MetaFic

... so my answer would be that the assumption that the soul is the same thing as ones conscience is incorrect. I can also see no reason to consider these to be the same. I would think it reasonable to say that conscience may be a function of the soul, but that does not necessarily mean that one cannot have a soul without a conscience.

Does that make any sense to you?

-SC

I agree with Chatmandu, my impression was that JK was saying that killing damaged the soul no matter what the person thought about it. I think that is why she avoided having Harry actually kill Voldemort in book 7, instead having Voldemort kill himself. That way Harry "vanquished" the Dark Lord, without damaging his own soul in the process. I personally made a mental distinction between killing and murder and have been confused while reading several different fanfics where the author has Harry suffering all this terrible angst over becoming a murderer just because he is the one prophesied to defeat Voldemort. These plots always feel forced to me because the argument had no weight in my mind.

____________________________________________________________________________
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read" Groucho Marks

I do not agree that you can infer from the story that all killing tears the soul. For instance, the Basilisk is a sentient creature that can communicate to a limited degree. Perhaps it is ruled by its most basic of desires, but the fact that it has an understandable structured language means it has an awareness about itself. Does Harry killing the Basilisk tear his soul?

More importantly, the Tom Riddle in the diary is very much a living soul, although a tattered part. In the last book, while Harry waited between life and death, the fragment of Voldemort was shown as a viable soul, although twisted and suffering. Harry personally killed at least two of Voldemort's soul pieces. Does that not make him a killer? Would that not have torn his soul?

To make the statement that all killing is wrong, JKR would have needed to create Harry as a pacifist unwilling to fight or kill. He would have needed to face Voldemort as if Harry were Gandhi. At the very least, she should have shown how detrimental killing is to Harry as a character, but it is not shown. His reactions to death are always strongest when someone dies whom he had no control over. In the book he shows no remorse for the death of Quirrel, no second thought on the death of the Basilisk or the shade of Tom Riddle.

IN truth, killing the diary is an easy choice for him. Therefore, logically, I do not see killing in general as the reason one's soul tears. Rather, I believe you can only make the argument that deliberate and callous murder is what tears the soul.

- “Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word ["I"]. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest

Nope. :)

My impression is that the way JKR has set it up is that killing tears the soul in the same kind of way that some sharp object might tear the skin, or an accident might break a bone. The soul is capable of re-knitting itself (through remorse?) unless something is done to capture the torn fragment, which is how a horcrux is created.

I think that why creating a horcrux is so horrible is that in order to produce a fragment which can be captured, the killing has to be deliberately timed otherwise the fragment is lost to the natural re-knitting process. Think of breaking a bone in order to reset it, or fixing a dislocated joint: neither is pleasant but must be done in order to produce the desired result (although in those cases the result is entirely more benign).

Quite how this works in with Harry becoming an accidental horcrux is not entirely clear, but I'm sure a bit more hand-waving will produce a reasonable solution.

Actually it's not me that equates a soul with a moral center, so to speak. It appears to be JKR who does, if it's true that Molly's soul isn't split when she kills Bellatrix. Either that, or she's half-souled after the battle, and the other part went somewhere else.

I would think we are talking about two different things. You lost me with that analogy. (Not that I haven't done that to anyone who's read my work...)

My take on that is that killing someone *always* tears the soul... but given time the soul will heal, if one doesn't keep hacking away at it. As with any spell in the series intent also seems to play a part, my reading is that if the intent is malicious then more damage will be done. Its made clear in the books that making a Horcrux however is a rare bit of dark magic. It's clear that most of the DEs have killed multiple people, and with malicious intent at that, but only Voldemort has horcruxes.

I would compare this to making a tear in the edge of a piece of paper, it weakens the paper but the paper itself is still whole, just damaged. Once the edge is torn however, you can fairly easily rip the paper in half, starting at the tear.

As for the Horcrux in Harry, well that was explained in the books too, by that stage Voldemort's soul was so weak from being repeatedly ripped apart that an act of that magnitude was enough to rip it apart again even if that was not the intent.

-SC

Edit: heh I just noticed that Chatmandu made the same argument at the top of the thread. I may need to start rereading earlier posts before posting.. :-)

This is easy to answer - Because that is how Jo wrote the story! :-)

As others have mentioned, I think the soul can "repair" itself if given time. That implies that to make a Horcrux, that it's a 2 step process: 1. rip the soul, 2. attach the ripped piece to an object. That leads us to ask: Just how did Harry become an unintentional Horcrux without step 2? (Yeah, I still don't like JKR's explanation in book7.)

However, I'd like to ask a different but related question: When the rip is made, how big a rip is created? As you can guess, I'm really asking how many pieces can be torn off?

It seems to me, this is not a process that has no upper limit, there must be one (the soul is not infinite or "replenishable"). I suspect JKR never answered this even for herself, given the story we ended up with. But when a rip is done, do you always get the same amount, and if so, how much? (e.g. if the answer is 10%, then there are a max of 10 equal-sized pieces) If it's a variable amount, does it simply half what remains? (so 50% of original, then 25% of original, then 12.5%...) Or is there another mathematical sequence?

I'd also be tempted to say that as more of the soul disappears, that changes the person's character, making them more and more sociopathic, but that's a different question. :)

Kevin

More of my two cents (pence?). For the internal logic use "the soul is the basis of a character's moral imperative." Not good or evil, but moral imperative. That way someone like Lucius Malfoy is operating with the same type of moral logic as Deasil, not the same morality though! For Lucius Malfoy and his Pureblood ilk it is a moral imperative that half-bloods, Muggle borns and Muggles be kept in ther subservient place. At best it can be a continuation of the logic behind feudalism, at worst it can be the logic behind apartheid. Yes, I know, these two social systems are not logical. But to their adherents facts are not important, only belief in the system.

Horcrux versus Dementor... A Dementor appears to remove the soul but leaves a body's automatic mental functions still intact. I have no thoughts for an internal logic on why that differs from the Avada Kedvra removing the soul and all mental functions go with it, sorry. A repeat of my own understanding of a Horcrux: creating one separates a piece of the soul in time and space from its other part. I'll go with kb0 here and postulate the soul is torn "down the middle," so each separation is in half. It would be really hard to justify a logic where "it is not really a great murder" so the soul is only 28% torn. Perhaps in an earlier time horcrux creation was more common however, the more a person created, the more unstable their mind became. Multiple horcruxes accelerates the mental instability. That would explain the shock of making more than one, on top of the shock about creating one in the first place. In the canon Voldemort is definitely comming off the mental rails by the end of the seventh book. An impaired morality degenerates into an impaired cognative thought process? If you keep to that you can build an internal logic around it.

There is a short fic somewhere that has Ron asking "If horcruxes were developed by the Egyptians, why aren't we surrounded by immortal Egyptians?" According to the story's logic horcruxes are magically unstable. They don't provide immortality, just a way to ward off death until they degenerate (think radioactive 1/2 life).

This is where I naturally want to go, because I don't think the person can control how much is split off. Also, in the books, it seems to me that the diary was more powerful as the first one created, but perhaps that's just me reading what I want into the situations.

But this brings up an interesting question to me. With this math, we get (with a little rounding):
1H = 50%
2H = 25%
3H = 12.5%
4H = 6.25%
5H = 3.12%
6H = 1.56%

So by the time Tom did 6 splits (ending with 7 pieces and the last is in him), he's down to about 1.5% of the original. One more split for the unexpected Harry piece would take him down to less than 1%! Is that even enough to still function? Or is that last piece even enough to do anything useful for him? (i.e. could it really be used to bring him back) Or is this just another case of JKR being bad with math and not thinking this thru? ;)

I would agree that Tom was multiple cards short of a full deck by the end of book7, and a very small (& unstable) soul is the only reason I can come up with.

Yep, I've read that and thought the author asked a fun "what if" question. It created a plot bunny for me too, but I doubt it'll ever get written. It'd be great if you could name the story as I'd love to reread it.

Thanks!

This is a side note to the conversation, but if you removed 10%, the next 10% would be a smaller amount than the first. And while each successive 10% would be smaller and smaller, there would always be 10% available. That is why in math we talk about half-lives, never discussing when something would be completely gone, because it is a mathematical impossibility. I see you've already outlined the basics of half-life here. Of course this is just a mathematical game, in reality we know that particles do reach a point when they cannot be divided further short of nuclear fission. But because of the math, we can never really be sure. Is 1.5% still functional? How about 0.0000368% ?So unless you go with your first option of a fixed amount, Voldemort could have continued making horcruxes indefinitely- assuming he was still sane enough to do so. Since he didn't, stopping when he did even after he must have heard about the diary, makes me wonder if the process involved was detrimental in some way that really did concern him? Did it physically hurt? Did it weaken him magically? Was he simply not able to because of the discussion above? Are we to believe he was just really that fixated on his magical seven number?

_______________________________________________________________________________
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read" Groucho Marks

I agree with the "remorse knitting the soul together" thing, but also that to completely tear the soul in two you have to have malicious intent, and actually know and accept that you are committing murder. In the case of Molly Weasley, she killed Bellatrix to save her children and to stop her from destroying even more lives, which makes her intentions good, thus the rip on her soul is smaller and more easily repaired. I don't think she ever felt remorse on killing Bellatrix, but on killing another human being (as little as there was left on human in her) and the fact that her children witnessed it, taking away a bit of their remaining innocence.

When Voldemort tried to kill Harry, he already planned on making a horcrux, so one might just think that the magic recognized that and tried to finish the job, but not finding an object prepared for a soul fragment, decided to lock it up in Harry instead. (Okay, a bit far-fetched but I'm trying to figure out some kind of an explanation for it.)

- Meri