Eating Death?

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

In poking around more while researching stuff for my coming discussion of Severus and Voldemort for Indestructible, I discovered a curious little fact that seems fitting.

In "Indestructible Intermezzo II - Etymological Excursus," I noted that:

"Our poison synonym, ‘toxic,’ on the other hand, derives ultimately from the Greek word for bow, toxon: the term toxicon pharmakon referred to the poison smeared on arrows, and was borrowed into Latin as toxicum, ‘poison.’ Meanwhile the probably-Scythian word for bow that entered Greek as toxon was also borrowed directly into Latin as taxus, the Latin word for ‘yew.’ A tree long associated with both death and resurrection, and from whose wood, of course, Voldemort got his wand."

And today, while researching the yew tree, I found an unexpected connection back to Severus.

All species of yew tree are known to contain varieties of a highly toxic class of alkaloids called taxanes. Every part of the tree other than the flesh of the red berry-like arils contains these toxins, including the seeds, wood, and leaves. Though the birds who eat the arils and spread the seeds are generally unable to break down the seeds and be affected by the poison, and larvae of a few species of moth and butterfly will eat yew foliage, to most animals consuming yew is fatally poisonous. Human beings consuming yew 'berries' without removing the seeds have died, and cattle and horses have been found dead near yew trees after trying to eat the leaves.

There does, however, seem to be an exception to this rule. Deer are able to break down the toxin, and so will eat the leaves of yew trees. Indeed, they graze so freely on yew that in the wild yew trees are commonly found only on steep slopes inaccessible to deer.

Apparently deer can eat death and live.

You can't make this stuff up.

Rita Skeeter posts a contribution to our discussion

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

I just re-read what Rita wrote after reproducing Albus’s charming letter to his lover.  And it’s instructive, as Rita always is.  Here she is, in all her audience-wooing. muckraking glory:

“Astonished and appalled though his many admirers will be, this letter constitutes proof that Albus Dumbledore once dreamed of overthrowing the Statute of Secrecy and establishing Wizard rule over Muggles. What a blow for those who have always portrayed Dumbledore as the Muggle-borns’ greatest champion!  How hollow those speeches promoting Muggle rights in the light of this damning new evidence!  How despicable does Albus Dumbledore appear, busy plotting his rise to power when he should have been mourning his mother and caring for his sister!”

Rita Skeeter, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, quoted in DH 18.

And there we have it.  What strikes US (or, at least me; I shouldn’t jump in and speak for other Muggles) as unthinkably shocking and horrifying about Albus and Gellert’s youthful fancies is that they quite seriously plotted to set themselves up as total dictators, whatever violence—to body or mind—was required for them to “seize control” and maintain it afterwards.

What Rita expected to astonish and appall her magical readers, conversely, was that Albus “once dreamed of overthrowing the Statute of Secrecy.”


Um.  So. Plot mass murder and absolute, inescapable repression?  Dream of enslaving, both body and mind, all the survivors of your original coup?  MILLIONS of victims?  (Most of them Muggle, by definition.)

And then force your slaves to recite, in unison, that it had all been for their own greater good.  Really.

(In real life, some Western slave-owners actually DID make this argument.  Had they not mercifully caused African natives to be kidnapped and worked [or tortured] to death, said natives might well have gone through their whole lives without ever, perhaps, having received the benefit of learning about Christianity!)

The response of Rita’s Daily Prophet readers to such a program? 

Neh.  Boys will be boys, and it’s good to have ambitions.

But.  Plot to overturn the Statute of Secrecy? 

How despicable does Albus seem!