Mystery of Mysteries

[gcanham at cs.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 193186

Death Chamber
 

 Starting off with the Death Chamber might sound morbid, but we are dealing with the world of J.K. Rowling's novels, and she loves to kill off favorite characters. Even Harry died; or did he? He certainly had his own 'near death experience', or was it an actual death experience. The Dumbledore that he met at Kings Cross said he could go on or go back, but he also said it was happening in his Harry's head. Of course, in life everything we think we see and hear is happening in our heads. The signals from our eyes are already mixed with related previous knowledge before it reaches the primary visual cortex, and as it gets processed by other areas of the brain, it gets mixed even more with previous memories. That is why two people can witness exactly the same thing and seemingly have seen two different events. But the brain has its own room, so we had better leave that for now. Hopefully the Unspeakables from different rooms do at least speak with each other.
 

 Death and redevelopment/regrowth seem to go together. You could say that the Big Bang came from the 'death' of the original singularity. Certainly the death of stars added more and more complex chemicals into the universe, leading ultimately to us. Our planet, and we ourselves would not be here if it wasn't for death. The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to develop beyond rodent-size creatures, and leading on to humans.
 

 The only thing we really see in the room is the Veil, which seems to be some physical manifestation of the gulf between the living and the dead. Whether the sounds from beyond the veil are just the sounds of activity in the afterlife, or efforts by those beyond to contact the living remains unclear. Personally, I would suspect the former, since if it was the latter I would have thought they would have more success.
 

 There are a number of ways a witch or wizard who has died can still appear to the living, and interact with them to some degree.
 There are moving photos, but they don't appear to be much more than Muggles can achieve with an animated GIF.
 Moving pictures seem to be like some sophisticated Muggle software that produces a lifelike image or hologram of a person, and has been programmed to respond like them. We know that the headmasters at Hogwarts talk with their paintings to give the painting an understanding of the way they think and act, effectively programming them.
 The Mirror of Erised obviously ties in with a person's desires, but Harry saw images of his relatives, who he had never previously seen, so where do the images come from? The Muggles have speculated about something called the Akashic Record (also known by many other names, such as the Collective Conscious/Unconscious, Supraconscious, etc.) that exists supposedly on a different level and holds the collective knowledge and experiences of every person (and maybe every creature) that has ever lived, and can project from that to visualize what the future may hold. The psychic, Edgar Cayce, was said to tap into that for his readings, and Thomas Edison is said to have used techniques to connect to it to arrive at his discoveries. Perhaps the Mirror of Erised is drawing information from such a field to build the images of peoples' desires.
 Prior Incantato is a spell that forces a wand to reveal what spells it has been used for, and this will also produce 'echoes' of people the wand has been used to kill. These seem to be equally as interactive as paintings, although presumably aren't the actual people, but images of them from the time they were killed.
 Ghosts walk the halls of Hogwarts, and appear to be the spirits of deceased witches and wizards, but Nearly Headless Nick describes them as imprints that they leave where they once existed. That sounds like similar terminology to that used by many Muggle ghost hunters. They are also described as not wanting to 'move on' because of 'unfinished business'. If they are the actual spirits of dead witches and wizards, it seems they are trapped in the ghost state, or perhaps they are never able to satisfactorily finish whatever their 'unfinished business' was.
 The Resurrection Stone seems to call back the actual people from 'beyond'. Although Harry's group might be seen as wish-fulfillment, the story from the tale of the Deathly Hallows has the girl pining to go back from where she had been pulled. That would definitely not have been the wish of Cadmus Peverell. Also, Dumbledore wanted to use the stone to call back Ariana, and it would seem that he imagined she would be the real thing.
 

 Does anyone have more insight into any of these things? I'd love to hear them.
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