Snape as the dark young man/Extra Material On Trelawney's Card Reading

[AyanEva]

No: HPFGUIDX 141938

I apologize ahead of time for any accidental abbreviations or mispellings.


Allie said in post 141934: 
> Was I the only one who took this scene at face value? I thought 
> it was JKR being funny.

Me answering:

I was so sure of that at first. I didn't think anything of the cards
that she was drawing. Then the other night, I was searching chapters
for things to add to future chapter discussions and those 4 cards just
struck me as being significant. But the "doesn't like the questioner"
 card just didn't seem to apply to Harry if Harry himself was the
questioner; that card at least has to be referring to someone other
than Harry. Unless Harry's got a weird self-loathing thing going on.
But I would expect that in OOTP, not HBP and the self-loathing theme
is contradicted anyway by Harry's somewhat headstrong character,
particularly evident, IMO in HBP. I see no hint of Harry disliking
himself to any sort of detriment in HBP.

Sydney responded to (Allie's) post 141934 in post 141935:
> I'd never noticed any Tarot imagery in
> HP before (I'm such a dork "The Hanged Man" never registered!). 
> Has anyone gone through the whole series Tarot-Wise?

Me again: 
Wait, where was The Hanged Man??? Oh, now you're tempting me into
doing just that; going through all 6 books with a tarot deck.  

Now back to the Spades discussion...

Ceridwen wrote in post 141893:
> There is a how-to for regular playing cards at 
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/terrir/divination_index.html  And, there is 
> a four-card reading, though it only uses 32 cards, sevens and above, 
> which doesn't help for Trelawney's reading.  However, since I was 
> curious, I snagged the meanings for the four cards we hear her 
> discussing:
> 
> 2 Spades:  Torn between two choices, stalemate 
> 7 Spades:  Stealth in dealings.Betrayal by someone you trust. Minor 
> theft.   (Romany: Seven of Spades - your tears )
> 10 Spades:  Weakened health, chronic illness (real and imagined)
> Knave Spades:  Immature, cold, bossy, delinquent or gang leader
> 
> Spades are for:
> "Wisdom of old age, obstacles in life, warnings Winter Air and Earth 
> Black hair and eyes, introverted, cold, unemotional approach to life 
> Swords"
> Wisdom sounds like Dumbledore, but the physical description sounds 
> like Snape.  Harry would be hearts, as he has dark hair and blue, 
> green or hazel eyes.
> 

Me now:

That's really interesting because while the cards in the reading sound
like both Draco (as CH3ed said in post 141929) and Snape, the
description for Spades is definitely not Draco. The suit of Spades,
IMO, definitely implies Snape. Since Draco matches the specific cards,
but not the suit as a whole, I'm still going to go with Snape as the
subject of the cards. Snape's 2 for 2 with this one.

However, I wanted to see if I could "prove" this, in a manner of
speaking, so I looked up the qualities of Spades that you listed by
referencing Snape's astrological sign. I found, at
http://fortunesnow.com/library/zodiac.asp:
 
"CAPRICORN – the Goat 
 
(December 22 – January 19)
 
Tenth sign of the zodiac; represents achievement, realism,
organization. Needs to learn to understand the feelings and needs of
others.
 
Planet: Saturn
Element: Earth
Season: early winter
Quality: cardinal
Energy: Yin
Tarot Card: The Devil
Gemstone: amethyst, garnet
Colour: black, gray
 
This list seems to mostly agree with other lists that I checked for
verification.

I'm not sure what "warnings winter air and earth" means exactly (from
your post), but if it's part of the description, the Earth and Winter
descriptions for Snape's sign (Capricorn) above match Spades. You can
explain away Wisdom as being associated with Dumbledore if you think
about how someone says, "S/he acts older than her/his age" or s/he is
old for his/her age." I do think that would apply to Snape, tantrums
aside, because of everything that he's been through. He's far
wiser/craftier than your average 36 year old; if he wasn't he wouldn't
still be alive. The tantrum issue has been explained in various
manners, so in my mind that becomes a non-issue. 

His particular tarot card, according to the list above, in my book
says this (about The Devil):
 
"On a divinatory level, the card of Pan, the Devil, implies the
necessity of a confrontation with all that is shadowy, shameful and
base in the personality. The Fool must free himself by gaining
knowledge and honest, humble acceptance of Pan, for then he can
release the creative power which is held in chains by his own panic
and self-disgust. Thus he comes to the heart of the labyrinth and
faces his own darnkess in the essential darkness of his body, in order
to become what he always was- merely natural(65)." 

I love that last line! Oh, the possibilities!

Both Capricorn and Yin are feminine: "yin is the passive, negative
force, and yang the active, positive force"
(http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=mh90iu0xub84
?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=Yin+and+yang&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&sbid=
lc01b&linktext=yin%20and%20yang) Sorry for the super long link. *shrugs*

The quality description for Capricorn is the same as yin, with the
addition of introversion. I'm not sure about the passive bit, but I'm
going to go out on a completely unsubstantiated and "bit of a stretch"
limb here and say that I think Snape would normally be fairly passive,
if he were in a different situation. Look at the memory from the
pensieve in OOTP. If we assume that the boy crying in the corner was
Snape, that's passive. Ok, yeah, so he *was* a kid, but...still. If
you add in the "worst memory" scene with James/Sirius/Remus/Lilly,
Snape, I'd argue that, at that time, was relatively passive until
provoked. He just wandered over to a tree and was minding his own
business. So, that's closer to his natural character: to leave people
alone and be left alone. Something wonky happened along the way... or
a lot of "somethings" wonky. 

BUT, I'm going to contradict myself completely now. There's the
problem of Saturn, a masculine energy apparently.
http://www.vedic-astrology-prediction.com/saturn.html 
I'm not sure how to reconcile that with yin, but oh well. Saturn is
more provable with canon and matches Snape's personality quite well,
so I'll champion that and leave Yin to the side for now, which is
proved only by massive conjecture. Although, I'd like the Yin bit to
be true, I can't say for certain that it is.

As a side note: The Cardinal quality is one of four in this category.
It signifies "dynamic change, movement and great vitality."
http://www.astrology.com.au/12signs/index.asp 

I'll save you an analysis of all of the crap that I found on
astrological stones (the amethyst and the garnet). Google turns up a
bunch of stuff.

And now for something completely different...

colebiancardi writes in post 141894:
>As I already know the events that will come, I am now thinking that
>the the dark young man who dislikes the questioner is actually
>forshadowing the events that will happen in this chapter. In other
>words, when Dumbledore meets Tom Riddle for the first time -
>conflict, violence,troubled, dark, young, and dislikes answering DD's
>questions.
>any thoughts on that?

Me responding:
That's a good one! Hadn't thought of that. It could work, but I do
have a problem have with the cards referring to the pensieve memory
with Riddle; the memory doesn't really seem all that worthy of a
prediction. The lightning struck tower is definitely a worthy
prediction because of the events that it signified. But it almost
seems like it would be a waste of page space to put in vague
predictions about Harry finding out something that happened in the
past that affects the present, but isn't going to occur in the near
future and drastically influence future outcomes. If it was a
prediction about something from the present that was going to affect
the future, then I could go with that. But not a prediction made in
the present about the past. 

Otherwise, we could've gotten the Gaunts in a prophetic card reading
way back in chapter 1 or a Trelawney-inspired hint about Dumbledore's
injury in Chapter 5 or something. Both the Gaunts and Dumbledore's
injury are integral to the plot like the meeting with Riddle, but they
definitely didn't get a card reading. 


Ok, hope I responded to everyone! I haven't even begun to get caught
up on all of the posts that I've missed while attempting to do some
school work. If you're interested, I've gotten no school work done
whatsoever. Lucky there aren't many gradable assignments...


AyanEva