****

Insofar as the matter of Lord Voldemort’s alleged broad public support goes, however. There clearly never was any. Ever. It was not needed, nor was it ever really wanted. Voldemort’s original followers turn out to have been a hand-picked selection from among his own schoolmates, augmented by a few other key recruits along the way and, ultimately their descendents. And there never were more than 5–6 dozen of them at any time.

In addition, he had commanded a number of allied groups of non-human, or “part”-human pariahs who had nothing to lose by supporting him and could be brought to think that they might have something to gain.

Plus a lake full of animated corpses, who didn’t think anything.

Consequently, a number of what I had previously believed to have been quite important factors to have to account for in the course of building a viable theory of the background issues, turn out not to have been issues at all.

I also — misled by various of Rowling’s public statements in interviews up to the point that we are discussing here — thought that she was invoking a basic redemptive pattern. This turns out to be more likely to have been an error of interpretation on my part than a change in intention on the part of JK Rowling. From the issues as defined in HBP and as stated in the interviews given around the time of that book’s release, it began to look as though Rowling did not intend to “redeem” anyone or anything whatsoever. Not Harry Potter, not the wizarding world, and certainly not Tom Riddle. As, indeed, turned out to be the case.

All of which utterly sank my Changeling Hypothesis in its original form. The original hypothesis was an unequivocal redemption scenario. It has been spun off into the essay entitled; ‘Redeeming the Potterverse’ which may be accessed farther down the sidebar.

****

The Admiring Skeptic’s premise (that the Harry Potter we know is in fact the same entity who formerly existed as Tom Marvolo Riddle) was an intriguing one, and I quite agree that as the series had gone — to that point — there had been ample suggestion that JKR could indeed have been building up to some variant of that revelation. OTOH, there were still a host of niggling details which made that particular Adopted!Harry premise a good deal less than fully convincing.

Therefore, I proposed what I dubbed the “Changeling!Harry” variant:

According to the Changeling!Harry variant, there was no Dark Ritual requiring the dislocation of the infant Riddle from his native time line. One of the major stumbling blocks to the original proposal was its dependence on the timeline paradox. Instead, my variant threw the burden of original motivation onto that moldy old fig of Trelawney’s bloody first Prophecy. Which has since been confirmed as having been Rowling’s intention as well. That this Prophecy was ever made at all is what set off the whole sorry business. Or, at any rate, Harry Potter’s part in it.

I’ll admit that initially I would have just as soon not resorted to this device, since it was already such a fanon cliché. But, given that this particular issue was sprawling in slatternly dishabillé all across the question of what Voldemort’s motivation in killing the Potters was, we ignore it at our peril. And, to be honest, it was the endless speculation and discussion of this element by the fans during the “three-year summer” between the publication of Book 4 and Book 5 rather than the attention drawn to it in canon which built the reference up into the monolith of utter tackiness that it was by then.

The major departure that the Changeling hypothesis took from the Adopted!Harry source is that the Potters really did have a son named Harry, and that the Changeling “substitution” (actually more like transformation) took place on the night of James and Lily’s deaths.

In this variant, we could take most of Dumbledore’s statements at face value. It was indeed the half-overheard Trelawney Prophecy which set Voldemort on the Potters’ trail. The Prophecy strongly implied that the Potters’ child (or possibly the Longbottoms’) might be the appointed one who would prove to be the answer to this particular Riddle. And, in accordance with tradition, every action Voldemort took to evade his fate has only served to bind him more firmly to it.

If he had left it strictly alone, it might not have come to pass at all.

****

When exploring the implications of the Changeling hypothesis, our first question is: Why on earth did we believe for so long that Voldemort’s curse did not materially affect Harry, apart from giving him his scar?

Because it did affect him. In fact that curse quite obviously affected Harry. It is widely and unblushingly admitted to have affected Harry. By the middle of CoS he had even been shown to have a trace memory of the name “Tom Riddle”. Which sounded familiar to him even though he knew he had not ever heard it before. He is a Parselmouth — like Riddle — despite there being no stated history of this gift in the Potter family tree and his mother, being Muggle-born, is unlikely to have passed it down to him. In OotP we were even finally told straight out that, now that Voldemort is back on the physical plane, the link between them which we have been seeing glimpses of as far back as PS/SS now goes in both directions.

What else did that botched curse do to him?

Is he even the same Harry Potter?

Are you sure? Are they? And even if you, or they, are sure, are they right?

Who, after all, really got a chance to observe that infant in the 24 hours or so after the attack, before he was turned over to the Dursleys to raise? And how well did those observers know the Potters’ child in the first place?

Pettigrew had (most probably) snatched Voldemort’s wand, escaped, and was off making his own plans to go into hiding to his best advantage. He only knew that the infant had survived the attack and had been left howling in the ruins.

Sirius got a quick glimpse of the baby, in the dark of night, in the ruins of the Potter house when he turned up soon afterwards and tried to convince Hagrid to let him take the child.

Lupin was out of the loop altogether. If Lily had close friends of her own we did not yet even know who they were (there does seem to have been a Mary MacDonald for one, no idea what became of her), and the child was not entrusted to any of them.

The Dursleys had never even seen the child. We do not know how closely Dumbledore had kept in touch with the Potters — who were very young members of the Order — which I believed had only been formed about the time the Prophesy was made. (And Rowling has provided us with no viable alternate reason for why it wouldn’t have been.)

We know that Hagrid had known the Potters, both as members of the Order and from when they were in still in school, but had he ever seen their son before he was sent to Godric’s Hollow to investigate what had happened?

No, we do not know. Everyone saw a dark haired child with Lily’s green eyes and inquired no further.

Or perhaps not. There is still that “missing” period between the time that the Potters were killed and Harry was left on the Dursleys’ doorstep. Much discussion has been generated regarding Harry’s probable whereabouts during that period. And I think that if my somewhat facetious suspicions about that time gap are wrong, and possibly even if they aren’t, there is a good chance that for at least part of that time he was under examination at the Department of Mysteries. And we haven’t been told their findings.

Some observations in canon (direct and indirect) for us to consider are;

1. Voldemort had already undergone a great many voluntary physical and magical changes from his origins as an apparently normal human wizard. By the time he showed up at Godric’s Hollow he certainly no longer appeared to be fully human. Or perhaps we ought to say, knowing what we know now, he was no longer a “complete” human.

2. Voldemort’s attempt to murder the infant Harry Potter established a connection between the two of them. To outside appearances, the result of that murder attempt was that the “Victim” lived while the “Murderer” did not. We have been shown in canon that the connection between them was not broken by Voldemort’s apparent death. It remained intact, open, and by OotP was fully active and went in both directions. Voldemort allegedly later blocked off the connection from his end by the use of Occlumency. Even later than that, Harry unconsciously managed to create an override to Tom’s Occlumency. The actual mechanics of this were never satisfactorily explained.

3. It was established in PS/SS, and later confirmed in GoF that VaporMort was capable of existing in the stolen bodies of other creatures for limited amounts of time. Even in the unwilling bodies of other creatures that he had taken control over by magical/psychic force. This may or may not be related to his exceedingly well-developed gift for Legilimency.

This particular talent for “taking possession” of others was shared by the Diary revenant in CoS. Voldemort is also stated as having “possessed” the snake that bit Arthur Weasley despite his having already reincarnated himself into a functioning simulacrum by that time. This and his last ditch effort to possess Harry and use him as a hostage during the battle of the Atrium at the end of OotP confirms that this was not an ability which was unique to his disembodied state, and once he was back in a physical body this ability had been retained. He was capable, in short, of maintaining a psychic connection with two host bodies at once. We do not know what becomes of the simulacrum while Voldemort is possessing a victim.

4. It appeared to be established in CoS that at least some wizards are capable of creating something on the order of independently aware and potentially fully-functioning reproductions of their personal “selves”; potentially-incarnate memories. We now know that that particular entity was generated by a fragment of the creator’s soul which had been removed into a Horcrux; and which under certain circumstances might have been capable of taking up a second, independent physical existence separate from its original container.

In order for this last to have taken place, two murders would have been required. One to split the soul prior to putting the fragment into the Horcrux, and one to enable the fragment to escape this external housing and reincarnate itself by stealing the life force of a second victim.

Such entities we are given to understand are NOT common, and are not merely very Dark magic, but are an abominable perversion of both magic and nature, in fact, tantamount to blasphemy.

5. Throughout this entire series J.K. Rowling has repeatedly rubbed everybody’s noses in the existence of a poltergeist; an entity believed by paranormal researchers to be generated as a manifestation of the psychic disturbance produced by turbulent human emotions — without ever having existed as an actual, living human being, and consequently, although it must be classified as a spirit, it is not actually a ghost.

6. It was stated outright in PoA that a wizard can live without his soul. The dysfunctional condition of those who have been administered the Dementor’s Kiss is due to the fact that their souls have allegedly been eaten. And, consequently, no longer exist.

Dementors are the only creatures in canon which have been openly stated to be without souls of their own. Certainly the only sentient creatures.

****

Got all that? We have still basically been reviewing components of my original, hypothesis with a few more recent updates to this point. Now we will move on to some of the more speculative issues, and some more recent explorations. First, we need to ask ourselves some questions:

1. Why did the curse rebound? For that matter just what kind of a curse was it?

2. Just what actions did Voldemort take in his to attempt to make himself immortal? How did he manage to achieve deathlessness? For he did certainly manage to achieve that.

3. What is the nature of the connection between Voldemort and Harry?

4. Can we blindly rely on Dumbledore’s summation of the matter? Is he telling us everything he knows? Or everything he suspects? Is he telling the truth of what he knows/suspects?

As to the first of these questions, we still don’t have anything beyond the most shallow of answers. But I was pretty sure that I may have finally figured it out. Of course I’d thought that before, too. The current version is better than the earlier ones, at least.

I also suspected that we had been following a false trail since GoF.

****

Q: When Crouch/Moody told us that there was only one person known to have survived the Aveda Kedavra Curse, and that “he is sitting in this classroom”, why did we believe him?

A: We believed him because he was a teacher. And he gave us what appeared to be a viable answer to the standing question of what had taken place the night that Voldemort went to murder Harry Potter, and didn’t succeed.

But that’s no reason to go on believing him now is it? We know somewhat better than that by now.

It was implied that Crouch Jr was just a raw recruit in 1981, he is said to have been no more than 18–19 years old at the time of Voldemort’s first defeat (or was he?). I very much doubt that he ever knew about Voldemort’s Horcruxes. He certainly wasn’t at Godric’s Hollow. What the hell does he know about what curse Voldemort threw at Harry Potter?

The obvious syllogism goes; AK is the “killing curse”. Voldemort tried to kill Harry Potter. Therefore, Voldemort tried to kill Harry Potter with an AK.

Well. No. Not necessarily. Not even if Rowling seems to imply as much. Rowling doesn’t bother to “think” about the kinds of things she plunks into her story. We will not get a well thought-out extrapolation of what happened from Rowling. Anything she gives us is going to be as full of holes as swiss cheese. And she doesn’t like to be pinned down to anything she’s already told us, either. We’vve got the Flints to prove it. We’d be much better off rolling our own.

So I am just not accepting that the curse that Tom Riddle tried to kill little Harry Potter with was the Avada Kadavera curse.

Particularly if Dumbledore was right in his belief that Voldemort’s intention was to create a Horcrux from Harry Potter’s murder (and I can’t see any real probability that he was wrong, even though Rowling doesn’t appear to have gone anywhere near that scenario in DHs.).

The Avada Kedavra curse does not in itself create a Horcrux, or they would be a lot thicker on the ground than they are. They would certainly be a lot wider known than they are. And for all that Avada Kedavra is referred to as the “killing curse” it is hardly the only curse that kills. Wizards are perfectly aware of this, although common usage tends to conflate the issue.

AK is just the killing curse which is reputed to be “unblockable”.

A 15-month-old infant is not going to be doing a lot of curse blocking.

Horace Slughorn is an abject coward and squeamish with it, besides, but I do not think that he would have been quite so agitated and dithery over the spell that creates a Horcrux (that’s “spell” singular, not “spells” plural. Acto Slughorn, to create a Horcrux requires only one spell), if all the spell did was move a pre-existing, already detached soul fragment to an external housing. I suspect that Slughorn’s wittering on and hyperventilating all over the subject was because the spell that creates the Horcrux is the same spell that actually murders the Victim and splits the caster’s soul.

****

Rowling, obviously never considered the details of the process important enough to work them out all the way through to their logical conclusion. (Or to account for how Albus supposedly knows exactly what happened at Godric’s Hollow despite the fact that there were no surviving witnesses apart from Harry who she is determined to say didn’t see what was going on.) But let’s explore this a bit further.

The actual splitting of the caster’s soul would be the Horcrux-creation spell’s primary purpose. The AK’s purpose is simply to kill it’s target. There are any number of perfectly legitimate, socially acceptable reasons why one might need to kill a target. The target doesn’t need to be human (in fact it usually isn’t). AK isn’t even necessarily illegal in itself. It’s only illegal when used against another human. You might as well compare the AK to owning a rifle.

But I suspect that the Horcrux-creator spell’s victim is human; always. In fact that one probably requires a human victim. It modifies the caster’s soul, and produces the side effect of the destruction of another person’s life, as a by-product.

And the spell also makes it possible to encase the newly-created fragment in its external housing (the Horcrux) as a part of the inherent process in order to keep the split from healing. The soul, as Slughorn tells us is supposed to remain intact. To separate it is against nature.

There is nothing against nature about killing things. In nature, most creatures kill just in order to eat.

I think that Slughorn was telling the truth, as well as he knows it, and when he says that there is a specific spell used to create a Horcrux, I do not think that he was wrong. Although his account of how it works may be inaccurate, or at the very least, incomplete. He does claim not to know the spell itself.

But whatever the spell is, it would be classified as a curse.

I repeat: I postulate that this as-yet-unnamed curse is the one which splits the soul and actually kills the victim, as well as making it possible to capture the liberated soul fragment into its new housing. If the creation of a Horcrux were only a matter of filing procedure I think even Horace might have known that, little as he clearly wants to know anything about the creation of Horcruxes. And I still contend that the curse to create a Horcrux is not the AK.

However, the if spell to create a Horcrux is also “a” killing curse, it is one that very few people are still aware of. Only those who either completed their schooling before the subject was banned at Hogwarts (some point before the mid-1940s), those who received their education outside of Britain, or those who have access outside of Hogwarts to Dark Arts reference materials which go into the subject, and have a reason to look the subject up. To most wizards in at least the past 3 generations, the term; “killing curse” will bring to mind only the AK.

Common usage being what it is, even those old enough to know better, or who were educated overseas, will probably not remember the Horcrux-creating curse when a current reference is made to “the killing curse”. And there could be noticeable similarities between the two spells, for their purpose is similar enough for them to have been created from the same root principles. Particularly if any sort of murder will also damage the soul, even if it does not create a Horcrux.

A classic AK is widely agreed to be unique in that it is unblockable. Lily shouldn’t have been able to have stopped one of those. An AK ought to have simply killed her and there would have been no effect upon any subsequent spells cast by her murderer.

In complete defiance of Rowling’s statements, even in defiance of the flashback at Godric’s Hollow, I still don’t believe what Tom threw at Harry would be a standard AK. I don’t think that what Tom threw at Harry was any kind of an AK at all. Even if Rowling seems to think it was. (Maybe she just didn’t want to have to stop and hand us yet another infodump in the middle of an action sequence.)

Tom tried to murder Harry with the Horcrux-creation curse.

Albus all but came out and told us so.

****

Even dismissing most of the information pasted on in DHs, we still are stuck with a number of anomalies to juggle in our information regarding the subject. However:

It should be noted that in neither Cedric’s nor Albus’s deaths was the “rushing sound” present that Harry was aware of in the death of the spider in Moody’s class, or in the death-in-a-dream/vision of Frank Bryce. That both of these deaths took place out of doors while the spider and Frank Bryce were killed in an enclosed space could have been relevant.

On the other hand, such a rushing sound was present when Harry was attacked by a dementor in Little Whinging. Which was also out of doors. The sound was also noted when he was confronted by the dementor on the Hogwarts Express in Year 3. That confrontation was in an enclosed space.

However, there is no mention of any rushing sound in his dementor-assisted memories of the attack upon him and his mother when he was a baby. Which is particularly odd since the presence of the dementors (at the Quidditch game), or the dementor-surrogate of the Boggart (in Lupin’s tutoring sessions), which provoked those memories, ought to have produced an awareness of the rushing sound, if the sound is also to be associated with the presence of dementors.

At present we have no context which would make it clear whether the rushing sound is a relevant piece of data for our reasoning or a detail that Rowling has allowed to fall through the cracks.

Although the fact that there was clearly NO Horcrux created from the death of the spider, might possibly count against the likelihood that one was created from the death of Frank Bryce, as well, even though we did not actually hear the incantation used to murder Bryce. (Rowling has changed her mind ex-cathedra regarding the murder of Frank Bryce as having been used to create the Nagini Horcrux. The correction was not incorporated into the books however. In canon, bogus as it is, it still stands.)

Another anomaly we have to juggle is the issue that when whatever the spell was rebounded, Tom’s body was completely destroyed. There was no body left at the scene of the attempted murder. The Dark Lord did not merely die, he disappeared.

And the wall blew out. AK might damage inanimate objects when it hits them by mistake, but it doesn’t typically cause explosions.

And there was no record in the Priori Incantatum “log” from Tom’s wand of a curse that failed.

****

If the spell was a standard AK — which is presumably unblockable — it ought not to have bounced at all. And if it hit the wrong person, it should have simply killed the wrong person. End of story.

If the spell had merely bounced, it ought to have still worked as designed when it did hit a living target, even if it did end up hitting the wrong person. Harry and Draco’s ricocheting spells, in GoF, were both perfectly functional after they collided and hit persons they were not aimed at. But whatever Voldemort threw at Harry rebounded and, not merely killing the caster’s body, completely destroyed it.

Clearly whatever Lily did totally bollixed whatever Tom was trying to do.

With mostly unforeseen results.

That Albus Dumbledore nevertheless appears to have been able to piece together, after the fact, despite the lack of any eyewitness account. I don’t care how powerful a wizard he is, he ought not to have been able to do that.

Not unless there was something about the scene of the crime which made it clear what had happened. So, can we extrapolate a series of actions that would produce such an effect that Albus would have been able to piece together what had taken place?

He is very clear that Harry lived because his mother died to save him as early as Book 1. I don’t think he is shaving the truth particularly closely when he tells us so. And there is no really satisfactory way of placing an eyewitness at the scene who could have reported the event. So how does he know?

What precisely did Lily do?

****

Which is probably not the right question. The right question is; what, precisely, was Tom trying to do?

I think we really ought to be asking whether we have enough information to postulate just how the Horcrux-creation spell works yet. Because just about any attempt to extrapolate what happened depends on that.

We might just have enough to work from, although we may still be missing critical bits which would render any speculation obsolete. But we might as well make the effort. We certainly are not going to be given any further information now.

****

This is hardly my first attempt to try to extrapolate what the spell that Voldemort threw at Harry was, and how it is supposed to work, and, most importantly, what exactly went wrong with it. I’ve posted at least two earlier iterations of an attempt at a solution to the problem here before. So, this is attempt #3.

To repeat: The Avada Kedavra does not create a Horcrux.

The Horcrux-creating spell is not unblockable.

Voldemort did not attempt to murder Harry Potter by means of the Avada Kedavra curse. He used the Horcrux-creator curse.

Lily’s sacrificial death blocked it.

And the Diary revenant admitted as much, now that we have the context to understand what it actually told us.

“So. Your mother died to save you. Yes, that’s a powerful counter-charm. I can see now...”

Excuse me; but haven’t we all been told, loud and clear, that Avada Kedavera has no known counter-charm? I think Riddle knew perfectly well that the same lack of counter-charm did not apply to the Horcrux-creation spell. There might have been any number of possible ways to have blocked that one. Lily’s willing sacrifice stopped it cold.

The big question now is whether Lily knew that this is what would happen.

****

There are very few means by which to attain deathlessness, and Lord Voldemort was not famed for recreating the Philosopher’s Stone.

But Horcruxes are a banned subject at Hogwarts. James Potter had been brought up to abhor the Dark Arts. Sirius Black no longer had access to his own family’s extensive Dark Arts library after the age of 16, and we know nothing of Lupin (a halfblood) or Pettigrew’s family backgrounds. There is no obvious source of information on Horcruxes to be found here.

And for that matter, Lily wouldn’t even go out with James until 7th year, and being Muggle-born, had no avenues of inquiry regarding Horcruxes, either.

But the information is out there if you know where to look for it. If Regulus Black, at the age of 17 could have figured out Voldemort’s Horcrux, it stands to reason that somebody else with access to a private library without the limitations that Dumbledore has imposed upon the one at Hogwarts could find it out as well. Dumbledore’s banning of the subject is presumably a comparatively recent phenomenon.

And it stands to reason that the Blacks are not the only family with Dark Arts volumes in their private library. I suspect that you could find a nice collection of such at Spinner’s End. I very much doubt that Severus Snape put that whole library together himself, although he has certainly added to it. I think he inherited the majority of it from his mother and his Prince grandparents. This is a possible source of at leasat some basic information.

My original reading was that Lily — who the reader had been consistently led to underestimate throughout the series — in an act of desperation masked in surface hysteria very cleverly maneuvered Voldemort into tacitly agreeing to a binding magical contract of “my life for Harry’s”. And that by killing her, rather than simply stunning her, he sealed his own fate, believing himself to be beyond the reach of consequences. When he turned his wand on Harry the “breech of contract” clause nailed him. If he had not already rendered himself deathless, that would have been the end of the story.

It now seems to me, however, that even that explanation is much more complex than really required. As of January/February, 2007, the dominoes have been falling like rain.

As things have turned out, I think that it is clear that it is what Tom did himself that established the connection between himself and Harry. What Lily did to directly cause the curse to misfire prevented the connection from being broken. And through the energy conducted by it, both parties were Changed.

****

As to our next question, that of how Lord Voldemort managed to attain deathlessness — even if not true immortality; we already had a clue to this puzzle in Muggle folklore. Specifically, Russian folklore. But the principle shows up in tales from other lands as well. Even some from Britain.

It was known that the sorcerer, Koschi the Deathless (in common with various other traditional villains from other cultures) could not be killed, because he did not keep his life inside his own body. His life was secured inside an egg, inside a bird, inside a treasure chest, hidden in the trunk of a tree, guarded by a dragon. The exact sequence here may be inexact, but the basic concept should be clear. When the dragon was lulled into sleep, the tree felled, the chest opened, the bird snared, and the egg broken, Koschi the Deathless died.

As I state above, the very fact that we were dealing with a “deathless” evil sorcerer was a clue in itself that we might be well-advised to check out what other traditional sources had to say about such entities. It turns out to be one of the elements that Rowling adopted from traditional folklore, as she has in the case of dragons or unicorns. And as in the case of her House Elves, she has made some modifications to her source before deploying it.

Toward the end of OotP Nearly Headless Nick tells Harry that all ghosts are the revenants of wizards who have not passed through the Veil in the Death Chamber of the Department of Mysteries.

Lord Voldemort accounts to his followers in GoF that he was “less than the meanest ghost”.

In what way was VaporMort less than a ghost? What constitutes a ghost?

The ghost of a person, as opposed to a poltergeist — which is not the revenant of anyone that was ever actually alive — is generally accepted to be the manifestation, or, as stated in HBP, the imprint, of the soul of the departed, retaining all of that individual’s evolved personality, and the self-identity, thoughts, and memories of that person in life, as well as his visual appearance at the time of death.

The soul is generally regarded to be the seat of the emotions and of self-awareness. Those who have been subjected to the Dementor’s Kiss have no such awareness, no kind of feelings or judgement, and without such self-knowledge are unable to access their own memories. Nor do they exhibit any signs of individual character.

Lord Voldemort would have been fully aware of this. He has almost certainly encountered dementors at some point before his first defeat, even if they had not been a part of his former army, and, indeed, he has gone out of his way to reinvent himself as a sort of dementor-surrogate.

We have also been given no indication whatsoever to lead us to suppose that Lord Voldemort places any value upon human emotions. From his own statements and those statements of his followers that we have been privy to, it appears that he ascribes to the belief that emotions are the handles that one uses to manipulate other people. One is best off without them, oneself. The wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle’s chief priority would, therefore, have been to insure that his consciousness and his memories would be preserved and would remain functional, whatever befell his physical body, And that whatever befell his physical body he would go on living, without taking any real consideration for the state of his soul. Indeed, it is now clear that he would happily mutilate it repeatedly to achieve this end, and did.

Consequently, VaporMort was less than a ghost because unlike a ghost, he was not the imprint of a complete soul, but only of a portion of one.

****

I think that, as with so much else in this series, we really do have to start with Riddle. Creating Horcruxes seems to be something that is peculiarly well-suited to Riddle’s capabilities. And we already knew that a number of things that Riddle is capable of are presumed to be extremely uncommon.

His ability as a Parselmouth, however, is not likely to be a relevant issue here. Albus has already told us that however rare the ability to understand and communicate with snakes may be, great and good wizards have shared this ability with Riddle. I think it is safe to say that we can dismiss Riddle’s being a Parselmouth from any consideration of the creation of Horcruxes.

Riddle has at least one other presumably rare (although never stated in the text as such) ability, however. One which he kept even after his defeat, and probably kept to the end. Even as a thing of shadow and vapor; a disembodied portion of a soul, he retained the ability to take possession of others. Not merely to dominate them and bring them under his control by force of will, but to take full psychic and physical possession of them. Indeed even the soul fragment that haunted the Diary was able to take such possession of Ginny Weasley, ultimately even against her will, and over her resistance. Another such fragment came very close to overmastering Ron.

That doesn’t sound nearly as innocent as chatting to snakes, and I am indebted to the LiveJournalist Swythyv for giving me a timely nudge, reminding me of this particular detail.

So let’s follow this particular line of inquiry a bit further shall we?

For that matter, I am abruptly reminded of a series of three murder mysteries read some years back, (The author I am informed by a correspondent is Rosemary Edgehill. The relevant title, is probably ‘Speak Daggers to Her’, although the relevant volume may be one of the other two books in that set.) in the first of these stories, the protagonist, a young woman who is a wiccan, is faunching over a young man who was into Ceremonial High Magick, among whose grimores is the description of a ritual in which one might attempt to divorce oneself from this world and its limitations by, among other similarly impossible feats, murdering oneself, yet continuing to live. I gather that this concept is not uncommon in occult studies.

And, perhaps we need to remind ourselves that what out here in the Real World is usually symbolic, in the Potterverse is just as likely as not to turn out to be literal. Perhaps Horcruxes are not just a folkloric element, after all.

It also occurs to me that if Ceremonial High Magick exists in the Potterverse our Tom would probably be very seriously into it. It would definitely suit his taste for grandeur and self-aggrandizement. Interestingly, the only example of any true “ritual” to which we have been treated in some 4000 pages was at Tom’s instigation.

However. One evidently cannot just split off a piece of their soul and put it directly into an inanimate object, or murder would not be necessary in order to produce a Horcrux. And it is also quite blindingly evident that the typical method of getting a soul out of a body is by killing the body that houses it.

But what if the soul in that body is not the Victim’s? Or, rather, what if the body in question contains not only the Victim’s soul?

What if the Murderer takes possession of the Victim before killing him. What would become of the portion of the Murder’s soul that is possessing the Victim at the point of death?

It would get split off, wouldn’t it?

Thank you, Swythyv. I think you have just solved our fundamental problem.

****

So. Let’s explore a few possibilities, here.

In his first life, apart from securing bits of his soul into physical objects, which was necessary to anchor himself to the material plane and prevent any other part of it from passing through the Veil, Riddle paid his soul, and its welfare no further attention. By the end of the decade-long, voluntary exile from the ww he had engaged himself in creating at least three, and possibly four known Horcruxes. Unlike the Diary, however, these fragments initially appeared to be inert. We had no indication that they would respond to or to attempt to interact with the holder of the artifact which housed them, and unlike the Diary, which could be written in, the other Horcruxes that we knew of for certain, (Cup, Locket, Ring) appeared to have had no “user interface” by which the holder could have interacted with the soul fragment they housed. Until DHs, we had never had it hinted to us that Riddle provided any of them with any obvious means by which to reach out to take possession of those who came in contact with the artifact that housed them, although strong protections were (allegedly) placed on these objects to prevent them from being harmed.

Or at least so we were led to believe. This certainly appears to have been the case with the Ring. There is no point to giving an artifact a user interface if it is cursed powerfully enough to destroy anyone who tries to put it on. We have also been told that once it had been converted to a Horcrux, Riddle was unwilling to continue wearing it himself, and ultimately concealed it in the ruins of the place from which it had come. It is possible that he did this because he did not want to give the soul fragment housed in it any opportunity to reintegrate itself with its original source, but that is far from certain. In fact we have no clue as to why he did not care to keep the Ring as close as he later kept Nagini. Excuse me if I dismiss the whole statement on the issue as yet another case of Rowling putting on airs to try to be interesting.

(And frankly, the clumsily-retrofitted Tolkein’s “One Ring” rip-off in DHs — which was not carried over to either the Cup or the Diadem, only spliced at the last minute onto the Locket which upon our first introduction had been passed from hand to hand all around #12 without incident, — was a big mistake, and made the story a lot cheesier than it had any authentic need to be.)

****

However, we need to keep in mind the fact that if Tom would customize one of them to serve as a potential weapon, he might have done the same to others.

The following is a side issue which may or may not be relevant.

It was a correspondent pointed out to me a possibility that I had not worked my way down the track far enough to put any attention toward unraveling yet. In his speech to the mustered DEs in the graveyard meeting at the end of GoF, Voldemort openly admitted that he had not yet attained true immortality. That he would settle for getting his “old” body back again for the time being. This seemed to be a non-sequiter at the time. But perhaps the statement ought to strike us as ominous.

Indeed it is difficult to understand how he could have made any claim to be immortal if he was still physically vulnerable to time. My correspondent suggests that he had perhaps, already made plans to get around that particular obstacle.

Tom Riddle is certainly stated as being the most brilliant (if perhaps also the most unwise) student that Hogwarts had ever seen.

Tom Riddle clearly planned that the Diary revenant should take control of whomever the book might be entrusted. That the (presumed) child under such control would reopen the Chamber of Secrets and call forth the Basilisk.

So far the only goal that appears to meet is a determination to raise some havoc on Dumbledore’s turf.

What if that was only step one? What if there was more to it than that?

Did Tom also plan that the revenant should steal the victim’s life and use it to escape from the book? To effectively reincarnate itself? Or was that an unforeseen bonus?

The Diary revenant was forever 16.

Would the reincarnated revenant remain forever physically 16? Forever young, handsome, 16-year-old Tom Riddle? Or would it have begun to age once its return to the material plane was complete?

Or would its return have ever been truly complete? It had solidified to the point that it could pick up and hold Harry’s wand, and play anagrams with it in floating letters of fire. It is assumed it would have eventually been able to cast a spell with it. But piercing and poisoning the Diary it had been housed in still managed to vanquish it into nothingness.

Was it originally intended that it would reach a stage only a little beyond the point that it did reach; a point that it would appear to be a solid human teenaged boy, able to move and act in the material world, but still actually based in the book, remaining as ageless as when it was first housed there? And impossible to kill unless the book was destroyed?

While, of course, the book was secured in a place that was inaccessible to anyone but a Parselmouth.

And would the “Master” soul fragment have been able to house itself in that reincarnated new body? To share it with the Diary revenant? Or to steal it from the revenant, forcing the revenant into dormancy, back into the book, or into some other housing, keeping the new body in its own possession. A body in which Lord Voldemort might now move without causing comment through either the wizarding or the Muggle worlds?

Had he always intended to ultimately remove himself from the monstrous ruin of his original body? Replacing it with a handsome, immortal, ageless one?

Would it have worked?

And, once he had returned to the material world, had he intended to finally deploy the Diary during Harry’s 5th year and take the final step to attaining his long projected immortality?

Only to discover that his servant Lucius had already deployed the Diary for his own purposes, in his Master’s absence, losing it forever.

Small wonder his anger was “terrible to see”.

Small wonder that he was determined to destroy Lucius’s wife and child once Lucius had managed to hide himself away in Azkaban.

Or had Tom just not thought it through that far, and not known that there was a way for the revenant to escape from the book?

I suspect we will never be told the answer to that.

****

Harry, an immature, fully human entity, seems to have been left with no conscious memory of the event that Changed him, beyond that of his mother’s screaming and a green light. Voldemort, a mature entity with an already deeply compromised soul, seems to have been left with only a memory of “pain beyond pain”. I believe that in Voldemort’s case this was only due in part to the destruction of his physical body.

In the original Changeling hypothesis, my contention was that by the miscalculation of choosing to preserve his life experience, rather than his soul, Voldemort’s soul was stripped of all its experience by the rebounding curse, and that the memory, self identity, and self-awareness of Lord Voldemort were spun off to exist independently as VaporMort. Essentially this was the “residue” of all his first life. But that his soul, now stripped of all of its first life’s experience and effectively returned to its original state, transmigrated to the nearest living body available to give it shelter, using the connection provided by the curse as its guide. That, in short, Harry Potter became the repository of Tom Riddle’s soul. That Harry was double-souled, and consequently had all the qualities needed to “vanquish” the residue of Lord Voldemort. And that “inheriting” a new identity and growing up as Harry Potter constituted Tom Riddle’s “second chance.”

Clearly, this interpretation was wrong.

****

Which brings me to yet another ultimately fruitless exploration. As with so many others, Rowling deliberately set this one up — and then apparently forgot about it altogether, for she certainly did nothing with it.

According to Albus Dumbledore’s reading of the circumstances, Voldemort intended to create his sixth and final Horcrux from the death of Harry Potter.

Dumbledore goes on to state that the rebounding curse prevented this, and that if he has created a sixth Horcrux, it was done after his return to the material plane. Dumbledore also admits that he makes mistakes, and that when he does they are likely to be huge ones.

In common with most of fandom, I was of the opinion that Dumbledore had either made a mistake in this case, or he has deliberately deflected inquiry from its proper object for reasons which were not immediately obvious. I was sure that the sixth Horcrux was not Nagini. The sixth Horcrux — such as it is — was Harry Potter.

In this supposition we were informed that we were wrong (actually we weren’t), and I was duly disgusted to learn that Nagini turned out to be a Horcrux after all. However, the fact that Voldemort had created a Horcrux — not from the death of Frank Bryce, but from that of Bertha Jorkins, once he returned to a vestigial physical form concealed from him the discovery that he had also created one from the infant Harry Potter when his curse misfired at Godric’s Hollow.

We saw what Riddle looked like in his interview with Madam Hepzibah Smith after he had already created at least his first Horcrux.

We saw what he looked like upon his return to the wizarding world 10 years later.

Voldemort was familiar with each incremental step of the process between those two points. And when he ran his hands over his newly-risen face after rising from the cauldron, he would have expected to discover the changes wrought by creating his most recent Horcrux. The changes between the “molten wax” face that he wore upon his return from his first exile, and the “mask-like” face that he has worn since his second return are extreme enough to detect by touch, running those spidery hands over his face, as Harry watched him do.

Even if, as I now suspect, there may have been a brief incremental stage between the wax image and the mask that came out of the cauldron which appeared the year before his first defeat (since I am now inclined to think that the Diary was actually the 5th Horcrux rather than the 1st).

****

Horace Slughorn claimed that “a spell” existed for the purpose of creating a Horcrux when Riddle asked his question in the academic year 1942–’43 (or possibly ’43–’44, but I doubt it) , but that he did not know that spell, and he insisted that the subject had already been banned. I think we can probably take Slughorn at his word on this. Tom Riddle did not learn how to create a Horcrux from Horace Slughorn. At most, he only learned what a Horcrux was. *sigh* Regardless of the direct contradiction to Slughorn’s information that Rowling inserted into DHs when she discovered that she had painted herself into a corner again. (And it has also now become abundantly clear that we cannot trust any statement of Rowling’s that was ever made in an interview.)

But we also know that Riddle, by all accounts, was brilliant. By the very fact that he ultimately created that Diary, not just from the manner in which he had designed its housing; incorporating the function of a calendar, and a Pensieve (which may have been done for some other purpose), and an interactive user interface by which the fragment housed in the Horcrux might be able to interact with and take possession of the holder, steal their life and escape from the book (one life spent to put it in, another spent to take it out), we can conclude that he was not in the least averse to messing about with extremely dangerous, highly experimental magic.

But first he had to find the spell which would split his soul, enabling him to do it.

Well, we are not without possibilities there. Albus Dumbledore was not able to ban information related to the creation of Horcruxes outside Hogwarts. And it has been recently pointed out to me that Riddle may not in fact have spent all of his summers in that orphanage.

But I do agree with the fan who pointed out that Tom may have learned more from Slughorn, than just what a Horcrux was; this fan also implied that Slughorn may have inadvertently given Riddle exactly the information he required when he informed Tom that the subject had been banned at Hogwarts.

Banned books are certainly to be numbered among the contents of the Room of Hidden Things. And it was no stretch whatsoever to suspect that Tom Riddle was probably well acquainted with the Room of Hidden Things.

In fact, that he was familiar with it was even confirmed. He hid a Horcrux there.

****

Which brings us to another recalcitrant contradiction between the various things that we have been told.

Tom Riddle was a murderer three times over by the age of 16. We are directly told this in HBP.

Dumbledore claims that he knows of no other murder committed by Riddle until the suspicions death of Hepzibah Smith, which took place at least 5 years after the Riddle massacre. And he also tells us that he believes that there were none.

This is either a whopping Flint or a clue to something.

Because Albus, who may know more about Horcruxes than Riddle does, must know that the diary was “supposedly” created by the end of 1943. Harry told everyone in McGonagall’s office that Riddle had “written in the Diary” when he was 16.

Which, upon reflection, suggests that Albus’s statement may be a pointed nudge away from that particular most well-trodden path. Even if Rowling seems to have forgotten that she ever gave us that nudge.

We know that Tom, at 15, had managed to escape a murder investigation by modifying his uncle Morfin’s memory. That took place the summer before he “wrote in the diary”.

What if that experience suggested a few experiments in memory storage?

What, after all, is a diary for? Why did it suddenly occurr to him to take a Muggle diary to school with him the following year? We know that the diary ultimately had been charmed to work as a fully-functioning Pensieve — with a built-in calendar to boot! And it was much more portable and convenient than any old stone bowl.

Tom did indeed “write in the diary” when he was 16.

But we have no evidence to suggest that he actually turned it into a Horcrux before he passed it to Lucius Malfoy — in 1981.

That the Diary revenant replicated a 16-year-old Riddle may have been only because the revenant was formed from the memories of a 16-year-old Riddle.

Yet even dismissing the Diary, Albus’s contention is still “Flinty”. Because the “pale and interesting” appearance which Tom was sporting by the time he had his interview with Madam Smith suggests that he had already created at least one of his Horcruxes. And yet Albus still claims that he knows of no additional murder committed by Riddle at that point.

Of course, this is Albus. Albus may just be being annoyingly literal here, and does not know, or was not prepared to voice any suspicions as to whose death may have served to create Riddle’s first Horcrux because he does not know who the victim was. Riddle may have managed to hide his tracks very, very well there.

Clearly Dumbledore is not including the death of Moaning Myrtle, for whose death Riddle was responsible, but who was killed by the Basilisk, not by Riddle himself.

For that matter, it was Hokey who remembered having poisoned her mistress, although this may be an all-too-similar case of modified memory to that of Morfin Gaunt, and that it may well have been Riddle himself who actually murdered Madam Smith. Indeed, considering the theft of the locket and cup it would probably be safest to assume this to be the case. Hokey might conceivably have been bewitched into poisoning her mistress. I seriously doubt that she also stole her mistress’s treasures.

But there is no indication whatsoever that you can create a Horcrux today from a murder committed at some unspecific point in the past. Particularly not if taking possession of the Victim is an intrinsic part of the process.

It was stated by Dumbledore, that Riddle, who since the time of his interview with Madam Smith had apparently has committed a great many murders — enough to stock a good-sized underground lake with Inferi, anyway; to the point that if mere murder, rather than murder by means of the Horcrux creation spell would split one’s soul, being incapable of remorse, his soul would probably be no more than a bundle of shreds and tatters — reserved the creation of his Horcruxes for “significant” deaths.

I suspect that this may be a slight misstatement on Dumbledore’s part. Possibly a deliberate one. As a “ritual suicide” any death that results in the creation of a Horcrux is by definition a significant death.

Riddle certainly does appear to have been saving up the last of his projected set of six Horcruxes for a significant murder. But there is no reason to suppose that the first five deaths that created the others were any more “significant” than that the Diary was an object of historical significance and grandeur.

We do not really know the identities of the deaths (significant or otherwise) from which Riddle created Horcruxes from the Diary, the Cup, the Locket, the Ring, and the Diadem. Rowling’s statement on the subject is contradictory and difficult to reconcile with the facts as they are depicted inside canon (although I am inclined to believe her when she says that Madam Smith’s death created the Cup). And, again, this was an interview statement. She tends to change those each time she is asked the same question. And at this point it looks very much as though we never will know for certain whose deaths he used for this purpose, any more than we will be told the identity of the people who are now sleeping the long sleep in Lake Inferi. But it is implied that by the time he had returned to the wizarding world after his first exile he had already created at least four of his intended set of 6 Horcruxes.

I had originally supposed, when I still believed that the soul could be split by any variety of murder, that in order to ensure that a Horcrux would be created by a specific murder some form of modification to the AK curse would have been required in order to ensure that the Horcrux would be created from the correct fragment.

That was the weak point of that particular theory. The point at which one has to invent magic to support a theory is the point at which the theory is usually hosed. In this case the evidence that the spell which Voldemort used to attempt to kill Harry was not a typical AK was clear enough, for what he threw at Harry did not behave as an AK had been demonstrated in canon to behave. But, at that time, we knew of no alternate spell that might have been used. This limitation no longer applies.

We may not ever know the name of the curse which splits the soul and makes the creation of a Horcrux possible, but, from Slughorn, we know that the spell certainly exists.

A dementor extracts the soul of its victim without harming the body. Nor are there any sweeping changes to the victim’s physical appearance due to having lost their soul. Those who have been Kissed do not resemble Lord Voldemort. And we get no indication in the text of the books that the dementors remove the soul in pieces when they extract it.

Under “normal” circumstances the dementors are more selective in what they take from their victims. Draining them of all hope, or joy, or happiness, or magic, and feeding upon them until the point that the victim, no longer able to recover from the drain, is left with only his worst memories to retreat into, leading ultimately to deepest melancholia, and the failure of the will to live. But while a dementor might devour a soul, or diminish it, it does not appear that a dementor would be able to divide one.

According to my current extrapolation; one must possess one’s Victim and then murder the Victim while one retains possession of them, in a form of ritual suicide, which will split off the portion of one’s soul that is possessing the Victim. The Horcrux-creation spell is what severs the connection between its caster and the fragment which is possessing the Victim, and then forces the soul fragment which had possessed