Blood magic (Was: Marietta, Magical Contracts, and that Damned Gleam of Triumph)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 155717

> Tonks:
> Now this is a fantastic idea. I do like it, I do!!  I posed the 
> question here once regarding the use of the blood of one that you 
> had murdered. LV has his victim's blood in his body. I really wonder 
> if that doesn't have some bearing on all of this. Lily's blood, the 
> blood of the pure sacrificed one now gives life to LV. There has got 
> to be something in this somehow. But I am at a lost...  ??  It must 
> be tied to the blood protection that is saving Harry, but how??? 
> Maybe factored into the life debit somehow??

Carol responds:
I'd like to take the "blood of an enemy" idea in a slightly different
direction. It seems to me that in the Potterverse, magical powers
reside in the blood (not the soul). Note that in CoS, the narrator
says that the Dursleys were Muggles "(not a drop of magical blood in
their veins)" (Am. ed. 3). So Voldemort, in taking the blood of an
enemy, and specifically Harry, would be trying to take his enemy's
*powers* into himself *through the enemy's blood*. (Obviously, this
idea went wrong somewhere, but I'm not concerned with the "gleam"
right now.)

By the same token, if magic resides in the blood and not the soul,
Harry could have acquired some of Voldemort's powers at Godric's
Hollow through a drop of blood that entered the lightning-bolt shaped
cut on his forehead. Makes at least as much sense as a soul bit
entering by the same route--and soul bits encased in Horcruxes seem
only to anchor the wizard to the earth, preventing him from dying,
rather than reducing his powers. (We're not dealing here with Sauron's
One Ring, into which he places "the best part" of the powers "native
to him" in order to control the other rings.)

Carol, wondering if there's a connection to ancient Druidic blood
magic but not knowing enough about the topic to discuss it intelligently