He is also known to lie to Harry on occasion or to withhold critical information. Dumbledore has been repeatedly shown to be willing to keep secrets for others, especially when they are important secrets. That said, Flamel is famously against sharing information about the Stone. Obviously, public information about the Stone and its capabilities (and limitations) would be possible to be misleading or flat-out wrong: Flamel and his wife have a vested interest in keeping their Stone's capabilities secret and the weaknesses (if any) of their immortality unknown.ĭumbledore, as an alchemist of note and a personal friend of Flamel's, obviously knows more. She has no sources of rare or exclusive knowledge, as she is limited to what is publicly available in the Hogwarts Library (not even the Restricted Section) and booksellers like Flourish & Blotts. Hermione, a Muggleborn, only knows what she could learn from published books. Most of the information Harry gains about the Stone and the Elixir comes from a pair of simple references in library books (stating that Flamel created a Stone, and that it produces the Elixir of Life) and what he is told by Hermione and Dumbledore. It is implied that, lacking Elixir, a drinker will die in short order (days or weeks, at most).īut all of this is only implied, not outright stated, and even if it were outright stated, we couldn't take it as granted. The implications given by reading the first book are that the Elixir needs to be consumed regularly, and that if you consume it you must continue indefinitely to continue living. We don't know for sure if he died the day he ran out of stored elixir, or if he simply began aging again and lived out a normal lifespan afterwards. Ironically, he removes the flaw of death, but the results – Georgiana’s death – are essentially the same as if he hadn’t.Based purely on canon information, we have no way to tell.įollowing the first book, Nicholas Flamel is not mentioned again, so we have no way to tell if he died days, weeks, months, or years after the stone was destroyed. On a more complicated level, he does render Georgiana immortal, since he removes the only thing that makes her mortal and her soul ascends to heaven, where it will live on through eternity. On a basic level, he succeeds in removing the birthmark. In this sense, perhaps Aylmer does achieve his goal. And if a person has already died, then they are in a sense no longer mortal-at least, they can’t die again. This achievement would put him at the pinnacle of science and on a level with God, a position which he does pursue even in his less ambitious attempts at changing nature.įurthermore, one exchange between Georgiana and Aylmer suggests that a poison is in fact an elixir of life, or, as Aylmer says, an “elixir of immortality.” He seems to imply that death brings about some sort of immortality in itself, which corresponds to the Christian view of heaven as a place where souls will forever reside. He sees the birthmark as a mark of mortality, and wants to remove it, which would logically result in immortality. Even though Aylmer claims to believe it would be immoral to create an elixir of life because it would unbalance nature, it seems a distinct possibility that his desire to render his wife immortal is an almost unconscious one. Aylmer and Georgiana discuss the elixir of life, a drink that would make its drinker immortal, multiple times. In Aylmer’s view, it doesn’t seem to matter how perfect Georgiana is-she still has that birthmark, that constant reminder that she’ll die and in death will be degraded to the exact same level as all of nature’s other creations. But while flaws are often thought of in moral terms, the flaw represented by the birthmark can also be seen as a purely mechanical one, a symbol of the fact that humans are flawed in that they are not immortal, in that they are destined to die. The birthmark, in this view, is like nature’s brand on its product – Georgiana – to mark it as flawed. On one level, the birthmark stands for mortality, and Aylmer’s obsession with the mark reflects his obsession with and fear of mortality itself.
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