Are curses necessarily Dark? (Was: Slytherin Gang)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 156664

colebiancardi back again:
> 
> I think Sirius stated it was that Snape was up to his ears in the Dark 
> Arts and that he knew more hexes & curses than a 7th year.  So, was 
> that comment incorrect?  Did Sirius *assume* that Snape was into the 
> Dark Arts because of the hex & curse knowledge?  Or were those hexes
& curses that Snape knew Dark Arts?
> 
> Also it could have been as simple as Snape being sorted into the 
> Slytherin House :)  Afterall, James states that his distain for
Snape is because "he exists".   Perhaps the bias towards Slytherin
(remember Hagrid stating that there wasn't a dark wizard that didn't
come from  Slytherin) was already in place at that time - I would
think that with 
> Bella, Narcissa, Malfoy, etc already graduated or still in Slytherin, 
> that is possible.  
><snip>
>
Carol responds:
Yes, it was Sirius Black, speaking some twenty years later, making
both those statements, but I think he may be allowing his recently
acquired knowledge that Snape had been a DE to color his judgment of
the boy Severus.

Although he used the word "curses" rather than "hexes," the dictionary
definitions of the terms are similar and JKR uses the terms more or
less interchangeably. (In OoP, "jinx" is used instead of "hex" for
most of the curses the students use on each other, but that seems to
be an anamoly. Elsewhere "jinx" seems to apply to curses placed on
inanimate objects like brooms and parchment--or to intangibles like
the DADA position.) I don't think there's any logic to the use of
"curse" vs. "hex" otherwise--the "Leg Locker Curse," for example, is
minor and easily reversed.

The only Dark Curses we know are the Unforgiveables, which certainly
the eleven-year-old Severus wasn't using, and Sectumsempra, invented
by Severus "for enemies" at age fifteen or sixteen. The other spells
we see in his Potions book are the toenail hex and Langlock, the
tongue-locker curse, both of which Harry cheerfully uses against
Crabebe and Filch respectively, and Muffliato, a charm rather than a
hex as far as I can tell (the narrator merely calls it "a useful
little spell") that merely causes buzzing in the ears of
eavesdroppers. Nothing Dark there (other than Sectumsempra); all of
those hexes are on a par with the hexes that the Gryffindors and
Slytherins use against each other--Ginny's Bat-Bogey Hex, for example,
or Petrificus Totalus or Jelly Legs or Densuageo, the tooth-growing
spell that gets deflected onto Hermione.

Evidently, it was quite unusual for an eleven-year-old to come to
school knowing as many spells of any kind as a seventh-year, and
perhaps having some of them cast on him before he caught up with
Sevvie's precocious knowledge caused Sirius to resent the little
Slytherin oddball and associate him with the Dark Arts because his own
family, also Slytherin (with his snake emblem all over their house)
were Dark wizards.

I don't think eleven-year-old Severus was practicing the Dark Arts,
whether he did so at a later age or not. All we have from his school
days is a single Dark spell, invented under provocation, for which he
also invented (or discovered) an elaborate countercurse.

Carol, who just realized that Adult!Snape is associated with Healing
from Book 1, not only discussing Bezoars, which later save Ron's life,
but keeping the antidote for the students' potion in his pocket and
administering it as needed in the very first lesson