Unforgivable Curses and Underage Wizardry

[Dysis]

No: HPFGUIDX 127388



As I was studying the excerpt in Book 5 where Harry breaks into 
Snape's thoughts, I noticed something odd. "<i>A greasy haired 
teenager sat alone in a dark bedroom, pointing his wand at the 
ceiling, shooting down flies...</i>" [US Verion, Book 5, pg. 592] 
This memory of Snape's is strikingly similar to another event in 
Book 4, when Crouch!Moody is teaching the class how to use 
Unforgivable Curses. He uses spiders to demonstrate the curses, and 
kills one with the Killing Curse [US Version, Book 4, Ch. 14].

Of course, we don't know if teenage Snape is using the Killing curse 
(or if it's even Snape, for that matter...). But we haven't been 
introduced to many other spells that can create those same effects. 
The Binding spell, which Hermione used on Neville in Book 1, is a 
possibility. However, I get the feeling that JKR deliberately 
included insects in both stories to catch our attention. Assuming 
that it <i>is</i> Snape, and that he is using the Killing Curse as a 
teenager, we have to wonder (1) where he learned it, (2) how 
powerful he must have been, and (3) why was a teenage kid using an 
Unforgivable Curse when he knew full well that the Ministry had and 
Underage Wizarding Policy.

For the first two, I think we can reasonably conclude that Snape was 
and still is good at the Dark Arts. After all, he was completely 
immersed in his DADA OWL as we see in "Snape's Worst Memory." And 
also, hasn't he been applying for the DADA teacher position ever 
since we've known him? Where he learned it, well that's still a 
mystery, unless someone out there has a good theory. But it wouldn't 
have been too hard. We've seen repeatedly in the books that Snape's 
a powerful wizard. However, I'm most interested in how the Ministry 
didn't send him a letter for Underage Wizardry.

The Ministry uses special magic to detect when an underage wizard 
has done magic. Yet, we see a teenager doing magic in his own 
bedroom without any qualms. Does he know some sort of spell that 
shields him from the special magic that the Ministry uses to detect 
underage magic? But what bothers me even more is that the Ministry 
doesn't have a special detector of the Unforgivable Curses <I>in 
general</I>, and not just by underage wizards. Why can the Ministry 
detect Underage Wizardry, which isn't more than a felony, when it 
can't detect Unforgivable Curses? Magic is magic, isn't it? The only 
possible explanation I could think of for this is that Malfoy Sr. 
had so much power in the Ministry that he successfully deterred any 
attempts to create such a detector. Any ideas?

dysisgirl