[HPforGrownups] The Potion in the Cave Possibly Revealed (Re: Dumbledore MAY be alive....)

[rebecca]

No: HPFGUIDX 149999

>Carol responds:

>I can't claim to be an expert on color and lighting, but AFAIK,
>there's no indication that JKR is, either. It's simpler to consider
>green as the actual color of the potion and to note the frequent
>association of the color green in the HP series with death and poison.
>(I'm not talking here about eye color or House colors, just spells and
>potions and evil creatures.)

Rebecca:

Actually, you don't have to be an expert on color and lighting to see or 
think of this - black lights and their effects are very common at 
Halloween..... :)  To be honest with you, one of my co-workers was talking 
this week about his kid being in this sort of "goth" stage wanting black 
lights in his room. It's how I came to think of it!

<snip>

>Carol:

>As you stated, the Draught of Living Death is not green, nor does it
>AFWK cause "unendurable pain" in the drinker. It's a very powerful
>sleeping potion that makes the drinker appear to be dead. (Think Snow
>White.) I do think we'll see the DLD in Book 7, but in relation to
>faked deaths (the Malfoy or Emmeline Vance, possibly, not Dumbledore,
>who is, I think, really dead).

Rebecca:

I do think DD is dead and will stay that way thanks to Snape's tower 
intervention, but that portrait snoozing irks my suspicions toward a DLD. Or 
something similiar, anyway.

I also think there was quite a bit of time spent on potions in this book, 
and the first potion brewed using the HBP potions book in Slughorn's class 
is, lo and behold,  DLD.  And also one of the first potions to be mentioned 
in the series, come to think of it. Doesn't it sound very, well, eerie to 
have a potion with the word "death" in it?  Why wouldn't it just be called a 
Sleeping Potion/Solution? We appear to already have one of those, so DLD has 
to be a major difference to your run-of-the-mill Sleeping Potion. We don't 
know what happens if that potion is tinkered with slightly, or when one 
comes out of such a sleep, either.

We know the steps, ingredients, and color transformations of DLD and from 
what I've read , we don't know that level of detail about many of the 
potions mentioned in the series so far.  I agree with you there is a 
significance behind it, but I still (sorry, I'm hardheaded) am drawn to this 
possibly being what DD drank.


>Carol:

>I think it's more likely, as I've suggested elsewhere, that the potion
>is some sort of poisoned memory. The stone basin in which the potion
>is placed is described as being "rather like the Pensieve," and the
>green light emanating from the basin is "misty," like the mist that
>rises from a Pensieve. After drinking several gobletsful of the
>potion, Dumbledore seems to be "dreaming a horrible dream," reliving
>terrible memories that may or may not be his own.

<snip other details, keeping them in mind but including this:)

>Sorry about the level of detail, but I'm trying to show that this
>potion, which glows a phosphorescent green like the Dark Mark hanging
>in the sky above Hogwarts, is not the Draught of Living Death but a
>poisoned memory that causes both mental and physical agony and greatly
>weakens the drinker.

>IMO, the resemblance of the basin to a Pensieve is not
>accidental, nor is the color, so reminiscent of the Dark Mark, Avada
>Kedavra, and the "venomous green" Basilisk, a coincidence.


Rebecca:

Let's explore this a little more fully, shall we? Particularly this:

"Immediately a thick coppery green chain appeared out of thin air, extending 
from the depths of the water into Dumbledore's clenched hand. Dumbledore 
tapped the chain, which began to slide through his fist like a snake, 
coiling itself on the ground with a clinking sound that echoed noisily off 
the rocky walls, pulling something from the depths of the black water. Harry 
gasped as the ghostly prow of a tiny boat broke the surface, glowing as 
green as the chain, and floated, with barely a ripple, toward the place on 
the bank where Harry and Dumbledore stood."

Glowing green, hmmmm.  Now that glow could be magical to the objects for 
whatever reason, and the chain and boat don't appear to be a memory. While I 
can almost accept the idea of a poisoned memory, I could combine a poisonous 
DLD potion and a memory together and come up with some intriguing ideas, 
first of which is that perhaps the potion DD drank isn't the same as the one 
Regulus Black had to drink. More on that in a minute, but before I forget, 
you quoted the word "misty" in reference to the potion basin in the cave and 
I didn't quite get that.  Since the boat glowed and the chain glowed and the 
potion glowed, seems they all glowed not because of memory but because of a 
magical spell. Did you mean that in reference of misty to the Pensieve 
instead? A phosphorescent glow is different from a mist to me. I am confused 
because I was able to find that word describing the cave's potion basin, 
unless you've a British version of the HBP book which has it and my US one 
doesn't.  Kindly steer me straight :)

>Carol:

>Whatever this potion may be, it is not the Draught of Living Death,
>which would simply have sent Dumbledore into a deep and deathlike
>sleep. It is, as Dumbledore himself says, "something more worrisome
>than blood and bodies," something sinister and deadly and cruel.

Rebecca:

I'm still not as convinced as you are that the potion isn't DLD, so alas, we 
shall agree to disagree. :)  DD thought he was drinking a potion that LV 
created - we have a clue, if you will, that if indeed Regulus Black is the 
mysterious R.A.B., he's someone who was in the cave before DD and we don't 
know what really happened to Regulus, do we? Lupin says he only managed to 
live a few days after "deserting" the DE's, and Sirius says in OoP that he 
was murdered on LV's orders, and then backtracks and says "on Voldemort's 
orders, most likely"  because Sirius thought he wasn't important enough for 
LV to kill personally.  So the question begets itself: how *did* he die, 
exactly? Was it the same potion DD drank?  Or did perhaps Regulus survive 
the cave and die trying to destroy the Horcrux? We've seen what trying to 
destroy one does to you from DD's arm and the Slytherin/Gaunt ring.

Since we think we *may* have seen the locket at GP in the clean up there 
during OoP, I could postulate that Regulus might have made it back home, at 
least. If so,  Regulus was a wizard smart and powerful enough to figure out 
all of this:

- the Horcrux secret,
- the location (cave)
- the boat (about which DD professes Voldemort would have been reasonably 
confident that none but a very great wizard would have been able to find it)
- have enough magical power to get across the lake in the boat (again, DD 
states "Voldemort will not have cared about the weight, but about the amount 
of magical power that crossed his lake")
- drank the potion  (DD again "He would want to keep them alive long enough 
to find out how they managed to penetrate so far through his defenses and, 
most importantly of all, why they were so intent upon emptying the basin.)
- got the locket and replaced it, apparently (from OoP: "......a heavy 
locket that none of them could open" - and this is only IF the one 
referenced in OoP is really Slytherin's locket)

So,  I'm curious.  If the above were true, would that same wizard be capable 
of modifying LV's defenses ever so slightly in case the Dark Smarmy Lord 
himself came back?  If it were me, I'd send the Dark Lord a message by 
allowing him to drink a potion which would give him a taste of what death 
was like considering that I alone thought I knew his Horcrux secret, if the 
potion works as I speculate it may. :)

Rebecca, who really digs this whole discussion