Creating a Horcrux (Creare un Horcrucx)
And so we arrive at creating a Horcrux, one of the – if not the – most difficult and extreme pieces of magic the wizarding world has to offer, for various reasons.
A Horcrux is created when a wizard takes an object and binds a piece of their soul to it. The purpose is immortality, with the logic going that as long as a piece of your soul survives within the object, then you can never truly die. It's magic so Dark, so heinous, that it's been kept a secret from most of the wizarding world. Yet despite many trying, there are only two known wizards to have discovered how to perform it: an Ancient Greek Dark wizard called Herpo the Foul, who created one Horcrux; and Voldemort, who mastered the spell and created seven. Again, as with flight, it's an example of how Tom Riddle's exceptional talents have been twisted into evil.
The actual process of creating a Horcrux is unknown; according to J.K. Rowling, it involves a spell and a 'series of things you would have to do' that are 'too horrible' to say out loud. What we do know, however, is how to split a soul – murder. According to Horace Slughorn, murder is, 'the supreme act of evil... Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: he would then encase the torn portion.' As with the Unforgivable Curses, the difficulty of splitting your soul depends upon what kind of person you are – on how easy you would find it to kill.
But then, beyond splitting your soul, beyond the mysterious process of welding a piece of it on to an object, there's also the matter of simply existing. For to split your soul means to have less of a soul to live with. By splitting his into seven parts, the remnant of Voldemort's soul is said to have become unstable – which is part of the reason why it finally broke apart when he tried to murder baby Harry in Godric's Hollow. What followed next was the toughest part of creating a Horcrux – the physical body being destroyed. You live on, you see, but in a non-corporeal form. Voldemort described it in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 'I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost… but still, I was alive.'
As Professor Slughorn once said, 'Death would be preferable.'
