Trelawney was wrong,

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 121748


Carol earlier:
> > So Trelawney, as usual, is not so much wrong as misreading the
> > information available to her, just as she misreads the dog in the
> > crystal ball as a Grim.
> 
> Potioncat:
> To keep us all balanced here I have some observations and questions.
> 
> The Lexicon describes Snape as tall.  But I don't see their source.  
> Does anyone know of any canon for Snape's height? (Oop does have him 
> as "rather shorter" than Sirius.) But I don't recall Harry as ever 
> thinking of Snape as short so he must be at least of average height.
> (Although I'm reminded of Dustin Hoffman, as Hook saying, "To a ten- 
> year-old I'm huge.")
> 
> Trelawney was using Harry's physical description and personal past 
> to determine his sign.  Well, if a short dark person is really 
> associated with Capricorn, Trelawney was correct....and obviously 
> Harry was defiant enough to be born on the wrong date! (I don't 
> know, is it correct?)
> 
> All kidding aside, not all the short dark wizards can be 
> Capricorns.  And the only way Trelawney could be correctly reading 
> Snape's sign at that moment was if something of Snape was in Harry.  
> Which is the logic for it being Tom Riddle's sign she was 
> predicting. 
> 
> So I don't think it was Snape she was talking about. Unless of 
> course, it's a bit of Snape that was transferred to Harry and that 
> would open a whole new set of good/Snape  bad/Snape posts....
> Potioncat

Carol responds:
Potioncat, you're taking this too seriously! I don't mean that
Trelawney was describing Snape specifically. I think she was
describing the traits (ostensibly) belonging to a person born under
Saturn, a Capricorn if you will, and thinking that they applied to
Harry. Snape wasn't there. She wasn't talking about him. *I'm* talking
about him, and so was the other person (sorry, cant remember who) who
brought up Trelawney's description of Harry and applied it to Snape.

There's nothing to indicate that she's sensing an "aura" in Harry, as
someone else suggested, only that she assumes from what she knows
about him or sees in him that he was born under Saturn. But the traits
she sees in him are similar to those we see in Snape (if we stretch
the definitions of "mean stature" and "tragic early life a bit," as
I've already indicated).
 
Obviously, all short, dark wizards can't be born in Capricorn or vice
versa, and Snape isn't actually short, just shorter than Sirius, as
you've said. It's just that Trelawney's association of those traits
with a midwinter birth turns out to be (sort of) true for at least one
person, but that person turns out to be Snape, not Harry. (If she were
looking at Snape and knew of his rather miserable childhood, she might
well have arrived at the same conclusion, and she would have been
correct. Now we just have to ask whether she could have deduced that
the Weasley twins were born in Aries. ;-) )

So I was half-jokingly stating that Trelawney was correct in her
information but wrong in her interpretation, just as she was with the
black dog in the crystal ball, which she really saw but misinterpreted
as a Grim. As I said before, when I read her description (it's not a
prediction or a prophecy) of a person born under Saturn, I immediately
thought of Snape. And voile! It turns out that birth date fits. So
even though *she* wasn't referring to Snape, some *readers* were able
to apply her information to him and correctly guess that he was born
in midwinter. Just possibly JKR had Sevvie in mind when she wrote that
description of a person born under Saturn. At any rate, I think she
chose his birthday carefully. Saturnine disposition, anybody?

Carol, who never intended this as a serious argument and does not
believe in astrology but does think that poor Sibyl has powers she's
not credited with if she only knew how to direct and interpret them