prophecy/Firenze

[Rachna]

No: HPFGUIDX 79126

I was just reading OP again and something caught my attention. 

(Harry, on Firenze's Divination Lesson, Ch 27, The Centaur and the 
Sneak, p.532 Canadian edition)
"It was the most unusual lesson Harry had ever attended.  They did 
indeed burn sage and mallowsweet there on the classroom floor, and 
Firenze told them to look for certain shapes and symbols in the 
pungent fumes, but he seemed perfectly unconcerned that not one of 
them could see any of the signs he described, telling them that 
humans were hardly ever good at this, that it took centaurs years 
and years to become competent, and finished by telling them that it 
was foolish to put too much faith in such things anyway because even 
centaurs sometimes read them wrongly.  He was nothing like any human 
teacher Harry had ever had.  His priority did not seem to be to 
teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that 
nothing, not even centaurs' knowledge, was foolproof."

The thing that really got me thinking was that a centaur (supposedly 
one of the wisest beings) tried to teach Harry that "nothing was 
foolproof" and that it was "foolish to put too much faith in 
[divination/fortune telling/etc]" in the same book that Harry finds 
out about the prophecy.

If the prophecy was first in the book and then I read Firenze's 
warning, I would have questioned it.  Since, she has written it so 
that it ends with the prophecy, you don't really question it.

Anyway, the point of my long-winded ramble was that maybe the 
prophecy turns out to not be true and Rowling is just stringing us 
along.

Rachna (who still doesn't completely believe her theory)