewolf is also a popular one, particularly a specific werewolf - one he met in a certain Shack, lured by haughty Sirius Black's lies, and nearly lost his life or humanity to, before being saved at the last minute by James Potter. Remus Lupin, Marauder, professor of DADA (or more precisely Dark Creatures, from what we see), failed spy, and definitely not Severus’ all-around favorite person, for all that he brews that Wolfsbane for him.
It’s a compelling image, isn’t it? And I think there might be more truth to the idea than we realize. Severus is a complicated man, after all.
I’ll come back to that.
*
Dark Lords and Death Eaters.
When you think about it, it’s quite bizarre that Severus ever ended up a Death Eater in the first place. We fans have twisted ourselves in knots attempting to explain why an impoverished halfblood raised in a “Muggle dunghill,” in Bella’s oh-so-charming phrase, with an actual Muggle for a father and a passionately-declared friendship for a Gryffie Muggleborn to boot, would ever have looked to be one of the Death Eaters or have been accepted by them. JKR’s extra-textual attempts to explain this haven’t much helped, either.
When Lily throws that “you all just can’t wait to be Death Eaters!” line at him outside the portrait, Severus is struck speechless. In utter confusion, perhaps? I think that may have been the first time the idea that associating with and being friendly with his housemates, and acclimating to their views whatever his own inner convictions, might be seen as necessarily leading to joining up with the DEs was ever explicitly put to him in those terms.
So how did he go from that to, a few years later, signing on with the Dark Lord’s inner circle? Apparently genuinely, from all the evidence we have - and yes, I do believe that it was at first a genuine commitment, however briefly and whatever misapprehensions he may have been under about exactly what he was signing up for. I think that’s important for his arc. But it’s a very curious thing to have happened.
What the hell is Severus doing as a Death Eater? What did he see, or think he saw, in them, and in Voldemort?
And what did Voldemort ever see in him?
And just what is a Death Eater, anyway, that Severus got the bright idea to become one?
Well, that last one’s easy, right? Death Eaters are Voldemort’s followers. Purebloods (for the most part) who think wizards are inherently superior to Muggles and that being descended from non-magic-users makes one inferior, that wizards of pure magical ancestry ought to either rule openly over, or simply eliminate, Muggleborns and Muggles, that Dark Arts like those nasty Unforgivables (cue spooky music) should be openly taught…
Er, what does any of this have to do with “eating death,” whatever that means?
Voldemort has a hobby of playing around with attempts at overcoming death. And he seems to have boasted once or twice to his followers about going further than anyone in achieving this goal. But we never hear of any of his followers either desiring, or attempting, to follow suit themselves - though nothing strictly rules out the idea that some had joined up in hopes of learning such magics for themselves. Nor do we have any indication that he would have welcomed this from them, if they had. Much less making this any sort of large-scale thing. Voldemort-fanboy Regulus Black wasn’t putting up newspaper clippings celebrating his lord’s promises to create a race of physically immortal pureblood wizarding overlords.
But he did, as terri points out, react rather quickly and decisively against Voldemort once he heard about the desecration of Merlin’s grail cave. And we have swythyv’s insight that the whole blood purity thing that drove Walburga Black, descendant of an Order of Merlin recipient, to frothing at the mouth may have been a corruption of an ancient injunction to spiritual purity, wrongly focusing upon physical ancestry and the minutiae of blood (traditionally though to be the carrier of the spirit, after all, and a substance with, ah, interesting magical properties that we see in canon) and ignoring the moral, inward character of the people selected for marriage into the most illustrious houses.
I think we, and the wizarding world, got swindled. Hornswoggled by some play with fancy terminology we thought we understood, because we never questioned it or looked deeper.
Mistakenly conflating the physical and the spiritual, and leading others to do the same, is rather a hallmark of Voldemort’s, isn’t it?
A fundamental misunderstanding, if not to say perversion, of the principles of alchemy. Self-transmutation and transcendence leading to immortality and immense powers, after an initial period of decay and dissolution… Well, from a certain perspective, considering the classic alchemical image of the ouroboros - the serpent devouring itself - it kind of sounds like eating death, doesn’t it? Taking death into oneself in order to triumph over it.
What kind of immortality, though? Nobody ever seems to ask that question. At least not in the Potterverse.
More on this when we come back to Severus in the next installment. His journey toward the Death Eaters has a couple of layers, I suspect, as does his relationship with Voldemort. The orbital patterns to trace out here are a bit complex.
I mean, nobody ever accuses Severus of being simple, now do they?