Why didn't Voldemort die?

[Cathy Drolet]

No: HPFGUIDX 110347

Naama said:
"So, compared to the phoenix, the snake would symbolise immortality 
achieved through fake dying or cheating death . (vol-de-mort - can be 
translated as thief of death.). This is exactly what happened to Voldemort 
in Godric's Hollow: he lost an external aspect of himself (his body), but 
retained his essential being (some kind of spirit, vapor.. etc.)

Obviously, Voldemort is inatimately linked to snakes, on various levels: 
He is a pareseltongue, he looks like a snake (eyes, shape of the face), 
his ugly!baby self was created by and fed on snake venom, he has a pet snake, 
and possibly the most significant of all: When Harry feels Voldemort rise in 
him (in OoP), he feels him as a snake; when he has the vision of the snake 
attacking Arthur, this is through his connection to Voldemort - and he is 
seeing the world through the snake's eyes!"

DuffyPoo:
This is the strangest thing!  :-0  Last night I was watching a TV show called "The Crow, Stairway to Heaven." (Please bear with me, list-elves, I'm coming to the point!)  Now, I'm not very good with these kind of shows but something in this one just jumped out at me.  The main character is a young man named Draven, who was murdered, along with his girlfriend.  The voice-over the credits of this series says this: "People once believed that when someone dies, A crow carries their soul to the land of the dead, but sometimes something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes,The crow can bring the soul back and put the wrong things right." So this Draven fellow has come back to life, a year after his murder to avenge his and his girlfriend's (Shelly) deaths.  Draven can't be killed by ordinary means (bullets, arrows, falls, etc) because he is neither alive nor dead (Neither here nor there as Nick would say.)

In this particular show, there is another not-quite-dead guy named Mase Reyes (he arranged Draven and Shelly's murders), /who has a huge snake/ around him nearly all the time. (Know anybody else with a big pet snake?)  In this snake appears to live part of this Mase Reyes guy, his evil nature, as, at the end of the show, Reyes' wife kills the snake with a silver coloured knife, which causes Reyes to begin to fade, and then Draven kills Reyes' body with another silver coloured knife.  Now, this Reyes fellow is really dead and gone.  

Back to HP.  Nagini and LV are all bound together as he used Nagin's venom in the potion - along with unicorn blood - to keep himself alive until he was re-birthed.  Was he possessing Nagini when he attacked Arthur?  I posted yesterday: "LV underestimates so much of the old magic, what if the potion he used 'only' gave him a body to house the 'near ghost'?  It didn't actually make him 'mortal' again, he just has a physical flesh house around his nearly ghost soul.  He can hold a wand and perform magic, because he still knows the spells (his memories were not erased), and has a body to hold the wand.  It may explain the "gleam" in DD eye (GoF); he knows the body LV created for himself did not make him mortal again, did not return him to "full strength and power" but is only a shell for his ghost-like self to dwell in and use."  Draven and Reyes' 'souls' lived on in a fleshly body.

Would killing Nagini destroy that part of LV?  Killing his physical body, with GG's sword, will leave nothing but the 'ghost' part that always feared death.  I'm back to "LV as a ghost, only an imprint of himself, a feeble imitation of life, powerless and wandless, unable to ingest a potion to ever make him anything more or less, trapped between here and there, laughable to some degree;  would that be worse than death to LV?"

Now, I'm not saying for a second that JKR is basing her outcome on The Crow TV series.  I'm just saying how odd it was that all of this tied together for me, particularly as I have probably only watched anything like The Crow, a half dozen times.

DuffyPoo...





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