HBP The memory in the cave... is Snape's (or is it Tom Sr.'s?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 138049

merpsiren wrote:
<snip>
> As for why it is Snape's memory in the cave... (Allie asked why
would someone fill the basin with Snape's memory.) <snip>

Carol responds:

My apologies for the merciless snipping, but I imagine that anyone who
has been following this thread is familiar with the essential points
of your theory (and, if not, he or she can discover them by going up
thread). Also, I'm replying to the thread in general and not to any
specific person.

Much as I enjoy discussing Snape (and it's amazing how many subplots
and themes in the story relate to him), I don't think he is involved
in the locket horcrux sequence (except as the person who might have
saved Dumbledore had the cave visit not ironically coincided with
Draco's letting the Death Eaters into the school). That bad timing, in
my view, relates to the DADA curse, which I discussed at length in
message 13791 (which apparently no one read because it's too darn long):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/137961

At any rate, regarding the potion/poison in the cave:

I proposed some time back, and it seems that others agree, that the
container is a kind of ancient Pensieve and that the potion, which
resembles the thoughts in Dumbledore's Pensieve in its consistency and
an AK in its color, is a kind of poisoned memory that causes
simultaneous physical agony and mental anguish, to the point that the
person who is forced to drink it wants to die. I think most of us
agree on this interpretation, at least in a general way. 

The chief questions are whose memory it is (assuming that it's a real
memory) and what, if anything, Snape had to do with it.

To answer the second question first: Except for his being a young
Death Eater at roughly the same time as Regulus Black (R.A.B.?), I
don't see any canon-based connection between Snape and this Horcrux.
(There could well be a connection between Regulus's death and
Severus's "return to our side," which occurred at roughly the same
time, but post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy and much as I would
like to believe that Regulus's death drove Severus to repent joining
the DEs and revealing the prophecy, I don't see the canon for it yet.)
There is even less canonical evidence (I would say nothing beyond a
remark in an interview about married teachers, which could at best be
regarded as semicanonical) for Snape ever having married and having a
child, that they were both murdered, and that that memory somehow
ended up in the Horcrux Pensieve.

As for Snape's having something to do with creating the potion/poison,
as some posters (I can't remember who) have proposed, how could he
have done so? He was eleven years old when Voldemort returned and
started recruiting followers, and by that time, Voldemort had long
since created most if not all of his Horcruxes. The locket and cup
were the third and fourth that he acquired, back when he was not long
out of Hogwarts and Severus Snape had not even been born. Surely
Voldemort had created and hidden the locket Horcrux between that time
and his interview with Dumbledore for the DADA position, which
occurred when Severus was about three years old (and initiated the
DADA curse). I see no reason why he would have hidden the locket
Horcrux a second time or brewed a new thought/memory potion some
eighteen years later using Snape's memories. And I doubt very much
that Snape, protective as he is of his memories, would have brewed
such a potion himself, however unlikely it might be that anyone would
experience the memory and survive to reveal it.

I think that Voldemort brewed the memory potion (which I see as
magically self-renewing rather than disappearing after R.A.B. or his
house elf drank it and having to be rebrewed) soon after he made the
Horcrux (between about 1950 and 1963 by my very rough calculations)
and the memory is his own, except that IMO he is the person
administering the Crucio and obeying the tortured request to "KILL
ME!" We know that he killed his father and grandparents, three people
whom he hated, and that he especially hated his father. We know that
they died without a mark on them (typical for the AK) but that they
wore terrified expressions (GoF, "The Riddle House"). We know that
even as a boy, Tom Riddle liked to cause pain and punish people. It
seems to me almost a given that he would have tortured the Riddles
before he killed them. He would have especially enjoyed making his
father watch helplessly while he Crucio'd his grandparents. He would
also, no doubt, have revealed his identity, which they could not
question given his resemblance to his father, and perhaps confronted
his "filthy Muggle father" with the crime of deserting his pregnant
mother and abandoning him to live in a Muggle orphanage instead of a
mansion.

"Don't hurt them!" fits perfectly with this scenario. So does "I know
I did wrong!" I think Tom Crucio'd his grandparents, perhaps putting a
freezing spell on his father to make him watch helplessly, then
Crucio'd his father, who couldn't endure the pain and begged for
death. This memory did not need to be extracted from anyone's head. It
was his own, as witness and torturer. But anyone experiencing it from
drinking the poisoned memory would experience it from the perspective
of the tortured Muggle father. (Alternatively, as a Legilimens, he
might have been able even at sixteen to extract a memory from the head
of a dead Muggle, or even extract it before he cast the AK, but I see
these as less probable alternatives.)

I meant to propose this idea in a single paragraph as a simple,
canon-based alternative to what I see as a very speculative theory.
Instead I've turned it into another long Carol post. I'm sorry!

Carol, hoping that someone will slog through the DADA curse post (link
above) and respond to it. The key parts relate to Quirrell, Lupin, and
Snape, exactly the parts that didn't get answered.