Draught of Living Death (Was: Draco and Narcissa in hiding)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 140689

colebiancardi wrote:
<snip>
> OK - the Draught of Living Death - I think that potion is not used
to *hide* the living and make them seem dead.  Instead of I think that
potion is used keep someone, who is moments away from death, from
actually crossing over to the other side.  I think that is what DD had
been taking during book 6 and why Snape didn't really kill DD - he
just released him from the effects of the potion.  DD doesn't fear
death, as he has stated time & time again, but he needed to teach
Harry about Horcruxes before he could go.  
><snip>

Carol responds:
You snipped most of my post, so I'll put in a link in case anyone
wants to go upthread to the original post:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/140681

I guess I didn't make myself quite clear here. I didn't mean that the
Draught of Living Death was in itself a way to hide the living though
I do think it makes them seem to be dead. I meant that after the
funeral service, someone in the know would rescue the "bodies" so that
the caskets buried in the Malfoys' graves would be empty (like Mrs.
Crouch's) and someone in the Order would administer the antidote
before sending them into hiding. They'd be like Peter Pettigrew, safe
from retaliation because they were believed by the whole WW to be dead.

The Draught of Living Death is apparently very much like the poison
given to Snow White by the wicked queen or maybe more like the one
given by the monk to Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet." Snape describes its
effects in SS/PS:

"For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping
potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death" (SS Am.
ed. 138). I read this to mean that the person is so deeply asleep that
he appears to be dead. It's unclear how long the effects last and
whether it requires an antidote, but it sounds like the perfect way to
fake a death, particularly an AK. (But someone would have to know that
they weren't dead and rescue them, or they'd be buried alive.)

As for Snape ending the effects of the potion protecting the (fake)
locket Horcrux (poisoned memories or whatever it was), much as I'd
like to believe that Snape rescued Dumbledore from it (with a spell
disguised as an Avada Kedavra), I don't see the evidence for it. That
potion was horrible, and it appeared to me to be killing Dumbledore,
making him weaker by the second as he slid down the wall. I don't see
any evidence that it was *preventing* him from dying, or that Snape
(who assuredly sent Dumbledore over the tower wall, whatever else he
did), released him from the potion's effects. (Can a spell counter a
potion? We've seen curses and countercurses, poisons and antidotes,
but never a spell that can counter a potion or vice versa.)

I do wonder if there's a potion that can bring a person back from
near-death, rather like phoenix tears but not so difficult to obtain.
(Maybe that's one of the twelve uses of dragon's blood.) Such a potion
would fit with Snape's claim in SS/PS that he can "stopper death,
assuming that he means "stop death in its tracks" and not "put a cork
in a bottle of poison," which even a Muggle can do.

Which brings us to the question of what Snape did to counter the curse
on the ring Horcrux, an instance when he clearly *did* bring DD back
from the brink of death, or at least "prevent him from crossing over."
My impression, based on the infuriatingly sparse information that
Dumbledore gives Harry, is that Snape used a countercurse, not a
potion, since we know that the ring was cursed and that there was no
potion protecting it as there was with the locket. ("Timely action" of
some sort, but what was it? Something like stabilizing Katie Bell
after she was cursed by the necklace, I'm guessing.) I picture a
conjured tourniquet followed by a wand applied to Dumbledore's dead
hand to suck out the curse, accompanied with an incantation like the
one that he used to save Draco, but I'm sure other readers have other
mental pictures. But I think he'd have needed to do something much
more drastic with the poisoned-memory potion that protected the
locket, maybe a combination of Legilimency (reading and removing the
poisoned memories) and an antidote against the corrosive elements of
the potion). But we don't know what was in the potion what it did
besides create physical pain and mental anguish, followed by loss of
powers and physical weakness--only that it clearly was *not* a
powerful sleeping potion that simulated death.

Again, I'm pretty sure that the Draught of Living Death will appear in
Book 7, but I think it will be used as a means of faking a death
(possibly the Malfoys'), not of "preventing someone from crossing
over." That just doesn't fit the description of the potion in SS/PS, IMO.

Carol