Tom Riddle and the Diary!Horcrux

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 161268

> Mike now:
> Two things come out of this Lupin quote. First, memories reside in 
> the soul and, second, your sense of *self* comes from your soul. 
> Both of theses are important to the Diary Horcrux. <snip>

Carol responds:
If memories reside in the soul, how is it that Snape and Dumbledore
take them out of their minds (brains), with no soul piece involved?
You don't have to split your soul (by commiting murder) to remove a
memory, but you do have to split your soul to detach a piece of soul
to encase in a Horcrux. It's altogether a different sort of thing. Tom
Riddle could have placed a memory or memories of himself at sixteen in
the diary for 1943 months or even years before he made it into a
Horcrux encasing a soul bit. (The diary was already, as Dumbledore
said, valuable to Tom because it proved that he was the Heir of
Slytherin. and that proof was in his memories, not in the soul bit
that anchored his core soul to the earth.)

More canon evidence that memories are in the mind and not in the soul:
Legilimency and Occlumency--the "reading" and blocking of thoughts and
memories--both include the Latin root "mens," meaning "mind." Snape
expels memories from Harry's mind, not from his soul, with the
Legili*mens* spell, just as we see DD and Snape removing thoughts from
their minds (brains).

The Unspeakables study the mysteries of mind and thought by studying
the pickled brains in the DoM. (Those who are interested in the *soul*
no doubt study what's beyond the Veil in the Death Chamber.) We see
tentacles of thought or memory trailing from the brain that attacks
Ron: "[I]t soared toward Ron, spinning as it came, and what looked
like ribbons of moving images flew from it, unravelling like rolls of
film." A few sentences later, the narrator refers to these "ribbons"
as "tentacles of thought" (OoP Am. ed. 798).

Later, Madam Pomfrey says that "thoughts could leave deeper scarring
than almost anything else" (though she's Obliviated the memories
transferred to Ron's arms with Dr. Ubbly's Oblivious Unction, the
potion equivalent of a Memory Charm).

Altogether, I'd say it's pretty clear that thoughts and memories
reside in the brain, not the soul, and the diary could have contained
Pensieve-style memories of Tom's fifth year (at least one of them
specifically dated) before it ever became a Horcrux. That the memories
date from 1943 in no way proves that the diary became a Horcrux at
that early date.

Carol, still sure that Tom could not create a Horcrux until some time
after he talked to Slughorn and that he did not go to Little Hangleton
with the intention of creating one