Hands up, who’s been possessed? (long)

[dungrollin]

No: HPFGUIDX 116301


I've been trawling through the back-posts with that trusty 
companion, Yahoo!Mort, searching for `possessed' right back
to June 20th 2003. I know I should have done possess, possesses, 
possessing and possession too, (possibly along with posessed, 
possesed, posesed, and all the variants thereon), but relations 
between Yahoo!Mort and I are getting a little tense now, and we 
could do with a breather from each other.  So this is it.

(Warning – I've inadvertently polished off half a bottle of
red wine, so I may get a fit of the giggles and write something 
silly.) 

Here are some credits:
Annemehr (74992, 76353); Carol (98789, 115612); Annunathradien 
(107595); Erica (92983); LDP (82557); Bohcoo (82530).  And, not 
forgetting that just being a member of this site means I'm
naturally using others' ideas.  Thank you all very much.

Lets start with the animals.

According to Voldy, the night he attacked Harry he lost *his powers 
and his body*.  He continues: "... I was ripped from my body, I
was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost ... but still, I 
was alive. What I was, even I do not know... I was as powerless as 
the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself ... 
for I had no body, and every spell which might have helped me 
required the use of a wand ... Only one power remained to me.  I 
could possess the bodies of others ... I sometimes inhabited 
animals - snakes, of course, being my preference – but I was
little better off inside them than as pure spirit, for their bodies 
were ill-adapted to perform magic ... and my possession of them 
shortened their lives; none of them lasted long..."  (GoF, Ch 
33: `The Death Eaters')

So he lost all his powers except the ability to possess.  He was not 
dead, nor was he a ghost, and it was the fact that he didn't have
a body that meant he couldn't perform magic, and possessing
animals wasn't much use as they couldn't hold a wand (which he
didn't have anyway).  

Verdict?  Yup – I'd say that (despite the fact that we only
have Voldy's word for it) they were truly possessed.


Now on to Quirrell.

In PS, nobody actually uses the 
words `possessed', `possess', `possession' or
`possessing'. 
Voldy says `...I have form only when I can share another's
body...'  
DD later says `...perhaps looking for another body to
share...' 
Then later still `Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition, 
sharing his soul with Voldemort...'
However, in GoF Voldy says: `I took possession of his body, to 
supervise him closely as he carried out my orders.'

There are some conflicting messages here.  But I'd take DD's
word over Voldy's.  So they were *sharing* body *and* soul, then? 
Quirrell's awareness is apparently separate from Voldy's. 
They converse with each other out loud, Voldy audibly says `he
lies' when Harry fibbed about what he saw in the mirror, and 
Quirrell speaks to Voldy out loud too, though we don't hear what 
Voldy is saying.  Voldemort is definitely *inhabiting* Quirrell, and 
can punish him by causing him pain, but he never seems to act 
*through* him; rather, he just gives him orders. Doesn't sound 
entirely like possession to me.  

However, Quirrell does need to drink Unicorn blood.  The unicorn 
blood can't be to stop Voldy dying, though, since he managed for 
years in Albania without it.  At the end of PS, Voldy *does* 
say "... you saw faithful Quirrell drinking it *for me*..."
(my emphasis).  But it's possible that Voldy meant he'd
ordered Quirrell to do it.

It's more likely that Quirrell drank it to ameliorate the effects
of carrying Voldy around – so the arrangement may well have been
just as fatal to Quirrell as it was to the Albanian wildlife.  But, 
hang on...  Voldy moves into his body after the failed attack on 
Gringott's, July 31st, and the detention with Hagrid takes place
on 26th May (according to the Lexicon).  Hagrid says "... it's
the second time in a week.  I found one dead last Wednesday."
– Which would have been May 20th. From Hagrid's tone
throughout the 
detention, it seems to me that the attacks on the unicorns are a 
recent phenomenon.  So Quirrell's lasted a good while carrying
Voldy around without snuffing it.

It appears (to me) that there was a sharing agreement (sounds like a 
holiday-home in the Algarve) but Voldy would occasionally possess 
Quirrell to punish him.  If he were possessed the whole time, he 
would not "...find it hard to follow my master's
instructions..." 

The problem is that we don't know how quickly full-time
possession kills, we don't know if a short-term possession can be 
recovered from, or whether the effects are cumulative, and we
don't know if witches and wizards can last longer while being 
possessed than can rodents and reptiles.

Verdict?  Sometimes, possibly; but not most of the time.


Lets move on to Ginny.

In CoS, again, nobody actually uses the 
words `possessed', `possess', `possession' or
`possessing'. 
Riddle says `...I've always been able to charm the people I 
needed...' 
Then later: `So I made Ginny write her own farewell on the wall
and come down here to wait.  She struggled and cried and became 
*very* boring.  But there isn't much life left in her: she put
too much into the diary, into me...'
After the fun, DD says `...how Lord Voldemort managed to enchant 
Ginny...' 
And later `Older and wiser wizards than she have been hoodwinked
by Lord Voldemort.'

The biggest problem with Ginny's (so-called) possessions, is that 
she doesn't remember anything about them.  Which has led many to 
believe that either the possession was of a different nature to 
those effected by present-day Voldy, or that she wasn't truly 
possessed.  

However, lets just look at what Diary!Tom says in the chamber –
when he quotes what Ginny ended up writing "...There was another
attack today and I don't know where I was.  Tom, what am I going
to do? I think I'm going mad ... I think I'm the one attacking
everyone, Tom!"

It's fairly certain that if Ginny had known from the beginning
what she was doing, she'd have stopped trusting the diary 
immediately.
 
Diary!Tom also says "Of course, she didn't *know* what she
was doing at first."  Well, if you were Diary!Tom and you'd
spent a while charming the girl, being sympathetic and kind, getting 
to know her.  Realising what kind of Gryffindor she was, would you 
then let her keep the memory of what she was doing if you had an 
alternative?
No. I wouldn't either.

Verdict?  Possibly possessed for short periods of time with memory-
modification afterwards. Or, possessed in a different way to the way 
the present-day Voldy does it.  Or, not possessed at all –
something different.


Now lets get on to Harry.

The one clear instance we have of possession is in the MoM.  It's 
unbearably painful for Harry – so much so that he wishes he could 
die.  He's "...wrapped in the coils of a creature with red
eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended 
and the creature's began: they were fused together, bound by
pain, and there was no escape –
And when the creature spoke, it used Harry's mouth...
Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release..."
And so on and so forth.

Harry was clearly possessed.

But what about the other incidents?  What about the night of Mr. 
Weasley's attack?  What about the vision of Rookwood?  What about 
the eye-contact with DD...?

"At once, Harry's scar burned white-hot, as though the old
wound had burst open again – and unbidden, unwanted, but
terrifyingly strong, there rose within Harry a hatred so powerful he 
felt, for that instant, he would like nothing better than to strike
–
 to bite – to sink his fangs into the man before him –"

Is this also possession?  There's the pain, true enough, but
it's centred in the scar, not all-encompassing.  It's not
really very similar to the true possession in the MoM.  This is just 
after the attack on Mr. Weasley, and Voldy has (apparently) just 
figured out the connection.  DD says later "I thought I saw a
shadow 
of him stir behind your eyes..." 
(Now, I know DD's a clever chap, and all, but how exactly does
one 
see a shadow of LV stirring behind someone's eyes?  Couldn't
be 
something to do with the red/green eye thing, could it?)

I suspect that this instance is Voldy seeing Harry's point of
view, in the same way that Harry saw Voldy's before.  But because
of the scar, Harry can also feel Voldy's emotions  - the hatred
that
is a result of Voldy seeing DD through Harry's eyes.  Which makes
me 
wonder... Voldy doesn't have a scar – so is he able to feel
Harry's emotions?  Or is the link equal in both directions?

If it is equal in both directions, then... Well, Voldy seeing 
through Harry's eyes should happen when *Voldy's* `mind
is most relaxed and vulnerable ... asleep, for instance...' I
can't imagine that it's because his mind just happens to be
relaxed 
and vulnerable – Voldy's an accomplished Legilimens, I'd
imagine he's a damned fine Occlumens too.  Which would mean that
in order to take advantage of the mind-link, in order to gather 
information from seeing through Harry's eyes, he'd have to
chill out.  And I can't imagine him being very good at that, to be
honest. Could it be that in this instance Voldy needs recuperation 
time after the possession of Nagini at the MoM?  

The visions that Harry sees through the mind-link with Voldy are 
not, IMO possession.  They are something entirely different.  They 
are the only events in the books, that we have seen, that break the 
rule that `time and space matter in magic.'


Just briefly back to Ginny and Diary!Tom, before I go back to the 
rest of that red wine...

If Diary!Tom can create himself a body by stealing Ginny's soul,
why can't Vapo!Mort?  There must be something fundamentally 
different about the two.  Diary!Tom can do a whole load of things 
that Vapo!Mort can't.  Particularly if he *was* possessing Ginny, 
and wiped her mind afterwards.  JKR refused to say what would have 
happened if Ginny had died, except that it would have strengthened 
the present-day Voldemort considerably.  

So what exactly *was* Vapo!Mort?  Even Himself admits that he 
doesn't know.  Less than the meanest ghost, but not as powerful
as memories...  I'm beginning to think that this is a very
important question.  Any theories lurking out there?


(Sighs)...  This has taken me much longer than I expected. (Though, 
admittedly, much of that was spent trying to decide whether to use a 
question mark or exclamation mark in the subject heading).

Hope it's provoked some ideas, though.  

I remain, as ever,
Dungrollin.

BTW, a quote for the FEATHERBOAS:

"We're more of the love, blood and rhetoric school ... Well,
we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you 
blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three, 
concurrent or consecutive; but we can't do you love and rhetoric 
without the blood.  Blood is compulsory."

- Stoppard.