dementors Re: unicorns and religious references in HP

[annemehr]

> 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.)

Anne:
Yes...  but C.S.Lewis is very clear that the characters involved in
his books chose it (in chosing to reject God).  In Perelandra, Weston
gave Ransom a very explicit speech in that vein.

> 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

Anne:
I don't know.  When Lupin explained the dementor's kiss to Harry,
there was no intimation that it mattered who the person was or what
they'd been doing lately.  As far as I can tell from the text, Harry
was in as much danger as anybody else would have been when the
dementors attacked him.

Now I do wonder, though -- do wizard parents threaten their children
with them?  "Now, be good, Kevin, or the dementors will get you!"  And
wizard children, in their turn, make their parents check under the bed
for lethifolds every night, and the closet for boggarts.

Kneasy wrote:
You were more right than you realise.
Dementors are the physical manifestation of Depression, according
to Jo. The real stuff, not just sadness. She admits in her interview of
23rd Oct 2000 that she herself was very badly affected at one time,
and it was only her thoughts for her daughter that stirred her to
find a way out of it and made her realise she should talk to a doctor.

Anne:
I'd read some of that, but not that particular interview, which has
much more detail.  Thanks for pointing that out.

I think it may have been the PoA DVD extras that contained Jo's
statement that she dreamed of creatures much like that once when she
was fifteen. *checks QQQ*  Yeah, here it is:

 "I had a nightmare in my teens, in which I saw hooded, gliding
figures. They could almost be figments of your imagination in a sort
of tortured imagination, as indeed they are. But you know what I mean?
They could be figments of a mentally ill mind. And um, that was the
thing that I was expecting in the book. Harry's particularly
vulnerable to them, but he's got a much worse post, so he would be.
You know it's not weakness, it's just the fact that he's faced more."

It may be that I personally see depression as one of the mental
illnesses which attack your mind, not your soul per se, that is
leaving me dissatisfied with all the explanations.  I wouldn't be
surprised if there is more to come about dementors, though.

~Anne