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alt_sally_anneSo, um. Back the summer after third year, when I'd taken that first year of Dark Arts with Miss Prof Alecto Carrow, I wrote essays about the three Cardinals on the other lock. For Terry, and for the rest who weren't in Dark Arts.
I was thinking I'd copy out some of what I said. Also just so you know, the context was that Amycus Carrow was making Terry do some awful stuff to other prisoners in Lincoln Castle. Here's what Terry wrote:
So that's some of what I was thinking about when I wrote this. Here's what I said:
So this is Part II of my essays on Dark Arts. Not that I think any of you are going to want to cast it. The theory is sort of interesting though, and it's related to what Terry was writing about yesterday.
So, first of all, like the other cardinal curses it was invented by a Ravenclaw. The inventor of the cruciatus curse was a Healer, if you can believe it, and he was investigating how people's brains work. There's a sort of paralysis that can happen when you damage the nerves in your back and he had a theory about this and the cruciatus was originally just a way to investigate his theory.
And in fact like Luna mentioned second year, there are specially trained Healers at St Mungo's that use the cruciatus curse occasionally to cure certain kinds of paralysis. But mostly it's used to torture people.
Second. There's pretty much nothing the cruciatus curse can accomplish that another spell can't do more effectively, except cause pain for its own sake. If you want to distract someone there are about a million possible spells. If you want to get information out of somebody, legilimency and veritaserum will get it much more quickly than cruciatus and people are less likely to lie. One of the books I read for Dark Arts had a chapter on the cruciatus curse and its use during interrogations, and the author thought using cruciatus was a bad idea -- not because he objected to it morally, but because he said people who are being tortured will say whatever they think will make the torture stop. He said five minutes of cruciatus will make most people claim to be a basket of dried peas, if they think their interrogator wants them to be a basket of dried peas. And the object of interrogation is supposed to be USEFUL information. He thought it was far more worthwhile to learn how to brew veritaserum but he seemed to have a bias towards potions generally.
(By the way he has a point but Hydra says her mother uses legilimency with cruciatus, because cruciatus makes it harder to occlude properly, especially if it goes on and on.)
Third. With cruciatus even more than the other two cardinal curses, mindset is key. With Avada Kedavra, you have to want to kill someone, but even if it's just a passing impulse that's enough to accomplish the spell. With Imperius, you have to want to control someone, and that's -- easier, for most people, because who HASN'T said 'oh if only you would LISTEN to me!' even to their best mate, you know?
But with cruciatus you have to want to cause someone unbearable pain and you have to keep wanting to, even after you see what it's doing to them, for as long as you want the spell to keep on going.
Anyway. With the killing curse, anger is the 'primary' (that's what the books call the primary emotion you'd draw on, when you're getting ready to cast it) and hate and fear are the 'secondaries' and then there are a host of tertiaries. With each of these spells, there are also 'oppositionals,' and those are the emotions that you have to be careful not to feel if you want to cast the spell. (With the killing curse one of the biggest oppositionals is protectiveness -- obviously, if you feel protective of someone it's hard to kill them. But, for instance -- I heard a rumour that in one of the Dogstar cells, someone cast the killing curse on one of their mates, probably because they knew too much that they could say under torture. You might kill someone you wanted to protect, if you were protecting them from being tortured horribly and then killed anyway. But you probably wouldn't be able to use the killing curse to do it, unless you were very good at controlling your emotions.)
So, back to cruciatus. With the cruciatus curse, hatred is the primary, and anger and contempt are the secondaries. It helps if you really believe that they deserve what you're about to do to them (and worse). They talk about 'intense awareness of your superiority' and basically what they mean is that if you're incredibly arrogant you're more likely to be able to cast it properly. And, of course, if you LIKE to see people in pain -- if you're a sadist -- you're basically a natural.
A lot of what all the Dark Arts mindset talk is about is the problem ('problem,' right, it's only a 'problem' to someone like Carrow) (or Mulciber) that most people are NOT actually sadists, at least they don't start out that way. The books say that as you get more practice you can 'develop a taste for power' and when they're talking about cruciatus what they mean is that you can learn to like causing people pain.
(Well, that's only part of it. There were some books I read in Dolohov's class that talked a bit more about what Terry mentioned, with the Carrows, that they got energized when they'd do Dark spells. There's something about Dark Arts specifically that for some people, make them feel good to do. I mean to do them on other people, especially. Some people get more out of it than others. It doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person if you don't get the high or a bad person if you do, although it DOES probably mean that you're more likely to turn into a bad person if you do, right, because if it feels good to curse people you're more likely to find reasons to -- does that make sense? Anyway this is all a bit of a tangent.)
The spell itself is actually incredibly simple. You point your wand at your victim and you say 'crucio' and you mean it. That's all it is. If it's a fleeting impulse, if you have the hatred and anger but not a wall of conviction, it might not work, or the person might get cursed but only for about a second. To keep the spell going, you keep your wand pointed at the person and you WANT it to keep going.
If you keep it on someone for too long, something in their mind breaks and they'll never be right again. The book that talks about using it for interrogation discusses this problem because someone who's lost their mind won't give you any useful information. So there are various clues that you're supposed to watch for to get a sense of whether you're on the edge of going too far, like trying to speak and only gibberish comes out, or no longer screaming and thrashing but just sort of lying there and moaning. It would be dead hard to fake that, though, if you were the person being tortured, especially as they say this is most often a problem if you go on for HOURS.
To cast it on someone you don't hate, you think intensely about someone you DO hate and something that makes you furiously angry and you sort of pretend that's who you're casting it on, even if it's actually someone else. If you're very good at it, you can rely on contempt mixed with tertiaries like arrogance, rather than hatred and anger.
The 'oppositionals' -- this was sort of the point I was getting at earlier, with Terry, the 'oppositionals' that keep you from casting cruciatus are things you might look to, in finding an opposite for sadism.
1. Guilt. If you have a conscience, it typically tells you it's not alright to torture people. Hatred and anger can make you feel like it's justified to do anything you want, which is why you focus on them so intensely if you want to cast a dark curse.
2. Compassion. If you feel any compassion for the person, like if you think 'oh, this is so terrible, I hate seeing people in pain' -- it stops.
3. Transference. This is where you imagine it happening to you, instead of the other person, and it's sort of related to guilt.
4. Indifference. If you truly don't care about a person one way or the other it can be very difficult to cast cruciatus on them. You have to summon up the energies of rage and hate, to make it work.
There is no way to defend yourself against cruciatus. However:
1. You can dodge. Especially if the person isn't very good at it and is pretending you're someone else, this is a good option. They have to be able to see you to cast it.
2. If you can shout something that plays on guilt, compassion, or transference, that can work very well on inexperienced people. Not that this would ever work on Carrow, but if Percy ever cast it, saying 'you promised Dad!' would probably end it, because he'd feel so guilty. Guilt is the enemy of conviction (according to the textbook.)
Playing on compassion sometimes works too -- crying, for instance, tends to upset people more than screaming. But if you can say or do something that puts them in mind of someone they care about, again, it can work like saying something to trigger guilt. If you think someone's about to cruciate you, look as YOUNG as you can. Unless we're talking about Carrow. (Or Mulciber. Also Bill I think looking really young probably works better for people who are thirteen than it would for you.)
Alright. So. The final thing is how it changes you.
If you're doing something that makes you feel bad and ugly, there are three ways to deal with it, basically.
1. You can change what you're doing.
2. You can acknowledge that you're doing something wrong, and keep doing it (because you have to survive, say)
3. You can change how you think so that you start thinking what you're doing is right.
So, if you cruciate people regularly, you can become the sort of person who thinks it's just fine, and you can become the sort of person who enjoys it, because the first two options are just too hard.
Terry. Here is the thing.
You can't do #1. Not all the time, anyway, because Carrow would kill you. And #3 is the path to becoming Carrow. You have to stay with #2, but you also have to try not to feel too guilty. Because you didn't burn that man's picture because you wanted to. You burned it because Carrow would have beaten you and maybe killed you if you'd refused and then he would have burned it anyway.
...anyway
I was thinking I'd copy out some of what I said. Also just so you know, the context was that Amycus Carrow was making Terry do some awful stuff to other prisoners in Lincoln Castle. Here's what Terry wrote:
But I'm seeing something else I never saw before. I think he wants to make me rotten inside, too. Like him. He wants me cowering and ignorant, but he's also interested in making me...cruel. Not enough that I'd ever threaten him, you understand, but then he's arrogant enough to think he totally controls me.
It's little things. Like he always used to be the one to kill his pigeons and rats for his experiments. But now he's started ordering me to kill them (I do it if I have to. But I try to sneak them out and free them instead if I possibly can). He got a crop of prisoners last week, and one of them had concealed a photograph of his wife in his shirt, and the git found it. He took the photograph away from the man and ordered me to burn it. In front of the prisoner.
He said something this week that made my blood run cold: that maybe he might get another mudblood. Someone even younger than me. 'You'd like having someone you could teach master's ways, wouldn't you? Someone you could break in yourself.'
Just getting away from him isn't enough. As long as I'm with him, I also need to figure out how to stay a decent human being, even if he's trying to warp me into someone who thinks he's admirable.
It's little things. Like he always used to be the one to kill his pigeons and rats for his experiments. But now he's started ordering me to kill them (I do it if I have to. But I try to sneak them out and free them instead if I possibly can). He got a crop of prisoners last week, and one of them had concealed a photograph of his wife in his shirt, and the git found it. He took the photograph away from the man and ordered me to burn it. In front of the prisoner.
He said something this week that made my blood run cold: that maybe he might get another mudblood. Someone even younger than me. 'You'd like having someone you could teach master's ways, wouldn't you? Someone you could break in yourself.'
Just getting away from him isn't enough. As long as I'm with him, I also need to figure out how to stay a decent human being, even if he's trying to warp me into someone who thinks he's admirable.
So that's some of what I was thinking about when I wrote this. Here's what I said:
So this is Part II of my essays on Dark Arts. Not that I think any of you are going to want to cast it. The theory is sort of interesting though, and it's related to what Terry was writing about yesterday.
So, first of all, like the other cardinal curses it was invented by a Ravenclaw. The inventor of the cruciatus curse was a Healer, if you can believe it, and he was investigating how people's brains work. There's a sort of paralysis that can happen when you damage the nerves in your back and he had a theory about this and the cruciatus was originally just a way to investigate his theory.
And in fact like Luna mentioned second year, there are specially trained Healers at St Mungo's that use the cruciatus curse occasionally to cure certain kinds of paralysis. But mostly it's used to torture people.
Second. There's pretty much nothing the cruciatus curse can accomplish that another spell can't do more effectively, except cause pain for its own sake. If you want to distract someone there are about a million possible spells. If you want to get information out of somebody, legilimency and veritaserum will get it much more quickly than cruciatus and people are less likely to lie. One of the books I read for Dark Arts had a chapter on the cruciatus curse and its use during interrogations, and the author thought using cruciatus was a bad idea -- not because he objected to it morally, but because he said people who are being tortured will say whatever they think will make the torture stop. He said five minutes of cruciatus will make most people claim to be a basket of dried peas, if they think their interrogator wants them to be a basket of dried peas. And the object of interrogation is supposed to be USEFUL information. He thought it was far more worthwhile to learn how to brew veritaserum but he seemed to have a bias towards potions generally.
(By the way he has a point but Hydra says her mother uses legilimency with cruciatus, because cruciatus makes it harder to occlude properly, especially if it goes on and on.)
Third. With cruciatus even more than the other two cardinal curses, mindset is key. With Avada Kedavra, you have to want to kill someone, but even if it's just a passing impulse that's enough to accomplish the spell. With Imperius, you have to want to control someone, and that's -- easier, for most people, because who HASN'T said 'oh if only you would LISTEN to me!' even to their best mate, you know?
But with cruciatus you have to want to cause someone unbearable pain and you have to keep wanting to, even after you see what it's doing to them, for as long as you want the spell to keep on going.
Anyway. With the killing curse, anger is the 'primary' (that's what the books call the primary emotion you'd draw on, when you're getting ready to cast it) and hate and fear are the 'secondaries' and then there are a host of tertiaries. With each of these spells, there are also 'oppositionals,' and those are the emotions that you have to be careful not to feel if you want to cast the spell. (With the killing curse one of the biggest oppositionals is protectiveness -- obviously, if you feel protective of someone it's hard to kill them. But, for instance -- I heard a rumour that in one of the Dogstar cells, someone cast the killing curse on one of their mates, probably because they knew too much that they could say under torture. You might kill someone you wanted to protect, if you were protecting them from being tortured horribly and then killed anyway. But you probably wouldn't be able to use the killing curse to do it, unless you were very good at controlling your emotions.)
So, back to cruciatus. With the cruciatus curse, hatred is the primary, and anger and contempt are the secondaries. It helps if you really believe that they deserve what you're about to do to them (and worse). They talk about 'intense awareness of your superiority' and basically what they mean is that if you're incredibly arrogant you're more likely to be able to cast it properly. And, of course, if you LIKE to see people in pain -- if you're a sadist -- you're basically a natural.
A lot of what all the Dark Arts mindset talk is about is the problem ('problem,' right, it's only a 'problem' to someone like Carrow) (or Mulciber) that most people are NOT actually sadists, at least they don't start out that way. The books say that as you get more practice you can 'develop a taste for power' and when they're talking about cruciatus what they mean is that you can learn to like causing people pain.
(Well, that's only part of it. There were some books I read in Dolohov's class that talked a bit more about what Terry mentioned, with the Carrows, that they got energized when they'd do Dark spells. There's something about Dark Arts specifically that for some people, make them feel good to do. I mean to do them on other people, especially. Some people get more out of it than others. It doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person if you don't get the high or a bad person if you do, although it DOES probably mean that you're more likely to turn into a bad person if you do, right, because if it feels good to curse people you're more likely to find reasons to -- does that make sense? Anyway this is all a bit of a tangent.)
The spell itself is actually incredibly simple. You point your wand at your victim and you say 'crucio' and you mean it. That's all it is. If it's a fleeting impulse, if you have the hatred and anger but not a wall of conviction, it might not work, or the person might get cursed but only for about a second. To keep the spell going, you keep your wand pointed at the person and you WANT it to keep going.
If you keep it on someone for too long, something in their mind breaks and they'll never be right again. The book that talks about using it for interrogation discusses this problem because someone who's lost their mind won't give you any useful information. So there are various clues that you're supposed to watch for to get a sense of whether you're on the edge of going too far, like trying to speak and only gibberish comes out, or no longer screaming and thrashing but just sort of lying there and moaning. It would be dead hard to fake that, though, if you were the person being tortured, especially as they say this is most often a problem if you go on for HOURS.
To cast it on someone you don't hate, you think intensely about someone you DO hate and something that makes you furiously angry and you sort of pretend that's who you're casting it on, even if it's actually someone else. If you're very good at it, you can rely on contempt mixed with tertiaries like arrogance, rather than hatred and anger.
The 'oppositionals' -- this was sort of the point I was getting at earlier, with Terry, the 'oppositionals' that keep you from casting cruciatus are things you might look to, in finding an opposite for sadism.
1. Guilt. If you have a conscience, it typically tells you it's not alright to torture people. Hatred and anger can make you feel like it's justified to do anything you want, which is why you focus on them so intensely if you want to cast a dark curse.
2. Compassion. If you feel any compassion for the person, like if you think 'oh, this is so terrible, I hate seeing people in pain' -- it stops.
3. Transference. This is where you imagine it happening to you, instead of the other person, and it's sort of related to guilt.
4. Indifference. If you truly don't care about a person one way or the other it can be very difficult to cast cruciatus on them. You have to summon up the energies of rage and hate, to make it work.
There is no way to defend yourself against cruciatus. However:
1. You can dodge. Especially if the person isn't very good at it and is pretending you're someone else, this is a good option. They have to be able to see you to cast it.
2. If you can shout something that plays on guilt, compassion, or transference, that can work very well on inexperienced people. Not that this would ever work on Carrow, but if Percy ever cast it, saying 'you promised Dad!' would probably end it, because he'd feel so guilty. Guilt is the enemy of conviction (according to the textbook.)
Playing on compassion sometimes works too -- crying, for instance, tends to upset people more than screaming. But if you can say or do something that puts them in mind of someone they care about, again, it can work like saying something to trigger guilt. If you think someone's about to cruciate you, look as YOUNG as you can. Unless we're talking about Carrow. (Or Mulciber. Also Bill I think looking really young probably works better for people who are thirteen than it would for you.)
Alright. So. The final thing is how it changes you.
If you're doing something that makes you feel bad and ugly, there are three ways to deal with it, basically.
1. You can change what you're doing.
2. You can acknowledge that you're doing something wrong, and keep doing it (because you have to survive, say)
3. You can change how you think so that you start thinking what you're doing is right.
So, if you cruciate people regularly, you can become the sort of person who thinks it's just fine, and you can become the sort of person who enjoys it, because the first two options are just too hard.
Terry. Here is the thing.
You can't do #1. Not all the time, anyway, because Carrow would kill you. And #3 is the path to becoming Carrow. You have to stay with #2, but you also have to try not to feel too guilty. Because you didn't burn that man's picture because you wanted to. You burned it because Carrow would have beaten you and maybe killed you if you'd refused and then he would have burned it anyway.
...anyway
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-29 08:55 pm (UTC)From what I've seen if you're really angry it's not hard to at least get a flicker of it, like to cast it for a second. Holding it is harder. When Lana Sandoval cruciated me, the first time she cast it it stopped a second after I screamed. I think I startled her. Carrow took the mickey and then told her to try again and this time she held it. It was -- I don't even know how long she held it on me. Even if I'd had a clock, I don't think I could have -- well. It was awful and afterward I couldn't walk right. And I was still afraid of the hospital wing then and terrified out of my mind of Madam Pomfrey so instead of going there for the potion I just went back to Slytherin.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-29 09:19 pm (UTC)I'm going to Moddey Dhoo tonight to speak with Alice and Frank and Kingsley, because I need to figure out to negotiate my way through this ethical maze. I'd like to read over what you've said and think about it and then talk with them, and I may write back with questions, all right?
Also, given what you've told me here, I think it might be helpful for me to speak with Terry. Would it be all right for me to do so, do you think? He told you this in confidence, I imagine, and I don't want to trespass upon that.
But it sounds as though he was in the position I'm finding myself in, and speaking with him might be very valuable. Perhaps you might ask him if it's all right? And then I can speak with him tonight.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-29 09:34 pm (UTC)And if you have more questions that's also fine.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-29 11:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-29 09:35 pm (UTC)I don't know whether you SHOULD learn to cast it.
I mean, if you have a choice(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-30 02:16 pm (UTC)and something I just wanted to point out is that Ron reread this essay too and noticed there are loads of reasons why people could just keep failing at cruciatus. This isn't quite like it was with Terry -- Terry couldn't very well fail to use a knife on another prisoner if that's what Carrow demanded. He could refuse or he could do it but he couldn't try and have it not work.
Maybe instead of learning to cast cruciatus you should learn to try to cast it and have it not work. Will Mulciber keep cruciating you, if you're trying? Would that be worth it to you, not to cast it yourself?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-30 05:02 pm (UTC)But unfortunately, that's isn't one of my choices.
Casting the cardinal curses is a condition of my employment. That was made clear during the interview when he told me that I had to get a Curse registration licence to even be considered for the position. If I can't (or won't) cast it, I have not the smallest doubt that he will sack me, probably within the week. He seems vindictive enough to prevent me from getting any other position in the Ministry anywhere under his jurisdiction. I could lose all my sources of information, which would be a huge blow to the Order.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-30 06:58 pm (UTC)I spent a long time discussing what you call option 2 with the people at Moddey Dhoo. Kingsley and Frank talked about what they call 'ethical flowcharts' in the Auror training they underwent, learning to see the sometimes split-second decisions necessary to be made in terms of either/or, with the goal of causing the least amount of harm possible for the greatest amount of gain.
Speaking with Fu Lee was surprisingly helpful, too. The man's an expert at military tactics and strategy, as well as knowledgeable about some Eastern disciplines that might help. He told me about an Eastern martial art called judo, where you use an opponent's weight (usually a tactical advantage in a fight) against them. This dovetailed with what Terry talked to me about: using distraction and subterfuge outsmart your enemy, in order to avoid doing what you don't want to do. An example: Mulciber sent me a message telling me his chair was uncomfortable and ordering me to swap chairs. So I put a hex on my own chair so that it leans to the side if anyone but me sits in it, and I offered him a chair from one of the spare offices. That satisfied him, and I was able to keep my own chair.
In other words, I'll end up doing what I hate a lot less if I can manage to outwit him.
Another reason I don't want to quit is that I want to protect both my coworkers and the people over whom this department has jurisdiction. (He's already asked why we bother feeding parasites like squibs, for example.) If I can get him to like me and trust me, there's a hope I can buffer his worst tendencies.