[HPforGrownups] Basilisk (was: obstruction of justice)

[Barb P]

No: HPFGUIDX 44899


jastrangfeld wrote: I suppose I should say that I do not believe that there can be only one basilisk at a time, although perhaps this is a possibility.  I stated in another post (I'm sorry my posts come back so slow, I've 
been lurking here for quite some time so now everything goes very slowly to post as I finally decided to post :o) ) that I believe that Nagini could also be a basilisk.  I also believe that the basilisk do not kill unless they want to.  Otherwise, why would Tom have to tell the basilisk to kill Harry in the chamber?   
 
Because there are two ways a basilisk kills: by someone looking in its eyes (a rather passive method) and by biting someone with those venomous fangs (the active method).  It's probably accustomed to killing passively, not having to do much of anything.  It's not used to acting.  The creature isn't depicted as being very bright by JKR; when Harry was very studiously concentrating on not looking at the basilisk, Riddle realized that the creature was going to have to kill Harry by biting him, and told it to do just that.  It didn't realize, it seems, that Harry wasn't looking at it, so he wasn't going to die that way.  One does wonder why Harry didn't try to give it a counter-order, as he is also a Parselmouth and the snake conjured by Malfoy immediately obeyed him when he started giving it orders.
 
 As for the other issues you raised, I don't believe Nagini is a basilisk as Frank Bryce would have died from looking at Nagini in the face, and he does not.  Wormtail would also have been in danger of death this way.  No, a basilisk does not need to be told to kill when it's the passive kind of killing.  It just happens.  Look at the way Moaning Myrtle describes her death.   
 
There can, of course, be any number of basilisks in the world at any given time, but because of the difficulty of getting the creature to Little Hangleton and removing the evidence of its existence afterward, it seems highly unlikely that Riddle killed his father and grandparents this way.  Moreover, the pointed descriptions of his family members in death, shocked and unmarked and perfectly healthy, is echoed very clearly in the descriptions both of the spider killed by Crouch/Moody in DADA class and of the dead Cedric in the graveyard.  JKR builds up to Cedric's death very effectively; first we hear of humans who have died this way, although we don't know it yet, then we get to see the curse being cast, although on a spider, and finally, Harry is (and we are) confronted with the casual, quick murder of Cedric.The very ease with which it seems to be done is part of the horror.  
 
Although it is, in theory, possible to create a basilisk if you just have the patience to go through the steps, I doubt that Riddle created another one, in addition to the one that had been living in the chamber for a thousand years.  It was hard enough for Hagrid to find a private place to breed giant spiders; for Riddle to have nurtured a basilisk and then taken it to Little Hangleton to kill his parents was supremely unnecessary.  
 
--Barb
 


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