Tom Riddle: “And how exactly does one split his soul?” Slughorn: “Well, you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature.” Tom Riddle: “But how do you do it?” Slughorn: “By an act of evil—the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: he would encase the torn portion—”
MoR!Horcrux might be different, but it seems likely that killing a willing victim isn’t good enough, it has to be murder most foul. If a MoR!Horcrux is different, and only requires a death, then why assume a human death is required?
You know, this sounds terrible but might be able to put the abortion debate to rest using the creation of a Horcruxes. It would be a horrible violation of human rights and ethics, but you could nail down the exact moment it became murder with enough testing. (Edit: I suppose you could do this on fetuses already slated for abortion anyways to avoid the ethical dilemmas.)
I wonder if pro-lifers and pro-choicers would have different threshholds for age required when to create a horcrux. And if so, I wonder if it would it be possible to create a horcrux with a murder that exists entirely within the mind of the murderer (eg, fake murder like in the Milgram experiment).
It’s probably best that I’m not a wizard scientist.
It would be a neat solution if murdering fetuses, animals, infants, etc. as compared to adult humans ripped apart varying-sized fragments of your soul depending on the level of personhood of the victim, and the resulting Horcruxes could store more or less of your soul (i.e. more or less of your personality and memories) depending on the same. Canon probably rules it out, though, or Voldemort would not have gone after a baby for his final Horcrux.
I can’t find confirmation of this online, and I don’t have the books with me, but I seem to remember Dumbledore telling Harry in HBP that Voldemort had intended to use the murder of baby Harry as means to create his last Horcrux (the planned Horcrux would not have literally been dead baby Harry, of course). Of course, that might have been mere speculation by Dumbledore, or I might be misremembering.
However, if my calculations are correct, Voldemort was still at least one Horcrux short of his goal of six when he entered your parents’ house with the intention of killing you. He seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. You would certainly have been that. He believed that in killing you, he was destroying the danger the prophecy had outlined. He believed he was making himself invincible. I am sure that he was intending to make his final Horcrux with your death. As we know, he failed.
It should be noted that “he reserved making Horcruxes for significant deaths” is flat wrong.
How do we know it’s wrong? As far as I can remember, the only two deaths to which we can pin the creation of horcruxes are Moaning Myrtle’s and Harry Potter’s. Myrtle herself wasn’t significant, but she was the casualty of Slytherin’s Basilisk, which Tom Riddle had commanded, which proved that he was the Heir of Slytherin. It was his coming out as the Heir of Slytherin, which would have been very significant to Riddle.
All the sources I’ve found indicate the deaths used to create the Horcruxes are Myrtle (diary) - Riddle Sr. (ring) - an unnamed Muggle tramp (locket) - Hepzibah Smith (cup) - an unnamed Albanian peasant (diadem) - Voldemort himself (Harry) - Bertha Jorkins (Nagini), in that order.
This is the quote I had in mind, from Chapter 23 of HBP:
’He [Voldemort] seems to have reserved the process of making Horcruxes for particularly significant deaths. You would certainly have been that. He believed that in killing you, he was destroying the danger the prophecy had outlined. He believed he was making himself invincible. I am sure that he was intending to make his final Horcrux with your death.
’As we know, he failed. After an interval of some years, however, he used Nagini to kill an old Muggle man, and it might then have occurred to him to turn her into his last Horcrux.
If Dumbledore is right, then Bertha Jorkins could not have been murdered to make that Horcrux, because she was already dead. Is there an interview where Rowling says otherwise? I don’t see anything on the wiki page (a citation, or other reference) that backs up their claim.
Wouldn’t he? I though he got madder & less reliable as he shaved off more & more of his soul; less & less recognizably human, too. If it had been the case that he could make a small Horcrux later on when that decay was already advanced then it might have made a sort of sense to take a smaller fragment of himself away from the already damaged original.
So after thinking about it some more, I came up with a possible rationale/rationalization why a wizard’s death might be needed.
Assume the “script kiddy magic” theory is right—A powerful wizard can be bind complex magic into a simple to execute script, with a key phrase (and/or emotion or gesture).
Thus it wasn’t some perverse law of the universe that decided “Wingardium Leviosa” is how levitation is activated, but some perverse ancient wizard.
A Horcrux stores an image of you, and the activation sequence is bound to the death of a wizard.
It was meant to be an emergency backup script, activated on the death of the wizard.
I.e. the ancient who created it was thinking that when a wizard dies, they would automatically be backed up into a Horcrux.
This explains where ghosts come from, and why the ghosts we know of were all wizards.
Later, someone figured out how to activate the script without dying.
Unfortunately, the method they discovered involved killing another wizard.
A backup is limited by the hardware that runs it, so ghosts, which can only barely be said to run, don’t seem like real people. They have limited ability to form new memories, so they seem more like chatbots than people (in the MoR universe).
A Horcrux is even more limited unless it can get near a brain, but has some “upload” magic associated which means it can possess people under the right circumstances.
Harry could be a Horcrux, in the sense that he might contain a backup image of Voldemort, but it can’t (normally) run
for much the same reason Voldemort can’t cast a spell on Harry. That’s why the hat didn’t sense it.
Additionally, it seems (at least in cannon) that making a Horcrux mutilates the person, damaging (or completely destroying) his ability to love, use empathy, … so from an utilitarian point of view, it’s not “a lot of life years” again “a few life years” but “a lot of years living a mutilated life” against “a few years living a complete life”, which is not the same.
And if horcruxing really gets rid of empathy, love and related emotions, it’s likely that if it were generalized, the whole society would collapse—leading to lots of negative utility.
The only cannon example is Voldemort who mangled his soul six or seven times. A single Horcrux might be less destructive. Also, we may be confusing cause and effect. But then we also have no examples of a Horcurx actually extending life—Voldemort’s was cut short despite making several.
I would also like to point out that it’s possible to value diversity. The utility of a single point of view for 200 years may not be as great as two points of view for 90.
The soul-mangling is what causes Voldemort’s snake-like appearance, IIRC, and MoR!McGonagall remembers a snake-like Voldemort from her battles. So either MoR!Voldemort has been doing some serious damage to his soul, or he decided to look freakish just for effect and stumbled by chance upon the exact same look which canon!Voldemort got from making Horcruxes.
Why isn’t “EY is making him look like in canon” a sufficient explanation for the look being exactly the same? It would be a rotten explanation within the MoRverse, of course, but within the MoRverse there’s no coincidence to need explaining.
I see your point. As an author I would think I’m misdirecting my readers by doing that though; “Voldemort has the same deformity as in canon? He’s been playing with Horcruxes!” is the reasoning I would expect from them. Which is why I would, say, remove Quirrell’s turban as soon as my plot had Voldemort not on the back of Quirrell’s head.
The soul-mangling is what causes Voldemort’s snake-like appearance, IIRC
I don’t think this is ever made explicit. It’s probably the reason J. K. Rowling had in mind, but I don’t think there’s anything in the text that rules out the possibility that he looked that way because he wanted to.
Well, the book shows a progression which correlates with the creation of Horcruxes via some of the flashbacks. There’s a scene where he’s in Dumbledore’s office asking for a job/planning to hid the Horcrux somewhere and he looks half evil Voldie and half handsome Tom.
Rather unfortunately, I think JK has confirmed that a large part of Voldemort’s inability to love is because he’s effectively a child of rape (via love potion).
Although I have no doubt your ‘too much butter spread over too little bread’ approach to Horcruxes as damaging.
I was pretty sure that it was the love potion, not the rape, that was decisive in neutering Riddle’s capability for love.
I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse, really.
This link is pretty shoddy work, but assuming it’s accurate, it was the loveless union that started it off—though Rowling made sure to say that his environment had a major part in it too.
I would be astonished if Eliezer wrote a story in which it were implied that murdering, say, a centaur, was on an intrinsically more justifiable moral ground than murdering a human (ceteris paribus). But you probably meant a nonsapient animal.
The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain.
Professor Quirinus Quirrell, HPMOR chapter 16. Unless he’s wrong or lying, nonsapient animals are killed by it just fine. (In canon, doesn’t the Fake Defence Professor Du Jour use it on a spider in, er, book 3 or thereabouts?)
Which reminds me of something. At (IIRC) that point in canon, the teacher who’s introducing the Killing Curse says something like “It kills absolutely anything, every time. Only one person has ever survived one, and he’s right here in this classroom”. Here in HPMOR we have Quirrell introducing the Killing Curse in a classroom that’s got Harry Potter in it, and everyone knows the story just as much as in canon, and he conspicuously doesn’t make any such remark.
Maybe it’s just coincidence. But (assuming, as is customary, that Q=V) it looks to me like another bit of evidence that in HPMOR what happened at Godric’s Hollow was not that V. attempted to AK Harry and failed.
The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain.
Not related to the current discussion, but I was always very unsettled by that kind of affirmation.
From both canon and MoR, the Killing Curse looks like missile spell. A bolt of green light flows from the wand to the target, and kills it. But the bolt can’t get around material objects, it doesn’t go through them, and it doesn’t switch directions to avoid them like a seeker missile could do.
It can’t be blocked by raw magic (Protego and similar) but what prevents Actio, Wingdarium Leviosa or Free Transfiguration to be used to create a physical barrier to block the spell ?
And going even further, couldn’t armor be made to block the spell ? It kills through clothes, but can very thick clothes prevent the effect ? If you make an armor with two layers, physically separated, the outer layer kept from touching the inner layer through electromagnetic forces or magic, would the outer layer count as an obstacle ?
Yeah, it’s yet another thing JKR didn’t think out very well. It’s said to be a super-extra-deadly unblockable spell, but in practice there’s nothing in what actually happens to show that it’s any more dangerous than any number of other spells.
What she probably meant is that it’s exceptionally good at penetrating innate resistance, magical barriers, that sort of thing. So, the prime spell for killing serious targets. Something that min-maxing DnD players would find useful in a duel.
It can’t be blocked by raw magic (Protego and similar) but what prevents Actio, Wingdarium Leviosa or Free Transfiguration to be used to create a physical barrier to block the spell?
Nothing. Indeed, Dumbledore blocks the killing curse in canon (Order of the Phoenix) by animating a statue to jump in front of it.
So if AK is in any way unblockable, it is unblockable only by magical means.
Oh, correct. I didn’t do my homework here. This implies that nonsapient animals do have a soul, which I didn’t expect in the MoR-verse.
Quirrellmort not saying that Harry survived the killing curse might indeed be evidence for V. not failing to kill Harry, but intuitively, it seems like a very tiny bit of evidence.
MoR!Horcrux might be different, but it seems likely that killing a willing victim isn’t good enough, it has to be murder most foul. If a MoR!Horcrux is different, and only requires a death, then why assume a human death is required?
You know, this sounds terrible but might be able to put the abortion debate to rest using the creation of a Horcruxes. It would be a horrible violation of human rights and ethics, but you could nail down the exact moment it became murder with enough testing. (Edit: I suppose you could do this on fetuses already slated for abortion anyways to avoid the ethical dilemmas.)
I wonder if pro-lifers and pro-choicers would have different threshholds for age required when to create a horcrux. And if so, I wonder if it would it be possible to create a horcrux with a murder that exists entirely within the mind of the murderer (eg, fake murder like in the Milgram experiment).
It’s probably best that I’m not a wizard scientist.
It would be a neat solution if murdering fetuses, animals, infants, etc. as compared to adult humans ripped apart varying-sized fragments of your soul depending on the level of personhood of the victim, and the resulting Horcruxes could store more or less of your soul (i.e. more or less of your personality and memories) depending on the same. Canon probably rules it out, though, or Voldemort would not have gone after a baby for his final Horcrux.
He didn’t; the Harrycrux was accidental, and he killed Bertha Jorkins to make Nagini in ’94.
I can’t find confirmation of this online, and I don’t have the books with me, but I seem to remember Dumbledore telling Harry in HBP that Voldemort had intended to use the murder of baby Harry as means to create his last Horcrux (the planned Horcrux would not have literally been dead baby Harry, of course). Of course, that might have been mere speculation by Dumbledore, or I might be misremembering.
Seems like speculation to me:
It should be noted that “he reserved making Horcruxes for significant deaths” is flat wrong.
How do we know it’s wrong? As far as I can remember, the only two deaths to which we can pin the creation of horcruxes are Moaning Myrtle’s and Harry Potter’s. Myrtle herself wasn’t significant, but she was the casualty of Slytherin’s Basilisk, which Tom Riddle had commanded, which proved that he was the Heir of Slytherin. It was his coming out as the Heir of Slytherin, which would have been very significant to Riddle.
All the sources I’ve found indicate the deaths used to create the Horcruxes are Myrtle (diary) - Riddle Sr. (ring) - an unnamed Muggle tramp (locket) - Hepzibah Smith (cup) - an unnamed Albanian peasant (diadem) - Voldemort himself (Harry) - Bertha Jorkins (Nagini), in that order.
Ah yeah, that list does ring a bell. Right you are, then.
I thought that the Nagini horcrux was made via the killing of Frank Bryce. Don’t have the book with me to check, though.
This being the 21st century, shall we make it up or look it up?
This is the quote I had in mind, from Chapter 23 of HBP:
If Dumbledore is right, then Bertha Jorkins could not have been murdered to make that Horcrux, because she was already dead. Is there an interview where Rowling says otherwise? I don’t see anything on the wiki page (a citation, or other reference) that backs up their claim.
It’s on the talk page. Link is broken, though.
Saved by the Wayback Machine. Thanks. I should have checked the talk page.
Wouldn’t he? I though he got madder & less reliable as he shaved off more & more of his soul; less & less recognizably human, too. If it had been the case that he could make a small Horcrux later on when that decay was already advanced then it might have made a sort of sense to take a smaller fragment of himself away from the already damaged original.
So after thinking about it some more, I came up with a possible rationale/rationalization why a wizard’s death might be needed.
Assume the “script kiddy magic” theory is right—A powerful wizard can be bind complex magic into a simple to execute script, with a key phrase (and/or emotion or gesture). Thus it wasn’t some perverse law of the universe that decided “Wingardium Leviosa” is how levitation is activated, but some perverse ancient wizard.
A Horcrux stores an image of you, and the activation sequence is bound to the death of a wizard. It was meant to be an emergency backup script, activated on the death of the wizard. I.e. the ancient who created it was thinking that when a wizard dies, they would automatically be backed up into a Horcrux. This explains where ghosts come from, and why the ghosts we know of were all wizards. Later, someone figured out how to activate the script without dying. Unfortunately, the method they discovered involved killing another wizard.
A backup is limited by the hardware that runs it, so ghosts, which can only barely be said to run, don’t seem like real people. They have limited ability to form new memories, so they seem more like chatbots than people (in the MoR universe). A Horcrux is even more limited unless it can get near a brain, but has some “upload” magic associated which means it can possess people under the right circumstances. Harry could be a Horcrux, in the sense that he might contain a backup image of Voldemort, but it can’t (normally) run for much the same reason Voldemort can’t cast a spell on Harry. That’s why the hat didn’t sense it.
Additionally, it seems (at least in cannon) that making a Horcrux mutilates the person, damaging (or completely destroying) his ability to love, use empathy, … so from an utilitarian point of view, it’s not “a lot of life years” again “a few life years” but “a lot of years living a mutilated life” against “a few years living a complete life”, which is not the same.
And if horcruxing really gets rid of empathy, love and related emotions, it’s likely that if it were generalized, the whole society would collapse—leading to lots of negative utility.
The only cannon example is Voldemort who mangled his soul six or seven times. A single Horcrux might be less destructive. Also, we may be confusing cause and effect. But then we also have no examples of a Horcurx actually extending life—Voldemort’s was cut short despite making several.
I would also like to point out that it’s possible to value diversity. The utility of a single point of view for 200 years may not be as great as two points of view for 90.
The soul-mangling is what causes Voldemort’s snake-like appearance, IIRC, and MoR!McGonagall remembers a snake-like Voldemort from her battles. So either MoR!Voldemort has been doing some serious damage to his soul, or he decided to look freakish just for effect and stumbled by chance upon the exact same look which canon!Voldemort got from making Horcruxes.
Why isn’t “EY is making him look like in canon” a sufficient explanation for the look being exactly the same? It would be a rotten explanation within the MoRverse, of course, but within the MoRverse there’s no coincidence to need explaining.
I see your point. As an author I would think I’m misdirecting my readers by doing that though; “Voldemort has the same deformity as in canon? He’s been playing with Horcruxes!” is the reasoning I would expect from them. Which is why I would, say, remove Quirrell’s turban as soon as my plot had Voldemort not on the back of Quirrell’s head.
I don’t think this is ever made explicit. It’s probably the reason J. K. Rowling had in mind, but I don’t think there’s anything in the text that rules out the possibility that he looked that way because he wanted to.
Well, the book shows a progression which correlates with the creation of Horcruxes via some of the flashbacks. There’s a scene where he’s in Dumbledore’s office asking for a job/planning to hid the Horcrux somewhere and he looks half evil Voldie and half handsome Tom.
Rather unfortunately, I think JK has confirmed that a large part of Voldemort’s inability to love is because he’s effectively a child of rape (via love potion).
Although I have no doubt your ‘too much butter spread over too little bread’ approach to Horcruxes as damaging.
I was pretty sure that it was the love potion, not the rape, that was decisive in neutering Riddle’s capability for love.
I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse, really.
This link is pretty shoddy work, but assuming it’s accurate, it was the loveless union that started it off—though Rowling made sure to say that his environment had a major part in it too.
I would be astonished if Eliezer wrote a story in which it were implied that murdering, say, a centaur, was on an intrinsically more justifiable moral ground than murdering a human (ceteris paribus). But you probably meant a nonsapient animal.
Then again, nonsapient animals probably don’t have any soul avada kedavra could separate from its body.
Professor Quirinus Quirrell, HPMOR chapter 16. Unless he’s wrong or lying, nonsapient animals are killed by it just fine. (In canon, doesn’t the Fake Defence Professor Du Jour use it on a spider in, er, book 3 or thereabouts?)
Which reminds me of something. At (IIRC) that point in canon, the teacher who’s introducing the Killing Curse says something like “It kills absolutely anything, every time. Only one person has ever survived one, and he’s right here in this classroom”. Here in HPMOR we have Quirrell introducing the Killing Curse in a classroom that’s got Harry Potter in it, and everyone knows the story just as much as in canon, and he conspicuously doesn’t make any such remark.
Maybe it’s just coincidence. But (assuming, as is customary, that Q=V) it looks to me like another bit of evidence that in HPMOR what happened at Godric’s Hollow was not that V. attempted to AK Harry and failed.
Not related to the current discussion, but I was always very unsettled by that kind of affirmation.
From both canon and MoR, the Killing Curse looks like missile spell. A bolt of green light flows from the wand to the target, and kills it. But the bolt can’t get around material objects, it doesn’t go through them, and it doesn’t switch directions to avoid them like a seeker missile could do.
It can’t be blocked by raw magic (Protego and similar) but what prevents Actio, Wingdarium Leviosa or Free Transfiguration to be used to create a physical barrier to block the spell ?
And going even further, couldn’t armor be made to block the spell ? It kills through clothes, but can very thick clothes prevent the effect ? If you make an armor with two layers, physically separated, the outer layer kept from touching the inner layer through electromagnetic forces or magic, would the outer layer count as an obstacle ?
The grim version of an ongoing joke in some potter circles is that you could strap a bunch of puppies to your body and use them as living armor.
My favorite mental image is covering yourself in bees. What can I say? I’m a fan of Eddie Izzard being able to beat the Dark Lord.
Yeah, it’s yet another thing JKR didn’t think out very well. It’s said to be a super-extra-deadly unblockable spell, but in practice there’s nothing in what actually happens to show that it’s any more dangerous than any number of other spells.
What she probably meant is that it’s exceptionally good at penetrating innate resistance, magical barriers, that sort of thing. So, the prime spell for killing serious targets. Something that min-maxing DnD players would find useful in a duel.
Nothing. Indeed, Dumbledore blocks the killing curse in canon (Order of the Phoenix) by animating a statue to jump in front of it.
So if AK is in any way unblockable, it is unblockable only by magical means.
Well, we know that either harry has an actual means of blocking it, OR, that Quirrel and Harry’s magical dissonance can disrupt the killing curse.
Oh, correct. I didn’t do my homework here. This implies that nonsapient animals do have a soul, which I didn’t expect in the MoR-verse.
Quirrellmort not saying that Harry survived the killing curse might indeed be evidence for V. not failing to kill Harry, but intuitively, it seems like a very tiny bit of evidence.
Or simply that the “separate the soul from the body” is just a mumbo-jumbo explanation from people that believe in souls.