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

[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...