The Opposite of a Horcrux - Lily, DD, Harry's eyes

[delwynmarch]

No: HPFGUIDX 137502

The creation of a Horcrux.

When a wizard murders someone, his soul is ripped apart. He can then
take advantage of this ripping to create a Horcrux, the wickedest of
all magical inventions, an artifact in which he stores the ripped part
of his soul in order to grant himself a degenerate form of
immortality. This is Dark Magic at its highest, since it involves at
least 2 absolute evils: the murdering of another human being, and the
cutting apart of one's soul.

I've been wondering if there exists an opposite action: the creation
of the Opposite of a Horcrux. Let's review what this would include.

1. Creating a Horcrux necessitates a murder, the deliberate and
unjustified taking of someone else's life. One opposite of this could
be the protection of someone else's life at the expense of one's own
life. In other words: self-sacrifice to save another life.

2. Creating a Horcrux necessitates to cut one's soul in two parts.
This is evil, as DD told us, because a soul is supposed to remain
whole, so it can't be part of the creation of the Opposite of a
Horcrux. One opposite of cutting something in half, though, is adding
something. Murder rips a soul apart. Maybe sacrificing oneself to save
someone else adds something to someone's soul, maybe it enlarges
someone's soul? And maybe this additional part could then be freely
transplanted into something else, since it isn't an original part of
the soul. Or maybe it is a copy, or an imprint, of the soul, that is
created, and that is then available for use for good purposes through
Love Magic. Something like a faint ghost, but borne out of sacrifice
instead of fear.

3. Creating a Horcrux is the epitome of Dark Magic. According to DD
again, the opposite of Dark Magic is Love. So the creation of the
Opposite of a Horcrux would be made possible by the use of Love Magic.
This is apparently a little-explored area of magic. But we know that
there is a room in the DoM where they study Love. Maybe they
discovered how to create the Opposite of a Horcrux there?

4. The goal of the creation of a Horcrux is to gain some twisted
version of immortality for oneself. The goal of the creation of the
Opposite of a Horcrux would be to protect someone else, to do good to
someone else. I don't think that the person who is saved by the
self-sacrifice and the person who gets the protection of the Opposite
of a Horcrux have to be the same. Just like the murder doesn't need to
be related to the Horcrux, I don't think the self-sacrifice and the
Opposite of a Horcrux have to be related. One can kill a perfect
stranger and create a Horcrux. Similarly, one could save a perfect
stranger at the price of one's own life, and be able to create an
Opposite of a Horcrux for someone else.

So maybe there exists a magical process that is the opposite of the
creation of a Horcrux. It is based on someone sacrificing themselves,
their own life, to protect another life. This sacrifice adds something
positive to the soul of the person who sacrifices themselves. This
additional part can then be transferred, with the use of Love Magic,
into something or someone, as a protection¸¸.

A Horcrux is eminently selfish: killing someone else to ensure one's
immortality. The Opposite of a Horcrux would be eminently selfless:
sacrificing one's life to ensure someone else's survival, to protect
someone else.

A Horcrux is the wickedest of all Dark Magic artifacts. The Opposite
of a Horcrux would be the most beautiful of all Love Magic artifacts.

Side note: the Opposite of a Horcrux is at the basis of Christianity:
Jesus gave his life so we could live. Of course, the Opposite of a
Horcrux and the Atonement are not on the same level at all, because
Christ gave his perfect, divine life, to grant us all eternal life,
while the Opposite of a Horcrux requires "only" an imperfect life and
grants only a little more physical survival or protection, not eternal
life. But the *principle* is the same: someone sacrificing themselves
so someone else can live and/or be blessed.

---

Those points make it highly possible that Lily Potter did indeed
create the Opposite of a Horcrux, and stored this highly Good Magical
artifact into Harry himself, as a protection against immediate mortal
dangers.

Knowing Lily, it is very possible that she explored Love Magic. We
know that Lily is supposed to have had a great heart, to have been
good at Potions, to have had a wand that was good for Charm work, and
that she was Head Girl, which implies that she must have been a good
student overall. So it is possible that in her short career Lily
discovered much about Love Magic and that she decided to use it to
advance the cause she was fighting for.

The protection she gave Harry has come into effect several times already.

* Its main purpose was to protect Baby!Harry from LV, of course. It
made the AK rebound.

* Quirrell, who hosted LV, was unable to hold Harry. A direct
consequence of Lily's protection, according to DD.

* I think Harry being able to resist the Imperius Curse so easily is
also a result of this protection. The voice that tells him to resist
it could be his mother's. The Imperius Curse is very Dark Magic, it is
very dangerous, it would make sense that Lily's Opposite of a Horcrux
would kick in when Harry would be subjected to such a potentially
life-threatening Curse.

* Harry's Patronus was Prongs even before Harry knew about Prongs
being his father. It is very possible that Lily's Patronus was her
husband's Animagus form (just like Tonks's new Patronus is Lupin's
werewolf form), and that her Patronus was initially transferred to
Harry. I will be very interested to see if Harry develops a new
Patronus in Book 7 - his *own* Patronus this time.

* There is the little episode about Uncle Vernon strangling Harry to
the point of suffocation, and an unknown force making him drop Harry.
This could be accidental magic, like all those incidents that happened
in Harry's childhood, but the way it is described makes me wonder if
it wasn't something else.

* There's also the possession episode in the MoM. It is supposed to be
love for Sirius which prevented LV from possessing Harry, but I don't
see how that love *in itself* could have this much power. Harry can't
be the first person who loved someone else that much and who thought
of them when feeling like about to die, so if loving someone was
enough to resist possession by LV, I think LV would have been expelled
from most bodies he ever tried to possess and he would know about this
phenomenon by now. What I think might have happened is that Harry
feeling love for his godfather resonated with the Opposite of a
Horcrux in him. Harry's love was somehow multiplied by the piece of
Love Magic in him, and that's what overwhelmed LV.

* I wonder if the Gleam in DD's eyes in GoF isn't due to the fact that
LV transferred a bit of Lily's soul into himself, he acquired a piece
of Love Magic for himself. This could seriously mess him up and
interfere with his abilities at some crucial moment, and could justify
DD thinking of it as a victory, even though it deprived Harry of his
special protection.

There's also the little thing about Harry vaguely remembering about
Tom Riddle. It doesn't have anything to do with any kind of
protection, but it could be a side effect of Lily transferring a bit
of herself in Harry. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if DD had
told Lily about Voldemort's true identity and his past - or if Lily
had discovered this on her own, smart girl that she was. Lily is
supposed to have had a big compassionate heart, so she might have felt
pity and compassion for Baby Tom, for what was done to him, especially
once she herself became a mother. This could explain why Harry had an
instinctive positive reaction to the name Tom Riddle (he felt as
though Tom was an old friend).

In short, I wonder if all those people who have argued for eons that
Lily somehow transferred a bit of herself into Harry when she
sacrificed herself to save him weren't right on target, and if the
discovery of Horcruxes wasn't the last piece of info we needed to put
everything together as to what she did and how.

---

Another person I suspect might have created an Opposite of a Horcrux
is DD.

1. His death protected two people: Draco, and Snape. DD might have
been able to save himself, but at least one of the other two would
have died. So by sacrificing himself, DD saved at least one other life.

2. I believe DD did this out of love. DD loved Harry, he loved him so
much that he jeopardized his great plan to spare the boy some
suffering. So I cannot imagine that he would abandon Harry before
having finished to train him properly, before having told him about
the other Horcruxes, about how to destroy a Horcrux, and so on, not
without a *very good* reason. The ONLY good enough reason I can come
up with is Love: Love for someone else. Harry isn't the only person DD
loved, far from it. I'm pretty sure DD loved Draco too. And if it came
to Harry's training vs Draco's life, I can imagine that DD would
choose Draco's life. 

3. The question of course then becomes: what did DD choose as his
Opposite of a Horcrux? Harry? Draco? Fawkes? Something else?
Personally, I would go for Harry, because Harry *needs* it more than
anyone else. A case could be made for Draco needing it badly too, but
considering how little of an influence Lily's soul *seems* to have on
Harry, I'd say that DD wouldn't want to risk wasting his piece of soul
on someone who wouldn't be willing to use it. And if Draco doesn't
want to use it, then he doesn't deserve the protection that maybe goes
with it either.

Moreover, I can see pieces of canon that would seem to confirm that
Harry was indeed chosen. During DD's funeral, Harry once or twice has
very funny flashes about how DD would react to what is going on, and
he wonders what's "wrong" with him. Maybe what's wrong with him is in
fact very right: maybe he's got a piece of DD's enlarged soul in him?
Or an imprint of DD's soul, or something like that.

I wonder how this could play out. First of all, did DD create this
Opposite of a Horcrux to protect Harry, like Lily did, or did he do it
with another goal in mind? Did he do it as a way to keep teaching
Harry maybe? Or as a way to transfer some of his powers to Harry? Or
simply as a way to make Harry even more magically powerful than he
already was on his own?

---

Something that might be related to this Opposite of a Horcrux business
is Harry's eyes. Everyone in the books keeps going on about how Harry
has got his mother's eyes. This in itself is not surprising at all,
it's genetics. So there must be another reason people insist so much
on it. One possibility, as many have suggested before, is that Lily's
eyes were special, and that by inheriting them Harry also inherited
their capacity. If that's the case, I just wish people *told* Harry
what was so special about his mother's eyes, instead of hoping he'll
find out on his own.

Another possibility is that Harry did not *always* have his mother's
eyes. Maybe Harry was born with his father's eyes, or other eyes
altogether, and then suddenly acquired his mother's eyes. When she
died maybe? People who would have known Harry as a baby would
undoubtedly be shocked to see him sporting Lily's eyes now.

As for why Lily's eyes would have been transplanted unto her son, this
could be a side effect of the creation of the Opposite of a Horcrux.
We know that losing parts of his soul modified LV's appearance, as
though by losing parts of his soul he also lost part of his physical
substance. Could the opposite be true also? By transferring a part of
her soul into Harry, or an imprint of it, did Lily also transfer a
part of her physical substance into him - her eyes?

And if so, what did DD transfer into Harry? It can't be anything
obvious, because nobody, not even Harry himself, noticed anything
different about his body, his substance. So what could it be? Maybe it
is a special power that Harry will discover when he needs it? Maybe
Legilimency and/or Occlumency? Or something else entirely? Or will
Harry someday notice how strangely shaped his new scar on his knee is
:-) ?

I'd love any input on those ideas. Criticisms are more than welcome,
and canon backups (if there are any other than those I mentioned) too.
Thanks in advance.

Del