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edenfallingI've been thinking about Horcruxes and the nature of the soul.
The act of murder creates a small fracture in the murderer's soul. Magic can extend that fracture (which would presumably scar over in an unrepentant murderer, or heal more-or-less completely in a repentant murderer), and actually split off a soul fragment, which can then be manipulated.
A Horcrux is a container that preserves and protects a soul fragment, which remains at least partially connected to the originating soul. So long as the Horcrux exists, the person whose soul it contains cannot fully die; Horcruxes don't prevent physical death, but they do prevent the person from either becoming a ghost or 'crossing over' to whatever afterlife exists in the HP world.
A Horcrux can only be destroyed by a few highly specific and dangerous things, such as Fiendfyre or basilisk venom. When a Horcrux is destroyed, its immortality effect is also destroyed, which means its originator can now be killed in a normal fashion.
We know all this from canon, and that's all we really need to know for the plot of DH to work.
But I'm left with some rather important questions.
1. When a Horcrux is destroyed, is the soul fragment destroyed or simply released?
---1a. If the soul fragment is destroyed, what effect does that have on the afterlife of its originator?
---1b. If the soul fragment is simply released, does it rejoin the originating soul, dissipate, become a ghost, or 'cross over' on its own? Are there other possibilities I'm forgetting?
------1b'. If the fragment 'crosses over' to the afterlife, does it rejoin the rest of the originator's soul upon true death, or is the originator's soul fragmented for all eternity?
2. Are Horcruxes difficult to destroy because the soul is difficult to destroy? Or is the durability of the artifacts simply part of the spell that creates them?
---2a. If destroying a Horcrux requires destroying part of a soul, does that destruction, in a sideways fashion, count as murder? (That is, would it be possible to create a Horcrux after destroying someone else's Horcrux?)
3. Do soul fragments naturally maintain a connection to their originating soul, or is that connection maintained by the Horcrux?
---3a. If the connection is natural, the Horcrux presumably enforces the separation of the fragment from the originating soul. If not, is that because the fragment would normally dissipate, or because the fragment would normally 'cross over,' no longer being tied to a physical body?
4. What is the soul, anyway, and how can it be tied to anything? What makes a knick-knack like a ring or a small book into the equivalent of a human body?
---4a. What if the murder is necessary for more than splitting the originator's soul? What if the victim's 'life energy' (for lack of a better word) is transfered to the Horcrux, to somehow mimic a human body and anchor the soul fragment?
---4b. Do other horrible actions split the soul? Does rape? Torture? They seem to carry the same sort of moral stress... but they don't involve death. Would it be possible to make a Horcrux after raping someone? Or would you still have to kill the victim? Would the rape split your soul further and make the Horcrux spell easier?
5. What is the difference between murder and killing? Presumably any death that results in a Horcrux will be premeditated, but not all premeditated deaths are technically murder. Some are executions; do they split your soul?
---5a. On a semi-related tangent, is it possible to make a Horcrux for someone else, or do you have to cast all the magic yourself?
---5b. If you can make a Horcrux for someone else, suppose you get the spell ready, Imperius a minion into attacking your target in such a way that the target kills the minion in self defense. Would that killing count as a murder? Would it split the target's soul and allow you to draw off a fragment?
------5b'. What effect would that have on your target? Voldemort grew more inhuman and less sane as he split his soul. How much did his pre-existing evil contribute to that, and how much is simply the effect of soul-loss?
------5b''. And on that note, what use is a soul in the first place? Plenty of people have done things just as evil as Voldemort while presumably in possession of complete and functional souls.
6. Is it possible to separate the concepts of 'soul as source of life' and 'soul as source of morality'? They're not the same, though people often use the two concepts somewhat interchangeably.
---------------
You know, I feel like I'm wandering over into BtVS territory. Let me change directions and talk about one specific Horcrux -- the diary -- which shows up over and over in my fanfiction.
Diary!Tom fascinates me because he's not just a Horcrux, like the locket. The locket was only able to whisper insidiously to people. Tom is a genuine, three-dimensional personality. I suspect this is because the original Tom Riddle used the diary for two separate magical experiments. First, it's a Horcrux. Second, it's an experiment at creating a copied personality (like magical portraits). The trouble is that the soul fragment joined the personality copy, which means Diary!Tom doesn't want to stay in the diary. He wants to be a real boy.
In "An Ounce of Prevention," this is the reason the diary was floating in the void between worlds. Voldemort realized that Diary!Tom might cause trouble, and wanted to get the book out of the way. He also wanted to guarantee that one of his Horcruxes would always be safe, so he put it where nobody could retrieve it -- there are no landmarks between worlds, so there's no reference point to lock onto.
I also tend to assume that the diary has a spell on it that makes people want to trust Diary!Tom. On the other hand, one of my pieces of evidence for that was the sense of familiarity Harry got from the diary, and that could just as easily be explained away as a trace memory from the soul fragment he's carting around -- remember, Harry is a Horcrux too. But I like the 'trust me' spell enough that I keep using it; it's just so fun and insidious, and very much the sort of thing Tom liked to do before he went batshit insane.
---------------
Clearly, I spend way too much time thinking about ethics and moral philosophy. It's an occupation hazard of being Unitarian Universalist, I suppose.
Also, I really need to go reread HBP and DH!
The act of murder creates a small fracture in the murderer's soul. Magic can extend that fracture (which would presumably scar over in an unrepentant murderer, or heal more-or-less completely in a repentant murderer), and actually split off a soul fragment, which can then be manipulated.
A Horcrux is a container that preserves and protects a soul fragment, which remains at least partially connected to the originating soul. So long as the Horcrux exists, the person whose soul it contains cannot fully die; Horcruxes don't prevent physical death, but they do prevent the person from either becoming a ghost or 'crossing over' to whatever afterlife exists in the HP world.
A Horcrux can only be destroyed by a few highly specific and dangerous things, such as Fiendfyre or basilisk venom. When a Horcrux is destroyed, its immortality effect is also destroyed, which means its originator can now be killed in a normal fashion.
We know all this from canon, and that's all we really need to know for the plot of DH to work.
But I'm left with some rather important questions.
1. When a Horcrux is destroyed, is the soul fragment destroyed or simply released?
---1a. If the soul fragment is destroyed, what effect does that have on the afterlife of its originator?
---1b. If the soul fragment is simply released, does it rejoin the originating soul, dissipate, become a ghost, or 'cross over' on its own? Are there other possibilities I'm forgetting?
------1b'. If the fragment 'crosses over' to the afterlife, does it rejoin the rest of the originator's soul upon true death, or is the originator's soul fragmented for all eternity?
2. Are Horcruxes difficult to destroy because the soul is difficult to destroy? Or is the durability of the artifacts simply part of the spell that creates them?
---2a. If destroying a Horcrux requires destroying part of a soul, does that destruction, in a sideways fashion, count as murder? (That is, would it be possible to create a Horcrux after destroying someone else's Horcrux?)
3. Do soul fragments naturally maintain a connection to their originating soul, or is that connection maintained by the Horcrux?
---3a. If the connection is natural, the Horcrux presumably enforces the separation of the fragment from the originating soul. If not, is that because the fragment would normally dissipate, or because the fragment would normally 'cross over,' no longer being tied to a physical body?
4. What is the soul, anyway, and how can it be tied to anything? What makes a knick-knack like a ring or a small book into the equivalent of a human body?
---4a. What if the murder is necessary for more than splitting the originator's soul? What if the victim's 'life energy' (for lack of a better word) is transfered to the Horcrux, to somehow mimic a human body and anchor the soul fragment?
---4b. Do other horrible actions split the soul? Does rape? Torture? They seem to carry the same sort of moral stress... but they don't involve death. Would it be possible to make a Horcrux after raping someone? Or would you still have to kill the victim? Would the rape split your soul further and make the Horcrux spell easier?
5. What is the difference between murder and killing? Presumably any death that results in a Horcrux will be premeditated, but not all premeditated deaths are technically murder. Some are executions; do they split your soul?
---5a. On a semi-related tangent, is it possible to make a Horcrux for someone else, or do you have to cast all the magic yourself?
---5b. If you can make a Horcrux for someone else, suppose you get the spell ready, Imperius a minion into attacking your target in such a way that the target kills the minion in self defense. Would that killing count as a murder? Would it split the target's soul and allow you to draw off a fragment?
------5b'. What effect would that have on your target? Voldemort grew more inhuman and less sane as he split his soul. How much did his pre-existing evil contribute to that, and how much is simply the effect of soul-loss?
------5b''. And on that note, what use is a soul in the first place? Plenty of people have done things just as evil as Voldemort while presumably in possession of complete and functional souls.
6. Is it possible to separate the concepts of 'soul as source of life' and 'soul as source of morality'? They're not the same, though people often use the two concepts somewhat interchangeably.
---------------
You know, I feel like I'm wandering over into BtVS territory. Let me change directions and talk about one specific Horcrux -- the diary -- which shows up over and over in my fanfiction.
Diary!Tom fascinates me because he's not just a Horcrux, like the locket. The locket was only able to whisper insidiously to people. Tom is a genuine, three-dimensional personality. I suspect this is because the original Tom Riddle used the diary for two separate magical experiments. First, it's a Horcrux. Second, it's an experiment at creating a copied personality (like magical portraits). The trouble is that the soul fragment joined the personality copy, which means Diary!Tom doesn't want to stay in the diary. He wants to be a real boy.
In "An Ounce of Prevention," this is the reason the diary was floating in the void between worlds. Voldemort realized that Diary!Tom might cause trouble, and wanted to get the book out of the way. He also wanted to guarantee that one of his Horcruxes would always be safe, so he put it where nobody could retrieve it -- there are no landmarks between worlds, so there's no reference point to lock onto.
I also tend to assume that the diary has a spell on it that makes people want to trust Diary!Tom. On the other hand, one of my pieces of evidence for that was the sense of familiarity Harry got from the diary, and that could just as easily be explained away as a trace memory from the soul fragment he's carting around -- remember, Harry is a Horcrux too. But I like the 'trust me' spell enough that I keep using it; it's just so fun and insidious, and very much the sort of thing Tom liked to do before he went batshit insane.
---------------
Clearly, I spend way too much time thinking about ethics and moral philosophy. It's an occupation hazard of being Unitarian Universalist, I suppose.
Also, I really need to go reread HBP and DH!
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 09:34 pm (UTC)But thinking about Question 1b, we may have an answer in DH: the scene where Voldemort kills Harry and his consciousness winds up at "King's Cross". Dumbledore is there to Explain All: Voldemort's AK has killed Harry and the soul fragment (Harry turned out to be a Horcrux, remember). We see the soul fragment as a stunted, deformed baby. It "goes on", but Harry chooses to return to life.
So if a Horcrux is destroyed, it would seem the soul fragment therein goes on to the Next Great Adventure, whatever that might be. Whether the soul fragments reunite once they all arrive is anybody's guess: we have no reliable reports from that side of the Veil.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 10:14 pm (UTC)Although, I'd always interpreted the deformed baby as the remains of Voldemort's original soul, not the Horcrux fragment... because, IIRC, the AK backlashed and hit him too, didn't it? *pulls DH from shelf, ruffles pages*
Actually, we're both wrong! Let me quote from page 708.
---------------
"I let him kill me," said Harry. "Didn't I?"
"You did," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Go on!"
"So that part of his soul that was in me..."
Dumbledore nodded still more enthusiastically, urging Harry onward, a broad smile of encouragement on his face.
"...has it gone?"
"Oh yes!" said Dumbledore. "Yes, he destroyed it. Your soul is whole, and completely your own, Harry."
"But then..."
Harry glanced over his shoulder to where the small, maimed creature trembled under the chair.
"What is that, Professor?"
"Something that is beyond either of our help," said Dumbledore.
---------------
The bolding is mine.
Later, on page 725, Harry sees Voldemort getting his feet, after Bellatrix has been worried, which does imply that the AK hit him as well. So I think that the deformed child-thing in King's Cross was, in fact, a representation of the current state of Voldemort's soul -- it's small and raw-looking because he has, in fact, flayed off six pieces of himself. And the missing pieces are, as Dumbledore explicitly says, destroyed when the Horcruxes are destroyed.
Now, this still doesn't definitively tell us whether the soul fragments might have crossed over or rejoined his main soul if they hadn't been caught in Horcruxes, but it does seem to imply that the destruction of a Horcrux also involves the destruction of soul-stuff. Whether destroying a Horcrux necessarily involves destroying the soul fragment, or whether there might be a way to untangle them, as it were, is unknown. I also don't know if Horcruxes are difficult to destroy because of something about the spell, or because the soul is such a naturally invulnerable thing... but I suspect the latter.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 10:22 pm (UTC)Of course, interpreting the flayed child-thing as Voldemort's current soul, rather than the soul fragment, and taking Dumbledore's assurance that the fragment was destroyed, does raise another thorny problem: the mechanism of the Killing Curse.
See, if the Killing Curse can destroy a fragment of Voldemort's soul, wouldn't it logically destroy the souls of any victims? So how can Lily and James still be around in some form for the Resurrection Stone to summon? And if the Killing Curse does destroy fragments of souls, but not complete souls, what makes the difference?
Metaphysical problems spring up everywhere I turn!
Not making things better . . .
Date: 2008-05-08 04:26 am (UTC)So First I have to admit that DH is sitting unopened on my shelf, AND I don't have any answers to your questions. (I have no problems with spoilers BTW.)
I do have another question for you.
Do Souls have the ability to 'grow'? Generally there is a strong argument that experience (good and/or bad) would help a soul grow.
It would follow asking whether split souls would grow, and if it would be at a slower pace or not.
Continuing with the idea of merging soul fragments, would the growth combine or not.
I hope that makes sense, at least a little bit. I'm just a wee too tired. But I've thought some similar questions when considering the whole Reincarnation bit of Kikyou and Kagome in InuYasha. Hmm, I wonder if you could make an argument that Kikyou was a primitive form of a Horcrux in that series. She did have to consume other souls to keep 'living,' which somehow makes me wonder what happens to the soul of the murdered? Does it help 'power' the Horcrux in some way?
Okay. So Rambling. Enough for this year.
Night,
Weathermarmalade
Re: Not making things better . . .
Date: 2008-05-08 11:45 pm (UTC)Re: Not making things better . . .
Date: 2008-05-13 05:20 am (UTC)http://www.jkrowling.co.uk/textonly/en/faq_view.cfm?id=121
http://www.jkrowling.co.uk/textonly/en/faq_view.cfm?id=122
Re: Not making things better . . .
Date: 2008-05-13 05:59 am (UTC)