Blood

Abstract

The first time Harry actually sees Voldemort it is as a hooded figure in the forest feeding on a wounded Unicorn’s blood (Stone 187). At that time Voldemort had usurped Quirrell’s (the stammering teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts) body, his face manifest on the other side of Quirrell’s head. Chamber is about the opening of subterranean vaults and releasing the long dead (undead?) dark forces within. Harry hears the unleashed dark force (a Basilisk, it turns out eventually) slithering through the walls of Hogwarts and muttering: ‘...I smell blood...I SMELL BLOOD!’ (Chamber 105). In Prisoner there are the Dementors, who, as Lupin (the new teacher of Defence Against Dark Arts) explains, suck — literally, it turns out, with their mouths — out human happiness and hope: ‘If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself — soulless and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life’ (Prisoner 140). The Dementors, who are spiritually akin to Voldemort, significantly make their victims like themselves. Near the culminating confrontation in Goblet, Voldemort brings himself to full strength from something like ‘a crouched human child’, almost helpless. To do this he gets his slave Wormtail to drop him in a cauldron, and add the ‘Bone of thy father’ (cemetery dust), the ‘Flesh of the servant’ (Wormwood’s hand, chopped off), and ‘Blood of the enemy’ (a phial of Harry’s blood) for a miraculous transformation into wholeness (Goblet 556–7).