dementors Re: unicorns and religious references in HP

[pippin_999]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "annemehr" <annemehr at y...>
wrote:

> Anne:
> And then we have that curious anti-Christian beastie in the dementor
> who can lose your soul *for* you, just for the sin of being unlucky
> enough to fall into its clutches.  I always wondered how to take
that
> -- whether it's a question Jo brought up with the intent to solve
> later, whether it was a bit of hyperbole to illustrate how
> soul-destroying depression can be, or whether it's merely as foreign
> to my Catholic roots as the doctrine of predestination is (at least
at
> first glance).
> 
> I never got anywhere with that question; I just file it under Fate
> Worse Than Death and read on.
> 

Pippin:
Sorry to take a while answering this.

CS Lewis's devils are always chowing down on the souls of unfortunate
mortals (in Perelandra and in The Screwtape Letters), so I interpreted
the dementors as an extension of Hell.  Barty Jr. wasn't exactly in a 
state of grace and neither was Sirius (he was planning to murder 
Peter, after all. And Dudley had just been beating up Mark Evans.)

The people who  waste away in Azkaban are not Kissed, so presumably 
their souls would go on to the Next Great Adventure intact.  
We don't know yet what would happen if a dementor kissed 
someone who was in a state of grace, do we?  It is not clear whether 
the dementor could have devoured Harry's soul even if it had 
succeeded in extracting it.

Pippin