And totally by accident, Harry wore conquistador outfit, while Susan was dressed up as a human sacrifice. A not-so-subtle hint from the Sidhe?

Heh, it's even in the WoJ compilation:

Ahh, true - BUT the Spanish Conquistadores were trying to wipe out the "savages" who practiced human sacrifice because that was contrary to Catholic dogma. The Spanish were not the ones doing the sacrificing - though one could argue that the numbers of deaths caused by the conquistadores would have been dramatically lower if they had bought into the Aztec/Inca/Maya religions as opposed to doing the whole genocide thing.

All that being said, it seems somehow hypocritical of Jim to have all of Harry's actions micromanaged to the point of him almost blindly following some divine plan when he hammers home to us in the text so often that humans actually have free will. If we get som many occurrences of exposition talking about the merits of free will and the ability to make choices, and then have the whole series as being a human who was herded into making the only possible choices to follow a divine plan will be a serious cop out.

OK - that bit of logic is really good. I like it and it dovetails very nicely with what we've seen. Good work!

Here's another thought. I'm going in the opposite direction of the "lets make a lot of warlocks to spread the White Council too thin" theory). We know that the White Court came up with a plan to rid the world of wizards by getting rid of females who had some talent. The reduction of the available breeding-stock and the long time required to get a wizard from "lucky embryo who has the spark of magic" to "Dresden-Level Battleship on Legs" is exceedingly long. Wizards are very vulnerable to supernatural baddies for most of that time, and for many, longer than Dresden took. Perhaps, this was a White Council, or someone from the White Council working on his own, plan to instill the magical spark a little more widely throughout the population.

Sure, it affects a lot of people badly, and we never saw any evidence that it imparted magical ability to any of its addicts, but what if, for example, a woman was on it while pregnant, the baby would have been exposed to magic from the get-go. In real life, we have heroin and crack babies, in the Dresdenverse, perhaps this was a plan to boost the wizarding population by creating 3Eye babies who, by being essentially bathed in magic from conception, would be much more likely to develop into full-blown wizards at puberty.

Victor could have been the tool to create and distribute the drug in Chicago as an initial test, with national and evetually world-wide distribution following.

If successful, then in 12 years or so, the world would have seen an initial spike in emerging wizards, with more appearing each year. At around 20 years, the White Council would have started swelling appreciably. Also, by that time, with a couple decades worth of addicts getting pregnant and having magic-infused babies, the wizarding community would be exploding in size. It could be like when homosapiens started to get born more and more and the cro-magnon was well on his way to extinction.

At the time, Harry was a non-entity in the wizarding world. But, he was perfectly positioned to take the fall should a Warden catch on that 3Eye was magic-related. Harry was already considered to be a warlock who got lucky at his trial, and the local Warden on the lookout for magical badness, Morgan, was not looking out for magical badness, but was rather looking at Harry waiting for magical baddness to show up. If Victor's sponsor had started 3Eye in, say, Seattle, where there was no Warden presence, once there was a hint of magical badness happening, the Wardens would have descended in force and started looking for the problem. In Chicago, Morgan's presence would have meant that the Wardens would not need to descend and start looking around: if any showed up to help Morgan, they all would have been looking at Harry. This would be, essentially, an early warning system for Victor's sponsor so that when Harry showed up decapitated, or brought before the council to explain, he would know to tell Victor to skip town.

Harry's power rise, successful evasion of Morgan, killing of Victor, imprisonment of the Beckitts, and destruction of the 3Eye messed everything up and probably kick-started Victor's sponsor to change tactics and form the Black Council.

I dunno - its just my theory. Take it for what its worth (and bear in mind I've had quite a few head injuries - I was a clumsy child).

Oh, BTW, someone quoted Vadderung in Changes saying that "no one has used power on that scale in more than a millenia" when referring to the bloodline curse. If thats true, what historical event if Jim pointing at? Could it be the Bubonic plague that reduced the human population by between 25% and 50% from 550 to 700 AD? Could it have been a variant of the spell that was responsible for the first-born male of every family in Egypt being killed on the same night before pharoah freed the slaves that we know of from the Bible? Could it be something else? Just a thought.