Product of the Department of Mysteries

[sunnyskywalker]

On oneandthetruth's last DH chapter commentary, an interesting thread compared the Mirror of Erised to the Resurrection Stone in its seductive (and potentially deadly) powers of showing something/someone you want.

There's another object somewhat like that: the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. There are voices coming from behind the Veil - voices Luna believes to be those of the dead - and Harry feels tempted to walk through it.

Well, okay, Harry is being trained to have a death wish. But maybe that just means he's more susceptible.

The Department of Mysteries is a research facility. One which we know has produced tangible items now available for (restricted) public use, such as Time-Turners. (Whether they invented them or improved on an existing idea, we don't know.) I seriously doubt they've only produced one artifact ever. So what else might they have made?

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask. The Mirror's ability to reflect your heart's desire is suggestively similar to the potion's ability to reflect the scent of what you desire.

A big glass mirror sounds like a relatively recent invention (unless you posit a long history of magical glassmaking, but wizards seem to adapt Muggle technology more often than the other way around). I propose that the Mirror of Erised is a product of the Department of Mysteries, combining attributes of Amortensia and the Veil which the DoM was able to partially replicate/adapt after long study.

Next question: are the Stone and the Veil related? Maybe Mr. Death, whoever he was, created both, and the DoM only got ahold of one of them. Whether this makes the Veil a fourth Hallow, left out of Beedle's version for numerical reasons, is not clear. Possibly it's a super-Hallow, and you can be Master of Death^TM with it alone? Or it's a death-related magical... thing... which shares some properties with the Hallows, but it isn't the same class of artifact and mastery isn't an issue in its case.

Or maybe the Veil is more ancient and the Stone is a portable adaptation created centuries ago by the DoM's first head researcher, Johannus Mors, along with a couple of other powerful items which also escaped the premises and have not been replicated. (And Death took the second lab assistant for his own...)

Thoughts? Fanfic links?

Comments

[blahblahcakes64.livejournal.com]

The origins and potential powers of the Mirror of Erised depend a lot on if it's a modern silvered mirror (invented in 1835, according to some quick Googling). The gold frame and carvings suggest something more rococo-esque, but it's pretty impossible to tell without a more detailed description. (Although, the image of French royalty looking longingly into a mirror that reveals their deficiencies is very poetic and triste, and kind of hilarious.) Whether or not it's made with glass doesn't really help us either, because glass mirrors of various kinds have been around since the first century.

As far as the Hallows, the notes in The Tales of Beedle the Bard say he was born in the 15th Century, probably as a parallel to Shakespeare. This doesn't make a ton of sense historically-speaking, considering Beedle's first edition was typeset in runes, which are Germanic/medieval, but I doubt Jo considered that. On the other hand, runes seem to be more relevant for wizards, even as they are titled "Ancient" in the Hogwarts curriculum, so perhaps they were still used commonly in the 1400s.

The Peverells--apparently born in the 1200s--offer a bit more insight into the age of the Hallows, assuming the Peverells were indeed the original discoverers/inventors/procurers.

The DoM is a tricky subject; we get so little information! The general idea, however, seems to be some top-secret research with a dose of CIA (re: the Unspeakables). They study the intangibles of the universe (love, death, time) like we study dark matter. I'm guessing that the Veil itself was built long ago before the DoM was even a thing (for what purpose, I'm not sure--an oracle? A literal connection to the "other side"?) and eventually discovered and transported to the DoM. (I would be interested to know where the Veil originated, if not in England.)

I think that the idea of the Stone and Veil being related is a fascinating concept (I'd probably throw the Mirror in there as well, since it also represents longing/unsatisfaction/absence), but I'm inclined to think the Veil isn't related to the Hallows at all. I believe the only think they share is their common link to the mysteries of death, which the Wizarding World is obsessed with. (And I can't blame them.).

Although, it's interesting to consider that the Veil was the way that the Peverell brothers "confronted Death" and forged the Hallows. Perhaps they are the only people who ever went through the Veil and managed to come out again.

As far as what else the DoM might have invented, it seems like most of their research goes into corralling and concentrating the forces that they study. It seems like time has gotten the farthest along, since they've created an item that can control time, to a point. Death doesn't really need "corralling" or "concentrating", but the afterlife has its own mysteries that dead people can't share either way (ghosts have never experienced it and, without the help of the Stone, no one can communicate with the dead). The Veil is probably their first and ongoing step to doing that. As far as the roomful of love, I can imagine it's the hardest thing to concentrate, or even obtain. Perhaps Amortentia was used as an experimental measure, but that doesn't incite feelings of true love. Perhaps they have expert potioneers working to tweak the recipe to manufacture "real" love?

[oryx_leucoryx]

How did you figure out the date of the Peverells? Is that based on the info for the Elder Wand? IIRC in Beedle it is mentioned that someone had it in the early middle ages. When that could have been depends on which chronology one follows. Europeans consider the middle ages to have started with the fall of the western Roman empire in 476, but I understand Brits use a different convention?

[blahblahcakes64.livejournal.com]

Oh, shame on me. I very foolishly took info from the HP wiki--since it was cited, I figured it was from the Beedle the Bard book itself, but it was a date taken from the prop gravestone in the DH1 film. Ignore that! It could've been far earlier. You're right that Emeric the Evil was the first well-documented owner in the "early middle ages".

However, Tales does say that many critics believe that Beedle's Resurrection Stone was inspired by the Philosopher's Stone, which could offer some clues as to date. However, that does beg the question of how widely-known the Peverells were, and if they were taken seriously (or written off as weirdos obsessed with impossible magical objects bequeathed by an anthropormorphic personification).

Jo wrote in two fictional historical accounts that cite "Ellhorn" and "Eldrun" as two old words for "Elder", which might also afford us some dates. I found one use of "ellhorn" in a pdf about elderberry folklore, and "eldrun" is cited in a nature blog. Both words are apparently Low-Saxon/Anglo-Saxon and mean "fire". (Links are below.) The Anglo-Saxons existed between 400 and 1066, so that's a pretty big gap--the wand could have been created at some point in this span of time, or that might just be when it was written about. (Although that timeline lines up perfectly with Wikipedia's definition of the early middle ages. I'm not sure how British people define it.)

http://www.normsfarms.com/PDFs/elderberry_folklore.pdf
http://www.naturetaleapp.com/naturetaleblog/index.php/two-berries-to-look-out-for-in-october-that-have-interesting-stories-to-tell/

[blahblahcakes64.livejournal.com]

Argh, apparently links=spam. Sorry about that!

[sunnyskywalker]

I was thinking Post-Seclusion for the mirror, since it's just so big (though I suppose wizards could have extended any glass they made and so manufactured large sheets easily before Muggles did) and Harry doesn't note that it looks unusually ancient, just fairly old. I wouldn't expect him to know the difference between "maybe a hundred years" and "maybe three hundred years," but I think he would notice if it looked, say, a thousand years old. He certainly noticed that the Veil looked incredibly ancient, and he was in the middle of a life-or-death chase at the time. (I agree the Veil is probably far older than the British wizarding government in any form, let alone any individual department.)

Though on second thought, we don't really know whether the mirror and the frame were originally made together, and it's possible that the frame is a replacement for the original and the mirror itself is much older. Who knows? But anyway, I think there isn't anything that makes it more likely that the mirror predates the Peverells, or the DoM, so it's at least a possible candidate for something they made, or at least based on their research if not a direct product. (Where did Dumbledore borrow it from, I wonder? An old family that owed him a favor, and their great-grandfather was an Unspeakable who used some of his less classified research to make a family heirloom? Or just an old family that owed him a favor and had developed the mirror on their own, or inherited it?)

I like the idea of the brothers confronting Death through the Veil! That's sent my mind off in a few interesting directions...