Killing too many is a breeding ground for avengers, who in turn become more mortal enemies. Let's be honest, it's hard to be an Evil Overlord without pissing a lot of people off.

 

No. I was correcting
the poster who mistakenly thought Voldemort's soul was split six times, when it was actually seven.

/condescending tone

 

Perhaps there's an argument to be made about there being no strict limit on how many times a person can split their soul before offing themselves. The soul is, in HPverse, the essence of a person; without it a person is nothing but a functioning body - surviving but nothing more. As Remus said about the dementor's kiss: "You'll just - exist. As an empty shell."

Thus, the splitting of a soul means that the person who does so loses a part of themselves each time they do so. However, as we have seen, losing one's soul completely does not kill you in the biological sense. Hence, the question is more of how much of oneself is the person willing to sacrifice - split your soul apart too many times and you may end up resembling a husk of a person after the kiss.

Edit: spelling

 

The dementors kiss was the first thing that popped into my head as well when I read the question of the thread.

However, when I think about what that stands for I do not think it accurately represents the damage done by having a torn soul.
Voldemort splits his soul seven times, and while his looks definitely took a drastic turn for the worse, I do not think his personality changed much.
He might have become a crueler man after committing that amount of murder, but the crimes that he did commit were crimes he was planning on committing all along.
Even when he still went by the name of Tom Riddle, his politeness and kindness were always a façade. Tom showed from the time he was a boy that we had a strong desire to hurt others around him. Neither his eloquence, nor his intelligence seemed to have been affected by the tearing of his soul either.

‘Losing yourself’ the way people in the Potter universe lose themselves to a dementors kiss suggests a complete failure to function, and becoming essentially more ghost than man, but this does not seem to be the case with Voldemort.
Keep in mind the circumstances of Voldemort’s birth.
In order to truly understand the effects that creating horcruxes have on a soul, you would have to read about another individual that made one or more. Pottermore might have some more information perhaps?

 

The primary disadvantage is in the afterlife. The trick, of course, is not to die.

 

I feel that there is no specific number to how many times that you can split your soul. It's just that you probably won't feel very human like if you have, say, 1/100th of your soul. But due to Voldemort's case, he changed drastically in appearance, but as stayintheloop said, his personality didn't really change. But then again, some people just obviously don't want to die, and live a half life. Like Voldemort did, but in the end, he still died. Imagine what would happen if he made 100 horcruxes.

 

I'd say probably like 1. You make a horcrux by brutally murdering the innocent and sooner or later somebody's gonna want to return the favour. I thought it was interesting the first time somebody pointed out the fact that Voldemort was about 70 when he died and Dumbledore was closing in on 120 and that he would have lived longer had he not persued immortality in the first place.

But if the question is more how many horcruxes can be made before it proves instantly fatal, I'd say the groundwork is there for it to be infinite. Might end up as some sort of deranged fungus though.

 

It certainly seems like splitting your soul over and over would be a really good way to eventually stop being anything even vaguely approximating humanity. Assuming we're talking about having a soul as having some connection to actually being a person, at least.

I think that's delving deeper than JKR was ever willing to go though.

Hilariously, Horcruxes would be more viable in Dresden Files since your soul's... stuff... can regenerate over time by just being human.

 

I don't think making too many Horcruxes would kill you. Rather, I think that at a certain point the horcruxes would start to gain sentience and queston exactly who is the real Voldemort and rebel.

 

For me, part of the magic of Harry Potter is that something like that isn't explained. We know they have souls, but not what they are, we know you can "split" your soul, whatever that means.

Here it already starts, how do you "split" something that isn't really there, that you can't see, you can't hear, you can't feel. We know your soul can be ripped out of you and it can be damaged, but how do you measure that?

A point was always, makeing Horcruxesis bad because it somehow wounds your soul, but how and why, we can't know. It is truely something magical.

 

I want to see 70 year old Voldemort groaning as he watches his 20 year old self arguing with his 16 year old self, arguing with his 30 year old self

 

I kind of agree with this. The whole point of Horcruxes is creating an anchor so that you stay alive. But, my take on it would be that while you ensure a higher possibility of living you also become less and less human each time a Horcrux is created which begs the question, is it really life?

 

Misread that.

I don't know, Voldemort was probably pretty happy being literally dictator of the magical world. His victory speech at Hogwarts (which was basically an assured victory except for deus ex) was quite magnanimous, though either filled with lies or quite confusing in light of the way he treats mudbloods earlier during to book.

 

Voldemort wanted Nagini to stay close to him. He didn't start creating more horcruxes.
So it's possible that the process is long and hard. It probably weakens him which he does not want in the middle of a war.
And like other dark magic, it would probably kill him if he messes the process up. I mean, harmless potions blow up in your face. Dark magic is more difficult to control. Dark potions? Yeah.
So if he creates too many in too little time he'd probably die. But if he creates say one a year? I don't think anything would happen.
And I don't think he'd mind losing his sanity and conscious and other "human" things too much. All he wanted as Tom was power. And that is what he has as Voldemort. So probably each horcrux sheds his human aspects and keeps just the core of his being. He loses his charming personality, his perfect looks, his sharp mind. He loses the traits he had as a student, as a rebel leader etc etc. And he keeps his power.
I don't think Voldemort at the end of the series could have been a model student or gotten others to rally behind him. All those aspects of his being were important but not central and thus got destroyed. The more horcrux he creates, the more of his self he destroys. Except his power.
And it isn't like magic is limited in the HPverse. No one ever gets tired of casting spells. So creating a horcrux is a pretty sweet deal for a guy like him.

 

I'm of the opinion that with Harry being an accidental horcrux that Tom reached his soul's limit to be divided, as it was assumedly too unstable to be safely divided again because he would not be able to control the split. Otherwise it would make sense that he would make more when he found out that some of his horcruxes were either destroyed or in Harry's hands.

 

I don't think it ever really kills you but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it makes you decidedly less intelligent. You hear in the books all about how brilliant Voldemort was in school etc. etc. but in the stories he's an arrogant insane egomaniac loon who makes frankly retarded plans. For the life of me I can't figure out why he didn't just grab harry from the bar in the first book and do the resurrection ritual right then and there, or why he had to wait the entire tournament to hand harry a portkey.
Since he was supposed to be smart as a kid though I'm just going to assume that when you split your soul you lose the ability to think rationally and instead just become more and more of a loon probably if he split his soul one more time he'd basically be hallucinating all the time.

 

I don't think the soul splits would be equal with each horcrux. The way canon portrays it as a literal "ripping apart of the soul". I don't think an equal amount rips out each time. Magic, especially soul magic, would be subject to several variables. However I think the percent of soul being ripped out each time would increase with each horcrux, as the sould gets more unstable. Eventually part of the soul can get ripped apart by accident, as happened with Voldemort. At this point voldemort had made 5 horcruxs, meaning six peices of his soul (Nagini was not a horcrux yet). This suggest that 4 is the max number of horcruxs you can make keeping your soul stable. Of course the case of voldemort could be unique due to the magical backlash of the curse rebounding.

But voldemort managed to split his soul again, making 8 pieces and 6 horcruxes(one more piece in both voldemort and harry). We really cant tell how much further it would be possible to push your soul past that. But I think we can assume this is close to the max as his soul was already extremely unstable at 5.

 

I like the interpretation of above that the more you split the more you lose your personality. You become ruled by your instincts alone.

I think a good example is canon Voldemort. He was smart, talented and charismatic. Waving some kind of wizard war and obsessively pursuing one boy is not smart. And he convinces no one in canon to switch sides or whatever. So he's lost his charisma (clearly he doesn't care though with this new body).

I think the original Tom Riddle was a brilliant boy, but each successive horcrux made him less Tom Riddle and more Voldemort

 

I don't think he's lost his charisma, otherwise he wouldn't be able to gain back the support of the werewolves as well as all the other dark creatures that have sided with him. Also, as much as it was also fear, a lot of his Death Eaters came to him. He may have switched charisma for inducing fear, but he still has it.

However, your idea is quite viable too. Riddle was known to appear quite calm and in control of himself. Later on though, he seems to be frothing at the mouth to even the tiniest insult.

 

True, though the Dresden Files also has using black magic seriously mess with the caster's head. I'd have to imagine that committing murder and carving up your own soul in the quest for immortality is the kind of thing that would lead to a seriously messed up worldview.