Why? Like I said, Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange didn't. Two prominent individuals known for their knowledge of Dark Magic and resources.

I didn't mean in total, I meant in a given encounter. The two sides never face off with all their members. If the Aurors can arrange to always significantly outnumber Death Eaters in any given small scale engagement (e.g. the capture of the Lestranges) it doesn't matter if their total numbers are equal.

He fights Dumbledore head on and loses, then flees. Voldemort has never shown any fear of the Aurors except when Dumbledore was also present. Somewhat significant, that.

Unless you can show that it's them being Aurors that make them skilled and not an unrelated factor, yes. If they're just talented wizards who happened to become Aurors, then you can't extrapolate from them to the general competency of Aurors.

Remus Lupin.

Only after GoF when Kingsley was recruited. Before then the Aurors spent 2 years searching for him and failed.

The Aurors are part of that government.

 

Malfoy didnt, we dont know either way about Bellatrix. She was scared shitless when she thought they had been in her vault.

Voldemort didnt lose. If anything it was a draw until the aurors showed up.

Dumbledore says having Aurors on their side is a huge advantage.

Care of Magical Creatures teacher. Biggest achivements in life are stpping Harry running through a Veil and being killed...

Point.

Two different types of incompetency.

EDIT: Either way I think we have proven your estimate of 5-6 is dramatically low before the battle of Hogwarts. With the entire teaching staff of Hogwarts in on it, numerous Historians, some people from Aurors and the Department of Mystery (they study death, someone there would know of them) and a few scattered academics and people like Hermione who just read for pleasure and find referenec to it and look it up our of curiosity. I think you could assume a number from one to several hundred and still not have it be common knowlesge. and not all of them would know how to make them and all there is to know about them, just that they exist and confer some form of Immortality.

 

Voldemort failed to kill either of his targets or succeed in any of his goals that night. He then fled. I think that counts as a loss. Also consider Dumbledore's handicap of protecting a less skilled ally while still matching Voldemort.

Because the Aurors are the lawmen of the society. Would you rather fight a civil war with the police on your side or on the enemy's side?

Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. You might remember him from such achievements as completing his Hogwarts education despite great social stigma, living with a horrible curse for the majority of his life, being competent enough to a), Teach at Hogwarts and b), teach a kid a charm so complex most adults rarely learn it. Also, he landed a babe some years his junior. Biggest achievement indeed...:facepalm

 

I said Care of Magical Creatures since that is basically what he did, no great magic.


Living with a curse doesnt make him great.

And Harry taught that same charm to a bunch of Kids.

 

You called him the Care of Magicl Creatures teacher. He's the Defence teacher.

Living with one of the most reviled curses in magical society might not make him great, but it is an achievement a touch higher than stopping someone getting themselves killed.

The bunch of kids that Harry taught also happened to be some of the brighter of their age, on top of being two years older than Harry was when he learned.

 

He isn't using the care of magical creatures teacher literally, he is demeaning him as that subject is what his DADA lessons largely consisted of.

 

That we saw. That he taught to a bunch of thirteen year olds. That were about dark creatures.

Tl;dr: people who rag on characters and perpetuate fan stereotypes irritate me.

 

The difference between Lupin and Hagrid is that one teaches the students how to take care of magical creatures wheras the other teaches them to defend against dark creatures. It ain't that hard to understand.

 

You people need to get your fucking irony detectors checked.

 

Though this was a ways back, I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from. I doesn't matter if Harry meant to tell everyone about Horcruxes or not. The fact is that he did and others heard it.

You're also talking about the most important final showdown of the last century for Wizarding Britain. Do you honestly think that Dumbledore is the only man of authority with a pensieve, or that others wouldn't want to go over a first-hand account of the events that transpired? Magic allows for things far beyond basic recall or conjecture.

If you want to make an argument against the public's ability to find out about horcruxes, then some pretty large assumptions have to be made:

1) Horcruxes are such an obscure topic that no libraries besides (presumably) the Blacks' and Hogwarts (before it was removed) have information about them. If it wasn't from the Black library, Regulus must have had other means of learning this information.

2) No other individual in history has ever made one, which would be pretty rare given that a school boy was able to find out enough about them to learn more from a potions master.

3) No one is interested in recording the discussion between Voldemort and Harry, if just for historical purposes.

 

My statement was not about whether or not people will find about horcruxes, it was about if Harry intends to inform the populace of them post-DH. I maintain that he doesn't, in spite of his slip up in the battle of Hogwarts.

I mean, we know this is canon:

1. Harry mentions that he is the master of the Elder Wand in the conversation with Voldemort.

2. After the conversation, Harry says that he intends for no-one to ever gain mastery of the Elder Wand from him.

With that in mind:

1. Harry mentions the horcruxes during the conversation with Voldemort.

2. Harry intends for no-one to ever gain knowledge of the horcruxes.

The second situation has equal logical strength to the first i.e. it is very weak. But the first is canon anyway. So it seems that the logical weakness of the second isn't really a factor in the discussion, since it isn't a factor in the first. Aka Harry is stupid.

 

Why all the shit-talking on Remus? He was a master of what is reputedly "the most difficult of any Defense charm" (the Patronus), and one of the creators of a map which is so broken JKR was tempted to take it away from Harry.

He also knows how to pwn Peeves. No easy feat. Oh, and wandless handful of flames. Dumbledore shit.

EDIT: He was also killed by Dolohov, who was arguably the most skilled duelist of Voldemort's followers.

 

I can understand your argument now and should have guessed from the beginning. It's Taure, after all. Something didn't happen in canon despite logical progression, so we have to assume that this logical progression will also fail in similar cases. I don't disagree.

That being said... given that we don't have any canonical information validating or invalidating your theory, let's just assume that the public is made aware of Horcruxes. Now we can move on to the entire point of this hypothetical discussion, and S can figure out who got what Order of Merlin.

 

I think Taure is right. Harry didn't reveal anything about Horcruxes, save for its name. Harry knows like 90% of the process, he just doesn't know the way to extract that shade of your soul you need to put in an object to complete the Horcrux. And, he didn't tell a thing about that. If you think a little harder, you can understand that he (Taure) was talking exactly about that: at the end of the day (or the Hogwarts battle), the only people who really know about Horcruxes are Harry, Ron, Hermione and Slughorn. The others who did are all dead.

So, people heard the word Horcrux. Not that big of a deal. It's the same when I hear about quantum mechanics: yeah, I have a little idea of what they're talking about, but can I do something with it? Na. Same deal here.

Then, maybe one wizard, who was present in the final confrontation between HP and LV, was interested in the word and searched for more info. Could you honestly say he would have found anything? And if he did, would he be willing to destroy his soul? I don't know, it's not necessary to become a Dark Lord or Dark Wizard. I wouldn't. The price is too high.

 

I think Dumbledore's censoring campaign would have had a pretty significant effect on the number of people who know about horcruxes. He started censoring either during Riddle's school years, or afterward at some point when he began to clue in (do we know when he first learned that Tom asked Slughorn about them?) As Erotic Adventures of S mentioned, lots of academically inclined students may well have looked them up out of curiosity, which was presumably what Dumbledore was trying to prevent. So apart from (possibly) a couple of extremely intelligent, academically curious kids from old, dark families or access to their libraries, at least the last few generations of Hogwarts kids wouldn't have heard of them. Apart from a few Aurors who really know their shit when it comes to dark objects or artifacts (Moody is the only one I can think of offhand) I can't see too many of them being aware of horcruxes or fully realizing the significance or implications when it comes to Voldemort (logic is not the wizard's strong point, after all).

If anyone in the ministry knew of horcruxes, I'd think it would be some of the Unspeakables. Who, obviously, wouldn't be speaking about them. Working in the ministry they can clearly see how stupid and corrupt they are and probably minimize the amount of dark, obscure and dangerous magical knowledge gets through to the upper levels (otherwise wouldn't everyone have known about the prophecy from very early on?) If Rookwood (the only Unspeakable DE I believe) put it together about Voldemort having one or multiple horcruxes, why would he be stupid enough to open his mouth? Same goes for Bellatrix or any other DEs who may have had an inkling about Voldemort's methods of immortality. I guess this includes Snape, though I can't remember how much Dumbledore told him about Harry's scar, I think he might have been aware of their existence beforehand and hearing Dumbledore's "explanation" about the Harrycrux was a bit of an 'aha' moment.

So, long-winded speculation aside, we do know that no one had really thought it plausible to create more than one horcrux even if they knew of their existence and purpose. I do think more than 5-6 people knew about them, though mostly older teachers or academics, and more probably looked them up after Harry's blathering at the final battle. As for people making actually them, though? Besides it being difficult to find information about their method of creation and possibly magically dangerous as well as having to get away with a murder (which admittedly doesn't seem to be a challenge for a wizard), who would really want to? Immortality seems like a pretty shit deal and it's not like no one would notice anything odd when you live til age 200. If anything I would think seeing how fucked up Voldemort was would be a deterrent to even considering it.

Of course if anyone would like to disprove that speculation with an awesome fanfic about a Wandering Jew/Count St. Germain type character, please do, I'd read the fuck out of it.

 

Flamel lived to 665.
In fact that would be a great cover story for a sane and enterprising horcrux maker.

 

He might have actually lived to be at least 666. In the book in PS, it said he had celebrated his 665th birthday last year.

 

I probably had a few years left in him. Dumbledore said he had elixer left and I doubt you drop dead if you miss a day. He could have made 700.

 

Cracks me up that Hermione is reading a dusty old tome that remarks on the man's birthdate.

The historical Nicolas Flamel was thought to have been born ~1330, Hermione is reading the book in 1992, so instead of the date being vaguely accurate for when THAT BOOK WAS PRINTED, it's accurate to the current year in the story. If it weren't for magic, it would be a plothole; instead, we can assume that at least some historical references kept in the Hogwarts library are auto-updating.

 

He was supposed to be born around 1330 . . . but wouldn't it be cool if it was just that he showed up as a fully grown wizard in France around 1350, and they (Muggle and wizard alike, perhaps) all assumed he was born there (with his help), making him potentially far older than even legend records . . .