A few questions about OOTP

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 162148

Antonia31h wrote:
>
> I was just wondering about certain things from OOTP. For example
what is beneath the veil in that room of the Ministry of Magic? What
were those voices Harry heard and Luna mentioned? And what about the
room that is locked at all times and as Dumbledore said has such a
great force inside it, one that Harry also posess? Is this force love?
And if so how is it kept in that room? And last but not least what is
the thing with the brains floating in the room? What did Hermione mean
by "they are breeding"? Breeding what?
> If anyone could answer I would be very grateful.


Carol responds:

Nothing is "beneath" the Veil. It hangs in an archway and the kids can
walk around it. However, once someone goes through the Veil, as Sirius
Black dead, they're dead. Also, Luna speaks of the voices that sha and
Harry can hear as being "inside" (Hermione claims that there is no
"inside," but she's clearly wrong. There's something on the other side
of the Veil, and it appears to be Death. The voices, as Luna tells
Harry, are the voices of the dead. Death is not the end, but the next
great adventure. Presumably, some of the Unspeakables, those who work
in the Death Chamber, study death, just as others study Love (which is
almost certainly contained in the locked room--I have no idea how it's
kept there, but I expect we'll encounter it again in Book 7) and still
others study Time (the Time Turners, which can probably be replaced or
repaired, though not, I hope, for the use of our characters) and the
Mind (the Brain Room) and Prophecies (those, unfortunately, probably
can't be replaced, but not all of them were destroyed). 

To get back to the brains, which are floating in a tank (it makes me
think of pickled frogs floating in formaldehyde or the jars lining the
shelves of snape's office), these are clearly the brains of dead
witches and wizards. We see the tentacles of thought (somehow not dead
and clearly not part of the soul, which "will have gone on," to quote
Nearly Headless Nick) coming out of the brain that Ron summoned and
stinging him, oddly causing welts on his flesh that Madam Pomfrey
later treats with Dr. Ubbly's Oblivious Unction.

I don't recall any quote about the brains "breeding" (I do recall the
Dementors "breeding," but that's another matter). Can you cite it for me?

In any case, it's all a matter of the mysteries of human existence
that Unspeakables like Bode and Croaker study in the Department of
Mysteries--the same mysteries that the Greek philosophers studied and
tried in vain to explain: love, death, time, thought, truth, and life
itself (though I don't recall a room associated with that one). "No
idea what they get up to" says Mr. Weasley of the Unspeakables in GoF,
but it's clear from the Veil and the Time Turners and the vat of
brains and all the rest that they're taking a practical approach to
studying what the Greeks thought about abstractly, turning philosophy
into science in a way possible only to Wizards.

Here's an excerpt from a post-HBP interview that may be useful to you:

[Question from a reader] How and when was the veil created?

JKR: The veil's been there as long as the Ministry of Magic has been
there, and the Ministry of Magic has been there, not as long as
Hogwarts, but a long time. We're talking hundreds of years. It's not
particularly important to know exactly when, but centuries, definitely.

M[elissa] A[nelli]: Was it used as an execution chamber or just studying?

JKR: No, it's just studying. The Department of Mysteries is all about
studying. They study the mind, the universe, death. . . .

MA: Are we going back to that room, that locked room?

JKR: No comment. [Read "yes"!]

http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2005/0705-tlc_mugglenet-anelli-3.htm

Carol, who used to think that the Veil was once an execution chamber
until JKR vetoed that idea