Believing Harry is not a Horcrux

[saraquel_omphale]

No: HPFGUIDX 139942

Hi Geoff:

> Geoff originally wrote:
>It's the structure where I may differ. As a Christian, I accept
>the concept of "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with
>all your mind and with all your soul".
>To that end, I see the transfer of powers and memories that you
>list as being intellectual - i.e. of the mind. I do not see them as
>being to do with the soul and thus do not imagine bits and pieces of
>Voldemort's soul moving over to Harry.

>Saraquel replied:
>you appear to me, to be disagreeing with the horcrux idea
> because you personally don't like it. Was that what you meant?

>Geoff replied:
>First of all, I have not disagreed with the idea of a Horcrux; what 
>i have done is to express my own conviction that Harry is not one. 
>Let me return to that later.

Saraquel:
First, I think my post was somewhat ambiguous as to what I was 
questioning, for which I apologise. The idea that I was really 
interested in was about whether the soul is different to the 
mind/intellect/personality/Psyche. (let's use the word psyche here, 
although I must admit, I don't know the full implications of that 
word.) If, in JKRs world, it is not the psyche, then, what is it?  A 
container perhaps? What is it's nature/purpose?  It is this question 
which has puzzled me when thinking about the soul.  

If the soul is greater (for want of a better word) than the psyche, 
then what is the nature of that greatness, and is there any evidence 
in canon that can point to that? For the soul, (in the world of the 
books rather than in Christian belief) to be just a container seems 
to me to be doing it an even greater disservice than equating it 
with the psyche.

When I looked at the evidence, it seemed I could only find canon to 
support the Psyche theory.  What would really interest me is if 
someone could look at it with a different pair of eyes and interpret 
what is there in a different way.  

I do agree with you, that it simply being the psyche seems somehow 
inadequate, and I hope that JKR will reveal to us in book 7, that 
her interpretation of soul has qualities of the numinous.  Maybe we 
will see this when Harry destroys a Horcrux, or more likely we will 
see it in the final showdown. However, my personal disappointment is 
not the issue here, I'm trying to get a feel for how JKR has 
interpreted the soul and my original post on the subject has 
definitely helped me, at least, to an easier understanding of the 
whole issue.

Much, but not all, of what I am now going to write was in  my 
original post 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/139828 but I 
shall address your points so that we have stuff all in one place, 
with the points taken individually.


>Geoff wrote:
>I believe that our whole being reflects our personality but
>after death, it is our soul which will continue into "the next great
>adventure".

Saraquel:
>From what Luna says to Harry at the end of OotP, and from the 
whispering which Harry hears beyond the veil, it would appear that 
the mind (originating the words/sounds) and some sort of body 
(whispering them) is also in evidence beyond the veil. I do think 
that the body is separate, but this topic is covered by me in 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/139763 

>Geoff wrote:
>We do not know precisely what form a Horcrux takes. Is it tangible? 
>Is it invisible? How do we know that it is there? I have a mental 
>vision of it being like a piece of A4 paper which is being torn 
>into smaller bits; a silly idea but it is one that has stuck with 
>me. As a mathematician myself, I would agree with those who have 
>suggested that it doesn't divide itself neatly into fractions of 
>the whole.

Saraquel:
I think we need to distinguish between a horcrux-as-container and 
the actual soul fragment.  I'm not going to talk about how the 
horcrux is made, only about the soul. I had the image of a little 
chip of rock :-), but that has now changed quite dramatically.  
Let's look at the description Voldemort gives to the DEs in GoF of 
the time after GH, when he was bodiless.

UK ed, p566 and 567 
"Aaah 
 pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me 
for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than 
the meanest ghost 
 but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do 
not know 
 <snip> Nevertheless, I was as powerless as the weakest 
creature alive, and without the means to help myself 
 for I had no 
body, and every spell that might have helped me, required the use of 
a wand
 I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, 
second by second, to exist 
"
Then further down the page. "I sometimes inhabited animals <snip> 
but I was little better off inside them than as pure spirit, for 
their bodies were ill-adapted to perform magic 
 and my possession 
of them shortened their lives 
"

He remembers only forcing himself – this implies to me that he had 
his mind, his will and his memory (he could remember spells) still 
intact. The pain beyond pain, could imply emotions, but maybe that 
was only referring to the process of being ripped from his body. 
However, I think how he describes the whole experience implies that 
emotions were present.

In the first part of the quote he calls himself – less than spirit, 
and later uses the expression pure spirit.  I interpreted that as 
JKR trying to imply here that he is having difficulty describing 
what form he was in.  Normally, our body defines our form for us, 
but without that, what form (in terms of the familiar three 
dimensions) would we describe our psyche as having?  I don't think 
it exists as a 3 dimensional form.  He says he is less than a ghost, 
I took that to mean that he does not even have a ghostly body.

His having to will himself to exist at every second, I think, is the 
key phrase to interpret here. I took that to mean that he was all 
the time trying to keep a sense of himself, a sense of identity.  He 
was having to pull together the wisps, for want of a better word of 
thoughts and feelings which were floating around in the ether.  Yes, 
I agree with Voldemort – it's bloody hard to describe what it might 
be like!  

The words, spirit and pure spirit, conjure up a vision of a gas, 
rather than a solid.  Ceridwen posted something up-thread about the 
soul being more gas like in structure.  Although I don't feel that 
the thing Voldemort is describing has any physical component at all, 
and that is why he finds it so difficult to describe.

>Geoff wrote:
>I have been exercised over the question of what happened to
>Voldemort's remaining fragment when he was disembodied at Godric's
>Hollow. Dumbledore's comment, quoted above, seems to suggest that it
>remained within him which again raises the question of how tangible
>is a soul? Which is also an interesting question within the real
>world.

>Were it not for Dumbledore's comment and the fact that we are told 
>in POA that a person without a soul is effectively an empty shell, I
>would lean to the idea that Voldemort lost his last soul fragment at
>this point - but not to Harry. He is certainly a person who could
>truly be described as soulless.

Saraquel:
This part of your post really interests me. I can't separate soul 
and psyche as you would like to do, but find yourself unable by 
canon.  To me, the core of who we are, defining that as soul, is 
essential to any sort of experience of being alive.  

If we look at the description of what happens to someone whose soul 
is sucked out, 
PoA p183 (Lupin) "You can exist without your soul, you know, as long 
as your brain and heart are still working.  But you'll have no sense 
of self any more, no memory, no 
 anything.  There's no chance at 
all of recovery.  You'll just – exist. As an empty shell."

Here, I think it's clear that with your soul goes all thought and 
feeling.  I interpreted that to mean that the heart and brain were 
needed to keep the body going, but the brain is not being used 
creatively in any way.  So, if I'm right – I think there is some 
very small marginal room for interpretation over the use of the 
brain to interpret that thought still exists, but "no anything' 
would seem to contradict that – when the soul goes, psyche goes with 
it.

So yes, Voldemort is not soulless, but I do agree with you in terms 
of the spirit of the word. <g> Language is so hopeless at expressing 
these non-concrete things, don't you think?

>Geoff wrote:
>He is obsessed with power, he is obsessed with killing Harry, he 
>shows no love or compassion or feeling for anyone else.

Saraquel:
Following through on my train of thought about the soul/psyche being 
non physical, then tearing it would not necessarily mean measurable 
fragments.  More, split and fragmented sense of self/personality.  
Introducing conflicting and disjointed sense of self – perhaps 
multiple personality (Here, I'm just going to jump onto a small 
hobbyhorse of mine – the term schizophrenia here is *not* 
appropriate.  Hearing voices etc is very different from split 
personality.  In schizophrenia, the individual is trying to cope 
with a perceived reality of the world that differs from those around 
them.) This presumably is what would happen when you murder someone –
 you have to separate the moral judgement from the impulse to murder 
in order to say to yourself that what you have done is OK, or you 
are left with terrible guilt, which is a sign of conflict.

If a Horcrux is made by siphoning off a part of one's identity, then 
the sense of identity gets more and more limited.  This is clearly 
what we have seen in the case of Voldemort.  Tom Riddle presents as 
a much fuller, rounder personality (to me anyway) than the later 
Voldemort, whom I have always seen as a rather cardboard cut-out 
figure. A case can be made for Voldemort having placed anything soft 
in his character, anything that might have prompted humanity of 
feeling, within his horcruxes, leaving himself only the traits that 
you described above.  

He has so limited his perceptions, that he possibly no longer has 
even the capacity to recognise the significance of Harry's power of 
wholeness and love.

>Geoff wrote:
>But what of Harry? Why do I not believe that he is a Horcrux? 
>Because I believe that it flies in the face of Dumbledore's now 
>famous comment:
>"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more 
>than our abilities." (COS "Dobby's Reward" p.245 UK edition)
<snip>
>If Harry is indeed a Horcrux than we know that he will have to die 
>in order for Voldemort to be destroyed once and for all.

Saraquel:
When I thought of the soul as something physical, I too thought 
Harry could not be a horcrux (there were a lot of other reasons 
too).  But now I'm thinking of the soul in terms of psyche, I'm not 
so sure.  And the reason only magnifies and enhances the importance 
of choice.  If the soul is manifested as sense of self and 
personality, then by making choices we can renounce, in effect 
destroy, the impulses to do evil.  It actually makes the case for 
Harry being some sort of horcrux quite appealing, in that, in order 
to destroy Voldemort's last horcrux he has to change himself and 
make the choice of good over evil and renounce his current thirst 
for vengeance.  So I find this quite liberating, because, like you, 
I want Harry to survive book 7!

Just a few thoughts that have occurred to me whilst constructing 
this post.  I personally think it is clear that JKR is including the 
psyche in her definition of soul.  But that the soul can be more 
than the sum of its parts is also possible.  The power of love that 
DD talks of, which I have always thought of as divine love, is 
within Harry.  Lily also found it in herself when she sacrificed her 
life.  We are told by JKR that all Lily did was step in front of 
Harry, she did not cast any spells.  So either she drew that love to 
her, or it existed within her.  If it did exist within her, then I 
reckon the soul is the place where it would be, or even, to prevent 
us from falling into soul=container, (which both of us hate) the 
soul *is* divine love.  So maybe the soul in the books is more than 
just the psyche, maybe it is also that spark of divine being – I 
really hope so :-)

Saraquel