Prophecy (was Re: What would Snape have done if Lily had lived? (Was: Mothers)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187566

Potioncat wrpte:
> I've just gone back to OoP and re-read "The Department of Mysteries" and "The Lost Prophecy."
> 
> Ch 34 "Tiny, yellowing labels had been stuck beneath each glass orb on the shelf. Some of them had a weird. Liquid glow; others were as dull and dark within as blown light bulbs."
> 
> I don't see that we are told that any of the prophecies did not come true. There are lit orbs and dark ones throughout the room. It would seem to me that the lit orbs are prophecies still in play; and the dark ones are completed prophecies. I guess other readers could interpret it differently, but at best we're left with the unanswered question, Do all prophecies come true? BTW, I think there's a difference between a prophecy and a prediction. 

Carol responds:
I agree that the dark orbs are those of prophecies that have been fulfilled and that the prophecies of the lit orbs have not yet been fulfilled, but I'm not sure that the lit orbs are necessarily "in play." Quite possibly, no one acted on them (other than to speak them and hear them) and so they were never fulfilled. If, for example, Snape had not overheard part of the Prophecy and reported it to LV, and if LV hadn't chosen to try to thwart it, nothing would have happened. There would have been no Chosen One because LV would not have created him by trying to thwart the Prophecy. Similarly, if Snape had not asked LV to spare Lily and LV had not actually given Lily the choice to live ("stand aside" and let him kill Harry instead of her), her Love magic would not have been activated and Harry would have died whether Lily lived or not (just as both Neville and Alice would have died even if she tried to protect him because she would not have been given a choice to live). In any of those cases, there would have been no boy "with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" because Harry would either have died or simply been an ordinary Wizarding kid not "marked as [LV's] equal. The prophecy orb would have continued to glow, an unfulfilled prophecy, while the unvaporized LV continued his reign of terror. Conversely, had the prophecy orb not been smashed in the MoM battle in OoP, it would have gone dark at the end of DH when "the one with the power" finally vanquished the Dark Lord, and "LV] died at the hand of [Harry]"--sort of. 

> Potioncat standing in the Potterverse:
> I was surprised at something DD said that I hadn't quite picked up on before. I recalled DD being dismissive of Divination, but clearly he isn't dismissing it all; he is saying he was against teaching it.
> 
> "¡Kthough it was against my inclination to allow the subject of Divination to continue at all. ¡K  I was disappointed. It seemed to me that she had not a trace of the gift herself."
> 
> There seems to be a way to identify the gift of Divination, and perhaps DD didn't feel it was worth the effort to teach it to students who didn't have the gift. (Which is kind of how I feel about some high school courses.) <snip>

Carol responds:
LOL! I think he may be dismissive of the subject *as* a subject, not just of seemingly incompetent teachers (cf. McGonagall's attitude), but he certainly knows a real prophecy when he hears one, and he knew that Trelawney would need his protection or he wouldn't have hired her. (He also said in PoA that her prophecy about the Dark Lord's servant returning brought her total of real prophecies up to two.) But I agree that a contempt for Divination as a school subject does not amount to contempt for the gift of prophecy or for prophecies themselves. He knows that Harry can choose not to act on the prophecy, and he tells him so, but he also knows quite well that it *will* be fulfilled, and that only Harry can vanquish Voldemort. Otherwise, he would never have let him learn the hard way and suffer as he did. He'd have defeated LV himself, with the Order's help. (IMO.)

> DD says that LV hadn't heard the whole prophecy and didn't know that attacking the child might give that child the power. So it again seems to me, that DD let Snape go, knowing LV would hear just enough to endanger himself. This is reinforced by DD's repeating comments that when he began to care about Harry he wasn't able to carry out his plan as well as he intended. This reinforces my belief that the prophecy was in play as soon as DD and Snape heard it, because in their own way both acted on it.

Potioncat: 
> DD does seem to indicate twice, that a prophecy can be tweaked. First he's saying the Chosen One could have been Neville--but that LV's choice determined the outcome.  DD's wording is that both had parents "having narrowly escaped Voldemort three times." Second that LV's attempt to kill the child is what gave Harry the power and it might have been better for LV if he had waited. 
> 
> I think JKR said that if Alice had been killed trying to save Neville he would not have been protected. So I think if LV had chosen Neville and killed him, he probably would have gone after Harry too, just in case. Then we'd have the dead "extra one" and Harry still chosen.

Carol responds:
Yes, but unless Lily had the choice of stepping aside and letting LV kill Harry (a choice to live or to die *instead* of Harry, which was the point of her self-sacrifice), the Love magic that protected him would never have kicked in and there would still have been no Chosen One. Both Harry and Lily would have died, just as both Neville and Alice would have died because neither Snape nor any other DE would have requested that she be spared. So "the one with the power" would never have acquired the power *unless* Snape made that request, and the prophecy would have gone unfulfilled.

Potioncat 
> On the other hand, (imho) if LV had waited a little, he would have dismissed Neville as ever being the one with the power and would still have chosen Harry. I guess that brings us right back to the issue of whether the prophecy could have played out differently or been completely neutralized. <snip>

Carol responds:
But what would have protected Harry in that case? He wouldn't have been a baby whose mother could step in front of him and plead with LV to "kill [her] instead, and Snape would have seen no need to ask LV to protect Lily if LV was just going after a young man or teenage boy. So Harry not only would not have acquired the powers that enabled him to defeat LV in DH (primarily the scar connection), he would not have been protected by Love magic, either, so he would simply have been killed like everyone else that LV went after.

Of course, the second part of the Prophecy ("either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives") could still have worked out the other way. If, for example, Harry had tried to kill LV instead of sacrificing himself, LV might simply have been vaporized rather than killed because of the soul bit in his forehead, or, more likely, LV's reflexes would have been quicker and Harry would actually have died along with the soul bit without activating any Love magic. Or suppose that LV had used someone else's blood to regenerate himself; Harry would have died from the AK. Or if he had killed Nagini when she attacked him at Bathilda's, the soul bit in his scar would have been the last "Horcrux" and he would have died. The Prophecy ("either must die at the hand of the other") would still have been fulfilled, but the terms "either" and "other" would refer to different people.

To sum up, in case my ideas are unclear, I think that prophecies can go unfulfilled (though, of course, if one appears in a story, it will be fulfilled in one way or another) and that some of the prophecy orbs on the shelves of the MoM would never have gone dark (or will never go dark, if they remain unsmashed). The rest will be fulfilled, possibly in unexpected ways (cf. Oedipus, Macbeth, Glorfindel's "Not by the hand of man will he fall," etc.), because of the notoriously ambiguous wording of prophecies. The ones that are fulfilled (except in LOTR) will generally be those that someone attempts to thwart (or to act on, with unexpected and often disastrous results, as in the case of the king who destroyed a great army--his own--through misinterpreting a prophecy).

> Potioncat, wondering why if Lily narrowly escaped LV three times, it's LV's 4th attempt that causes Snape to ask DD to save her.

Carol responds:
I'm guessing that he didn't know about or wasn't involved in the other attempts. In this case, he's prompted by a combination of concern for her safety and unbearable remorse because her death will be at least partly his own fault if he stands by and does nothing. (But we don't even know what "defying Voldemort three times" means. Maybe in the past, James and Lily were fighting as members of the Order against DEs rather than against LV himself. They could hardly have escaped being killed if he'd confronted them personally. Ditto for the Longbottoms, whose jobs as Aurors must have led to similar confrontations (although most of the DEs were arrested after LV's fall). Simply joining the Order should count as one act of defiance, IMO.

Carol, guessing that young Snape never thought about Lily as being in danger until LV specifically targeted the Potters