Hey everyone,
Welcome to another installment of Harry Potter Theory. In this video, we’re going to be discussing Severus Snape and his knack for creating all sorts of spells.
Last week I made a video where I explained, in-depth, each of the 7 spells that Snape was responsible for creating. This list included the toenail growing hex- which causes the victims toenails to grow alarmingly fast, langlock - which affixes the victims tongue to the roof of their mouth, the muffliato charm - which fills the ears of anyone nearby with an unidentifiable buzzing, levicorpus, which lifts the victims body in to the air, liberacorpus- which drops them out of the air, vulnera sanentur, which heals wounds inflicted by sectumsempra, and lastly, and perhaps most importantly, sectumsempra, which is a vicious dark curse that acts like an invisible sword, causing lacerations, haemorrhaging and cuts upon it’s target.
When Harry first takes Slughorns potion class, he is without a textbook, he’s then instructed by Slughorn to go and find a spare textbook in the classroom. It’s at this time that Harry finds Snapes old copy of‘Advanced Potion Making’. When he opened the textbook he first saw written inside:
“This book is the property of the Half Blood Prince”
Harry uses the book for quite some time, as for each and every one of Slughorn’s lessons, the book provided easier and clearer instructions that he could follow. The book was like having cheat codes to all of the potions lessons. But inside the book was not just advice on how to make potions or perfect existing spells, there were also spells written inside that were totally new to Harry. These were spells that he had never seen or heard of- and the reason that noone knew about them was because they were invented by Snape.
Spell creation isn’t ever properly addressed in the Harry Potter books and films - it’s definitely a bit of a grey area. Why some witches and wizards seem to be able to create their own spells, and some can’t, is left entirely unclear. While I was initially of the impression that it was a skill reserved for the immensely talented and dedicated, I then remembered that the famous fraudster Gilderoy Lockhart was also able to produce his own spell. Either he was extremely lucky, or Lockhart was actually quite talented underneath all of that vanity. Lockhart’s spell resembled the dark mark in that it projected a glowing holographic image in to the sky, but instead of the dark mark, it displayed Lockharts cheesey grin.
But, of all of the witches and wizards that we’re introduced to, Snape appears to have the most impressive portfolio of spell creation. So, how did he do it? How does he create spells?
We know Snape as the cold, calculated professor that haunts Harry for most of his time at the school. But Snape is actually one of the most diverse characters in the series - haunted by the actions of his past and his troubled childhood. Snape was the potions master at Hogwarts for a whopping 15 years, and his personal copy of ‘advanced potion making’ is just another signifier that snape was more devoted to his work in potion making than anyone else. It’s his passion. In the Philosopher’s Stone, he says the following to his Potions class:
"...I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of...the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses...I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death..."
What Snape is really saying here is that, if you have enough talent and dedication, you can really do anything with potions. We know that Snape makes improvements on the potions recipes in his book while he was a student at the school, and this directly implies that he liked to experiment- he liked to do things his own way. This was how he was able to create potions and spells in the most efficient way possible.
In this video, we’re going to be diving in and tackling the question 'how are spells created?'. We will also be addressing how Snape made Sectumsempra.
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