What turned me on to this concept was whilst feeling under the weather and deciding to watch my collection of Babylon 5 DVD’s. Strange the ideas you get when watching a space opera and have an addled slightly baking brain, hm? Probably should be outlawed...
Episode 2 of the first real season is entitled "Soul Hunter, written as all D5 episodes are by J. Michael Straczynski. JMS, as he signs his notes to his fans, felt that this was one of the episodes he hoped would "generate discussions, arguments, even a bar fight or two." One of the races he created which are represented on the station, the Minbari, fear soul hunters, even warning and educating their people from birth actively about them. The Minbari believe that the soul hunter’s method of preservation is true death, for it cuts a soul off from the rest and diminishes the next generation of Minbari.
Soul hunters believe when a person dies, the soul expires into oblivion. However, soul hunters have a prescient attraction to death - if they so choose they can capture and preserve a soul "for the greater good" at the moment it leaves the body. They carry with them a bag full of the souls they have "saved", each in its own glass vessel.
The various other characters on the show take their own stands about this, which of course vary depending on their theological. cultural, and philosophical beliefs about what a soul is. And true to real life, JMS also mentions in his backstory about the episode with fans that he had problems with some members of the production staff having a theological problem with the episode’s content. As he also said, the basic concept goes back to the beginnings of civilization (that your soul can be captured somehow) and includes the issues *behind* the soul...where does it come from, where does it go, does it survive the death of the body, or does it go on. While he admitted the episode was creepy, he was very proud of it nonetheless.
LV at the moment isn’t a harvester of anyone’s soul but his own, but in the present, he views himself as immortal, doesn’t he? Most characters in mythology and literature who believe they achieve or have achieved immortality often begin thinking they are *gods.*
I like seeking what the truth is, from a *philosophical* perspective. This marries with something that DD said in PS/SS when telling Harry that the truth "is a beautiful and terrible thing,and should therefore be treated with great caution." Truth, knowledge and wisdom are all intertwined in philosophy. Many think that applies to just Harry’s related truth’s about why LV tried to *kill* him, and I would submit it applies to everything in the WW society, including the propensity for propaganda displayed by the Ministry through the Daily Prophet. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have seen those Prophet issues way back when? You know, it was a rumor about all of it - did the Ministry influenced Prophet actually publish anything of substance about GH?
Pandering to what people want to think rather than what really *is* promotes deceiving one’s self about reality - this is a major issue in the HP series. Fudge in GoF is a true representation of this with his obvious self denial of LV’s return: the Dursleys and their denial of magic and Harry are a case study of it. DD also mentions that the WW is in denial about how they treat their fellow magical cousins and creatures, and Harry even has to battle this denial in OoP in physical way overtly when Umbridge has him write the line " I will not tell lies" in his own blood. Ok JKR, I get the message -the WW society has a definite problem with reality. :)
The problem with self deception or the denial of reality is that eventually as that condition progresses, 2 things happen: 1) the condition bleeds to other areas and 2) reality and the truth rears its head until denial is no longer possible. The latter is the progression I think I we’re seeing in the books, particularly with HBP. The reality of LV, if he weren’t a wizard and were present in our world today, is that he is a thief and a sadistic serial murderer, probably afflicted with antisocial personality disorder - he is a criminal. There are members of the DE who are going to figure this out as the DE’s start to be affected *themselves* with those close to them at LV’s direction - the Malfoys are one example and my bet is others will be too. It’s a fact that people only change their thoughts or actions when there’s a direct endangerment or incentive. Regulus Black figured it out, and look how far he went?
What if the Ministry had come out with a dossier to the public on LV, including the fact he’s a half blood and not a pureblood - and that his given name is Tom Riddle? It’s not common knowledge those 2 things, are they? Forget listing who the DE’s are, and focus on dumbing this guy down to what he is: a criminal who must be stopped. Part of the reason that the WW at large doesn’t use his given name is that yes, they fear him, but no real information about Tom Riddle has been provided to them to decrease this fear, has it? It doesn’t even appear that anyone (other than DD) has tried to find out about him at all! Instead, they hide behind calling him HWMNBN or YKW and make him less than human, thereby increasing the fear about him. Futhermore, now the Ministry and the Prophet have seemed to have granted Harry, in the effort to make an "equal" with LV, the same kind of notoriety: The Boy Who Lived now matured to The Chosen One in HBP. Compare that to what Harry did when telling his story to the Quibbler - he provided accurate information that started to "shift" perception of Quibbler readers that LV was back and what he is capable of doing.
I have a very hard time with the media in the US when serial criminals are sensationalized by some catchy names like DC Sniper, BTK, the Hillside Strangler, and the Zodiac. It sensationalizes and dehumanizes a criminal in a subconscious way to the point where the rest of the law abiding public is in a panic - if you’d been in DC during the Sniper episode and got caught in 5 hours of rush hour traffic going home when your normal commute was an hour (and this happened several times over a period of 6 weeks for me), you’d understand just how panicked people and officials were. And how rampant rumor was - good lord, the things we heard.
It has been said that lies become rumor -- given enough time, rumor becomes myth -- myth becomes legend and there is always a fragment of truth in legend. I’m of the mind that we’ll see that legend/myth broken in the next book because I think the full truth known to the public, not just Harry and Company, and LV’s defeat are linked.
Notice that the myth is not fed with "Lily died for her son’ with the general population, just that the Potters were killed and Harry lived. All of it seems to be focused around who lived, not how he lived or the others who died. The WW is very, very shallow in this regard, isn’t it? A society which lives in denial cannot long survive without acceptance of the reality, and ultimately, the realization of the truth.
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