Well, I'm just gonna ignore that, becaus, IMHO, fuck that. WD is right, it's stupid.

 

Ah, my bad, then. Missed that.

 

Happens to everyone, no big.

 

Right, wrong, or indifferent, it's also a moral that's been at the core of Western society for about fifteen hundred years (and still is for a number of people). I think everyone would know about it to some degree, including wizards. However, due to witch-hunts, the forming of secret societies, and the general utilitarianism concerning magic that seems to pervade much of JKR's wizarding world (for whatever reason), it would be knowledge that has faded deep into the background of the corporate psyche of that world.

Known, but dismissed and almost forgotten.

 

Can anyone think of anything in canon that implies that the portion of soul within a horcrux is a significant portion of soul?

Many people assume that Voldemort's soul is splintered into 7 equal parts, more or less. Others assume each time you make a horcrux you halve your soul. But is there anything ruling out the possibility that a horcrux only contains some tiny splinter of your soul? (If indeed, a soul can be quantified, which the idea of splitting does not necessarily imply...)

The closest I can think of is the fact that Voldemort's soul is meant to be very unstable as a result of all his horcruxes. Yet maybe even 7 tiny splinters missing are enough to do that.

 

It could just be coincidence (or I'm reading too much into it) but the horcruxes appear to be "weaker" in order of creation, possibly indicating there is more soul in the earlier ones or the soul fragment itself is more damaged following each split. I don't know if Voldemort's gradual loss of humanity is implied to be primarily due to horcrux number, but if it is, he did seem to change more and more after each horcrux was made (normal-ish until after his time at Borgin and Burke's with the cup and locket, waxy and melted after the diadem, ugly snake-faced bastard once he was resurrected).

The diary was a powerful object in itself only after it had been written in extensively, and while that could be a result of additional enchantments or infusion of memories, it is never really implied to be anything more than Riddle's soul piece feeding on Ginny's soul/life force.

The ring is hard to say since it was a Hallow to begin with, but since it managed to goad Dumbledore into putting it on despite all his foreknowledge, I would think it was more powerful than a garden variety compulsion charm. If I remember right Dumbledore just brushed it off as his own weakness and curiosity regarding the Hallows, but wasn't he just blowing smoke up Snape's ass in a memory when we learned that? I can't really remember but either way I'd consider the fact that it managed to seduce and kill Dumbledore as evidence of its power and/or potency.

The cup and the locket I don't think were explicitly stated to be made in any specific order. No one was said to have spent an extended time with the cup or tried to drink from it, so we really don't know. The replication and burning metal was (I'm pretty sure) a Gringott's protection rather than an act of the horcrux itself. The locket was capable of turning anyone wearing it into a raging dickhead after a time and tried to strangle Harry once, but wasn't quite as potent. It influenced Ron and Umbridge by way of preexisting character flaws, sure, but it barely affected Harry or Hermione at all, was incapable of outright possession, and only tried to strangle Harry when he was already halfway up shit creek.

The diadem we again don't know much about since no one spent very much time near it or tried to put it on. The snake was pretty much just a snake. He might have had "an unusual degree of control" over it, but post owls and kneazle/cats can understand and follow directions just as well. Voldemort could possess her, but I recall him stating that he possessed animals (snakes being his preference) after his first "death" so that's not unique to Nagini. However, unlike the other snakes she didn't die after a short time being possessed. Otherwise, as I said, normal snake.

Then there is Harry's bastard scarcrux which occurred second to last, it's hard to say if his inability to properly possess Harry even after the blood resurrection was because of Lily's sacrifice making him good/noble/wizard Jesus or if it was just a weak, shitty soul fragment. Parseltongue ability, migraine headaches and a shaky legilimency link being the only effects of a hunk of someone's soul permanently stuck in your head still seems pretty low-key when you compare it to the diary's effects on Ginny.

Thoughts?

 

How significant a portion of a soul does it take for the shit in Chamber of Secrets to be possible? I mean it's a ridiculous premise to try to apply logic to right from the get-go, but it seems to me that if you just chipped off a tiny splinter of your soul to use as an anchor it wouldn't be strong enough to start possessing people.

But seven equal parts is ridiculous. If memory serves nothing about horcruxes in canon implies that seven is the standard, so why would it split off a seventh of a soul for the first horcrux?

 

I tend to go with the soul being unquantifiable, so a piece of soul that has been split off would be more akin to a lesser infinity than a fraction.

 

It's hard to think of the soul not only as quantifiable, but of such a nature as to "split," "fracture," or "break." I always thought it was a kind of dilution taking place. Each time you bind some of your essence to an object, you dissolve it, so to speak, or water it down, spread it thin.

 

Well all the pieces seemed to be powerful. If anything, Wraith Voldemort was the weakest part. So maybe the first Horcrux was the biggest and strongest, then the next ect ect and his soul got lesser. The earlier horcruxes seemed to be more potent.

 

I don't list horcruxes in terms of power. I rather think what a particular horcrux can do is at least partially decided by the creator, but inasmuch as an enchanted object can have a "goal", a horcrux's goal is to keep its creator alive and canon gives examples of two ways a horcrux can do that. In CoS the diary is apparently bringing the sixteen year old Tom Riddle back to life (the Chamber confrontation) by sucking the life out of Ginny. But the very existence of horcruxes also anchored Wraith-Voldemort to the world of the living.

"Prince of the Dark Kingdom" deals with the idea of Voldemort who is alive when the diary does its work and from that moment on there are essentially two Voldemorts in the story. Which brings me to the meat of this post.

I rejected the idea of splitting the soul into any sort of quantifiable parts early on. I interpret "splitting" as basically copying a hard drive: you make a copy of what you have and leave that copy alone. Then as you gain new experiences, memories and knowledge, the next copy you create will be more advanced in comparison to the previous one.

The copies act as anchors (your "original" soul can't die/pass on/turn into a ghost), but there is also the possibility of the horcruxes turning into standalone copies of the creator. Considering how selfish and power-hungry Voldemort is, the horcruxes becoming copies of him may not be desirable, which is why they're hidden away and heavily protected. I can't say if canon specifically mentioned Voldemort being pissed at Lucius for giving the diary to Ginny, but this fits nicely into that interpretation: not only was an anchor lost, Voldemort probably wouldn't have been happy to have another him running around and usurping power.

The possibility of creating copies of oneself could also explain why the horcruxes are such a taboo topic: imagine how much there being another you would fuck with your head.

 

According to Perspicacity's version of Canon, the soul can be thought of as a bounded set existing on a manifold in three or more dimensions with nonzero interior. As such, and assuming the Axiom of Choice (a reasonable assumption--who can deny that Choice is a dominant theme throughout the series?) the soul can be broken into partitions and reassembled into two or more copies of the original soul, a la the famous theorem of Banach and Tarski. This is how successive splittings of the soul to make Voldemort's horcruxes do not appear to diminish his soul.

That said, these actions are not without consequence. Unlike the soul, which has this sort of infinite and infinitely divisible character, a person's humanity is finite. Each splitting of the soul stretches the remaining humanity onto the new soul copies, thereby diluting one's humanity with each split. Consequently, the more Voldemort splits his soul, the less human he becomes.

Dumbledore did not explain this to Harry because Harry lacked sufficient knowledge in real analysis and axiomatic set theory to comprehend the subtleties. For rhetorical purposes, it was easier to just use the "damaged soul" metaphor to convey the idea of a (functionally) complete soul with greatly diminished humanity.

 

I always imagined Horcuxes as linked glass containers filled with water. With creation of of a new one the amount of soul in each is equalized. And from Dumbledore's words we know that crippled soul does not diminish magical power in any way, therefore all Horcruxes are equal in power discounting object differences/additional enchantments/Tom Riddle's knowledge at the moment of the creation.

 

Lol Pers. I've always had very mixed feelings about stuff like that. On the one side, it has a level of complexity that I love, and I feel the difficulty of understanding such concepts goes a long way to explaining the big gap between wizards like Dumbledore and your average Auror.

On the other hand, if magical theory is so mathematically complex to understand, one would think that mathematics would be taught at Hogwarts.

I generally settle on the idea that magic is as complex as the mathematics you invoked but has its own mode of description, analogous to mathematics.

Anyway, Tehan: regarding "7 equal pieces", if Voldemort knew that he wanted to create 7 horcruxes this could affect the spell. Perhaps the caster has control over the "amount" of soul they take away, or maybe it would just work subconsciously.

 

Math? That's just muggle rubbish.

 

I always thought of them as actual physical anchors that the metaphysical soul clings to whilst remaining a part of his whole. The spirt/soul we see coming out is more of a piece of the Whole that remains in Voldemort that had been holding onto the ritually made anchor screaming in pain/terror. The ritual of creating an anchor is literally making it so the piece takes on more than just a physical aspect in reality. It gives it a tangible fifth/sixth dimension for Voldermort to basically glue an immobile part of his soul to. There's never any actual splitting as that's impossible, merely he's "dipping a finger into the pie" so to speak.

Imagine a man clutching at multiple pieces of wood via rope, that rops is the Horcrux, the spirits coming out when the raft is destroyed is the man's line being severed and the rope falling into the sea with the piece of wood. Once all the pieces are severed, he's just floating on his own with no anchors in place.

This doesn't really jive with anything said so far but I liked the concept that he's not severing his soul, so much as he's preparing the Horcrux vessel to be something he can attach a piece of his soul to and then it acts as a handhold to reality. This allows for his ability to remain as a incomplete soul searching for a body as he's still floating in reality but has no real body.

It also allows for the idea that Harry is affected by his moods in an emotional way and it allows for him to physically feel that pain of that Soul finger gripping him while showing that it can't take him over fully without help from the Man who's soul is gripping him.

Maybe I'm crazy but I hope I made this clear enough for others to get.

 

While I admit to being a bit facetious with my post, who's to say that it isn't, that the deeper tenets of Arithmancy don't involve elements of higher mathematics or its magical analogue? It wouldn't be inconsistent with canon to propose that it does since Arithmancy is so poorly defined in canon.

We see the series through the lens of Harry's experience, one with very little connection to Arithmancy, and we have a good indication that the discipline involves more than numerological divination, as it would be unlikely to be Hermione's favorite subject otherwise. Bridget Wenlock's celebrated discovery of the magical properties of the number seven (along with Voldemort's obsession with the number) indicate that the discipline is more than simply using numbers to predict the future, involving as well the exploration of the deeper connections between mathematics and magic.

One doesn't necessarily need a formal mapping between Muggle maths concepts and magic of the sort I described, but there's no reason not to suppose that analogies may be made between the two. To me, given the nebulousness of the concept of soul in canon, it's as plausible to argue Banach-Tarski and say he has a full soul as it is to argue over Voldemort's soul's being 1/7 of his original soul or 1/64th of it. All map some mathematical concept onto the division process.

 

And I suppose a wizard doesn't necessarily need to understand the nature of the soul to use magic pertaining to it -- he just has to understand the magic he's using. Similar to how you can transfigure something without needing to know the full physical details of the objects involved. You just need to know the spell.

 

Can I filter the DLP library by size to many one shots I don't care to read.

 

Try the DLP C3 on ffnet. It's not exactly the same as our library, but it's very close.

If you can't filter by size there, then there's probably a script somewhere that'll do it for you.