Dark Devices: The Mirror of Eris
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deathtocapslockDark Devices: the Mirror of Eris.
Excuse me, that was Erised. How silly of me. Eris was the goddess of discord, and according to Hesiod (Works and Days), she sometimes worked by planting unsatisfiable desires in men’s hearts:
She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. But Strife is unwholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar….
Completely different thing from what that mirror does, got it.
Jodel suggested in “The Quirrell Debacle” that Dumbledore had set up Harry to look into that mirror. She argued that the headmaster had first moved that Mirror away from the heart of the labyrinth, and then had had Filch and Snape herd Harry to the appropriate room, primarily because Albus wanted to learn Harry’s heart’s deepest desires. Letting Harry gaze into that mirror, in that view, was Dumbledore’s test to make sure Harry wasn’t another future Dark Lord in training.
I think that there was something more going on than merely Albus’s test of Harry. If I am correct, I earnestly hope that Severus and Argus were not implicated in Twinkles’ plots.
*
First, let’s look at how Harry ended up before that mirror.
We’ll take as a given Jodel’s point that the Mirror could only have been in a room easily accessible to students by Dumbledore’s will. Once the Stone had been moved to Hogwarts for safekeeping in August, the Mirror’s place was obviously at the end of Dumbledore’s labyrinth as its final, and untrickable, guardian. So for the Mirror to be discovered anywhere else was proof that Dumbledore himself had moved the Mirror for some overriding purpose.
And the purpose clearly involved Harry. To test the boy, as Jodel thought, or what?
Let’s start with how. How did Twinkles induce the child to look into that mirror? Was Harry “herded” there by Filch and Snape alone, or what did bring him to that room and make him look his fill at what the mirror showed him?
It happened Christmas day, after a long, happy, tiring day and a lazy supper (PS 12): “everyone felt too full and sleepy to do much before bed.”
Harry and Ron went to bed, both replete, satisfied, and exhausted… except Harry couldn’t sleep. Why not?
It had been Harry’s best Christmas day ever. Yet something had been nagging at the back of his mind all day. Not until he climbed into bed was he free to think about it: the invisibility cloak and whoever had sent it.
Ron, full of turkey and cake and with nothing mysterious to bother him, fell asleep almost as soon as he’d drawn the curtains of his four-poster. Harry leaned over the side of his own bed and pulled the cloak out from under it.
His father’s… this had been his father’s…. Use it well, the note had said.
He had to try it, now. He slipped out of bed and wrapped the cloak around himself. Looking down at his legs, he saw only moonlight and shadows. It was a very funny feeling.
Use it well.
Suddenly, Harry felt wide-awake. The whole of Hogwarts was open to him in this cloak. Excitement flooded through him as he stood there in the dark and silence. He could go anywhere in this, anywhere, and Filch would never know.
Ron grunted in his sleep. Should Harry wake him? Something held him back—his father’s cloak—he felt that this time—the first time—he wanted to use it alone.
He crept out of the dormitory…..
Where should he go? He stopped, his heart racing, and thought. And then it came to him. The Restricted Section in the library. He’d be able to read as long as he liked, as long as it took to find out who Flamel was…..
The Restricted Section was right at the back of the library. Stepping carefully over the rope that separated these books from the rest of the library, he held up his lamp to read the titles.
They didn’t tell him much….
He had to start somewhere… A large black and silver volume caught his eye. He pulled it out with difficulty, because it was very heavy, and, balancing it on his knee, let it fall open.
A piercing, bloodcurdling shriek split the silence—the book was screaming!... Panicking, he heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside—stuffing the shrieking book back on the shelf, he ran for it. He passed Filch in the doorway; Filch’s pale, wild eyes looked straight through him, and Harry slipped under Filch’s outstretched arm and streaked off up the corridor, the book’s shrieks still ringing in his ears.
He came to a sudden halt in front of a tall suit of armor. He had been so busy getting away from the library, he hadn’t paid attention to where he was going. Perhaps because it was dark, he didn’t recognize where he was at all. There was a suit of armor near the kitchens, he knew, but he must be five floors above there.
“You asked me to come directly to you, Professor, if anyone was wandering around at night, and somebody’s been in the library—Restricted Section.”
Harry felt the blood drain out of his face. Wherever he was, Filch must know a shortcut, because his soft, greasy voice was getting nearer, and to his horror it was Snape who replied, “The Restricted Section? Well, they can’t be far, we’ll catch them.”
Harry stood rooted to the spot as Filch and Snape came around the corner ahead. They couldn’t see him, of course, but it was a narrow corridor and if they came much nearer they’d knock right into him—the cloak didn’t stop him from being solid.
He backed away as quietly as he could. A door stood ajar to his left. It was his only hope. He squeezed through it, holding his breath, trying not to move it, and to his relief he managed to get inside the room without their noticing anything.
[underlining mine]
*
So. How, exactly, did Harry end up in front of that mirror?
Death’s cloak, gifted to him by Dumbledore that morning, brought him nearly straight there.
He’d been thinking about the cloak all day. Despite being surfeited and worn out, he couldn’t sleep for obsessing over it. He felt he “had” to try it out. Immediately. And as soon as he donned it his exhaustion dropped away. He thought of waking Ron to share the adventure—but “something held him back.” He didn’t know where to go —“and then it came to him:” the library. Where the first book that caught his eye tripped an alarm, and he fled blindly “up the corridor.”
He ran, not conscious of where he was going. By sheer coincidence he halted (suddenly) by a suit of armor. Immediately AFTER he’d passed by the open door of a certain room.
None of this happened by Harry’s conscious agency—he didn’t even know which way he was running, he just ran—possibly in a circle, for Filch to come from the library and end up around a corner in front of him. And then, for no reason, he stopped dead. Just beyond a room whose door was ajar.
And then he saw Filch and Snape and he felt that “his only hope” of escaping them was by slipping into that room.
All perfectly unconscious, yes? At every decision point something outside his conscious mind directed his actions.
Except for the last decision that took him into the room itself. That one was logical. As Harry reflected, even if he was invisible he was still solid, and they might discover him accidently by bumping into him.
Except….
When I was growing up, one of the favorite games in my neighborhood was “Starlight Moonlight,” an only-in-the-dark game that combined tag and hide & seek. Hiding in the dark is very different from daylight hide & seek. The most secure places to hide, in fact, are places that the seeker would overlook because they aren’t (in the daylight) hiding places at all.
And the very worst scenario in any tagging hide and seek game is to let yourself be trapped in a space with only one exit if the seeker is at all likely to search it seriously. Even if it’s pitch black, a methodical seeker could quarter the area and find you, and if s/he keeps between you and the exit, there’s no possible chance to run free.
Harry, of course, did not spend his childhood playing light-hearted games with his neighborhood friends. But he did have a decade’s experience of “Harry Hunting,” and we’re told he often won. Surely some of his experience was at night?
And surely he learned that general rule against about never trapping himself?
When Harry heard Filch and Snape speaking ahead of him, and looked wildly for a place to hide, he was standing in front of a large suit of armor. Given the cloak, the best place to hide was to flatten himself against the wall next to the suit. As his seekers walked past, they would automatically veer far enough away from the wall to miss the armor, and would therefore be certain to miss one skinny boy. And since it wasn’t a hiding place for anyone visible, they wouldn’t be looking for him there. (This is assuming he can control his breathing—but with two of them, talking, that’s not such an issue as it might be. And that consideration already held—they were already in the same corridor as Harry; if he were panting loudly enough to be heard, he’d already lost.)
The second-best place, as the Trio proved hiding from Umbridge in Hagrid’s hut, was flattened against any random patch of wall, trusting to luck that the seeker wouldn’t brush against the hider. And be ready to dodge and run like crazy if they did—a strategy that had already worked once that night with Filch.
The third-best thing, was to turn and retreat before them, hopefully in utter silence, and slip away down a side passage.
The very worst thing to do was to go through a door that was ajar if there was any chance at all of brushing the door while the seekers could see. Because, as even our Harry of little brain realized, if he moved the door his pursuers would know exactly where he was, and he’d be trapped without any chance of escape.
But to Harry it seemed that going through that one door, temptingly ajar, was the “only hope.”
Yes, that door—that room—was a trap. And the cloak lured him into it. I think the cloak was ensorcelled to entice Harry to use it (solo), and to bring him exactly to where Dumbledore wanted him to go.
Regarding Snape and Filch—if their conversation was authentic (not established: they could have been acting parts at the headmaster’s behest), Harry at some point doubled back to near to the library. They seemed (note the verb) to be ranging out from the library, and they were now in front of Harry.
And, whatever the tricks of the staircases, do we ever see, in canon, any other instance of the Hogwarts corridors shifting into an un-navigable maze?
Depending on the headmaster’s control of the castle, that might be possible. But, Occam’s razor—we have evidence the cloak was influencing both Harry’s emotions and his thoughts, producing, in order, obsession, invigoration when he donned it, and the desire for secrecy even from his best friend—and quite plausibly suggesting Harry’s first destination, very close to the ultimate one. Even, perhaps, guiding Harry to pluck a book with an auditory alarm charm on it from the shelves of the Restricted Section so he would be sped mindless on his way to his true destination (or maybe any book in that section does that if opened without permission, in which case inducing the idea to do research there would suffice to assure the eventual alarm).
But I don’t think the corridors moved, and I don’t think Filch and Snape had a shortcut. (A shortcut could only be effective if they knew where the trespasser would try to go from the library, and Harry didn’t know that himself.) I think that Harry was drawn to his true destination, which means he may have turned himself around with realizing it and headed back towards the library. He came to a halt, remember, just after passing the room Dumbledore wanted him to enter, and just before hearing Filch’s voice.
Were Severus and Argus being used by Albus to herd Harry into that one room where waited a certain Mirror? Clearly.
Did they know what they were really doing, and why? Less clear. They might have been told by Albus to herd “a Disillusioned student” into that one room, and deliberately ignored the signs of Harry’s presence once he’d entered the selected room. They might simply have been alerted that “a student might try to break into the Restricted Section of the Library tonight,” responded appropriately when he did, and herded Harry inadvertently.
In either case, it’s a damned odd coincidence that they caught up with the trespasser just where they did. I mean, if they’d caught up with Harry (even though they didn’t realize it) coming from around any other corner, Harry wouldn’t have ended up in the right room.
Or Severus and Argus might have been told by Albus exactly what he was intending to do to Harry, and that the boy had an invisibility cloak bespelled to draw him to the right place, and lurked in wait around the corner to chivvy the child to meet his fate.
I hope it’s not that last, but canon leaves the possibility open.
Or, in fact, there’s one other possibility.
They might not have been there at all.
If Albus was there the third night, and invisibly there the second night, he was undoubtedly invisibly there the first night as well to study Harry’s reactions. But if Albus was waiting in the room to watch Harry confront that mirror, it becomes perfectly plausible that Albus might have created either an illusion or a hallucination of Filch and Snape to herd Harry finally into the room when the boy didn’t enter it on his own. That’s really the only explanation that doesn’t make their “appearance” at the precise place and time to herd Harry exactly where Albus wanted him to go a staggeringly large piece of luck for Albus.
In which case Harry might never have been turned around at all, but just run straight through the corridors to his destination, came to a sudden halt (for no cause that he’s aware of), and then was given a compelling reason to slip immediately through the temptingly half-open door.
*
Twinkles deeply wanted Harry to face that mirror.
So, what were its effects?
“It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.” (PS 12)
Let’s ignore Albus’s words and look at actual effects.
Well, Harry was almost immediately entranced. He paid no attention to time passing; he was unaware of cold or exhaustion. He only roused himself to break away from it when he heard a noise that made him fear he’d get caught. And his burning thought then was how soon he might return and look some more.
The next day, our ice-cream-every-hour Harry was unable to eat for thinking of the mirror. And he didn’t care any more about solving the Flamel-puzzle that had been obsessing the children for months, or even whether Snape might steal whatever the Cerberus was hiding.
When he tried to take Ron to see it the next night, Harry refused to give up the quest even when it took over an hour of wandering (frightened, cold, and tired) to find the room. As soon as Ron had had a brief glance, he and Harry fought physically over who got to continue to look in it. When Mrs. Norris came in and frightened the boys with the threat of discovery, it was limited-exposure Ron who insisted that they leave—and he had to physically pull Harry out of the room.
The next day Ron told Harry that he had a bad feeling about that mirror and that Harry shouldn’t go back. (The same reaction, note, that Ron later had to Riddle’s diary.) But Harry didn’t care.
Harry didn’t care about anything by then, except going back to the mirror. Not playing with Ron, not visiting Hagrid, not eating, not sleeping.
All Harry could think about, by then, was his next fix.
The images he saw in that mirror were more real and important to him than his living friends or his body’s needs. Hmm. Kind of like how the images produced by the Suicide Stone were more real to him than his own body or his living friends, making them seem like ghosts to him.
Harry was a Mirror junkie, and the addiction was induced by a single (prolonged) exposure.
This is a majorly-worrying artifact.
Why did Dumbledore want Harry to be exposed to it? A mirror so addictive—he admitted—that grown men had died or been driven insane by it?
Jodel suggested that Dumbledore wanted to read Harry’s heart’s desire. Albus himself said to Harry that now that Harry knew what the Mirror did, he would know what to expect if he saw it again—suggesting that the fatal confrontation between Harry and Quirrell!mort was anticipated (possibly eagerly) by Albus. (Jodel, more lenient to Albus than I, thought that the headmaster planned to use Harry to retrieve the Stone from storage once Tom’s current incarnation were defeated and the shouting done.)
But there may have been another effect anticipated by Albus. A long-term effect; indeed, it might have been a life-long effect.
The images in that mirror were more important to Harry than any living being, including his real-life first-ever friends. And the images were of Harry’s dead family, especially his parents, whom he previously didn’t remember.
The immediate aftereffects of Harry’s looking in that mirror were vivid nightmares of his parents’ deaths. Before, his only memory or nightmare about it was a flash of green. In fact, if you look closely, his previous nightmares about that night were not about his parents at all—he was dreaming about his own injury, a “flash of green” followed by a flash of pain. We’re told that Harry assumed the memory/dream was connected to the “car accident” that killed his parents, but what he dreamed was specifically the infliction of his own scar.
It’s only after the Mirror that Harry “dreamed about his parents disappearing in a flash of green light, while a high voice cackled with laughter.”
“Over and over.”
What one sees in the mirror is NOT what one most desires, but a visual symbol of it, a representation. And I think that part of the addictive quality of the mirror is that what it shows is the underlying desire being fulfilled in a manner that the victim believes (or knows) to be impossible in reality. The image in the mirror makes the victim feel their deep desire to be unsatisfiable. Unattainable.
So that looking in the mirror again is the only possible way to come close to one’s heart’s desire.
Men have gone mad… not sure if what they see is real, or even possible.
Because there’s one very important similarity between Ron’s experience of the mirror and Harry’s: neither came away inspired to take steps to attain his heart’s desire. Harry wanted to be surrounded by people who love him—and he ignored his real-life friends to obsess about returning to the mirror. Ron wanted to stand out, the most accomplished of all his brothers—but the next day, he wasn’t inspired to study like Percy or invent things like the twins or even practice Quidditch like Charlie. No, he suggested playing or visiting Hagrid.
My own real=life experience is that being reminded forcefully of what I want tends to make me more motivated to take the steps to make it happen. (Ask any athlete in training whether focusing on the goal makes it easier or harder to endure discomfort.) Yet with both Harry and Ron, looking in that mirror has the opposite effect. Harry wants to be surrounded by people who love him—and he ignores the people who do. Ron wants to be outstanding, to shine among his accomplished brothers—and he ignores everything he might do to make himself stand out.
Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction if what one sees in the mirror, what one longs for, craves, thirsts for, is unattainable. I can lose weight and get in better shape than I am now, fine, no problem. However, nothing I can do will ever make me an Olympic athlete. If I saw myself getting an Olympic gold medal in that mirror, the only way I’ll ever see that again is … by going back and looking in that mirror.
In fact, realizing that what I truly want is to be an Olympic-class sprinter, and nothing less will ever satisfy me, and it ain’t ever gonna happen, would have a rather depressing effect on my motivation to keep myself in tolerable shape by exercising every day. Why bother? It’ll never get me what I really want….
I mean, seriously. An orphan’s deepest desire is surely not to see his family, but to have one. It was all a mistake; his parents didn’t really die; they were thought dead but really were in a coma for a while and afterwards suffered amnesia, and upon seeing him accidentally in the street one day, they miraculously recover their memories. Or failing that, his dad’s cousin has always longed for a little boy just like Harry. Or even, a Daddy Warbucks takes one look at Harry and wants to make him his own….
An orphan yearns for a family that loves him to belong to.
But instead, Harry sees the dead. Looking at him lovingly, but forever out of his reach.
That’s his deepest desire? To SEE the love and belonging that he’d irrevocably lost? Never to have it again?
No, I don’t think so. I think that’s the Mirror, showing him what he wants in such a manner that if he accepts that as the image of his desire, he can only have access to it by returning to the mirror.
The Mirror is designed to be addictive, and to use its victims’ most deep-seated but unsatisfied needs and longings to enslave them. And to do so, it must make the unsatisfied need seem unsatisfiable.
Unsatisfiable, that is, except by returning to the Mirror.
Harry saw himself surrounded by love and acceptance. All from dead family, accessible now and forever after only by gazing in a certain Mirror.
*
So. That abomination’s primary effect: instant attraction. Immediate addiction if the first dose is sufficiently prolonged, or the victim especially vulnerable. Looking in the mirror again is more important than food or friends or duty.
Secondary effect: the image displayed by the Mirror displaces other ways the victim had visualized having that need met or that desire satisfied.
Tertiary effect: suppression of the victim’s ambition/ability to attain that particular desire by other pathways. Since nothing attainable in real life can live up to the dream shown by the mirror….
That mirror is in the business of producing a dependency, of drawing people back to it.
If we’re to trust Dumbledore at all (or if the children’s reactions are representative), people are drawn to that mirror in lieu of living their lives in a manner likely to achieve the deep desire the mirror shows them.
Think of Ron. Do we ever, in canon, see Ron ACT in a way that would make him stand out among his brothers, much less win him the Head Boy badge, the Quidditch captaincy, or the cups? Ron has five highly accomplished older brothers; he is under no illusion that greatness, or recognition of greatness, happens without work. He may not have vivid memories of Bill’s or Charlie’s school careers, but he sees Percy studying nonstop and trying to follow and enforce the rules to earn his Head Boy badge, the twins tirelessly developing new pranks and original spells, and all the Quidditch captains (until Harry) being nuts for scheduling practices.
Ron? Ron is lazy. And seeing himself as outstanding in the mirror makes him more so, not less.
Ron never does do anything about that ambition of his, does he? He never tries to hone his Quidditch skills to earn the captaincy (we see Harry practicing and practicing, but not Ron), he never tries to study hard or behave properly or act as a leader among his peers to earn being made Head Boy. Seeing his heart’s desire, acclaim that must be (and that might be) earned, he slides firmly into mediocrity as a permanent sidekick. (He hadn’t earned being made even a Prefect, and all three of the trio know it. If it was an award for good behavior, it should have gone to Neville; for leadership (at least of the trio), to Harry; for good school work, at least to Harry before Ron, but quite likely to Seamus or Dean before either.)
And Harry? Family is his heart’s desire, yes? So how does he react when it is offered?
Mrs. Weasley reaches out to him, welcoming him to her family; he never reaches out to her. The Weasleys invite him to visit; he doesn’t ask to come. At the beginning of PoA, he stays alone at a pub rather than asking to be allowed to go to the Burrow. In GoF, he doesn’t ask Molly and Bill to attend the final task; it’s their idea to invite themselves as his surrogate family. The only person he seems inclined to accept as family-substitute is Sirius—who’s strongly connected to his dead father, and who (as Molly pointed out) often acts more like Harry is James Mark II to him, his lost brother, than as a godfather. Like Hagrid, Sirius ends up being a pseudo-brother whom Harry feels he must protect, rather than a father-figure.
(And note how Dumbledore helps to foster this dynamic….)
Now, consider the implications of our supposition that Albus was present watching Harry the first night as well as the second and third. The third night he revealed himself, and warned Harry away from the further use of the Mirror (and told him it was being moved so he couldn’t find it again).
The first two nights “a noise” roused the mirror-watchers.
So why, even if Albus wanted, first, to test Harry’s heart, and second, for Harry to know what the mirror did, would he leave the boy entranced long enough the first night to become addicted? A very short exposure, like Ron’s, apparently doesn’t produce outright addiction. (Though, as mentioned above, even that short exposure may have stunted Ron’s ability to work towards fulfilling the desires the mirror showed him.) Why didn’t Albus create a noise in the hall as soon as Harry’s whisper of “Mom? Dad?” confirmed what images the orphan saw, and send Harry hurrying off, eager to return but not an already-desperate junkie?
I think that Dumbledore hoped from the first that the mirror would show little orphan Harry his parents. And left him to gaze into it long enough to become addicted to Erised after confirming that it had.
I think that Dumbledore expected the result to be Harry’s parents’ becoming real to him, their loss felt more immediately, his grudge against Voldemort moving from, “You orphaned me,” to “You killed my mum and dad, those people, forever lost, who loved me perfectly!”
And quite possibly, to make Harry resistant to attaching himself to anyone else as parental substitutes—and as possible rivals to Dumbledore’s influence.
Those recurrent nightmares of his parents’ deaths were the result that Albus HOPED FOR from Harry’s addiction. That’s the only reason I can come up with to let the boy gaze long enough the first night to become a junkie.
I mean, sure, the Dursleys had done their part in making sure Harry would feel the loss of his real parents. But how could Dumbledore explain to Molly Weasley that treating Harry as though he were her seventh son (and rather obviously favored above her sixth) is, er, very kind of you I’m sure, but interfering with Harry’s scheduled programming to suicide upon turning 17? (Note that Dumbledore let Harry become addicted to Erised AFTER noting that Molly had sent the orphan a Weasley sweater for Christmas. It might not have been part of his original plan.)
And even if he could figure out an excuse to stop Molly from mothering Harry, what if Harry formed a bond to some other Wizarding adults, not in Albus’s control at all, who offered him the family that he grew up deprived of? That was one of the primary purposes of sending Hagrid as Hogwarts’ first emissary, after all, that the boy’s first bond of affection in the WW not be with a functioning adult, but with someone who behaved like an oversized baby brother.
But if the Mirror conditioned Harry that his thirst for family love could only truly be satisfied by his blood family, now all dead, the potential influence of any other father- and mother-figures would be eliminated or at least weakened. (My father died when I was eleven; I assure you that an adopted parent-figure can be an extremely potent influence on one’s life.)
Moreover… the sharper the loss, the sharper the anger at the loss, and the more intense the desire to exact vengeance (if that’s in one’s make-up). So presumably the more bitterly Harry mourned the loss of his Mum and Dad, the more bitterly would he hate Voldemort for killing them.
And Albus expected that bitterness to become the reason Harry would eventually sacrifice himself to destroy Tom.
Look at how Albus characterized what Harry saw in the Mirror the last time he looked in it (at Tom’s behest rather than Albus’s). Twinkles spoke of it in that inspiring little scene in HBP 23 where he explained to Harry that a thirst to murder Voldemort showed Harry’s incorruptible capacity for love, and solicited and received Harry’s final commitment to kill or suicide to “finish” Tom.
“If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! …
“In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches.” [emphasis mine]
That’s why he steered Harry to the Mirror—to create a person incapable of recovering from the loss of his parents, incapable of desiring anything more fervently than to “thwart” the murderer who’d deprived him of them, even if thwarting him came at the expense of his own life.
The perfect eleven-year-old suicide bomber, primed, aimed at his proper target, and ready to train.
*
Excuse me, that was Erised. How silly of me. Eris was the goddess of discord, and according to Hesiod (Works and Days), she sometimes worked by planting unsatisfiable desires in men’s hearts:
She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. But Strife is unwholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar….
Completely different thing from what that mirror does, got it.
Jodel suggested in “The Quirrell Debacle” that Dumbledore had set up Harry to look into that mirror. She argued that the headmaster had first moved that Mirror away from the heart of the labyrinth, and then had had Filch and Snape herd Harry to the appropriate room, primarily because Albus wanted to learn Harry’s heart’s deepest desires. Letting Harry gaze into that mirror, in that view, was Dumbledore’s test to make sure Harry wasn’t another future Dark Lord in training.
I think that there was something more going on than merely Albus’s test of Harry. If I am correct, I earnestly hope that Severus and Argus were not implicated in Twinkles’ plots.
*
First, let’s look at how Harry ended up before that mirror.
We’ll take as a given Jodel’s point that the Mirror could only have been in a room easily accessible to students by Dumbledore’s will. Once the Stone had been moved to Hogwarts for safekeeping in August, the Mirror’s place was obviously at the end of Dumbledore’s labyrinth as its final, and untrickable, guardian. So for the Mirror to be discovered anywhere else was proof that Dumbledore himself had moved the Mirror for some overriding purpose.
And the purpose clearly involved Harry. To test the boy, as Jodel thought, or what?
Let’s start with how. How did Twinkles induce the child to look into that mirror? Was Harry “herded” there by Filch and Snape alone, or what did bring him to that room and make him look his fill at what the mirror showed him?
It happened Christmas day, after a long, happy, tiring day and a lazy supper (PS 12): “everyone felt too full and sleepy to do much before bed.”
Harry and Ron went to bed, both replete, satisfied, and exhausted… except Harry couldn’t sleep. Why not?
It had been Harry’s best Christmas day ever. Yet something had been nagging at the back of his mind all day. Not until he climbed into bed was he free to think about it: the invisibility cloak and whoever had sent it.
Ron, full of turkey and cake and with nothing mysterious to bother him, fell asleep almost as soon as he’d drawn the curtains of his four-poster. Harry leaned over the side of his own bed and pulled the cloak out from under it.
His father’s… this had been his father’s…. Use it well, the note had said.
He had to try it, now. He slipped out of bed and wrapped the cloak around himself. Looking down at his legs, he saw only moonlight and shadows. It was a very funny feeling.
Use it well.
Suddenly, Harry felt wide-awake. The whole of Hogwarts was open to him in this cloak. Excitement flooded through him as he stood there in the dark and silence. He could go anywhere in this, anywhere, and Filch would never know.
Ron grunted in his sleep. Should Harry wake him? Something held him back—his father’s cloak—he felt that this time—the first time—he wanted to use it alone.
He crept out of the dormitory…..
Where should he go? He stopped, his heart racing, and thought. And then it came to him. The Restricted Section in the library. He’d be able to read as long as he liked, as long as it took to find out who Flamel was…..
The Restricted Section was right at the back of the library. Stepping carefully over the rope that separated these books from the rest of the library, he held up his lamp to read the titles.
They didn’t tell him much….
He had to start somewhere… A large black and silver volume caught his eye. He pulled it out with difficulty, because it was very heavy, and, balancing it on his knee, let it fall open.
A piercing, bloodcurdling shriek split the silence—the book was screaming!... Panicking, he heard footsteps coming down the corridor outside—stuffing the shrieking book back on the shelf, he ran for it. He passed Filch in the doorway; Filch’s pale, wild eyes looked straight through him, and Harry slipped under Filch’s outstretched arm and streaked off up the corridor, the book’s shrieks still ringing in his ears.
He came to a sudden halt in front of a tall suit of armor. He had been so busy getting away from the library, he hadn’t paid attention to where he was going. Perhaps because it was dark, he didn’t recognize where he was at all. There was a suit of armor near the kitchens, he knew, but he must be five floors above there.
“You asked me to come directly to you, Professor, if anyone was wandering around at night, and somebody’s been in the library—Restricted Section.”
Harry felt the blood drain out of his face. Wherever he was, Filch must know a shortcut, because his soft, greasy voice was getting nearer, and to his horror it was Snape who replied, “The Restricted Section? Well, they can’t be far, we’ll catch them.”
Harry stood rooted to the spot as Filch and Snape came around the corner ahead. They couldn’t see him, of course, but it was a narrow corridor and if they came much nearer they’d knock right into him—the cloak didn’t stop him from being solid.
He backed away as quietly as he could. A door stood ajar to his left. It was his only hope. He squeezed through it, holding his breath, trying not to move it, and to his relief he managed to get inside the room without their noticing anything.
[underlining mine]
*
So. How, exactly, did Harry end up in front of that mirror?
Death’s cloak, gifted to him by Dumbledore that morning, brought him nearly straight there.
He’d been thinking about the cloak all day. Despite being surfeited and worn out, he couldn’t sleep for obsessing over it. He felt he “had” to try it out. Immediately. And as soon as he donned it his exhaustion dropped away. He thought of waking Ron to share the adventure—but “something held him back.” He didn’t know where to go —“and then it came to him:” the library. Where the first book that caught his eye tripped an alarm, and he fled blindly “up the corridor.”
He ran, not conscious of where he was going. By sheer coincidence he halted (suddenly) by a suit of armor. Immediately AFTER he’d passed by the open door of a certain room.
None of this happened by Harry’s conscious agency—he didn’t even know which way he was running, he just ran—possibly in a circle, for Filch to come from the library and end up around a corner in front of him. And then, for no reason, he stopped dead. Just beyond a room whose door was ajar.
And then he saw Filch and Snape and he felt that “his only hope” of escaping them was by slipping into that room.
All perfectly unconscious, yes? At every decision point something outside his conscious mind directed his actions.
Except for the last decision that took him into the room itself. That one was logical. As Harry reflected, even if he was invisible he was still solid, and they might discover him accidently by bumping into him.
Except….
When I was growing up, one of the favorite games in my neighborhood was “Starlight Moonlight,” an only-in-the-dark game that combined tag and hide & seek. Hiding in the dark is very different from daylight hide & seek. The most secure places to hide, in fact, are places that the seeker would overlook because they aren’t (in the daylight) hiding places at all.
And the very worst scenario in any tagging hide and seek game is to let yourself be trapped in a space with only one exit if the seeker is at all likely to search it seriously. Even if it’s pitch black, a methodical seeker could quarter the area and find you, and if s/he keeps between you and the exit, there’s no possible chance to run free.
Harry, of course, did not spend his childhood playing light-hearted games with his neighborhood friends. But he did have a decade’s experience of “Harry Hunting,” and we’re told he often won. Surely some of his experience was at night?
And surely he learned that general rule against about never trapping himself?
When Harry heard Filch and Snape speaking ahead of him, and looked wildly for a place to hide, he was standing in front of a large suit of armor. Given the cloak, the best place to hide was to flatten himself against the wall next to the suit. As his seekers walked past, they would automatically veer far enough away from the wall to miss the armor, and would therefore be certain to miss one skinny boy. And since it wasn’t a hiding place for anyone visible, they wouldn’t be looking for him there. (This is assuming he can control his breathing—but with two of them, talking, that’s not such an issue as it might be. And that consideration already held—they were already in the same corridor as Harry; if he were panting loudly enough to be heard, he’d already lost.)
The second-best place, as the Trio proved hiding from Umbridge in Hagrid’s hut, was flattened against any random patch of wall, trusting to luck that the seeker wouldn’t brush against the hider. And be ready to dodge and run like crazy if they did—a strategy that had already worked once that night with Filch.
The third-best thing, was to turn and retreat before them, hopefully in utter silence, and slip away down a side passage.
The very worst thing to do was to go through a door that was ajar if there was any chance at all of brushing the door while the seekers could see. Because, as even our Harry of little brain realized, if he moved the door his pursuers would know exactly where he was, and he’d be trapped without any chance of escape.
But to Harry it seemed that going through that one door, temptingly ajar, was the “only hope.”
Yes, that door—that room—was a trap. And the cloak lured him into it. I think the cloak was ensorcelled to entice Harry to use it (solo), and to bring him exactly to where Dumbledore wanted him to go.
Regarding Snape and Filch—if their conversation was authentic (not established: they could have been acting parts at the headmaster’s behest), Harry at some point doubled back to near to the library. They seemed (note the verb) to be ranging out from the library, and they were now in front of Harry.
And, whatever the tricks of the staircases, do we ever see, in canon, any other instance of the Hogwarts corridors shifting into an un-navigable maze?
Depending on the headmaster’s control of the castle, that might be possible. But, Occam’s razor—we have evidence the cloak was influencing both Harry’s emotions and his thoughts, producing, in order, obsession, invigoration when he donned it, and the desire for secrecy even from his best friend—and quite plausibly suggesting Harry’s first destination, very close to the ultimate one. Even, perhaps, guiding Harry to pluck a book with an auditory alarm charm on it from the shelves of the Restricted Section so he would be sped mindless on his way to his true destination (or maybe any book in that section does that if opened without permission, in which case inducing the idea to do research there would suffice to assure the eventual alarm).
But I don’t think the corridors moved, and I don’t think Filch and Snape had a shortcut. (A shortcut could only be effective if they knew where the trespasser would try to go from the library, and Harry didn’t know that himself.) I think that Harry was drawn to his true destination, which means he may have turned himself around with realizing it and headed back towards the library. He came to a halt, remember, just after passing the room Dumbledore wanted him to enter, and just before hearing Filch’s voice.
Were Severus and Argus being used by Albus to herd Harry into that one room where waited a certain Mirror? Clearly.
Did they know what they were really doing, and why? Less clear. They might have been told by Albus to herd “a Disillusioned student” into that one room, and deliberately ignored the signs of Harry’s presence once he’d entered the selected room. They might simply have been alerted that “a student might try to break into the Restricted Section of the Library tonight,” responded appropriately when he did, and herded Harry inadvertently.
In either case, it’s a damned odd coincidence that they caught up with the trespasser just where they did. I mean, if they’d caught up with Harry (even though they didn’t realize it) coming from around any other corner, Harry wouldn’t have ended up in the right room.
Or Severus and Argus might have been told by Albus exactly what he was intending to do to Harry, and that the boy had an invisibility cloak bespelled to draw him to the right place, and lurked in wait around the corner to chivvy the child to meet his fate.
I hope it’s not that last, but canon leaves the possibility open.
Or, in fact, there’s one other possibility.
They might not have been there at all.
If Albus was there the third night, and invisibly there the second night, he was undoubtedly invisibly there the first night as well to study Harry’s reactions. But if Albus was waiting in the room to watch Harry confront that mirror, it becomes perfectly plausible that Albus might have created either an illusion or a hallucination of Filch and Snape to herd Harry finally into the room when the boy didn’t enter it on his own. That’s really the only explanation that doesn’t make their “appearance” at the precise place and time to herd Harry exactly where Albus wanted him to go a staggeringly large piece of luck for Albus.
In which case Harry might never have been turned around at all, but just run straight through the corridors to his destination, came to a sudden halt (for no cause that he’s aware of), and then was given a compelling reason to slip immediately through the temptingly half-open door.
*
Twinkles deeply wanted Harry to face that mirror.
So, what were its effects?
“It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.” (PS 12)
Let’s ignore Albus’s words and look at actual effects.
Well, Harry was almost immediately entranced. He paid no attention to time passing; he was unaware of cold or exhaustion. He only roused himself to break away from it when he heard a noise that made him fear he’d get caught. And his burning thought then was how soon he might return and look some more.
The next day, our ice-cream-every-hour Harry was unable to eat for thinking of the mirror. And he didn’t care any more about solving the Flamel-puzzle that had been obsessing the children for months, or even whether Snape might steal whatever the Cerberus was hiding.
When he tried to take Ron to see it the next night, Harry refused to give up the quest even when it took over an hour of wandering (frightened, cold, and tired) to find the room. As soon as Ron had had a brief glance, he and Harry fought physically over who got to continue to look in it. When Mrs. Norris came in and frightened the boys with the threat of discovery, it was limited-exposure Ron who insisted that they leave—and he had to physically pull Harry out of the room.
The next day Ron told Harry that he had a bad feeling about that mirror and that Harry shouldn’t go back. (The same reaction, note, that Ron later had to Riddle’s diary.) But Harry didn’t care.
Harry didn’t care about anything by then, except going back to the mirror. Not playing with Ron, not visiting Hagrid, not eating, not sleeping.
All Harry could think about, by then, was his next fix.
The images he saw in that mirror were more real and important to him than his living friends or his body’s needs. Hmm. Kind of like how the images produced by the Suicide Stone were more real to him than his own body or his living friends, making them seem like ghosts to him.
Harry was a Mirror junkie, and the addiction was induced by a single (prolonged) exposure.
This is a majorly-worrying artifact.
Why did Dumbledore want Harry to be exposed to it? A mirror so addictive—he admitted—that grown men had died or been driven insane by it?
Jodel suggested that Dumbledore wanted to read Harry’s heart’s desire. Albus himself said to Harry that now that Harry knew what the Mirror did, he would know what to expect if he saw it again—suggesting that the fatal confrontation between Harry and Quirrell!mort was anticipated (possibly eagerly) by Albus. (Jodel, more lenient to Albus than I, thought that the headmaster planned to use Harry to retrieve the Stone from storage once Tom’s current incarnation were defeated and the shouting done.)
But there may have been another effect anticipated by Albus. A long-term effect; indeed, it might have been a life-long effect.
The images in that mirror were more important to Harry than any living being, including his real-life first-ever friends. And the images were of Harry’s dead family, especially his parents, whom he previously didn’t remember.
The immediate aftereffects of Harry’s looking in that mirror were vivid nightmares of his parents’ deaths. Before, his only memory or nightmare about it was a flash of green. In fact, if you look closely, his previous nightmares about that night were not about his parents at all—he was dreaming about his own injury, a “flash of green” followed by a flash of pain. We’re told that Harry assumed the memory/dream was connected to the “car accident” that killed his parents, but what he dreamed was specifically the infliction of his own scar.
It’s only after the Mirror that Harry “dreamed about his parents disappearing in a flash of green light, while a high voice cackled with laughter.”
“Over and over.”
What one sees in the mirror is NOT what one most desires, but a visual symbol of it, a representation. And I think that part of the addictive quality of the mirror is that what it shows is the underlying desire being fulfilled in a manner that the victim believes (or knows) to be impossible in reality. The image in the mirror makes the victim feel their deep desire to be unsatisfiable. Unattainable.
So that looking in the mirror again is the only possible way to come close to one’s heart’s desire.
Men have gone mad… not sure if what they see is real, or even possible.
Because there’s one very important similarity between Ron’s experience of the mirror and Harry’s: neither came away inspired to take steps to attain his heart’s desire. Harry wanted to be surrounded by people who love him—and he ignored his real-life friends to obsess about returning to the mirror. Ron wanted to stand out, the most accomplished of all his brothers—but the next day, he wasn’t inspired to study like Percy or invent things like the twins or even practice Quidditch like Charlie. No, he suggested playing or visiting Hagrid.
My own real=life experience is that being reminded forcefully of what I want tends to make me more motivated to take the steps to make it happen. (Ask any athlete in training whether focusing on the goal makes it easier or harder to endure discomfort.) Yet with both Harry and Ron, looking in that mirror has the opposite effect. Harry wants to be surrounded by people who love him—and he ignores the people who do. Ron wants to be outstanding, to shine among his accomplished brothers—and he ignores everything he might do to make himself stand out.
Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction if what one sees in the mirror, what one longs for, craves, thirsts for, is unattainable. I can lose weight and get in better shape than I am now, fine, no problem. However, nothing I can do will ever make me an Olympic athlete. If I saw myself getting an Olympic gold medal in that mirror, the only way I’ll ever see that again is … by going back and looking in that mirror.
In fact, realizing that what I truly want is to be an Olympic-class sprinter, and nothing less will ever satisfy me, and it ain’t ever gonna happen, would have a rather depressing effect on my motivation to keep myself in tolerable shape by exercising every day. Why bother? It’ll never get me what I really want….
I mean, seriously. An orphan’s deepest desire is surely not to see his family, but to have one. It was all a mistake; his parents didn’t really die; they were thought dead but really were in a coma for a while and afterwards suffered amnesia, and upon seeing him accidentally in the street one day, they miraculously recover their memories. Or failing that, his dad’s cousin has always longed for a little boy just like Harry. Or even, a Daddy Warbucks takes one look at Harry and wants to make him his own….
An orphan yearns for a family that loves him to belong to.
But instead, Harry sees the dead. Looking at him lovingly, but forever out of his reach.
That’s his deepest desire? To SEE the love and belonging that he’d irrevocably lost? Never to have it again?
No, I don’t think so. I think that’s the Mirror, showing him what he wants in such a manner that if he accepts that as the image of his desire, he can only have access to it by returning to the mirror.
The Mirror is designed to be addictive, and to use its victims’ most deep-seated but unsatisfied needs and longings to enslave them. And to do so, it must make the unsatisfied need seem unsatisfiable.
Unsatisfiable, that is, except by returning to the Mirror.
Harry saw himself surrounded by love and acceptance. All from dead family, accessible now and forever after only by gazing in a certain Mirror.
*
So. That abomination’s primary effect: instant attraction. Immediate addiction if the first dose is sufficiently prolonged, or the victim especially vulnerable. Looking in the mirror again is more important than food or friends or duty.
Secondary effect: the image displayed by the Mirror displaces other ways the victim had visualized having that need met or that desire satisfied.
Tertiary effect: suppression of the victim’s ambition/ability to attain that particular desire by other pathways. Since nothing attainable in real life can live up to the dream shown by the mirror….
That mirror is in the business of producing a dependency, of drawing people back to it.
If we’re to trust Dumbledore at all (or if the children’s reactions are representative), people are drawn to that mirror in lieu of living their lives in a manner likely to achieve the deep desire the mirror shows them.
Think of Ron. Do we ever, in canon, see Ron ACT in a way that would make him stand out among his brothers, much less win him the Head Boy badge, the Quidditch captaincy, or the cups? Ron has five highly accomplished older brothers; he is under no illusion that greatness, or recognition of greatness, happens without work. He may not have vivid memories of Bill’s or Charlie’s school careers, but he sees Percy studying nonstop and trying to follow and enforce the rules to earn his Head Boy badge, the twins tirelessly developing new pranks and original spells, and all the Quidditch captains (until Harry) being nuts for scheduling practices.
Ron? Ron is lazy. And seeing himself as outstanding in the mirror makes him more so, not less.
Ron never does do anything about that ambition of his, does he? He never tries to hone his Quidditch skills to earn the captaincy (we see Harry practicing and practicing, but not Ron), he never tries to study hard or behave properly or act as a leader among his peers to earn being made Head Boy. Seeing his heart’s desire, acclaim that must be (and that might be) earned, he slides firmly into mediocrity as a permanent sidekick. (He hadn’t earned being made even a Prefect, and all three of the trio know it. If it was an award for good behavior, it should have gone to Neville; for leadership (at least of the trio), to Harry; for good school work, at least to Harry before Ron, but quite likely to Seamus or Dean before either.)
And Harry? Family is his heart’s desire, yes? So how does he react when it is offered?
Mrs. Weasley reaches out to him, welcoming him to her family; he never reaches out to her. The Weasleys invite him to visit; he doesn’t ask to come. At the beginning of PoA, he stays alone at a pub rather than asking to be allowed to go to the Burrow. In GoF, he doesn’t ask Molly and Bill to attend the final task; it’s their idea to invite themselves as his surrogate family. The only person he seems inclined to accept as family-substitute is Sirius—who’s strongly connected to his dead father, and who (as Molly pointed out) often acts more like Harry is James Mark II to him, his lost brother, than as a godfather. Like Hagrid, Sirius ends up being a pseudo-brother whom Harry feels he must protect, rather than a father-figure.
(And note how Dumbledore helps to foster this dynamic….)
Now, consider the implications of our supposition that Albus was present watching Harry the first night as well as the second and third. The third night he revealed himself, and warned Harry away from the further use of the Mirror (and told him it was being moved so he couldn’t find it again).
The first two nights “a noise” roused the mirror-watchers.
So why, even if Albus wanted, first, to test Harry’s heart, and second, for Harry to know what the mirror did, would he leave the boy entranced long enough the first night to become addicted? A very short exposure, like Ron’s, apparently doesn’t produce outright addiction. (Though, as mentioned above, even that short exposure may have stunted Ron’s ability to work towards fulfilling the desires the mirror showed him.) Why didn’t Albus create a noise in the hall as soon as Harry’s whisper of “Mom? Dad?” confirmed what images the orphan saw, and send Harry hurrying off, eager to return but not an already-desperate junkie?
I think that Dumbledore hoped from the first that the mirror would show little orphan Harry his parents. And left him to gaze into it long enough to become addicted to Erised after confirming that it had.
I think that Dumbledore expected the result to be Harry’s parents’ becoming real to him, their loss felt more immediately, his grudge against Voldemort moving from, “You orphaned me,” to “You killed my mum and dad, those people, forever lost, who loved me perfectly!”
And quite possibly, to make Harry resistant to attaching himself to anyone else as parental substitutes—and as possible rivals to Dumbledore’s influence.
Those recurrent nightmares of his parents’ deaths were the result that Albus HOPED FOR from Harry’s addiction. That’s the only reason I can come up with to let the boy gaze long enough the first night to become a junkie.
I mean, sure, the Dursleys had done their part in making sure Harry would feel the loss of his real parents. But how could Dumbledore explain to Molly Weasley that treating Harry as though he were her seventh son (and rather obviously favored above her sixth) is, er, very kind of you I’m sure, but interfering with Harry’s scheduled programming to suicide upon turning 17? (Note that Dumbledore let Harry become addicted to Erised AFTER noting that Molly had sent the orphan a Weasley sweater for Christmas. It might not have been part of his original plan.)
And even if he could figure out an excuse to stop Molly from mothering Harry, what if Harry formed a bond to some other Wizarding adults, not in Albus’s control at all, who offered him the family that he grew up deprived of? That was one of the primary purposes of sending Hagrid as Hogwarts’ first emissary, after all, that the boy’s first bond of affection in the WW not be with a functioning adult, but with someone who behaved like an oversized baby brother.
But if the Mirror conditioned Harry that his thirst for family love could only truly be satisfied by his blood family, now all dead, the potential influence of any other father- and mother-figures would be eliminated or at least weakened. (My father died when I was eleven; I assure you that an adopted parent-figure can be an extremely potent influence on one’s life.)
Moreover… the sharper the loss, the sharper the anger at the loss, and the more intense the desire to exact vengeance (if that’s in one’s make-up). So presumably the more bitterly Harry mourned the loss of his Mum and Dad, the more bitterly would he hate Voldemort for killing them.
And Albus expected that bitterness to become the reason Harry would eventually sacrifice himself to destroy Tom.
Look at how Albus characterized what Harry saw in the Mirror the last time he looked in it (at Tom’s behest rather than Albus’s). Twinkles spoke of it in that inspiring little scene in HBP 23 where he explained to Harry that a thirst to murder Voldemort showed Harry’s incorruptible capacity for love, and solicited and received Harry’s final commitment to kill or suicide to “finish” Tom.
“If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! …
“In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart’s desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches.” [emphasis mine]
That’s why he steered Harry to the Mirror—to create a person incapable of recovering from the loss of his parents, incapable of desiring anything more fervently than to “thwart” the murderer who’d deprived him of them, even if thwarting him came at the expense of his own life.
The perfect eleven-year-old suicide bomber, primed, aimed at his proper target, and ready to train.
*
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Date: 2015-05-15 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-16 02:38 pm (UTC)Also, re: the title, "Erised" can be viewed as a past tense for "Eris", in a "you've been pwned" kind of way. Everyone who's looked into the mirror is already a sucker.