Private Message to Harry
May. 5th, 2015 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alt_linusMarvolo —
I’d best wrap this up and get it to you, as my revising will suffer if I give way to the temptation to excavate further in the caverns of recondite research. You have several splendidly evil things for your villain to choose from, vis-a-vis an unblemished victim and historically-based (or at least legend-based) spells. One of them is bound to do the trick for your narrative.
First, the ever-popular human sacrifice to a dark and vengeful god. Apparently dark and vengeful gods prefer their sacrifices to be comely, chipper, and helpless, if the literature already extant is anything to go by.
Second, legends of esoteric religious orders describe the patriarchs moving into the bodies of chosen acolytes in a ritual referred to as “ascension.” It all sounds quite picturesque, with rigorous meditative practices on the part of master and acolyte alike, and a regimen of bathing the acolyte in the milk of various animals. (Or blood, according to some stories.) However, it does require a cooperative victim, which I don’t think was quite what you wanted in order to build dramatic tension.
Third, there were suggestions that experiments had actually been performed in using young persons as, in essence, spell components. However, this siphoning off of youth and vigor would theoretically work best if the victims were under ten years of age, and I believe that puts it out of the realm of possibility for your bold hero or heroine or whatever you end up going with. (Apparently the purpose of that sort of thing was to restore youth and vigor to an aged person. Perhaps you could threaten the hero or heroine’s younger siblings?)
The most shrouded in mystery, and therefore probably best for your purposes as it allows the greatest liberties to be taken fictionally, is a spell supposedly practiced by certain ancient families in the dim recesses of time. When there was great need for a strong leader to provide continuity in times of threat or turmoil, this method allowed the head of a family to take possession permanently of a younger family member, thereby providing unbroken guidance through troubled times. The references suggest that this spell exacts grave payment from its caster (though, of course, not so grave as that experienced by its subject!) in the form of an inability to bear or sire further offspring when in the new body, thus necessitating the next move be into a nephew, niece, foster child, or some such. It all sounded quite dire, and might be exactly what you need, should you wish a villain with a yen to live forever and a fondness for breeding programs to provide appropriate vessels through the millennia. This is further suited to your purposes in that the references specify that the vessel need not be willing to receive the incoming soul — which lets you build quite a harrowing villain indeed. (Nor does the vessel necessarily need to remain unblemished, though obviously if a villain is going to the trouble to find a nice body to move into, they’d probably take care not to muck it up with too much torture, et cetera.) You can find what references there are under the search term “Succession Rite,” though if you’d like to see the primary sources, it would probably quicker for me to assemble them for you than for you to plow through the stacks in search, unless that’s really the sort of thing you enjoy.
Please do let me know if I might be of any further assistance — though, of course, not until after NEWTS, old bean!
I’d best wrap this up and get it to you, as my revising will suffer if I give way to the temptation to excavate further in the caverns of recondite research. You have several splendidly evil things for your villain to choose from, vis-a-vis an unblemished victim and historically-based (or at least legend-based) spells. One of them is bound to do the trick for your narrative.
First, the ever-popular human sacrifice to a dark and vengeful god. Apparently dark and vengeful gods prefer their sacrifices to be comely, chipper, and helpless, if the literature already extant is anything to go by.
Second, legends of esoteric religious orders describe the patriarchs moving into the bodies of chosen acolytes in a ritual referred to as “ascension.” It all sounds quite picturesque, with rigorous meditative practices on the part of master and acolyte alike, and a regimen of bathing the acolyte in the milk of various animals. (Or blood, according to some stories.) However, it does require a cooperative victim, which I don’t think was quite what you wanted in order to build dramatic tension.
Third, there were suggestions that experiments had actually been performed in using young persons as, in essence, spell components. However, this siphoning off of youth and vigor would theoretically work best if the victims were under ten years of age, and I believe that puts it out of the realm of possibility for your bold hero or heroine or whatever you end up going with. (Apparently the purpose of that sort of thing was to restore youth and vigor to an aged person. Perhaps you could threaten the hero or heroine’s younger siblings?)
The most shrouded in mystery, and therefore probably best for your purposes as it allows the greatest liberties to be taken fictionally, is a spell supposedly practiced by certain ancient families in the dim recesses of time. When there was great need for a strong leader to provide continuity in times of threat or turmoil, this method allowed the head of a family to take possession permanently of a younger family member, thereby providing unbroken guidance through troubled times. The references suggest that this spell exacts grave payment from its caster (though, of course, not so grave as that experienced by its subject!) in the form of an inability to bear or sire further offspring when in the new body, thus necessitating the next move be into a nephew, niece, foster child, or some such. It all sounded quite dire, and might be exactly what you need, should you wish a villain with a yen to live forever and a fondness for breeding programs to provide appropriate vessels through the millennia. This is further suited to your purposes in that the references specify that the vessel need not be willing to receive the incoming soul — which lets you build quite a harrowing villain indeed. (Nor does the vessel necessarily need to remain unblemished, though obviously if a villain is going to the trouble to find a nice body to move into, they’d probably take care not to muck it up with too much torture, et cetera.) You can find what references there are under the search term “Succession Rite,” though if you’d like to see the primary sources, it would probably quicker for me to assemble them for you than for you to plow through the stacks in search, unless that’s really the sort of thing you enjoy.
Please do let me know if I might be of any further assistance — though, of course, not until after NEWTS, old bean!
no subject
on 2015-05-06 03:09 am (UTC)You're brilliant. Thanks.
no subject
on 2015-05-06 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-05-06 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-05-06 03:16 am (UTC)That reminds me, I had a question for him. I should probably write him a note before I forget again. I think all my revising is making me absent-minded.
Thanks again, Moon.