Neither Harry nor his Scar is a Horcrux (Was Re: Voldemort's Age)

[Mike]

No: HPFGUIDX 170386

> Jen:
> I'd say it all comes back to the prophecy.  If Harry is marked as
> Voldemort's equal and 'either must die at the hand of the other' 
> that means they should be equitable (except for the 'power the Dark 
> Lord knows not').  As a Horcrux, Harry would be acting as an anchor 
> for Voldemort and keeping him from being killed but Harry wouldn't 
> be equal to him in this way. <snip>

Mike:
If the "marking" incident occurs at GH and involves a soul piece that 
carries with it Voldemort's special powers, that would qualify 
as "mark him as his equal". The connotation I read is that by the 
transferrence of powers Harry now has as much potential to use those 
powers as Voldemort can. 

Yet, Voldemort "marking" Harry as his "equal" is not the same thing 
as them being "equals". The prophecy itself says that Harry 
has "power the Dark Lord knows not", which right there says that 
Harry and LV are not "equals". And Voldemort has developed his powers 
to a degree that Harry may never achieve, some of those powers 
undoubtedly involve dark magic that Harry wouldn't *want* to develop.

As an analogy, there is a race car series where all the participants 
get the same car. They then have time to make whatever adjustments to 
the spoilers and such that they think will give them an edge. 
Likewise, each driver does not have the same talent nor have they all 
learned to drive the same way or have the same experience level.

Voldemort gave Harry the same race car that he drives. But Voldemort 
has had much more time to make adjustments, gathered much more 
experience, learned how far he can push his car and still keep 
racing, and just what his car can do that other cars can't. Harry got 
the car as a baby, he knows none of this stuff, and there are ways 
that Voldemort pushed the envelope with his car that Harry won't even 
try with his own.

But Harry has the ability to see the condition that will cause a 
crash to occur in front of him. Voldemort in his arrogance, doesn't 
think a crash will ever affect his race and therefore ignores any of 
the signs and outright ridicules anybody who thinks someone elses 
crash could ever affect him.



> Carol:
> We know that Horcruxes can be destroyed, as both the diary and
> the ring have been. Why would Harry!Horcrux be any different?

Mike:
This brings up a point where I think JKR is confusing us. On the one 
hand, Dumbledore told us that after Harry defeated the Diary, "That 
particular fragment of soul is no more; you saw to that." (HBP p.501) 
So it would seem that when Harry stabbed the Diary he *killed* the 
soul piece. But later in that chapter both Dumbledore and Harry refer 
to destroying the Horcrux, which I take to mean destroying the 
objects magical capacity of encasing a soul piece, as certainly both 
the diary and the ring still existed after the fact. So which is it? 
Does Harry have to get to the soul piece inside the Horcrux and kill 
it or does he merely have to destroy the capacity of the object, the 
Horcrux, to contain the soul piece?


> Carol:
> 
> As I said, before, I think that the "bit" of Voldemor that entered
> Harry's cut and gave him some of Voldemort's powers was physical. 
> The "gleam" in Dumbledore's eye when he learned that the resurrected
> Voldemort had some of Harry's blood in him could have been a
> recognition that the same thing had happened to *Harry*--he was
> "marked as Voldemort's equal" not by the scar per se but by what was
> in it, a bit of Voldemort's magical blood, now sealed inside the 
> scar.

Mike:
I have two problems with the blood transferrence theory:

1) The Harry!Crux theory has always been hampered by the question of 
why Dumbledore wouldn't tell Harry this if he suspected it. By the 
same logic, why wouldn't Dumbledore the magical blood scholar, tell 
Harry that Voldemort transferred some of his blood to Harry and that 
was why Harry got some of LV's powers?

2) Voldemort, or more exactly Quirrell!Mort couldn't touch Harry 
without suffering great pain because of Lily's love protection. After 
Voldemort got Harry's blood, that was no longer an obstacle. But if 
Harry got a magical transfer of powers from some of Voldemort's 
blood, why could LV not touch Harry before? IOW, if LV can touch 
Harry after getting some Harry blood that carries magical properties, 
LV should have been able to touch Harry all along because Harry had 
gotten some LV blood that carried magical properties.


> Carol:
> As for the question someone (Deb?) asked about what happened to the
> soul bit from Lily's murder, possibly nothing happened to it at all.
> Voldie probably had a lot of unused soul bits from various murders,
> which would need to be detached and encased by a Horcrux spell 
> before they could leave the main soul. <snip>

Mike:
Slughorn tells Tom how to *split* the soul, said killing rips the 
soul *apart*, that one would encase the torn *portion*. This clearly 
means that a murder *seperates* a piece of soul, and that the Horcrux 
spell is not needed to "detach" the piece of soul from the main, it 
was "detached" completely by the murder.


> Carol:
> Normally, of course, a soul bit would remain within the murderer 
> until and unless it was placed in a Horcrux.

Mike:
And if the murderer is no more, what happens to this detached, 
unfettered by a body's containment soul piece?


> Carol:
> We have no indication that the soul bit from Lily's murder or any 
> of the others would just fly off looking for a host, nor, if a  
> soul bit could possess someone, would it need a cut to enter 
> through.

Mike:
We have a detached, bodiless soul piece, recently created by Lily's 
murder. What happened to it is anybody's guess, since we haven't been 
given any other time in canon where a Horcrux protected wizard who 
had just committed a soul-splitting murder was blown up by a 
rebounding AK. But some of us believe the "indication" is that Harry 
acquired a piece of Voldemort's soul at this time. 

Whether Harry got that piece because it was trying to possess and 
take control of Harry, or it was compelled to transfer to Harry 
because of the action of a Horcrux encasing spell and Harry 
being "marked", or it was simply looking for a place to reside until 
it could pass beyond the veil, is all speculation. But it does meet 
your requirement of some "indication" that it has happened.


> Carol:
> Are all the soul bits from all those other murders Voldie committed
> still flying around looking for hosts? Clearly, they haven't found
> them or we'd have heard about it.

Mike:
This assumes that the soul pieces from other murders haven't in some 
way at least partially re-attached themselves to the main. That these 
detached pieces attempt to heal, seems a viable alternative to them 
remaining forever rent.
 

> Carol:
> I think that *if* any soul bits came loose and detached themselves
> from the main soul, they went behind the Veil. 

Mike:
But Voldy's Horcruxes prevent this from happening.


> Carol:
<snip> 
> because they were anchored to the main soul by the Horcruxes.

Mike:
Horcruxes anchor the soul to this realm. Where did your reading cause 
you to surmise that Horcruxes anchor soul pieces to each other? That 
seems rather antithetical to the purpose of a Horcrux.


> Carol:
> Anyway, I see no need to complicate the plot by making Harry a
> Horcrux.  <snip>

Mike:
I don't understand this reasoning. We speculate what, when, why, and 
how something happened. Something that JKR has not fully explained. 
If it turns out we are right in our speculation, that means that JKR 
chose our storyline and has a plan for resolving it. *We* are not 
putting a burden on JKR nor on Harry. JKR has already done that, and 
we are trying to guess at *how* she did it. Your reluctance seems to 
be that you have presupposed that any resolution to this dilemna will 
be unsatisfying, at least that's the way it appears to me, all 
evidence of JKR's storytelling ability to the contrary.


> Carol, who thinks that the whole David/Goliath aspect of the
> Harry/Voldemort conflict would be ruined if Harry were immortal, and
> "either must die at the hand of the other" suggests that he *can* 
> die

Mike, who also thinks that Harry is not immortal, but may be supra-
mortal because he has some extra soul ;)