Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187138

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
>
> > > Alla:
> > 
> > > Maybe he expected to fool Dumbledore and run away after he delivered his warning, after all he did leave after he eavesdropped the Prophecy, maybe he thought that he will get Lily later after he is out of prison, 
Alla wrote:
> Any other inference about Snape not wanting Lily for himself does not hold up for me, but this one does, I am just not 100% sure, that's all.
> 
Carol responds:

But we don't need inferences. All we need is canon. He went first to Voldemort and then to Dumbledore not because he wanted Lily (certainly Dumbledore wouldn't have "given" Lily to Snape!) but because we wanted to save her life. The only person (if we can call him that) who ever refers to Snape as desiring Lily is Voldemort, the one character in the books who has no idea what love is. (Harry knows better.)

> Pippin:
> <SNIP>
> Snape wouldn't be shocked or revolted that Voldemort intended to kill a baby. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Yes and it disgusts me.

Carol responds:

We really don't know whether he thought about a baby dying at all until he learned that Voldemort intended to target the Potters, and then his fears for Lily overpowered any thought of anyone or anything else. He didn't protest against Dumbledore's "you disgust me" because he knew that already--he had gone to DD at the risk of being killed. He was perfectly willing for DD to protect "them" as long as he protected "her."

We don't know what young Snape's principles were at that point, but it's clear that he could no longer support Voldemort, the man who wanted to kill the woman he loved, and he was ready to do "anything" to stop him.

>From that point on, whether he believed in Voldemort's goals or not (and I'll speculate on that in a minute), he was opposed to Voldemort himself and therefore to the DEs who supported him, without whom he could not come to power. He was, as Harry puts it, Dumbledore's man, not Voldemort's, and he remained so--surprisingly--after Lily was killed. Harry's survival gave him no comfort (he shrugs off that unimportant bit of information as if it were an annoying fly), but Harry's survival *becomes* important--a goal worth dying for--once DD persuades him that Lily's sacrifice will be in vain if Harry dies. 

Whatever he believed in before is no longer important. All that's important is doing whatever it takes to protect Harry. (Of course, he later manages to pull himself together, to be a Potions teacher who actually cares whether his students get good marks and a Head of House who actually cares whether his team wins the Quidditch match, but under it all is the man who will lie and spy and risk his life for Dumbledore and for Lily. It's not, IMO, a matter of principle at all until he reaches the stage of preferring to save lives rather than watch people die. It's personal.

The question is, why did he join the DEs at all and what did he actually believe. It seems to me that his DE beliefs could not have been all that strong in the first place or he couldn't have set them aside and started actively working against Voldemort. I can't imagine, say, Lucius Malfoy doing the same thing. JKR says in an interview that he thought that Lily would admire him if he joined the DEs. That sounds ridiculous; he knew that she hated Avery and Mulciber, the DE wannabes, and actually referred to Mulciber (the future Imperious specialist) as "evil." Could Snape, usually so logical (at least as an adult) really be that dim? Maybe he thought that if she was attracted to James Potter, she must be attracted to bullies, but he also knew that she regarded Potter as a toerag and disapproved of his hexing people in the hallways. It makes no sense (sorry, JKR) that he would expect her to act like Pansy Parkinson twenty years later, idolizing a "man" with a mission from the Dark Lord. 

Other possible motives? His friends were joining the DEs and no doubt expected him to join them. The former prefect he had (presumably) admired, Lucius Malfoy, was a DE and perhaps had told him how wonderful it was, how LV would "honor him above all others" is he knew about young Snape's talents with potions and invented spells. I think, and of course I'm just guessing, he thought that he'd have more scope for experimental magic, some or most of it Dark, than he'd have as, say, a Ministry employee. We know that as a child not yet in Hogwarts he expected to go far; we know that he considered Slytherin the House of Brains. Possibly, he was still under that delusion.

We know, too, that he disliked Muggles based on his father's abuse and Petunia's unfriendliness. Maybe that was a motive. But he can't have strongly believed in Pure-Blood superiority knowing that he himself was a Half-Blood and Lily was a Muggle-born, yet they were as talented as anyone in their year. (He didn't know that WPP were Animagi and had made the Marauder's Map, but I think he would still have held that view if he had; his potion improvements and invented spells showed him to be equally clever.) At any rate, there's a difference between going along with the crowd and actually believing in your heart that Pure-Bloods are superior. (If he knew that Dumbledore and LV were also Half-Bloods, he'd have even less reason to truly believe that propaganda.)

It seems to have cost him no effort to throw those beliefs aside (which is not to say that his acting and lying and spying didn't require effort--quite the contrary). We never hear him say "Mud-Blood" as an adult or give any indication that he holds those view (other than believing, rightly, that werewolves can be dangerous). And eventually, he reprimands Phineas Nigellus (a non-DE Slytherin type) for using the term. 

I think there can be no question that he continued to consider Wizards superior to Muggles, but so does most of the WW. But that's not the same as continuing to believe in Muggle-baiting.

At any rate, when I say that he ceased to be a DE from the moment LV targeted Lily, I mean that he ceased to be a supporter of LV, whom he now must have seen clearly as a murderer and a maniac. How much thought he gave to the principles that LV supposedly stood for, we can't possibly know. I don't think he ever cared all that much about Pure-Blood superiority. As for the rest of what LV stood for--his own immortality and power--Snape would have done and did everything he could to fight that. And, no doubt, if he'd known about the Horcruxes, he's have destroyed them, too.

> Pippin:
> What do you think would have happened to Neville, when dear Uncle Algie dropped him out the window, if he hadn't bounced? Augusta doesn't seem to have thought any less of old Algie for it. That's the Longbottoms, mind you, a family that wouldn't have anything to do with the Dark Arts.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> What you think he intended to kill him??? I disagree. We had seen several times that wizard kids often shown more resistant to physical injuries. I did not like Uncle Algie doing it at all, however I did not think for one second he intended to kill the boy, I thought that maybe he would do same thing as Dumbledore did when Harry was falling after Quidditch. I am sure he would not let him die.
> 
Carol:
I agree with Pippin here. Had Neville not bounced, it would have been too late to save him with a cushioning charm (the whole point was to see whether he bounced--and consequently lived--when he landed).

Carol, who is equally disgusted with DD's statement that he didn't care about the deaths of nameless and faceless people as long as Harry lived