![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
terri-testing.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockA Crazed, Quibbler-Worthy, Absolutely Unverifiable Manipulative!Dumbledore Theory
*
Definitions:
“rejoin, v.t.
return, v.t.
Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Second Edition, c 1979.
*
“Severus Snape was indeed a Death Eater. However, he rejoined our side before Lord Voldemort’s downfall and turned spy for us at great personal risk. He is now no more a Death Eater than I am.” Dumbledore in the Privy Ministry Hearing, Pensieve, GoF
“You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realized how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the Prophecy, Harry. I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned—” Dumbledore to Harry, HBP
"Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban.... When the time comes, we can protect him too.... Come over to the right side, Draco...." Dumbledore to Draco, HBP
“And what will you give me in return, Severus?” Dumbledore to Snape, DH
*
Fact: Never in seven books is Harry given a coherent explanation of “the Dark Arts” and why they are (or if they are) intrinsically evil. But he's encouraged to believe that they are. And his parents believed so too.
Fact: Severus Snape heard part of a Prophecy and was allowed to leave with his knowledge of it intact.
Fact: When Severus met Albus on that windswept hillside, Albus seemed confident both that Severus was a Death Eater and that Severus had turned over the Prophecy voluntarily to Lord Voldemort (that is, that Severus had not been tricked or forced into revealing it).
Fact: Severus expected Albus to know this: the young man’s first words to the old wizard were, “Don’t kill me!”
Fact: When Severus offered Albus, gratis, the information that the Dark Lord had interpreted the Prophecy to point at Albus’s devoted followers the Potters, Albus didn’t thank the young man for the warning. Instead, he demanded what the young man would offer HIM, Albus, to protect Albus’s own Order members.
Fact: Albus subsequently hired Severus as his Potions Master.
Inference from that fact: Albus concealed the damaging information that Severus Snape had joined the Death Eaters from the public, the Ministry, the Aurors, and from most or all of the Order of the Phoenix. Had he not, the later outcry over his hiring a werewolf would have paled in comparison to the outcry over his hiring a proven Voldemort supporter at the height of the war.
But—Severus had expected Albus to kill him as a Death Eater on that hillside. So he knew that Albus already knew or suspected his affiliation before that time. But if so, Albus must have concealed that knowledge from both the Ministry and his own Order, well before Snape’s desperate decision to defect in an attempt (ultimately futile) to try to save Lily’s life at the probable cost of his own.
And finally, fact: Albus consistently spoke of Severus’s defection from the Death Eaters as Snape’s “return.” As his “rejoining” of “our side.”
Whereas when Albus spoke to Draco, he invited the boy to “come OVER to the right side.”
What theory could we spin to explain these disparate facts?
*
This particular crazed theory is the result of a collision between one of Pasi’s excellent stories and a question raised by Oryx_leucoryx on Snapedom. Pasi’s “The Killing of Regulus Black” is totally AU now, but still an excellent read. I’d read it some time ago; it had fermented in my subconscious, and then Oryx_leucoryx raised the question on Snapedom: Who knew that Severus was a Death Eater? And one of the answers is: Albus, and he apparently hid that information for a long time from (at least most of) his own Order, from the Auror Department, and from the Ministry.
Why?
*
Dumbledore spoke of Snape as “rejoining our side.”
To rejoin is “to reunite after separation.”
But who initiated that separation, and for what purpose?
*
This crazed theory depends on three hypotheses which can, I believe, be neither confirmed nor refuted by canon.
Unverifiable Hypothesis One: that Albus had paid enough attention to Severus as a child to identify the boy’s fundamental character, talents, and weaknesses. Specifically, that Albus recognized, among other things, that Severus a) was a vulnerable loner from an abusive home; b) had an immense capacity for devotion and loyalty; and c) had offered that devotion to his childhood friend Lily Evans.
Unverifiable Hypothesis Two: That the Muggle-born Registration Committee, which came out of the blue for me as a reader, would have come as no such surprise to Albus: that Albus knew, well before the rest of the WW, that Voldemort would eventually aspire to exterminate, not just “rule over”, Muggle-borns (or selected Muggle-borns, while controlling—completely—the magic use and reproduction of the rest).
Unverifiable Hypothesis Three: Pasi’s story opens with Alastor Moody attending the funeral of a talented young Auror, a gifted Occlumens who’d managed to infiltrate Voldemort’s supporters to the extent of being invited to take the Dark Mark. At which he failed: not the best Occlumency would allow someone to take the Dark Lord’s Mark while hiding treason to Riddle in one’s heart. Hypothesis Three: Supposing that Pasi were correct, what would follow?
*
Unverifiable Hypothesis One:
I think we can agree that canon establishes that Albus had guessed by (or on) that hilltop that Severus was devoted to Lily Potter née Evans: Albus would scarcely have asked the question, “And what will you give me in return, Severus?” had he not been anticipating the answer he received.
I’d argued previously that Severus’s actions and words that night might have been what clued Albus in; Severus was, after all, risking his life (from both sides) in approaching Albus, he’d stated he had come with a “request”, and he was clearly distraught at Lily’s peril. Moreover, while we know that (as of fifth year) Lily’s girlfriends knew that Lily and Severus were at least friends, it seems that no one else did.
Or more precisely, no one seems to remember. Which is rather curious, really. When Harry, dissecting Snape’s perfidy after Dumbledore’s murder, says bitterly, “And he didn’t think my mother was worth a damn either—he called her a Mudblood,” neither Minerva, Horace, Hagrid, nor Remus objected, “But before that quarrel they used to be friends. In fact, he had seemed to be rather sweet on her. That must have been what Dumbledore thought Snape regretted.”
And yet there had been that extremely public vigil outside the Fat Lady, with Severus threatening to spend the night outside the door for the merest chance to apologize to Lily—risking (and almost certainly receiving some combination of) detention, public ridicule and humiliation, further hexing by the Marauders, and the extreme displeasure of the Pureblood supremacists among his housemates.
Did the gossip mill not work that night? Talk about fools who wear their hearts on their sleeve! Everyone in Hogwarts MUST have known, as of breakfast the next morning, exactly how far gone that Slytherin boy must have been on that pretty Gryffindor prefect, and how she had told him off. So it seems that Severus must have subsequently sold everyone interested on the story that “there were other [girls], and of purer blood, worthier of him….” and that he cared as little about the loss of their friendship as Lily appeared to.
However, Albus was a Legilimens, and Severus was not always an Occlumens capable of deceiving “the greatest Legilimens the world has ever known.”
But in fact, Albus might have previously EXPECTED young Severus to display unreasonable loyalty and continued devotion to his first-ever friend and first love. Depending on what he understood of Severus’s upbringing and consequent character.
"All the privilege I claim... (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." Jane Austen, Persuasion
Anne Elliot claimed this "privilege" for her sex; but in fact it's a known characteristic of children of alcoholics (which, indeed, Anne Elliot well might have been). Or, as Janet Woititz expressed in Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents, children from such backgrounds are often “extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.”
Ouch.
Other characteristics of children from that particular type of dysfunctional family? Fear of losing control; fear of feelings; an overdeveloped sense of responsibility; guilt feelings; inability to relax; harsh, even fierce self-criticism (coupled with difficulty tolerating criticism from others); difficulty in intimate relationships; fear of abandonment; approval-seeking; stress-related physical complaints (such as, perhaps, chronically oily skin and hair and eating disorders which could lead to either gauntness or obesity); anxiety & hypervigilance; compulsive behavior (including compulsive overwork) ….
Nah, not a one of those could be seen to apply in any way to our Severus!
And, oh, per Woititz again, such children “...tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences.” (“Anything,” anyone? Or for that matter, accepting the Dark Mark?)
“We got guilt feelings when we trusted ourselves, giving in to others. We became reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative. We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally.” (from the ACOA website)
Those with insider knowledge of some types of dysfunctional families have no problem at all identifying Severus’s pattern of behavior. And once one has spotted the overall pattern, one might investigate which parts of the pattern apply in this specific case. Especially if the investigating party might be a Legilimens.
It’s actually entirely predictable that if Severus lost Lily and thought it was because HE was unworthy of HER, that he’d idealize her and have a hard time getting over her. Severus was, after all, like Anne Elliot, someone who “had hardly any body to love” (Jane Austen, Persuasion, again). Indeed, if Severus were soon to be moving almost exclusively in Pureblood-supremacist circles, it’s not as though Lily could be given any serious competition. Avery might accept Snape as a comrade-in-arms, but he was not about to introduce his pretty younger sister to him. The brightest and prettiest of the supremacist Pureblood witches would be even less likely than little Miss Evans to settle for a scrawny, ugly half-blood, whatever his talents and intelligence.
Could Albus have identified Severus as someone scarred by a dysfunctional upbringing in ways that could possibly be exploited? Albus often seemed tone-deaf to people’s feelings, after all. However, Albus himself cane from such a background (“secrets and lies,” said his brother). He’d worked with children for at least thirty years as of the mid-seventies, maybe for double that time; he ought to have picked up something about how children from abusive backgrounds react, at least in theory. He was an adept Legilimens. And he had a proven track record of picking up people with a weakness or secret who served him gratefully in return for his protection: Hagrid, Lupin, Trelawney… Snape himself, later, that reformed DE who owed his freedom, his employment, and his chance of redemption all, all to Albus.
Hypothesis One is unverified in canon, but I think it’s not contradicted.
Unverifiable Hypothesis Two: That Albus, unlike (say) Regulus or myself, anticipated that Muggle-borns faced possible genocide if Voldemort gained sufficient political power. Tom’s first actions when he finally took over the Ministry seemed a bit strange to me. Try to capture Potter, check. Take over the WW propaganda organ, check. Take over the education system, check.
Let known members of the Order of the Phoenix run free to organize a resistance while the subverted Ministry spends its time accusing Muggle-borns of usurping magic and rounding them up—huh wha’? I get as articulate as Hagrid just thinking about it.
But as I pointed out elsewhere, it makes sense if you regard it as Tommy the Indefinitely Prolonged making it a priority to monitor and eliminate genetic threats before they can materialize. Tommy himself, Albus, and Harry (and maybe Severus) were crosses between very old, probably inbred Pureblood lines (Ariana & Aberforth, like Morfinn and Merope, were apparently abnormal; James, while seemingly physically healthy, was the last of a dying line) and Muggles/Muggle-borns. If Tommy believed such crosses to produce the most powerful wizards, he could eliminate potential rivals or challengers before birth by a multi-pronged approach. Bring the oldest houses to extinction where possible, encourage Purebloods to breed only among themselves, encourage the view that mating with Muggles is tantamount to bestiality, and monitor and/or destroy Muggle-borns, who are much more likely to attract Pureblood mates than actual Muggles are.
And if the effects of inbreeding among magical families include a higher incidence, not only of the same stillbirths and birth defects that we Muggles experience, but of Squibs, then spreading the rumor that Muggle-borns have stolen Purebloods’ magic will be snatched at as a scapegoat—my baby has no magic because it was stolen from her by some Muggle, not because her blood is too pure! If Tom had started whispering such things among his followers, Albus well might have figured out that Muggle-borns might be targeted if Riddle ever attained control over the Ministry….
Unverifiable Hypothesis Three: That a spy, an Auror or Order member, could infiltrate the outer ranks of Voldemort’s supporters, but that one had to be genuinely committed to take the Mark itself and enter the inner circle.
The only real support for this is that as far as we know, no one DID ever succeed in entering the Death Eater ranks as a spy. (Jodel indeed had speculated that Snape himself had done so, but that theory was canon-shafted by DH.) We know of Death Eaters who turned after their branding (Regulus, Severus, Igor, Draco); we’re told that Dumbledore at least (not the Ministry) had other “useful spies.” But Severus is the only double agent in the inner circle that we ever get the smallest whiff of. Yet it is almost inconceivable that neither the Ministry nor Dumbledore would have tried to infiltrate the Death Eaters. Ergo, any such attempts must have been unsuccessful.
Obviously, if it were true that one had to be in earnest to take the Mark binding oneself permanently to Voldemort, then the only way for the other side to get a spy in the innermost circle would be to locate a branded Death Eater who could somehow be coerced or seduced to betray his master and his mates.
Unless, of course, one were possessed of the great brain of Albus Dumbledore.
That pre-eminent example of Homo habilis, Man the Toolmaker, as the dioramas used to say admiringly.
What if one didn’t try to locate a potential double agent, but to make one? Find a promising piece of obsidian and chip it into the proper shape?
What if one sent someone in? Someone whom one could manipulate into taking the Mark absolutely sincerely, but with a hidden hook that one could use to make him turn (return) to one’s own side at one’s pleasure?
Such as, perhaps, the shocking revelation that the organization that one had joined in good faith would kill one’s true love if it actually attained power?
I did say this theory was crazed, didn’t I?
*
But indulge me.
Suppose one were the headmaster of Britain’s premier school of wizardry, and one were looking for a pupil one could shape into the perfect double agent to infiltrate into Lord Voldemort’s most trusted ranks.
What would one look for?
Well, the first consideration would be the characteristics required to be a successful spy in the Death Eater camp. The candidate must obviously have a natural talent for Occlumency. He (almost certainly he—Riddle allows few women in his inner circle, so those few would be under extra scrutiny—an automatic disqualification) must furthermore be brave enough to be willing to risk himself, and intelligent and devious enough to have a chance of pulling such a deception off. He must be someone Riddle would want to recruit—either well-connected, well-placed, or talented in his own right.
And the candidate must be someone susceptible to being recruited: either a Pureblood who was (or could be induced to become) attracted by Riddle’s overt ideology that Purebloods are superior to everyone else, or someone vulnerable for other reasons. There is. after all, a type of boy who’s the natural prey of extremist organizations.
Mary_j_59, talking earlier on Snapedom about Severus’s recruitment, comments:
“He {Severus} was an isolated, impoverished, and angry young man, and also quite vulnerable. Borolin points out that cults and hate groups "love bomb" kids like Sev, telling them how special and valuable they are, insisting that they are appreciated, and getting them firmly sewn up with their new friends. Only then, when their emotions are fully engaged, do the cult leaders begin inculcating doctrine.”
And then there’s the most important consideration of all: that whoever one sent in could be reeled back, fairly certainly, at the desired time. Probably, since the candidate will need to be willing to act in ways that would seem insane to anyone governed by simple self-interest, by danger to someone whom the candidate values above his life.
So you’d need to target someone who’s capable of such loyalty that he would sacrifice himself unhesitatingly for those he loves best, and who loves someone who’d be threatened by Tom’s ultimate triumph.
Why, at first glance there are at least three candidates in Lily Evans’ year alone!
However, there’s another consideration at play: Albus knows that Riddle doesn’t have a terribly good track record for rewarding his followers. It’s one of the things Albus counts on for getting the candidate to return to his side—if danger to a loved one is to be the hook, the candidate must conclude that he can’t count on protecting his beloved as a reward for any service, however exemplary, that he might provide to his Dark Lord.
There is one reward, however, and only one, that Death Eaters do obtain consistently: anyone with sadistic impulses will find ample opportunity to indulge them. Send James or Sirius in to join the D. E.’s, when they already get off on causing pain and humiliation to others, and you risk getting back (if at all) a full-fledged sadist like their cousin Bellatrix (assuming she was such, before Azkaban). Far better, on that count, to find someone who doesn’t have a natural bent for hurting others.
In the year in question, that leaves one obvious candidate; there may, of course, have been others, not visible from our vantage.
*
So what would be the procedure, should a headmaster wish to push a particular student to join the Death Eaters?
*
The very first step, obviously, would be to interview potential candidates. The interview process would serve multiple purposes. If one had founded, or were purposing to found, an Order of the Phoenix, a vigiliante group opposed to Tom’s, one would naturally privately examine the more talented, intelligent, and brave students with a view for future recruitment. And one would naturally mark which students seemed most susceptible to the lure of positive attention.
Having identified a potential candidate, perhaps towards the end of fourth year, one would push him towards the camp one wished him to join initially, while isolating him from other possible sources of validation, support, and friendship.
How might this be done?
One step would be to let loose the hounds to drive him in the right direction.
In this case, that would be easy enough. The candidate was already on terms on enmity with a pack of Gryffindor bullies in his year; all one would need do was to let the pack slip their leashes. Or rather, loosen the leash a trifle.
Appointing the right Gryffindor prefects for fifth year would do wonders along that line.
Prefects’ primary disciplinary tools are scolding, detentions, and docking house points. But when a prefect docks points from a housemate, the anger felt by housemates at the points lost can sometimes be directed, not at the miscreants, but at the prefect who docked the points. Especially in houses Gryffindor and Slytherin.
Gryffindor prefects, therefore, come in four major flavors: those like Percy Weasley, determined to do what they understand to be their duty, and making themselves odious in their house in so doing—but generally keeping order. Those like Ron Weasley, always ready to enforce a rule against another house, but cheerfully bending the rules to his or his house’s (for example, confiscating a banned item to play with it himself). Those like Hermione Granger, knowing that she ought to be like Percy, but without the moral courage to take the consequent social opprobrium. Those under her discipline learned that she’d verbally espouse the rules and try usually to enforce them, only to cave when doing so would cost her too much socially. And the fourth, finally, the spineless ones like Remus who turn their heads not to notice misdemeanors they ought to punish.
(Slytherin prefects exhibit much the same range of behaviors, but with slightly different underlying motivations. Ravenclaws are less likely to throw group four; a Ravenclaw analyzes which pattern of behavior best suits hir and sticks with it. Hufflepuff prefects are almost always group one; their own housemates will shame them into a semblance of fairness, even if they’d personally rather be partial. Have I mentioned recently that I LIKE House Hufflepuff?)
So if one wanted the Marauder pack to slip its leash, appoint prefects who wouldn’t oppose them effectively. Suggest Lupin as the male prefect. He has a heart; he has a conscience; he knows full well that he should oppose the worst of what his pack does. The headmaster could convincingly argue for giving him the chance to rein in the others. But Lupin hadn’t the guts to risk losing his pack’s support even momentarily; he wouldn’t check them.
(And really, who else could be picked? James was the only other option we know of, and no one could have expected him to even try to enforce rules, much less fairly. He’d be Ron [or, we suppose, Draco], only doubled. Except, of course, in the real world if you gave a boy that responsibility, you’d also be giving him the duty of monitoring his own behavior. And if he violated that duty, he’d then be doubly erring and subject to double punishment. Which might make an impression.)
For the other fifth-year prefect, the girl, pick the Muggle-born Evans. A political choice, most would think it, a slap at the Pureblood supremacist faction; an obvious choice, would think others, given her talent and intelligence.
But. This Muggleborn might be impressed and intimidated by the trappings of the Pureblood culture to which she can’t aspire, but she’s trying hard not to show it. She was pretty, bright, vivacious; she had always been popular, sought-after, both in the Muggle cow-byre in which she was raised and now here among her own.
And she knew full well that she walked on thin ice socially in the WW, and she has always had high social standing.
Like Lupin, she has both a heart and a conscience. But she cares about her own popularity. If she were appointed prefect, this would be at stake in her decisions. Her friends would let her know, unmistakably, that in Gryffindor house, the people who really belong don’t jeopardize the House standings by deducting House points for anything that can be ignored. And that a true Gryffindor would never penalize their house’s best Quidditch star and his cronies for anything short of murder.
Best of all, of course, she was the candidate’s dearest friend from before ever they were at school. If she felt that she was failing him in not adequately reining in her housemates’ attacks on him, her own feelings of guilt would drive a wedge between them (even if he himself didn’t blame her, since Slytherins put the same pressure on their prefects to show house bias).
Next, make sure that the punishments given by staff aren’t such as would actually restrain the Marauders. When caught in the act, the Marauders must be punished, naturally. However, the punishments should never be onerous enough actually to deter them. If James and Sirius were separated for detentions, for example, encourage their initiative in obtaining or creating magic mirrors to communicate with each other. And make sure that the staff (especially Pomfrey) knows that accusations of bullying supported by nothing but the alleged victim’s word were not to be tolerated. Telling tales on other students is never to be encouraged!
Consider the Weasley twins, two decades later. They boasted of being experts, pre-Umbridge, at never putting more than a toe over the line leading to expulsion. The Marauders were undoubtedly the same. If that line moved a bit, were drawn further out, they would quickly learn to take advantage. So it would be easy enough to encourage the Marauders to escalate their attacks on the candidate and his house. (Other students would suffer collateral damage, of course.)
The Marauder attacks would serve several purposes. One, they would make the candidate feel that the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t adequately protect him and make him susceptible to considering who else might. Two, his attempts to defend himself—to train his power and use his creativity against his tormentors—would make him more attractive to the Dark Lord’s recruiters. Three, his long-simmering fear and anger are emotions the Dark Lord could eventually use to reel him in. And four, those Slytherins in the candidate’s year who were able and willing to stand up to a popular Gryffindor jock and his gang were those who despised Sirius as an apostate Black. And those particular Slytherins were from families which held other views as well. They would draw the candidate to a certain political persuasion.
The candidate was naturally a bit of a loner, but he was bright; he’d figure out quickly enough that his best hope to make himself less of a target for the Marauders was to start hanging out as much as possible with that specific group of housemates. To accept their offers of friendship.
And once he started doing so, he could then be penalized for it. Either told he was weak to be unable to stand against a gang of four bullies without support, or punished by his oldest friend’s disapproval for making such a poor choice of new friends.
If the candidate threw his new friends over, he’d be throwing himself to the Marauders as their meat—but that objection is not one he can make without looking weak or cowardly.
*
But it’s not enough to drive the candidate to affiliate loosely with the desired group.
One would also need to eliminate, so far as possible, the candidate’s chances of getting support from other sources.
Well, what are the other possible sources of support for this particular candidate? He’s a loner, with only one close friend outside his house. However, he’s bright: an obvious candidate for his Head of House’s Club, and an obvious object of interest to other teachers.
How could one ensure the candidate not be invited to join the Slug Club? That’s easy enough: use the rivalry with the Marauders. The candidate’s talent makes him an obvious Slug Club recruit, but his appearance and personality are not prepossessing. If one pointed out to Horace that he could have EITHER the candidate OR the current Black and Potter scions, he’d likely invite the latter first.
Of course, Black and Potter weren’t likely to accept the invitation on their own. If, however, the headmaster hinted about the Order of the Phoenix he’s setting up—and that if they want to be considered for membership, they should join the Slug Club, at least for a year or so, to make contacts that will be useful later and to spy on the Slytherins in the Club…. If the two Marauders later dropped out, to Horace’s chagrin and disgruntlement, they would have served their purpose of excluding the candidate.
The headmaster might also privately warn the non-Slytherins on his staff that You-Know-Who had been a Slytherin and was recruiting largely from that house; they should be wary of encouraging ambitious Slytherin children, as they might find the talents they encouraged perverted to Voldemort’s service.
And he would let drop the same information to the Gryffindor prefects. Leading the Gryffindor prefect to distrust both the candidate and his other associates would serve nicely to separate her from him.
In fact, don’t just inflame the Gryff’s existing prejudice again the Snakes by associating the house itself with You-Know-Who. The candidate shows particular aptitude in two fields, one of which is the Dark Arts, um, excuse me, we like to say at Hogwarts, Defense. But the Dark Lord is known to be a master of the Dark Arts, particularly of Dark spells of domination and cruelty. So the headmaster might encourage selected Gryffindors, especially the prefects, in the misapprehension that those spells are the whole of the Dark Arts, that Dark magic is itself intrinsically evil, and that an interest in them leads nearly inevitably to an interest in joining that noted master, Voldemort.
This reputation would obviously spread among other Gryffindors. And now, finally, we can make sense of Sirius's dismissal of his parents as obvious followers of You-Know-Who. Jodel pointed out that Sirius knew that his family was tossing every Knut they could into layering protections on Grimmauld Place—during the time of Voldemort’s rise. Who did Sirius think they were trying to protect themselves from? The Ministry? They owned the Ministry!
Why did Sirius not even consider the possibility that his parents, nasty Pureblood supremacists though they may have been, did not support that upstart Dark Lord fellow?
Well, as the saying goes, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Sure, the senior Blacks acted as though they were preparing to withstand a siege by the up-and-coming power. But if Dumbledore had specifically warned the Gryffindors that Slytherins, especially ambitious ones, were natural followers of You-Know-Who; and if he'd told them further that the Dark Arts are evil and all its practitioners accepted You-Know-Who as their Lord; and if You-Know-Who was espousing a Pureblood supremacist ideology.... Well, then! Sirius’s family met all the recruitment criteria; of course they must support him.
And then consider Lily’s concerns about her first friend in the Wizarding World. Severus was a Slytherin, and openly wanted to better himself, and he had friends who used Dark Magic and he clearly didn't see how self-evidently evil they were to do so.... Maybe he was Dark himself? So when he finally snapped during the Marauders’ torture and used that opprobrious racist epithet, he filled in the one missing piece of the DE-wannabe profile. Just as Dumbledore had been hinting he inevitably would.
*
And now see how circumstances do conspire in Dumbledore’s favor. Consider the werewolf caper. Dumbledore must have been LIVID at Sirius for endangering the chess piece he’d spent perhaps a year in shaping—and correspondingly grateful to James for saving his piece’s life.
But how well Albus can use this, to drive Snape in the proper direction….
Indeed, it all works out perfectly: Twinkles can let James know that for his heroic rescue of an enemy Albus will give him the Quidditch captaincy, and will consider him for Head Boy (and Lily Evans is the most serious contender for Head Girl) if James will only clean up his act and stop getting caught hexing other students. James is fully bright enough to appreciate the distinction between “stop hexing” and “stop getting caught hexing,” although he won’t realize the headmaster MEANT him to catch it.
And Lily decides Snape’s a DE-wannabe, right on schedule, and cuts him off.
And an embittered and embattled boy has only one set of allies to defend him, and one set of friends left to offer him any support or validation.
*
And now consider that Prophecy.
Dumbledore’s original plan would have been to reveal to Snape, at some time in the nebulous future, the Dark Lord’s true plans regarding Muggleborns, and then to catch the boy as he recoiled at having joined a group that posed a direct threat to his Lily.
But what if, when Dumbledore heard that Prophecy and discovered that Severus had heard it too, Dumbledore already knew that Lily was pregnant and due at the end of July…? Then the Prophecy could apply, or could be made to seem to apply, to her son. And then Snape would have imperiled her by his own actions, not just by joining the wrong group.
And his guilt and horror would give Dumbledore a lifelong choke collar on the boy.
No wonder Albus let Severus go to report that Prophecy to the Dark Lord, even aside from the prospect of luring Tom into unwise action.
The trap springing shut.
*
I did say this theory was crazed. And, alas, absolutely unverifiable.
A/N: I wrote almost all of this essay four/five years ago, but I considered it too, ah, extreme to post on Snapedom. But a recent exchange with oneandthetruth regarding Albus reminded me of it, so I’ve dusted it off to post here. Hope you enjoy!
Appendix:
The site moderator gave me permission to post links to essays outside DTCL
Much of what I asserted Twinkles might do if his aim during Severus’s last several years at school were to drive Severus into Tom’s arms were things I’d previously argued Twinkles was doing anyhow: encouraging (the Marauder’s) bullying, blackening Slytherin’s reputation, promoting misinformation on the Dark Arts…
Here, then, are essays independently analyzing Dumbledore’s responsibility for unjustified biases (deliberate misinformation) and bullying at Hogwarts.
Evidence that Dumbledore deliberately encouraged anarchy and violence at Hogwarts:
“Mr. Filch has Asked: Discipline at Hogwarts”
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/276142.html
See also oneandthetruth’s “Chaos a Hundred Times Over”
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/292051.html
That Slytherin’s reputation had been blackened, some time between Severus’s Sorting and Harry’s, by the selective release of the information that Voldemort had been a Slytherin (while concealing which Slytherin he’d been):
“The Corruption of the House System”
http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/26003.html
That the reputation that the Dark Arts as a whole are intrinsically evil was unjustified, relatively new, and originated among Dumbledore’s followers:
“Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper”
http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/28365.html
*
Definitions:
“rejoin, v.t.
- To join together again; to reunite after separation.
return, v.t.
- To come back; to come or go back, as to a former place, condition, etc…
- To revert to a former owner…”
Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Second Edition, c 1979.
*
“Severus Snape was indeed a Death Eater. However, he rejoined our side before Lord Voldemort’s downfall and turned spy for us at great personal risk. He is now no more a Death Eater than I am.” Dumbledore in the Privy Ministry Hearing, Pensieve, GoF
“You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realized how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the Prophecy, Harry. I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned—” Dumbledore to Harry, HBP
"Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban.... When the time comes, we can protect him too.... Come over to the right side, Draco...." Dumbledore to Draco, HBP
“And what will you give me in return, Severus?” Dumbledore to Snape, DH
*
Fact: Never in seven books is Harry given a coherent explanation of “the Dark Arts” and why they are (or if they are) intrinsically evil. But he's encouraged to believe that they are. And his parents believed so too.
Fact: Severus Snape heard part of a Prophecy and was allowed to leave with his knowledge of it intact.
Fact: When Severus met Albus on that windswept hillside, Albus seemed confident both that Severus was a Death Eater and that Severus had turned over the Prophecy voluntarily to Lord Voldemort (that is, that Severus had not been tricked or forced into revealing it).
Fact: Severus expected Albus to know this: the young man’s first words to the old wizard were, “Don’t kill me!”
Fact: When Severus offered Albus, gratis, the information that the Dark Lord had interpreted the Prophecy to point at Albus’s devoted followers the Potters, Albus didn’t thank the young man for the warning. Instead, he demanded what the young man would offer HIM, Albus, to protect Albus’s own Order members.
Fact: Albus subsequently hired Severus as his Potions Master.
Inference from that fact: Albus concealed the damaging information that Severus Snape had joined the Death Eaters from the public, the Ministry, the Aurors, and from most or all of the Order of the Phoenix. Had he not, the later outcry over his hiring a werewolf would have paled in comparison to the outcry over his hiring a proven Voldemort supporter at the height of the war.
But—Severus had expected Albus to kill him as a Death Eater on that hillside. So he knew that Albus already knew or suspected his affiliation before that time. But if so, Albus must have concealed that knowledge from both the Ministry and his own Order, well before Snape’s desperate decision to defect in an attempt (ultimately futile) to try to save Lily’s life at the probable cost of his own.
And finally, fact: Albus consistently spoke of Severus’s defection from the Death Eaters as Snape’s “return.” As his “rejoining” of “our side.”
Whereas when Albus spoke to Draco, he invited the boy to “come OVER to the right side.”
What theory could we spin to explain these disparate facts?
*
This particular crazed theory is the result of a collision between one of Pasi’s excellent stories and a question raised by Oryx_leucoryx on Snapedom. Pasi’s “The Killing of Regulus Black” is totally AU now, but still an excellent read. I’d read it some time ago; it had fermented in my subconscious, and then Oryx_leucoryx raised the question on Snapedom: Who knew that Severus was a Death Eater? And one of the answers is: Albus, and he apparently hid that information for a long time from (at least most of) his own Order, from the Auror Department, and from the Ministry.
Why?
*
Dumbledore spoke of Snape as “rejoining our side.”
To rejoin is “to reunite after separation.”
But who initiated that separation, and for what purpose?
*
This crazed theory depends on three hypotheses which can, I believe, be neither confirmed nor refuted by canon.
Unverifiable Hypothesis One: that Albus had paid enough attention to Severus as a child to identify the boy’s fundamental character, talents, and weaknesses. Specifically, that Albus recognized, among other things, that Severus a) was a vulnerable loner from an abusive home; b) had an immense capacity for devotion and loyalty; and c) had offered that devotion to his childhood friend Lily Evans.
Unverifiable Hypothesis Two: That the Muggle-born Registration Committee, which came out of the blue for me as a reader, would have come as no such surprise to Albus: that Albus knew, well before the rest of the WW, that Voldemort would eventually aspire to exterminate, not just “rule over”, Muggle-borns (or selected Muggle-borns, while controlling—completely—the magic use and reproduction of the rest).
Unverifiable Hypothesis Three: Pasi’s story opens with Alastor Moody attending the funeral of a talented young Auror, a gifted Occlumens who’d managed to infiltrate Voldemort’s supporters to the extent of being invited to take the Dark Mark. At which he failed: not the best Occlumency would allow someone to take the Dark Lord’s Mark while hiding treason to Riddle in one’s heart. Hypothesis Three: Supposing that Pasi were correct, what would follow?
*
Unverifiable Hypothesis One:
I think we can agree that canon establishes that Albus had guessed by (or on) that hilltop that Severus was devoted to Lily Potter née Evans: Albus would scarcely have asked the question, “And what will you give me in return, Severus?” had he not been anticipating the answer he received.
I’d argued previously that Severus’s actions and words that night might have been what clued Albus in; Severus was, after all, risking his life (from both sides) in approaching Albus, he’d stated he had come with a “request”, and he was clearly distraught at Lily’s peril. Moreover, while we know that (as of fifth year) Lily’s girlfriends knew that Lily and Severus were at least friends, it seems that no one else did.
Or more precisely, no one seems to remember. Which is rather curious, really. When Harry, dissecting Snape’s perfidy after Dumbledore’s murder, says bitterly, “And he didn’t think my mother was worth a damn either—he called her a Mudblood,” neither Minerva, Horace, Hagrid, nor Remus objected, “But before that quarrel they used to be friends. In fact, he had seemed to be rather sweet on her. That must have been what Dumbledore thought Snape regretted.”
And yet there had been that extremely public vigil outside the Fat Lady, with Severus threatening to spend the night outside the door for the merest chance to apologize to Lily—risking (and almost certainly receiving some combination of) detention, public ridicule and humiliation, further hexing by the Marauders, and the extreme displeasure of the Pureblood supremacists among his housemates.
Did the gossip mill not work that night? Talk about fools who wear their hearts on their sleeve! Everyone in Hogwarts MUST have known, as of breakfast the next morning, exactly how far gone that Slytherin boy must have been on that pretty Gryffindor prefect, and how she had told him off. So it seems that Severus must have subsequently sold everyone interested on the story that “there were other [girls], and of purer blood, worthier of him….” and that he cared as little about the loss of their friendship as Lily appeared to.
However, Albus was a Legilimens, and Severus was not always an Occlumens capable of deceiving “the greatest Legilimens the world has ever known.”
But in fact, Albus might have previously EXPECTED young Severus to display unreasonable loyalty and continued devotion to his first-ever friend and first love. Depending on what he understood of Severus’s upbringing and consequent character.
"All the privilege I claim... (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." Jane Austen, Persuasion
Anne Elliot claimed this "privilege" for her sex; but in fact it's a known characteristic of children of alcoholics (which, indeed, Anne Elliot well might have been). Or, as Janet Woititz expressed in Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents, children from such backgrounds are often “extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.”
Ouch.
Other characteristics of children from that particular type of dysfunctional family? Fear of losing control; fear of feelings; an overdeveloped sense of responsibility; guilt feelings; inability to relax; harsh, even fierce self-criticism (coupled with difficulty tolerating criticism from others); difficulty in intimate relationships; fear of abandonment; approval-seeking; stress-related physical complaints (such as, perhaps, chronically oily skin and hair and eating disorders which could lead to either gauntness or obesity); anxiety & hypervigilance; compulsive behavior (including compulsive overwork) ….
Nah, not a one of those could be seen to apply in any way to our Severus!
And, oh, per Woititz again, such children “...tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences.” (“Anything,” anyone? Or for that matter, accepting the Dark Mark?)
“We got guilt feelings when we trusted ourselves, giving in to others. We became reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative. We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally.” (from the ACOA website)
Those with insider knowledge of some types of dysfunctional families have no problem at all identifying Severus’s pattern of behavior. And once one has spotted the overall pattern, one might investigate which parts of the pattern apply in this specific case. Especially if the investigating party might be a Legilimens.
It’s actually entirely predictable that if Severus lost Lily and thought it was because HE was unworthy of HER, that he’d idealize her and have a hard time getting over her. Severus was, after all, like Anne Elliot, someone who “had hardly any body to love” (Jane Austen, Persuasion, again). Indeed, if Severus were soon to be moving almost exclusively in Pureblood-supremacist circles, it’s not as though Lily could be given any serious competition. Avery might accept Snape as a comrade-in-arms, but he was not about to introduce his pretty younger sister to him. The brightest and prettiest of the supremacist Pureblood witches would be even less likely than little Miss Evans to settle for a scrawny, ugly half-blood, whatever his talents and intelligence.
Could Albus have identified Severus as someone scarred by a dysfunctional upbringing in ways that could possibly be exploited? Albus often seemed tone-deaf to people’s feelings, after all. However, Albus himself cane from such a background (“secrets and lies,” said his brother). He’d worked with children for at least thirty years as of the mid-seventies, maybe for double that time; he ought to have picked up something about how children from abusive backgrounds react, at least in theory. He was an adept Legilimens. And he had a proven track record of picking up people with a weakness or secret who served him gratefully in return for his protection: Hagrid, Lupin, Trelawney… Snape himself, later, that reformed DE who owed his freedom, his employment, and his chance of redemption all, all to Albus.
Hypothesis One is unverified in canon, but I think it’s not contradicted.
Unverifiable Hypothesis Two: That Albus, unlike (say) Regulus or myself, anticipated that Muggle-borns faced possible genocide if Voldemort gained sufficient political power. Tom’s first actions when he finally took over the Ministry seemed a bit strange to me. Try to capture Potter, check. Take over the WW propaganda organ, check. Take over the education system, check.
Let known members of the Order of the Phoenix run free to organize a resistance while the subverted Ministry spends its time accusing Muggle-borns of usurping magic and rounding them up—huh wha’? I get as articulate as Hagrid just thinking about it.
But as I pointed out elsewhere, it makes sense if you regard it as Tommy the Indefinitely Prolonged making it a priority to monitor and eliminate genetic threats before they can materialize. Tommy himself, Albus, and Harry (and maybe Severus) were crosses between very old, probably inbred Pureblood lines (Ariana & Aberforth, like Morfinn and Merope, were apparently abnormal; James, while seemingly physically healthy, was the last of a dying line) and Muggles/Muggle-borns. If Tommy believed such crosses to produce the most powerful wizards, he could eliminate potential rivals or challengers before birth by a multi-pronged approach. Bring the oldest houses to extinction where possible, encourage Purebloods to breed only among themselves, encourage the view that mating with Muggles is tantamount to bestiality, and monitor and/or destroy Muggle-borns, who are much more likely to attract Pureblood mates than actual Muggles are.
And if the effects of inbreeding among magical families include a higher incidence, not only of the same stillbirths and birth defects that we Muggles experience, but of Squibs, then spreading the rumor that Muggle-borns have stolen Purebloods’ magic will be snatched at as a scapegoat—my baby has no magic because it was stolen from her by some Muggle, not because her blood is too pure! If Tom had started whispering such things among his followers, Albus well might have figured out that Muggle-borns might be targeted if Riddle ever attained control over the Ministry….
Unverifiable Hypothesis Three: That a spy, an Auror or Order member, could infiltrate the outer ranks of Voldemort’s supporters, but that one had to be genuinely committed to take the Mark itself and enter the inner circle.
The only real support for this is that as far as we know, no one DID ever succeed in entering the Death Eater ranks as a spy. (Jodel indeed had speculated that Snape himself had done so, but that theory was canon-shafted by DH.) We know of Death Eaters who turned after their branding (Regulus, Severus, Igor, Draco); we’re told that Dumbledore at least (not the Ministry) had other “useful spies.” But Severus is the only double agent in the inner circle that we ever get the smallest whiff of. Yet it is almost inconceivable that neither the Ministry nor Dumbledore would have tried to infiltrate the Death Eaters. Ergo, any such attempts must have been unsuccessful.
Obviously, if it were true that one had to be in earnest to take the Mark binding oneself permanently to Voldemort, then the only way for the other side to get a spy in the innermost circle would be to locate a branded Death Eater who could somehow be coerced or seduced to betray his master and his mates.
Unless, of course, one were possessed of the great brain of Albus Dumbledore.
That pre-eminent example of Homo habilis, Man the Toolmaker, as the dioramas used to say admiringly.
What if one didn’t try to locate a potential double agent, but to make one? Find a promising piece of obsidian and chip it into the proper shape?
What if one sent someone in? Someone whom one could manipulate into taking the Mark absolutely sincerely, but with a hidden hook that one could use to make him turn (return) to one’s own side at one’s pleasure?
Such as, perhaps, the shocking revelation that the organization that one had joined in good faith would kill one’s true love if it actually attained power?
I did say this theory was crazed, didn’t I?
*
But indulge me.
Suppose one were the headmaster of Britain’s premier school of wizardry, and one were looking for a pupil one could shape into the perfect double agent to infiltrate into Lord Voldemort’s most trusted ranks.
What would one look for?
Well, the first consideration would be the characteristics required to be a successful spy in the Death Eater camp. The candidate must obviously have a natural talent for Occlumency. He (almost certainly he—Riddle allows few women in his inner circle, so those few would be under extra scrutiny—an automatic disqualification) must furthermore be brave enough to be willing to risk himself, and intelligent and devious enough to have a chance of pulling such a deception off. He must be someone Riddle would want to recruit—either well-connected, well-placed, or talented in his own right.
And the candidate must be someone susceptible to being recruited: either a Pureblood who was (or could be induced to become) attracted by Riddle’s overt ideology that Purebloods are superior to everyone else, or someone vulnerable for other reasons. There is. after all, a type of boy who’s the natural prey of extremist organizations.
Mary_j_59, talking earlier on Snapedom about Severus’s recruitment, comments:
“He {Severus} was an isolated, impoverished, and angry young man, and also quite vulnerable. Borolin points out that cults and hate groups "love bomb" kids like Sev, telling them how special and valuable they are, insisting that they are appreciated, and getting them firmly sewn up with their new friends. Only then, when their emotions are fully engaged, do the cult leaders begin inculcating doctrine.”
And then there’s the most important consideration of all: that whoever one sent in could be reeled back, fairly certainly, at the desired time. Probably, since the candidate will need to be willing to act in ways that would seem insane to anyone governed by simple self-interest, by danger to someone whom the candidate values above his life.
So you’d need to target someone who’s capable of such loyalty that he would sacrifice himself unhesitatingly for those he loves best, and who loves someone who’d be threatened by Tom’s ultimate triumph.
Why, at first glance there are at least three candidates in Lily Evans’ year alone!
However, there’s another consideration at play: Albus knows that Riddle doesn’t have a terribly good track record for rewarding his followers. It’s one of the things Albus counts on for getting the candidate to return to his side—if danger to a loved one is to be the hook, the candidate must conclude that he can’t count on protecting his beloved as a reward for any service, however exemplary, that he might provide to his Dark Lord.
There is one reward, however, and only one, that Death Eaters do obtain consistently: anyone with sadistic impulses will find ample opportunity to indulge them. Send James or Sirius in to join the D. E.’s, when they already get off on causing pain and humiliation to others, and you risk getting back (if at all) a full-fledged sadist like their cousin Bellatrix (assuming she was such, before Azkaban). Far better, on that count, to find someone who doesn’t have a natural bent for hurting others.
In the year in question, that leaves one obvious candidate; there may, of course, have been others, not visible from our vantage.
*
So what would be the procedure, should a headmaster wish to push a particular student to join the Death Eaters?
*
The very first step, obviously, would be to interview potential candidates. The interview process would serve multiple purposes. If one had founded, or were purposing to found, an Order of the Phoenix, a vigiliante group opposed to Tom’s, one would naturally privately examine the more talented, intelligent, and brave students with a view for future recruitment. And one would naturally mark which students seemed most susceptible to the lure of positive attention.
Having identified a potential candidate, perhaps towards the end of fourth year, one would push him towards the camp one wished him to join initially, while isolating him from other possible sources of validation, support, and friendship.
How might this be done?
One step would be to let loose the hounds to drive him in the right direction.
In this case, that would be easy enough. The candidate was already on terms on enmity with a pack of Gryffindor bullies in his year; all one would need do was to let the pack slip their leashes. Or rather, loosen the leash a trifle.
Appointing the right Gryffindor prefects for fifth year would do wonders along that line.
Prefects’ primary disciplinary tools are scolding, detentions, and docking house points. But when a prefect docks points from a housemate, the anger felt by housemates at the points lost can sometimes be directed, not at the miscreants, but at the prefect who docked the points. Especially in houses Gryffindor and Slytherin.
Gryffindor prefects, therefore, come in four major flavors: those like Percy Weasley, determined to do what they understand to be their duty, and making themselves odious in their house in so doing—but generally keeping order. Those like Ron Weasley, always ready to enforce a rule against another house, but cheerfully bending the rules to his or his house’s (for example, confiscating a banned item to play with it himself). Those like Hermione Granger, knowing that she ought to be like Percy, but without the moral courage to take the consequent social opprobrium. Those under her discipline learned that she’d verbally espouse the rules and try usually to enforce them, only to cave when doing so would cost her too much socially. And the fourth, finally, the spineless ones like Remus who turn their heads not to notice misdemeanors they ought to punish.
(Slytherin prefects exhibit much the same range of behaviors, but with slightly different underlying motivations. Ravenclaws are less likely to throw group four; a Ravenclaw analyzes which pattern of behavior best suits hir and sticks with it. Hufflepuff prefects are almost always group one; their own housemates will shame them into a semblance of fairness, even if they’d personally rather be partial. Have I mentioned recently that I LIKE House Hufflepuff?)
So if one wanted the Marauder pack to slip its leash, appoint prefects who wouldn’t oppose them effectively. Suggest Lupin as the male prefect. He has a heart; he has a conscience; he knows full well that he should oppose the worst of what his pack does. The headmaster could convincingly argue for giving him the chance to rein in the others. But Lupin hadn’t the guts to risk losing his pack’s support even momentarily; he wouldn’t check them.
(And really, who else could be picked? James was the only other option we know of, and no one could have expected him to even try to enforce rules, much less fairly. He’d be Ron [or, we suppose, Draco], only doubled. Except, of course, in the real world if you gave a boy that responsibility, you’d also be giving him the duty of monitoring his own behavior. And if he violated that duty, he’d then be doubly erring and subject to double punishment. Which might make an impression.)
For the other fifth-year prefect, the girl, pick the Muggle-born Evans. A political choice, most would think it, a slap at the Pureblood supremacist faction; an obvious choice, would think others, given her talent and intelligence.
But. This Muggleborn might be impressed and intimidated by the trappings of the Pureblood culture to which she can’t aspire, but she’s trying hard not to show it. She was pretty, bright, vivacious; she had always been popular, sought-after, both in the Muggle cow-byre in which she was raised and now here among her own.
And she knew full well that she walked on thin ice socially in the WW, and she has always had high social standing.
Like Lupin, she has both a heart and a conscience. But she cares about her own popularity. If she were appointed prefect, this would be at stake in her decisions. Her friends would let her know, unmistakably, that in Gryffindor house, the people who really belong don’t jeopardize the House standings by deducting House points for anything that can be ignored. And that a true Gryffindor would never penalize their house’s best Quidditch star and his cronies for anything short of murder.
Best of all, of course, she was the candidate’s dearest friend from before ever they were at school. If she felt that she was failing him in not adequately reining in her housemates’ attacks on him, her own feelings of guilt would drive a wedge between them (even if he himself didn’t blame her, since Slytherins put the same pressure on their prefects to show house bias).
Next, make sure that the punishments given by staff aren’t such as would actually restrain the Marauders. When caught in the act, the Marauders must be punished, naturally. However, the punishments should never be onerous enough actually to deter them. If James and Sirius were separated for detentions, for example, encourage their initiative in obtaining or creating magic mirrors to communicate with each other. And make sure that the staff (especially Pomfrey) knows that accusations of bullying supported by nothing but the alleged victim’s word were not to be tolerated. Telling tales on other students is never to be encouraged!
Consider the Weasley twins, two decades later. They boasted of being experts, pre-Umbridge, at never putting more than a toe over the line leading to expulsion. The Marauders were undoubtedly the same. If that line moved a bit, were drawn further out, they would quickly learn to take advantage. So it would be easy enough to encourage the Marauders to escalate their attacks on the candidate and his house. (Other students would suffer collateral damage, of course.)
The Marauder attacks would serve several purposes. One, they would make the candidate feel that the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t adequately protect him and make him susceptible to considering who else might. Two, his attempts to defend himself—to train his power and use his creativity against his tormentors—would make him more attractive to the Dark Lord’s recruiters. Three, his long-simmering fear and anger are emotions the Dark Lord could eventually use to reel him in. And four, those Slytherins in the candidate’s year who were able and willing to stand up to a popular Gryffindor jock and his gang were those who despised Sirius as an apostate Black. And those particular Slytherins were from families which held other views as well. They would draw the candidate to a certain political persuasion.
The candidate was naturally a bit of a loner, but he was bright; he’d figure out quickly enough that his best hope to make himself less of a target for the Marauders was to start hanging out as much as possible with that specific group of housemates. To accept their offers of friendship.
And once he started doing so, he could then be penalized for it. Either told he was weak to be unable to stand against a gang of four bullies without support, or punished by his oldest friend’s disapproval for making such a poor choice of new friends.
If the candidate threw his new friends over, he’d be throwing himself to the Marauders as their meat—but that objection is not one he can make without looking weak or cowardly.
*
But it’s not enough to drive the candidate to affiliate loosely with the desired group.
One would also need to eliminate, so far as possible, the candidate’s chances of getting support from other sources.
Well, what are the other possible sources of support for this particular candidate? He’s a loner, with only one close friend outside his house. However, he’s bright: an obvious candidate for his Head of House’s Club, and an obvious object of interest to other teachers.
How could one ensure the candidate not be invited to join the Slug Club? That’s easy enough: use the rivalry with the Marauders. The candidate’s talent makes him an obvious Slug Club recruit, but his appearance and personality are not prepossessing. If one pointed out to Horace that he could have EITHER the candidate OR the current Black and Potter scions, he’d likely invite the latter first.
Of course, Black and Potter weren’t likely to accept the invitation on their own. If, however, the headmaster hinted about the Order of the Phoenix he’s setting up—and that if they want to be considered for membership, they should join the Slug Club, at least for a year or so, to make contacts that will be useful later and to spy on the Slytherins in the Club…. If the two Marauders later dropped out, to Horace’s chagrin and disgruntlement, they would have served their purpose of excluding the candidate.
The headmaster might also privately warn the non-Slytherins on his staff that You-Know-Who had been a Slytherin and was recruiting largely from that house; they should be wary of encouraging ambitious Slytherin children, as they might find the talents they encouraged perverted to Voldemort’s service.
And he would let drop the same information to the Gryffindor prefects. Leading the Gryffindor prefect to distrust both the candidate and his other associates would serve nicely to separate her from him.
In fact, don’t just inflame the Gryff’s existing prejudice again the Snakes by associating the house itself with You-Know-Who. The candidate shows particular aptitude in two fields, one of which is the Dark Arts, um, excuse me, we like to say at Hogwarts, Defense. But the Dark Lord is known to be a master of the Dark Arts, particularly of Dark spells of domination and cruelty. So the headmaster might encourage selected Gryffindors, especially the prefects, in the misapprehension that those spells are the whole of the Dark Arts, that Dark magic is itself intrinsically evil, and that an interest in them leads nearly inevitably to an interest in joining that noted master, Voldemort.
This reputation would obviously spread among other Gryffindors. And now, finally, we can make sense of Sirius's dismissal of his parents as obvious followers of You-Know-Who. Jodel pointed out that Sirius knew that his family was tossing every Knut they could into layering protections on Grimmauld Place—during the time of Voldemort’s rise. Who did Sirius think they were trying to protect themselves from? The Ministry? They owned the Ministry!
Why did Sirius not even consider the possibility that his parents, nasty Pureblood supremacists though they may have been, did not support that upstart Dark Lord fellow?
Well, as the saying goes, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Sure, the senior Blacks acted as though they were preparing to withstand a siege by the up-and-coming power. But if Dumbledore had specifically warned the Gryffindors that Slytherins, especially ambitious ones, were natural followers of You-Know-Who; and if he'd told them further that the Dark Arts are evil and all its practitioners accepted You-Know-Who as their Lord; and if You-Know-Who was espousing a Pureblood supremacist ideology.... Well, then! Sirius’s family met all the recruitment criteria; of course they must support him.
And then consider Lily’s concerns about her first friend in the Wizarding World. Severus was a Slytherin, and openly wanted to better himself, and he had friends who used Dark Magic and he clearly didn't see how self-evidently evil they were to do so.... Maybe he was Dark himself? So when he finally snapped during the Marauders’ torture and used that opprobrious racist epithet, he filled in the one missing piece of the DE-wannabe profile. Just as Dumbledore had been hinting he inevitably would.
*
And now see how circumstances do conspire in Dumbledore’s favor. Consider the werewolf caper. Dumbledore must have been LIVID at Sirius for endangering the chess piece he’d spent perhaps a year in shaping—and correspondingly grateful to James for saving his piece’s life.
But how well Albus can use this, to drive Snape in the proper direction….
Indeed, it all works out perfectly: Twinkles can let James know that for his heroic rescue of an enemy Albus will give him the Quidditch captaincy, and will consider him for Head Boy (and Lily Evans is the most serious contender for Head Girl) if James will only clean up his act and stop getting caught hexing other students. James is fully bright enough to appreciate the distinction between “stop hexing” and “stop getting caught hexing,” although he won’t realize the headmaster MEANT him to catch it.
And Lily decides Snape’s a DE-wannabe, right on schedule, and cuts him off.
And an embittered and embattled boy has only one set of allies to defend him, and one set of friends left to offer him any support or validation.
*
And now consider that Prophecy.
Dumbledore’s original plan would have been to reveal to Snape, at some time in the nebulous future, the Dark Lord’s true plans regarding Muggleborns, and then to catch the boy as he recoiled at having joined a group that posed a direct threat to his Lily.
But what if, when Dumbledore heard that Prophecy and discovered that Severus had heard it too, Dumbledore already knew that Lily was pregnant and due at the end of July…? Then the Prophecy could apply, or could be made to seem to apply, to her son. And then Snape would have imperiled her by his own actions, not just by joining the wrong group.
And his guilt and horror would give Dumbledore a lifelong choke collar on the boy.
No wonder Albus let Severus go to report that Prophecy to the Dark Lord, even aside from the prospect of luring Tom into unwise action.
The trap springing shut.
*
I did say this theory was crazed. And, alas, absolutely unverifiable.
A/N: I wrote almost all of this essay four/five years ago, but I considered it too, ah, extreme to post on Snapedom. But a recent exchange with oneandthetruth regarding Albus reminded me of it, so I’ve dusted it off to post here. Hope you enjoy!
Appendix:
The site moderator gave me permission to post links to essays outside DTCL
Much of what I asserted Twinkles might do if his aim during Severus’s last several years at school were to drive Severus into Tom’s arms were things I’d previously argued Twinkles was doing anyhow: encouraging (the Marauder’s) bullying, blackening Slytherin’s reputation, promoting misinformation on the Dark Arts…
Here, then, are essays independently analyzing Dumbledore’s responsibility for unjustified biases (deliberate misinformation) and bullying at Hogwarts.
Evidence that Dumbledore deliberately encouraged anarchy and violence at Hogwarts:
“Mr. Filch has Asked: Discipline at Hogwarts”
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/276142.html
See also oneandthetruth’s “Chaos a Hundred Times Over”
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/292051.html
That Slytherin’s reputation had been blackened, some time between Severus’s Sorting and Harry’s, by the selective release of the information that Voldemort had been a Slytherin (while concealing which Slytherin he’d been):
“The Corruption of the House System”
http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/26003.html
That the reputation that the Dark Arts as a whole are intrinsically evil was unjustified, relatively new, and originated among Dumbledore’s followers:
“Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper”
http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/28365.html
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-11-10 07:44 pm (UTC)My (unverifiable) fanon is that Sirius's parents attributed Regulus's disappearance to some Order ambush - possibly even fratricide. Which might go some ways towards explaining why Walburga went completely around the bend.
I tend to also think that Albus was anti-Dark-Arts less as a calculated thing and more to buy off his own conscience. Gellert was a Pureblood into the Dark Arts, therefore that's what he should have looked out for all along! (Conveniently, it was the one trait he did NOT share in common with "very moral student" Albus.) Tom was a would-be-Pureblood into the Dark Arts, therefore he must always have been un-salvageable.
Therefore, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, CHAMPION of the "impure" and hater of the Dark Arts, could not possibly succumb to the megalomania that had so corrupted his fellow prodigies... could he?
Aside from that, it's an interesting theory and I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a scheme went off - with the absence of Severus as a particular target. We hear only from the Marauders and Severus on the issue, and Harry never speaks to any Slytherin alumni who might have shared the experience of being Marauder-targets.
After all, according to the great Albus, our choices SHOW who we really are. Not determine.
So I expect that he may have tracked several Slytherins who could be reeled back in by family members, loved ones, or other considerations. If you would like to call for 'extreme' theories, what if Regulus was one? ;) After all, Kreacher's point of view is limited. Just because Voldemort's experimentation upon Kreacher shook Regulus doesn't mean that it was the ONLY motivation for his eventual double-cross. Albus may well have yanked hard on Regulus via 'What if you could see your brother again, and not only across a battlefield?' while feeding him the right scraps of information questioning Voldemort's Pureblood credentials.
Unfortunately, I can't make it work out for Regulus to have passed Albus the information on the Cave, since he only returned with Kreacher for his suicide mission. Well - assuming Kreacher is telling the whole truth. If Regulus could forbid Kreacher from telling the family where he'd gone, he may well have forbid Kreacher from giving a full version of the truth to any subsequent masters.
It would also be a bit odd that Albus never went to the Cave if he knew in advance, but, under this theory, he would have assumed that Regulus had been found out and killed, that Voldemort knew, and so that the Cave was either rigged for an ambush or the treasure within had been removed. Very likely both. No use bothering with that, then.
Of course, the above is a silly theory. However, it gives a crude example of how Albus might begin reeling in a non-Severus Slytherin from the inner ranks.
Driving people "firmly into Voldemort's camp" who actually had flimsy ideological attachments and strong ties outside the camp is the sort of harebrained scheme I can readily see Albus pulling. "Harebrained", because I'm sure such a scheme would generate many genuine converts, if only because the figurehead of the anti-Voldemort, pro-Muggleborn side was such a @#$%^&* that otherwise-neutral Purebloods might wonder if Voldemort had the right idea.
But that would be a trifling consideration in the face of the Greater Good.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-11 12:44 am (UTC)Here are a few addresses I saved on my iPad "notepad"...
Date: 2014-11-11 06:38 am (UTC)X=93392
Snape's trust for Dumbledore and how the latter threw it away like Schindler did with his money
X=91172
Dumbledore's the epitomy of good — or is he? (See, I can do Quibbler as well :P)
X=276142
Rule-breaking and snitch-lynching in Hogwarts.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-11 08:57 am (UTC)Albus does not support his staff in enforcing official rules.
Albus encourages rules breakers who don't get caught.
No snitching/squealing ever. Neither Severus nor Minerva punish based on others' eyewitness testimony (regardless of House, BTW). The only misdeeds that get punished are those confessed by the miscreant, or those witnessed directly by the teacher (or prefect, or any other disciplinarian).
Discipline follows a tight chain of command, people of equal status cannot discipline one another - prefects cannot take points of one another, teachers cannot discipline other teachers even for torturing students (bouncing ferret scene).
Verbal provocation, even extreme, is never punished. Physical or magical retaliation to such is.
Arbitrarily breaking official rules for the sake of favorites.
We see these in the 90s often. It is consistent with the events of Severus' 5th year. But also with Tom's 5th, so perhaps Albus only made more extreme an existing culture. (Terri shows that the supposedly corrupt Ministry is more lawful and more consistently so than Albus' Hogwarts. Now I wonder if the Ministry, being a place where many people stay for life-long careers, represents the pre-Albus wizarding tradition.)
-----------
Terri's essays about the Dark Arts are called "Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper" parts 1 and 2.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-11 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-12 03:43 am (UTC)Dumbledore was one of Voldemort's best recruiting tools.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-12 09:27 am (UTC)We know that both wizarding Britain at large and Albus' Hogwarts are plagued with favoritism, but lawlessness at Hogwarts goes a few steps further with the twinkling headmaster who places strong limits on what actions can be disciplined at all, including a strong 'no snitching' rule. However we already see him showing a similar attitude to 11 year-old Tom, so it seems this was inherently his style, not necessarily something he did specifically as part of his engineering of spy!Severus. (But following oneandthetruth, he may have been engineering both the future Dark Lord and those who would ultimately fight him, all with the same useful policy.)
Based on OOTP, the appointment of prefects and Head Boys/Girls is in the hands of the headmaster, so he bears the responsibility for appointing Lily, Remus and possibly James. If James indeed was Head Boy it would be explained to the teachers in the know perhaps as a reward for the bravery and leadership he exhibited wrt the werewolf affair, and more broadly as a political move, to elevate a member of a family opposed to Voldemort. The existence of a hidden motive is of course possible.
We know the Dark Arts have been losing popularity among Albus' supporters - with the rise of a new faction - supporters of Albus who believe the Dark Arts aren't just dangerous but are outright evil (whereas non-Dark magic that achieves the same goals is good clean fun). We don't know when the change happened, but likely before Severus' 5th year, as we see Lily expressing those new views.
More another time.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-13 02:27 am (UTC)Extreme theories are fun :D
This scheme has the benefits (from Our Noble Headmaster's point of view) of having several possible favorable outcomes. If the Voldemort-endangered entanglements cause the shocked and betrayed recruits to do something rash or just perform badly and get punished or killed by Voldemort as a result, then the DEs are kept busy with infighting and the level of organizational fear gets ratcheted up, which can't be good for morale. If they manage to pass on some doubts to fellow DEs, so much the better! If they quit and escape to Canada without providing any direct benefit to the Order in the process, that's still a blow to DE morale and might disrupt whatever plan they had going at the moment. And if Albus gets a double agent out of the deal, well, that's like buying a candy bar and finding out you've nabbed a golden ticket. Not an impossible result, no, of course you did all you could with your limited means to get it, but it was only ever a long shot. Which worked out, hooray!
Now, we might still see some problems with this plan, but we don't have the vision Albus does.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-13 05:27 am (UTC)Hint that Voldemort was once a Hogwarts student from Slytherin House, and that current Slytherins were likely to join his ranks: Lily certainly agreed with the latter, no idea if she knew of the former. But I think Terri is addressing the odd things we hear and don't hear from Hagrid: In PS Hagrid tells Harry that You-Know-Who is an alumnus of Slytherin House, yet even when relevant he never indicates that they overlapped at Hogwarts, that Hagrid had known Voldemort as a student, that Voldemort was the one who precipitated his expulsion. So it seems Hagrid does not recognize Voldemort as Riddle, he might be relying on something he was told. Well, maybe Hagrid would be satisfied with this kind of tidbit, but wouldn't Minerva or Filius ask about the student's identity? Or does anyone think they are under the belief that sometime in the past there was a Hogwarts student by the name of Lord Voldemort, and never looked up to see what kind of records exist about him? So if Albus did spread such hints, I think he limited their audience to a few select students and the less inquisitive members of the staff.
Did Albus discourage teachers specifically from effective punishment of James and Sirius (beyond the general chaos-promoting policies)? I'm not sure how he would do that. What could he have told Minerva to cause her to keep punishing James, but to do so ineffectively?
I can't decide based on what Horace says, whether James and Sirius ever spent time in his club. He laments not having Sirius as a student in Slytherin, but makes no mention of interacting with James and/or Sirius outside the classroom.
Is there any indication for a change in disciplinary policy during the 1970s? Well, according to Minerva's claim, Argus Filch was made caretaker around 1973. I'm not sure how that should weigh in.
Black Elders
Date: 2014-11-14 05:29 pm (UTC)But I took the idea the older family members were anti-Voldemort from Jodel, and it really does make sense to me. Tom seemed to have recruited among the YOUNG, and his primary known proposal was Albus's old idea of promoting wizard supremacy by ENDING SECRECY. With a filip, perhaps, of "in the New Order, Mudbloods as well as their families will be kept in their place!"
Sirius said, my parents were Dark and had a mania about blood purity, Voldemort was Dark and talked about purifying the Wizarding race and putting Purebloods in charge. Of course they supported him at first, "They weren't alone, either, there were quite a few people who thought he had the right idea about things.... They got cold feet when they saw what he was prepared to do to get power, though."
But Kreacher said Regulus talked of the Dark Lord, "who was going to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns."
So Sirius thought his parents and their ilk supported Voldemort's ideas but didn't agree with [the extent of] his use of terrorism to achieve them. But, see, I can't see older, conservative people accepting the idea that ending Secrecy was the way to restore Pureblood hegemony. Young proud Purebloods, sure, upset that (as Borgin commiserated with Lucius), "wizard blood is counting for less everywheres," but their elders? Sounds too radical to me, even before you start arguing about how much violence is acceptable to bring about the revolution.
No, I think Tom appealed to romantic and impetuous youth, and that the older generation always viewed his central idea--and his appeal to their children--with some alarm. Ending Secrecy? Madness! Even those who agreed he had the right idea about the importance of blood purity.
Sirius himself said, "Harry, haven't you seen enough of this house to tell what kind of wizards my family were? ... I bet my parents thought Regulus was a right little hero for joining up at first."
"What kind of wizards." "I bet." Not, I know. He's been talking through his hat about their supposed support all along. Orion and Walburga weren't saying over the dinner table, "That Voldemort chappie has the right ideas. Sirius, you should listen to his speeches on the Wireless like Regulus does!"
No, Sirius just assumes that anyone who believed in "wizard blood" and accepted the use of the Dark Arts MUST be a Voldemort supporter--and I don't agree that that follows.
In fact, I don't think that anyone in the WW except a very small faction (which includes Sirius, but also Lily, Hagrid, and the Weasleys) ever did make the equation that pureblood supremacist plus Dark magician equals Death Eater.
Because of Lucius Malfoy's behavior.
Lucius is known to have committed crimes in Voldemort's service and to have gotten off on the Imperius defence. That means he has to have convincingly claimed that he didn't ever really support Voldemort. It's IMPERATIVE, once cleared, that the Malfoys avoid doing anything that might look like supporting Voldemort's old program.
And we never once see Lucius or his son or his wife advocate the overthrow of Secrecy, do we? Whereas they do go around openly disdaining Muggle-borns and blood traitors, and frequenting Nocturne Alley. A canny politician wouldn't DO those things if they would, in the public mind, tar him with having once supported Voldemort. Least of all, one who'd barely gotten off on that very charge!
And no one except Hagrid and the Weasleys say, "Ha! He's a bad 'un. Slytherin, visits Borgin and Burke's, hates Muggle-borns--he musta been a Death Eater all along."
Dumbledore's crowd, you see.
Re: Black Elders
Date: 2014-11-14 05:36 pm (UTC)Albus and the Dark Arts
Date: 2014-11-14 05:58 pm (UTC)Did he do evil because he was a vain and weak idiot, blinded by his own ineradicable belief that He Knew Best, and inducing (as Swythyv put it) the school in his care to act out his own internal contradictions?
Or was Albus merely another Tom, but, as Jane Austen put it about a lesser-scale heartless villain, "a clever, cautious man, grown old enough to appreciate a fair character?”
See, your view of Albus is the more interesting to me. Buying off his conscience, which presupposes that he has one. Yes, there he is, champion of the impure and anti-Dark-Arts, not like Gellert or Tom at all, really. Really! Even if he has to do things he's rather not in opposing them. (Have you read the wonderful fic in which Albus decides he needs to master the Imperius--and selects Minerva as the victim, on the grounds that there could be no ethical problem with that since they share the same goal? See, that fic, right there, is why my aesthetic preference is for fool-Albus over evil-Albus, whichever I write myself. You can't write a fic about a psychopath leading himself into evil.)
Excellent point that this reasoning allows him to write off Tom as "always unsalvagable", which excuses him for never having tried to give the boy guidance....
But... oneandthetruth's arguments that Albus is just a psychopath are rather compelling.
I would really love to see that point debated properly. Albus Was Evil versus Albus Was Weak, Stupider than he thought himself, Vain, and Manipulative, but Fundamentally Well-Intentioned, However Much Damage He Did.
Re: Albus and the Dark Arts
Date: 2014-11-14 07:16 pm (UTC)Albus and Imperius
Date: 2014-11-15 05:32 am (UTC)Re: Albus and Imperius
Date: 2014-11-15 07:23 am (UTC)Maddening Acronyms
Date: 2014-11-16 07:08 pm (UTC)Re: Maddening Acronyms
Date: 2014-11-17 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-30 08:42 pm (UTC)Suddenly removing corporal punishment might have left the staff in a bit of confusion as to what punishments they should be using. Which Albus could manipulate to his ends, possibly?
no subject
Date: 2014-12-01 01:45 am (UTC)The younger we make Arthur and Molly the more believable the bookstore fist-fight with Lucius becomes (though Arthur is definitely older than Lucius, with the latter leaving school no earlier than June 1972).
And Argus was hired around 1973. I like the idea of one major revolution of policies leaving teachers on unsure footing.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 02:28 am (UTC)Snape's and Filch's punishments of "scrub and chop things by hand, Muggle-style, bwahaha!" seem like decent solutions. Not dangerous or violent, unpleasant, and at least marginally useful to the school. Flitwick gives (humiliating) lines, which while less useful and potentially an occasion for him to bully students with the public humiliation aspect, is at least not likely to get anyone killed. Sending kids out into the dangerous FORBIDDEN Forest with a known unicorn-killer on the loose, or leaving a kid out where a mass-murderer could get him, now... McGonagall just gets more and more disappointing the more I really look at her actions.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-04 04:00 am (UTC)I agree that those 2 punishments by Minerva are in a category of their own. (I wish we knew what she assigned Draco as punishment for slacking off in HBP).
no subject
Date: 2014-12-05 04:09 am (UTC)Anyway, I was thinking of Neville and the horned toads. He probably wouldn't assign Neville to chop things magically unless he wanted them melted or fried. That he has a stash of horned toads that need prepping does suggest that he buys un-prepped ingredients in bulk and then has to get them ready for class somehow. (Maybe pre-gutted horned toads cost extra, or you can put whole corpses in suspension but can't keep individual organs fresh for shipping and storage.) Whether he would normally wave a wand to get them ready, though, I don't think there's enough information to say for sure.
Those two punishments are really odd. Yes, what did she give Draco in HBP? Or the Marauders, for that matter. Harry saw plenty of detentions in James's records, but I don't think he noted any of them as being detentions to be served in a pool of hungry sharks, for instance. Did she get harsher over time? Does she just snap occasionally? Were there not enough details in the detention files, and really she put James in danger every other weekend? It would be very interesting to know.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-06 06:14 pm (UTC)(Was Harry's appointment as Seeker in 1st year a partial punishment? Trial by ordeal? And what would she have done if she had caught Harry sneaking to Hogsmeade?)