Nicholas Flamel + Sirius/Snape

[anna_l_milton at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 22198

Hi all, I'm a newbie here, this is my first post so please don't be 
too harsh on me... I hate to say this, but I believe you've all 
forgotten something rather crucial about Nicholas Flamel. Namely, 
that he existed. In real life, I mean. I happen to know a lot about 
this because I spent the golden years of my youth reading ancient 
books about esoteric themes on Saturday mornings at the public 
library (yes, I know reading "De Occulta Res" at 13 isn't exactly 
normal, but hey...). As you all know, alchemy's main goal was the 
discovery of the Philosopher's Stone. In the bibliography written by 
Fulcanelli and his adepts (adept means student in alchemy parlance 
and Fulcanelli was one of alchemy's head honchos), there is a mention 
of Nicholas Flamel, who supposedly was the only person to have gone 
through the twelve steps of trasmutation and managed to create a 
Philosopher's Stone. He then supposedly wrote a book detailing his 
process, but unfortunately that "book" belongs to the realm of hoax 
literature. It simply never was written, just like the famous Book of 
Toth, the Delomelanicon and the Necronomicon (half the books in 
Fulcanelli's bibliography were never written anyway).

But the thing is that the real-life Nicholas Flamel remains the only 
person credited with having discovered the Philosopher's Stone, so I 
guess we're all reading too much into this and JKR just thought it 
would be a nice connoisseur adult touch, just like all the mythologic 
references...

As for the Snape/Sirius affair, I'd just like to add my 2 knuts 
without being pillored, so here goes: what Sirius did when they were 
children were young, what Snape did at the end of PoA was wrong. 
Period. Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do bring the score 
back to zero. What gets on my nerves a little (and I know I'll be 
pelted with rotten tomatoes for this) is that lots of people are 
willing to let Sirius get away with everything but just can't keep 
chastising Snape for his failings. Doesn't that just prove Snape's 
point that some people are simply held in adoration no matter how 
many rules they break or what they do to others, while some people 
consistently get the shorter end of the stick called life? By all 
means, I don't have the hots for Snape, but he's my favourite adult 
character precisely because of the struggle between his sense of duty 
and his baser impulses. I think that is one of the things that 
elevate the books from simple fun and games to meditations on 
morality (even though I don't always agree with the gung-ho heroic 
ethos of the books), because that is the basis of all literature 
worthy of the name: change and ambiguity.

So no, Snape isn't pleasant or nice, but I must say that in ours, the 
most sentimental epoch in history, I always feel inclined to those 
who are not afraid of sharpness -- people like Camille Paglia, for 
instance. I think Snape brings a lot of complexity to the books and 
he is probably the most tri-dimensional character in the series -- 
and amidst all that heroism and moral certainty, he is the only one 
to bring a little Raymond Chandler, a little Rick Deckard into the 
game. The moral bastard, as I like to term it, is a perenial 
character both in life and in literature, and signposts the 
difference between the nice and the good, as Iris Murdoch would have 
put it (see for instance Quirrell vs. Snape). A perfect example of 
this would be the novel "Smilla's Feeling For Snow", by Peter Hoeg. 
Smilla is the female Snape: she's rude, unpleasant, insensitive and 
nasty, and yet she is so committed to her sense of morality that she 
doggedly pursues the murderer(s) of her young neighbour, using 
whatever means to achieve the ends. And you cannot refrain from 
liking her, like I'm sure lots more people would like Snape if we had 
the 1st person account instead of just the biased version.

There, I've made my point and you can begin pelting me with rotten 
tomatoes...

Sorry for the long post!

Slytherinly yours,

Diana (A. L. Milton)