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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.
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.Teddy Nott is incre
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) 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.
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.)
Not that I think Percy would do that.
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.
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.
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.
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) 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.
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.)
Not that I think Percy would do that.
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.
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.