Death Eating, Horcruxes, and Potterverse Souls (was: Sadistic Teachers )

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 148129

> Alla:
> Neri. I have a question for you. 
> Do you think that in "after Horcrux world" the name "Death Eaters" is 
> still significant for thematic reasons or there is really nothing 
> important to be implied from it? "Death Eaters" they are, because 
> they like the name or something like that?

Neri:
This is a very good question. I had so many outlandish speculations
about the Death Eaters and the Dark Mark that now seem to be
completely outdated. I think the most outlandish, which I didn't even
dare to publish, was that the scar on Dumbledore's left knee (the one
that looks like a map of the London Underground) was actually the Dark
Mark. This was based on Dumbledore saying in Karkaroff's trial that
"Snape is now no more a Death Eater than I am". I even tried to prove
that the London Underground map looks like the Dark Mark. Here, take a
look at this map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:London_Underground_Zone_1.svg
and tell me that the Black Line doesn't look like a skull and the
Green/Yellow Line like a snake coming out of its mouth. I wasn't sure
what to make of the fact that the MoM and Diagon Alley seem to be
located in the mouth area, but the general idea was that the Dark Mark
scars are used as some kind of a network to ensure the DEs' connection
to Voldy, and that Snape was able to hack it because he was also
connected with Dumbledore's scar, which Dumbledore himself had burned
on his own knee for exactly that purpose. Or something.

Now, what can we still do with the DEs and the Dark Mark today? How
can we connect them to the darn Horcruxes? Well, probably most of the
DEs had killed somebody, so they have their souls nicely ripped. What
if Voldy made himself their Horcrux? He put their soul parts inside
himself, instead of his own soul parts. This looks like a reasonable
deal – the DEs would be immortal as long as Voldy is alive, not a bad
way to ensure loyalty. The problem with this is that Dumbledore
thought that Lucius never had any idea what the diary really was. 

OK, another speculation. Maybe living without most of your soul makes
you feel so completely and horribly hollow, and you simply must fill
this empty space. So after making the Horcruxes, Voldy became hungry
for souls and consumed some of the DEs' souls, the same way that
Diary!Riddle (who also had only a 1/7 of a soul) feasted on Ginny's
soul. So the DEs, robbed of part of their souls, in turn felt empty,
and they had to suck souls from poor victims. And perhaps the Dark
Mark scars are used as a channel for all this soul consuming.  

Now, let us assume that in the Potterverse, when you are really scared
of something, you lose a tiny part of your soul. This would be
consistent with what we are told about the dementors (at last! It
really annoyed me that there seemed to be no connection between souls
in the Horcruxes story and souls in the dementors story). So dementors
actually feast on souls all the time, but usually in small chunks.
They make you scared and depressed in order to leech on something of
your soul. Only when they get really hungry they suck the whole thing
at once, kind of like eating the whole chicken when you get tired of
the eggs. So the DE's, lacking some of their soul and feeling hungry
and empty, became something like human dementors. This is why they put
a big Dark Mark above the house whenever they kill. Anybody who sees
the Mark get scared, and tiny bits of soul are sucked through the Dark
Mark sign into the scars on the DEs hands.

Of course, this would mean the Death Eaters should have been more
properly called Soul Eaters. But maybe JKR felt that this would be a
giveaway, so she invented the dementors instead. 

Or maybe she just liked the name.


Neri