The Afterlife (was Re: Of Sorting and Snape)

[Judy]

No: HPFGUIDX 175852

Adam (Prep0strus) proposed a lot of ideas about the afterlife in the 
Potterverse, and asked how these different forms of the afterlife fit 
together.

Before I respond, let me first say that for someone who claims she 
will never bring a character back to life, JKR seems to have an awful 
lot of forms of life-after-death.

Ok, here are my comments on these various forms of afterlife:

Ghosts -- these seem to me to BE the actual person, except the person 
is now devoid of a body, and thus can not eat and do other physical 
things. Ghosts seem very much stuck in the situation they were in 
when they died (perhaps with the exception of the Fat Friar, who 
seems happy rather than stuck.) As I said previously, I would really 
like to have seen at least one ghost "move on." (And, if ghosts can 
never move on, Hogwarts is going to get quite crowded with them over 
time.)

The Resurrection Stone:  This seems to summon something almost 
exactly like a ghost, except that the person summoned HAS moved on, 
and therefore may appear in a healed form that a ghost would not 
have. I would assume that you can not use the Resurrection Stone to 
summon someone who is already a ghost; instead you would just go talk 
to the ghost. It's unclear to me why, in the "Three Brothers" story, 
the woman who was summoned back was unhappy, but Harry's loved ones 
are not unhappy. Perhaps the woman in the story was unhappy because 
she had been summoned back for a less noble reason, or because she 
wasn't just summoned back briefly, as were Harry's loved ones?  


The Wand Regurgitation from GoF:  JKR has said that these 
were "echos" of the people killed. My interpretation is that these 
were not souls, but that rather the wand had a sort of memory of each 
person it had killed. Therefore, when the wand regurgitated its 
spells, the "echos" acted as the original people had.  However, like 
an echo, these "regurgitations" faded away very quickly; that's what 
I see as the reason they drifted away. I would expect that there 
would be no real connection between these echos and the actual souls 
in the afterlife, just as a recording of a voice has no real 
connection with the person whose voice was recorded.  Therefore, when 
Harry summoned his parents with Resurrection Stone, I would not 
expect them to remember seeing him in the graveyard three years 
earlier. 

The Diary Horcrux:  This had so much of Voldemort (his memories and a 
piece of his soul), that I would expect it to become a real person if 
Ginny had died and Tom had fully escaped from the Diary.  However, I 
don't see this version of Tom Riddle then going on to compete with 
Voldemort. Instead, I would expect it and Vapor!Mort to merge.  (I 
think JKR said something that led me to believe that this merger 
would happen, but I don't remember what.)  I do not think this would 
repair Voldemort's soul, however. Instead, his soul would still be 
fragmented, just both fragments would be in the same body.

Other Horcruxes: These seem to have personalities, as we saw when the 
Locket taunted Ron. However, I'm not sure they contain the same 
amount of information as the Diary, so I don't know if they could 
turn into a real person the way Diary!Riddle almost did. 

Portraits and Photos:  Now, the ways these are presented just don't 
seem consistent to me. At first, I thought wizarding photos were just 
like a silent movie – they showed the movement that the subjects of 
the picture showed at the time that the photo was taken, but didn't 
have any feelings, intelligence, etc.  And, most of the time, photos 
are presented that way. When Hagrid gets a photo album of pictures 
for Harry, the pictures of Harry's parents wave, as James & Lily were 
presumably doing when the pictures were taken, but don't point to 
Harry, mouth "we love you", hold out their arms to him, cry, or do 
anything else that you'd expect parents to do upon seeing their child 
for the first time in a decade. On the other hand, there are times 
when photos act like they have feelings (Percy's girlfriend's photo 
tries to hide behind the frame when she gets damaged by water), or 
even interact with the real world (the people in the photo of the 
Order move along when Moody tells them "Budge up.") I can't come up 
with a consistent theory of photos from this.

Portraits have similar problems. There were actually a lot of 
arguments, back before Book 5 came out, about whether the portrait of 
the Fat Lady had feelings and suffered when Sirius slashed her 
picture.  JKR implied, sometime around then, that the portraits 
didn't have feelings.  So, I assumed that portraits were like very 
simple computer simulations – they acted similar to how the person 
acted during life, could answer questions about at least some things 
that the person knew during life, and could even move simple messages 
from place to place, but didn't have thoughts or feelings, nor 
contain any of the actual person's soul. I assumed that portraits 
would have little or no ability to adapt to how the world had changed 
since their deaths.  But in Book 7, we see Dumbledore's portrait 
weighing information, making decisions, and giving advice (or even 
orders.)  The portrait seemed almost like a two-dimensional 
Dumbledore, acquiring new information and responding to it.  And, 
Adam, I agree completely that if portraits could do this, you'd 
expect everyone to want a portrait of every person they ever cared 
about, and Harry would have a whole portrait gallery by now. (I liked 
your "I'll always be with you ... in the den" line!) So, I can't come 
up with a workable theory of portraits, either.

I see ghosts, people summoned by the Resurrection Stone, and 
Horcruxes to contain souls (or soul pieces, in the case of Horcruxes.)
Therefore, I would expect that a person could not have two or more of 
these forms at the same time. Photos, portraits, and wand "echos" I 
see as not containing any part of the person's soul. So, a ghost 
could talk to his own portrait, if he wanted to, for example. 

--JudySerenity, knowing that she is speculating here.