The true horror of Horcruxes?
Nov. 2nd, 2013 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalker posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockWe've had discussions here at DTCL about the strangeness of Horcruxes being considered so much more evil than regular premeditated murder which splits your soul, and the discomfort at the idea that it seems to be considered so heinous because of what it does to the caster rather than the victim, like that actually matters more.
But we are, after all, basing that mainly on Dumbledore, who has a habit selecting bits of truth to tell that can give a... shall we say... misleading impression, on bits of old and arcane books whose authors might have had a less-than-clear writing style (never mind any potential biases or agendas), and on Slughorn's basically off-the-cuff remarks to young Tom.
None of them are lying, as such, but they might well be a bit careless in their explanations, yes?
Slughorn says that splitting one's soul is "against nature," and putting one of the pieces in some external container apparently even more so. This sounds like the terrible thing is the harm suffered by the unwise Horcrux-maker, who is now suffering from unnatural soul-damage and whose continued existence, if killed but stuck on the mortal plain, would be even more terrible. Poor Horcrux maker!
But people use "against nature" to mean "super inconceivably bad," not necessarily literally unnatural. You hear that it's "unnatural" to kill one's own children, for instance, and yet I quite clearly remember seeing hamsters and rabbits eat their babies as a child - as natural as can be. It's more a kind of shorthand for "no really, it's just that awful, you can't even imagine." And Slughorn is specifically talking about the side effects which might deter anyone thinking of trying it, not necessarily all off the effects. No, really, you wouldn't like it, it's so bad for you that you'd wish you'd died instead. Just say no to Horcruxes!
Which doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of truth in the idea that the soul damage is a terrible thing. But I doubt it's only terrible for the person whose soul-bit is now residing in a cup or a rock. So what is the terrible effect that isn't named?
Well, we know that the way to heal your torn soul after a murder is to feel remorse.
Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. After all, you can't heal it if you've fully split that piece off and put it in a rock, can you?
Making a Horcrux, in this light, is a magical declaration that you know you've done an awful thing and you're not sorry - nothing will ever make you sorry. At least, not enough to heal yourself. Just as premeditated murder is considered worse than murder in the heat of the moment, deliberately making it impossible for remorse to fully take effect is probably worse than not feeling sorry at the moment but allowing for the possibility that you might later realize have done something wrong. That's not quite enough, though. However...
When you tear your soul but keep the torn bit inside you, presumably you still have access to that bit of your soul, even if it isn't working together with the main chunk as well as it usually does. It's still part of you, in active daily use. If you remove it, does it work long-distance? It doesn't seem so, does it? We've all noted how Voldemort's abilities to plan, estimate others' emotions in order to manipulate them, self-control, etc. all seem to deteriorate after he's made a few Horcruxes, and that the accidental Harrycrux (and/or spending eleven years possessing snakes) seems to have finally cracked him a bit too much to be a truly effective Dark Lord. We also saw that even the Horcruxes that weren't explicitly designed to hold memories seem to have bits of Tom's personality and the ability to understand outside events and react to them, like the Locket. And imprints of departed souls - ghosts - also seem to have memory, personality, emotions, etc. (or imprints of them, whatever that actually means). So it does seem likely that these things are all carried in the soul, at least for wizards.
Doesn't it follow, then, that cutting off your access to a piece of your soul would destroy part of your ability to feel remorse? For anything, ever, not just for that particular murder? And would diminish your ability to feel empathy as well? And your ability to control your impulses?
I'm sure someone here has said as much before, but tying it all together in one post: the true horror of Horcruxes is that, by damaging your soul in this particular way, you become much more likely to commit horrible acts in the future. And you almost certainly know this: in accepting the soul damage, you didn't just plan this one single murder, but signed on for the possibility that you're going to hurt more people, too. You can't "just" decide to make one single Horcrux, with regret and solemn intentions never to murder again, because you've decided that the greater good requires your continued existence during some crisis - becoming more dangerous yourself is an unavoidable part of the package. You can't even hope that your sense of self-preservation will restrain you all the time, because some of your self-restraint has been split off as well. You've got less of a filter between your temper and blasting someone with whatever nasty spell you want to see them suffer from.
Making a Horcrux isn't just premeditated murder, but a premeditated decision to quite possibly make yourself incapable of not hurting people forever after.* Not quite premeditated serial or mass murder, or even premeditated petty verbal cruelty... or manipulativeness... but being perfectly fine with the possibilities, enough to actively encourage it. (Even if you somehow didn't know about that particular side effect, your ignorance won't matter to your victims - they'll get hurt just the same.) You're committing to kill not just one person, but potentially lots of them, forever, to preserve your own life.
Ultimately, the concern is for your potential victims, not necessarily your mangled soul itself. Or at least not primarily so. After all, just diminishing your capacity for remorse isn't even the end of it, is it? You kill one person, you don't feel sorry at all - well, there's one less thing restraining you from trying it again, isn't there? It wasn't so bad, really, and look what you got in exchange! And so your remaining empathy and remorse is dampened even further... In essence, you'll start conditioning yourself to murder.
You might not start out as incapable of remorse and empathy as Tom Riddle... but you sure might end up that way, the longer you live after having diminished your capacity to feel those things.
That's pretty awful.
*Well. Maybe if you limit yourself to just one... and have lots of self-control to begin with, because you're just so wise and awesome at everything... And it's for the Greater GoodTM
But we are, after all, basing that mainly on Dumbledore, who has a habit selecting bits of truth to tell that can give a... shall we say... misleading impression, on bits of old and arcane books whose authors might have had a less-than-clear writing style (never mind any potential biases or agendas), and on Slughorn's basically off-the-cuff remarks to young Tom.
None of them are lying, as such, but they might well be a bit careless in their explanations, yes?
Slughorn says that splitting one's soul is "against nature," and putting one of the pieces in some external container apparently even more so. This sounds like the terrible thing is the harm suffered by the unwise Horcrux-maker, who is now suffering from unnatural soul-damage and whose continued existence, if killed but stuck on the mortal plain, would be even more terrible. Poor Horcrux maker!
But people use "against nature" to mean "super inconceivably bad," not necessarily literally unnatural. You hear that it's "unnatural" to kill one's own children, for instance, and yet I quite clearly remember seeing hamsters and rabbits eat their babies as a child - as natural as can be. It's more a kind of shorthand for "no really, it's just that awful, you can't even imagine." And Slughorn is specifically talking about the side effects which might deter anyone thinking of trying it, not necessarily all off the effects. No, really, you wouldn't like it, it's so bad for you that you'd wish you'd died instead. Just say no to Horcruxes!
Which doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of truth in the idea that the soul damage is a terrible thing. But I doubt it's only terrible for the person whose soul-bit is now residing in a cup or a rock. So what is the terrible effect that isn't named?
Well, we know that the way to heal your torn soul after a murder is to feel remorse.
Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. After all, you can't heal it if you've fully split that piece off and put it in a rock, can you?
Making a Horcrux, in this light, is a magical declaration that you know you've done an awful thing and you're not sorry - nothing will ever make you sorry. At least, not enough to heal yourself. Just as premeditated murder is considered worse than murder in the heat of the moment, deliberately making it impossible for remorse to fully take effect is probably worse than not feeling sorry at the moment but allowing for the possibility that you might later realize have done something wrong. That's not quite enough, though. However...
When you tear your soul but keep the torn bit inside you, presumably you still have access to that bit of your soul, even if it isn't working together with the main chunk as well as it usually does. It's still part of you, in active daily use. If you remove it, does it work long-distance? It doesn't seem so, does it? We've all noted how Voldemort's abilities to plan, estimate others' emotions in order to manipulate them, self-control, etc. all seem to deteriorate after he's made a few Horcruxes, and that the accidental Harrycrux (and/or spending eleven years possessing snakes) seems to have finally cracked him a bit too much to be a truly effective Dark Lord. We also saw that even the Horcruxes that weren't explicitly designed to hold memories seem to have bits of Tom's personality and the ability to understand outside events and react to them, like the Locket. And imprints of departed souls - ghosts - also seem to have memory, personality, emotions, etc. (or imprints of them, whatever that actually means). So it does seem likely that these things are all carried in the soul, at least for wizards.
Doesn't it follow, then, that cutting off your access to a piece of your soul would destroy part of your ability to feel remorse? For anything, ever, not just for that particular murder? And would diminish your ability to feel empathy as well? And your ability to control your impulses?
I'm sure someone here has said as much before, but tying it all together in one post: the true horror of Horcruxes is that, by damaging your soul in this particular way, you become much more likely to commit horrible acts in the future. And you almost certainly know this: in accepting the soul damage, you didn't just plan this one single murder, but signed on for the possibility that you're going to hurt more people, too. You can't "just" decide to make one single Horcrux, with regret and solemn intentions never to murder again, because you've decided that the greater good requires your continued existence during some crisis - becoming more dangerous yourself is an unavoidable part of the package. You can't even hope that your sense of self-preservation will restrain you all the time, because some of your self-restraint has been split off as well. You've got less of a filter between your temper and blasting someone with whatever nasty spell you want to see them suffer from.
Making a Horcrux isn't just premeditated murder, but a premeditated decision to quite possibly make yourself incapable of not hurting people forever after.* Not quite premeditated serial or mass murder, or even premeditated petty verbal cruelty... or manipulativeness... but being perfectly fine with the possibilities, enough to actively encourage it. (Even if you somehow didn't know about that particular side effect, your ignorance won't matter to your victims - they'll get hurt just the same.) You're committing to kill not just one person, but potentially lots of them, forever, to preserve your own life.
Ultimately, the concern is for your potential victims, not necessarily your mangled soul itself. Or at least not primarily so. After all, just diminishing your capacity for remorse isn't even the end of it, is it? You kill one person, you don't feel sorry at all - well, there's one less thing restraining you from trying it again, isn't there? It wasn't so bad, really, and look what you got in exchange! And so your remaining empathy and remorse is dampened even further... In essence, you'll start conditioning yourself to murder.
You might not start out as incapable of remorse and empathy as Tom Riddle... but you sure might end up that way, the longer you live after having diminished your capacity to feel those things.
That's pretty awful.
*Well. Maybe if you limit yourself to just one... and have lots of self-control to begin with, because you're just so wise and awesome at everything... And it's for the Greater GoodTM
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-04 03:37 pm (UTC)Your fundamental argument is a bit canon-shafted by Dh 6, where Hermione describes what she learned from the books she stole from Dumbledore's study. She suggests that you can put your soul together again (after ripping it to make a Horcrux) by feeling remorse--and allwoing yourself to feel that is so painful it might destroy you.
However, Hermione's implication that even a soul split by making Horcruxes might conceivably be reunited, still allows for most of your theory.
We need only posit that separating off (and encasing under impremeable enchantments) a soul-fragment makes it much HARDER to the murderer to feel enough remorse to heal....
And that the effect worsens, the more often s/he does it....
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 02:15 am (UTC)We also saw that at a distance of however many miles means that Voldemort can't tell whether one of his Horcruxes is even still intact. Not feeling an outright "death" suggests that any remorse he might feel would have a hard time communicating across that same distance as well. (I wonder if this is why the process might kill you? Some sort of whiplash from a soul-bit suddenly getting yanked into you from a long distance? Or just such an overwhelming amount of remorse that you're going to be hanging yourself anyway to make the pain stop?)
While it might be theoretically possible for it to work at greater distances, the amount of remorse you would need might increase exponentially to a point where it's just not going to happen. Especially if your ability to feel remorse is already impaired.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 03:06 pm (UTC)Who's closer, emotionally, to a soul-piece than the rest of the soul?
And Hermione was obviously partly wrong, because physical proximity did play a role....
Oh, no, wait. We're forgetting--the locket's effect was unique to it. The diary didn't do anything to people who were just around it. Only when Ginny wrote in it and formed an attachment to her pocket friend was it able to do anything--and then the soul-fragment DID flit out and possess her.
The locket never POSSESSED any of the three of them--it just influenced them, negatively.
So it's probably more that the locket had originally been crafted (by Salazar or whomever) to be an emotion-amplifying artefact, and being made into a Horcrux turned the effect evil.
So we weren't really seeing "flitting" in the camping scenes--just the pervesion of an emotion-amplifying object.
But your other argument holds--in fact it holds better than you thought. Tom was near Hogwarts, in the Shrieking Shack or nearly, and concentrating on his Horcruxes, worried about them. But he didn't notice the cup being stabbed nor the iara burned, and the latter happens while Death Eaters have made it into the castle.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-11 04:00 pm (UTC)So how much of this did Tom know? Was the ring already a Horcrux when we saw him wearing it, and he only stopped because he realized it was better to keep it separate? (He'd killed three people already, and so could have made the diary, the ring, and some third object into Horcruxes already, though quite possibly had only made one or none.) Or did he only Horcruxify it later? Just how much does each Horcrux creation change his appearance - was the "melted wax" look only after five, and the "pale but interesting" look three? Two? One? Does the change in appearance accelerate with each one, so that after three you still look okay, but four makes you melty and five gives you snake eyes and no nose?
no subject
Date: 2013-11-11 08:09 pm (UTC)The only thing we have to go on is Sluggy's memory of Tom's appearance while he's wearing the ring. By that time he has killed at 4 least people (Myrtle, his father and grandparents). It does kind of depend on whether one must make the horcrux at the same time as the murder or whether one can take out the ripped soul piece to make the horcrux at a later time.
IF one must have the object to be horcruxed on one at the time of the soul splitting (murder), did youngTom make the diary before Myrtle was killed? She is apparently the murder for that horcrux. And the ring is supposed to be for his father's. IF the horcrux must be made at the time of the murder then Tom has already made two of them by the time of Sluggy's memory. Which makes no sense of his asking whether it might be okay to make more than one (if he already has done so).
We know by the time Tom visits Hepzibah that his looks have degenerated a bit, but not much. He's still very attractive, altho' his eyes can already turn red. However, it isn't until after this time that he has possession of the Cup or the Locket. Therefore, his appearance at that time is the result of only 2 horcruxes.
How different does he look in that memory from his appearance in Sluggy's? Because that is what tells us whether or not the ring in Sluggy's memory is already a horcrux or not. IF it is, then he should look the same in both of those memories. Does the Tom from Sluggy's memory actually look different from the Tom in the Diary (presumably before ALL horcruxes IF it was the first object)?
I don't tend to think that the horcrux must be made at the time of the murder. The soul is ripped inside one, Why must it be removed at the time of the ripping? Why not later? IF it must be made at the time of the killing then Tom of Sluggy's memory had made 2 horcruxes already and should look almost exactly like Tom of the visit to Hepzibah.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-11 11:47 pm (UTC)Your "Nagini milk > snakey look" ideas makes me wonder... Are we even sure that it was making the Horcruxes that changed his appearance in the first place? We also have that ambiguous statement about the "measures" he'd taken to keep himself deathless, which he claimed to have told his followers a little about. What were those, and when did he do them, and did they affect his appearance? Maybe casting some sort of Dermum Adamantium charm on himself (or drinking a special longevity potion, or bathing in the blood of virgins who were bitten by snakes, or whatever) is actually responsible for the melted wax thing, and he only started looking gaunt and pale after leaving school because he no longer got the fabulous spreads the elves put together at Hogwarts and was living off whatever they serve at the Leaky Cauldron or the wizarding equivalent of ramen cups. Even the red eyes might not be a result of making Horcruxes, but of some other nefarious magical practice. Correlation isn't causation and all - he was making Horcruxes during the same years he was also supposedly learning other nasty and dangerous magic, so that makes it harder to sort out what caused what.
It might actually have gone like this: he makes a Horcrux every few years, and at the same time also gradually experiments and then modifies his body in various ways to make it sturdier (not immune to harm, but more difficult to harm - and/or maybe decay-resistant, if he's planning centuries ahead? - and which he could convincingly pass off to his followers as making him unkillable) and learns and practices various kinds of (unspecified) dangerous magic which have unknown effects on the caster. The Horcrux-making causes no change in appearance, but the other two things do. Because they happen along the same timeline, we (and Dumbledore?) just assumed that it was the Horcruxes.
Which would make figuring out when he actually made the things even harder (never mind what he knew when about leaving Horcruxes far from you). What's left as evidence besides Dumbledore's suppositions and knowing when he actually acquired the objects themselves? Not a whole lot! It probably is easier and simpler to go with Horcrux creation affecting his appearance...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-12 01:14 am (UTC)Anyways - IF it was 'reckless endangerment' on Tom's part that his soul was split by this, then it is ONLY because James came in and rescued Snape that kept Sirius' soul intact. Don't you think that OUGHT to be more likely to cause a Life Debt?
Note also that it's doubtful that either Remus or Sirius ever knew anything about how your soul can rip if you kill someone, since only Harry is able to convince them not to kill Peter. One shouldn't actually need to know about horcruxes to realize ripping your soul by murdering someone isn't the smartest bit of revenge.
So much for Remus' vaunted DADA knowledge. It would seem he never came across that bit of info. Tho' to be fair, I'm not POSITIVE that Snape knew before Albus spoke about Draco's soul. Tho' I suspect he did, since he didn't question the information, only that Albus didn't apparently value HIS (Snape's) soul as much.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-13 02:16 pm (UTC)Do we know for sure that Tom made the ring horcrux from his father's death, or is that just a bit of fanon/Dumbledorean speculation? It's possible that at the time of the memory Tom had taken the ring but not yet turned it into a horcrux, and was asking Slughorn to see if this would be feasible.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-24 12:21 am (UTC)According to interview, the other Horcruxes were made with the following deaths:
diary - Myrtle
cup - Hepzibah Smith
locket - Muggle tramp (there goes Dumbly's theory of 'significant deaths')
diadem - Albanian peasant (idem)
snake - Bertha Jorkins (Dumbles was wrong here too)
Harry - Lily.