deathtocapslock | Speculation on the Big Three (Reply)

Following Jodel, I’ve long assumed the three Unforgivable Curses to be of long, and possibly even honorable, antiquity.

And I really hope they are, because their being well-established is a key component of an argument I’m working on.

But what if they’re not? What if they were developed by Tom, and regarded with such superstitious awe and unparalleled horror because they’re his?

As I said, I’d really like this not to be true because I like the essay I’m working on.

But consider.

We know that eleven-year-old Tom had invented wandless precursors of the Imperius and Cruciatus. “I can make animals do what I want…. I can make them [people who annoy me] hurt if I want to.” (HBP, 13)

The earliest recorded use of Avada Kedavra that I can find is Tom’s killing of his father and grandparents. (HBP, 17)

Bellatrix boasts of having learned the Dark Arts from the Dark Lord himself (OotP 36), but which spells do we actually see her use?

Then there’s Barty’s lesson. “[T]hose three curses—Avada Kedavra, Imperius, and Cruciatus—are known as the Unforgivable Curses. The use of any one of them on a fellow human being is enough to earn a life sentence in Azkaban.” (GoF 14) Why the unique categorization and, apparently, punishment for these spells’ use, when they’re in competition with things like the Entrail-Expelling Curse and the curse on that opal necklace? Which Borgin displayed and sold openly and legally.

Well, if they were Tom’s trademark curses, taught by him to his Death Eaters and used originally only by them, their reputation for being more terrible than any other curses ever invented would make sense. It matches Tom’s.

And until the Auror Department figured out how to cast them too, a Priori Incantatem on one’s wand turning up any of the three would be proof positive that the wand’s owner was a secret Death Eater who’d learned Dark Magic from You-Know-Who himself. So a life sentence (in time of war) would make sense.

While turning up a nasty curse that was in everyone’s grimoires proved only that one had been a bad boy recently, or REALLY didn’t like rats.

(Cough—stolen wands, frames, people? But still, you can see the Ministry’s point.)

It really hangs together too well.

In which case, everyone’s believing Avada Kedavra to be unblockable merely means that everyone swallowed Tom’s PR about it. All anyone could really know for sure is that standard spells such as Protego weren’t effective. (Which would be terrifying enough, if a strong-enough Protego does shield against curses like our friend the EEC. )

But its reputation for being impossible to survive is really Tom’s.

I looked up the three on the Lexicon, and its list of canon mentions/uses of the spells turn up no counterexamples, no uses that predate the Death Eaters or Tom.

There is one ray of hope: the MoM accepted Morfin’s confession. If the Riddles were killed by AK, well…. Morfin doesn’t seem the sort to invent his own spells, does he? So that’s some evidence for AK at least being known.

Only that objection is fairly-easily gotten around. Morfin could have been charmed to claim the spell was a family heirloom, inherited (like the locket that drab ran off with) from Salazar Slytherin.

Help me out here! I’d like to be wrong.