The DADA Curse

[sunnyskywalker]

I have to thank Terri for posting, which inspired me to dust off some notes myself and pull them into some sort of order!

I’ve been re-reading some meta, and there are enough interesting bits and pieces about the DADA curse that I wanted to wrap it all up into one post. Most of this is not new; it’s just a synthesis of disconnected comments.

Red Hen in “His Heart Belongs to DADA?” notes,

And yet, the curse itself does not seem to show any signs of serving Lord Voldemort’s interests. Quite the opposite, if anything. It almost seems to be calibrated to do its greatest damage to those who are the greatest threat to Hogwarts. It was the agents which Voldemort had placed there himself (apart from Snape) who were the ones most deeply “bitten” by it.

I mean, look at that track record during Harry’s time in the school.

Year 1 & Year 4: the DADA instructor was Voldemort and/or one of his agents. The result? Death and worse.

Year 2 & Year 5: The DADA instructor was an unaffiliated outsider. Result? Both were “hoist on their own petard.” Both brought to grief through the defects of their own characters. Mental, emotional, or physical damage of varying degree.

Year 3 & Year 6: The DADA instructor was one of Dumbledore’s agents. Result? Exposure, loss of reputation. Both driven from the school, without permanent or long-lasting injury. They both still had any problems that they brought with them, but they took no significant (additional) physical or mental damage, whatsoever. That’s hardly the way you would expect the curse to go if it were Lord Voldemort driving it.

It really isn’t, is it?

So. Maybe Voldemort didn’t create the curse from scratch. (One might expect a powerful curse to take more than a simple covert wand movement, after all, but then again, who can say with the inconsistent Potterverse magic.) Maybe he twisted some pre-existing magic of Hogwarts, and didn’t do a perfect job of it.

We know Hogwarts has protective enchantments. What might some of the less obvious ones be? Let’s look at what directly preceded each DADA instructor’s exit from the school, shall we?

Year 1: Quirrellmort tries to kill a student and is killed.

Year 2: Lockhart tries to Obliviate two students and is instead himself Obliviated.

Year 3: Lupin unintentionally puts students in danger by transforming and is revealed and ejected.

Year 4: Crouch Jr. is about to kill a student and is drained of his soul.

Year 5: Umbridge plans to torture students and is herself tortured.

Year 6: Snape kills the Headmaster at the Headmaster’s request and is only temporarily ejected from the school, having no apparent difficulties returning two months later.

Year 7: Amycus Carrow tortures students (and orders them to torture each other) and is himself tortured (by Harry).

I’m thinking there’s some sort of “don’t seriously harm students or faculty, especially not on purpose” magic at work here. Maybe it always operates at a lower, less damaging level (allowing Hagrid to have students tend his blast-ended skrewts and McGonagall to leave Neville in the hall with a murderer on the loose with no obvious repercussions), only invoking if a teacher actually kills a student. Or maybe it’s latent, waiting to be triggered by the Headmaster in special circumstances. In which case it might be that only Dumbledore’s allowing Tom access to the Headmaster’s office gave Tom the opportunity to activate and/or alter the enchantment. (No wonder he starts holding interviews off-campus!)

Swythyv hinted at this possibility in “Pipes” (archived version available here).

“No one can bide there who plays false to the peace and safety of Hogwarts - and that defense was set long before Tom Riddle was a gleam in Merope Gaunt's eye.”

If the curse/protection always active, what Voldemort did was crank the sensitivity up to eleven (for DADA teachers only). He went to Hogwarts; he knows how, erm, flexible the definition of “harm” can be there. Just about any teacher might accidentally endanger students a bit, or intend to cause at least minor harm, at some point. So if you fiddle the dials on the enchantment, as it were, so that it triggers at a much lower level of “harm” by DADA teachers, you’ll catch most of the DADA teachers.

Well, okay, he must also have magically busted something so no one can dial the setting back down again (or turn it off).

As to how he cranked up the dial for DADA teachers only, that might take some thinking. If it’s tied to the position, why not formally abolish it and replace it with a similar position with a different title? Swythyv thought that perhaps the quarters, rather than the position as such, were jinxed. Which might work, if the quarters assigned to the various departments don’t change for decades at a time or longer. Each suite of rooms designated for a particular position might have been added separately to the “don’t maim or kill students” enchantment as the castle expanded over the years, leaving them able to be dialed up or down individually.

My main problem with this is that if the Headmaster knows about these protective enchantments (which he ought to), and that they’re tied to the professors’ quarters, why doesn’t he just move all DADA-related activity to different rooms? There seem to be plenty of empty rooms and classrooms about (though maybe that’s only because we mainly see or hear about “empty” rooms after hours). So we’re in much the same position as if it’s tied to the position.

Red Hen says the curse “seems to consist of the fairly devilish trick of focusing the [Dark] energies that the instructor of the class is forced to invoke in order to teach his students a defense from, and turning them against the instructor.” Well, Quirrell died going up against Lily’s blood protection (ancient magic, possibly dark?) but didn’t himself channel it. Though maybe possession and/or drinking unicorn blood would have done the trick. Lockhart got blasted by Obliviate (possibly dark, but not publicly advertised as such since Secrecy relies on it so heavily). Lupin was disgraced after being outed as a dark creature. Crouch Jr. and Amycus used Unforgivables, and Snape used one (AK). Umbridge only planned to use Cruciatus. So I’m not sure how well this works either.

Especially since we’re also told that all curses are dark magic, and I sincerely doubt that no professor in another position has ever cast a fair number of minor curses in a year. We don’t see any of them ever suffer even the kind of minor rebound you might expect if the enchantment were working on them at a lower setting. (I think. Any possible examples?) And if the Animagus transformation is dark, McGonagall especially ought to have suffered some minor magical bad luck.

The whole thing would also work a lot more smoothly if Dumbledore’s one off-hand comment about not being able to keep a DADA teacher longer than a year might be him speaking carelessly (as discussed in a previous DTCL thread). Maybe a few teachers lasted a year and a half! That would cut down on how many passed through the revolving DADA door a bit.

And since presumably most of them endangered students through carelessness rather than actively intending to torture or kill them, most of them would have left under circumstances more like Lupin’s: inconvenient, perhaps shameful, but not permanently damaging or fatal. This could explain why no one (except Dumbledore) is 100% certain that there is a curse at work.

So, there you have it: the DADA curse, courtesy of pre-existing Hogwarts enchantments. Still missing the details of how Tom fiddled the magical dials for one position only, and why Dumbledore can’t just turn the sensitivity of the enchantment back down. Any ideas?