The idea that you can “accidentally” perform a complex secret Dark ritual is ridiculous. Especially because accidental magic has previously always matched the goals of the caster, but Voldemort didn’t want Harry to live and certainly didn’t want to make him into a living Horcrux (although that would have been cool if he actually did, and had planned that).
Dumbledore, in Deathly Hallows:
[...] on the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building.
So yeah.
I’m currently of the opinion that she made up the idea to turn him into a Horcrux halfway through the series
Pretty sure she made up the idea of Horcruxes halfway through the series.
Pretty sure she made up the idea of Horcruxes halfway through the series.
The second book, nearly the start of the series, centers around a diary that is nearly indestructible, can possess others, and can reconstitute Voldemort after his death. Even though it wasn’t called a Horcrux by name at the time, it hits all the key points of something you’d make to save yourself from death. It’s also known in that same book that he’s got more than one of the things.
She might not have had everything planned out, but it seems pretty clear to me she had an Immortal Dark Lord in mind when she made the first book and had already mapped out the mechanism by the second book.
The second book, nearly the start of the series, centers around a diary that is nearly indestructible, can possess others, and can reconstitute Voldemort after his death.
It was fireproof. No other conventional type of damage ever occurred to it. (ETA: oops.) Those other properties you mention are evidence that the idea of Horcruxes had not been settled on when the diary was created- none of the other Horcruxes were independent, sentient copies.
(Incidentally, did anyone else think Arthur’s line about “never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain” was hilariously stupid? Tons of magical stuff can think, and absolutely none of it has a brain.)
ETA: Amusingly, canon!Professor Quirrell was apparently a “pseudo-Horcrux”.
It’s fireproof, it doesn’t get damaged by water, and it can’t have the pages torn out. Ginny tried to destroy it in a variety of ways offscreen and wasn’t successful.
The only other Horcrux we get to see much of, the locket, constantly attempts mind control for about half of the 7th book. Luckily the heroes already know about it’s power of mind control and keep trading off the locket to prevent possession. Plus, they’re not impressionable eleven year old girls. IIRC the other Horcruxes are described as attempting similar but get such minor screentime they’re destroyed before it matters.
It didn’t need to possess Umbridge. A Voldemort horcrux influences you to be more like Voldemort, or do to things in favor of Voldemort. Umbridge was already doing precisely what Voldemort wanted, so the best thing for the horcrux to do was to STFU and let her continue.
Yes, I think ‘mind control’ is wrong here. It’s very similar to the One Ring, which occasionally does seem to deliberately slip off someone’s finger etc. but mostly just projects a certain feeling. I never felt the horcrux was plotting against them.
As to Harry the Horcrux, I don’t think accidental Horcruxes are crazy because the magic is implied not to be sophisticated so much as primal and brutal. At a narrative level, it fits very well. He isn’t accidentally casting a Horcrux spell, a Horcrux is accidentally being formed from the combination of a spare bit of soul and a well-suited container.
I’m not sure if you were disagreeing with the accidental secret Dark ritual part or not.
If you weren’t then ignore this.
If you were then this is my response.
“the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building.”
This arguably solves my problem with it being an accidental piece of magic specifically.
I still don’t like it though.
First, this is Dumbledore guessing, not a technical description. It’s very vague, and his guess only makes sense as a post de facto explanation when you already know that Harry is a Horcrux. Even then it’s not the only plausible explanation.
Secondly, we were previously given no reason to believe that when people died their souls could randomly latch on to other people. It would seem like jettisoning your soul would be an intentional kind of thing, if I had to give a guess about what souls would do if they were real.
Third, if this happened, it would seem like we would have seen that happen before, at some point in time. It makes no sense given everything that we were told about magic and about souls. Why aren’t there accidental Horcruxes all over the place?
Fourth, transferring souls is still inherently magical (and also evil according to PotterLogic), so I think that my above criticism based on the nature of accidental magic, and on the nature of forbidden rituals, specifically, all still applies to this case. Even though it’s explained in the paragraph you cite as a consequence of the Killing Curse, soul transferring is a very magical type of consequence and magical consequences have previously been goal oriented, and not complex enough to cast Horcrux ritual spells.
if this happened, it would seem like we would have seen that happen before, at some point in time.
Why? Someone having multiple Horcruxes is explicitly unprecedented, and having the Killing Curse not kill someone it hits and instead rebounding to hit the caster is explicitly unprecedented. An unprecedented result isn’t particularly improbable.
Yes, “accidental Horcrux” is inherently less probable than the broader category of “random magical accident”, but that’s only because “accidental Horcrux” is a subset of all possible “random magical accidents”.
On your first point: It’s not the making of a Horcrux which rips apart the soul, it’s murder. Although multiple Horcruxes are unprecedented, multiple murders are not. Since it’s the ripped apart soul which causes accidental Horcruxes, if Horcruxes can accidentally be made then we’d expect at least a few of the people in Azkaban to have accidental Horcruxes, and for this to be known about. On the other hand, if making Horcruxes requires complicated Dark Incantations (and it seems like it would) then that’s also evidence against.
On your second point: right, but the absence of any evidence which makes “accidental Horcrux” more probable should make “accidental Horcrux” even less probable than the broad category of “generic unexplained random magic” because when good authors want to write about specific pieces of magic they leave evidence supporting that specific thing. It made sense, since she didn’t support any one possibility of accidental magic over another, to believe that she wouldn’t specify the mechanism at all and that perhaps there was no specific mechanism she had thought out.
That’s not relevant, I shouldn’t have said Azkaban specifically but that shouldn’t undermine my point. Some people who were mass murderers, many, actually, I assume, and have been hit with Killing Curses (or have died in other ways, I don’t know why the Killing Curse specifically would be more likely to fragment a soul than other forms of death?). None of those murderers stayed alive because of accidental Horcruxes.
[...] on the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building.
If the only accidental Horcruxes made this way are similar to Harry, there wouldn’t have been noticeable effects (assuming most people who aren’t expecting it would cope significantly less well than Voldemort), and the shade left over would have passed on when the living Horcrux died. (The actual requisite for destroying Horcruxes is “damaged beyond magical repair”.)
Or possibly there wouldn’t have been a shade at all- maybe a mass murderer who didn’t have a Horcrux to begin with would just die the same way everything else does when hit by an AK.
Or maybe nobody else in history had flayed his soul into ~3.125% of its original glory.
Yes, it’s murder that rips the soul—but it’s the process of creating a horcrux that takes half of what’s left and seals it somewhere else. If you aren’t making horcruxes, then you get a soul that’s heavily damaged, but it isn’t lacking pieces, it’s just torn up. With Voldemort, you get a soul that barely has anything left and is constantly being torn up.
Even if you don’t buy the death-mid-horcrux-ritual theory, does it make sense how damage that would normally be taken without notice could rip off whole sections of a soul with ~3% of the...size?...of the souls of even the worst non-horcrux-using mass murderer?
Don’t the books say at some point, or didn’t Rowling say at some point, that Voldemort was trying to create his final horcrux with the murder of Harry Potter? She didn’t mention it at the time most crucial for our understanding, as is her habit, but I could swear I read that somewhere authoritative.
So he was trying to make a Horcrux elsewhere and had therefore created a Horcrux-open environment in some odd way?
This would have been better if there was a clearly suited Horcrux-vessel found at Godric’s Hollow, so when they found it, knew that he’d set out to make a Horcrux at that time, couldn’t find one...
This would have been better if there was a clearly suited Horcrux-vessel found at Godric’s Hollow
The fact that this wasn’t the case is one of the reasons I think it’s not actually true. The only indication we have of it is Dumbledore’s speculation based on a false premise.
Sure there was: his wand. You know, the symbol that he actually was special, that raised him from that hell that was the orphanage. If you think that’s not significant to him, then you need to take another look at the diary.
I suppose it could have been something else, that was destroyed in the explosion.
DavidAgain, I think that he was interrupted in the process of making the Horcrux. As in, he did the entire Horcrux ritual, whatever it may be, and when it came time to kill the sacrifice, he fired the Killing Curse at Harry...who clearly reflected it backwards, killing Voldemort. Voldemort became his own sacrifice. Then the ritual finishes, except that without the guiding hand of the caster, the soul fragment “latched itself onto the only living soul left,” Harry.
Yeah, I agree that it’s ridiculous—I think I summed up JKR’s explanation elsewhere as “his soul was unstable or something, stop asking questions”. I just didn’t know if you were aware that it was the canonical explanation (and it is- she’s confirmed it in interviews).
Dumbledore, in Deathly Hallows:
So yeah.
Pretty sure she made up the idea of Horcruxes halfway through the series.
The second book, nearly the start of the series, centers around a diary that is nearly indestructible, can possess others, and can reconstitute Voldemort after his death. Even though it wasn’t called a Horcrux by name at the time, it hits all the key points of something you’d make to save yourself from death. It’s also known in that same book that he’s got more than one of the things.
She might not have had everything planned out, but it seems pretty clear to me she had an Immortal Dark Lord in mind when she made the first book and had already mapped out the mechanism by the second book.
It was fireproof. No other conventional type of damage ever occurred to it. (ETA: oops.) Those other properties you mention are evidence that the idea of Horcruxes had not been settled on when the diary was created- none of the other Horcruxes were independent, sentient copies.
(Incidentally, did anyone else think Arthur’s line about “never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain” was hilariously stupid? Tons of magical stuff can think, and absolutely none of it has a brain.)
ETA: Amusingly, canon!Professor Quirrell was apparently a “pseudo-Horcrux”.
It’s fireproof, it doesn’t get damaged by water, and it can’t have the pages torn out. Ginny tried to destroy it in a variety of ways offscreen and wasn’t successful.
The only other Horcrux we get to see much of, the locket, constantly attempts mind control for about half of the 7th book. Luckily the heroes already know about it’s power of mind control and keep trading off the locket to prevent possession. Plus, they’re not impressionable eleven year old girls. IIRC the other Horcruxes are described as attempting similar but get such minor screentime they’re destroyed before it matters.
Hm. I had forgotten the locket’s paranoia-inducing field. Revising my confidence downward.
Except, wait, Umbridge wasn’t possessed. (Googles...)
So, uh… I’ve got nothing.
It didn’t need to possess Umbridge. A Voldemort horcrux influences you to be more like Voldemort, or do to things in favor of Voldemort. Umbridge was already doing precisely what Voldemort wanted, so the best thing for the horcrux to do was to STFU and let her continue.
Yes, I think ‘mind control’ is wrong here. It’s very similar to the One Ring, which occasionally does seem to deliberately slip off someone’s finger etc. but mostly just projects a certain feeling. I never felt the horcrux was plotting against them.
As to Harry the Horcrux, I don’t think accidental Horcruxes are crazy because the magic is implied not to be sophisticated so much as primal and brutal. At a narrative level, it fits very well. He isn’t accidentally casting a Horcrux spell, a Horcrux is accidentally being formed from the combination of a spare bit of soul and a well-suited container.
I’m not sure if you were disagreeing with the accidental secret Dark ritual part or not.
If you weren’t then ignore this.
If you were then this is my response.
This arguably solves my problem with it being an accidental piece of magic specifically.
I still don’t like it though.
First, this is Dumbledore guessing, not a technical description. It’s very vague, and his guess only makes sense as a post de facto explanation when you already know that Harry is a Horcrux. Even then it’s not the only plausible explanation.
Secondly, we were previously given no reason to believe that when people died their souls could randomly latch on to other people. It would seem like jettisoning your soul would be an intentional kind of thing, if I had to give a guess about what souls would do if they were real.
Third, if this happened, it would seem like we would have seen that happen before, at some point in time. It makes no sense given everything that we were told about magic and about souls. Why aren’t there accidental Horcruxes all over the place?
Fourth, transferring souls is still inherently magical (and also evil according to PotterLogic), so I think that my above criticism based on the nature of accidental magic, and on the nature of forbidden rituals, specifically, all still applies to this case. Even though it’s explained in the paragraph you cite as a consequence of the Killing Curse, soul transferring is a very magical type of consequence and magical consequences have previously been goal oriented, and not complex enough to cast Horcrux ritual spells.
Why? Someone having multiple Horcruxes is explicitly unprecedented, and having the Killing Curse not kill someone it hits and instead rebounding to hit the caster is explicitly unprecedented. An unprecedented result isn’t particularly improbable.
Yes, “accidental Horcrux” is inherently less probable than the broader category of “random magical accident”, but that’s only because “accidental Horcrux” is a subset of all possible “random magical accidents”.
On your first point: It’s not the making of a Horcrux which rips apart the soul, it’s murder. Although multiple Horcruxes are unprecedented, multiple murders are not. Since it’s the ripped apart soul which causes accidental Horcruxes, if Horcruxes can accidentally be made then we’d expect at least a few of the people in Azkaban to have accidental Horcruxes, and for this to be known about. On the other hand, if making Horcruxes requires complicated Dark Incantations (and it seems like it would) then that’s also evidence against.
On your second point: right, but the absence of any evidence which makes “accidental Horcrux” more probable should make “accidental Horcrux” even less probable than the broad category of “generic unexplained random magic” because when good authors want to write about specific pieces of magic they leave evidence supporting that specific thing. It made sense, since she didn’t support any one possibility of accidental magic over another, to believe that she wouldn’t specify the mechanism at all and that perhaps there was no specific mechanism she had thought out.
None of the people in Azkaban have been hit with Killing Curses, though.
That’s not relevant, I shouldn’t have said Azkaban specifically but that shouldn’t undermine my point. Some people who were mass murderers, many, actually, I assume, and have been hit with Killing Curses (or have died in other ways, I don’t know why the Killing Curse specifically would be more likely to fragment a soul than other forms of death?). None of those murderers stayed alive because of accidental Horcruxes.
Maybe they did. Again, the quote is
If the only accidental Horcruxes made this way are similar to Harry, there wouldn’t have been noticeable effects (assuming most people who aren’t expecting it would cope significantly less well than Voldemort), and the shade left over would have passed on when the living Horcrux died. (The actual requisite for destroying Horcruxes is “damaged beyond magical repair”.)
Or possibly there wouldn’t have been a shade at all- maybe a mass murderer who didn’t have a Horcrux to begin with would just die the same way everything else does when hit by an AK.
Or maybe nobody else in history had flayed his soul into ~3.125% of its original glory.
Yes, it’s murder that rips the soul—but it’s the process of creating a horcrux that takes half of what’s left and seals it somewhere else. If you aren’t making horcruxes, then you get a soul that’s heavily damaged, but it isn’t lacking pieces, it’s just torn up. With Voldemort, you get a soul that barely has anything left and is constantly being torn up.
Even if you don’t buy the death-mid-horcrux-ritual theory, does it make sense how damage that would normally be taken without notice could rip off whole sections of a soul with ~3% of the...size?...of the souls of even the worst non-horcrux-using mass murderer?
Don’t the books say at some point, or didn’t Rowling say at some point, that Voldemort was trying to create his final horcrux with the murder of Harry Potter? She didn’t mention it at the time most crucial for our understanding, as is her habit, but I could swear I read that somewhere authoritative.
Sort of.
So he was trying to make a Horcrux elsewhere and had therefore created a Horcrux-open environment in some odd way?
This would have been better if there was a clearly suited Horcrux-vessel found at Godric’s Hollow, so when they found it, knew that he’d set out to make a Horcrux at that time, couldn’t find one...
It would have flagged it up.
The fact that this wasn’t the case is one of the reasons I think it’s not actually true. The only indication we have of it is Dumbledore’s speculation based on a false premise.
Sure there was: his wand. You know, the symbol that he actually was special, that raised him from that hell that was the orphanage. If you think that’s not significant to him, then you need to take another look at the diary.
I suppose it could have been something else, that was destroyed in the explosion.
DavidAgain, I think that he was interrupted in the process of making the Horcrux. As in, he did the entire Horcrux ritual, whatever it may be, and when it came time to kill the sacrifice, he fired the Killing Curse at Harry...who clearly reflected it backwards, killing Voldemort. Voldemort became his own sacrifice. Then the ritual finishes, except that without the guiding hand of the caster, the soul fragment “latched itself onto the only living soul left,” Harry.
Why have two posts seemed to have disappeared from this discussion?
Yeah, I agree that it’s ridiculous—I think I summed up JKR’s explanation elsewhere as “his soul was unstable or something, stop asking questions”. I just didn’t know if you were aware that it was the canonical explanation (and it is- she’s confirmed it in interviews).
I had forgotten, but I knew that at one point in time.