Nagini / great but terrible / word of honor / Homorphus / the DADA curse

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 165936

Shelley wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/165557>:

<< We see Wormtail needing to "milk Nagini"- milk is used for a baby,
is it not? >>

Here in the Muggle real world, 'milk' is the verb for drawing venom
from a snake, such as to use the venom to produce antivenin.

Carol wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/165631>:

<< (Does Ollivander know about the Horcruxes? What else would qualify
as "terrible but great"?) >>

Maybe the curse on the Hogwarts DADA professorship -- it works in
quite a complicated way. Maybe making Inferii -- we don't know how
difficult that spell is. Maybe breaking through a protective spell
that was thought to be invulnerable. Maybe transforming some mighty
and magically protected building into a termite and all the people in
it into bacteria in the termite's digestive system...

Finwitch quoted in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/165739>:

<< "Were you to draw a circle around me, on the ground and I gave you
my word not to step outside it, that word would held me surely if
locks and ropes could not. That is honor." >>

And there is on-going argument about whether it is more ethical, more
virtuous, to be bound by one's honor or to sacrifice one's honor to
prevent some very bad thing from happening. If one gives one's word of
honor to keep Lord Voldemort's secrets, and then tells those secrets
to the Order of the Phoenix so they can defeat Voldemort, was that the
right thing to do? 

Celia cdayr wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/165761>:

<< The Homorphus Charm: Hope for Remus and Bill? >>

I agree that the Homorphus Charm is real, because Lockhart stole his
exploits, not invented them. I don't agree that the Homorphus Charm
is a cure for lycanthropism, because if it were, someone would have
tried it on Lupin by now, either his parents, who 'tried everything'
or his clever friends who became Animagi for his sake.

At first I thought it might put an end to the werewolf transformations
permanently, but at the cost of tremendous brain damage to the person,
but then I realized (as Carol has mentioned) that it might be the same
spell that Black and Lupin used to make Pettigrew leave his rat form.

So now I think that it turns the transformed human back into his/her
human form for only a few moments. That's not a cure for lycanthropy,
but it is long enough for the villagers to recognize one of their
neighbors. Now that they know who the werewolf is, they can deal with
him while he is still a mere human. One would hope that they would
lock him in a secure cage before moonrise on the Full Moon night and
release him when he turned human again, but I expect they probably
just killed him in his sleep in his bed at New Moon.

Houyhnhnm wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/165875>:

<< The DADA position might bring out the worst in Snape, but making
him head of Slytherin House wouldn't? Sending him back out as a spy
among the Death Eaters wouldn't? >>

Rowling was being sneaky when she said that. At the time she said it,
everyone assumed that Dumbledore meant that giving Snape the DADA job
would be like giving an alcoholic a bartending job. Not until we read
HBP did we learn that the curse on the DADA job was real, not just a
student rumor, and had begun long before Harry discovered Hogwarts.
There has been much discussion on list about how that curse works,
apparently by using the person's own secret flaws against them. That's
pretty clear for Lockhart, whose secret flaws were that he was a liar,
a braggart, a thief of accomplishment, and not actually good at any
magic except Memory Charms. And for Lupin, it exposed his secret of
being a werewolf and his flaw of being careless about werewolf
precautions. So when Dumbledore said he was afraid that the DADA
position would bring out the worst in Snape, he meant that the curse
on the DADA position would reveal ('bring out') Snape's secrets and flaws.