[the_old_crowd] AKs and Horcrux!Harry and soul-ripping (was: Re: Stupid question about...)

elfundeb elfundeb at elfundeb2.yahoo.invalid
Tue Aug 23 14:03:15 UTC 2005


Eloise:
> 1)Voldemort cast some spell at Harry that night. Belief in the WW is
> that that spell was an AK and that Harry is the only person to have
> survived it.
> 
> We Muggles have problems with this AK. *Why the heck* does anybody in
> the WW think Harry was subject to one?
> 
> There *must* have been a witness (I think JKR's all but confirmed that
> by refusing to anwer the question). Even that is problematic, for how
> did the news disseminate? Did that witness tell the truth, did s/he lie
> or was s/he mistaken?

As you wrote in another post, all roads lead to Snape, whose execution
of the double agent game seems to have placed him in the thick of
everything.

But I think the witness, Snape or not, told the truth, as IIRC
Voldemort himself confirms that account in the graveyard.  <will have
to check this later>

> What does Diary!Tom *know*? The fact that he knew about Harry's early
> history is intriguing. It could have come from Ginny, OTOH, the diary
> being a Horcrux, it should (perhaps?) also contain Voldemort's own
> knowledge and experience up to the time it was made (as implied by
> the "I am LV's past, present and future" speech). Diary!Tom seems to
> believe that LV tried to *kill* Harry. In fact, Diary!Tom *still* wants
> to kill Harry, so presumably doesn't think that the spell cast at him
> was a Horcruxfacient, (or at the very least that it failed).

JKR describes Diary!Tom as a 'memory' so his knowledge would be
limited to Riddle's experience up to then.  Although Diary!Tom would
have known about the Horcrux plan, he presumably only knew what Ginny
told him about Godric's Hollow.  Thus, he wouldn't know whether or not
the future LV had attempted to make a Horcrux when he killed Harry.
 
> If Dumbledore knows it wasn't an AK, but an attempt at making a
> Horcrux, then we're back to the question of why he's kept it quiet. I
> know it's something Harry hasn't been capable of absorbing until very
> recently, but given Dumbledore's recent urgency and probable awareness
> of impending mortality, he left it a bit late.

As I wrote above, I think it was an AK, but I think Dumbledore may
have good reason not to conclude that Voldemort was simultaneously
trying to make a Horcrux.  Under his reconstruction of the timeline
for Riddle's murder of his parents, Dumbledore assumes that Riddle
first murders his parents, then returns to Morfin and steals the ring
*after* the murder.  So clearly Dumbledore believes that they are not
simultaneous actions.
 
> 2) Dumbledore tells us that using [any] living being as a Horcrux is
> risky. Why would Voldemort want to make a Horcrux out of Harry,
> believing he was the one powerful enough to vanquish him?

I think the logic would be this:  Voldemort fears death more than
anything, and he cannot comprehend love and sacrifice.  By making
Harry a Horcrux, he thought he was protecting himself from defeat at
Harry's hands, since Harry could not kill Voldemort without destroying
himself.  Therefore, he went to Godric's Hollow with the intention of
killing James to tear out the soul fragment he needed (which is why
Lily needn't have died)   He tells the DEs in the graveyard that he
had not foreseen Lily's sacrifice, but maybe he forged ahead with the
Horcrux, thinking perhaps that a mother's love is unique.

The problem with this logic is that it doesn't really make sense to be
simultaneously trying to kill Harry and make a Horcrux out of him.  So
either the AK was aimed at someone else, or Hx!Harry was
unintentional.  Since it doesn't appear that magical powers transfer
to an ordinary Horcrux, it's possible that the destruction of
Voldemort's body released a package of soul and magical powers that
hit Harry on the forehead.  In this scenario, the need for Harry to
sacrifice himself to destroy Voldemort is simply a fortuitous
consequence of the failed AK.

> 3)Dumbledore suggests (as above) that Voldemort uses significant deaths
> to facilitate the making of Horcruxes and that he intended Harry's to
> be the final death in the process.

> If Dumbledore is wrong, and he intended Harry to be the Horcrux, whose
> was the significant death he intended to use (James' would seem to pale
> into insignificance next to Harry's)? Is this why Lily didn't need to
> die? Because he had already killed James? Did he want Lily to live to
> care for his living Horcrux?

I already answered most of this, but one possibility is that he was
still two Horcruxes short.  We don't know if he ever found a Ravenclaw
object.

> Well, all this soul-ripping stuff. Souls must get ripped all the time
> without the ripped parts actually dissociating. Granted it's more
> likely if you happen to get disembodied at the time.
> 
> But Voldemort's soul apparently got ripped *two* more times at GH, so
> there were potentially three bits of soul floating around (counting the
> one that is now in his body). And throughout his life it must have been
> ripped many more than seven times. I do have problems envisaging how
> then Voldemort gathers up the right quantity of soul to place in a
> Horcrux (but then, like JKR, maths isn't my strong suit).

I find it hard to get my arms around this one, too, but think that
maybe the answer is that in the normal course the key to the Horcrux
spell is extracting the soul fragment (ripping apart doesn't
necessarily mean that the ripped fragment has left the body).  At
Godric's Hollow perhaps some fragments were released because of the
destruction of Voldemort's body.

But what happened to the other ripped soul bits?  Voldemort killed
enough people to make an army of Inferi, but they're just bewitched,
right?  I didn't get the sense that Voldemort had to dispatch his soul
to the Inferi to make them do his bidding.  I think he must still have
them.

> And just out of curiosity (and almost certainly irrelevantly) if you
> were not quite as murderous as LV and just wanted to divide your soul
> seven times, how would you control it so the rips came in the right
> places? One would assume that when the soul rips, it divides fairly
> evenly, so that as time went by you would be dividing smaller and
> smaller fractions and that which remained in the body would be a very
> small proportion of the original (no, I'm not going to attempt it and
> show myself up).

My thinking was that each murder ripped off a piece of soul, but that
it was not ripped into two equal halves.  However, by this time,
Voldemort has precious little soul left.

> Do/can the rips heal? Does *any* killing rip the soul? Are those who
> kill in the course of war similarly damaged? And what damage exactly
> does the ripping do?

Well, I'm falling back on my old catechism again, but I think that in
the ordinary course, genuine remorse combined with some sort of
recompense, or penance if you will, could mend some of the damage,
though the scars would always remain.  There are all kinds of examples
of how good actions (Lily's sacrifice, Harry's sparing of Pettigrew)
create magical benefits.  I don't see why this can't be the same.  For
example, perhaps Wormtail could repair his soul by making good on his
life-debt to Harry.

What makes creating a Horcrux so horrifying is that the soul bit has
been separated permanently from the body, making repair impossible.

Debbie
who must turn to the paying work now




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