Ignorance (Deus Ex Machina)

[Blaise]

No: HPFGUIDX 27753

<j.balfour at l...> wrote:
> 
> Forgive me, but I have seen this phrase a couple of times and don't 
know what it means - Deus Ex Machina - can anyone enlighten me, 
please?

Deus ex machina: literally 'the god from the machine'.  The term 
comes from ancient Greek tragedy.  At the end of a play, often a 
character playing one of the gods would come down in the 'machine,' a 
crane-like machine which made it look as if the god were descending 
from Olympus.  Normally the god would deliver some kind of moral 
about the events of the play.  

Nowadays the phrase means a miraculous solution to a problem within a 
story, for example when some hitherto unknown creature/person comes 
in and saves the hero from disaster at the eleventh hour.  It also 
can be used more loosely to mean an unbelievable plot device. (Eline 
wrote a wonderful fanfic called 'Deus Ex Machina' which can be found 
at http://www.fanfiction.net when it comes back online.  This 
explains the concept far better than I ever will.)

Examples of deus ex machina events from HP: You could say that Fawkes 
arriving to rescue Harry in the Chamber of Secrets was a mildly deus-
ex-machina event, in that we had no real warning that something like 
that was possible and he solves all Harry's problems rather quickly.  
I expect there are others, but I've run out of inspiration.

I hope that explains it fairly well.  

Blaise