Snapedom

I posted a long (10,000+ word) rambling essay on the Dark Arts, Dark Magic, Dark wizards, and the inconsistency with which these various terms seem to be used in the WW on my lj: “Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper.”
http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/28365.html#cutid1

What is relevant for looking at “Severus and the Dark Arts” is the central distinction I made: that the portrayal of Dark magic in the Potterverse lacks coherence partly because different groups in the WW are actually using the adjective “dark” in different, and sometimes mutually incompatible, ways.

To recapitulate my main argument (so no one here has to wade through my interminable babble to understand what I want to say about Severus): I posit that in the British WW there are at least three distinct groups applying the adjective “Dark” to magic with different meaning. (Cut here for those who don’t want to read the original.)



The first group considers the discipline called “the Dark Arts” to be a dangerous but powerful branch of magic, worthy of study. This is Durmstrang’s position, which is obviously the majority view on parts of the Continent. And this view is known and (largely) socially acceptable in Britain.

The Black family, historically, have apparently all been Dark witches and wizards while also being the cream of Wizarding Society. Similarly, Lucius in books two-five pretended never to have been a Death Eater and hid specific artifacts and poisons, but he was quite open about his family’s interest in Dark magic (he brought his young son to Knockturn Alley)—and being a known Dark wizard was no bar to Minister Fudge trusting him above Albus for a time.

The opposite extreme is the group that considers “Dark” magic to be intrinsically, innately Evil, to consist only of spells like the Cruciatus and Inferius-making. Opposing Dark magic is therefore, to this group, obviously and inherently Good. “Snape was just this little oddball who was up to his eyes in the Dark Arts and James—whatever else he may have appeared to you, Harry—always hated the Dark Arts,” said Sirius in defense of James when Harry discovered that his father’s actual behavior was, um, possibly not above reproach. Interest in the Dark Arts is Evil; opposition to the Dark Arts is Good. QED.

This was Harry’s belief, and most of his friends and mentors belong to this group, so we assumed it was the norm. In fact it’s not; this is an extreme minority view in the British WW.

The middle group is the mainstream attitude in British Wizarding society; they split the difference. They use the term “Dark” only of magic that they consider illegal, immoral, or fattening. For them, calling a spell or object “Dark” indicates disapproval or concern. However, they understand perfectly well that the old Pureblood families are using the term “Dark” differently and they don’t imagine that specializing in “the Dark Arts” makes someone automatically evil, any more than being a Charms expert would.

And in fact we see proof that it does not in Viktor Krum. The Grindelwald-hating Krums probably sent their son Viktor to Durmstrang rather than Hogwarts or Beauxbaton largely because they wanted him to receive a well-rounded education including the Dark Arts. The Krums would certainly hardly prefer a former Grindelwald-clone supporter to Grindelwald’s defeater as Headmaster! And Viktor was neither morally corrupted, nor did he imbibe Pureblood supremecism with his Dark studies.

This middle group uses “dark” to apply to any magic of which they disapprove; but Ministry employees, in particular, tend to conflate “Dark” with “illegal.” So Barty Crouch Sr. could rant, “I despise and detest the Dark Arts and those who practice them,” despite the fact that he’s the one who authorized Aurors to use the Unforgivable Curses. No one laughed in his face when he said that, because his listeners understood that DE’s using the Cruciatus were breaking the law, Aurors doing the same were not. His listeners understood Barty Sr. to be engaging in a Law-and-Order diatribe, not a Ravenclaw symposium on the value and uses of various branches of Magic.

Fudge and Skeeter both belong to the middle group: we see that they will consort with Malfoys, but when they’re trying to discredit Harry they bring up that the boy’s a Parselmouth.

Naturally, those who openly study the Dark Arts consider the middle group to be hypocrites, and the group that thinks ALL Dark magic evil to be hysterical lunatics. Those who reserve the term “Dark” to indicate disapproval consider the Malfoys et al. old-fashioned and a bit politically incorrect, and the third faction to be a bit extreme. The “Dark equals EVIL” folks don’t always realize that Fudge & Co. don’t quite think as they do (since whenever that group does use the term “Dark” it’s disparagingly), and consider those who study the Dark Arts to be deliberately wicked.

A European reader said the following analogy really clarified the distinction, so I’ll quote myself: I’m American, and I grew up in a rural small town where hunting was THE main sport/hobby for adult men. Nearly every home had guns. I now live in a major city, and for most of my neighbors, guns are associated with violence and crime. For the most extreme of these, firearms are evil and incite people to violence: giving a little boy a cap pistol would practically rank as child abuse. Whereas rural hunter fathers bring their sons to gun shows as a male-bonding ritual, and agree that “Sure, guns are dangerous, that’s why you teach the kids young to respect ‘em.” While the middle group says, “Isn’t hunting a bit, well, bloody?” And if one heard that a friend was buying a pistol for self-defense, one might regale the friend with statistics about firearm accidents, but not think the friend evil. But the term “gun nut” is reserved for someone whom one worries is, well, interested in firearms. Creepily so.

I also contend that historically, the oldest attitude is that the Dark Arts is a valid discipline, and that this was the default assumption in the British WW until some point in the twentieth century. And most of the oldest families still hold to this attitude—and so do their children, who often sort Slytherin. And those children teach their housemates….

At some point this came to be considered an old-fashioned point of view; the new politically correct version reserved the term “Dark” for disapproved magic. And at some point, possibly around the same time, Hogwarts stopped formally teaching the Dark Arts as a separate field.

And the view that “Dark” magic is innately, obviously, wicked, is an extension or misunderstanding of the second usage, which I think is extremely recent, and restricted almost wholly to Gryffindors.



Which brings me finally to Severus.




The Dark Arts are a POWERFUL branch of magic. Dangerous, yes, hard to master—that’s hardly a disincentive to our Sev. And he’s sorted to the House where a lot of his housemates are scions of old Dark families. Like Lucius, like all the Blacks but Sirius, like Mulciber and Avery and Rosier…. Forget their political affiliations; Severus is in position to rub shoulders with people who grew up with libraries full of information of a whole branch of magic that Hogwarts has stopped formally teaching, but which is still well worth independent study. And the Hogwarts library DOES still have those volumes, even if the books on “Evil” Dark magic have been removed.

The magic we actually see Severus perform as an adult include Potions, Expelliarmus, the Confundus Charm, an unspecified hex in DADA class, the Patronus Charm, countercurses, Sectumsempra, unspecified defensive combat magic (unlike the dozen Death Eaters a year earlier, Severus deflects Harry without breaking a sweat), Occlumency, Legilimency, healing curse damage, casting Avada Kedavra, and flying without a broom. I’d argue that most of the latter involve Dark magic.

Compare Severus to Bill Weasley for a moment. Bill Weasley, per baby brother Ron, is a cursebreaker for Gringotts. So he’s an expert in Dark magic; breaking curses is his CAREER. If he were a Black or a Rosier, Bill would be openly calling himself a Dark wizard. But he’s a Weasley, so that admission will never pass his lips in polite conversation.

Severus Snape repeatedly heals curse damage. He may well have brewed the ten-a-day restorative potions Hermione was taking in the Hospital Wing after the MoM debacle; he certainly was the (apparently sole) expert who arrested Albus’s ring-curse; he stabilized Katy Bell, and he healed Draco entirely. Even Harry noticed his expertise—looking at Bill’s cursed wounds, Harry came close to wondering if Snape could have healed them.

When Bill’s brother Percy said to Harry that Snape “knows a lot about the Dark Arts,” he hadn’t meant Harry to understand that Snape is Britain’s leading expert in treating curse injuries. But he apparently is (if not, Albus was a fool for relying on Snape’s ministrations). And Percy and the other Weasleys never point out that Bill, too, “knows a lot about the Dark Arts.”

Of COURSE Severus was a Dark wizard. You got a problem with that?

*

Which brings us naturally to Lily. Who DID have a problem with that.

Lily obviously was in the third group. She’s one of those Gryffindors who *know* that Dark magic is inherently wicked. But I don’t think Severus realized this at first; certainly he didn’t in time to prevent her curious misconceptions about the nature of Dark magic from damaging their friendship.

Which is one of the reasons that I conclude that this minority view is also new: so new, in fact, that Severus might never have encountered it before. Certainly in the argument over Mulciber he seemed not to have registered the difference between Lily’s position and the majority one, those hypocrites who only call magic “Dark” when they don’t like it. In argument the difference at first seems subtle.

Severus as a teen may have been socially and emotionally inept, but even at that age he knew how to construct a logical argument.

Think a minute.

Suppose you’re a Dark wizard arguing with a friend over another friend’s use of a spell which Friend One calls “Dark magic.” (Which, as it happens, it was, technically: it was a Dark Arts spell, not a spell from one of the other branches of magic. But that’s not really the point at issue.)

If Friend One were a Dark witch, the term would be simply diagnostic, like calling it a Transfiguration.

But she’s not a Dark witch; you know that she means the designation to be disparaging.

If your friend were in the group that uses the term “Dark” to indicate disapproval, you understand that what she really means by calling it “Dark” is that she thinks the magic in question illegal, or that it crosses the line of what she personally considers permissible.

So if you don’t think the spell merits such disapprobation, your argument would be that it’s not that serious, certainly no worse than what others do without her accusing them of Dark magic.

If, on the other hand, you are a Dark wizard arguing with a friend who really thinks that “Dark” magic is inherently wicked, you would know that accepting the label “Dark magic” for the spell in question is agreeing in advance that the spell is Evil.

Not a concession any sane debater would make!

So you’d argue, “Dark Magic? That wasn’t Dark Magic! At least, ‘not in that crude sense.’ Who said that spell was Dark, Lily? They’re starkers. Rafe told me what spell he tried to use, and it wasn’t Dark—it wasn’t dangerous at all.”

Reread the Prince’s Tale, the argument between Severus and Lily over what Mulciber ”tried to do.”

(Note: “tried to do,” not “did.” I finally noticed that little fact. Mulciber had apparently not actually done anything to Macdonald.)


“… D’you know what he tried to do to Mary Macdonald the other day?”

… “That was nothing,” said Snape. “It was a laugh, that’s all—”

“It was Dark Magic, and if you think that’s funny—”

“What about the stuff that Potter and his mates get up to?”

…

“They don’t use Dark Magic, though.”


Severus kept trying to tell Lily that Mulciber’s spell “was a laugh and to compare it to ”the stuff that Potter and his mates get up to” (Which, at that point, included nearly murdering Sev, though he’s forbidden to tell her so.)

The naiveté of the boy! As though intention or comparative harm mattered.

The moment that Severus failed to challenge Lily’s assertion that Mulciber had used Dark Magic, Lily had Sev’s confirmation that Mulciber was Wicked—and that Sev himself was guilty of condoning Evil.

[Sev’s probable response to this allegation, had Lily made it explicitly: “HUH?”]

To quote my other essay again:

“But really, taken to the logical conclusion, if ‘Dark Magic’ really, truly, equaled ‘innately evil magic’ and vice versa, then NOTHING anyone could do while avoiding the use of Dark Magic could be as bad as ANYTHING someone did with it!”

And Lily and the Marauders seem rather close to believing that.

Now, of course, Mulciber at fifteen might have been exactly as “creepy” as Lily claims. What he “tried to do” to Macdonald might appall and horrify us if we knew what was. But canon never shows this, and Lily never says so. Her only firm accusation is that Mulciber tried to use Dark Magic. That’s it. That’s all she actually accuses him of. Which, if Dark Magic is inherently evil and vicious, is enough. However, if the Dark Arts are a legitimate discipline, her condemnation is simple prejudice—precisely on a par with Petunia complaining about her dratted freak sister “turning teacups into rats.”

‘It was Magic, and if you think that’s funny—’

If Lily had a legitimate complaint to make about Mulciber’s behavior, she should have made it. And she did not. Apparently as far as she was concerned, knowing that Mulciber’s spell was Dark was enough to condemn it, and him, and Severus for excusing him.

And Severus didn’t understand this.

So the Dark=Deliberately Evil view may be so new that Severus had never previously encountered it. Certainly he didn’t expect that to be his Lily’s viewpoint. Or Sev would never have conceded as he did that one of his other friends was willing to use Dark Magic and that he didn’t disapprove on principle.

When to his Lily that would mean that Sev was acceding to Evil.


*


Draco complains, “Defense Against the Dark Arts—it’s all just a joke, isn’t it, an act? Like any of us need protecting against the Dark Arts—”

“It is an act that is crucial to success, Draco!” said Snape.

And it’s an act that adult Snape actually performed well; the Harry-filter prevented us from seeing quite how well. Adult Snape knew how to present himself to the mainstream as their kind of Dark wizard: one who can be trusted to use his Dark expertise for the community’s benefit without rubbing the community’s noses in the fact that it was Dark Arts that were used.

We were misled into assuming there was general distrust (as well as some well-earned dislike) of Professor Snape because the children who initiated Harry into Hogwarts culture were all Weasleys—from a family who fear all Dark magic.

There’s actually no canon evidence even that all Gryffindors share Harry’s conviction that the Potions Master is a villain, much less that any student from another house does.

Neville, of course, is in a class by himself. But Neville, after all, believes no worse of Snape than he does—with greater cause—of his own relatives. He seems to believe that Snape, like Algie, Enid, and Augusta, might be willing to kill Neville for magical incompetence. Moreover, the extreme fear of Snape shown in the Boggart lesson came after Neville had spent months walking the Hogwarts corridors expecting to be ‘the Heir of Slytherin’s’ next victim—which would have both reinforced his fear of being killed by the WW as a near-Squib, and allowed him to displace it from his family onto Hogwarts, and onto Slytherin House in particular. It’s obviously more emotionally agreeable to fear that your nasty teacher might want to kill you for incompetence than that your family does. (Harry, of course, used the same emotional technique of displacement onto Snape with his guilt over Sirius’s death.) Notice that the grandmother who repeatedly allowed Great Uncle Algie to try to “force some magic out of me” (or kill the little boy in the process) is apparently still Neville’s second-greatest fear object: “I don’t want the boggart to turn into her either,” he protested when Lupin mentioned her.

But a quick review of canon shows nothing to imply that students in general shared Harry’s distrust of Snape. Dislike, quite probably: all the third-year Gryffindors laughed at the cross-dressed Boggart (of course, I probably would have too at that age), Dean and Seamus always enjoy it when Harry cheeks the Potions Master, and Harry noticed nobody except the Slytherins applauding the professor’s elevation to DADA. But Harry also noticed nobody overtly sharing his fury at the news—the “buzz of conversation” is described as being due to the news being “sensational,” not outrageous. And Hagrid said in book one that Snape “liked” hardly any of the students, which would often lead to a reciprocal lack of affection. But being generally unpopular (if Snape was) is not at all the same as being suspected of being an attempted murderer and thief, a Voldemort-lover, a traitor, a villain willing (nay, eager) to perform any atrocity.

There are few interactions in canon between Snape and a Gryffindor outside Harry’s circle. One is Parvati asking about Inferi in Snape’s first DADA class. Patil treats the professor as a reliable source of information in his area of expertise, and he answers her question without any insults about either her terror, her ignorance, or her failure to apply logic. Later, Seamus asks again (politely) about Inferi, and is answered without insult even though Seamus is wasting class time under the misconception that Mundungus had been an Inferius. You would almost think the man a normal teacher! Further, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Harry is so quick to catch anything to Snape’s discredit that it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have noted other students sharing his opinions, if only to bolster his recurrent arguments against trusting Snape. “Dean and Seamus/Susan Bones/Cho/Penelope Clearwater think he’s evil too!” should be an obvious debate point with Hermione, Hagrid, Sirius, Lupin, and Dumbledore, and Harry never once uses it.

As to Snape’s reputation among adults—what was it, really? Moody, who always knew him to have been a Death Eater, never trusted him—at least, so Barty acted, and this attitude took no one, Albus least of all, by surprise. We never actually saw the real Moody interact directly with Snape to know how they treated each other. But the one time Harry saw Snape coming out of a general Order meeting, he was apparently being mobbed by the others for information. Sirius claimed, in the fight at Grimmauld Place, to “know better” than to believe with Dumbledore that Snape had reformed, but he apparently “knew” that much as Snape “knew” Black to be a coward (Severus’s return volley). What Sirius actually worried about, what started the fight, was Sirius’s concern that Snape might give Harry a hard time in Occlumency lessons—a very different question than whether Snape might really be a traitorous Voldemort supporter. As I pointed out long ago, both Sirius and Remus believed unhesitatingly that Snape both should and could be persuaded to resume Harry’s Occlumency lessons after Harry’s Pensieve incursion. Which demonstrates both that they truly believed Snape to be loyal to the Order (otherwise, like Harry, they’d feel safer with him out of Harry’s head), and that they believed Snape fundamentally good enough to overlook such a grievous offense when Harry’s safety and the Order’s might be at stake.

And among those who did not know Snape had ever been a Voldemort supporter, what had been Snape’s reputation? Well, in CoS Draco (the son of a Hogwarts Governor) advised Snape to apply for the headmaster’s position. Even if Draco were just sucking up (and we don’t know that), proper sucking up technique requires one to keep some perspective. If it were totally absurd for Professor Snape to apply for the position, the comment would be an insult rather than flattery. (And our esteemed Potions Master is, shall we say, not backwards at detecting insults.) So Snape might have been ridiculously young for the position, but his background as a Dark wizard would apparently not have been a bar (any more than it barred Lucius from the Board of Governors, any more than it had barred Phineas from the post in question).

And in PoA, we saw that Minister Fudge clearly did not share his underling Weasley’s distrust of Dark wizards: he offered Snape the Order of Merlin for catching Black—“First Class, if I can wangle it!” Fudge clearly thought the world of the young Dark wizard then—until Snape’s subsequent loss of control and crazy claims that young Potter was somehow responsible for Black’s escape put him off. [Not to mention Fudge’s need and ardent desire to bury the whole incident.] But don’t you know, paranoia and loss of the ability to see reality in the face of one’s prejudices, IS one of the known dangers of overuse of the Dark Arts—just look at that poor chap Mad-Eye, barking mad after an illustrious career of catching Dark wizards.

In fact, if you look at the scene in GoF where Severus revealed his Mark to Fudge—part of Fudge’s shock there may be the overturning of his ideas about Snape. He’d thought Snape one of the trustworthy Dark wizards, one on the side of the Ministry—and now to see him Marked as a Death Eater, and claiming an allegiance to Dumbledore?

Really, Severus’s impulsive action there was ill-advised. Outing himself probably damaged his previous reputation with everyone.

*

As an adult Severus demonstrates that he has learned how to communicate with members of the other groups. Dumbledore doesn’t want the children instructed in the Dark Arts or told that the Dark Arts are worthy of study, and so far as we can see, Severus complies with DD’s orders. He may be a Dark wizard, but he knows better than to flaunt it. (Except in that one private conversation with Draco.)

Further, the only times we see Snape identify a spell or object as Dark is when he wants to indicate disapproval of Harry’s shenanigans—the Map, Sectumsempra. And, since he can’t really expect Harry to care about Snape’s disapproval, I think he’s identified Harry as someone who, like Lily, conflated Dark with Evil, so that calling something Dark would somewhat dissuade Harry from using it. (At least until Harry next lost his temper.)

This point is a bit subtle, so let me clarify: if Severus thinks Harry belongs to the middle group (as he seemed in the Mulciber conversation to assume Lily was), then calling the Map “Dark” is implicitly saying, “I think it’s bad and you should too.” Using the word “Dark” to someone in the mainstream is expressing a personal (or perhaps, a popular) opinion and inviting the listener to share it. And since when has Harry ever cared about Snape’s opinions?

But calling something “Dark” to someone in the third group is a judgment: if the object/spell IS Dark, a member of the last group has no choice but to consider it evil. The only way to argue that it isn’t evil is to establish that it isn’t really Dark. This of course is what Lupin implies when Severus shows him the Map. “Full of Dark Magic? Do you really think so, Severus? It looks to me as though it is merely a piece of parchment that insults anybody who reads it. Childish, but surely not dangerous?”

And indeed, with Sectumsempra, Harry never tried to defend the spell itself. (Which could be done—others have pointed out it might well be as useful for slicing and dicing Potions ingredients as enemies.) His continued favor for the Prince, his refusal to agree with Hermione that the Prince was dodgy, Harry excused on the grounds that the Prince had never told him to use such a Dark spell, after all, and maybe the Prince had just copied it out as something someone had used on him, and…well, and.

So adult Severus had learned to communicate with people in the third group, and it’s not by trying to enlighten them about what Dark magic really is and is not. Rather, one uses their prejudice to manipulate them.

*

One last thing. Suppose you’re a young Dark wizard, and you’ve been hearing some of your friends talk about a powerful Dark wizard whom their parents support. In fact, that wizard styles himself the Dark Lord, and your friends tell you he’s been pushing the bounds of magical knowledge, that he knows more about magic, especially the Dark Arts, than old Dumbledore himself. His particular interest is immortality and resurrection, and he’s said to have discovered things that even the Flamels haven’t managed in their six-hundred-odd years. His closest friends and followers, in fact, call themselves Death Eaters, in honor of the hope that their leader will one day find a way to become master of Death.

This Dark Lord also has a stated political agenda: to put an end to the Statute of Secrecy. Wizards, he says, should come out of hiding and rule over their Muggle inferiors.

He also preaches that Purebloods should rule, not just have social predominance, over other wizards and witches—but that wrinkle would be downplayed to a potential Half-blood recruit. Indeed, the mere fact that it’s the Purebloods from Death Eater families who befriend the grubby Half-blood Prince shows that the Dark Lord’s followers don’t really take that stuff as seriously as Purebloods elsewhere in the WW do. And besides, the Dark Lord also advocates better status for marginalized magical beings such as werewolves and giants—clearly, for him, it’s the magical/nonmagical distinction that counts most.

There’s an occasional nasty rumor about the Dark Lord and his followers—there have been some odd disappearances over the last few years. But your friends assure you that the rumors tying the disappearances to the Dark Lord are false; they just show his enemies’ jealousy and spite over the Dark Lord’s growing influence.

Well, all your friends but one. One of your friends keeps telling you that this Dark Lord person is CREEPY, Sev. Evil.

Until she stops talking to you altogether.

But then she thinks ALL Dark magic is evil; you finally figured out that part. So of course she’d think a ‘Dark Lord’ evil! Her blind prejudice leads you to disregard her strictures.

Voldemort, evil?

What does she know, anyhow?


Of course, as it chances, about that one thing Lily was absolutely right.

*