Lily's sacrifice may not be what we think it is... (very long)

[arielock2001]

No: HPFGUIDX 95652

Arianna here with another post that belongs in The Quibbler,

	As usual, everyone has excellent theories on what happened 
the night Harry's parents died and Voldemort's curse rebounded.  
We all keep coming back to the same problem: why didn't 
James' sacrifice protect Lily and Harry?  Was Lily the only person 
in the history of the wizarding world to die protecting her child?  
No one seems to believe that Lily was the first person who 
would step in front of her child to save his life.  Any sane parent 
would do the same.  Really, this is the reason that on planes, 
parents are told to put their air masks on themselves before 
putting them on their children: a parent's instinct is to protect her 
child first.  
	
	 So far the consensus seems to be that Lily insisted on 
Voldemort murdering her so that her death would create some 
sort of protective charm on Harry.  Some posters suspect that 
Dumbledore had suggested this to her.

	Here's the problem: this theory requires Lily (and Dumbledore 
and perhaps James) actually risking Harry's life.   

	You see, for this theory to work, we must accept that Lily (and 
Dumbledore) was OK with the idea that helpless Baby Harry 
would actually be cursed with an AK (the magical equivalent of 
being shot with a gun, point blank in the face) by the most 
powerful dark wizard in a century, in the hope that 
their complicated (and unprecedented) experiment would work.  
We have cannon evidence as far back as the first book that no 
one has been known to survive an AK.   Lily knew that 
Voldemort had come into the room with the intent to murder her 
child, and that there was no known way to deflect an AK.  There 
was no guarantee that her death would protect Harry.   Is it really 
possible that Lily would be so arrogant and reckless as to ever 
allow Harry to be put in this position?  The theory also doesn't 
address why the spell *rebounded*, instead of just failing.  

	Here's my theory: Lily didn't cast a charm on Harry.  She cast a 
charm on HERSELF.  We don't know what Lily was working on in 
the Ministry of Magic . We also don't know what was in the locked 
room in the DoM, but I think it was Karma.  Is it possible that Lily 
was working on research there?
We do have cannon evidence in QtTA that new spells and 
charms can be discovered (p20).   
Lily may have cast some new charm that she 
created from a theoretical perspective that causes spells and 
hexes to rebound.   She might have even taken part in 
experiments in the DoM involving simple hexes and even 
imperios (I still say Voldemort's "stand aside" was not a request 
but an imperio that she was able to resist).  Experimenting with a 
death curse would never have been tested as it would be 
unethical.   
	
	That night, in that moment of horror, ostensibly wandless, 
knowing that her husband had just been murdered, after 
begging Voldemort to have mercy on her child,  she panickingly 
cast this experimental and risky charm on herself, probably while 
touching Harry.   Her plan was that the AK would rebound off of 
her and kill Voldemort.  Instead, as she cast the spell without a 
wand, something went wrong and the charm didn't work as she 
intended.  The AK killed her, leaving Voldemort still alive.  But, as 
her only goal at the moment she cast the charm was to protect 
her child, her unfocused, wandlessly cast charm was bestowed 
on Harry, causing the spell to rebound off of him.

	Yes, without a doubt, Lily would choose to die to save Harry's 
life.   She even may have been aware of the possibility that *both* 
she and Voldemort would die if he cast the AK on her.  That 
would have still been one heck of a sacrifice.  She still would 
have died to save her child.   
 
	I can't help but wonder, as Lily was very powerful, if she had had 
her wand that evening, might Lily Potter have been known as The 
Woman Who Lived?

     	So, what do you all think?


Arianna (who really hopes the locked room in the MoM contains 
Karma).