Inconceivable - More thoughts on Secrecy, wizarding politics, and Severus Snape
I started replying to a comment posted to "I Would Sell Out the Nation," but it developed into a rather long post thinking my way through some things. And talking more about Snape, of course. I’m just thinking out loud here though.
In particular, thinking through how a number of canonical incidents and patterns might have looked from the inside, once we make the realization that - since valuing ‘purity’ of wizarding ancestry is a concept that really only makes sense as arising from and existing within a formally Secret and so strictly isolated wizarding world - when the issue of blood status is on the table, it’s virtually always at one level a coded way of talking about the ever-present but culturally traumatically-frightening threat of historical violent muggle-on-wizard persecution. And is not necessarily the only form of such coded talk. It has developed, over three centuries, a life of its own and has picked up and integrated itself with a lot of other cultural and psychological stuff, like any bigotry, but the root of it and the most unnameable but central aspect of it is the specter of the reverse of wizarding supremacy: muggle domination or eliminationist violence.
A threat that the ongoing, legally-required and violently-maintained muggle ignorance of magic both looks back to historically, and implicitly promises to allow - indeed to spark - again if it is ever discovered.
Not that most adult witches and wizards even want to THINK about that, thank you very much. Secrecy is the most unquestioned need and principle, and its collary - wizarding ignorance of the muggle world - practically a point of pride; but beyond the political and social acceptability and indeed near-indispensibility of expressing at least minimally-coded anti-muggle sentiment, wizards just don’t want to think about it. Keep muggles in their place by whatever means necessary, and then leave it and them alone. Don’t remind anyone of the muggles. Think about wizarding things. Proper things. Safe things.
Show proper wizarding pride.
Inconceivable
More thoughts on Secrecy, wizarding politics, and Severus Snape
If I know only one thing it's that everything that I see
of the world outside is so inconceivable that often I barely can speak.
Yeah, I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself.
What good is it to sing helplessness blues? Why should I wait for anyone else?
-- Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”
*
In her comment sweettalkeress wrote:
If I understand correctly your argument is essentially that the wizards feel free to abuse the muggles at their will and whim as long as the muggles don't know what's going on, but the Death Eaters threaten to undermine the secrecy, and expose the WW to the wrath of the muggles, which is why they're a danger, right? So the Death Eaters who want to undermine secrecy attempt to deflect accusations by blaming the muggleborns?
Basically, yes. Reflecting, I suspect, a larger historical pattern that developed as wizards moved into increasing isolation and then Secrecy. As the idea of engaging or re-engaging openly with muggles became more and more anathema to the general wizarding mindset, this horror became more and more codified into legal as well as cultural-political imperatives. And so the social and legal positions of two - not necessarily strictly distinct - groups of people became increasingly fraught and perilous, to the point where one of them was formally and forcibly outlawed, and the other formally and all-but-forcibly (er, let’s say they were strongly encouraged to be) integrated and assimilated to the exclusion of muggle influence, though not without lingering suspicion in some quarters. The latter: Muggleborns and other magical people with muggle blood relatives, who they were, er, encouraged to distance themselves from and disdain. The former: those witches and wizards holding and advocating for (or suspected of holding) the view that isolation and then formal Secrecy are mistaken, and should be rolled back. For any reason - there are multiple potential reasons to want to end Secrecy, after all, some of which I think we muggles would heartily approve of.
Though after three centuries of fearful isolation in memory of violence, and three centuries of manaically and futilely attempting to cut away every reminder of the threat as it sprouts a new hydra-head with every generation of muggleborns, I suspect that some reasons and rationales for ending Secrecy are more likely to circulate, and will more easily be cloaked enough to circulate more publicly, than others. After all, the acceptability of anti-muggle violence in some basic form is not only a political common denominator, but a legal requirement that every witch and wizard is by necessity made aware of and obligated to support in both theory and practice. Even - or, one would think, especially - muggleborns and others with muggle relatives.
*
To judge by the bizarre approach the wizarding world has toward the topic of muggles and the historical violence of the witch-hunts, the general mindset that the WW instills to some degree in the average witch and wizard is one of profound but subconscious and so unacknowledged and unresolved terror; trauma on a cultural rather than individual level. What is threatening and so rejected, but unfaced and unprocessed, sublimated into obsession with physical purity or reduced into shallow fantasies that can be defeated by things holding only the force of jokes.
We have: the laughably shallow fantasies of Wendelin the Weird and that wizards split away because impressed muggles made too many demands on their skills; the general political acceptability and near-obligation of expressing anti-muggle sentiment, even to the point of concealed violence; legal requirements to avoid dealing directly with muggles and their world as far as possible, and to forcibly conceal wizarding existence from them, without any ability for muggles in the know to claim redress against wizards for any harm done them; indications that the only crime against a muggle one might be prosecuted for is killing them (and so leaving bodies), an exception that one radical but non-pariah witch, Araminta Melliflua, tried to overturn via law; acknowledgement by liberal wizards that muggleborns are needed ‘so wizards don’t die out’ and legal and cultural pressures encouraging muggleborns to integrate both culturally and via marriage, but limited acceptance of them in society; suspicion and disdain for those with muggle relatives, expressed in terms of ‘blood’ but decreasing with each generation away from actual muggles; disdain of and fear of producing non-actively-magical children, squibs, who are disowned by blood purist families together with those ‘marrying out;’ the term ‘muggle’ applied in pureblood circles to those with little to no magic and to muggleborns as well as actual muggles; the term ‘blood traitor’ thrown at a pureblood who indulges a fascination with muggles and politically supports Albus Dumbledore; the bizarre fantasy that muggleborns have somehow ‘stolen’ magic; rejection or suspicion of all forms of ‘halfbreeds’ and strict control of the magic-focusing wand to human wizards, while other self-aware magical beings looking to different legal and cultural codes are forbidden them and forcibly exploited where possible; of the existence but social rejection of adult squibs living in the muggle world; of wandless muggleborns under the DEs choosing to beg in the streets rather than return to their muggle families; of at least two muggleborn witches who fought against Voldemort’s side while showing disdain for and isolating themselves from their muggle families; and finally the mention of but five post-isolation magical-muggle relationships in total, of one of which we know only that it caused the witch to be disowned (Isla Black/Bob Hitchens), and of the other four we know that all produced magical sons, but not that any of them were both happy and stable marriages - in the least-clear/potentially-best case, the post-wedding revelation of his wife’s magic was “a bit of a nasty shock” for Finnigan’s father.
I suspect that, in addition to the legal barriers to successful maintenance of happy relationships of any kind between muggles and magical people, the cultural and political pressures against such fraternizing are strong and inflected with a particularly paranoid and traumatized - and so irrational and very dangerous - form of fear. “Constant vigilance!” That’s the watchword of the wizarding world against the threat of muggle discovery and violence. The threat that, however, it will bend over backward to avoid directly naming where possible (blood), and to downplay laughably where not (Wendelin the Weird).
In “ The Weasley Family Traveling Circus” on hp-essays swythyv dissected the Weasley family’s bizarre approach to security precautions, particularly Molly’s. I think that her outline of the reaction to paranoid fear there is accurate in shape as well to the general wizarding public as a whole, the small scale reflecting in a microcosm the large, if sometimes for varying reasons and with varying objects of fear.
Here’s swythyv:
“Molly is as effective as enemy action. Because Molly Weasley has a blisteringly dangerous definition of security, as this Weasley Family Traveling Circus was designed to show us.
"Arthur the truth would terrify him," said Mrs. Weasley shrilly. "Do you really want to send Harry back to school with that hanging over him? For heaven's sake, he's happy not knowing!" (PoA4)
There followed such gems as "perfectly safe at Hogwarts" (Quirrel!mort? Giant basilisk? Ginny possession?) and repeated denial of reliable intelligence, almost amounting to a fugue state.
[…] Molly had literally rather die than think about the bad thoughts. If it's all right, everybody's safe, and she doesn't have to think about the bad thoughts. And if she's wrong, she's dead, and she doesn't have to think about the bad thoughts. So it's all good.”
Sound familiar?
*
Now consider further.
We KNOW that muggles have no practical rights to speak of within the wizarding world. It may be illegal to kill them for fun, but we see wizards of all political stripes abuse them freely without fear of legal repercussion when the muggles are either 1) already in the know (Dursleys), or 2) obliviated afterward. And consider that Sirius' relative Araminta thought she had enough of a realistic chance at changing even this that she BOTHERED to put the effort to seriously put forward her 'muggle-hunting' act. And neither apparently risked legal punishment that we can see, nor made her family scandalously pariah in the WW. Only known as somewhat extreme in their political conservatism, but still respected and influential.
Killing muggles without cause might be the sole crime against them wizards can actually be prosecuted for. (Indeed, if there was any evidence Sirius did cast something that might have triggered that explosion, Dumbledore might indeed have been actually unable to clear him of a prosecutable crime. Not that he necessarily wanted to, either.) And, er, dead bodies can't be obliviated away - they'll attract official muggle notice. Somehow one doesn't think that the DE cause horrified the WW because of their love of muggle human rights, whatever the lip service some more liberal factions may espouse about only doing NECESSARY violence to muggles.
But those who, like Gellert and like the DEs, aren't content to merely be secretly superior to the muggles from whom they hide, but want to be OPEN in their power over them, unrestricted even by the sole requirement of maintaining secrecy? THEY are the ones who provoked actual legal, moral, and violent backlash from broad sectors of the public. Once it became known that OVERT RULE was their (likely impossible) goal.
And we KNOW how fiercely Secrecy is maintained. Harry had some close calls with that. Including an attempt by his political enemies to hamstring him RIGHT after Voldemort returns. Before the full wizengamot, no less. He got off on that only because DUMBLEDORE HIMSELF showed up (to general unrest), and won over enough of the members. By claiming Harry acted in legitimate self-defense, against those Ministry law enforcement agents - agents sent by a Ministry official, but agents who had no proper business pursuing him then - and by producing a surprise witness to that effect (Mrs. Figg).
Consider also Arthur’s profound discomfort at the change of courtroom there:
'Those courtrooms haven't been used in years,' said Mr. Weasley angrily. 'I can't think why they're doing it down there - unless - but no - '
[…]
'Go on,' he panted, pointing his thumb at the door. 'Get in there.'
'Aren't - aren't you coming with - ?'
'No, no, I'm not allowed. Good luck!'
[…]
Harry gasped; he could not help himself. The large dungeon he had entered was horribly familiar. He had not only seen it before, he had been here before. This was the place he had visited inside Dumbledore's Pensieve, the place where he had watched the Lestranges sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban.
I think Courtroom Ten may just be the - necessarily very secure - courtroom reserved for trying the most severe breaches of the Statute by the most dangerous wizarding criminals: deliberate action meant to undermine Secrecy itself. World-destroying treason.
Swythyv noted Hermione’s fear for Harry when she heard of the change of courtroom, stating that this indicated the event was ‘very nearly an act of state against Harry.’ Swythyv’s right: Umbridge had been hoping to get at Dumbledore and Harry by manufacturing an incident she could use to push through a charge - and hopeful conviction - of attempted treason, or something very close.
If it had worked, the anti-Voldemort effort would have been badly set back indeed. The Boy Who Lived, vanquisher of Voldemort - and rumored powerful Dark Wizard in his own right, who already has been cited for violating the Statute - would have been packed off to Azkaban (or, if enough strings were pulled, possibly Kissed). Meanwhile Dumbledore and his renewed anti-Voldemort cause - a threat whose existence Fudge and the Ministry in general officially and vehemently disclaimed and looked at Dumbledore in suspicion for asserting - would have been politically, socially, and possibly legally hamstrung. Potentially even seen as a new growing intended threat to Secrecy themselves, given all the later paranoia in this book about Dumbledore starting up a ‘secret army’ against the Ministry.
Dumbledore, self-chosen patron of the BWL, with his continuing habit of deferring only to the most minimal anti-muggle-engagement authority and law: the ICW’s Statute of Secrecy. Rejecting both working with and working for the British Ministry, but heading an international body, upholding Secrecy in the letter but surrounding himself with ‘muggle-lovers’ and muggleborns, and (as a comment on IWSOTN noted) reading muggle periodicals and adopting other bits of muggle culture. Without, however, treating muggles with respect himself, note.
Dumbledore, patron or employer at one time or another of the most curious sorts: a half-giant convict with a habit of setting monsters loose, a werewolf with a bad habit of wanting to play outside whom he secretly educated, a memory charm specialist and repeat conman (in a cursed position), Ministry employees linked with muggle relations and law enforcement, and muggleborns and vehemently pro-muggle or pro-muggleborn purebloods.
Oh, and patron of one self-confessed but publicly-unrevealed actual ex-Death Eater, apparently released by so closed a hearing that, even as MINISTER later, Fudge was unaware of his record. Until said ex-DE intervened into a Fudge-Dumbledore argument about Voldemort by quite literally shoving the evidence of his criminal associations into Fudge’s face, on Dumbledore’s supposed behalf. After a previous visit in which escaped DE convict Sirius Black had been captured and then mysteriously disappeared while under Dumbledore’s control. And now establishing that there was crucial information about the Death Eaters and their workings (the Mark) that Dumbledore was aware of but had not fully informed the Ministry of.
Er.
If Voldemort could have cast his major declared enemy and biggest non-Ministry threat as a deliberate underground anti-Secrecy effort and so the actual threat to the Ministry, using rumors of his own return as a smokescreen for their activities (just as Voldemort himself would be doing here and with the muggleborns in general), wouldn’t that have done wonders for his program of takeover? No wonder he recruited Lucius and then kept him around as long as he did despite his missteps: with his connections and influence he was very, very useful.
(And Severus, dear, what were you doing with that little move there? Really?)
*
Potential or actual violations of Secrecy are somehow involved in all the crimes that we see people actually risking severe Ministry punishment and/or GENERAL social disapprobation for. And marking the limits of what is considered politically feasible or desireable. Regardless of the views on the importance of strict blood purity held by anyone involved.
And it makes sense. How do we think the muggle world would react, realistically, to finding out that for three centuries a small population of freakishly powerful and self-obsessed people have been freely abusing and mind-wiping ordinary people and hiding it from them, while utterly ignoring all muggle laws and interests? And that elements of this society want to violently dominate the entire muggle world because they think their magic gives them the right to?
I don’t think we’d be seeing wizarding-muggle pancake breakfasts as a first response here. Especially if that revelation came in the form of an actual violent attempt to establish such domination. And most adult wizards and witches would eventually realize this on some level - would realize that Wendelin the Weird is a FANTASY of successful resistance. If magic alone was enough to counter any muggle violence, Secrecy wouldn’t exist. And now they have weapons that can destroy CITIES at once.
Imagine the reaction of non-Muggleborn wizards and witches learning for the first time about Hiroshima or the like. Does that get covered in Muggle Studies?
This would also make sense of how easily Lucius got that Imperius defense, and then continued to spout unapologetic anti-muggle and anti-muggleborn views and be considered socially influential. He didn’t claim he’d been imperiused into acting violently toward muggles/muggleborns, the horror! He claimed he’d been imperiused into thinking that breaking Secrecy in his anti-muggle sentiments was the way to go. An idea so profoundly stupid, heretical, and openly treasonous - and so inherently destructive to his own family’s best interests! - that it would be easy (and subconsciously reassuring) for the wizard on the street to believe he MUST have been imperiused. Look how much he’s got to lose from breaking Secrecy!
Indeed, it’s possible - though by no means necessary - to posit that after his initial experience with the DEs he MAY HAVE quietly and genuinely repented of this one particular criminal view. Came to see the realistic necessity of maintaining Secrecy at the moment. (And perhaps, thus, to take particular personal and political offense at DUMBLEDORE’S continued patronage of a certain “muggle-loving blood traitor” - that is, the pureblooded but unrepentantly muggle-involved Ministry clown who can’t even do his job right, but uses it as an excuse to FURTHER involve himself with muggle things and even try to push for greater protection for muggles themselves? And rendering his continued friendship with one Severus Snape very interesting indeed.) Without, however, needing or being pushed to reconsider his views of inherent wizarding SUPERIORITY OVER muggles and disdain for muggleborns. Or feeling the need to stop expressing them in culturally and legally acceptable ways.
Leaving Harry and those like him in Dumbledore’s circle obsessed with the surface blood aspect to assume he must still be a loyal DE at heart, while leaving Lucius further reason to be terrified of Voldemort. Might that, in fact, not help to explain why so many of his followers deserted the Dark Lord in terror, beyond his psychopathy and willingness to torture them, etc.?
Some of them realized what would happen if he got control and tried to actually take over the muggle world, as he apparently WAS seriously intent upon. Whatever they initially thought they were signing up for.
But if he can come back from the DEAD, and will torture and kill whoever does not bow to him, wizard or muggle alike?
Well, he might be powerful enough to actually eventually see his insane program through. At least to the point of breaking Secrecy for good, whatever the fallout. In which case, better to be on the winning side and have a chance at being one of the wizards in power, not one of those slaughtered by either the muggles or the DEs first. He’s going to kill you and your family anyway if you resist - better a long shot at a place in the regime than a choice of death by Voldemort or death by muggle. Once you’ve already got his brand and leash on you, that is. Not so many NEW recruits this time around, after all.
No wonder they thought him the worst in a hundred years, or since ever. Worse than Grindelwald. For once they had an anti-muggle Dark Lord bent on ending Secrecy who might actually be able to force the issue!
We don’t see ANY political group or faction openly dedicated to - or even honestly considering - peacefully ending Secrecy and opening up careful negotiations with the muggle world. NONE. Not even any individuals other than perhaps Carlotta. No matter how “muggle-loving” they are.
This is indicative of just how deep-seated the assumption of wizarding superiority is to the wizarding mindset; it’s essentially a required as well as natural assumption given the terms of the existence of their world, which every wizard is apparently made explicitly aware of beginning in childhood.
Consider how much nine-year-old Severus Snape knew about wizarding law relating to Secrecy and the Ministry’s mechanisms of and dedication to enforcement of it. Having been raised in a dirt-poor and thoroughly muggle neighborhood by a magical-muggle couple, and without apparently having had much significant, successful, social integration with other wizards at that point. Or, for that matter, with muggles either.
A thought: how POSSIBLE would such integration have been for him, practically speaking, given the family’s economic situation - and thus choice of location - and the combination of legal caution required in their day to day life with the likely suspicion and cultural disdain of them by other wizards? Was the Snape family’s tense and bitter unhappiness and conflict rooted in the practical fallout from Eileen and Tobias’ marriage across the invisible line dividing their worlds? From what might have originally been, even, a marriage made in love, maybe some gesture of youthful hopeful defiance on Eileen’s part a la Andromeda Black? Only a step further. And that she eventually came to bitterly regret. So that she instilled in her son, not deep-seated concerns over purity of wizarding ancestry, but the impulse to reject MUGGLES specifically and to avoid getting tangled up with them where possible? Pushing on him, with all the vehemence of a parent wanting her child to avoid her own mistakes, the need to INTEGRATE as completely as possible with the wizarding world? A need that muggleborns of course would be seen as having too - not their FAULT they have muggle parents, but better for them to succeed in adapting fully to the wizarding world and engaging socially only with other magical people, etc. And thus urged him to aim for Slytherin - Eileen would have known of the Slug Club whatever her own house.
The lack of peaceful political opposition to Secrecy also may be indicative of what is legally, practically, possible. Depending on how the Statute is written. If there’s any language in there forbidding groups dedicated to ending Secrecy from simply meeting, or forbidding any serious effort to end Secrecy even by non-violent means, it might not be practically possible to HAVE such a political faction. Which might be merely the result of unclear language in the law having been previously interpreted as strictly forbidding the formation of factions with such a goal or even serious discussion of the issue.
Or, depending on how terrified the wizards at the ICW back in the 17th century were, it might be a deliberate feature of the law. They might have intended Secrecy to be literally irrevocable. In which case, they’ve rather screwed themselves over and painted themselves into a very tight corner indeed. For they might not have understood just how rapidly the muggle world would grow, and how crowded up against its edges wizards would become. And thus left themselves no practical peaceful means for dealing with the situation when it came it pass.
Muggleborns will have to continue to be integrated, or dealt with some other way. Not only to “keep wizards from dying out” for lack of a refreshed gene pool and number of mates, as Ron implies, but also to keep them from being potentially WIPED out by an angry muggle population alerted to the existence of magic by them, as probably almost happened before Secrecy was imposed.
But the political and other pressures will by necessity keep building, because no release valve will have been built into the wizarding world’s structure for opening toward the muggle world in any significant way. The paranoid, traumatized fear that drove the early generations during and post-Secrecy imposition will only become more and more repressed and potent and reinforced, because the only possible image of muggles that can get transmitted effectively down the generations is that of the inherent implacable and terrifying enemy, against whom the WW must defend at any cost. At first consciously, then subconsciously and structurally, with an increasing layer of ‘muggles can’t possibly hurt wizards EFFECTIVELY, not at all, we are so much more powerful than them inherently! we are in no danger’ fantasizing laid on top, to numb that profound, reinforced and irresolvable, unlooked-at terror. A vicious circle, with the pressure erupting every so often through the violent release valves of muggle-domination-wanting dark lords rising and then being successfully, violently, defeated by the WW BEFORE they can effectively end Secrecy itself.
*
Now, also, we know why Gryffindor Sirius Black, who so vehemently and publicly rejected his family and all their concerns and desires as a point of PRINCIPLE, and loudly proclaimed his brotherhood with muggleborn-accepting James Potter, was so easily believed by the public to be Voldemort’s chief lieutenant. They didn’t think Sirius was secretly a raving blood purist. They thought he was a raving anti-Secrecy zealot who got himself accepted among the muggle- and muggleborn-FRIENDLY elements of society, but then found them not radically anti-Secrecy enough for him, and thus supposedly went over to Voldemort. Betraying the path of quiet acceptance of potential fifth-columnists, in his ostensible hopes of ending Secrecy through them, for the militant approach of taking over the WW’s institutions and through them moving to openly attempt to engage the muggles directly. They didn’t much care what specifically he thought about muggles themselves, sympathy or antipathy. To outside observers, both actual anti-wizarding sentiment, and mere heedless arrogant stupidity in one’s anti-MUGGLE sentiment, were equally dangerous, and equal motives for trying to end Secrecy.
And we may also have here, it strikes me now, something more of an explanation for where precisely that comment of muggleborn-accepting James Potter’s came from, when he replied to muggleborn Lily’s objection to his treatment of the literal halfblood Snape with, “it's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean…” And why Lily, herself muggleborn and thus most likely getting pressure from EVERY direction to integrate, integrate, integrate, by that point may not have felt like she had much social ground to stand on, so that risking it by doing something to ACTIVELY help Severus might be too costly by her own calculations. A further, somewhat tragic explanation for that whole ugly mess and the dissolution of the halfblood-muggleborn friendship, now that I consider it.
How long do you think it took to become known around Hogwarts that the new Slytherin potions geek, the one with the muggleborn Gryffindor for a friend, was a LITERAL halfblood who was raised primarily in the muggle world?
As a muggleborn witch, Lily Evans stood on uncertain social and political ground in the wizarding world. Legally accepted, within certain limits, but pushed by every faction to integrate as far as possible with other wizards - whether out of explicit blood purist concerns, well-meaning security concerns, or even concern for Lily’s own wellbeing and legal, social, and political success. Some factions would reject her as inherently inferior or of suspect loyalties, some might allow her limited success and acceptance, and some might try to push for something more for her; all of them however will expect her to adhere fully to the most fundamental wizarding assumptions and policies. Including rejection of significant dealings directly with the muggle world, except where absolutely unavoidable. For her own good, of course.
As the direct, MAGICAL offspring of a mixed witch-muggle marriage, Severus Snape was practically a walking violation of the Statute of Secrecy itself. Standing inherently and unchangeably right astride the most fundamental line in the wizarding world. Subconsciously an offense to every decent and right-thinking wizard’s most fundamental principles, regardless of their further political views on ‘blood purity.’ Living proof that the all-important, white-hot, essential legal and political as well as cultural-moral line had been crossed, decisively and with unignorable, continuing concrete consequences.
Crossed by a witch, no less - not by a wizard who could disclaim paternity and disappear back into the wizarding world, but by a witch who had to carry and bear the child and raise it in one or the other world, and who, out of choice or economic necessity or both, seems to have ended up doing so primarily in the muggle world. To the very circumscribed extent permitted to her and her child by wizarding culture and LAW. And thus she AND HER SON were also potential violations of the statute waiting to happen. A present and continuing danger to the fragile legal veil preserving the wizarding world from the directly unfaceable but ever-present and not-quite-nameable threat. Of discovery and renewed muggle persecution.
Not, as with the muggleborns, due to chance occurrence and thus - for the more open-minded wizards - potentially viewable as just an unfortunate circumstance that isn’t the witch or wizard’s own fault, something uncontrollable and thus somewhat excuseable, so long as the muggleborn makes every effort to integrate. Innocent, if still potentially dangerous. But a reminder that the line can be and had been crossed BY CHOICE, the OTHER direction. And thus inherently GUILTY. An offense, not an accident. Something - SOMEONE - that, especially to the most hardline integrationists, should not exist. For the wizarding world’s very safety. And who either knows it, or ought to be made to know it as effectively as possible.
As a warning, to the walking violation himself, of exactly where he stands. As an example to all the others watching, a reminder of where the most fundamental lines are and how much they ought not to be crossed, of what the stakes are. And as a reminder to the muggleborn Lily herself of her own precarious position in the wizarding world, and thus of the strategic desireability to herself of accepting James’ advances and attentions.
None of this need necessarily be fully consciously thought out by James himself, though some of it likely may have been in his mind to a degree. It’s all been instilled in him to the subconscious or even unconscious level as well, and he simply chose to recognize and act upon it for his own purposes and to his own advantage.
As, of course, is also the case with his fellow pureblood friend-turned-brother Sirius Black. And possibly status-unknown Peter, to some degree.
And, of course, in a very particular way to the other walking potential violation of Secrecy (and other boundaries) in that little club, the werewolf Remus Lupin. Who undoubtedly has been told over and over of the lifelong need to make sure he is secured for his transformations because of the specific danger he poses to MUGGLES, who don’t know to go inside on full moon nights.
The same werewolf Sirius Black had recently tried to use as a trap for the halfblood, consciously (supposedly) considering it merely something meant to “scare” the halfblood. Scare him out of sneaking around and trying to use wizarding authority to halt the games the two pureblood scions felt as their entitled right to play with him, as well as with the werewolf. Getting them expelled - and thus preventing them from attaining the full rights of first-class wizarding citizenship to which they would be entitled upon completing their schooling, preventing them from free exercise of their magic.
The trap that, as the halfblood himself pointed out so bitterly, would more likely have ended with him infected and shunned himself, or dead.
After all, the “fact that he exists” is offensive two ways: both as reminder of the past violation by his parents, and as threat of future violations (legal, cultural, etc.) by himself. He should not exist, and should not be allowed to KEEP existing.
Not that Sirius or James themselves never ever violated the statute, however. There was that charmed motorcycle, remember. Among other things they liked to have fun with.
And, er, when exactly did that occasion with the muggle policeman occur? Do we even know for sure? Or when that bike was first charmed and ridden, at least? And that it was always, except that one time, ridden outside of muggle view?
I think it was swythyv, wasn’t it? who posited that maybe one reason they were able to clap Sirius in prison without a trial is because he was on probation for already having violated the Statute of Secrecy with that motorcycle stunt, as the owner and charmer of the machine, and his family had pulled strings for him?
And that then he was allowed to go into the care of the Potter family (‘run away to live with James’) when he rejected his own family afterward, because they guaranteed to keep in check both boys?
Whatever the specific incident and its timing, one imagines that James as well as Sirius got a very, very stern reminder about not breaking that particular law again, too. About the VITAL need to maintain that line.
Stern enough, perhaps, that it not only sparked him to shape up on that particular front, earning the Hogwarts’ authorites’ notice and eventually that headboy badge, but indeed something of a, let’s say a passionate dedication to maintaining that line? Possibly, just possibly, driven by a little tiny bit of repressed anger at this immovable but vital outer limit to the universe that he, like Sirius, felt otherwise entitled to play master of?
Was SWM partly a displaced reaction to having had the boundary lines of his and Sirius’ assumed mastery of the world drawn out harshly for him with the weight of an authority he could not ignore?
That would go some way toward explaining why Severus continued to be such a special case for him, even to the point of hexing him behind Lily’s back and lying to her about it.
He’s everything James is supposed to detest on principle, has been encouraged to reject, and yet apparently has a fascination with that he can’t quite calmly free himself and walk away from. He takes the more politically-acceptable, pretty and integrationist muggleborn girl for himself, and ends up later dedicating himself to an explicitly pro-muggleborn but pointedly integrationist vigilante group, while obsessing himself while at school with violently disdaining and abusing her half-muggle former friend whenever possible.
*
And by the time of that incident, Lily had received enough of the general message from all sides about her own position in the WW that she was already trying not to be seen by her magical peers to associate openly too much with him, wasn’t she? Though not quite enough, before this, to convince her to just drop him altogether - her first wizarding friend, and only one back home outside the wizarding world. Where she still had to go in the summers and restrict her magic, until she turned seventeen.
Not that she handled, or necessarily knew how to handle, all of this in a particularly forthright and conscious way with him, as befitting any claim to solid committed friendship - or to, on the other hand, an honest recognition that maybe she just didn’t feel committed to the friendship any more, for whatever reason.
Severus, meanwhile, has of course been getting certain messages himself from various sides. And appears to have been at least as aware of the pressure as she was (though the nuances of it would have been somewhat different for each of them given, not only their respective Houses, but also particular vulnerabilities, uncertain positions, and even genders, given the default assumption of heterosexuality I think we can take as read in the Potterverse like our own).
And no better at responding to this pressure in a graceful and self-aware way.
“I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!”
When Severus picked that particular epithet to fling at Lily that way in his humiliated and betrayed fury, I now realize, he wasn’t just aiming to hurt her with a word he knew she individually would be sensitive to in payment for her flirting with James over helping him - though I do think that was his conscious motive. He was also sending her and everyone watching that display an implicit multi-layered message. Much of it only subconscious, and some of it self-contradictory. Severus was, after all, always deeply in conflict with himself.
The gendered aspects of this I think should be fairly obvious already, and I know others have mentioned them in previous discussions elsewhere, so I’ll move on.
1 - I don’t need or want help from someone potentially legally and politically suspect like that. I’m not anti-wizard, I want to integrate. I’m not a threat. I don’t want to threaten Secrecy.
The single most constant danger he must have been conscious of, and explicitly or implicitly reminded of, every time he went back home to the Snape household.
As Lily would, of course, also have been made to be conscious of herself when outside the WW, but only as the victim of circumstance. An accident of her birth. Whereas the mere existence of Severus’ immediate family, of the very union that produced him, was, shall we say, a LEGALLY curious as well as culturally and politically touchy thing.
2 - You’re in the same boat as me, Evans. Don’t forget it!
An angry rejection of her felt betrayal of him by giving in to the pressure to show her proper wizarding pride, by displacing the tension, the source of opposition to the present incarnation of implied pureblooded support of Secrecy currently literally attacking Severus, away from herself and onto him, instead of taking direct action to protect or free him and standing in solidarity with him against James and the unspoken weight of everything behind him, everything tacitly permitting and encouraging his behavior. Implicitly offering him up in practice, while voicing a token protest against it that allows her to save social face with those most likely to overlook her own background.
An implicit offering-up that he’s now responding to with his own reversal of it. See point 1.
And also, possibly, self-contraditorily, subconsciously - or even consciously - a genuine warning to her? To indeed remember that she’s on shaky ground herself, and that Potter and company - and thus everything he stands for and that falls behind him in the WW’s power structures - not only CAN as easily and implacably turn on her as it has on him, but might actually DO so at some point. Even if she sacrifices HIM up to it right now.
Don’t think this will save you, Lily.
He’s kept trying to tell her that Potter and company are bad news, hasn’t he? One wonders what sort of views, not only of muggleborns and halfbloods, but also of certain established wizarding families, their politics, and their scions’ escapades got expressed and hashed out in the Slytherin common room in Severus’ hearing, let alone with Severus himself. Where they’re slightly more inclined by House character to want to dissect such things and discuss the implications - and the older students likely a little more practiced at debating rather than just making personal declarations - than take-things-at-face-value, feel-your-way-along Gryffindors are. Plus, Lily’s in the heart of Potter’s own territory; Severus, of course, very much not.
3 - Hypocrite! This one meant specifically for James, of course. And anyone willing to acknowledge that’s what James is.
Attacking one example of the thinness of the veil between muggle and wizarding worlds, while courting the attentions of another. Claiming implicitly to be a defender of Secrecy by attacking the example of its near-violation, while both courting someone from a muggle background and in his spare time playing or having played a little fast and loose with Secrecy himself. Claiming not to care about blood or ancestry, to be willing to accept the muggleborn, while overtly and repeatedly attacking the halfblood explicitly for the mere fact that he exists. Whose life he claims - boasts - to have saved recently. Contradicting his own claims at the moral, cultural, and political-legal high-ground here.
Unfortunately for Severus, James judged his position and the relative positions and temperaments of his two pawns in that little game rather well. At whatever level of consciousness he did so.
James apparently had enough goodwill both from the institution and socially from his (version of the telling of his) dramatic rescue of the Slytherin to be able to successfully pull that off, and get Severus to dig a hole for himself he couldn’t climb back out of with Evans (cutting off the major source of anti-James sentiment she’s likely to hear, and the only one she’ll encounter outside the WW), without himself risking too much meaningful disapprobation from quarters that mattered, or anything that couldn’t be repaired.
And of the two pawns, the muggleborn was rather more socially acceptable and desireable to the wizarding world, both in the circles James cared about moving in, and likely in general, than the precariously-literal halfblood. Whatever Severus’ relationships in Slytherin and potential patronages there (I strongly suspect a Malfoy-Prince connection somewhere along the line), to the people James cared about looking good to, Lily - the properly integrationist muggleborn girl - was the one who would matter.
As to those potential sources of support or patronage of Severus, current or future (and indeed of Lily too, though not identically to Sev’s situation): we have to be aware that there were necessarily going to be at least two distinct threads to any view of him, or of Lily and other muggleborns for that matter. Merely brought into a particular focus in Severus’ case. And that the nuances of one of them (the question of ‘blood’) disguise both to us and by design to most of the wizarding world the presence and workings of the other.
On the one hand, there would be the standard politically-acceptable range of views on ‘blood purity’/ancestry, its importance, and the nature and context of whatever exceptions that might be made for merit or the like, given appropriate understanding on the latters’ parts of their implicit place and allowed claims. On the other hand, there would be a - quiet and very carefully-expressed - range of views on the other fundamental issue in question: the acceptability and desirability of preserving versus abolishing Secrecy, and why or why not. As well as how best to go about each of those things.
James and Lily were both poised to be drawn firmly and naturally in by the easily dominant - and legally virtually compulsory - preservationist camp. And so they were. Particularly by Dumbledore’s version of it, after Dumbledore has had years to set his own stamp on the House of the lions, while Horace Slughorn has set a slightly different stamp on the integrationist sides of his House.
Severus was inherently positioned at the quiet tipping point between preservationist and abolitionist camps. Which were likely not at all easy to distinguish from one another at first or even second glance when either (any) of them spoke, especially to someone raised for the most part outside the wizarding world, and given the cultural constant of using talk simply of ‘blood’ as a cover for a broader range of concerns. But which would have played out their tension around and through him and on his account, regardless of how conscious he was of this at first.
And with this little stunt of James’, and Severus’ own reaction to it, Severus would have just thrown a wrench into the delicate balance of those tensions surrounding him. Rupturing a link with the integrationist, preservationist side, while opening himself up more to influence from the various abolitionist positions, which by necessity cloak themselves, some even within the rhetoric of others.
And it’s not as if having the Gryffindor scions of two major preservationist families get off without major punishment, from that icon of edgy integrationist-preservationism Albus Dumbledore himself, for nearly murdering the muggle-raised literal halfblood Slytherin with their pet werewolf, while trumpeting their disdain for questions of blood, is going to convince Severus of the sincerity or rightness of their point of view, nor to make him think he’d ever find any welcome in any camp sharing their views, now would it?
His very existence seems to be an unspeakable trespass to them. Whereas to polished pureblood Slytherin prefect Lucius Malfoy (who I suspect knew exactly who this little muggle-named runt was, for a variety of reasons), whatever his expressed views on the importance of blood purity or related concerns, the muggle-raised halfblood Severus was explicitly welcome at his table and in his House, and eventually apparently as some degree of personal friend as well. And who also, at some point, then joined him in fellowship in an inherently anti-Secrecy organization, whatever the particular other goals or understandings of that movement they shared or did not share, then or later.
*
How much did Severus and Lily each, and their housemates, know about the Death Eaters and their ostensible versus true goals at that point? What was publicly known, what suspected, what quietly rumored - and by whom, to whom? How was the organization spun to each of them from the sources they had?
And what exactly did each of them take to be the real issue or issues most in question in both Severus’ comment to Lily, and Lily’s to him?
I’ve rather come to doubt that they shared a common understanding of what the DEs supposedly were and wanted, and simply disagreed on the acceptability of certain aspects of that. I suspect that, by the time the issue began to be talked about at all between them - and then thanks to James erupted right into the middle of their relationship - they had very, very different ideas about what was ‘really’ going on outside Hogwarts and why. (And neither of which was necessarily a good match for the full reality on the ground.) Ideas built up within the very different environments of their two Houses. But that neither of them really grasped WERE so different, because of that very fact.
Crossed wires and talking at crossed purposes every time, each mention only exacerbating the depth of miscommunication and leading them to be less, not more, likely to actually talk anything out at length about what they understood - or about their similarly but not identically unstable positions within the wizarding world’s legal, political, and cultural hierarchies. The thing driving each of them, in their own way, to be trying to adapt as best they could figure out how to a world that simultaneously embraced and rejected them in both overt and covert ways -- but a world which, by legal as well as political-cultural necessity, cloaked discussion of this fact and the various pressures shaping it within a confusing and multi-layered, too-simplistic model of ‘blood purity’ and which was, in all its overt expressions, to some degree inescapably anti-muggle.
A world which, by virtue of these pressures and cloaked views, ultimately demanded that each of them choose who to sacrifice: self or friend.
A sacrifice that at least one of them immediately regretted making.
Is it, perhaps, possible to speculate that it was the very fact that he and Lily felt driven to sacrifice each other to the WW’s bloody politics that led Severus to dream of making a world where that would not be necessary? Fiercely and desperately enough to try to make it happen? Desperately enough to let himself be lied to just enough by those seeming to promise that hope?
Potter’s world, and then Potter himself, set them against each other and poked them into playing an unwinnable game against each other. If someone else held out the vision, the possibility of scrapping the rules of that game and the very limits defining the board itself…
There was no pity in Lily’s voice. “It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends - you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?”
He opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking.
“I can’t pretend anymore. You’ve chosen your way, I’ve chosen mine.”
“No - listen, I didn’t mean - ”
It would be tragically ironic if Lily’s speech were the point at which ‘choosing his way’ started, not - as she thought - ended. If it were the point at which both the vision of a non-Secret-bound world and the painful need for it both sprang clearly into view for him.
A vision and a need that, however, it turned out nobody in the wizarding world of any note or power ever had any honest desire or intent to bring about, except to further extend the reach of the bloody games already occupying it.
Unfortunately.
And a vision and need that the wizarding world’s power structures - political, legal, social, cultural - seem designed to make almost impossible to either express or resolve in any sustained peaceful way.
Because it’s a need that, at the time of the wizarding world’s founding as such, would have seemed diametrically opposed to the most pressing life-and-death need of the wizarding population then. And therefore, in their terror, the vision of it would have been unthinkable, unmentionable, treasonous and heretical. Needing explicitly to be written out as a possibility, as a thought that could be - dared be - ever seriously entertained.
Inconceivable.
And thus equally inconceivable to them as a vision that might ever be needed to be entertained, or made real. Much less with the same life-and-death need they themselves knew.
That the world they were fleeing for life might need again to be conceived of, and rebirthed, for new life.
It was simply, utterly, inconceivable. And nearly as utterly so now.
To Severus’, among others’, great misfortune.
Sectumsempra!
In particular, thinking through how a number of canonical incidents and patterns might have looked from the inside, once we make the realization that - since valuing ‘purity’ of wizarding ancestry is a concept that really only makes sense as arising from and existing within a formally Secret and so strictly isolated wizarding world - when the issue of blood status is on the table, it’s virtually always at one level a coded way of talking about the ever-present but culturally traumatically-frightening threat of historical violent muggle-on-wizard persecution. And is not necessarily the only form of such coded talk. It has developed, over three centuries, a life of its own and has picked up and integrated itself with a lot of other cultural and psychological stuff, like any bigotry, but the root of it and the most unnameable but central aspect of it is the specter of the reverse of wizarding supremacy: muggle domination or eliminationist violence.
A threat that the ongoing, legally-required and violently-maintained muggle ignorance of magic both looks back to historically, and implicitly promises to allow - indeed to spark - again if it is ever discovered.
Not that most adult witches and wizards even want to THINK about that, thank you very much. Secrecy is the most unquestioned need and principle, and its collary - wizarding ignorance of the muggle world - practically a point of pride; but beyond the political and social acceptability and indeed near-indispensibility of expressing at least minimally-coded anti-muggle sentiment, wizards just don’t want to think about it. Keep muggles in their place by whatever means necessary, and then leave it and them alone. Don’t remind anyone of the muggles. Think about wizarding things. Proper things. Safe things.
Show proper wizarding pride.
Inconceivable
More thoughts on Secrecy, wizarding politics, and Severus Snape
If I know only one thing it's that everything that I see
of the world outside is so inconceivable that often I barely can speak.
Yeah, I'm tongue-tied and dizzy and I can't keep it to myself.
What good is it to sing helplessness blues? Why should I wait for anyone else?
-- Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”
*
In her comment sweettalkeress wrote:
If I understand correctly your argument is essentially that the wizards feel free to abuse the muggles at their will and whim as long as the muggles don't know what's going on, but the Death Eaters threaten to undermine the secrecy, and expose the WW to the wrath of the muggles, which is why they're a danger, right? So the Death Eaters who want to undermine secrecy attempt to deflect accusations by blaming the muggleborns?
Basically, yes. Reflecting, I suspect, a larger historical pattern that developed as wizards moved into increasing isolation and then Secrecy. As the idea of engaging or re-engaging openly with muggles became more and more anathema to the general wizarding mindset, this horror became more and more codified into legal as well as cultural-political imperatives. And so the social and legal positions of two - not necessarily strictly distinct - groups of people became increasingly fraught and perilous, to the point where one of them was formally and forcibly outlawed, and the other formally and all-but-forcibly (er, let’s say they were strongly encouraged to be) integrated and assimilated to the exclusion of muggle influence, though not without lingering suspicion in some quarters. The latter: Muggleborns and other magical people with muggle blood relatives, who they were, er, encouraged to distance themselves from and disdain. The former: those witches and wizards holding and advocating for (or suspected of holding) the view that isolation and then formal Secrecy are mistaken, and should be rolled back. For any reason - there are multiple potential reasons to want to end Secrecy, after all, some of which I think we muggles would heartily approve of.
Though after three centuries of fearful isolation in memory of violence, and three centuries of manaically and futilely attempting to cut away every reminder of the threat as it sprouts a new hydra-head with every generation of muggleborns, I suspect that some reasons and rationales for ending Secrecy are more likely to circulate, and will more easily be cloaked enough to circulate more publicly, than others. After all, the acceptability of anti-muggle violence in some basic form is not only a political common denominator, but a legal requirement that every witch and wizard is by necessity made aware of and obligated to support in both theory and practice. Even - or, one would think, especially - muggleborns and others with muggle relatives.
*
To judge by the bizarre approach the wizarding world has toward the topic of muggles and the historical violence of the witch-hunts, the general mindset that the WW instills to some degree in the average witch and wizard is one of profound but subconscious and so unacknowledged and unresolved terror; trauma on a cultural rather than individual level. What is threatening and so rejected, but unfaced and unprocessed, sublimated into obsession with physical purity or reduced into shallow fantasies that can be defeated by things holding only the force of jokes.
We have: the laughably shallow fantasies of Wendelin the Weird and that wizards split away because impressed muggles made too many demands on their skills; the general political acceptability and near-obligation of expressing anti-muggle sentiment, even to the point of concealed violence; legal requirements to avoid dealing directly with muggles and their world as far as possible, and to forcibly conceal wizarding existence from them, without any ability for muggles in the know to claim redress against wizards for any harm done them; indications that the only crime against a muggle one might be prosecuted for is killing them (and so leaving bodies), an exception that one radical but non-pariah witch, Araminta Melliflua, tried to overturn via law; acknowledgement by liberal wizards that muggleborns are needed ‘so wizards don’t die out’ and legal and cultural pressures encouraging muggleborns to integrate both culturally and via marriage, but limited acceptance of them in society; suspicion and disdain for those with muggle relatives, expressed in terms of ‘blood’ but decreasing with each generation away from actual muggles; disdain of and fear of producing non-actively-magical children, squibs, who are disowned by blood purist families together with those ‘marrying out;’ the term ‘muggle’ applied in pureblood circles to those with little to no magic and to muggleborns as well as actual muggles; the term ‘blood traitor’ thrown at a pureblood who indulges a fascination with muggles and politically supports Albus Dumbledore; the bizarre fantasy that muggleborns have somehow ‘stolen’ magic; rejection or suspicion of all forms of ‘halfbreeds’ and strict control of the magic-focusing wand to human wizards, while other self-aware magical beings looking to different legal and cultural codes are forbidden them and forcibly exploited where possible; of the existence but social rejection of adult squibs living in the muggle world; of wandless muggleborns under the DEs choosing to beg in the streets rather than return to their muggle families; of at least two muggleborn witches who fought against Voldemort’s side while showing disdain for and isolating themselves from their muggle families; and finally the mention of but five post-isolation magical-muggle relationships in total, of one of which we know only that it caused the witch to be disowned (Isla Black/Bob Hitchens), and of the other four we know that all produced magical sons, but not that any of them were both happy and stable marriages - in the least-clear/potentially-best case, the post-wedding revelation of his wife’s magic was “a bit of a nasty shock” for Finnigan’s father.
I suspect that, in addition to the legal barriers to successful maintenance of happy relationships of any kind between muggles and magical people, the cultural and political pressures against such fraternizing are strong and inflected with a particularly paranoid and traumatized - and so irrational and very dangerous - form of fear. “Constant vigilance!” That’s the watchword of the wizarding world against the threat of muggle discovery and violence. The threat that, however, it will bend over backward to avoid directly naming where possible (blood), and to downplay laughably where not (Wendelin the Weird).
In “ The Weasley Family Traveling Circus” on hp-essays swythyv dissected the Weasley family’s bizarre approach to security precautions, particularly Molly’s. I think that her outline of the reaction to paranoid fear there is accurate in shape as well to the general wizarding public as a whole, the small scale reflecting in a microcosm the large, if sometimes for varying reasons and with varying objects of fear.
Here’s swythyv:
“Molly is as effective as enemy action. Because Molly Weasley has a blisteringly dangerous definition of security, as this Weasley Family Traveling Circus was designed to show us.
"Arthur the truth would terrify him," said Mrs. Weasley shrilly. "Do you really want to send Harry back to school with that hanging over him? For heaven's sake, he's happy not knowing!" (PoA4)
There followed such gems as "perfectly safe at Hogwarts" (Quirrel!mort? Giant basilisk? Ginny possession?) and repeated denial of reliable intelligence, almost amounting to a fugue state.
[…] Molly had literally rather die than think about the bad thoughts. If it's all right, everybody's safe, and she doesn't have to think about the bad thoughts. And if she's wrong, she's dead, and she doesn't have to think about the bad thoughts. So it's all good.”
Sound familiar?
*
Now consider further.
We KNOW that muggles have no practical rights to speak of within the wizarding world. It may be illegal to kill them for fun, but we see wizards of all political stripes abuse them freely without fear of legal repercussion when the muggles are either 1) already in the know (Dursleys), or 2) obliviated afterward. And consider that Sirius' relative Araminta thought she had enough of a realistic chance at changing even this that she BOTHERED to put the effort to seriously put forward her 'muggle-hunting' act. And neither apparently risked legal punishment that we can see, nor made her family scandalously pariah in the WW. Only known as somewhat extreme in their political conservatism, but still respected and influential.
Killing muggles without cause might be the sole crime against them wizards can actually be prosecuted for. (Indeed, if there was any evidence Sirius did cast something that might have triggered that explosion, Dumbledore might indeed have been actually unable to clear him of a prosecutable crime. Not that he necessarily wanted to, either.) And, er, dead bodies can't be obliviated away - they'll attract official muggle notice. Somehow one doesn't think that the DE cause horrified the WW because of their love of muggle human rights, whatever the lip service some more liberal factions may espouse about only doing NECESSARY violence to muggles.
But those who, like Gellert and like the DEs, aren't content to merely be secretly superior to the muggles from whom they hide, but want to be OPEN in their power over them, unrestricted even by the sole requirement of maintaining secrecy? THEY are the ones who provoked actual legal, moral, and violent backlash from broad sectors of the public. Once it became known that OVERT RULE was their (likely impossible) goal.
And we KNOW how fiercely Secrecy is maintained. Harry had some close calls with that. Including an attempt by his political enemies to hamstring him RIGHT after Voldemort returns. Before the full wizengamot, no less. He got off on that only because DUMBLEDORE HIMSELF showed up (to general unrest), and won over enough of the members. By claiming Harry acted in legitimate self-defense, against those Ministry law enforcement agents - agents sent by a Ministry official, but agents who had no proper business pursuing him then - and by producing a surprise witness to that effect (Mrs. Figg).
Consider also Arthur’s profound discomfort at the change of courtroom there:
'Those courtrooms haven't been used in years,' said Mr. Weasley angrily. 'I can't think why they're doing it down there - unless - but no - '
[…]
'Go on,' he panted, pointing his thumb at the door. 'Get in there.'
'Aren't - aren't you coming with - ?'
'No, no, I'm not allowed. Good luck!'
[…]
Harry gasped; he could not help himself. The large dungeon he had entered was horribly familiar. He had not only seen it before, he had been here before. This was the place he had visited inside Dumbledore's Pensieve, the place where he had watched the Lestranges sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban.
I think Courtroom Ten may just be the - necessarily very secure - courtroom reserved for trying the most severe breaches of the Statute by the most dangerous wizarding criminals: deliberate action meant to undermine Secrecy itself. World-destroying treason.
Swythyv noted Hermione’s fear for Harry when she heard of the change of courtroom, stating that this indicated the event was ‘very nearly an act of state against Harry.’ Swythyv’s right: Umbridge had been hoping to get at Dumbledore and Harry by manufacturing an incident she could use to push through a charge - and hopeful conviction - of attempted treason, or something very close.
If it had worked, the anti-Voldemort effort would have been badly set back indeed. The Boy Who Lived, vanquisher of Voldemort - and rumored powerful Dark Wizard in his own right, who already has been cited for violating the Statute - would have been packed off to Azkaban (or, if enough strings were pulled, possibly Kissed). Meanwhile Dumbledore and his renewed anti-Voldemort cause - a threat whose existence Fudge and the Ministry in general officially and vehemently disclaimed and looked at Dumbledore in suspicion for asserting - would have been politically, socially, and possibly legally hamstrung. Potentially even seen as a new growing intended threat to Secrecy themselves, given all the later paranoia in this book about Dumbledore starting up a ‘secret army’ against the Ministry.
Dumbledore, self-chosen patron of the BWL, with his continuing habit of deferring only to the most minimal anti-muggle-engagement authority and law: the ICW’s Statute of Secrecy. Rejecting both working with and working for the British Ministry, but heading an international body, upholding Secrecy in the letter but surrounding himself with ‘muggle-lovers’ and muggleborns, and (as a comment on IWSOTN noted) reading muggle periodicals and adopting other bits of muggle culture. Without, however, treating muggles with respect himself, note.
Dumbledore, patron or employer at one time or another of the most curious sorts: a half-giant convict with a habit of setting monsters loose, a werewolf with a bad habit of wanting to play outside whom he secretly educated, a memory charm specialist and repeat conman (in a cursed position), Ministry employees linked with muggle relations and law enforcement, and muggleborns and vehemently pro-muggle or pro-muggleborn purebloods.
Oh, and patron of one self-confessed but publicly-unrevealed actual ex-Death Eater, apparently released by so closed a hearing that, even as MINISTER later, Fudge was unaware of his record. Until said ex-DE intervened into a Fudge-Dumbledore argument about Voldemort by quite literally shoving the evidence of his criminal associations into Fudge’s face, on Dumbledore’s supposed behalf. After a previous visit in which escaped DE convict Sirius Black had been captured and then mysteriously disappeared while under Dumbledore’s control. And now establishing that there was crucial information about the Death Eaters and their workings (the Mark) that Dumbledore was aware of but had not fully informed the Ministry of.
Er.
If Voldemort could have cast his major declared enemy and biggest non-Ministry threat as a deliberate underground anti-Secrecy effort and so the actual threat to the Ministry, using rumors of his own return as a smokescreen for their activities (just as Voldemort himself would be doing here and with the muggleborns in general), wouldn’t that have done wonders for his program of takeover? No wonder he recruited Lucius and then kept him around as long as he did despite his missteps: with his connections and influence he was very, very useful.
(And Severus, dear, what were you doing with that little move there? Really?)
*
Potential or actual violations of Secrecy are somehow involved in all the crimes that we see people actually risking severe Ministry punishment and/or GENERAL social disapprobation for. And marking the limits of what is considered politically feasible or desireable. Regardless of the views on the importance of strict blood purity held by anyone involved.
And it makes sense. How do we think the muggle world would react, realistically, to finding out that for three centuries a small population of freakishly powerful and self-obsessed people have been freely abusing and mind-wiping ordinary people and hiding it from them, while utterly ignoring all muggle laws and interests? And that elements of this society want to violently dominate the entire muggle world because they think their magic gives them the right to?
I don’t think we’d be seeing wizarding-muggle pancake breakfasts as a first response here. Especially if that revelation came in the form of an actual violent attempt to establish such domination. And most adult wizards and witches would eventually realize this on some level - would realize that Wendelin the Weird is a FANTASY of successful resistance. If magic alone was enough to counter any muggle violence, Secrecy wouldn’t exist. And now they have weapons that can destroy CITIES at once.
Imagine the reaction of non-Muggleborn wizards and witches learning for the first time about Hiroshima or the like. Does that get covered in Muggle Studies?
This would also make sense of how easily Lucius got that Imperius defense, and then continued to spout unapologetic anti-muggle and anti-muggleborn views and be considered socially influential. He didn’t claim he’d been imperiused into acting violently toward muggles/muggleborns, the horror! He claimed he’d been imperiused into thinking that breaking Secrecy in his anti-muggle sentiments was the way to go. An idea so profoundly stupid, heretical, and openly treasonous - and so inherently destructive to his own family’s best interests! - that it would be easy (and subconsciously reassuring) for the wizard on the street to believe he MUST have been imperiused. Look how much he’s got to lose from breaking Secrecy!
Indeed, it’s possible - though by no means necessary - to posit that after his initial experience with the DEs he MAY HAVE quietly and genuinely repented of this one particular criminal view. Came to see the realistic necessity of maintaining Secrecy at the moment. (And perhaps, thus, to take particular personal and political offense at DUMBLEDORE’S continued patronage of a certain “muggle-loving blood traitor” - that is, the pureblooded but unrepentantly muggle-involved Ministry clown who can’t even do his job right, but uses it as an excuse to FURTHER involve himself with muggle things and even try to push for greater protection for muggles themselves? And rendering his continued friendship with one Severus Snape very interesting indeed.) Without, however, needing or being pushed to reconsider his views of inherent wizarding SUPERIORITY OVER muggles and disdain for muggleborns. Or feeling the need to stop expressing them in culturally and legally acceptable ways.
Leaving Harry and those like him in Dumbledore’s circle obsessed with the surface blood aspect to assume he must still be a loyal DE at heart, while leaving Lucius further reason to be terrified of Voldemort. Might that, in fact, not help to explain why so many of his followers deserted the Dark Lord in terror, beyond his psychopathy and willingness to torture them, etc.?
Some of them realized what would happen if he got control and tried to actually take over the muggle world, as he apparently WAS seriously intent upon. Whatever they initially thought they were signing up for.
But if he can come back from the DEAD, and will torture and kill whoever does not bow to him, wizard or muggle alike?
Well, he might be powerful enough to actually eventually see his insane program through. At least to the point of breaking Secrecy for good, whatever the fallout. In which case, better to be on the winning side and have a chance at being one of the wizards in power, not one of those slaughtered by either the muggles or the DEs first. He’s going to kill you and your family anyway if you resist - better a long shot at a place in the regime than a choice of death by Voldemort or death by muggle. Once you’ve already got his brand and leash on you, that is. Not so many NEW recruits this time around, after all.
No wonder they thought him the worst in a hundred years, or since ever. Worse than Grindelwald. For once they had an anti-muggle Dark Lord bent on ending Secrecy who might actually be able to force the issue!
We don’t see ANY political group or faction openly dedicated to - or even honestly considering - peacefully ending Secrecy and opening up careful negotiations with the muggle world. NONE. Not even any individuals other than perhaps Carlotta. No matter how “muggle-loving” they are.
This is indicative of just how deep-seated the assumption of wizarding superiority is to the wizarding mindset; it’s essentially a required as well as natural assumption given the terms of the existence of their world, which every wizard is apparently made explicitly aware of beginning in childhood.
Consider how much nine-year-old Severus Snape knew about wizarding law relating to Secrecy and the Ministry’s mechanisms of and dedication to enforcement of it. Having been raised in a dirt-poor and thoroughly muggle neighborhood by a magical-muggle couple, and without apparently having had much significant, successful, social integration with other wizards at that point. Or, for that matter, with muggles either.
A thought: how POSSIBLE would such integration have been for him, practically speaking, given the family’s economic situation - and thus choice of location - and the combination of legal caution required in their day to day life with the likely suspicion and cultural disdain of them by other wizards? Was the Snape family’s tense and bitter unhappiness and conflict rooted in the practical fallout from Eileen and Tobias’ marriage across the invisible line dividing their worlds? From what might have originally been, even, a marriage made in love, maybe some gesture of youthful hopeful defiance on Eileen’s part a la Andromeda Black? Only a step further. And that she eventually came to bitterly regret. So that she instilled in her son, not deep-seated concerns over purity of wizarding ancestry, but the impulse to reject MUGGLES specifically and to avoid getting tangled up with them where possible? Pushing on him, with all the vehemence of a parent wanting her child to avoid her own mistakes, the need to INTEGRATE as completely as possible with the wizarding world? A need that muggleborns of course would be seen as having too - not their FAULT they have muggle parents, but better for them to succeed in adapting fully to the wizarding world and engaging socially only with other magical people, etc. And thus urged him to aim for Slytherin - Eileen would have known of the Slug Club whatever her own house.
The lack of peaceful political opposition to Secrecy also may be indicative of what is legally, practically, possible. Depending on how the Statute is written. If there’s any language in there forbidding groups dedicated to ending Secrecy from simply meeting, or forbidding any serious effort to end Secrecy even by non-violent means, it might not be practically possible to HAVE such a political faction. Which might be merely the result of unclear language in the law having been previously interpreted as strictly forbidding the formation of factions with such a goal or even serious discussion of the issue.
Or, depending on how terrified the wizards at the ICW back in the 17th century were, it might be a deliberate feature of the law. They might have intended Secrecy to be literally irrevocable. In which case, they’ve rather screwed themselves over and painted themselves into a very tight corner indeed. For they might not have understood just how rapidly the muggle world would grow, and how crowded up against its edges wizards would become. And thus left themselves no practical peaceful means for dealing with the situation when it came it pass.
Muggleborns will have to continue to be integrated, or dealt with some other way. Not only to “keep wizards from dying out” for lack of a refreshed gene pool and number of mates, as Ron implies, but also to keep them from being potentially WIPED out by an angry muggle population alerted to the existence of magic by them, as probably almost happened before Secrecy was imposed.
But the political and other pressures will by necessity keep building, because no release valve will have been built into the wizarding world’s structure for opening toward the muggle world in any significant way. The paranoid, traumatized fear that drove the early generations during and post-Secrecy imposition will only become more and more repressed and potent and reinforced, because the only possible image of muggles that can get transmitted effectively down the generations is that of the inherent implacable and terrifying enemy, against whom the WW must defend at any cost. At first consciously, then subconsciously and structurally, with an increasing layer of ‘muggles can’t possibly hurt wizards EFFECTIVELY, not at all, we are so much more powerful than them inherently! we are in no danger’ fantasizing laid on top, to numb that profound, reinforced and irresolvable, unlooked-at terror. A vicious circle, with the pressure erupting every so often through the violent release valves of muggle-domination-wanting dark lords rising and then being successfully, violently, defeated by the WW BEFORE they can effectively end Secrecy itself.
*
Now, also, we know why Gryffindor Sirius Black, who so vehemently and publicly rejected his family and all their concerns and desires as a point of PRINCIPLE, and loudly proclaimed his brotherhood with muggleborn-accepting James Potter, was so easily believed by the public to be Voldemort’s chief lieutenant. They didn’t think Sirius was secretly a raving blood purist. They thought he was a raving anti-Secrecy zealot who got himself accepted among the muggle- and muggleborn-FRIENDLY elements of society, but then found them not radically anti-Secrecy enough for him, and thus supposedly went over to Voldemort. Betraying the path of quiet acceptance of potential fifth-columnists, in his ostensible hopes of ending Secrecy through them, for the militant approach of taking over the WW’s institutions and through them moving to openly attempt to engage the muggles directly. They didn’t much care what specifically he thought about muggles themselves, sympathy or antipathy. To outside observers, both actual anti-wizarding sentiment, and mere heedless arrogant stupidity in one’s anti-MUGGLE sentiment, were equally dangerous, and equal motives for trying to end Secrecy.
And we may also have here, it strikes me now, something more of an explanation for where precisely that comment of muggleborn-accepting James Potter’s came from, when he replied to muggleborn Lily’s objection to his treatment of the literal halfblood Snape with, “it's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean…” And why Lily, herself muggleborn and thus most likely getting pressure from EVERY direction to integrate, integrate, integrate, by that point may not have felt like she had much social ground to stand on, so that risking it by doing something to ACTIVELY help Severus might be too costly by her own calculations. A further, somewhat tragic explanation for that whole ugly mess and the dissolution of the halfblood-muggleborn friendship, now that I consider it.
How long do you think it took to become known around Hogwarts that the new Slytherin potions geek, the one with the muggleborn Gryffindor for a friend, was a LITERAL halfblood who was raised primarily in the muggle world?
As a muggleborn witch, Lily Evans stood on uncertain social and political ground in the wizarding world. Legally accepted, within certain limits, but pushed by every faction to integrate as far as possible with other wizards - whether out of explicit blood purist concerns, well-meaning security concerns, or even concern for Lily’s own wellbeing and legal, social, and political success. Some factions would reject her as inherently inferior or of suspect loyalties, some might allow her limited success and acceptance, and some might try to push for something more for her; all of them however will expect her to adhere fully to the most fundamental wizarding assumptions and policies. Including rejection of significant dealings directly with the muggle world, except where absolutely unavoidable. For her own good, of course.
As the direct, MAGICAL offspring of a mixed witch-muggle marriage, Severus Snape was practically a walking violation of the Statute of Secrecy itself. Standing inherently and unchangeably right astride the most fundamental line in the wizarding world. Subconsciously an offense to every decent and right-thinking wizard’s most fundamental principles, regardless of their further political views on ‘blood purity.’ Living proof that the all-important, white-hot, essential legal and political as well as cultural-moral line had been crossed, decisively and with unignorable, continuing concrete consequences.
Crossed by a witch, no less - not by a wizard who could disclaim paternity and disappear back into the wizarding world, but by a witch who had to carry and bear the child and raise it in one or the other world, and who, out of choice or economic necessity or both, seems to have ended up doing so primarily in the muggle world. To the very circumscribed extent permitted to her and her child by wizarding culture and LAW. And thus she AND HER SON were also potential violations of the statute waiting to happen. A present and continuing danger to the fragile legal veil preserving the wizarding world from the directly unfaceable but ever-present and not-quite-nameable threat. Of discovery and renewed muggle persecution.
Not, as with the muggleborns, due to chance occurrence and thus - for the more open-minded wizards - potentially viewable as just an unfortunate circumstance that isn’t the witch or wizard’s own fault, something uncontrollable and thus somewhat excuseable, so long as the muggleborn makes every effort to integrate. Innocent, if still potentially dangerous. But a reminder that the line can be and had been crossed BY CHOICE, the OTHER direction. And thus inherently GUILTY. An offense, not an accident. Something - SOMEONE - that, especially to the most hardline integrationists, should not exist. For the wizarding world’s very safety. And who either knows it, or ought to be made to know it as effectively as possible.
As a warning, to the walking violation himself, of exactly where he stands. As an example to all the others watching, a reminder of where the most fundamental lines are and how much they ought not to be crossed, of what the stakes are. And as a reminder to the muggleborn Lily herself of her own precarious position in the wizarding world, and thus of the strategic desireability to herself of accepting James’ advances and attentions.
None of this need necessarily be fully consciously thought out by James himself, though some of it likely may have been in his mind to a degree. It’s all been instilled in him to the subconscious or even unconscious level as well, and he simply chose to recognize and act upon it for his own purposes and to his own advantage.
As, of course, is also the case with his fellow pureblood friend-turned-brother Sirius Black. And possibly status-unknown Peter, to some degree.
And, of course, in a very particular way to the other walking potential violation of Secrecy (and other boundaries) in that little club, the werewolf Remus Lupin. Who undoubtedly has been told over and over of the lifelong need to make sure he is secured for his transformations because of the specific danger he poses to MUGGLES, who don’t know to go inside on full moon nights.
The same werewolf Sirius Black had recently tried to use as a trap for the halfblood, consciously (supposedly) considering it merely something meant to “scare” the halfblood. Scare him out of sneaking around and trying to use wizarding authority to halt the games the two pureblood scions felt as their entitled right to play with him, as well as with the werewolf. Getting them expelled - and thus preventing them from attaining the full rights of first-class wizarding citizenship to which they would be entitled upon completing their schooling, preventing them from free exercise of their magic.
The trap that, as the halfblood himself pointed out so bitterly, would more likely have ended with him infected and shunned himself, or dead.
After all, the “fact that he exists” is offensive two ways: both as reminder of the past violation by his parents, and as threat of future violations (legal, cultural, etc.) by himself. He should not exist, and should not be allowed to KEEP existing.
Not that Sirius or James themselves never ever violated the statute, however. There was that charmed motorcycle, remember. Among other things they liked to have fun with.
And, er, when exactly did that occasion with the muggle policeman occur? Do we even know for sure? Or when that bike was first charmed and ridden, at least? And that it was always, except that one time, ridden outside of muggle view?
I think it was swythyv, wasn’t it? who posited that maybe one reason they were able to clap Sirius in prison without a trial is because he was on probation for already having violated the Statute of Secrecy with that motorcycle stunt, as the owner and charmer of the machine, and his family had pulled strings for him?
And that then he was allowed to go into the care of the Potter family (‘run away to live with James’) when he rejected his own family afterward, because they guaranteed to keep in check both boys?
Whatever the specific incident and its timing, one imagines that James as well as Sirius got a very, very stern reminder about not breaking that particular law again, too. About the VITAL need to maintain that line.
Stern enough, perhaps, that it not only sparked him to shape up on that particular front, earning the Hogwarts’ authorites’ notice and eventually that headboy badge, but indeed something of a, let’s say a passionate dedication to maintaining that line? Possibly, just possibly, driven by a little tiny bit of repressed anger at this immovable but vital outer limit to the universe that he, like Sirius, felt otherwise entitled to play master of?
Was SWM partly a displaced reaction to having had the boundary lines of his and Sirius’ assumed mastery of the world drawn out harshly for him with the weight of an authority he could not ignore?
That would go some way toward explaining why Severus continued to be such a special case for him, even to the point of hexing him behind Lily’s back and lying to her about it.
He’s everything James is supposed to detest on principle, has been encouraged to reject, and yet apparently has a fascination with that he can’t quite calmly free himself and walk away from. He takes the more politically-acceptable, pretty and integrationist muggleborn girl for himself, and ends up later dedicating himself to an explicitly pro-muggleborn but pointedly integrationist vigilante group, while obsessing himself while at school with violently disdaining and abusing her half-muggle former friend whenever possible.
*
And by the time of that incident, Lily had received enough of the general message from all sides about her own position in the WW that she was already trying not to be seen by her magical peers to associate openly too much with him, wasn’t she? Though not quite enough, before this, to convince her to just drop him altogether - her first wizarding friend, and only one back home outside the wizarding world. Where she still had to go in the summers and restrict her magic, until she turned seventeen.
Not that she handled, or necessarily knew how to handle, all of this in a particularly forthright and conscious way with him, as befitting any claim to solid committed friendship - or to, on the other hand, an honest recognition that maybe she just didn’t feel committed to the friendship any more, for whatever reason.
Severus, meanwhile, has of course been getting certain messages himself from various sides. And appears to have been at least as aware of the pressure as she was (though the nuances of it would have been somewhat different for each of them given, not only their respective Houses, but also particular vulnerabilities, uncertain positions, and even genders, given the default assumption of heterosexuality I think we can take as read in the Potterverse like our own).
And no better at responding to this pressure in a graceful and self-aware way.
“I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!”
When Severus picked that particular epithet to fling at Lily that way in his humiliated and betrayed fury, I now realize, he wasn’t just aiming to hurt her with a word he knew she individually would be sensitive to in payment for her flirting with James over helping him - though I do think that was his conscious motive. He was also sending her and everyone watching that display an implicit multi-layered message. Much of it only subconscious, and some of it self-contradictory. Severus was, after all, always deeply in conflict with himself.
The gendered aspects of this I think should be fairly obvious already, and I know others have mentioned them in previous discussions elsewhere, so I’ll move on.
1 - I don’t need or want help from someone potentially legally and politically suspect like that. I’m not anti-wizard, I want to integrate. I’m not a threat. I don’t want to threaten Secrecy.
The single most constant danger he must have been conscious of, and explicitly or implicitly reminded of, every time he went back home to the Snape household.
As Lily would, of course, also have been made to be conscious of herself when outside the WW, but only as the victim of circumstance. An accident of her birth. Whereas the mere existence of Severus’ immediate family, of the very union that produced him, was, shall we say, a LEGALLY curious as well as culturally and politically touchy thing.
2 - You’re in the same boat as me, Evans. Don’t forget it!
An angry rejection of her felt betrayal of him by giving in to the pressure to show her proper wizarding pride, by displacing the tension, the source of opposition to the present incarnation of implied pureblooded support of Secrecy currently literally attacking Severus, away from herself and onto him, instead of taking direct action to protect or free him and standing in solidarity with him against James and the unspoken weight of everything behind him, everything tacitly permitting and encouraging his behavior. Implicitly offering him up in practice, while voicing a token protest against it that allows her to save social face with those most likely to overlook her own background.
An implicit offering-up that he’s now responding to with his own reversal of it. See point 1.
And also, possibly, self-contraditorily, subconsciously - or even consciously - a genuine warning to her? To indeed remember that she’s on shaky ground herself, and that Potter and company - and thus everything he stands for and that falls behind him in the WW’s power structures - not only CAN as easily and implacably turn on her as it has on him, but might actually DO so at some point. Even if she sacrifices HIM up to it right now.
Don’t think this will save you, Lily.
He’s kept trying to tell her that Potter and company are bad news, hasn’t he? One wonders what sort of views, not only of muggleborns and halfbloods, but also of certain established wizarding families, their politics, and their scions’ escapades got expressed and hashed out in the Slytherin common room in Severus’ hearing, let alone with Severus himself. Where they’re slightly more inclined by House character to want to dissect such things and discuss the implications - and the older students likely a little more practiced at debating rather than just making personal declarations - than take-things-at-face-value, feel-your-way-along Gryffindors are. Plus, Lily’s in the heart of Potter’s own territory; Severus, of course, very much not.
3 - Hypocrite! This one meant specifically for James, of course. And anyone willing to acknowledge that’s what James is.
Attacking one example of the thinness of the veil between muggle and wizarding worlds, while courting the attentions of another. Claiming implicitly to be a defender of Secrecy by attacking the example of its near-violation, while both courting someone from a muggle background and in his spare time playing or having played a little fast and loose with Secrecy himself. Claiming not to care about blood or ancestry, to be willing to accept the muggleborn, while overtly and repeatedly attacking the halfblood explicitly for the mere fact that he exists. Whose life he claims - boasts - to have saved recently. Contradicting his own claims at the moral, cultural, and political-legal high-ground here.
Unfortunately for Severus, James judged his position and the relative positions and temperaments of his two pawns in that little game rather well. At whatever level of consciousness he did so.
James apparently had enough goodwill both from the institution and socially from his (version of the telling of his) dramatic rescue of the Slytherin to be able to successfully pull that off, and get Severus to dig a hole for himself he couldn’t climb back out of with Evans (cutting off the major source of anti-James sentiment she’s likely to hear, and the only one she’ll encounter outside the WW), without himself risking too much meaningful disapprobation from quarters that mattered, or anything that couldn’t be repaired.
And of the two pawns, the muggleborn was rather more socially acceptable and desireable to the wizarding world, both in the circles James cared about moving in, and likely in general, than the precariously-literal halfblood. Whatever Severus’ relationships in Slytherin and potential patronages there (I strongly suspect a Malfoy-Prince connection somewhere along the line), to the people James cared about looking good to, Lily - the properly integrationist muggleborn girl - was the one who would matter.
As to those potential sources of support or patronage of Severus, current or future (and indeed of Lily too, though not identically to Sev’s situation): we have to be aware that there were necessarily going to be at least two distinct threads to any view of him, or of Lily and other muggleborns for that matter. Merely brought into a particular focus in Severus’ case. And that the nuances of one of them (the question of ‘blood’) disguise both to us and by design to most of the wizarding world the presence and workings of the other.
On the one hand, there would be the standard politically-acceptable range of views on ‘blood purity’/ancestry, its importance, and the nature and context of whatever exceptions that might be made for merit or the like, given appropriate understanding on the latters’ parts of their implicit place and allowed claims. On the other hand, there would be a - quiet and very carefully-expressed - range of views on the other fundamental issue in question: the acceptability and desirability of preserving versus abolishing Secrecy, and why or why not. As well as how best to go about each of those things.
James and Lily were both poised to be drawn firmly and naturally in by the easily dominant - and legally virtually compulsory - preservationist camp. And so they were. Particularly by Dumbledore’s version of it, after Dumbledore has had years to set his own stamp on the House of the lions, while Horace Slughorn has set a slightly different stamp on the integrationist sides of his House.
Severus was inherently positioned at the quiet tipping point between preservationist and abolitionist camps. Which were likely not at all easy to distinguish from one another at first or even second glance when either (any) of them spoke, especially to someone raised for the most part outside the wizarding world, and given the cultural constant of using talk simply of ‘blood’ as a cover for a broader range of concerns. But which would have played out their tension around and through him and on his account, regardless of how conscious he was of this at first.
And with this little stunt of James’, and Severus’ own reaction to it, Severus would have just thrown a wrench into the delicate balance of those tensions surrounding him. Rupturing a link with the integrationist, preservationist side, while opening himself up more to influence from the various abolitionist positions, which by necessity cloak themselves, some even within the rhetoric of others.
And it’s not as if having the Gryffindor scions of two major preservationist families get off without major punishment, from that icon of edgy integrationist-preservationism Albus Dumbledore himself, for nearly murdering the muggle-raised literal halfblood Slytherin with their pet werewolf, while trumpeting their disdain for questions of blood, is going to convince Severus of the sincerity or rightness of their point of view, nor to make him think he’d ever find any welcome in any camp sharing their views, now would it?
His very existence seems to be an unspeakable trespass to them. Whereas to polished pureblood Slytherin prefect Lucius Malfoy (who I suspect knew exactly who this little muggle-named runt was, for a variety of reasons), whatever his expressed views on the importance of blood purity or related concerns, the muggle-raised halfblood Severus was explicitly welcome at his table and in his House, and eventually apparently as some degree of personal friend as well. And who also, at some point, then joined him in fellowship in an inherently anti-Secrecy organization, whatever the particular other goals or understandings of that movement they shared or did not share, then or later.
*
How much did Severus and Lily each, and their housemates, know about the Death Eaters and their ostensible versus true goals at that point? What was publicly known, what suspected, what quietly rumored - and by whom, to whom? How was the organization spun to each of them from the sources they had?
And what exactly did each of them take to be the real issue or issues most in question in both Severus’ comment to Lily, and Lily’s to him?
I’ve rather come to doubt that they shared a common understanding of what the DEs supposedly were and wanted, and simply disagreed on the acceptability of certain aspects of that. I suspect that, by the time the issue began to be talked about at all between them - and then thanks to James erupted right into the middle of their relationship - they had very, very different ideas about what was ‘really’ going on outside Hogwarts and why. (And neither of which was necessarily a good match for the full reality on the ground.) Ideas built up within the very different environments of their two Houses. But that neither of them really grasped WERE so different, because of that very fact.
Crossed wires and talking at crossed purposes every time, each mention only exacerbating the depth of miscommunication and leading them to be less, not more, likely to actually talk anything out at length about what they understood - or about their similarly but not identically unstable positions within the wizarding world’s legal, political, and cultural hierarchies. The thing driving each of them, in their own way, to be trying to adapt as best they could figure out how to a world that simultaneously embraced and rejected them in both overt and covert ways -- but a world which, by legal as well as political-cultural necessity, cloaked discussion of this fact and the various pressures shaping it within a confusing and multi-layered, too-simplistic model of ‘blood purity’ and which was, in all its overt expressions, to some degree inescapably anti-muggle.
A world which, by virtue of these pressures and cloaked views, ultimately demanded that each of them choose who to sacrifice: self or friend.
A sacrifice that at least one of them immediately regretted making.
Is it, perhaps, possible to speculate that it was the very fact that he and Lily felt driven to sacrifice each other to the WW’s bloody politics that led Severus to dream of making a world where that would not be necessary? Fiercely and desperately enough to try to make it happen? Desperately enough to let himself be lied to just enough by those seeming to promise that hope?
Potter’s world, and then Potter himself, set them against each other and poked them into playing an unwinnable game against each other. If someone else held out the vision, the possibility of scrapping the rules of that game and the very limits defining the board itself…
There was no pity in Lily’s voice. “It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends - you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?”
He opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking.
“I can’t pretend anymore. You’ve chosen your way, I’ve chosen mine.”
“No - listen, I didn’t mean - ”
It would be tragically ironic if Lily’s speech were the point at which ‘choosing his way’ started, not - as she thought - ended. If it were the point at which both the vision of a non-Secret-bound world and the painful need for it both sprang clearly into view for him.
A vision and a need that, however, it turned out nobody in the wizarding world of any note or power ever had any honest desire or intent to bring about, except to further extend the reach of the bloody games already occupying it.
Unfortunately.
And a vision and need that the wizarding world’s power structures - political, legal, social, cultural - seem designed to make almost impossible to either express or resolve in any sustained peaceful way.
Because it’s a need that, at the time of the wizarding world’s founding as such, would have seemed diametrically opposed to the most pressing life-and-death need of the wizarding population then. And therefore, in their terror, the vision of it would have been unthinkable, unmentionable, treasonous and heretical. Needing explicitly to be written out as a possibility, as a thought that could be - dared be - ever seriously entertained.
Inconceivable.
And thus equally inconceivable to them as a vision that might ever be needed to be entertained, or made real. Much less with the same life-and-death need they themselves knew.
That the world they were fleeing for life might need again to be conceived of, and rebirthed, for new life.
It was simply, utterly, inconceivable. And nearly as utterly so now.
To Severus’, among others’, great misfortune.
Sectumsempra!