WMG / Harry Potter Horcruxes

Voldemort made a eight Horucrux.

By the time he was in the forest, he knew by then he only had 1 Horucrux(to his knowledge): Nagani. So he made The Elder Wand his eight horucrux.

Now all he needs is someone who is loyal to him, to accept him, like what Quirell did...

If Voldemort was such a practiced and prolific mass murderer of all men, women, children and all things great and small why didn't he have dozens or Horcruxes? Here's why:

The specific spell to make a Horcrux requires murder because a murder is heinous is tears a chunk from your own soul and then you can put that part of your soul into another object. This means it has to be a murder that you, yourself consider soul wrenchingly heinous that it repulses even yourself. Riddle committed his first cold blooded murder of his own father and was like 'shit I am a monster' and POW his soul ripped and he made another horcrux. This means to make his next horcrux he had to have committed a murder that he, a man who murdered his own father out of spite, would find repulsive. And so it went. Until finally the thought of murdering a good woman trying to save her innocent infant son in his crib was heinous even to Voldemort.

• Even more heinous than he himself had thought. He did not expect Harry to be a hrocrux because Voldemort couldn't have imagined that the site of Lilly Potter dying over her infant by his own hand would bother him. He had a little bit more of a soul left than even he knew.
• which is why in Order of the Phoenix when Harry said 'I feel sorry for you' it repeled Voldemort. That little bit of pity still touched him just a little bit, and that twinge of feeling repulsed Vodemmort because that little bit of pity made Voldemort repulsed at what he himself had become.

The Sorting Hat is a Horcrux.

Like Riddle's Diary, the Sorting Hat belongs to that rare category of objects that can think for themselves. Nothing else in the series but a Horcrux has been shown to be capable of sentient thought (and personal creativity, as shown by its composition of circumstantially appropriate songs).

• Doubtful. The Sorting Hat has been almost consistently benevolent. Of course, Voldemort was beyond evil and one would expect his Horcruxes to be particularly nasty, but given what goes into making a Horcrux (at least a murder and that's heavily implied to only be the beginning), it's hard to imagine any Horcrux being a "nice" Horcrux, if you will. There is a chance that there's some sort of 'good' counterpart to a Horcrux - or, rather, that the Horcrux is a corrupted version of the original magic, which was meant to be more benevolent.
  • Who said anything about it being one of Voldemort's Horcruxes? Also, didn't the hat itself say that Godric Gryffindor 'put some brains in' the sorting hat? And the books never say that Wizards with Horcruxes are 'Actually' immortal, Voldy just says that he's 'travelled further down the path of immortality than anyone else'.
  • The Marauder's Map seemed capable of a certain degree of creativity, at least for the narrow purpose of insulting Snape.
  • Nobody said that the Sorting Hat was one of Voldemort's Horcruxes- the second poster stated that Voldemort's Horcruxes were particularly nasty, and as they're the only ones we've seen, that's what we've got to go on. There was also mention of other Horcruxes that we haven't seen in-universe, and although we can't tell whether they would be as bad as Voldemort's, the idea of a "good" Horcrux is difficult to imagine. I don't think that the Sorting Hat is a Horcrux, although it did cross my mind after reading HBP for the first time- if it had been, it would have been addressed. And I agree- a Nice Horcrux, after the (undisclosed) ritual to put the thing together? Highly doubtful.

The Rule of Seven Voldemort was going for would have worked if he'd made one more horcrux.

His soul was in seven pieces, but the way I misunderstood the first time I read book six was that he should have had seven horcruxes, aside from the central soul that was powered-up by them. When he killed Harry's parents, not only The Power of Love saved Harry, but the fact that Voldemort had completed six horcruxes and his spell was straining for a seventh was what caused him to gain a fragment of Voldemort's soul. Because of this, instead of one soul in the human and seven fragments forming a metaphorical septagram around him, it was one soul in the human, six fragments looking for the seventh point, and after the lashback, became two souls in a human body and six souls trying to protect the most significant one. The end of Book Four just confused things even more.

• He did. He accidentally made Harry a Horcrux. This allows the WMG to be reversed. Perhaps it would have worked if he made six horcruxes, like he originally planned. In fact, the seventh horcrux coincided with his first fall from power, and resulted in the person who caused his second fall from power.
  • When he went after Harry, he had made 5 of the intended 6 horcruxes: Diary, Ring, Diadem, Locket, Cup. He was going to kill Harry and make his 6th. Died made Harry into the 6th accidentally, without realising it. In Goblet of Fire, he made Nagini into what he thought was his 6th Horcrux, and was actually his 7th. So really, he achieved the Rule of Seven simultaneously with his fall.

Two of the ^spoiler  horcruxes had already been used up by the time Tom Riddle's diary was destroyed.

The first two were used up the nights Voldemort and Quirrel died, and all that remained was the protective charms that Voldemort had placed on them rather than any inherent protection. I'm thinking the ring was one of them, and the locket or an earlier snake was another, either because Voldemort put them back because they were important anyway and he wanted to get some use out of the traps, or because he thought they could still be used. If the second one was the locket, he might have been rescued by Pettigrew before getting a temporary body and was told to put the locket back (without specifying where it should have been) or got a blind piggy-back-ride inside Pettigrew (like Quirrel, but patched together instead of with added benefits like senses and external speech) before getting his temporary body.

• I don't have a source on this, but horcruxes are not "used up" like extra lives in a video game. They way they work is simply that their very existence prevents the maker's (remaining) soul from leaving this world. Even if the person's body is destroyed, the soul remains — but the other horcruxes remain as well.

As a Horcrux, Harry couldn't have died at all except to things that can destroy Horcruxes (Basilisk venom, Fiendfyre, etc).

As Hermione says when she talks about Horcruxes, they're virtually indestructible. Any damage to a Horcrux will be repaired; the only way to destroy a Horcrux and render it inoperable is to damage it beyond repair with an incredibly destructive force. That's why Riddle's Diary was perfectly fine after being flushed down a toilet. So Harry, being a Horcrux, should have theoretically been invincible during the time when he had Voldy's soul in him, meaning that the only things that could have killed him were Basilisk venom, fiendfyre, and potentially the Killing Curse (technically, it doesn't destroy things beyond repair, since it doesn't do any physical damage, so it probably shouldn't be capable of destroying a Horcrux).

• This troper got the sudden image of Harry dying of Avada Kedavra, and his body then becoming possessed by the fragment of Voldemort soul on him.
  • And that subguess has already been guessed above, including of course that it was Harry's body and not Harry himself that was the horcrux.
• This might explain why (aside from being the main character, therefore unable to die or there'd be much less story to tell) he can survive so many attacks.
• But wouldn't that mean the Horcrux part of Harry should have died in Chamber of Secrets, after he was bitten by the Basilisk? All evidence points to the destruction being instantaneous, so the Horcrux could've still been destroyed before Fawkes came along and saved Harry, the host.
  • Word O God states that Harry was not a true Horcrux as he was not created by the traditional processes needed to create one so he would not be subject to the same magic of it. there for he could die any ordinary way and as or the basilisk venom in 'Secrets' Rowling has stated that Harry had to be killed for it to die as he was "the container."

A Horcrux does not require one murder, but one murder and one rape (no requirement for any connection between the two.

JK Rowling said that "something nauseating" was required beyond just a murder to create a Horcrux. Perhaps Voldemort just did this a lot of times so he could make as many as he wanted, which is why Harry turned into an unplanned one.

• This troper thought that that other thing was never get any sort of remorse for the murder, as remorse would re-unify the divided soul, preventing the making of a Horcrux
• I thought that creating a horcrux needed a special dark ritual, murder alone not being enough.
  • It's confirmed that it involves a ritual and a spell, and that Rowling knows exactly what that entails. If and when the HP Encyclopedia is published, it will be documented, and whatever it was, Rowling's editor said he "felt like vomiting" when she related it to him.
• Maybe cannibalism? The term 'Death Eaters' makes one wonder...
  • Like eating the flesh of the person that's just been murdered? Yeah, that sounds nauseating enough.
• Okay, seriously: does someone that regularly contributes to this page have a rape fetish or something? Because this is like the 30th mention of rape on a page of a series where there are exactly zero rapes shown.

Only Horcruxes in living Objects work.

Otherwise we'd be up to our ears in dead egyptians.

• So, what you're saying is that none of Voldemort's Horcruxes apart from Nagini and Harry actually worked, and that Harry needn't have bothered going on that Horcrux hunt because the other Horcruxes, neither of which were in a living object, were actally useless? Well, that is an idea, but it means we need to find an alternate explanation for Riddle's diary and Slytherin's locket, especially the diary. And for the fact that Voldemort grew more and more monstrous-looking over the years before he'd even made his first working Horcrux (Harry, which was an accident anyway). The canon explanation is that splitting his soul so many times made him more and more monstrous, but if all the Horcruxes up to that point were duds, why does ol' Tommy still end up looking like Mumm-Ra's ugly brother?
  • I think the theory is not that those Horcruxes did not contain part of Voldemort's soul. It is that they did, but such a thing does not actually anchor someone to the world. I.e., all Voldemort was doing was wasting parts of his soul.
• All in all, I think a better explanation for why we're not up top our ears in dead Egyptians is because Egyptians did not make Horcruxes...

• The real objection to this is that, if Voldemort had no working Horcruxes when he attacked Harry, getting hit with a backfiring killing curse should have immediately killed him for realsies, with no time for parts of his soul to do anything. Even if broke his soul into two pieces, that wouldn't give either piece of him the ability to hang around. If getting killed via the killing curse means your soul (or part of it) could just wander over and decide to live inside someone else instead of dying, we'd probably see that more often.
  • We could perhaps postulate that getting hit by a backfiring killing curse has different results than a normal one, or that a killing curse attacks the soul so doesn't work entirely correctly against a fractured one, but at the end of the last book Voldemort is hit by exactly that, with his soul still completely screwed up, and he dies.

The apparently nauseating act one needs to commit along with a murder in order to create a Horcrux is possibly...

Necrophilia, or something close to it.

• It wouldn't be anything before the killing, or Moaning Myrtle would have remembered it. She's so gossipy I'm sure she would have included every detail when Harry asked her how she died.
  • If necrophilia is part of the ritual for creating a Horcrux, it would have to include oral sex as well as vaginal intercourse, as Voldemort created Horcruxes after murdering male victims. Also, the witch or wizard would have to be able to clean up their mess because Voldemort didn't do anything to the Riddles that had any physical evidence left for the police to find.
• Maybe biting/eating the body?
  • Nope. Voldemort created his first Horcrux with the murder of his father and paternal grandparents and in the first chapter of Goblet of Fire, it is said that the police were baffled by the fact that all of the Riddles were unharmed except for the fact that they were dead. If he bit or ate part of anyone's body as part of creating a Horcrux, that wouldn't fit with the villagers' account of the Riddles' deaths.
• The account of Rowling's editor feeling like vomiting when she told him triggered this troper to start imagining increasingly elaborate and disgusting Urban Dictionary-esque rituals involving individual sex acts with names like "Herpo The Foul". Move over Canada's History
• Perhaps the person creating the Horcrux must murder a person, then replace part of his or her body with the victim's. This has nice parallels with the Horcrux's purpose: requiring one to fragment their body to fragment their soul. Also, it's pretty darn squicky to think of someone going all Nameless One and tearing out their own eye, liver, ulna, or what-have-you and replacing it with that of a corpse's.
• I always got the impression it was a rather unpleasant ritual (something akin to how Pettrigrew brought Voldemort back to life in book 4, only with a lot more blood, or something like that).

Voldemort's Horcruxes can manipulate the Red String of Fate

In Book 7, the locket Horcrux implies to Ron that it can help him get together with Hermione ("All you desire is possible…"). Because the pair's mutual feelings had already developed by then, such help wasn't necessary. But perhaps Tom Riddle's diary-Horcrux made promises to Ginny regarding a then-uninterested Harry, to help win her trust and allegience. (Remember, she didn't know the kind of evil she was dealing with, and in her culture Love Potions are considered acceptable.) Four years later, Harry finally got Strangled by the Red String. That's why his affection for Ginny arrives as the infamous chest-monster. Maybe it's even his own Horcrux at work. Lord Voldemort, matchmaker…

• Text from the penultimate chapter of Book 2: "Little Ginny’s been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes… how she didn’t think famous, good, great Harry Potter would ever like her…" All the time he spoke, Riddle’s eyes never left Harry’s face. There was an almost hungry look in them. Hmm…
  • Yeah, but...that means that Diary!Riddle must have found something attractive about Ginny. A 'spiritual' imprint in the body of a teenage boy leading an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl into a place called the "Chamber of Secrets"? Wrong...on...so...many...levels...
  • Hmm? To clarify (original poster) I wasn't pointing to the "hungry look" as implying Riddle's love for Ginny, but rather interpretable as "I know something you don't about this". Of course I don't think there's anything to this one, I just thought it could be an interesting premise for a fantasy romance: What if you discovered that you and your one true love had been manipulated into that situation by sinister forces?

The Marauder's Map was a horcrux

• A piece of writing that retains the memories and character of its creators, and is able to communicate with the reader. Remind you of anything?

Suffering the Dementors Kiss while having a Horcrux is a fate WORSE than a fate worse than death

This idea spooked me. We all know that you can't die when you have a horcrux right? And when somebody is 'kissed' by a dementor they lose their soul. So what would happen if you had a horcrux because part of your soul would be away from your body.

This becomes Fridge Horror when you realise that not only would you become a living vegetable but ... you would never die of old age or get killed and thus be able to move on. You'd be trapped in a state of nothingness for ETERNITY. The only way out would be if somebody destroyed your horcrux ... but if you didn't tell them during your life then you would never be able to tell them after being kissed. And even if they knew, how many people have the skill to cast fiendfyre or have a basalisk fang present? Brrrr...

• . . . AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Wizards with Horcruxes have a degree of immunity to the Dementor's Kiss.

As an alternative to the theory above. Dementors, like any other sentient creatures that feed, will go for the most plentiful food source more often than not. Not only does a wizard who has made a Horcrux (let alone a handful like Voldemort did) have less than 100% of their soul inside their body by definition, but one must also consider the sort of condition of that soul in the first place, to commit the murder and then go through the Horcrux ritual. Since the Dementors favor (one could assume, whole) souls filled with a lot of positive emotions, a soul split several ways that's there in name only wouldn't exactly be gourmet eating to a Dementor.

• Plausible. On the other hand, leaving one's Horcrux anyplace where a Dementor might stumble over it is probably not a good idea. Prepackaged snack food?

The process of creating a Horcrux requires unicorn blood.

Each will save your life, but results in a Fate Worse than Death. Horcruxes are a more extreme version, due to the other elements involved in Horcrux creation.

A part of the ritual for creating a Horcrux is a spell that endows the Horcrux as The Ageless

That is, a living creature that is a Horcrux will be immortal, but it will not die unless it's harmed beyond repair. If a living Horcrux could die of natural causes, why would Voldemort have chosen a living creature to be one of his Horcruxes? This scenario would be one where the living Horcrux is Cursed with Awesome: you're essentially immortal unless you're physically harmed beyond repair, but you're the receptacle for a mangled part of some evil, fucked up person's soul.

Other ways to destroy a Horcrux.

• Dementors: Creatures that easily pull souls from a resisting human body - seems that they could easily take the fraction of a soul weakly tied to a Horcrux.

• Throwing through the Veil: Any object that has gone through the veil, living or inanimate, does not come out the other side. If the veil doesn't "kill" the portion of the soul thrown through the veil, it will leave it in a place where the soul cannot be reached by any means.

• "Touch this Object and You DIE" Curses: We do know of at least one object in the Potterverse that has been cursed to kill by a mere touch. However, none of the Horcruxes has this feature, even though Voldermort would have the ability to do so. Since he wasn't above a softer version, that killed anyone slowly if he put on the ring, it would explain this oversight if the soul is killed or the object can't be made into a Horcrux if it kills anything it touches.
  • Dumbledore explicitly said that Voldemort wouldn't want to kill anyone who found his horcruxes immediately; he'd want to find out how they knew about his horcruxes. It also explains why the ring was killing Dumbledore slowly, rather than immediately.

• Poisons about as deadly as Basilisk Venom: If any magical poison is as strong as or stronger then the one found in the fangs of the chicken snake, one should assume it would hold true to any poison equal or greater in strength.

• Nuke 'em: The shockwave that crumbles buildings, the intense radiation, and mostly the heat that would vaporize just about anything seems like it would satisfy the "beyond magical repair" threshold needed to destroy a Horcrux.

The hocrux inside the locket and Ron

The locket seemingly works on Ron's self-esteem, at least that's what I got out of it, but what if that's wrong... What if the hocrux/locket streamed into Ron's memories every single Harmonian fic ever written. The ones where he's not good enough, where he's too stupid, where he's considered worthless.

The ones where he's abusive, or a rapist, or a Death Eater.

Not only would he have the feelings of inadequacy, but also the idea that, if he was with Hermione, he'd just make her miserable, and hurt her, and with that, he left them. Not only does he feel inadequate, he also is afraid that he'll hurt his friends, not realizing that him leaving hurt more than he would.

When he left the locket's influence, though, he realized that he had the choice to hurt those he loved or not, and he doesn't want to, so he went back.

All the Horcruxes (except Harry and possibly Nagini) had malicious magic placed on them

• The ring is obvious, that was a normal curse plus probably some sort of compulsion to put it on.
• The diary included some of Voldemort's memories in addition to his soul (Remember, memory embedding is done all the time with paintings and whatnot. Presumably that's a spell.), and a spell to suck someone's soul into the Horcrux and let the memories and Voldemort's soul back out.
• The locket is interesting. Many people assume that was purely the effects of being around Voldemort's soul...but that clearly doesn't make sense, as Harry's been around Voldemort's soul his entire life. Also it seems strange that a soul could rear up and attack people like that. So there seems to be a specific spell on it causing it to put horrible thoughts in people's ears.
• The one on the Diadem of Ravenclaw? It's the DADA position curse! Assuming that Voldemort hid it on his way down after being rejected for the position, it makes perfect sense. And explains why he hide it in Hogwarts...perhaps it has to be located there to work. And yet a check for malicious magic won't find it, hidden as it was in the Room of Requirement.
• The cup is unknown, it didn't show up long enough, but would possibly attempt to make people drink from it at some point, perhaps poisoning them. Although that's a retread of the ring.

The horcruxes have progressively smaller soul fragments

The first time Voldemort made a horcrux, his soul probably split directly in half. So half went into the first horcrux (the diary?) and half stayed in Voldy. Well, that means each horcrux has less and less soul — the next would only have 1/4 of a soul, the one after that only 1/8, and so forth. The earliest horcrux, the diary, was sentient in its own right and could possess people. The ring, which was the second, was able to effectively kill Dumbledore. The third, the locket, was able to exert evil influence on Ron but couldn't act directly. So Harry, being the last horcrux, has a very small soul fragment, which is able to talk to snakes and has flashes into the mind of the original, but isn't very powerful on its own. Of course, by extension Voldy himself would have the same size of soul fragment as Harry, but perhaps because it's in the original body / has access to the others, it's more potent?

• Since he planned from the beginning to make seven, it's more logical that he would put 1/7 in each (in so far as it makes sense to talk about actual amounts of soul, that is....)

Koschei was a Dark Wizard that created a Horcrux

Koschei is a Slavic Fairy Tale villain described as having his soul separate from his body and hidden. When his Soul Jar was destroyed he died. This may be exaggeration, he was simply killed after this happened.

The disgusting thing you need to do to make a horcrux:

You need to place the Horcrux object fully within the corpse of the murder victim. I've thought about this, and it makes a surprising amount of sense.

• How about "while the victim is still living". That'd be even creepier. Of course Myrtle says she died immediately, but maybe she just blocked the horcrux part out.

The deluminator is Dumbledore's horcrux.

It's far too sentient in "guiding" Ron to be just an object.

• One problem with that theory is that this means Dumbledore murdered someone, and anyone who knows Dumbledore knows that that would never happen. Also the Deluminator is no more sentient than the Marauder's Map or the sorting hat.
  • Well, we know, thanks to the death of Myrtle by the basilisk, that 'giving an order to kill someone and having them do it' counts as 'murdering them' for the purpose of a horcrux. And Dumbledore did, in fact, tell Snape to kill someone, and Snape did. Has anyone ever checked to see if you can make a Horcrux via suicide?

Horcruxes can be made by accident, and Ghosts are the result of those who didn't realize they made a horcrux.

• Harry's scar horcrux was obviously not intentional. Apparently a wizard can walk up to someone intending to murder them and just accidentally create a horcrux.
• Pretty much all ghosts in the book have some kind of bloody history - Nick and the Baron speak for themselves, and we find out about the Grey Lady eventually. The Friar remains a mystery, but perfectly possible to have committed murder. Myrtle seems to be the only exception, but she acts more like a poltergeist than a ghost - she can affect physical objects, like Peeves does.

Harry was going to be used in the creation of a Horcrux.

What better time to create your last Horcrux than with the murder of the one prophesied to defeat you? So Voldemort, when ready to kill Harry, did in advance whatever horrible ritual is required to create a Horcrux. This ritual makes your soul ready to split apart.

Then, and only then, did he head over to the Potter's house, with an object ready to put part of his soul in.

When he got there he murdered James, perhaps weakening his soul even more, but he could keep conscious control and not fragment his soul then. Then he killed Lily, and the same. As long as he's aware he's going to kill someone, he can keep from that act from making a Horcrux. (Perhaps this even explains why he was willing to not kill Lily...killing people while holding back from making a Horcrux after doing the Horcrux ritual requires actual effort, and he frankly didn't want to deal with it.)

And then he tried to kill Harry, ran up against Lily's magic, and, bam, disintegrated. He fell apart, and the part of his soul that he had carefully prepared to split off, that he had consciously held on to...left. And as he wasn't aware at the time, he couldn't force it into whatever object he carrying. (Possibly he had Nagini at this time, or possibly there's still some random object is sitting on the floor in the ruined nursery.) So it went, randomly, into the most suitable container, which was Harry.

He didn't ever realize this, or if he had suspected he had lost that part of his soul, assumed it had vanished forever.

• Isn't this canon?

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