Soccer Dad: I never did believe in the ways of magic

August 18, 2006

I never did believe in the ways of magic

My friend Elie's Exposition's post from a few days ago Book 7 Buzz is a reminder of a possible solution to some of the mysteries remaining in the Harryy Potter series.

As I mentioned in an e-mail to Elie's Expositions (and a blog post a year ago) Dumbledore is possibly another name for bumblebee.

As I mentioned earlier, J K Rowling is careful with her names. She seems to choose names with a purpose.

So what's the point of Dumbledore's name?

I've seen speculation that Harry is a Horcrux. Now in the magical world of JK Rowling, a horcrux is container for someone's soul. It apparently is an evil to use one, as the spell involved requires a killing. Voldemort, we are informed, has scattered his soul into 7 such containers and the final book in the series will involve Harry chasing down the remianing Horcruxes presumably before the evil Wizard Voldemort can retrieve them.

When JK Rowling suggested that Harry would not survive Book 7, there was speculation that Harry would have to sacrifice himself because he realized that he was a horcrux and in order to destroy Voldemort, he, too, would have to die.

I don't believe Harry is a horcrux.
1) If Harry is a Horcrux why would Voldemort want to kill him? Wouldn't killing him destroy the Horcrux too?

Well according to the essay cited above no

This question assumes something that almost all analyses I�ve seen take for granted: that killing a person in which a Horcrux resides also destroys the Horcrux. But is that so obvious? As noted earlier, the Killing Curse kills the person but seemingly does nothing to a person�s body.

Is this assumption baseless? After all when Harry destroyed the diary, which was a horcrux, in the Chamber of Secrets, it apparently destroyed the part of Voldermort's soul within. Why wouldn't the same apply to a human horcrux who's killed? Because the body remains intact? I don't buy it.

2) The one horcrux we know of has a mind of its own. If Harry were a horcrux he would be under some level of control by Voldemort. Since Harry's the character we know best, I don't find that plausible.

My conclusion is that Harry is not a horcrux.

But if Harry's not a horcrux, maybe someone else is.

Last year I found this wonderful website Dumbledore is not dead. Since J K Rowlings announcement that Dumbledore is indeed dead and not returning, the webmaster David Haber has backtracked a bit, but that doesn't make the site any less fascinating.

In particular let me point you to one of the clues that Dumbledore wasn't really dead

4. The Flying Avada Kedavra [Updated 3/9/06]

As soon as I read the description of exactly what happened the moment that Snape [killed] Dumbledore, little red flags were popping up in my brain, but I didn't pay attention to them at first. This was actually the very first clue that alerted me to this whole thing.

Every other time we've seen the Avada Kedavra performed, the victim simply falls over [dead] :

...

However, in Half-Blood Prince, when Snape curses Dumbledore with the same spell, Dumbledore violently flies up and away from the tower...

Haber speculates that Dumbledore was the object of a different spell not a killing curse and that explains why he was blasted out of the tower. But maybe something else was at work here.

Snape, did indeed, kill Dumbledore with a curse. But there was a reason for it. Dumbledore was a horcrux and was therefore compromised by Voldemort. Also by killing him, it killed a part of Voldemort's soul further compromising the evil wizard's chance of returning to full power.

We saw at the end HPatGoF that in certain cases two spells could interact with each other (under certain circumstances) and have an unusual result (Priori Incantatem). Then the reason was that the two spells (Voldemort's and Harry's) came from wands that had feathers from the same bird. Perhaps a killing curse applied to a horcrux has a more explosive effect than a simple killing curse.

And this brings us to Dumbledore's name. A bee when it stings an enemy often loses its stinger and dies. Perhaps that's what Dumbledore's name signifies, that when he died, he took part of Voldemort with him. Snape and Dumbledore realized that the only way to destroy that part of Voldemort's soul was to kill Dumbledore.

There are two serious deficiencies in this analysis.
1) In the real world - In the movie when Cedric is hit by the killing curse, he's thrown into the air. If the effect of the curse was such a crucial point I can't imagine that J K Rowling would have approved that portrayal.

2) In the magic world - If Snape is pretending to serve Voldemort and Voldemort didn't want Dumbledore dead - because Dumbledore was a horcrux how could Snape defy him?

Clearly Dumbledore is not dead has some excellent observations. (2 examples) Harry was put in place so that he could "witness" Dumbledore's death audibly. His testimony on the circumstances of Dumbledore's death almost certainly will be crucial to book 7. And the difference in the effect of the killing curse is also significant.)

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