Magic Imitations

[rja.carnegie at excite.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 18948

I'd guess that the boggart derives its power, as well as its appearance, from its victim.  Effectively, you're involuntarily working a transformation spell to change it into what you fear most.  So it's limited by your own power - which, however, makes it powerful enough to defeat you, since it's almost certainly attacking where you're weak.  But I propose that Harry's boggart Voldemort wouldn't be a match in a duel for any adult wizard (although in practice it would become the adult wizard's Voldemort, which is more serious), and Neville's boggart Snape couldn't teach a class - all it can do is make Neville miserable.  The boggart Snape is only a thirteen-year-old boy's caricature of a teacher.

The boggart is a very powerful magical self-transformer, though, and its body parts (if any are left when it's not being something else) are probably potent - but it isn't listed in my copy of _Fantastic Beasts_, unless the Muggle edition has a Memory Charm halfway down page five.  Perhaps it does, for that reason...

Actually, I think JKR's "implementation" of the boggart is logically defective, and paradoxical.  But let's not get started - no, on secont thoughts, let's do - on how many laws of physics it breaks, of conservation and otherwise, starting, snug in its box or wardrobe, with the one about Schroedinger's cat, and ending with the actual size of the Moon, according to Sir Patrick Moore ( www.bbc.co.uk/skyatnight/ ), relative to a Hogwarts classroom.  The book might have ended right there...

Robert Carnegie

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Tim Kronsell <timkronsell2 at o...> wrote:
> This is not so, in my oppinion. The powers you are talking about are "natural" 
> powers to the creatures, while V uses a wand to draw on a hidden source, 
> internal/external as it might be, point is that it is not a power he was 
> "born" with.
> 
> Darreder
> 
> >The boggart Dementors effect Harry the same way real Dementors do when Lupin
> >is trying to teach him the Patronus charm in PoA. And in the Boggart in the
> >Wardrobe chapter, Seamus's boggart Banshee can scream like a real Banshee. I
> >don't see why it should be different for a boggart Voldemort.
> >
> >Toby