Horcruxes

First of all, I'm not going to even start about what the proper plural is. I do not care. Horcruxes works, and I am going to go with that.

I am also going to use this page for the general discussion of whatever magic it was that 1) allowed Riddle to survive hitting Harry with the killing curse and 2) affects Harry's scar regardless of if that magic is actually a horcrux or not.

Origin

One place I want to quibble with cannon is on the origin of Horcruxes. Mrs. Rowling would have Herpo the Foul be essentially the prefigurement of Riddle, an evil dark wizard who deals with Parseltongue, a basilisk, and a horcrux.¹ She tries to rescue this a bit by saying in an interview that others experimented with this before him, but did not succeed.² This might be nice neat foreshadowing for a novel, but I find it unrealistic and hokey world building; the caveat made in the interview is too little, too late.

If Herpo did use a Horcrux, he would have lived somewhere between the 12th and 9th century BC³, which debunks the Chinese origin of the magic put forth in The Mandatory Marriage Contract Fic.⁴

DisobedienceWriter wrote a fairly extensive one-shot, The Valley of the Kings Massacre, which focused a fair amount on horcruxes. I dislike the characterisation of Harry in this work, but I do like some of the backstory it posits. He suggests that the Egyptian priest class delved deep into runic magic and soul magic, including Horcruxes and "the ancestor of the modern Killing Curse."⁵ In my mind both the killing curse and horcruxes are evil, the first requiring hatred, the second requiring the remorseless killing of an innocent. DisobedianceWriter suggests that one could be created with any killing, I think Rowling's interview comments require something more gruesome.⁶ Of particular note, the Valley of the Kings was in use from the 16th to the 11th century BC.⁷ For my purposes the overlap is actually useful.

Despite the parts I dislike, I do like the idea that the Egyptian priests played the ruling class, developed horcruxes, and that, unlike Itsme66's theory, horcruxes do work. It keeps me more in line with cannon, but gets rid of the over convenient root of all evil version of Herpo. To mesh back in with cannon, it is my thought that, since Ancient Greece and Egypt had at least some contact, Herpo stole the magic theory behind horcruxes from the Egyptians. Hence it being convenient that the two civilisations overlap in time.

Several centuries later, Wong Shan-Hao (from Itsme66's work) attempted a horcrux, but botched the creation, explaining the intact one on display in the Imperial Museum of Magic.⁸ Dumbledore's failure to know about and properly investigate what an intact horcrux is doing in the Imperial Museum is a testimony to his overall dependence on the prophecy, and failure to act.

Effects on the Creator

There are several competing theories on what effect the creation of a horcrux would have on the person creating it. The cannon books, to my memory, do not speak to this at all, and supplementary works Mrs. Rowling has since published online do, I similarly do not recall seeing it.

• Christian theology states that thought is at least partially a power of the soul.⁹ If you fragment your soul, you then, logically, fragment your ability to think. You would thus render yourself either less intelligent, less sane, or both.
• As a slight variation to the above, it may be not your intelligence that is effected so much as less tangible aspects of your humanity. You may become more sociopathic, psychopathic, or both.¹⁰
• As a variation on either of the above, the effects may only be felt as the horcruxes are destroyed.¹¹
• Magical ability may be linked to the soul. If your horcrux is destroyed, you may lose some portion of your ability to project magical power, your stamina for so projecting, or both.¹²
• What does it mean to "split" an immaterial soul? Is such a split a 50/50 spit, or is the horcrux a true "fragment" - that is a very small part of the whole? If the former, how much of the soul must remain anchored to earth to prevent the death of the whole?
• Along the same lines as the prior point, what would it take for a horcrux to show up on the Marauder's Map? It would be interesting to know, though of course we do not, if Tom showed up during Harry's first year.

Tom Riddle specifically

Tom was said to be charming¹³, clever,¹⁴ able to fool even the very wise.¹⁵ How much of that do we see in the version of Riddle who appears on the back of Quirrell's head? He makes a superficial attempt to persuade Harry to join him, before he starts snarling and threatening.¹⁶ His followers in the latter books seem to follow more out of fear than out of any real expectation of gain or power.

Harry's Scar

Cannon makes it very clear that Mrs. Rowling has gone with 6 horcruxes plus Harry's scar, plus the portion of the soul that floats around for the first three point something books and is finally fully resurrected at the end of book four. That is fine, and her prerogative. When it comes to Harry's scar, I think that cannon is a bit ambiguous, and leaves open some legitimate speculation. If you include interviews as part of cannon, then it starts to lean heavily in favour of it being … complicated.¹⁷

I first read this in The Thorny Rose 2:

"But if you know about the Horcruxes, then you will know that they can only be destroyed by the most destructive of forces. There is no way Harry could survive that,"the old wizard pointed out.

"What’s the matter? Is your hearing going? As I just said; that would be the case if Harry was a proper Horcrux, but he isn’t! His body was never prepared in the correct manner that Horcrux receptacles are required to be and he wasn’t subjected to a Binding Ritual, either. Voldemort’s sliver of soul isn’t properly integrated with Harry’s," Ginny yelled in anger.¹⁸

However I now know that this theory is more or less exactly what Mrs. Rowling intended:¹⁹ a horcrux has to be intentional, the bit of soul in Harry's scar is not, therefor he is not a true horcrux. Because he is not a true horcrux, it cannot take him over the way a real one would. The pain is the bit of soul trying to rejoin the rest of Riddle; and the few times we see it actually influencing Harry it is because he is, independently, emotionally vulnerable to it due to feeling things similar to what Riddle would have been feeling.

Interestingly she insists that despite the fact that he is not a true horcrux, he would have had to be destroyed the same way.²⁰ I, like Ginny in the fan fiction above, disagree on that. It does not make sense. I prefer the theory "Anything enchanted can be disenchanted … there are many poor methods to solve a problem, but usually only one or a small number of elegant options."²¹ Under this theory, few if any researchers have ever discovered a way to disenchant a Horcrux that does not involve destruction of the object. Of those who did discover such a way, they either left no records, left records inaccessible to Dumbledore, or (nearly the same thing) were someone considered untrustworthy by Dumbledore and thus not consulted. A variation of this theory is that there are people that Dumbledore trusts (like Bill Weasley) who had studied such records, but Dumbledore was so paranoid about knowledge of Horcruxes that he did not ask even people he trusted.²²

Of course all of this assumes that the soul fragment is actually attached to Harry and not something embedded in his scar.²³ It is very clear that Mrs. Rowling intends precisely that; works with something in the scar really fall into the "nonsense" section below.

Destroying

Mrs. Rowling accepts a fallacy here: that sometimes an evil can be so great, so powerful, that only another evil can destroy it. Despite having said that love is one of the most powerful magics,²⁴ she will allow only dark things to harm this example of deep evil: basilisk venom, fiendfire, or the killing curse. The same fallacy is found in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, where the evil taint left by the Dark One can only be purged by the "opposing" evil found in Shadar Logoth.²⁵ The problem with the Wheel of Time version is that it presupposes that two evils can be different in nature or kind. Not only is this is a prime example of the problems with the lack of balance in her universe, it begs the question why should a horcrux react badly to an evil substance? That is, basilisk venom may be massively destructive to all that is good, healthy, and in right order, but it could have equally followed that the horcrux would have fed off the evil nature of the venom, becoming stronger by imbibing of its evil power. Had she taken this more balanced approach to her world building, you would need something minimally morally neutral and ideally morally cleansing to destroy that which is morally tainted. Thus a muggle blast furnace or a volcano²⁶ would work just fine.

Mostly Unsupported Nonsense

Even though the other 6 have no real legitimate room for speculation given what is in cannon, it would be fun if we did. I will not promise that I will not ever do so in anything I attempt to write. I really hadn't considered just how much fun you could have with this until I read offsides' Long Live The Queen. From Chapter 32:

“I've reviewed the diary," said Croaker, jumping straight in, "along with interviewing both the victim Miss Weasley, as well as Mister Potter. Based on what I learned, I'm confident that it was not a Horcrux."

The Chief Wizard let out a small sigh of relief, though he knew it didn't mean that Voldemort hadn't actually made one later. "Do you know what it was?" he asked.

"Yes and no," replied Croaker. "I'm pretty sure I know what it did and how it worked from the big picture, but not how it was made or many of the details. In fact, I've never seen or found anything in my research quite like it. As you recall, a Horcrux holds a piece of the soul, which could theoretically be used to take over another body. This," he held up the diary, "was almost the exact opposite.

"After checking it for various residual traces, I found no indication that there was ever a soul directly attached to it, though it was used as a temporary repository for one. Based on the memories of Miss Ginny Weasley, it became clear that while the diary contained some sort of consciousness that interacted with her “the one thing it lacked was a soul, which it was slowly leeching as she wrote more and more in the diary. I also reviewed the memory of Harry Potter from his encounter with the construct of Tom Marvolo Riddle when he ultimately destroyed the diary, and from that came to a rather astonishing conclusion.”

“Somehow, a young Tom Riddle found a way to place a complete copy of his consciousness inside the diary, along with a mechanism to trap and ultimately absorb the soul of whoever wrote in it. Perhaps he was trying to make a Horcrux and failed, but we'll never know. As it absorbed Miss Weasley's soul, it gained control over her Magic, as well as partial control over her body. But once the soul was mostly absorbed it was able to create a new body for that soul using Magic, and ultimately would have left Miss Weasley's body a decayed husk, similar to a victim of the Dementor's Kiss, once the absorption was complete. However, the diary itself was required as a focus of this process, and since it was destroyed before the process completed the soul was able to return to its natural body once control was lost. At least that's > what I think happened; as I said, I've never seen anything quite like it before.”²⁷

Imagine the staggering implications of that. It is the one criticism I have of that story, that the author did not really explore the can of worms that section opens up. Basically, what if Riddle really had done experiments, plural such that neither he nor Dumbledore could know which had prevented him from truly dying? The idea is not without cannon support, Riddle implies as much in the graveyard scene.

I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked . . . for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it.²⁸

Six essentially identical horcruxes really doesn't constitute a situation where you would say "one or more of my experiments had worked." I mean, the idea that so many authors have that you have to consume a horcrux to resurrect Riddle is silly and rather insulting. It is hardly an immortality device if it only preserves you from a single death that is bound to happen at some point eventually. But if a horcrux can be properly understood as an anchor that need not be consumed, then while the idea of a 7 part soul might be interesting and all, the idea of having several totally different types of anchors is really just fascinating. It would be so easy to do too, let Riddle be enamoured with the idea of a seven part soul, that does not mean it is possible, let there be some arithmetical limit he hits before that, so that it is something he tried for, but ultimately could not do.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, souls are clearly not really splitable at all. If the soul was truly split, then the horcrux would not anchor you to this life, the death of one half would simply not affect the other. That is probably where the idea that a horcrux gets consumed in a resurrection comes from, because the author implicitly assumes that there is no wraith to resurrect. The problem is that Riddle's existence in the first book contradicts the theory. The part of his soul that was not in a horcrux did not pass on, but rather fled, without a body (or container) to the forest in Albania.²⁹

Building on that, given that the soul does not really split, lets force the death of one segment, by throwing a horcrux through the veil, and let it pull the other segments through with it.³⁰ The cannon discrepancy from that work is that the diary horcrux was destroyed by the basilisk fang, so while the soul parts are not entirely disconnected (and so can be anchors) they are not entirely connected either (the containers can be de-horcrux-ified if destroyed).

I suppose you could speculate on if the soul fragment was destroyed with the diary or not. It is theoretically possible that instead of dying that soul fragment was released from the container. The problem then would be explaining what is up with Harry's scar, since we are told that a soul fragment latched on to him, instead of rejoining some other soul fragment (or the main soul piece that was the wraith).

Alternately, it seems to be a favourite idea in any number of fan fiction works to think that resurrecting the person who created the horcrux consumes that horcrux. Under this theory, the portion of the soul in the killed body, or destroyed horcrux, does pass on, but having left behind a portion of their soul anchored to this world, that portion can be attached to a body, and will become the new primary fragment. I see no support for this idea in cannon, nor, counting the various horcruxes that Harry and Dumbledore between them find and destroy, do I see room for one to have been used but not mentioned in book four. This idea suffers from many of the rebuttals listed above as well.

More rarely, but closely in line with my first entry in this section, is the idea that Harry's scar is not a soul fragment.³¹ Many of these authors believe that there ought to be a maximum number of splits. If that were true, if Riddle intended to create his seventh horcrux with/at Harry's murder, then he was at six soul parts. This is not a stable number, but also not a notably unstable one.³² For this theory to work, Riddle ought to have been at eleven, or thirteen parts.