Avada Kedavra and the Swishing Sound

[frantyck]

No: HPFGUIDX 31121

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Cindy wrote:
> In GoF, we see Avada Kedavra used four times.  
[snip 1]
> 2.  When Moody kills the spider, "there was a flash of blinding 
green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible 
something was soaring through the air . . . "
[snip the other 2 cases]


This really grabbed me on the latest reading of GoF. Often with 
magical spells and all that, I get the feeling that in addition to 
wand core material and innate magical ability, something 'outside' 
the witch or wizard is being harnessed to help perform a difficult 
spell.

In this sense, this swishing could, as Hollydaze perceptively noted, 
be a soul or some such thing leaving the body; it might have a really 
very clever physical explanation like air being ionised momentarily 
by some powerful energy as happens during a lightning flash (pause to 
pat myself on back: pat, pat), if that's accurate and not too 
extreme; it might be something being called upon; it might, although 
this is pretty unlikely, be something like an individual form like a 
daimon which represents the soul or whatever Rowling believes in, 
leaving the body.

Before you howl with mirth, consider that in an interview (my advisor 
would tsk-tsk briskly over the missing citation here), Rowling noted 
that an Animagus (fem. Animaga?) cannot *choose* the animal whose 
form he will take. Against which, I suppose, is the fact that of 
MWPP, Padfoot and Prongs became large animals so that they might 
restrain Moony in his extremities... was that choice?

(Now feel free to howl with mirth.)

Apropos of which, why isn't Rita Skeeter a mosquito or a spider? She 
seems closer to both than to the much-maligned fly!

Whatever the 'truth' may be, Rowling's image of the Killing Curse is 
appropriately magnificent and dreadful, as it ought to be. The wizard 
who performs the curse is teetering at some boundary, and it is more 
than human law and social norms whose limits he tests.

It sounds as if, in dabbling with Dark magic, wizards and witches are 
offering up something in exchange. Think of Voldemort's efforts to 
achieve immortality: "the steps I had taken" or some such suggestive 
phrasing. Bargain with the Devil, Faust and all that highly familiar 
and resonant material comes to mind. And must therefore have come to 
Rowling's mind as well.