Horcrux questions

[randomjitter]

Rereading GoF brought some questions concerning Horcruxes to the forefront of my mind. I'll try to be brief:

DD said LV made six horcruxes (so there're 7 pieces of LV's soul). And my question: did the rebound Avada Kadavra from baby Harry destroy the piece of soul residing in LV at the time?

• If so, shouln't there be six total now? Or perhaps he

Comments

[skepanie]

to answer your first question, no, I don't see how it could have. the whole point of making Horcruxes is to divide the soul in order to keep the original soul-piece (the one kept with the body/consciousness/whatever) intact. I suspect that the body-soulpiece remains intact because it is connected to the body/consiousness of the person and therefore has a stronger presence or connection to life. I mean, the other pieces are in, for the most part, inanimate objects. I think a soul-piece disconnected from its owner would be more vulnerable to attack or destruction simply because it is not a part of the person anymore. the consciousness of the person is something of a shield to the soulpiece.

I'm having a hard time expressing what I'm thinking here, but that's as good as it's going to get right now. :)

[randomjitter]

Hi, thanks for commenting

[whatitistoburn1]

I agree with the insurance mechanism idea. That's what I got from reading HBP, in any event

[skepanie]

yeah, an insurance policy is basically what I was thinking. I think two things keep people from making tons of them and make creating Horcruxes such a terrible thing to do: 1) the act that allows you to do it in the first place (i.e., murder) and 2) the implications of splitting your soul. I don't know for sure how JKR thinks of a "soul," but I suspect it is interpreted in the Christian tradition, where a person's soul is the eternal essence of that person. think about how unnatural it is to rip your eternal essence into pieces. now, I don't know what happens to the soul-piece in a Horcrux when the Horcrux is destroyed, but I really don't see it going up to heaven, as it might if it were whole

[chiralove]

As far as the numbers of it go - we all know how good JKR is at math and I assure you that I am no better - I have always imagined that a soul is infinite; after all, there is no practical measurement of it and it doesn't seem the sort of thing that one can limit in a metaphysical sense, although there are clearly physical limits such as bodies. If this is the case, the mathematics are the sort that even I can understand: infinity/2 = infinity. Thus, if LV is killed, any one of his Horcruxes is sufficient to "reconstitute" him as it were, with no less soul in the new body than he possessed in the old. It's the sort of math that seems counter-intuitive, at least to me - how can (infinity/2)*7=infinity? but I have been assured in the past that this is how math works.