Extraordinary

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

I was in the middle of crafting an extremely ingenious and elaborate explanation of why, uniquely in the WW, Lily’s sacrificial death could possibly have powered a shield so extraordinarily strong as to have deflected the unblockable Avada Kedavra, when the question hit me: but did it?

Or did something else happen that night?

This meta is dedicated to Erastes’ Random Death Eaters, Chuck and Lance, who I think would appreciate my final supposition.

(If you never read the posts in “Deadly Hollow” sporking DH, why not? Do that first.)




We inferred that that German woman’s attempt to shelter her children behind her own body (as Lily had shielded Harry) probably hadn’t saved them when Tom was Elder-Wand-hunting. We KNOW that James’s flinging himself wandlessly in Tom’s path didn’t create a shield that deflected the AK from Lily when it was her turn to face Tom’s wand.

And we know that a knowledgeable but inexperienced Dark Arts expert, sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle, agreed upon consideration that a mother’s dying to save her baby could be, or create, “a powerful countercharm.” [CS 17]

Only—powerful enough to outright block Avada Kedavra???

Well, but did it need to?

Tom never said that it had.

*

It was Dumbledore who disseminated the various stories about what happened that night, some of which we eventually deduced to have been, shall we say, more notable for creativity than for truthfulness.

For example, it was Dumbledore who informed the WW that Harry’s curse scar was from surviving Avada Kedavra, that the spell had actually hit Harry and somehow failed to kill him. Oryx_leucoryx argued, I thought most convincingly, that the scar was rather from the entry of Tom’s soul-fragment. (The existence of which Albus wanted to cover up….)

Similarly, it was Dumbledore who convinced the whole of Wizarding Britain that “somethin’ about you finished him, Harry…. somethin’ about you stumped him, all right [PS 4]” when really it was Tom’s rebounding Avada Kedavra that “finished” Tom (or at least destroyed his body).

And it was Dumbles who told Harry directly that “Your mother died to save you… love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark… to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed, and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good. [PS 17]”

So. Lily’s love and death created a permanent protection-field in Harry’s very skin, making it impossible for anyone evil ever to touch him. (That settles any possible question as to whether any of the Dursleys could be considered to be full of hatred, greed, or ambition, hm?)

Or at least, as Twinkles modified our understanding later [OotP 37], made it impossible for Voldemort himself to touch or (directly) harm Harry. His mother’s blood was Harry’s strongest shield.

So, that must have been what happened that night, right? It wasn’t HARRY’S super-Speshulness that had absorbed the killing curse with only a scar, it was the Power of Lily’s Love that had made it impossible for Tom to “touch or harm” her baby. Her loving sacrifice made it agony for Tom to touch her child later, and it shielded Harry from Tom’s direct curses.

Even from the Killing Curse, presumably.

But Avada Kedavra, we’re told, can’t be blocked by magical means. Any more than it can be survived.

That’s why everyone in the WW thought Harry had to be so very special, for surviving it.

So then Lily must have been, for blocking it.

The fact that the WW was previously utterly ignorant that Love can block the Killing Curse just proves that Lily’s love for her child must have been of unprecedented, extraordinary, depth and power.

Er, right.

Only, it was Dumbledore who’d put it in my mind that Lily’s sacrifice had SHIELDED Harry from Tom, Dumbledore who’d used the terms shield, and refuge, and protection...

Dumbledore told Harry that he had protected Harry “by an ancient magic, of which he [Tom] knows, which he despises, and which he has always, therefore, underestimated—to his cost. I am speaking, of course, of the fact that your mother died to save you. She gave you a lingering protection… that flows in your veins to this day…. Your mother’s sacrifice made the bond of blood the strongest shield I could give you… While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort. He shed her blood, but it lives on in you and her sister. Her blood became your refuge.” [OotP 37, emphasis mine}

So it was Dumbledore’s words (and the fact that Lily had previously physically interposed her body between her baby and the murderer) that had led me to believe that Lily’s death had somehow created a shield that directly blocked harmful touches or curses inflicted by Tom on her son, that had blocked even the Killing Curse.

Instead, it seems that Dumbledore had BUILT upon Lily’s death-sacrifice some spell that subsequently MADE Harry “untouchable” to Tom when Harry was in the presence of (or domicile of) “Lily’s blood.” Which magical protection had weird legalistic restrictions on it, characteristic more of Twinkle’s twisty mind setting up a formal spell than of a dying mother’s love fountaining out to provide her baby with mystical protection.

I mean, a protection that blocked Tom but no one else from “touching or harming” her child? What, Lily would have been fine with Dudley’s gang using Harry as a football, with Tom’s servants kidnapping, binding, and cutting him, with a sadist permanently mutilating him? But would burn to death possessed!Quirrell for being in involuntary contact with the boy? Yeah, right. A “protection,” moreover, that blocked direct curses but left Quirrell!mort free to shake Harry off his broom? That could be easily circumvented by cheating (Tom’s taking Lily’s blood into himself)?

That was set to expire the moment Harry came of age?

Excuse me, we’re expected to believe that maternal love comes with an expiration date?

No, sorry, that protection on Harry was not the natural magical expression of a mother’s dying wish to protect her child. That was not a maternal death-blessing.

That was “the charm I placed upon you… the strongest shield I could give you [OotP 37, emphasis mine].” A charm which Dumbles constructed from, and powered by, Lily’s sacrificial death, after the fact.

It seems characteristic that Dumbles didn’t notice that Petunia’s blood-tie to Lily, and making her legal residence Harry’s, were actually extraneous to his charm—if Lily’s blood was the true key to his “shield,” Harry by definition was always in its presence.

I imagine that Albus adapted one of those ancient protective spells that were powered by burying sacrificial victims under the threshold or mixing their blood with the mortar in the walls, so the original spell WAS tied to protection both of a place and of a bloodline. Twinkles undoubtedly blithely assumed he understood the ramifications of his little modifications, only to be taken by surprise by Quirrell’s death.

“There” he cannot touch or harm you—wait, what, anywhere he can’t? Oh, right—wherever you go, there you are. So there Lily’s blood is. Ah, well, it’s not as thought I didn’t have other reasons to want you to be raised by lowly Muggles who feared and abused you, Harry.

And of course Albus’s charm would have an expiration date! Twinkles always intended Horcrux-Harry to suicide as soon as he came of age, and naturally if Tom had returned to a body by that time, poetic justice would require that Tom make himself mortal by killing Harry.


However, if Harry had been made “untouchable” to Tom’s hand or wand by Dumbles after the fact, if Dumbles had turned Lily’s “lingering protection” into a “shield”, that “shield” cannot be what had saved Lily’s baby in the first place.

Yet something did.

*

So, let’s turn to what our Dark Arts authorities said about Harry’s survival. Here’s Diary!Tom’s analysis.

“So. Your mother died to save you. Yes, that’s a powerful countercharm. I can see now… there is nothing special about you, after all. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us…. but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. That’s all I wanted to know.” [CS 17]


And here’s Severus discussing Harry’s tendency to exist with two other Dark Arts experts (or three, and fully expecting his analysis to be generally circulated—and critiqued—among all of the Death Eaters): “… there were still many stories circulating about him, rumors that he himself was a great Dark wizard, which was how he had survived the Dark Lord’s attack…. Of course, it became apparent to me very quickly that he had no extraordinary talent at all. He has fought his way out of a number of tight corners by a simple combination of sheer luck and more talented friends.” [HBP, 2]


It’s a rather odd circumstance that the series’ villain and supposed villain are consistently more honest than the hero’s mentor, but so Jo would have it.


Tom was wrong, however [and Severus disingenuous], to denigrate “lucky chance.” We were explicitly shown in HBP exactly how powerfully luck can operate in the Potterverse: Harry accomplished the otherwise-impossible feat of acquiring Slughorn’s deleted, incriminating memory, and Ginny gaily dodged Unforgiveables she couldn’t conceivably have blocked.

And those effects were merely from a potion (though I now harbor dark suspicions about what’s required to brew that potion).

*

One of the traditional aims of human sacrifice (back when that was a traditional and honored practice) was to counter ill-fortune or to confer good-fortune: upon a city, a people, a person, a purpose (typically a war)….

To get the gods on one’s side.

Or at least the gods of chance.

Tommy complained to his followers [DH1}, “I have been … thwarted by luck and chance,”

He was precisely right.

*

Let’s look again at Tom’s memory (which might not have been accurate) of his attempt to kill baby Harry.

(A total aside: it’s interesting that Tom thought of James by name, but not the “girl” or “the boy”. Was it that James was only one he accorded respect as a plausible adversary?)

… James Potter fell like a marionette whose strings were cut…

He could hear her screaming from the upper floor, trapped, but as long as she was sensible, she, at least, had nothing to fear… He climbed the steps, listening with faint amusement to her attempts to barricade herself in…. She had no wand upon her either…. How stupid they were, and how trusting, thinking that their safety lay in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments….

He forced the door open, cast aside the chair and boxes hastily piled against it with one lazy wave of his wand… and there she stood, the child in her arms. At the sight of him, she dropped her son into the crib behind her and threw her arms wide, as if this would help, as if in shielding him from sight she hoped to be chosen instead…

[Dialog: three times she pleads “Not Harry,” three times he tells her, “Stand aide, girl.”]

…. He could have forced her away from the crib, but it seemed more prudent to finish them all…..

The green light flashed around the room and she dropped like her husband. The child had not cried all this time. He could stand, clutching the bars of his crib, and he looked up into the intruder’s face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty lights, and his mother would pop up any moment, laughing—

He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy’s face. He wanted to see it happen, the destruction of this one, inexplicable danger. The child began to cry: It had seen that he was not James. He did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage—

“Avada Kedavra!”

And then he broke. [DH, 17]


What’s missing from this scene?

Tom actually entering the nursery.

According to Jo, he did not move from the doorway to kill Lily, and he did not cross over her body to approach the crib. Tom was pointing his wand carefully into the toddler’s face … from across the room.

At which point ickle Harrykins finally registered that the person who had just made Mummy scream, and cry, and fall down amidst that pretty flashing light, wasn’t Daddy after all, and began to wail.

And maybe—let go of the bars of his crib?

*

Avada Kedavra is unblockable, that’s why it’s so fearsome, right?

Which is to say—it can’t be blocked by the shield spell, however strongly cast.

And those moronic wizards and witches are so impressed by this, they don’t notice that the killing curse IS blocked by solid matter.

In fact, that like some {apparently not all) other spells, it can be reflected off solid surfaces.


How much do you want to bet that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection?


Too bad the WW only took paid attention to Isaac Newton’s work in alchemy. What were Isaac’s other interests, remind me?

*

In OotP, we saw that when most offensive spells hit those golden statues, they broke off pieces from the statues (and presumably were spent in so doing). But when Tom’s Avada Kedavra hit, it “glanced off.”

Here’s from the battle between Bellatrix, Harry, and then Tom and Albus:

… her counterspell hit the head of the handsome wizard, which was blown off….

She screamed, “Crucio!” and he was forced to duck down again as the centaur’s arm… spun off…

… his own Stunning Spell bounced back at him. Harry scrambled behind the fountain, and one of the goblin’s ears went flying across the room….


“AVADA KEDAVRA!”

… The spell merely glanced off its chest as the statue flung out its arms, protecting Harry. [OotP, 36]


*

Umm. So.

By luck, by chance, baby Harry just happened to let go of the bars and fall on his bum at exactly the right moment to let Tom’s AK skim over his head and hit—what?

I kind of favor, myself, the idea that the killing curse bounced off the back of Harry’s crib into Tom’s face—cribs are meant to protect babies, right? But probably Avada Kedavra needs to bounce off a reflective surface, and the crib might have been painted rather than polished. Was there a mirror behind the crib? Or a window (the attack took place at night)? Or just the odd talcum-tin or picture frame? Or—if Tom was aiming down as well as over—perhaps a stuffed animal with shiny metal eyes was propped up against the far side of the crib?

Whatever it was, its fortuitous placement meant that NOBODY had to manifest extraordinary talent, or power sufficient to block the Killing Curse, in order to save Harry’s bum that night.

Nor a degree of courage and love utterly unparalleled in human history, a sacrifice capable of conjuring a heretofore unimagined shield.


Ordinary love, yes, absolutely, but not extraordinary. Not to create a death-blessing conferring fair fortune.


Harry survived by sheer dumb luck, same as always.

Comments

[wolf-willow31.livejournal.com]

Regardless, I find the obsession with "choosing to die" and human sacrifice very, very creepy.

[wolf-willow31.livejournal.com]

It's not death that's creepy, it's choosing to die (suicide), and the celebration of human sacrifice.

[sunnyskywalker]

That would probably work better if you were accepting a death which was unavoidable, though! While death is inevitable for us all eventually, you have to up and die right this minute to truly accept that fact. That isn't "accepting" death, that's actively wanting to die - not really the same thing. Lily wanting to die rather than see Harry die and Harry, eg, feeling happy about seeing his parents and Sirius again if he dies in OotP, come across as much more "almost eager to die" than "accepting that death is inevitable" to me. If JKR was aiming for a message about accepting death, then she did a poor job of conveying that in any way comprehensible to me.

[ioanna-ioannina.livejournal.com]

Creepy, but very in-line with the creepy cheering suicide squad accompanying Harry to the forest... That is why hare-and-otter's idea sounds believable to me.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Of course Regulus made a choice to die. He could have saved himself by instructing Kreacher to Apparate him to safety before the inferi drowned him. The question is whether his choice to die was necessary to protect anyone. Not in the context of the destruction of the Horcrux - there was actually a better chance to destroy it if Regulus had survived and worked on that project with Kreacher.

But in an other essay Terri raised the possibility that Regulus chose to die in order to destroy his Dark Mark. She proposed that the connection between Tom and the DEs via the Dark Mark gave him the equivalent of the magical status of a family member, and therefore included in any protective charms the family used such as the protections Orion Balck had put on 12GP. So Regulus may have died to protect his family from Voldemort. It is unknown whether Orion was still alive when Regulus died. We do not know of any direct attack of Voldemort on either Walburga or Sirius, so we don't know if such protection, if it existed, was ever put to the test. It is noteworthy that the person most directly responsible for Sirius' death was herself a member of the Black family, so definitely not someone Sirius could have been protected from in such a manner.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Regulus knew what would happen in the cave ahead of time, based on Kreacher's story. So he could have instructed Kreacher to Apparate him away once he was done drinking and the lockets were exchanged.

[sunnyskywalker]

Regulus chose to take actions which he correctly believed would lead to his death. How is that not choosing to die? He could have chosen to stay in his very safe house which Voldemort never entered and live, but consciously chose to die and even wrote a suicide-by-inferius note first. It seems pretty clear that he is accepting death, not fighting it. So what would negate that? Instinctively thrashing about in his last barely-conscious moments while drowning?

A friend or relative or bodyguard who jumps in front of a bullet (or AK, or whatever) intended for someone else likewise chooses to die - they could have just stood where they were and lived, but chose not to. Again, has this never ever happened in the wizarding world? Not in battle or during an attempted assassination or a random killing spree or anything? (And whether getting killed in battle counts really ought to depend on the battle. Suppose you go on a guaranteed suicide charge which you hope will give the people behind you time to get into position?) It seems highly unlikely.

[sunnyskywalker]

I'd say that preparing for a suicidal charge, then running into it, gives you at least as much time to "process" your certain death as Lily had. There was what, maybe a minute between him bursting in the door and Lily jumping in front of his AK? Not a whole lot of time, at any rate, especially when she probably spent part of it frantically thinking "where's my wand?" and "oh god, James!" and "is there a way out of this room oh shit what do I do?" rather than focusing exclusively on her own death. So it can't take that much processing time to trigger the magic.

I think probably this is just more common than anyone realizes, because the usual effects - powerful luck - are just not easy to link to an obvious spell, especially for wizards used to magic which requires a wand (plus fancy wand movements and incantations).

[sunnyskywalker]

I was thinking more generally, not James in particular (I agree he's arrogant enough that the idea of actually failing and dying might not quite penetrate his mind). Some wizard, at some point in history, has surely gone on a suicidal charge which they knew to be suicidal to protect someone. (For all we know, someone at the battle of Hogwarts did this and we just never saw it, or knew who in particular benefited from it.) They chose and accepted death. But if the only effects are conferring unusual luck on the others, then the magic wouldn't necessarily be evident to anyone, which would explain why no one knows for sure this has happened.

[malic-ba.livejournal.com]

Lily's last act was one of resistance, too. She died fighting just at least as much as Regulus.

The main differences I see are

* Lily died directly at the hand of her enemy.
* Lily died in the presence of the person she was trying to save.
* Regulus had time to plan. If anything, he had time to process and choose death, Lily not so much.
* Regulus had reason to think his actions would be effective, Lily didn't.
* I think that, in his note, Regulus aims his sacrifice at bringing down Voldemort more than protecting any specific people. (Mind you, Harry didn't have to be all that specific...)

I don't know if the first two things make a difference or not, though to me they 'feel' like the kind of things that might. Harry didn't die right in front of the people he wanted to save (except Hagrid) but I can think of excuses for his case to be extra special.

I think the third and fourth things would make Lily's sacrifice much more effective in a 'capricious gods' world and Regulus' more so in the 'conscious choice' framework you're talking about.

The last point might be most important. Regulus might well have intended his death to protect his family or the world, as others have said - I'm not sure we have enough info to be sure. If he aimed it at Voldemort, though, I don't think it would work the same way. It might have been effective in a different way, though - it's still a willing human sacrifice. I will enjoy trying to work out how Regulus' sacrifice might have done some good :)


That's just one case, though. Regulus's death may not have been equivalent to Lily's but I frankly do not believe that no-one has ever done what she did.

(Unless, as was once suggested on another thread, wizards really are that different from normal muggle humans - if loving your parents and refusing to work for their killer are things only the 'chosen one' would do, then perhaps no-one in history has ever sacrificed themselves for their child.)

[malic-ba.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Is it something to do with Voldemort himself then? The ultra-dark magic he's loaded himself up with, taken further than ever before?

[oryx_leucoryx]

I think Harry's situation matches Regulus' almost completely, much closer than Lily.

[sunnyskywalker]

If it's a human sacrifice to capricious "gods" and Regulus was more focused on defeating Voldemort, maybe the effects were more like conferring bad luck on Voldemort's Horcruxes? What bad luck that the tiara ran afoul of a teenager who just so happened to know a Horcrux-destroying form of magical fire which he was aiming at something else entirely, right? And what bad luck for the cup that Ron remembered a vague hissy sound from five years ago and was able to retrieve the basilisk fangs. What are the odds?

[malic-ba.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love this :D

[oryx_leucoryx]

And we all thought Rowling was a hack for her contrived plots when in fact she was a genius in designing a world ruled by luck. Hangs head in shame

[wolf-willow31.livejournal.com]

Well, she did make us think about it all. A lot. But probably not in the way that she intended.

Nonetheless, she did accomplish something.

[sunnyskywalker]

She's accomplished tempting me to make a diagram of all the possible sacrifice-fueled luck, though I'm not sure that's really a good thing...