deathtocapslock | On Human Sacrfice and Dark Magic

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On Human Sacrfice and Dark Magic

I've spent some time archive binging recently and got to thinking about what the new conclusions meant for old issues that weren't directly addressed. In particular, I was reminded of all the old complaints about Lily's sacrifice being held up as exceptional even though most parents would die for their children. And if sacrificial magic is as ancient, wild, and Dark as it is claimed, without needing any channeling incantations or rituals, there should be thousands, if not millions of people throughout the history of humanity clearly benefiting from such sacrifices. Yet canon says there aren't. Few people are even aware of the possibility that it could happen, let alone happen reliably. Why not?

Well. What is one of the most essential things we learn about the Dark Arts?

You have to mean them.

And that was just in reference to such highly domesticated spells as avada kedavra and cruciatus. (They have incantations! They give consistent results! And people want to call those Dark? Puh-lease.) I suspect that the further back you go, the more vital will and intent becomes to any manipulation of magic.

So of course most parents would be WILLING to die for their children, but how many would WANT to? Would PLAN on it?

Of all the mothers who ever threw themselves between their children and an assailant, how many intended to die then and there, and how many were praying that the attacker would show mercy at the last moment, or some savior would miraculously appear, or that any wounds be at least non-fatal? Of every soldier who threw themselves on a grenade, how many wanted to die to save their friends, and how many prayed that this one is a dud and they'd all survive to laugh about this incident later?

I think the lack of intent to sacrifice their lives explains why most sacrificies don't result in such absurdly noticeable effects as we see in Harry.

Does that mean that the intent to gamble their lives means nothing? Canon suggests yes. Mere desire to achieve a result isn't enough to trigger magic. No matter how badly you want to someone to writhe in agony, they're going to be just dandy until you point your wand at them and say, "Crucio." The closest we see is children's accidental magic, but even that requires an emotional jolt, and there's no control over what will actually happen - only that it will somehow mitigate the immediate emotional threat.

So. What does this say about Lily's state of mind when she was bargaining with Voldemort?

Well Terri Testing's Liberacorpus offers one answer:

http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/7569.html

But I don't think we necessarily have to go that dark.

Canon doesn't explicitly support the idea that risking yourself can produce power in the same manner that sacrificing yourself can, but it doesn't contradict it either. I'm quite fond of the fanon theory that Felix Felicis is so tricky to make because the process requires the brewer risk injury, or even life, to make it correctly. Even concentrated into a potion though, the effect is rather short lived, only several hours, not life-long as Harry seemed to enjoy.

Still, let's try this on for size:

According to canon, James charged Voldie without even his wand, trying to buy time for Lily to take Harry and go. Even as arrogant as he was, he must have known that his chances of surviving, let alone winning, were infinitesimal. Though I'm sure he was also convinced they weren't zero. Regardless, he was at minimum willing to put his life on the line. For the purpose of allowing his wife to save their son.

His sacrifice wasn't powerful enough to grant Lily a miracle. They still had no secondary escape plan. No last minute savior appeared to whisk her away. No clever bit of spellwork occurred to her that would allow to escape or defeat an opponent far stronger than her. She had nothing to bargain with... except her life. When Voldie confronted her less than 5 minutes after James sacrificed himself.

And here's where the sacrificially generated luck found an opening.

We know from Harry's use of Felix that it can alter the behavior of those around you in ways that will allow you to reach your goals. Is there any other explanation for why Slughorn allowed himself to become drunk around Harry, when he had been assiduously avoiding the boy because he'd been hounding him for his memory of Tom?

James died so his wife could save their son. It didn't matter that Lily didn't know about sacrificial magic. It was enough that it existed. The luck magic caught the thought that she could save her son by giving her life and reinforced it, giving her conviction that it would work if only she could get Voldemort to accept the trade. But that was the sticking point. Voldemort had to agree. Here's where the second part of James' sacrifice comes in, twisting Voldemort's sadism into a form that would allow his wife to save Harry. Not only did Voldie act like a complete idiot by killing rather than incapacitating her, he ritualized her sacrifice by offering her the chance to save herself three times. Three is a powerful number. No wonder Harry was so powerfully protected.

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Which leads me to one more rather depressing conclusion. Sacrifices of love may be the most powerful force in the HP-verse, but sacrifices of pain and terror are probably more consistent in their outcomes. This goes back to willingness vs. desire. There are far more people who are willing to die for their cause, their city, their country, their family than there are those who actively want to martyr themselves for the same. For every person who volunteered to sacrifice themselves, how many were able to sustain such a desire to the very end? I suspect that any wavering, any doubt or hesitation, drastically weakens the magic generated, leaving a far less potent, and far more temporary, effect. Sacrificing unwilling victims doesn't require them to cooperate. Actually assumes they won't, and are structured to compensate for that and draw out as much power as possible.

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James died so his wife could save their son.

Interesting. So, do you think this is meant to be seen as ultimate proof that James is a True Hero(TM) after all? Like, he might have been a complete bastard in every other respect but he was willing to trigger Special Sacrificial Love Magic by martyring himself for his family and that somehow cancels out all his former crimes?

Uh, where did you get that from? Even bad people can have loved ones. Lucius loves Narcissa and Draco, do you want to argue that he's not a bigoted, murderous arse? Severus despises James, does that mean he's incapable of loving Lily, or anyone else? Are you looking for a fight? Or is it simply verbotten to say a villainous character has any redeemable features whatsoever?

The original complaint was that there was no reason why *Lily's* sacrificial death was so special, as if no one else in the history of humanity would have been willing to sacrifice their life for another. I was arguing that there are plenty of people who are willing, but that few are crazy enough to WANT to do it, but it's the will and intentionality that magic responds to.

The stuff about James is entirely conjecture. There's no evidence in canon whatsoever that merely risking injury or death is enough to trigger a magical reaction. It's just a nice, hypothetical thought that in this magical world being willing to put your life on the line can buy a little luck for another, even if only for a few minutes.

Nor is this about James Potter specifically (though I'm sure his ego would be enormously flattered that you think it is). It's about what ANY human, or sentient being, in the Potter-verse is able to accomplish through sacrifice of varying degrees.

The only reason James and Lily are particularly relevant is because Harry's luck does seem to be far beyond the usual. Thus my conjecture that James' willingness to risk his life, which under normal circumstances might, at most, have bought his wife a few minutes good fortune, like spotting a spare wand that had fallen behind the bed she would otherwise have overlooked, instead let Lily hit upon, in ignorance, the far more powerful magic that *could* keep their son safe - ironically, solely because they were so screwed that Lily had no other options whatsoever (i.e. there were no spare wands). But in order for it to work, Tom had to take the deal. Since Tom's already a sadist, even a very weak surge of luck was enough to make him do it.

Addendum: it occurs to me that intentionality may still be important in that you must WANT to take the risk in the first place, in which case you can argue that James was just showing off again for thrills and glory, since it seems to be anathema to you to allow that he had any positive traits whatsoever, however banal and small in scope they were.

Edited 2016-08-25 19:08 (UTC)

This is interesting, and does seem to hang together. But I thought the whole point about Lily, and what rendered her death different from that of the brave German mother, was that Voldemort genuinely intended to let her live. The other woman was not given a chance to reject her life and sacrifice herself; Voldemort just killed her.

And the fact that Lily had a choice at all is Snape's doing.

But, as I said, this idea of how sacrifice seems to work in the Potterverse does hang together, and your ending is quite chilling -- and, I'd say, consistent with canon.

I am 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% positive that information about how Lily having a genuine choice was the deciding factor was from an interview, not canon. Thus, I feel it really doesn't matter. At all. Especially since I think this hangs together much better. Besides, the German woman did have a choice! She could have tried to run and save herself, but instead tried to protect her children.

I do think that the 3 offers made a big difference in amplifying the *power* of her sacrifice to the absurd levels we see in canon, so she can thank Severus for that. But I think that the reasons they amplified her power was because 3 is an arithmatically powerful number, it ritualized the sacrifice, giving it more structure (if rituals didn't matter at all, wizardry wouldn't be any easier than Dark magic, would it?) and, possibly, because it increased Lily's pain by tempting her away from her chosen path thus intensifying her sacrifice.

I suspect the business about Lily having a choice because Severus begged for her life, thus making her death a True Sacrifice, is pure fan interpretation, not anything from JKR. I have certainly put it forward often enough that if there was no Man Who Loved, there would have been no Boy Who Lived. As far as I can tell, JKR has never explicitly made the connexion. Her idea seems to be that Lily’s mother love is just that special. Can anyone cite a genuine semi-canon source (interviews, Pottermore, etc.) on this issue?

I agree with you that JKR probably intended the three offers to step aside to imply some sort of ritual meaning, but the whole scene was so chaotic (Voldemort snarling like an impatient traffic cop, Lily bawling like an hysterical five-year-old) that it gives no impression of having deeper significance. I would expect Ancient Deep Magic to involve a bit more sense of drama.

I don't think the 3 offers acted like a true ritual in any way; it was more of a proto-ritual than anything. But it did add pressure to Lily's resolve making her sacrifice more difficult. It called to mind the blood-letting practices in Meso-America where it wasn't enough to simply pierce an organ and let the blood flow out naturally: a string with thorns or bits of obsidian or something else would often be pulled through the wound to increase the blood and the pain and thus intensify the power in the offering.

Making it more difficult to tell what's significant and what's not is that Rowling never clearly defined her magical system. What we do know is that Dark magic is unstructured and chaotic, Wizardry is highly formalized with set incantations and wand movements for each spell which activate regardless of the caster's state of mind, arithmancy is a formal field of study at Hogwarts, and 3 is widely considered to be a powerful number across multiple religions and cultures.

It's impossible to say exactly how these factors would interact with such Dark magic as a human sacrifice, but we do know from DD's expertise that it is possible to channel such sacrificial magic formally to achieve specific (and at least relatively consist) results.

Mostly I'm trying to figure out how sacrificial magic works in general principle, why so few people know about it in-universe, and why Harry seems disproportionately affected by it. I'm not trying to deny Snape any credit, just trying to look dispassionately at what's in the text, what can be reasonably inferred from it, and how it might relate to real world traditions and practices. Of course, no one is required to agree with my interpretation, but I would be interested in hearing where you think the weaknesses are in my theory.

I have some broader thoughts about how wizardry and witchcraft work in the Potterverse but I think they belong in their own post.

Edited 2016-08-26 00:08 (UTC)

WE know from Tom's internal monologue that he did not think it was necessary for Lily to die, as long as she acted sensibly. So in his own mind he was genuinely offering her a choice.

But how do we know it was *the* deciding factor? What in the text itself supports that? If there's something I'm forgetting I'd really like to know, but I don't particularly care about what Rowling says outside of the books themselves. If I like it I'll adopt it as head-canon, but it's not that important to me in the grand scheme of things.

You want the short story? Nothing was specified in canon. Which wouldn't be that bad a thing, except we're never really lacking of cases where a mother throws her child out of the way when an incoming bus comes crashing through.

Lily's sacrifice and the protective magic it produced is the only reason we have a plot. And we do have the counter example of the German mother who likewise threw herself in front of a killing curse for her children, but did not generate the protective magic that saved Harry.

These are both irrefutably canon. As is the classification of human sacrifice as Dark magic, and the information on what Dark magic entails (intent and will).

What's your explanation for why one differed from the other?

I don’t remember any canon explanation about what Dark magic entails, at all. We are told that in order to perform Cruciatus, “you have to mean it,” but that’s only one Dark spell, and it was presented as a bit of mockery in battle from someone not known for clarity of mind. All theories about chaos and intent and will—even the idea that children’s accidental magic is Dark—is fanon speculation. JKR’s refusal to define Dark magic in any meaningful way is one of the biggest failures of her world-building. Fans have done yeoman’s service trying to make sense of it, but it remains fanon, not canon. It’s one of the many reasons I prefer good fanfic to the actual books.

I could have sworn Snape said something to similar effect in his introductory speech to his DADA class. If you say he didn't, I'll believe you since I don't have the books to double check.

I will say that Bellatrix's statement is at least consistent with what we saw of Harry's casting. Yes, he was furious with her and (a part of) him wanted to hurt her horribly, but mostly he was in a general turmoil over Sirius's death. So, he got a little effect, but he couldn't sustain it because he wasn't focused on it.

Also, it's more reasonable than not to assume that assume that she's well versed in the Dark Arts, and "You have to mean them," sounds about as foundational as saying, "If you want to use a computer, you have to turn it on."

*shrugs* I wouldn't take any detailed statements at face value from her, but we know she's functioning well enough at this point to be sent on the raid and act effectively. I think the general concept can be trusted as largely factual, if over-simplified and incomplete.

Bellatrix’s mocking comment tossed off in battle is doubtless true in itself, but it’s a slim reed to base an entire theory of Dark magic on. Too bad we have nothing better.

'The Dark Arts,' said Snape, 'are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible.'

Edited 2016-08-31 13:40 (UTC)

Well, the German mother was probably a Muggle, so why should her sacrifice have magical effects? No magical energy at work.

Fair enough, but more depressing than I'd like. Personally, I would prefer the magic/lack of magic distinction to affect the power of the effect, if anything. Potterverse wizards/witches are already pretty Sue-like with so few restrictions on their magic.

Although, that still leaves the entire wizarding population throughout history, and they don't exactly have a pacifist culture. From the little bits of history we hear in the books, it seems unlikely they ever did. So why does no one seem to know about the power of sacrifice out of love?

Edited 2016-08-26 18:21 (UTC)

Funny thing is that when Harry mentioned it to Diary!Tom, the latter acknowledged such an effect should be possible, so Tom's research in the Dark Arts by age 16 or so did point in that general direction (also supporting sacrificial magic being related to the Dark Arts, whether Rowling likes it or not).

Of course, we also know Tom was doing some rather specialized research at about that age, if not earlier.

The real sticking point to me is how many people bought the Boy Who Lived story instead of wondering if maybe one or both of his parents saved him by sacrificing themselves. I don't think the wizarding world is so psychotic that no one would even think that a parent might be willing to die for their child. Especially if they knew such things had been done in the past.

We might be able to excuse this ignorance in the general population, but even the Death Eaters seemed to believe that it was Harry himself who had defeated Voldemort since they were wondering if he could be groomed into the next Dark Lord. I suppose they might have wanted him for propaganda purposes even if they didn't believe he was special in and of himself, but that wasn't quite the impression I got from Snape and Bella's conversation. If they knew of the potential protective effects of self-sacrifice, and that both parents died but the baby survived, wouldn't that have been where the smart money bet?

My view is that one of the things that Severus did to protect Harry from DEs was to start a whispering campaign that they might find Harry useful in some way. Or maybe Albus was responsible for the rumors. I think wizards believed so strongly in Harry's specialness because there was a deliberate effort to cause them to embrace this interpretation rather than the maternal sacrifice version.

While this is a very interesting concept, the only problem is what JKR has had canon say on the matter - unless of course it was a lie (always possible when dealing with Albus' explanations).

Supposedly, the reason Lily's sacrifice worked was all down to the fact that Voldy intended to allow her to live, but Lily did not know this. So, it seems she had no way to 'plan' a sacrifice IF what we were told in canon was truthful. You cannot plan a sacrifice if Voldy intends to kill everyone = and why would they suspect that he wouldn't. As far as canon suggests, if anyone in the house might normally not be killed when Voldy attacked, it would be Harry - at least according to Hagrid.

We do not even have any indications that Lily and James were aware that Harry was the reason to go into hiding - that he was the one Voldy was after, not them.

I do rather like the idea, since it means James was not quite so stupid in leaving his wand on the couch, nor Lily for leaving hers wherever it was. But it would also change the importance of Snape's request.

What we always dismiss (except in some fics) is that Lily was ab exceptional student like Hermione or Tom - so why would that girl be a mere sitting duck if her baby or whole family was threatened??? Who's to say that she wouldn't have found a ritual -light or dark it doesn't matter- and protected her child???
Funny thing with that theory it doesn't make a lie of what Dumbledore told Harry just conceals some things:DDP

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