Horcrux

File:Riddle's Diary.jpg

Tom Riddle's diary, the first Horcrux that Harry Potter encountered, as seen in the film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

A Horcrux is a fictional magical object in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. The concept of a Horcrux was first revealed in the sixth novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, although Horcruxes are present in earlier novels without being identified as such. Rowling uses the character Horace Slughorn to introduce their properties. Their retrieval and destruction forms the main focus of the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Description

In an online diary entry, Rowling described a Horcrux as a "receptacle in which a Dark wizard has hidden a part of his soul for the purposes of attaining immortality." With part of a wizard's soul thus stored, the wizard becomes immortal so long as the Horcrux remains intact. For this reason, Horcruxes are typically hidden in a safe location. Even if the wizard's body is destroyed, a portion of his soul will remain preserved within the Horcrux. However, the destruction of the creator's body leaves the wizard or witch in a state of half-life, without corporeal form. The dark magic involved in the creation of a Horcrux is considered most despicable and is therefore rarely published, even in books devoted to the Dark Arts.

A Horcrux can be made from any normal object, including living organisms. Destroying a Horcrux will destroy the fragment of soul contained within it, ending its protection and returning the creator to a state of mortality. If a wizard has created more than one Horcrux, he will remain immortal until all are destroyed. Once destroyed, the wizard will die normally if mortally wounded.

The portion of soul within a Horcrux also has the ability to take spiritual possession of other people. This possession is limited to those who become emotionally attached to the Horcrux. Once possessed, the soul within the Horcrux can take total control of the person's actions while the person remains completely unaware of the connection. Once a person has become possessed by a Horcrux, the Dark Wizard has the ability to take corporeal form by draining the life force of the possessed person. None of these spiritual connections extend to a wizard's other Horcruxes.

Lord Voldemort is the only wizard explicitly mentioned as having created a Horcrux (though others are known to have done so), and is the only wizard known to have created more than one.

Creation

Rowling uses Professor Slughorn's expository dialogue to reveal that the creation of a Horcrux requires one to commit a murder, which, as "the supreme act of evil, (...) rips the soul apart." After the murder, a spell is cast to infuse part of the ripped soul into an object, which becomes the Horcrux. Rowling has never published the actual enchantment. In the final book of the series, Hermione Granger finds the spell in a book titled Secrets of the Darkest Art.

There is no apparent restriction on the nature of the items that can be made into a Horcrux. Both inanimate objects and living organism have been used as Horcruxes. There is also no known limit on the number of Horcruxes a wizard can create. However, as the creator's soul is divided into progressively smaller portions, he loses more of his natural humanity and his soul becomes increasingly unstable, as in the case of Voldemort.

Under very specific conditions, a soul fragment can be sealed within an object without the intention or knowledge of the creator. While the object thus affected will, like any Horcrux, preserve the immortality of the creator, it does not become a "Dark object." The only time this is known to have occurred is when Voldemort unsuccessfully used the Killing Curse on one-year-old Harry Potter. Voldemort's body was destroyed by the attempted murder and a portion of his soul was embedded within Harry.

Destruction

Horcruxes are extremely difficult to destroy. They cannot be destroyed by conventional means such as smashing, breaking, or burning. In order to be destroyed, a Horcrux must suffer damage so severe that repair through magical means would be impossible. Once irreparably damaged, the fragment of soul within a Horcrux is destroyed.

A Horcrux can be magically undone only if the creator goes through a process of deep remorse for the murder committed to create the Horcrux. The pain of this remorse is so excruciating that the process itself may kill the creator.^[HP7]

Voldemort's Horcruxes

Voldemort's creation of Horcruxes is central to the later storyline of the Harry Potter novels.

Believing that seven is a powerful, mystical number (see Bridget Wenlock), Voldemort intended to create six Horcruxes, and leave the remaining seventh portion of his soul within his body. However, Voldemort unintentionally created a seventh Horcrux (the sixth sequentially) when his Killing Curse on the one-year-old Harry Potter backfired. It destroyed his body and infused a part of his soul into Harry. Only six Horcruxes ever existed at any one time in the series.

All of Voldemort's consciously created Horcruxes were made using objects that had been important or held some sentimental value. He used artifacts from three of the four founders of Hogwarts (he was unable to obtain a relic from Godric Gryffindor), his childhood diary (which contained proof that he was a descendant of Salazar Slytherin), the Peverell family ring owned by his maternal grandfather, and the snake Nagini.

Each Horcrux is destroyed by a different person, as shown in the following table:

Horcrux	Created with the murder of	Hiding place	Destroyed by	Destroyed using	Notes
Tom Riddle's diary	Moaning Myrtle	In the care of Lucius Malfoy	Harry Potter	Basilisk fang	Lucius Malfoy planted the diary on Ginny Weasley to reopen the Chamber of Secrets, not knowing it was a Horcrux.
Marvolo Gaunt's Ring/Resurrection Stone	Tom Riddle Senior	Gaunts' Shack	Albus Dumbledore	Sword of Gryffindor	Voldemort created this Horcrux, not knowing the ring was also the Resurrection Stone, the second of the three Deathly Hallows.
Helga Hufflepuff's Cup	Hepzibah Smith	Gringotts Bank, in the Lestranges' vault	Hermione Granger	Basilisk fang	Stolen from Hepzibah Smith, along with Slytherin's Locket.
Salazar Slytherin's Locket	A Muggle tramp	A coastal cliffside cave	Ron Weasley	Sword of Gryffindor	Stolen from Hepzibah Smith, along with Hufflepuff's Cup. Originally recovered from the cave by Regulus Black and Kreacher.
Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem	An Albanian peasant	The Room of Requirement in Hogwarts	Vincent Crabbe	Fiendfyre	Discovered by Harry in the Room of Requirement, but destroyed by a Fiendfyre curse cast by Vincent Crabbe.
Harry Potter	N/A	N/A	Lord Voldemort	Killing curse	When the attempted Killing curse rebounded, a part of Voldemort's soul flew into the nearest living thing, Harry Potter. Since the creation was unintentional, it is impossible to determine whose murder led to Harry becoming a Horcrux.
Nagini	Bertha Jorkins	N/A	Neville Longbottom	Sword of Gryffindor	Dumbledore believed that the Horcrux was created through the murder of Frank Bryce, however J. K. Rowling stated that the Horcrux was formed earlier with the murder of Bertha Jorkins.

Tom Riddle's Diary

Tom Riddle used his diary to create his first Horcrux during his sixth year as a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He cast the spell after murdering a fellow student nicknamed Moaning Myrtle. The diary is introduced in the fourth chapter of the Chamber of Secrets and is destroyed by Harry Potter during the climax of the same book.

Before Voldemort's downfall, he entrusted the Horcrux to Lucius Malfoy. While aware of its corrupting magical properties, Malfoy did not know the diary was a Horcrux. In an attempt to discredit Arthur Weasley, Malfoy hid the diary in Ginny Weasley's book bag. The spirit-memory of Tom Riddle possessed Ginny and through her reopened the Chamber of Secrets. In the end of book two, Harry saved Ginny and destroyed the diary by stabbing it with the venomous fang of a Basilisk.

When asked what would have happened if Ginny had died and Riddle had managed to escape, author J. K. Rowling declined to give a straight answer, but revealed that "it would have strengthened the present-day Voldemort considerably."

To Rowling, a diary is a very scary object. She said in an interview that "the temptation particularly for a young girl, [is] to pour out her heart to a diary." Rowling's little sister Diane was prone to this, and her great fear was that someone would read her diary. This gave Rowling the idea to have a diary that is, in itself, against the confider.

Marvolo Gaunt's ring / Cadmus Peverell's Resurrection Stone

Tom Riddle created his second Horcrux using a ring owned by his maternal grandfather, Marvolo Gaunt. He cast the spell after murdering his father. The ring, having already been destroyed by Albus Dumbledore, is introduced during the fourth chapter of the Half-Blood Prince.

Riddle took the gold ring, which had a black stone inscribed with a magical symbol, from his uncle Morfin Gaunt, whom he had framed for the murder of his father and grandparents. Riddle wore the ring while still a student at Hogwarts, but eventually hid it in the house where the Gaunt family had lived. It was hidden under the floorboards, placed in a golden box, and protected by several enchantments.

Albus Dumbledore found Marvolo Gaunt's ring in the summer of 1996. Dumbledore destroyed the Horcrux with Godric Gryffindor's sword. Because the ring was cursed, Dumbeldore was also seriously injured after putting the ring on his finger. The injury left his right arm permanently disfigured and would have killed him quickly but for the intervention of professor Severus Snape, who could still only postpone its inevitably fatal effects. The damaged ring was kept for a time on a table in the Headmaster's office.

Before his death, Dumbledore hid the ring's black stone inside a golden snitch (the very same golden snitch Harry Potter had caught in his first ever Quidditch match at Hogwarts) and willed the snitch to Harry Potter. Dumbledore had learned that the stone was, in fact, the Resurrection Stone, one of the three Deathly Hallows. Voldemort was unaware of the stone's additional magical properties.

Helga Hufflepuff's Cup

Tom Riddle used a cup owned by Hogwarts founder Helga Hufflepuff to create his next Horcrux. The spell was cast after he murdered Hepzibah Smith. The cup is introduced during the twentieth chapter of Half-Blood Prince and is destroyed by Hermione Granger in the thirty-first chapter of Deathly Hallows.

Hepzibah Smith, who owned the cup, was a distant descendant of Helga Hufflepuff. Riddle killed Smith, stole the cup, then framed her house elf for the murder.

Voldemort entrusted the cup to Bellatrix Lestrange, who kept it protected in her family's vault at Gringotts Bank, a place that Harry guessed that the once penniless Voldemort would have always coveted a connection to. Additional protective spells, including the Gemino and Flagrante curses, were used to protect the contents of the vault. Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger stole the cup after breaking into the bank.

Hermione destroyed this Horcrux using a fang from the remains of the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets.

Salazar Slytherin's Locket

Tom Riddle created his next Horcrux using a locket once owned by Salazar Slytherin and which had belonged to Riddle's mother, Merope Gaunt. The spell was cast after Riddle murdered a muggle tramp. The locket is introduced briefly in the Order of the Phoenix (described only as "a heavy locket that none of them could open") and is destroyed by Ron Weasley in the nineteenth chapter of the Deathly Hallows.

Slytherin's locket was passed down through the generations and eventually ended up in the possession of Merope Gaunt. After being abandoned by her husband Tom Riddle Senior, Merope sold the locket to Caractacus Burke for ten galleons, a fraction of the Locket's true value.

The locket was eventually sold to Hepzibah Smith. Riddle stole the locket, along with Helga Hufflepuff's cup, after murdering Smith. Once the locket became a Horcrux, Voldemort hid it in a cave where he had once terrorized two of his fellow orphans. The cave's magical protection included an enchanted boat and the use of inferi.

Disillusioned Death Eater Regulus Black learned about the Horcrux and its hiding place. In an effort to bring about Voldemort's eventual downfall, he and his house elf Kreacher broke through the magical protection and stole the locket. While Black died in the effort, killed by the surrounding inferi, Kreacher took the locket back to their home at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

Kreacher continued to protect the locket for years. However, while the Order of the Phoenix was using the house as its headquarters, the locket was stolen by Mundungus Fletcher, a petty criminal and member of the Order. He gave it to Dolores Umbridge as a bribe when she caught him selling stolen property.

Two years later, Harry, Ron, and Hermione infiltrated The Ministry of Magic, where Umbridge worked, and stole the locket. Ron later saved Harry from being strangled by the locket. The Horcrux inside assumed the shape of Harry and Hermione and played off of Ron's fear that Harry and Hermione had started a relationship during his absence (and longer held fear that in Hermione's eyes he, Ron, would never match up to Harry). The Horcrux attempted to possess him, but Ron overcame its influence and destroyed it using the sword of Godric Gryffindor.

Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem

Tom Riddle created his fifth Horcrux using Hogwarts founder Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem. The spell was cast after he murdered an Albanian peasant. The diadem is officially introduced by the character Xenophilius Lovegood during the twentieth chapter of Deathly Hallows and is accidentally destroyed eleven chapters later.

Ravenclaw's daughter Helena stole the diadem from her mother in an attempt to become more intelligent. She fled to Albania where she hid the diadem in the hollow of a tree.

After Helena died, she became the Ravenclaw house ghost known as the Grey Lady. Tom Riddle, while a student at the school, charmed her into telling him the location of the lost diadem. Shortly after the murder of Hepzibah Smith, Riddle travelled to Albania and took possession of the artifact. Years later, when Voldemort returned to Hogwarts and reapplied for the Defence Against the Dark Arts position, he hid this Horcrux in the Room of Requirement.

Harry Potter deduced the Diadem's location in the Room of Hidden Things (one manifestation of the Room of Requirement). The diadem was accidentally destroyed by a Fiendfyre spell cast by Vincent Crabbe, who died in the resulting fire.

Harry Potter

Main article: Harry Potter (character)

Voldemort inadvertently sealed a fragment of his soul within Harry Potter while attempting to murder the boy. The event took place just before the opening chapter of the Philosopher's Stone. Rowling has explicitly stated that Harry never became a proper "Dark object" since the Horcrux spell was not cast. Regardless, as with all Horcruxes, Voldemort would remain immortal so long as his soul fragment remained within Harry. That portion of Voldemort's soul is destroyed by Voldemort himself at the close of the thirty-fourth chapter of the Deathly Hallows.

As a baby, Harry Potter was in the room when Voldemort's fatal Killing Curse backfired. Voldemort's soul had been weakened and destabilized by his continuous murders and the creation of his previous Horcruxes. Harry became a Horcrux when a fragment of Voldemort's soul attached itself to him after the failed curse.The lightning bolt-shaped scar on Harry's forehead is a direct result of this attempted murder.

This connection is used to explain several important plot points. Throughout the series, Harry is able to receive insight into Voldemort's mental and emotional states, allowing the reader to eavesdrop on the series' primary antagonist. This insight is usually accompanied by pain in the scar on Harry's forehead. Through Voldemort, Harry also inherited the ability to speak and understand Parseltongue.

While Voldemort did learn of Harry's telepathic ability, Voldemort was never made aware that Harry was like a Horcrux. When Voldemort attempted to kill Harry with the Killing Curse near the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he destroyed the portion of his own soul embedded within Harry. Once destroyed, the connections between the two were also broken. Harry never again felt pain in his scar.

Nagini

Template:HP character Voldemort used his devoted pet serpent, Nagini (Hindi: nāginī, pronounced [ˈnɑːɡɪniː], although in the films, etc. as [nəˈɡiːni]; variant of Hindi: nāgin, a female cobra, from Hindi/Sanskrit: nāg, a cobra), to create his final Horcrux. He cast the spell after murdering Ministry official Bertha Jorkins. Nagini is introduced in the first chapter of the Goblet of Fire and is killed by Neville Longbottom in the final chapter of the Deathly Hallows.

Nagini is a large venomous serpent and the loyal pet of the series' primary antagonist. Voldemort intended Nagini to be his sixth Horcrux, which would have split his soul into the magically significant seven pieces. Since he had inadvertently made Harry into a Horcrux, Nagini was in fact his seventh Horcrux. As with his diary, Voldemort intended Nagini to be a tool as well as a safeguard of his immortality.

Lord Voldemort is able to communicate with her due to his ability to speak Parseltongue, the language of snakes. Readers are first introduced to Nagini when the snake is the first to notice Frank Bryce, the Riddles' gardener, and alerts Voldemort to Bryce's presence. During the fourth year Harry spends at Hogwarts, Voldemort's temporary body was sustained by Nagini's "milk" (presumably her venom), harvested by Peter Pettigrew. In the fifth book, Harry witnesses Nagini attacking Arthur Weasley in one of his dreams. He saw this from Nagini's point of view, and felt as though he himself was the snake. Dumbledore believed this to be due to Harry's mental connection to Voldemort, with Harry's witnessing the attack by virtue of the fact that Voldemort's mind "happened to be" in Nagini at the time. This is the first indication of Nagini and Voldemort's deeper connection, having the ability to share each other's thoughts and, unwittingly, share them with Harry as well.

In the final book, Nagini consumes Professor Charity Burbage, Hogwarts' Muggle Studies teacher, after the Killing Curse is used on her. Later on, Nagini is placed inside the body of Bathilda Bagshot by Voldemort, and uses the hiding place to launch a surprise attack on Harry while he is in Godric's Hollow. Because snake senses are different, being able to sense heat and movement in a way humans can't, Nagini is able to detect Harry and Hermione even when they were under the Invisibility Cloak. After discovering that Harry is searching for his Horcruxes, Voldemort places Nagini into a protective magical shell to prevent her from being killed, and uses her to slay Severus Snape by expanding the shell over Snape and trapping him with Nagini. When Harry is apparently killed by Voldemort, Nagini is released from the protective shell and is draped around Voldemort's shoulders during the Death Eater's "victory march" back to Hogwarts. After Neville openly defies Voldemort, Voldemort punishes him by putting the Sorting Hat atop his head and setting it on fire. The Death Eaters are then attacked, and Neville pulls Godric Gryffindor's sword from the Hat and beheads Nagini.

Since she was Voldemort's last remaining Horcrux, her death sets up the series' climactic duel between him and Harry Potter. With no Horcruxes remaining and therefore rendered mortal, Voldemort's death in that duel is final.

Similar objects in other works of fiction

Almost immediately upon publication, reviewers noted a basic similarity to the One Ring from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. While Tolkien's Sauron character (unlike Voldemort) was an inherently immortal being, both the Ring and the individual Horcruxes tended to corrupt their possessors.

Other notable authors have utilized similar concepts. In Oscar Wilde's book The Picture of Dorian Gray, the titular character is kept alive and youthful by his own portrait while he commits acts of evil. In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, an urban fantasy set in the London Underground, the character of the marquis de Carabas keeps his life-force separate from his body, inside an ornate silver snuff box, allowing his body to be resurrected. In Lloyd Alexander's book Taran Wanderer, the enchanter Morda infuses his littlest finger with his life force, cuts off the finger, and hides it in the woods, making him essentially invincible until the protagonist manages to snap the finger bone and kill Morda.

The concept has also been used in various mythologies. Russian mythology includes Koschei, an evil person whose soul is hidden inside a needle. Arabic mythology includes a supernatural being called a Djinn (or Genie) who, according to Western culture, is an immortal concealed in an object (most often an oil lamp).

References

Online resources

1. Frazer, James George, Sir. "The Golden Bough: The External Soul in Folk-Tales".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
2. Rowling, J.K. "J.K. Rowling's Official Site". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)