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?

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Re the Veil, the only use of it I've seen in a fanfic is in notwolf's Death Eater No More. In that story, Lucius angers some goblins. They get revenge on him by kidnapping Narcissa, putting her in a coma, and throwing her through the Veil. Several chapters are devoted to her rescue. The Veil is explained as having been created 1500 years ago by a group of wizards and witches as a means of communicating with the dead and learning from them.

That's a good catch on the similarities between the Veil, the mirror, and the Hallows. The most annoying undeveloped aspect of the Potterverse to me is that stuff in the Dept. of Mysteries. The hummingbird that endlessly cycles through life, the tanks of brains--that's all great stuff that could have made that world so much richer and more interesting. Instead, we get endless crap about teen love angst (both present and past) and useless camping trips. What a waste!

[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!

[attilathepbnun.livejournal.com]

Yet more evidence for the theory that Rowling didn't actually plan the series in much detail, whatever she publicly says. She wrote the first book, maybe with a reasonable start on the second and third, in case the first one took off; but with only a vague idea of what else would happen. Then Book One was a rousing success; she had to write the rest of the story but wasn't really up to the task ... at least at the pace she set ...

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

I think she kinda sorta had a plan, but it wasn't laid out in detail. So when she was writing the individual books, she would come up with great ideas and just throw them in there willy-nilly, without any thought of what she might do with them later, or whether she'd do anything at all. They were just cool and provided atmosphere in the now.

There's also the possibility she knew how she wanted to start and finish the story, but was vague about the middle. Given her "oh, dear, maths" propensity, there's a cartoon that's appropriate. It shows two people standing at a blackboard. On the left, one of them has written the beginning of a complicated problem. In the middle of the board it says, "Then a miracle occurs." On the right it says, "Solution." The other person says, "That's a good beginning, but you need to be more explicit abut the middle and the end."

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Apropos of attila's suggestion about the mirror being a sorting tool, and throwing in your thoughts about the DoM, maybe the mirror was designed as an interrogation tool. You could plop down an enemy in front of it, and when they're thoroughly hypnotized, ask them what they see. You then (falsely) promise to give it to them in exchange for what they know.

[dracasadiablo.livejournal.com]

Nothing much to say about the Mirror (aside from the general "Yes, it was a dark object and most likely connected to death. And exposing Harry, or anybody else, to it was criminal) but this:

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask.
^Is the most terrifying part of Department of Mysteries to me.
Moral and emotional cripples i.e. wizards messing with time travel, death, brains . . . all of that is scary. But giving them power to make others feel slavish devotion and obsession? That's pure Nightmare Fuel.
I could easily imagine some believer in the Greater Good and a "muggle lover" using it on all muggles and / or wizards to end conflicts.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Word on the scariness of these losers having that kind of power over others.

I read a fanfic in which Lily made a love potion from a recipe in Witch Weekly and gave it to Severus. When it worked, she was so embarrassed she didn't have the nerve to tell him what she'd done. The potion caused him to drive away a girl who loved him because he was never able to love her the same way. Decades later, he found out by accident what had happened and was finally able to take the antidote, fall in love, and have a happy life.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

I don't know who first theorized this - I think it may have been Swyhyv or Jodel - but I'm pretty sure, wherever the veil came from, the chamber of the veil is an execution chamber. Trials would be held there, and then wizards or witches who were found guilty would be shoved through the veil and killed. I think the setup is probably very ancient, and any study on the veil would be recent - after Azkaban took the place of summary execution.

[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...

[sunnyskywalker]

Interesting-sounding fic - I'll have to look it up sometime!

The DoM just has that feel of a Very Significant Place We'll Be Seeing Again, So Pay Attention. We spend so much time there in OotP, with passing significantly nearby the portentous hallway before the trial, Harry's recurring visions, Nagini's attack on Arthur, and then the battle when we get a lovingly detailed grand tour, and Dumbledore making a point of what's behind that knife-melting door during his wrap-up when we expect to hear about significant things. And then... we never bother with it again? What? That just doesn't fit our narrative expectations! If you're going to break an expectation like that, it should be for a point, not just because it was a neat bit of scenery that got out of hand.

I think it's completely natural and expected that an author's plans for a series might shift a bit after she's written the first third or half of it. The problem was she (a) couldn't go back and revise the earlier ones to fit if she got a better idea down the road, and (b) wasn't able to change her plans for the later ones, either through lack of time or lack of experience or talent (or a combination). DH shows all the signs, to me, of being full of messages from JKR's subconscious trying to yank her story into the new path it had fallen into, where (for instance) she realized Dumbledore's actions made him actually pretty untrustworthy and not the best guide for Harry, and that the whole "plan" to defeat Voldemort was terrible - but then she tried to yank things back onto the pre-planned track and have Dumbledore show up again to play mentor and Harry agreeing he's great after all, and the plan works and was the only way it could have happened because... er... just because, stop asking questions! (She may have had some vague notion of Dumbledore having made a bad choice once in his teens, but since he hadn't "done" many of the things he later did until she actually wrote them down, they weren't as real and solid, and his repentance and reformation were perfectly convincing. But once she did that, all the little details didn't add up to the picture she'd originally intended for the Book 7 evaluation of Dumbledore's character.)

Actually things started cropping up by GoF, like the "oops wait, isn't the world as I've depicted it awfully wrong when it comes to magical beings like goblins and all those other house-elves I mentioned in passing?" So she had started realizing where the holes were while she was writing, and started adding stuff in related to them. A more experienced writer might have been able to look at that draft and realize, well, the conclusion I planned originally won't address all the additional subplots and themes in here now that I wasn't expecting, and then reevaluate and tweak (or totally scrap and re-do) the ending so that it worked. Maybe Harry will have to come up with his own plan instead of just doing what Dumbledore said, or at the very least will have to come to terms with the idea that there might have been a better plan but he's now locked into one because of Dumbledore's mistakes and personality flaws, and he won't be naming his son after him even if he can make it work against all odds. JKR wouldn't, or couldn't, do that.

Well, maybe she could have made the ending fit better with the series as it developed given a little more time, but we'll never know now.

[sunnyskywalker]

Ooh, that's an interesting idea! Now I'm wondering if the mirror-makers were inspired by the Sorting Hat too...

But a closer connection might be that Foe-Glass of Moody's, come to think of it. It somehow knows what you don't want (your enemies) rather than your deepest desire. Not quite the mirror's opposite number, but pretty close. And the Foe-Glass most certainly does seem like something the Ministry might have developed for its own use. Or at least they might have improved on it, if it's an older idea. I imagine something that shows you your enemies would be something people would have wanted to create not long after they figured out they could control magic, even if it took different forms than a mirror.

[sunnyskywalker]

It is terrifying! The things they could do with that...

This also suggests yet another way Voldemort made an ineffective Evil Overlord, though. He'd taken over the Ministry. If the research resulting from that room was in any way usable, why didn't he use it? He could have had all the Ministry employees not just obeying the new regime out of fear, but actually devoted to him. Just to start. Then anyone who had tried to keep working there in hopes of sabotaging from within or passing information to a resistance would abandon their plans and tell Voldemort everything, out of desperation to please him. Or maybe they'd be like Harry under Veela influence and think jumping off cliffs would be a dramatic and pleasing gesture of devotion, should he tell them they needed to atone for something.

And after that, the world...

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, that sounds like a very plausible use too. Talking to the dead if you can, and sending people bodily to the land of the dead in any case, in a very clean and tidy way. Maybe you're supposed to walk through it under your own power for an honorable(ish) death, sort of like the old Roman "honorable suicide."

And I wonder if occasionally people would petition for the right to die by Veil? Say if they were very old or had a terminal disease and wanted to die peacefully and quietly at a time of their choosing instead of lingering painfully. Meeting Death as an equal, if you will.