How Magic Works, Some Facts, Inferences, Conclusions, and Speculations
The Facts:
Wizards did not have clocks before muggles did.
Time turners are limited to 6 solar hours.
Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.
The Aurors are planning a jinx to stop opposite reaction effect rockets, but they don’t understand rockets.
There was a significant flux in children’s spells, but children did not seem to use more or fewer spells in the past.
Brooms work via Aristotelian physics.
It’s easier to put together spells to make a broom than to make a new spell to make a broom.
You can create semi-intelligent objects without understanding what you’re doing or creating a copy of yourself or breeding.
Mass production of magical effect-bound objects is easier than individual crafting of individual spells for each item.
Objects and animals can be made to understand and respond to speech.
Magical animals and plants exist and contain magical power and but are all sized more or less a few orders of magnitude around the human norm. No magical ticks or ants seem to exist.
Created animals and object are not aware by default.
The Interdict of Merlin seems to be blocking the creation of new powerful spells but allow old powerful spells to be rediscovered.
The Interdict of Merlin does not block the creation of new spells, only new powerful spells
Random unwanted effects seem to seep into the creation of new spells.
New spell creation does not seem correlated with magical power or skill.
New spells are created, but not all the time- it is either random, requires effort, or requires time.
Nobody was as good as Merlin, and then nobody was as good as the four founders.
Children have unconscious magic, but not to the extent that OT Harry did.
Wizards seem to spend most of their time in pocket universes, otherwise you’d spot dragons and hogwarts trains on satellite imagery.
The Speculations:
The source of magic has a certain limited number of permitted Spell to Effect associations on each power level. These associations are susceptible for expiration when no-one knows the spell anymore. High level associations were frozen in place by the Interdict of Merlin, but low level slots are still expiring, and whatever ritual the wizards use to create spells is merely triggering a garbage collect and conditional new spell insert.
Upon reception of the insert ritual, the Source of Magic scans the Wizard’s mind, and performs an optimization algorithm on a set of existing spells to make a new spell which is close enough in some set of dimensions to what it thinks the Wizard wants, after which it associates the spell and effect. Therefore it would use thousands of years of existing infrastructure for making intelligent object effects.
In this scenario a wizard might be trying to create a spell for years, until a slot opens up that he will get to first, competing with everyone else trying to make spells.
Wizards, of course, not willing to accept the apparent randomness of this, have additional learned behaviors about creating spells, things they believe are required, most of which are not required and boil down to daydreaming about the effect you want and practice with the spell string and wand wave.
Time turners are limited to 6 solar hours. Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.
Can you expand on the reasoning here? I don’t see how you conclude that the limitation on time turners is somehow dependent on someone thinking in terms of equinoctal hours. It seems just as plausible that the (length of day)/4 limit (which happens to equal six equinoctal hours) is based on the physics of time turning and has applied all along.
Hm.
If we were using physics here, I’d observe that a usable time turner has to be tied into things like the rotation and movement of the earth, because traveling back in time without taking those things into account somehow leaves one stranded in interplanetary or interstellar space. Given that we’re talking magic, well, who knows. But sure, I agree that it’s suggestive but inconclusive.
A good bit off topic but replying here anyway. If humanity was not special enough to set the Interdict of Merlin on absolutely everybody it could really turn against them when the aliens arrive.
Are we certain that the amount of time that each rotation takes you actually is an equinoctal hour, or a constant? If broomsticks can use Aristotlean physics, maybe Time Turners can be limited to six solar hours.
Would you mind giving your evidence for the following points?
Magical animals and plants exist and contain magical power and but are all sized more or less a few orders of magnitude around the human norm. No magical ticks or ants seem to exist.
We don’t actually have any general comments on what kind of animals and plants don’t exist. We only know which ones exist in the vicinity of Hogwarts, plus a limited sampling of foreign ones (such as Veela).
The Interdict of Merlin seems to be blocking the creation of new powerful spells but allow old powerful spells to be rediscovered.
Isn’t this the opposite of what it does? I thought its sole effect was to prevent the impersonal transmission of spells (and thus the rediscovery of old powerful spells from books).
Random unwanted effects seem to seep into the creation of new spells.
Example, please?
Nobody was as good as Merlin, and then nobody was as good as the four founders.
This is Draco’s opinion, IIRC, and apart from the fact that he’s an 11-year old boy of limited education, we know that his information sources on wizard power over the ages are strongly biased and unreliable.
In re: Interdict of Merlin- if the Interdict of Merlin did not block the creation of high-level spells, the loss of old high level spells would not matter, since newly invented high level spells would replace them. You might say that this is due to loss of knowledge, but then we have to assume that the interdict of Merlin actually limits not only spells but also knowledge.
In re: Random Effects: Booger-tasting jelly beans from OT universe would be one.
You’re assuming that a culture as ossified as modern wizarding society has lots of people striving to create new spells en masse, and that it’s sufficiently easy to do so that they’d be getting created if the people were trying and “slots” were available. That’s absurd. Also, you seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the Interdict of Merlin—it says that spells above a certain power level can only be passed between intelligent minds, with no intermediaries(like books) allowed. The best I can assume is that you’re engaged in circular reasoning, with the lack of new spells proving the slot theory proving your weird interpretation of the Interdict proving the lack of new spells.
Its purpose might simply have been to slow down the rate of high-level spell development and use. We know that the greatest body of magical lore would have been lost with Atlantis (going with the theory that the Atlanteans created the Source of Magic) and that magical research appears to largely be the province of individuals. The Interdict of Merlin would be like going to medieval Europe and saying “OK, you can carry on developing science/natural philosophy/etc., but you can’t read any classical works, and if you want the latest research, you’ve got to get it in person rather than reading your fellow thinkers’ texts”.
Is anyone here familiar with the “Labyrinths of Echo” sequence by Max Frei (the first book of which has recently been butchered into English)? That has the central premise that magical power is fuelled by the magical axis running through the the world, and that overuse of said power has nearly drained away the soul of the planet. As such, the protagonists are a magical police force dedicated to protecting the ban on high-level magic so that the heart of the world can recover and the all-too-near apocalypse can be averted. I wonder if the Interdict of Merlin is based on a similar idea.
It appears to me that the original purpose of the Interdict was as a form of DRM for strong spells. If you want to disseminate a spell, you can’t just take a book, magically duplicate the book, and pass it out to all your friends. Learning a powerful spell thus required a willing trainer to teach you the spell, and you couldn’t duplicate the knowledge contained in your mind until you knew the spell well enough to teach it yourself (and teaching something is harder than just being able to use it).
If you take this as a starting point, it’s just basic classism at play motivating Merlin. All the wrong sorts were getting literacy and learning spells from books, taking away from the right sorts, who had learned from tutors, exclusive clubs, and networking with other powerful wizards. And it probably worked exceedingly well for several hundred years until those damn four decided to start up a school and accept everyone to be taught.
the first book of which has recently been butchered into English
Is it actually that bad? I haven’t read it in English yet, but if the translation is at least semi-decent, then I can start recommending it to friends.
I will admit to having read reviews rather than the actual thing (having read the original in Russian). However, the reviews are pretty damning in terms of translation quaity. To give one example, the translator apparently didn’t twig that, in the Cyrillic alphabet, “X” is pronounced “KH” rather than “ECKS”. As a result, every single name containing an “h” sound (of which there are many, including major characters) has had it swapped for an “x” sound. This is a level of incompetence that I wouldn’t believe if I hadn’t read the reviews first-hand.
...Huh. By itself, that doesn’t seem that bad: it’s not as though the exact pronunciation matters to someone who hasn’t read the original. But it is a pretty frightening warning sign.
It’s pretty bad in that it forces you to pronounce lots of awkward “x”s in names that were meant to be euphonic. But yes, the main issue is that a translator making such an epic mistake can’t be trusted to maintain accuracy or faithfulness elsewhere.
Also, a separate review criticism is that the translation fails miserably to capture the cheerful, whimsical style of the original narration, instead giving it a completely different and much less gripping narrative voice that ends up clashing with the content of the story.
Magical animals and plants exist and contain magical power and but are all sized more or less a few orders of magnitude around the human norm. No magical ticks or ants seem to exist.
You don’t distinguish your facts from your inferences well enough. Your list of “facts” seems to contains inferences like “Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.”, speculations like “Wizards seem to spend most of their time in pocket universes, otherwise you’d spot dragons and hogwarts trains on satellite imagery.” and assumptions like “Children have unconscious magic, but not to the extent that OT Harry did.”
This made me think of an omission that’s probably not a very big deal, but preHogwarts Rationalist Harry never reports having used magic before. At the same time, he believes in magic. So maybe he did some magic or saw some magic and was Obliviated?
Also, since Harry’s magic bag responds to sign language, can all spells be cast that way even by people who’re bad at nonverbal magic?
I don’t think he really believes in magic… he just points out that belief is not necessary since it can be tested:
“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”
Although he also thinks
Except that some part of Harry was utterly convinced that magic was real, and had been since the instant he saw the putative letter from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
In canon, it’s suggested that accidental magic is self-defense. Harry apparently has a perfectly happy & safe childhood spent reading, so no need for underage magic to ever manifest and no events to cause his dark side like an abused child. So what explains all this?
Well, we know one thing that explains both the certainty and dark side, and does not require any unhappiness or accidental magic in his childhood: influence from a Voldemort horcrux.
Well, we know one thing that explains both the certainty and dark side, and does not require any unhappiness or accidental magic in his childhood: influence from a Voldemort horcrux.
You know, if it weren’t for everyone else taking it so seriously, I would have (and did, before I started following discussions) dismissed Harry’s so called dark side as a perfectly normal personality quirk which he makes a big deal of because once he’s told he’s a prophesied hero he feels he ought to have something dramatically appropriate like a mysterious dark side.
In his place, I wouldn’t be thinking “My mysterious dark side is good at X,” I’d be thinking “I’m good at X when I put myself into the right frame of mind.”
Well, actually, in his place, I might be thinking “my mysterious dark side is good at X,” but that’s because if I were in his place, I’d be eleven.
In his place, I wouldn’t be thinking “My mysterious dark side is good at X,” I’d be thinking “I’m good at X when I put myself into the right frame of mind.”
Sometimes I’m all simplistic and think to myself “I’m good at X when I get pissed off.” Combined with a little emotional regulation with respect to pissed-off levels it amounts to much the same thing.
Especially if the ‘frame of mind’ has lots of other stuff going on as well: the implication is that he can’t get the competence without the rest of the baggage. So it’s like ‘slightly drunk me is good at pool (but it also wants to drink more and thus become very bad at pool), rather than ‘thoughtful me is good at understanding where other people are coming from’.
Okay, that makes sense. But I disagree that the dark side is part of Voldemort’s soul.
The dark side is the one that wants to protect his friends, and calling it dark isn’t really fair. Voldemort is pretty selfish so this doesn’t seem like it applies to him. It’s also been stressed in MOR that Harry’s dark side isn’t giving him access to any of Voldemort’s powers. I think it’s just a part of his psychology and lonely genius personality and that “the normal explanation is worth considering”, even in the wizarding world.
I just thought of something, and I’m not sure what the connection is to this but I feel like there is an underlying connection. Is EY emphasizing Snape’s history for a pragmatic plot type reason? Maybe there’s a secret reveal coming up, about Lily or something? This is purely intuitive so it’s probably crap. But sometimes my intuition is smarter than my active thoughts.
It also allows him to master the preparatory Occlumency exercises with extreme speed and ease. Which makes sense since the heart of Occlumency is assuming whatever personality you want at a given time, a gift Voldemort claims to have in abundance.
I just thought of something, and I’m not sure what the connection is to this but I feel like there is an underlying connection. Is EY emphasizing Snape’s history for a pragmatic plot type reason? Maybe there’s a secret reveal coming up, about Lily or something? This is purely intuitive so it’s probably crap. But sometimes my intuition is smarter than my active thoughts.
My guess is that he’s filling in Snape’s character background to give him the full complexity he deserves as one of the major players. Although Dumbledore doesn’t seem to think twice about him, Harry treats him as an obstacle, and Quirrell dismisses him as an opponent, it’s been made clear that Snape is running his own multi-stage plans (such as his manipulation of Hermione), which interact and interfere with everyone else’s. Perhaps his role is due to expand.
Harry is totally schizophrenic in MOR though. He’s got all of the Founders in his head.
You seem to be working from a unified view of the mind in which there is one single personality with one single voice, and deviations from this structure are pathological. I don’t think this is accurate.
Even if it was, it is common for people to hold internal dialogues, and not unusual for patterns to develop where certain kinds of thought are given certain labels. I don’t think this says anything special about Harry, except that he has a rich and vibrant inner life.
Also, a Public Service Announcement: “schizophrenia” is an umbrella term for a long list of possible symptoms whose main common feature is disconnection from reality or warped perception of it. You are thinking of Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), which is a completely different thing altogether.
The dark side isn’t even a personality, as such, which implies strongly that it’s not a soul.
I was originally going to put a quote here, but it turned out to be pretty much half the chapter, so… Chapter 56. In particular, when you read
a blind terrified thing that only wanted to find a dark corner and hide and not have to think about it any more - [...]
Visualizing himself cradling his dark side like a frightened child in his arms.
Think back to Deathly Hallows, Chapter 36: King’s Cross, specifically the bit
He was the only person there, except for -
He recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.
He was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless he drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.
No. Parseltongue has nothing to do with the dark side, and neither does the possible piece of Voldemort’s soul inside Harry. You’re confusing two different things. I’m not trying to argue that he isn’t a Horcrux, I’m trying to argue that the dark side is an authentic part of Harry and was not a result of the Horcrux.
Harry has some Voldemort powers. None of those are from the dark side of Harry, though. Nothing about Harry’s dark side is Voldemorty except that Harry arbitrarily labeled it dark.
I think the difference there is that Hufflepuff is a voice representing some of Harry’s thoughts and attitudes, running in parallel with the voice that Harry thinks of as himself. His dark side is a different state of consciousness—while it’s “on”, Harry processes emotions differently to normal, as well as thoughts, and the difference is big enough for him to perceive a separation between the dark side and his usual self.
Anecdotal evidence: I have a mental separation in my own inner life between “modules”, things like Harry’s house avatars that interject thoughts into my ongoing thought process, and “other personalities,” only one of which can be running at once. So the structure isn’t totally unrealistic.
since Harry’s magic bag responds to sign language, can all spells be cast that way [...] ?
I very much doubt it. You have to say “prior incantato” or whatever it is, not “previous spell”, and “expecto patronum” rather than “I’m waiting for my protector”, etc., and (at least in MoR) the exact durations of the vowel sounds in “oogely boogely” are essential for conjuring glowing bats. It seems very much as if magic is keyed to particular sounds and (pseudo-)languages. There might be sign-language spells, which might make for an interesting underexploited niche for an ambitious magical researcher, but I don’t see any reason to expect any sign-language translations of spells to exist.
and (at least in MoR) the exact durations of the vowel sounds in “oogely boogely” are essential for conjuring glowing bats
In canon you have to pronounce it Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa and can’t cast it unless you make the ‘gar’ nice and long. (In the movies, it’s “Levi-o-sa, not levio-sah”).
How Magic Works, Some Facts, Inferences, Conclusions, and Speculations
The Facts:
Wizards did not have clocks before muggles did.
Time turners are limited to 6 solar hours.
Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.
The Aurors are planning a jinx to stop opposite reaction effect rockets, but they don’t understand rockets.
There was a significant flux in children’s spells, but children did not seem to use more or fewer spells in the past.
Brooms work via Aristotelian physics.
It’s easier to put together spells to make a broom than to make a new spell to make a broom.
You can create semi-intelligent objects without understanding what you’re doing or creating a copy of yourself or breeding.
Mass production of magical effect-bound objects is easier than individual crafting of individual spells for each item.
Objects and animals can be made to understand and respond to speech.
Magical animals and plants exist and contain magical power and but are all sized more or less a few orders of magnitude around the human norm. No magical ticks or ants seem to exist.
Created animals and object are not aware by default.
The Interdict of Merlin seems to be blocking the creation of new powerful spells but allow old powerful spells to be rediscovered.
The Interdict of Merlin does not block the creation of new spells, only new powerful spells
Random unwanted effects seem to seep into the creation of new spells.
New spell creation does not seem correlated with magical power or skill.
New spells are created, but not all the time- it is either random, requires effort, or requires time.
Nobody was as good as Merlin, and then nobody was as good as the four founders.
Children have unconscious magic, but not to the extent that OT Harry did.
Wizards seem to spend most of their time in pocket universes, otherwise you’d spot dragons and hogwarts trains on satellite imagery.
The Speculations:
The source of magic has a certain limited number of permitted Spell to Effect associations on each power level. These associations are susceptible for expiration when no-one knows the spell anymore. High level associations were frozen in place by the Interdict of Merlin, but low level slots are still expiring, and whatever ritual the wizards use to create spells is merely triggering a garbage collect and conditional new spell insert.
Upon reception of the insert ritual, the Source of Magic scans the Wizard’s mind, and performs an optimization algorithm on a set of existing spells to make a new spell which is close enough in some set of dimensions to what it thinks the Wizard wants, after which it associates the spell and effect. Therefore it would use thousands of years of existing infrastructure for making intelligent object effects.
In this scenario a wizard might be trying to create a spell for years, until a slot opens up that he will get to first, competing with everyone else trying to make spells.
Wizards, of course, not willing to accept the apparent randomness of this, have additional learned behaviors about creating spells, things they believe are required, most of which are not required and boil down to daydreaming about the effect you want and practice with the spell string and wand wave.
Can you expand on the reasoning here? I don’t see how you conclude that the limitation on time turners is somehow dependent on someone thinking in terms of equinoctal hours. It seems just as plausible that the (length of day)/4 limit (which happens to equal six equinoctal hours) is based on the physics of time turning and has applied all along.
My non-conclusive arguments for this are as follows:
Each rotation equals one hour.
We cannot privilige the human experience, and therefore the length of the earth day cannot be a physical constant.
Hm. If we were using physics here, I’d observe that a usable time turner has to be tied into things like the rotation and movement of the earth, because traveling back in time without taking those things into account somehow leaves one stranded in interplanetary or interstellar space. Given that we’re talking magic, well, who knows. But sure, I agree that it’s suggestive but inconclusive.
The length of an earth day is part of all Earth life experience, not uniquely human.
A good bit off topic but replying here anyway. If humanity was not special enough to set the Interdict of Merlin on absolutely everybody it could really turn against them when the aliens arrive.
Are we certain that the amount of time that each rotation takes you actually is an equinoctal hour, or a constant? If broomsticks can use Aristotlean physics, maybe Time Turners can be limited to six solar hours.
Would you mind giving your evidence for the following points?
We don’t actually have any general comments on what kind of animals and plants don’t exist. We only know which ones exist in the vicinity of Hogwarts, plus a limited sampling of foreign ones (such as Veela).
Isn’t this the opposite of what it does? I thought its sole effect was to prevent the impersonal transmission of spells (and thus the rediscovery of old powerful spells from books).
Example, please?
This is Draco’s opinion, IIRC, and apart from the fact that he’s an 11-year old boy of limited education, we know that his information sources on wizard power over the ages are strongly biased and unreliable.
In re: Interdict of Merlin- if the Interdict of Merlin did not block the creation of high-level spells, the loss of old high level spells would not matter, since newly invented high level spells would replace them. You might say that this is due to loss of knowledge, but then we have to assume that the interdict of Merlin actually limits not only spells but also knowledge.
In re: Random Effects: Booger-tasting jelly beans from OT universe would be one.
You’re assuming that a culture as ossified as modern wizarding society has lots of people striving to create new spells en masse, and that it’s sufficiently easy to do so that they’d be getting created if the people were trying and “slots” were available. That’s absurd. Also, you seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the Interdict of Merlin—it says that spells above a certain power level can only be passed between intelligent minds, with no intermediaries(like books) allowed. The best I can assume is that you’re engaged in circular reasoning, with the lack of new spells proving the slot theory proving your weird interpretation of the Interdict proving the lack of new spells.
Its purpose might simply have been to slow down the rate of high-level spell development and use. We know that the greatest body of magical lore would have been lost with Atlantis (going with the theory that the Atlanteans created the Source of Magic) and that magical research appears to largely be the province of individuals. The Interdict of Merlin would be like going to medieval Europe and saying “OK, you can carry on developing science/natural philosophy/etc., but you can’t read any classical works, and if you want the latest research, you’ve got to get it in person rather than reading your fellow thinkers’ texts”.
Is anyone here familiar with the “Labyrinths of Echo” sequence by Max Frei (the first book of which has recently been butchered into English)? That has the central premise that magical power is fuelled by the magical axis running through the the world, and that overuse of said power has nearly drained away the soul of the planet. As such, the protagonists are a magical police force dedicated to protecting the ban on high-level magic so that the heart of the world can recover and the all-too-near apocalypse can be averted. I wonder if the Interdict of Merlin is based on a similar idea.
It appears to me that the original purpose of the Interdict was as a form of DRM for strong spells. If you want to disseminate a spell, you can’t just take a book, magically duplicate the book, and pass it out to all your friends. Learning a powerful spell thus required a willing trainer to teach you the spell, and you couldn’t duplicate the knowledge contained in your mind until you knew the spell well enough to teach it yourself (and teaching something is harder than just being able to use it).
If you take this as a starting point, it’s just basic classism at play motivating Merlin. All the wrong sorts were getting literacy and learning spells from books, taking away from the right sorts, who had learned from tutors, exclusive clubs, and networking with other powerful wizards. And it probably worked exceedingly well for several hundred years until those damn four decided to start up a school and accept everyone to be taught.
I’d think of it as being more like “don’t spread nuclear design secrets” than DRM, given the nature of powerful wizardry.
Feature rather than bug, I think. They don’t call them “Every Flavour Beans” for nothing.
Is it actually that bad? I haven’t read it in English yet, but if the translation is at least semi-decent, then I can start recommending it to friends.
I will admit to having read reviews rather than the actual thing (having read the original in Russian). However, the reviews are pretty damning in terms of translation quaity. To give one example, the translator apparently didn’t twig that, in the Cyrillic alphabet, “X” is pronounced “KH” rather than “ECKS”. As a result, every single name containing an “h” sound (of which there are many, including major characters) has had it swapped for an “x” sound. This is a level of incompetence that I wouldn’t believe if I hadn’t read the reviews first-hand.
...Huh. By itself, that doesn’t seem that bad: it’s not as though the exact pronunciation matters to someone who hasn’t read the original. But it is a pretty frightening warning sign.
It’s pretty bad in that it forces you to pronounce lots of awkward “x”s in names that were meant to be euphonic. But yes, the main issue is that a translator making such an epic mistake can’t be trusted to maintain accuracy or faithfulness elsewhere.
Also, a separate review criticism is that the translation fails miserably to capture the cheerful, whimsical style of the original narration, instead giving it a completely different and much less gripping narrative voice that ends up clashing with the content of the story.
Chizpurfles appear to be canon.
You don’t distinguish your facts from your inferences well enough. Your list of “facts” seems to contains inferences like “Therefore time turners were limited after the invention of Equinoctal hours, in 127CE.”, speculations like “Wizards seem to spend most of their time in pocket universes, otherwise you’d spot dragons and hogwarts trains on satellite imagery.” and assumptions like “Children have unconscious magic, but not to the extent that OT Harry did.”
I admit all the above flaws.
This made me think of an omission that’s probably not a very big deal, but preHogwarts Rationalist Harry never reports having used magic before. At the same time, he believes in magic. So maybe he did some magic or saw some magic and was Obliviated?
Also, since Harry’s magic bag responds to sign language, can all spells be cast that way even by people who’re bad at nonverbal magic?
I don’t think he really believes in magic… he just points out that belief is not necessary since it can be tested:
Although he also thinks
In canon, it’s suggested that accidental magic is self-defense. Harry apparently has a perfectly happy & safe childhood spent reading, so no need for underage magic to ever manifest and no events to cause his dark side like an abused child. So what explains all this?
Well, we know one thing that explains both the certainty and dark side, and does not require any unhappiness or accidental magic in his childhood: influence from a Voldemort horcrux.
You know, if it weren’t for everyone else taking it so seriously, I would have (and did, before I started following discussions) dismissed Harry’s so called dark side as a perfectly normal personality quirk which he makes a big deal of because once he’s told he’s a prophesied hero he feels he ought to have something dramatically appropriate like a mysterious dark side.
In his place, I wouldn’t be thinking “My mysterious dark side is good at X,” I’d be thinking “I’m good at X when I put myself into the right frame of mind.”
Well, actually, in his place, I might be thinking “my mysterious dark side is good at X,” but that’s because if I were in his place, I’d be eleven.
Sometimes I’m all simplistic and think to myself “I’m good at X when I get pissed off.” Combined with a little emotional regulation with respect to pissed-off levels it amounts to much the same thing.
Especially if the ‘frame of mind’ has lots of other stuff going on as well: the implication is that he can’t get the competence without the rest of the baggage. So it’s like ‘slightly drunk me is good at pool (but it also wants to drink more and thus become very bad at pool), rather than ‘thoughtful me is good at understanding where other people are coming from’.
Okay, that makes sense. But I disagree that the dark side is part of Voldemort’s soul.
The dark side is the one that wants to protect his friends, and calling it dark isn’t really fair. Voldemort is pretty selfish so this doesn’t seem like it applies to him. It’s also been stressed in MOR that Harry’s dark side isn’t giving him access to any of Voldemort’s powers. I think it’s just a part of his psychology and lonely genius personality and that “the normal explanation is worth considering”, even in the wizarding world.
I just thought of something, and I’m not sure what the connection is to this but I feel like there is an underlying connection. Is EY emphasizing Snape’s history for a pragmatic plot type reason? Maybe there’s a secret reveal coming up, about Lily or something? This is purely intuitive so it’s probably crap. But sometimes my intuition is smarter than my active thoughts.
I would have thought Parseltongue was an obvious example.
It also allows him to master the preparatory Occlumency exercises with extreme speed and ease. Which makes sense since the heart of Occlumency is assuming whatever personality you want at a given time, a gift Voldemort claims to have in abundance.
My guess is that he’s filling in Snape’s character background to give him the full complexity he deserves as one of the major players. Although Dumbledore doesn’t seem to think twice about him, Harry treats him as an obstacle, and Quirrell dismisses him as an opponent, it’s been made clear that Snape is running his own multi-stage plans (such as his manipulation of Hermione), which interact and interfere with everyone else’s. Perhaps his role is due to expand.
Harry is totally schizophrenic in MOR though. He’s got all of the Founders in his head.
The dark side isn’t even a personality, as such, which implies strongly that it’s not a soul.
I think your interpretation of the Snape thing is probably accurate.
You seem to be working from a unified view of the mind in which there is one single personality with one single voice, and deviations from this structure are pathological. I don’t think this is accurate.
Even if it was, it is common for people to hold internal dialogues, and not unusual for patterns to develop where certain kinds of thought are given certain labels. I don’t think this says anything special about Harry, except that he has a rich and vibrant inner life.
Also, a Public Service Announcement: “schizophrenia” is an umbrella term for a long list of possible symptoms whose main common feature is disconnection from reality or warped perception of it. You are thinking of Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), which is a completely different thing altogether.
I was originally going to put a quote here, but it turned out to be pretty much half the chapter, so… Chapter 56. In particular, when you read
Think back to Deathly Hallows, Chapter 36: King’s Cross, specifically the bit
No. Parseltongue has nothing to do with the dark side, and neither does the possible piece of Voldemort’s soul inside Harry. You’re confusing two different things. I’m not trying to argue that he isn’t a Horcrux, I’m trying to argue that the dark side is an authentic part of Harry and was not a result of the Horcrux.
Harry has some Voldemort powers. None of those are from the dark side of Harry, though. Nothing about Harry’s dark side is Voldemorty except that Harry arbitrarily labeled it dark.
The dark side is ridiculously afraid of death, which we know to be a Voldemort trait. It’s also very much separate from Harry.
I see fear of death as more of a universally human thing. I think that makes more sense than saying Voldemort’s soul is inherently more fearful.
I think people are attributing things to the dark side that don’t really belong there.
Why do you think the dark side is any more separate from Harry than Hufflepuff?
Harry says it is, in Azkaban.
I think the difference there is that Hufflepuff is a voice representing some of Harry’s thoughts and attitudes, running in parallel with the voice that Harry thinks of as himself. His dark side is a different state of consciousness—while it’s “on”, Harry processes emotions differently to normal, as well as thoughts, and the difference is big enough for him to perceive a separation between the dark side and his usual self.
Anecdotal evidence: I have a mental separation in my own inner life between “modules”, things like Harry’s house avatars that interject thoughts into my ongoing thought process, and “other personalities,” only one of which can be running at once. So the structure isn’t totally unrealistic.
In fairness, MoR!Voldemort has yet to demonstrate this trait. If anything, he acts as if he is tired of living.
Well, Quirrell thinks that the Dementor at Hogwarts tells him that he’ll hunt him down....
When you think about it, it makes sense that Horcruxing yourself would piss off Deathmentors something fierce.
I very much doubt it. You have to say “prior incantato” or whatever it is, not “previous spell”, and “expecto patronum” rather than “I’m waiting for my protector”, etc., and (at least in MoR) the exact durations of the vowel sounds in “oogely boogely” are essential for conjuring glowing bats. It seems very much as if magic is keyed to particular sounds and (pseudo-)languages. There might be sign-language spells, which might make for an interesting underexploited niche for an ambitious magical researcher, but I don’t see any reason to expect any sign-language translations of spells to exist.
In canon you have to pronounce it Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa and can’t cast it unless you make the ‘gar’ nice and long. (In the movies, it’s “Levi-o-sa, not levio-sah”).