photo vs. painting in magical world/DD's legilimency & 1st OoP/worse than death

[wry1352000]

No: HPFGUIDX 80446

Hello!

There are some questions that I've been pondering since reading book 
5, and I'd be very interested to know what other people think of it.

I wonder why there should be such a difference between the arts of 
photography and painting in the magical world.  Both people in 
photographs and people in pictures move and get in and out of their 
frames, but people in paintings can also talk and seem to be aware of 
what goes on, while people in photographs don't talk and don't seem 
to be aware of later events (the Potters on the picture Alastor Moody 
showed Harry didn't mind sitting on both sides of Pettigrew).  In a 
way, the paintings' sitters are still alive (like ghosts) and can 
participate in life around them, while photographs' sitters are more 
like images frozen in time.  It seems important to me, for otherwise 
Harry could have communicated with Sirius as well as his parents.

Another idea that struck me sometime after I read OoP was how 
Dumbledore, if he possessed the skill of Legilimency could not know 
who was the traitor in the first Order of the Phoenix.  It appears 
that Snape needed to be skilled in Occlumency to be able to spy on 
Death Eaters, but Pettigrew didn't in order to spy on the first Order 
of the Phoenix.  In fact, in PoA, Professor McGonagall says in the 
Three Broomsticks that before the Potters went into hiding, DD "was 
sure that somebody close to the Potters had been keeping You-Know-Who 
informed of their movements.  Indeed, he had suspected for some time 
that someone on our side had turned traitor and was passing a lot of 
information to You-Know-Who" (PoA, ch. 10, p. 205).  And Sirius tells 
Pettigrew when he confronts him in the Shrieking Shack, "You had been 
passing information to him for a year before Lily and James died" 
(PoA, ch. 19, p. 374), which Pettigrew doesn't deny.  So DD is well 
aware that "somebody close to the Potters" is "passing a lot of 
information to You-Know-Who," but he can't decide who among the three 
people is actually doing it.  This seems rather strange, doesn't it? 

Another matter I have been thinking about can only be speculated on 
at this point, but still I've been wondering what exactly did DD mean 
when Voldemort noticed, surprized, that he didn't try to kill him 
during their duel at the end of OoP, and DD replied that there are 
other ways of destroying a man, that indeed merely taking V's life 
wouldn't satisfy him, and that V's failure to understand that there 
are things much worse than death had always been his greatest 
weakness (OoP, ch. 36, p. 814).  I wonder, could he probably mean 
losing one's soul, as during dementors' attack?  It seems to run 
counter DD's oft-expressed views against the use of dementors, but 
maybe he considered it acceptable in such exceptional case as this, 
or maybe there are some other ways of making a person lose his/her 
soul, or maybe he meant that V was in danger of losing his without 
extra help, the way he was going.  I began thinking of this because 
firstly, V has already almost lost his soul in the conventional 
meaning of the expression (he doesn't/can't feel attachment and has 
traded (even his outward) humanity for more power) and DD tells Harry 
that his humanity is the power he has which V hasn't (and thus not 
realizing the importance of it might be V's greatest weakness).  And 
secondly, we have seen that when V's body was destroyed by a 
backfired curse, his soul survived and eventually he fashioned 
himself another body, so just "separating his body and soul" might 
not be enough.  But if his soul was sucked in by a dememtor or 
destroyed in some other way, that would be final, whether the body 
was still sound or not.

What do you think?

Zinaida.