The Afterlife (was Re: Of Sorting and Snape)

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 175872

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Judy" <judy at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> 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.
> 

You noticed that too, eh? For someone who "isn't going to pull a
Gandalf" Dumbledore had a rather large speaking part in DH!

I agree with your and Geoff's comments about ghosts and those summoned
by the ressurection stone.

I don't count horcruxes as part of an afterlife since their whole
purpose is to anchor their creator to this life. I suppose there are a
number of questions that the text naturally raises about them and then
fails to answer. The one place that they do touch on the afterlife is
the pitiful state of Riddle in the afterlife. Is that due to having
lost so much of his soul to destroyed horcruxes? Or is it due to the
fact that the soul he has left is so riddled (groan) with damage from
the evil he has done and shown no remorse for? Or some of each?

I think of photos, wand echoes, and portraits as examples of an idea
that you sometimes find in science fiction stories. The basic idea is
that the essence of a human soul or personality can be replicated and
given existence independent of the original human being, who in some
cases has died. Most often this is done by making a computer program
that *is* the person in some significant sense. In Frank Hebert's
*Dune* series this was done by copying the deceased (by cloning or an
analog of cloning I suppose) and somehow imbuing the clone with the
original personality creating a "ghola". In David Brin's *Kiln People*
you can buy artificial "clay" human templates and download copies of
your soul into them. You can make multiple copies if you like but each
copy only lasts a day and at the end of the day you upload their
experiences back into your own soul. If you have ever felt that if
only you had three or four of yourself you could make a day go right,
this the the technology for you! Photos, echoes, and portraits in the
Potterverse seem to me to be this kind of copy of a human's essance
with varying degrees of capability. 

The headmaster portraits seem to be nearly full blown copies of the
original in terms of knowledge and experience. Evidently they cannot
do magic so they are almost like eternal, Muggle versions of their
subjects. I wonder if they can communicate with their prototypes in
the afterlife? That would seem to violate the "Gandalf clause" but
then Rowling strikes me as very much the sort of author for whom *any*
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Ken