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[alt_pansy]

That book Dolohov showed us in class today was pretty nift. I wonder if it has anything about horcruxes in it?

And did he really mean that bit about reading something so powerful that it would kill you? I mean, how did it ever get written down in the first place if just reading it would make you die like that? I'd imagine thinking it up to begin with would be rather hazardous to one's health.

Comments

[alt_severus]

I do not know what he said, but I can assure you, certain books of Dark magic are indeed very dangerous. There are a number of precautions that can be taken to prevent harm coming to you from reading a sufficiently powerful book, most involving maintaining strict discipline regarding how much you read at one sitting. It was also once common for the Darkest books to be written in mirror-writing, so that you do not read from the book itself but rather by holding a mirror up to the page, which can disrupt the building magical effects. (That technique has fallen out of favour; the prevailing opinion now is that if you are foolish enough to fail to take proper precautions, on your head be it.)

It is not the spells themselves that are the danger — although casting a sufficiently Dark spell without proper preparation and knowledge of the safety precautions is often likely to be fatal — but the concentration of the energies in one place and in such a stagnant fashion; it is one of the reasons why Dark texts often cannot be mass-printed without exceptional precautions, another being that the type can retain the impressions of what it was used to print, to the considerable detriment of other books printed later.

[alt_hermione]

I've read that there are books that actually have a compulsion spell right on them, so the reader simply can't bear to stop reading, even to eat or sleep. So they waste away or they have to learn to do everything one-handed so they can keep reading the book the rest of their lives.

Was it that sort of book?

Why did he want to show you something so dangerous?

[alt_pansy]

It was his copy of the Cruor Invictus. He showed us the glass case, and talked a lot about the protective charms.

Some of us are working on projects with containing and safely handling Dark objects, so it was rather useful to learn about the containment process.