Nineteen Years Later...
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Key to the Code
Part 3: The Structural Framework
Part 4: The Characters and Concepts
Part 5: The Chemical Wedding
Part 6: The Heart of It All
Part 7: Epilogue Section A
the locket . . . the cup . . . the snake . . . something of Gryffindor's or Ravenclaw's . . .
This Epilogue is being posted in April 2024, nineteen years after the first six parts were posted, which is obviously the right time for an Epilogue. During those years we have had the opportunity to read the sixth and seventh books of the series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and received a superfluity of abundant evidence of Rowling's reliance on the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter or, in other words, the Rule of Seven. Those of us with that deep understanding were not in any way surprised that The Half-Blood Prince was Severus Snape. We knew that the sixth book would be the book of Snape and of Potions as a Hogwarts course, we anticipated the emphasis on Ron's development, that Harry would Go Back into the past to learn about Voldemort's life, etc. We knew that Deathly Hallows would be the book exploring Dumbledore's history and character, that Harry would have to Go Forward (leaving Hogwarts) and be a Seeker, that Ginny would be developed independently of Harry, fighting Voldemort in her own way, that there would be a symbolic Chemical Wedding (Bill and Fleur) in the book, and--obviously--that Harry would marry Ginny and all would be well in the end. We expected that Voldemort's life path would involve a reversal of the alchemical process, where he systematically destroyed his own soul rather than purifying it. And, of course, that Voldemort would try to do so by splitting his own soul into seven parts, but that he would fail, with the result that Harry would need to find and destroy seven Horcruxes. I mean, DUH.
But many things have happened in these nineteen years besides the much-anticipated release of the last two Harry Potter books. We have also, unfortunately, seen the author of those books forget or fail to understand the lessons of her own books and dedicate herself to a denial of her own themes--Death and Rebirth and Moral and Spiritual Growth--as exemplified in her two motifs--Alchemy and Trip to the Underworld. The symbolic applicability of the androgynous, two-sexed alchemist and the process of dying and being reborn into one's true identity to the campaign for transexual rights are too obvious to need explanation here. Which is fortunate, because that is not the topic of this Epilogue. I have (symbolically) returned to King's Cross Station purely to discuss the seven original books.
The last two books of the Harry Potter series revolve around the discovery and destruction of Voldemort's seven Horcruxes, which must be destroyed before Voldemort can be killed. The seven Horcruxes are the culmination of the symbolic structure of the series, intimately tied to its two unifying themes--Death and Rebirth and Moral and Spiritual Growth--and its two primary symbolic motifs--the Trip to the Underworld and the Alchemical Process. The first section of this essay will explain those connections in detail. However, Horcruxes are very far from the only "sevens" that were revealed in the last two books. Some examples are:
- The Seven Potters who helped Harry escape from #4 Privet Drive at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, George, Fleur, and Mundungus Fletcher.
- The Seven Adults who transported the Seven Potters: Hagrid, Tonks, Kingsley, Arthur, Remus, Bill, and Moody.
- The Seven OWLS earned by Harry (and Ron): Astronomy, Care of Magical Creatures, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, Potions, and Transfiguration.
- The Seven Ancient Artefacts: the three Deathly Hallows and the four Founders' Relics.
- The Seven Artefact Owners: the three Peverell brothers and the four Founders.
- The Seven Captives held in Malfoy Manor: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dean, Griphook, Luna, and Ollivander.
- The Seven People Harry Loves mentioned as he walked toward death: the three living people from his own generation (Ron, Hermione, and Ginny) and the four dead people from his parents' generation (Lily, James, Sirius, and Remus).
- The Seven Hogwarts Students (and future students) in the Epilogue: James, Albus, Lily, Rose, Hugo, Scorpius, and Victoire.
- The Seven Adults seeing them off on the train: Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, Draco, Astoria, and Teddy.
The last two books also re-confirmed what most of us had perceived in the first five books, the geometry of the seven primary child characters, referred to by J.K. Rowling in this interview as "the Big Seven": Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna, and Draco.
The second section of this essay will delve into the geometric permutations of characters that Rowling plays with under her symbolic rubric, but now we turn to ...
THE HORCRUXES
From https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Horcrux
As readers of my previous essays will have known in advance, Voldemort's plan was to make himself immortal by splitting his soul into seven parts, as follows:
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
2 - the Peverell Ring
3 - Slytherin's Locket
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
6 - (unknown object when he killed Harry Potter)
7 - the portion of original soul left in his body.
And, as any reader of my previous essays will also have guessed, this did not work out for Voldemort because the structure of the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter absolutely requires that there be seven HORCRUXES. The seven Horcruxes that Voldemort actually made are as follows:
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
2 - the Peverell Ring
3 - Slytherin's Locket
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
6 - Harry Potter (the accidental Horcrux)
7 - the snake Nagini.
The seven Horcruxes are--of course--destroyed in the same order that Voldemort made them.
Obviously, these seven Horcruxes are directly tied into the symbolic structure of the Harry Potter books. They divide in the traditional way: the first three represent Tom Riddle's family heritage and the final four represent aspects of his life as a wizard. Let's review the symbolic structure that led to the seven Horcruxes (with the Acts of Mercy in the sixth and seventh books corrected):
The Horcruxes are more closely tied to the Trip to the Underworld pattern than to the Alchemical pattern, as can be understood by looking at their 3+2+1+1 structure rather than a 3+3+1 structure. The first three are objects related to Voldemort's life and ancestry, the next two are Founders' relics not directly related to Voldemort, then there is his unintentional living Horcrux and his intentional living Horcrux.
Remember the interpretation rule: Every grouping of seven mentioned in the books is a symbolic marker and every element of every grouping is symbolically related to every other element belonging to the same number.
Given that, let's look at the Horcruxes one by one.
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
From the books we know that Tom Riddle released Slytherin's monster, the Basilisk, when he was sixteen, near the end of his fifth year at Hogwarts. He killed Myrtle, framed Hagrid on June 13th, and recorded those events magically in a Muggle-made diary, then encased the part of his soul torn off by killing Myrtle into the diary using the Horcrux spell. We have already seen that Book 1 of the series was associated with Harry overcoming the Deadly Sin of Sloth, as he received the call and accepted his destiny as a wizard and a hero. The first Horcrux belongs to Hagrid, the person Riddle framed for the death of Myrtle and to Hagrid's teaching subject, Care of Magical Creatures. It also belongs to the first potions bottle, poison, to the first task, Fluffy, to the Chaser position in Quidditch, to Bill Weasley, to the Heavenly Virtue of Faith, and to the Act of Mercy Feeding the Hungry.
It is easy to see how all this applies to the Diary. It records the freeing of a dangerous Magical Creature, much like Fluffy, whose eyes were destroyed by the singing Phoenix (analogue of the musical flute which caused Fluffy to close his eyes and sleep). The Basilisk's venom is literally poison and it was Harry's Faith in the absent Dumbledore that brought him the aid he needed:
'Help me ... help me ...' Harry thought, his eyes screwed tight under the hat. 'Please help me!'
There was no answering voice. Instead the hat contracted, as though an invisible hand was squeezing it very tightly.
Something very hard and heavy thudded onto the top of Harry's head, almost knocking him out. ... A gleaming silver sword had appeared inside the hat, its handle glittering with rubies the size of eggs. (51)
While Harry overcame the sin of Sloth in answering the call to rescue Ginny, Tom Riddle/Voldemort began his journey of ultimate evil by willfully succumbing to it. Even when pursuing the evil action of "purg[ing] the school of all who were unworthy to study magic," Tom Riddle took the slothful path, letting the Basilisk do his dirty work and, in the end, leaving the task unfinished and passing on the responsibility to some future version of his sixteen-year-old self, whenever it might be released from the diary. Then he turned even that responsibility over to Lucius Malfoy, who in turn sloughed it off onto an eleven-year-old girl. Finally, in the Chamber of Secrets, the memory version of Tom Riddle let the Basilisk fight his battle for him, never attempting to give it any aid, even after it was blinded by the phoenix. Tom Riddle had no Faith, except wrongful faith in himself and his own cleverness. His use of Slytherin's monster, feeding it with the blood of Muggleborns after it had spent long centuries starving in the Chamber of Secrets ("... soo hungry ... for so long ..."), was a corrupt perversion of the first Act of Mercy, Feeding the Hungry. Tom Riddle acted as a Chaser to create this first Horcrux, hunting for the Chamber of Secrets and the monster to bolster his ego-driven pride in his ancestry and indulge his murderous sadism and blood-prejudice. Harry was also a Chaser when he destroyed the Horcrux, following Ginny into the Chamber of Secrets to save her life.
This is how the pattern will go for all seven Horcruxes. Tom Riddle succumbs to every Deadly Sin in sequence when he creates and hides the Horcruxes. Harry is tempted by each Sin and overcomes it in sequence, while exhibiting the Heavenly Virtue that Tom Riddle so markedly lacks. Each Horcrux, like the diary, is associated with a symbolic trip to the underworld and a symbolic (or actual!) death-and-rebirth.
2 - The Resurrection Stone/Peverell Ring
Tom Riddle's next move was to travel to Little Hangleton to steal the Peverell Ring from his Uncle Morfin and murder his Muggle father and grandparents. This happened in the summer, and it would make sense for it to be the summer between his sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts because he would have been seventeen years old then and able to Apparate without the Trace showing his movements. However, the fact that he was wearing the Peverell Ring in Professor Slughorn's memory when he was "by no means the eldest in the group of boys" implies that he was only in his sixth year then, so he must have traveled to Little Hangleton during the summer directly after he killed Myrtle and created the diary.
Of all the Horcruxes, the second Horcrux has the longest and most complicated history, with many subtle symbolic connections. Like Book 2, it is associated with the Deadly Sin of Lust. The creation of the Resurrection Stone is connected to this sin, as the second Peverell brother, Cadmus, demanded the ring to wrongfully bring his deceased fiancée back to life to live with him:
Though she had returned to the mortal world, she did not truly belong there and suffered. Finally the second brother, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as to truly join her.
In the seven tasks at the end of Book 1, lust is symbolized by the creeping tendrils of the Devil's Snare plant, entwining themselves around the two boys. There is a real plant called Devil's Snare, Datura stramonium, also known as jimsonweed. Datura is known in European folklore as an ingredient in traditional witches' "flying ointment," due to its hallucinogenic properties. It is, of course, a poison if taken in excess.
It seems a bit unfair to poor Professor Sprout, but Rowling often uses plant life and Herbology as a marker for sexual desire and sexual behavior:
- ... in March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy.
"The moment they start trying to move into each other's pots, we'll know they're fully mature," she told Harry.
- Snape had his wand out and was blasting rosebushes apart, his expression most ill-natured. Squeals issued from many of the bushes, and dark shapes emerged from them.
- Fleur and Roger Davies had disappeared, probably into a more private clump of bushes.
- "He put a hex on me, Professor Dumbledore, and I was only teasing him, sir, I only said I'd seen him kissing Florence behind the greenhouses last Thursday...."
- "What's happened to you?" asked Harry, for Hermione looked distinctly disheveled, rather as though she had just fought her way out of a thicket of Devil's Snare.
"Oh, I've just escaped--I mean, I've just left Cormac," she said. "Under the mistletoe," she added in explanation...
- On one such evening, when Ginny had retired to the library and Harry was sitting beside the window in the common room, supposedly finishing his Herbology home-work but in reality reliving a particularly happy hour he had spent down by the lake with Ginny at lunch-time...
It is significant, therefore, that the Gaunt house where the Peverell Ring next appears is described as almost completely swallowed by plant life:
... it was a few seconds before Harry's eyes discerned the building half-hidden amongst the tangle of trunks. It seemed to him a very strange location to choose for a house, or else an odd decision to leave the trees growing nearby, blocking all light and the view of the valley below. He wondered whether it was inhabited; its walls were mossy and so many tiles had fallen off the roof that the rafters were visible in places. Nettles grew all around it, their tips reaching the windows, which were tiny and thick with grime.
In Bob Odgen's memory, we see that the story of the Ring Horcrux is a story of lust--the forbidden desire that Merope Gaunt feels for her Muggle neighbor Tom Riddle. Because he is disgusted by her desire, Merope's brother Morfin jinxes Tom Riddle, leading to Bob Ogden's visit and eventually to both her father and brother being sent to Azkaban. We know that Merope's feelings are lust rather than true love because of what she does to Tom Riddle Sr., taking him against his will and forcing him to marry her by means of a Love Potion. Tom Riddle Sr.'s abandonment of his wife and child after she releases him from the Potion is also emblematic of a classic lust scenario, though of course the details are different from the usual story.
When Tom Riddle arrives to steal the Ring and frame his Uncle Morfin for the murder of his father and grandparents, both the Ring and the Locket are associated with Merope's lust in the text:
... "You look mighty like that Muggle."
"What Muggle?" said Riddle sharply.
"That Muggle what my sister took a fancy to, that Muggle what lives in the big house over the way," said Morfin, and he spat unexpectedly upon the floor between them. "You look right like him. Riddle. But he's older now, in 'e? He's older'n you, now I think on it ..."
Morfin looked slightly dazed and swayed a little, still clutching the edge of the table for support.
"He come back, see," he added stupidly.
Voldemort was gazing at Morfin as though appraising his possibilities. Now he moved a little closer and said, "Riddle came back?"
"Ar, he left her, and serve her right, marrying filth!" said Morfin, spitting on the floor again. "Robbed us, mind, before she ran off. Where's the locket, eh, where's Slytherin's locket?"
Voldemort did not answer. Morfin was working himself into a rage again; he brandished his knife and shouted, "Dishonored us, she did, that little slut! And who're you, coming here and asking questions about all that? It's over, innit ... It's over ..."
...
"So the Ministry called upon Morfin. They did not need to question him, to use Veritaserum or Legilimency. He admitted to the murder on the spot, giving details only the murderer could know. He was proud, he said, to have killed the Muggles, had been awaiting his chance all these years. He handed over his wand, which was proved at once to have been used to kill the Riddles. And he permitted himself to be led off to Azkaban without a fight. All that disturbed him was the fact that his father's ring had disappeared. "He'll kill me for losing it," he told his captors over and over again. "He'll kill me for losing his ring."
We had not--at least not until we read the Cursed Child play!--associated Tom Riddle with lust for physical sexual pleasure. Of course we knew of the other lusts he felt, for power, for vengeance, for distinction and glory, and most of all for life, since he was determined never to die. During his acquisition of the Peverell Ring, Tom Riddle succumbed to lust for vengeance on the father who abandoned him and lust for a material possession, the heirloom Ring.
As is fitting in the symbolic structure, Riddle was a Chaser when he found the Peverell Ring, following the life path of his mother. Dumbledore was also a Chaser when he found it buried in the ruins of the Gaunt hovel, following in the footsteps of Tom Riddle. And here the second Horcrux is associated with Lust again, because Dumbledore had searched for the Ring long before, when he and Gellert Grindelwald were questing for the Deathly Hallows. Dumbledore's sexual attraction to Grindelwald blinded him to Grindelwald's true character, and he tells Harry the he desired the Resurrection Stone so he could go off with Grindelwald rather than stay and take care of his sister and brother:
The Resurrection Stone--to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi! To me, I confess, it meant the return of my parents, and the lifting of all responsibility from my shoulders.
By the time he searches for the Resurrection Stone the second time, and actually finds it, Dumbledore has long since overcome the temptation of the lust he felt for Grindelwald, and he wants to use the Stone only to show his remorse:
“When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts--the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons--I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry, I was ..."
Since Harry is neither the one to find the Ring nor the one to destroy it, one might think that Rowling failed to follow her scheme of having Harry overcome the sin, Lust, associated with that Horcrux. But there is more to the story of this Horcrux! Dumbledore encases the Resurrection Stone in a Golden Snitch and leaves it to Harry in his will.
We have already seen in Part 6 of this essay how heavily gold and Snitches are associated with Ginny Weasley, and Ginny, of course, is the object of Harry's lust as well as his love. If we had somehow failed to associate Snitches with Ginny in spite of the Secret Key of Seven, in spite of her being a Seeker who caught the Snitch right under Cho Chang's nose, in spite of the Snitches on the chocolate egg she gave Harry, in spite of the hummingbird, the fact that she is a Leo with the Alchemical Metal of gold, and all the rest, we are reminded again in Book 7 when "Ginny's new dress" is indeed of great symbolic importance as I predicted years ago in Part 4 of this essay:
Ginny and Gabrielle, both wearing golden dresses, looked even prettier than usual ...
“Yes, my tiara set off the whole thing nicely,” said Auntie Muriel in a rather carrying whisper. “But I must say, Ginevra’s dress is far too low cut.”
Ginny glanced around, grinning, winked at Harry, then quickly faced the front again. Harry’s mind wandered a long way from the marquee, back to the afternoons spent alone with Ginny in lonely parts of the school grounds. They seemed so long ago; they had always seemed too good to be true, as though he had been stealing shining hours from a normal person’s life, a person without a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead ...
If Harry had succumbed to lust, he might have wanted to take Ginny on the Horcrux hunt, in spite of her being underage, or he might have taken advantage of her before he left, rather than virtuously promising Ron to stay away from her until he completed his terrible destiny and was free to love. Harry had a symbolic triumph over lust way back in Book 2 when he rescued Ginny from her would-be ravisher and restored her safely into the arms of her family. But, obviously, lust was not such a personal temptation to Harry at age twelve as it was at the end of Book 6 and the beginning of Book 7. Harry has to overcome the sin of Sloth in each book to continuously accept his fated duty to destroy Voldemort, and in the Horcrux hunt he has to overcome the temptations of lust as well. Harry truly loves Ginny, so he refuses to expose her to unnecessary danger and resolves to leave her free to love another and be happy after Harry's likely death.
When Harry finally frees the Resurrection Stone from the Golden Snitch "at the close" and walks voluntarily to his sacrificial death, he has to overcome his instinctive lust for life ("Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?"), but also his lust for sexual satisfaction with Ginny. She is the last living person he sees as he walks toward the Forest and he is greatly tempted to make himself known to her ("With a huge effort Harry forced himself on"). His last thought before Voldemort strikes is the memory of kissing her ("Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his--").
Harry is able to overcome the temptations of lust because he has the Cardinal Virtue of Hope. When Harry walks to his death, he has not finished destroying the Horcruxes and killing Voldemort, just as Dumbledore allows himself to be killed while his plan to defeat Voldemort is still unfulfilled. But both men have hope because they trust their friends and allies to carry on after they have gone. As is customary, Dumbledore counsels Harry on this Horcrux's Cardinal Virtue in their conversation near the end of the book:
“Voldemort’s got the Elder Wand.”
“True. Voldemort has the Elder Wand.”
“But you want me to go back?”
“I think,” said Dumbledore, “that if you choose to return, there is a chance that he may be finished for good. I cannot promise it. But I know this, Harry, that you have less to fear from returning here than he does.”
Ginny, like Harry, is able to overcome the temptations of immediate gratification, to squash her natural desire to be with her boyfriend, and to send him off on a seemingly impossible quest with a goodbye kiss, because she also has the virtue of Hope. When Harry breaks up with her at the end of Book 6, she accepts it with a "twisted smile" and says:
"I never really gave up on you," she said. "Not really. I always hoped ..."
The Work of Mercy associated with this Horcrux--Clothe the Naked--is very appropriate to counteract Lust. Harry performs this act literally when he wakes up naked after Voldemort "kills" him, and clothes himself with a robe. He performs it figuratively, and refers back to his original Act of Mercy from Book 2, when he wraps Dobby in his own coat before burying him:
Harry wrapped the elf more snugly in his jacket. Ron sat on the edge of the grave and stripped off his shoes and socks, which he placed on the elf’s bare feet. Dean produced a woolen hat, which Harry placed carefully upon Dobby’s head, muffling his batlike ears.
Thus, the second Horcrux shows us a more elaborate pattern than the first one. Not only does Voldemort eagerly succumb to the Deadly Sin associated with it and Harry overcome that same Deadly Sin while exhibiting the Heavenly Virtue, but the person who finds and destroys the Horcrux--Dumbledore in this case--also overcomes the same Deadly Sin and exhibits the same Heavenly Virtue. The connection of the Resurrection Stone to the Trip to the Underworld is too obvious to even mention, but its connection to the Alchemical Process and the Philosopher's Stone is also fairly obvious.
3 - Sytherin's Locket
The story of the third Horcrux is almost as long and complex as the story of the second Horcrux (but don't worry, the 4th through the 7th are simpler, so this essay won't be infinitely long!). Tom Riddle learned of the existence of Slytherin's Locket (if he didn't know already) at the same time he learned of the Peverell Ring, when he traveled to Little Hangleton during the summer before his sixth year at Hogwarts to kill his father and grandparents. He was a Chaser as he searched for it, following the path of his dead mother, and he found it not too long after he finished his education, perhaps a year or two later.
The Locket is associated with the Deadly Sin of Gluttony. Its story begins with Salazar Slytherin, one of the founders of Hogwarts and the owner of Slytherin's Monster, the ravenous and deadly Basilisk. It is associated with Book 3 in the Harry Potter series, which we have seen is replete with images of gluttony, ranging (as I wrote in Part 3 of this essay), "from Crookshanks being wrongly suspecting of having "eaten" Scabbers to Buckbeak's ravenous gulping to the traditional figure of the werewolf ravenous for human flesh to -- most notably -- Harry "blowing up" his Aunt Marge as she is patting her stomach after an "excellent nosh." However, the most powerful image of Gluttony being defeated in Book 3 is Harry driving away the Dementors who want to eat everyone's soul, and saving Sirius from that fate.
Dementors are again associated with the Locket Horcrux in Book 7, as we will see, but Rowling also repeatedly associates the Gluttony of the Locket with circumstances of starvation. First there is the centuries-long starvation of the Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. Then the Locket is passed down in the Gaunt family in circumstances of ever-increasing poverty and want. Even their surname is representative of the look of a starving person. Finally, Merope is so desperate, ragged and starving, that she sells the Locket to Borgin & Burkes for a small percentage of its true worth. Her son Tom Riddle grows up in an orphanage, often associated with hunger. Tom Riddle murders Hepzibah Smith, the owner of the Locket, after she serves him a tray of little cakes:
"Help yourself, Tom," said Hepzibah, "I know how you love my cakes.
Tom Riddle murders Hepzibah with "a lethal and little-known poison" and frames an unfortunate house elf for the murder. Then he turns the Locket into a Horcrux with a part of his soul ripped off by a different murder--according to Rowling in an interview--that of a "Muggle tramp." Again, tramps are associated with poverty and hunger. He hides the Horcrux in a cave he found while on a picnic as a child, protected by an army of Inferi, otherwise known as Zombies, a well-known image of ravenous, mindless hunger. The cave also demands to be fed with blood before it lets anyone in.
Riddle cruelly abuses another house elf, Kreacher, to test his defenses for the Locket, which leads Regulus Black to sacrifice his life to steal the Locket. Kreacher holds it for years, then it is stolen by Mundungus Fletcher and taken from him by Dolores Umbridge. House-elves are the providers of food in the wizarding world, so it makes sense that two of them would be victimized by this Horcrux.
The Locket Horcrux is the first found by Harry, Ron, and Hermione on their Horcrux hunt, acting as Chasers. They work together to infiltrate the Ministry and grab the gold Locket just as the three of them mounted brooms to catch the Flying Key in the Third Task. Their capture of the Locket is associated with Gluttony because they have to hold off the Dementors while taking the Locket from Dolores Umbridge and with the Act of Mercy Visiting the Prisoner because they free Mrs. Cattermole and the rest of the Muggle-borns on trial that day in the same scene. Harry and Hermione work together in the courtroom much like they worked together to free Sirius and Buckbeak in Book 3 (it seems that Harry can never simply visit prisoners; he always frees them--not just Sirius and the Muggleborns at the Ministry, but the captives in Malfoy Manor and the dragon at Gringotts as well).
As soon as they possess the Locket, Harry, Ron, and Hermione begin to suffer from hunger:
This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits, an empty one, bickering and gloom. Harry was least surprised by this, because be had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys’. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences dour. Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron’s turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.
The sin of Gluttony is not particularly hard for Harry to overcome, but it has always been a weakness of Ron's. There are many references throughout the books to his greedy consumption of food. The Locket's exaggeration of hunger attacks Ron the most and he, of course, becomes the destroyer of the Locket Horcrux when he returns after abandoning the Horcrux hunt. His leaving is closely associated with hunger:
“Then GO!” roared Harry. “Go back to them, pretend you’re got over your spattergroit and Mummy’ll be able to feed you up and-”
Ron not only overcomes Gluttony to return and save Harry, he also overcomes Envy. When he tries to overcome the Locket it tortures him, revealing his insecurity and envy of Harry. Envy, of course, is the Deadly Sin I had previously assigned to Book 7 and Task 7, following the general opinion about which Deadly Sin belongs to each circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno. However, the sixth and seventh circles aren't as neat a fit as the first five, and I now think that Rowling reversed Pride and Envy in the sixth and seventh columns of the Secret Key, something I could not have confirmed until Books 6 and 7 were published. Book 6 belongs to Ron, so it is fitting that Envy is his besetting sin. It is also the besetting sin of Severus Snape, the professor associated with Book 6. Book 7, of course, belongs to Professor Dumbledore and Ginny Weasley, neither of whom is particularly troubled by Envy. Dumbledore's greatest weakness is clearly Pride. I have made this change on the Secret Symbolic Matrix below.
The Heavenly Virtue associated with the Locket Horcrux is Charity, a quality greatly lacking not only in Tom Riddle, but in the Gaunts and Riddles, Hepzibah Smith, Kreacher, Mundungus Fletcher, and Dolores Umbridge. Kreacher learns charity when he befriends Harry, Ron, and (especially) Hermione and they, in turn, learn charity toward him. Regulus Black also exhibits charity toward his house elf, and Harry and Ron are able to recover the Sword of Gryffindor and destroy the Locket due to the charity of Severus Snape.
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
The fourth Horcrux is the first of the twin Beater or Nettle Wine Horcruxes, associated with a Founder's Artifact but not with Voldemort's ancestor Slytherin or his Gaunt family line. The Cup is abundantly associated with the Deadly Sin of Greed. Its owner, Hufflepuff descendant Hepzibah Smith, is a rich woman who hoards all sorts of possessions:
... the elf scurried out of the room, which was so crammed with objects that it was difficult to see how anybody could navigate their way across it without knocking over at least a dozen things: There were cabinets full of little lacquered boxes, cases full of gold-embossed books, shelves of orbs and celestial globes, and many flourishing potted plants in brass containers. In fact, the room looked like a cross between a magical antique shop and a conservatory.
However, Hepzibah is not greedy only for material possessions; she also covets the handsome young man:
Voldemort stretched out a long-fingered hand and lifted the cup by one handle out of its snug silken wrappings. Harry thought he saw a red gleam in his dark eyes. His greedy expression was curiously mirrored on Hepzibah’s face, except that her tiny eyes were fixed upon Voldemort's handsome features.
Voldemort is greedy as well--so much so that he steals Hufflepuff's Cup as well as Slytherin's Ring when he murders Hepzibah, and encases the bit of his soul torn by that murder into the Cup.
Voldemort then entrusts the Cup Horcrux to Bellatrix Lestrange, another rich woman who puts it into her family vault in Gringotts Bank, stuffed with treasures and guarded by a dragon, a tradition symbol of Greed. Appropriately, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are not Chasers for the Horcrux. They do not follow anyone to the Cup; they learn of its location in Bludger-like fashion from Bellatrix Lestrange while she is torturing Hermione.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione perform the corresponding Work of Mercy--Bury the Dead--with Dobby before they begin their adventure to steal the Cup. At almost the same time, Voldemort performs a corrupt perversion of this Work of Mercy by desecrating Dumbledore's grave to steal the Elder Wand.
The Trio's process for obtaining the Cup is a rich examination of the Sin of Greed. They work with Griphook the Goblin. Because of their different understanding of property rights, the two races--wizards and goblins--each regard the other as dishonest and greedy. Harry, Ron, and Hermione promise Griphook the Sword of Gryffindor as his reward for helping them break into Gringotts to steal the Cup, but they intend to cheat him by not giving him the sword until they have used it on all the Horcruxes. Griphook, in turn, runs off with the sword and denounces Harry, Ron, and Hermione to the Gringotts goblins as thieves--which they certainly are! They rightly fall victim to the "Thief's Downfall" and Harry successfully uses an Unforgivable Curse (Imperius) for the first time ever in his desperation to obtain the Cup Horcrux.
The harmful results of Greed are illustrated by the curses on the Lestrange vault that cause the treasure items to multiply rapidly and burn anyone who touches them until the would-be thief is "crushed to death by the weight of expanding gold." Harry, Ron, and Hermione suffer a great deal of pain to obtain the Hufflepuff Cup and they exhibit the Heavenly Virtue associated with this Horcrux, Fortitude, both in the vault and during their terrifying and uncomfortable dragon-ride. This is a clear analogue to the fourth task, the Chess Game. Both the chess game and the bank heist require logic and planning, but in the end success in both tasks depends on having the Fortitude to bear pain.
I don't know if it is intentional or not, but I can't help associating a scenario where our hero steals only a gold, two-handled cup from a dragon-guarded hoard and the villainous owner (Voldemort, in this case) erupts with murderous rage when he finds out it is gone with the similar scene of Bilbo and Smaug in The Hobbit. Voldemort has more cause to be upset than Smaug does but his violent reaction reminds me of Tolkien's famous passage (52):
...Then he missed the cup!
Thieves! Fire! Murder! Such a thing had not happened since he first came to the Mountain! His rage passes description--the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.
Surely that is the quintessential description of Greed.
The Cup Horcrux is finally destroyed by Hermione, with help from Ron. This is appropriate because Greed has never been a sin that Harry is particularly vulnerable to but Hermione is vulnerable to it--not greed for material possessions but greed for knowledge, for books, for magical learning. Think of her third year, when she insisted on taking every school subject offered, or the time she Summoned all of the forbidden library books from Dumbledore's office after his funeral, and carried them (and many, many other books) on the journey in her beaded bag. Hermione's destruction of the Cup, like Ron's destruction of the Locket, is intimately tied to the Ron/Hermione romance. She overcomes her greed for knowledge by relying, for once, on Ron's abilities and ideas to reach the Chamber of Secrets and obtain the Basilisk fangs (or rather, for the second time, since this is a repeat of her and Harry's reliance on Ron's ability and knowledge in the Chess Game task). Even then, Hermione and Ron display a slight case of greed, bringing back as many Basilisk fangs as the two of them can hold, many more than they could possibly need for the two remaining Horcruxes. However, when Ron shows his concern for the Hogwarts house elves, Hermione immediately drops her hoard of Horcrux-killers to embrace him. Finally, she has sorted out her priorities!(53)
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
It isn't clear exactly when Tom Riddle charmed the location of Ravenclaw's Lost Diadem from the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw. I suspect it was during his sixth or seventh year after he learned of the existence of Slytherin's Locket and formed the ambition to own something from each of the four Founders of the school he considered "his first kingdom, his birthright." It probably took him a while to gain her confidence and coax the information out of her.
The Diadem is the second of the two "twin" Horcruxes, associated with Fred and George, beaters, and nettle wine. Tom Riddle didn't have to be a Chaser to find it in Albania; the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw told him exactly where it was. Harry was not a Chaser when he found it in the Room of Requirements either. He "heard" Voldemort say that it was hidden at Hogwarts and he remembered seeing it in that room when he hid his Potions book.
The story of Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem is intertwined with the sin of Anger. After her daughter Helena stole it from her, she sent Helena's rejected lover, the Baron, to find her. He found her in Albania:
"He tracked me to the forest where I was hiding. When I refused to return with him, he became violent. The Baron was always a hot-tempered man. Furious at my refusal, jealous of my freedom, he stabbed me."
"The Baron? You mean--"
"The Bloody Baron, yes," said the Gray Lady, and she lifted aside the cloak she wore to reveal a single dark wound in her white chest. "When he saw what he had done, he was overcome with remorse. He took the weapon that had claimed my life, and used it to kill himself. All these centuries later, he wears his chains as an act of penitence . . . as he should," she added bitterly.
After making it a Horcrux with the death of a peasant he slew in Albania, Voldemort hid the Diadem in the Room of Requirements at Hogwarts while he was there to apply to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. Again, Voldemort succumbed to Anger, his eyes burning red several times during his talk with Dumbledore, and he is described as having "features thick with rage". After Dumbledore refused to hire him, Voldemort angrily cursed the position:
"Was he after the Defense Against the Dark Arts job again, sir? He didn't say. . . ."
"Oh, he definitely wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts job," said Dumbledore. "The aftermath of our little meeting proved that. You see, we have never been able to keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for longer than a year since I refused the post to Lord Voldemort."
Harry travels to Hogwarts after he learns from Voldemort's mind that the Diadem is hidden there. His visit takes the form of the corresponding Work of Mercy, Visiting the Sick because the first person he sees is Neville:
The longer Harry looked at Neville, the worse he appeared: One of his eyes was swollen yellow and purple, there were gouge marks on his face, and his general air of unkemptness suggested that he had been living rough. Nevertheless, his battered visage shone with happiness as he let go of Hermione and said again, “I knew you’d come! Kept telling Seamus it was a matter of time!”
“Neville, what’s happened to you?”
“What? This?” Neville dismissed his injuries with a shake of the head. “This is nothing, Seamus is worse. You’ll see....”
While Harry is searching for the Diadem he exhibits a most notable occurrence of Anger in his encounter with Amycus Carrow and Professor Mcgonagall in the Ravenclaw Common Room.
“It’s not a case of what you’ll permit, Minerva McGonagall. Your time’s over. It’s us what’s in charge here now, and you’ll back me up or you’ll pay the price.”
And he spat in her face.
Harry pulled the Cloak off himself, raised his wand, and said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”
As Amycus spun around, Harry shouted, “Crucio!”
The Death Eater was lifted off his feet. He writhed through the air like a drowning man, thrashing and howling in pain, and then, with a crunch and a shattering of glass, he smashed into the front of a bookcase and crumpled, insensible, to the floor.
“I see what Bellatrix meant,” said Harry, the blood thundering through his brain, “you need to really mean it.”
Harry recovers from losing his temper in the company of the delightfully calm Luna and the prudently business-like Professor McGonagall. However, he is soon in danger of losing his temper again when he tries to get information from the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw:
“WAIT!”
He had not meant to shout, but anger and panic were threatening to overwhelm him.
Harry's anger is effective at getting the ghost to confide in him, just as it was effective at neutralizing Amycus Carrow. However, he overcomes the sin of Anger in the actual recovery of the Diadem Horcrux from the Room of Requirements. Harry is ambushed there by Draco Malfoy, Gregory Goyle, and (most of all) Vincent Crabbe, who tries to kill both Hermione and Ron. Crabbe is furiously angry, even at his erstwhile leader Draco Malfoy, and he unleashes the ultimate symbol of Anger--Fiendfyre:
As they turned a corner the flames chased them as though they were alive, sentient, intent upon killing them. Now the fire was mutating, forming a gigantic pack of fiery beasts: Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again, and the detritus of centuries on which they were feeding was thrown up into the air into their fanged mouths, tossed high on clawed feet, before being consumed by the inferno.
Harry, finally, triumphs over what seems to be his most besetting sin. He sees Draco Malfoy trying to rescue the unconscious Gregory Goyle, empathy comes to his aid, and he risks his life to save Draco, while Ron and Hermione risk theirs to save Goyle. Crabbe, fittingly, perishes in the flames of his own rage and the Anger Horcrux is also destroyed. This fifth Horcrux is destroyed by the "bad guy" Crabbe just as the Troll was knocked out by bad guy Quirrell in the fifth task and the Prophecy in Book 5 was accidentally destroyed in the chaos of battle in the Department of Mysteries.
The Corresponding Virtue to the Deadly Sin of Anger is Patience. Patience does not come easily to Harry and he struggles to achieve it several times in the course of his quest for the Diadem Horcrux. The Heavenly Virtue is Prudence. We see that Harry has, at long last, mastered his anger and learned both patience and prudence after he escapes from the destruction of the Fiendfyre. The next thing that happens after that is that Fred is killed, giving Ron and Harry an almost irresistible temptation to fight Death Eaters and revenge Fred's death:
Hermione was trying to restrain Ron, to stop him running after Percy.
“Listen to me-LISTEN RON!”
“I wanna help-I wanna kill Death Eaters-”
His face was contorted, smeared with dust and smoke, and he was shaking with rage and grief.
“Ron, we’re the only ones who can end it! Please-Ron-we need the snake, we’ve got to kill the snake!” said Hermione.
But Harry knew how Ron felt: Pursuing another Horcrux could not bring the satisfaction of revenge; he too wanted to fight, to punish them, the people who had killed Fred, and he wanted to find the other Weasleys, and above all make sure, make quite sure, that Ginny was not-but he could not permit that idea to form in his mind-
“We will fight!” Hermione said. “We’ll have to, to reach the snake! But let’s not lose sight now of what we’re supposed to be d-doing! We’re the only ones who can end it!”
Harry--for once--listens to Hermione and rededicates himself to patiently following the harrowing path assigned to him by Dumbledore. Never again in the book does Harry lose his temper or indulge himself in thoughts of hatred and revenge.
6 - Harry Potter
The sixth Horcrux was accidentally made when Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter and tried to kill Harry. We can guess that Voldemort wanted to encase that torn-off bit of his soul in the Sword of Gryffindor, but he had been denied the opportunity to steal it. Perhaps he had not given up hope of obtaining it to make his sixth and last Horcrux, but instead he was nearly killed and his maimed and bodiless soul fled to hide in distant Albania. The accidental Horcrux belongs to the Potion bottle task and to the sixth bottle that allows you to "Go Back", as Voldemort flees back to his place of refuge in Albania where he had found and enspelled the previous Horcrux. Harry is neither a Chaser, a Beater, or a Seeker for this Horcrux; He doesn't have to go anywhere or do anything to find it because it is already in him. He is the Keeper of Voldemort's soul-bit.
The sixth task/book/Horcrux is tied to Professor Snape, and it is, of course, Snape who has the task of telling Harry that he is a Horcrux, that he bears a piece of Voldemort's soul within him. Harry feels a bond with the "Half-Blood Prince" who owned his Potions book, just as he has a mental bond with Voldemort and he felt an instinctive connection to Tom Riddle's Diary. Envy seems to be the Deadly Sin tied to the sixth place in the matrix, to Snape and Ron and--in a more humorous vein--to all the romantic relationships described in the sixth book. Ron is jealous of Hermione/Krum and Hermione/McClaggan, Hermione is jealous of Ron/Lavender, Lavender is jealous of Ron/Hermione, Harry is jealous of Dean/Ginny, Dean is jealous of Harry/Ginny, Romilda Vane is jealous of Harry/Ginny, and so on. Severus Snape's life, as told in the "Prince's Tale" chapter, was corrosively damaged by his besetting sin of Envy, especially his deep jealousy of James Potter that destroyed his relationship with Lily Evans. Dumbledore gives Snape the task of telling Harry that he must die after Snape expresses envy of Harry's relationship with Dumbledore:
“What are you doing with Potter, all these evenings you are closeted together?” Snape asked abruptly.
. . .
“Information,” repeated Snape. “You trust him . . . you do not trust me.”
The "Prince's Tale" is also a tragic portrayal of Envy on the part of Lily's sister Petunia, who was desperately jealous of Lily's magical talent. Petunia's envy destroys her relationship with her sister and the magical world and leads to Harry's miserable childhood in her care after he becomes the sixth Horcrux. The Contrary Virtue of Envy is Kindness. Petunia manages to find enough kindness to agree to take Harry in and give him the safety of her blood protection, but she cannot go beyond that and actually raise him with loving kindness. Snape, too, repeatedly fails in this regard.
Harry is not as prone to Envy as Severus Snape, Petunia Evans, and his best friend Ron are, but he continuously envies "normal" people who are not famous, not marked by a scar, not burdened with a tragic backstory and a terrifying destiny as The Chosen One. Just as Snape's envy was closely tied to his feelings for Lily Evans, Harry's envy of regular people is repeatedly associated with his feelings for Ginny Weasley:
- "It's been like . . . like something out of someone else's life, these last few weeks with you," said Harry. "But I can't . . . we can't . . .
- “She’s not an idiot, she knows it can’t happen, she’s not expecting us to-to end up married, or-”
As he said it, a vivid picture formed in Harry’s mind of Ginny in a white dress, marrying a tall, faceless, and unpleasant stranger.
In one spiraling moment it seemed to hit him: Her future was free and unencumbered, whereas his . . . he could see nothing but Voldemort ahead.
- Harry’s mind wandered a long way from the marquee, back to the afternoons spent alone with Ginny in lonely parts of the school grounds. They seemed so long ago; they had always seemed too good to be true, as though he had been stealing shining hours from a normal person’s life, a person without a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead
Both Severus Snape and Harry Potter overcome the sin of Envy at the same time, in that Underworld analogue, the Shrieking Shack. Snape, who never wanted "the boy" to know what he felt and did for Lily, who carefully hid his past from Harry by removing his memories before their Occlumency sessions, at the last gives all his memories to Harry. They come out of him like water, symbolic of Giving Drink to the Thirsty, and strikingly reminiscent of Albus Dumbledore re-living his own traumatic memories in the cave with Harry:
“Take . . . it. . . . Take . . . it. . . .”
Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do-
A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hand by Hermione. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand. When the flask was full to the brim, and Snape looked as though there was no blood left in him, his grip on Harry’s robes slackened.
. . . The stone Pensieve lay in the cabinet where it had always been. Harry heaved it onto the desk and poured Snape’s memories into the wide basin with its runic markings around the edge. To escape into someone else’s head would be a blessed relief. . . . Nothing that even Snape had left him could be worse than his own thoughts. The memories swirled, silver white and strange, and without hesitating, with a feeling of reckless abandonment, as though this would assuage his torturing grief, Harry dived.
In this moment, Snape died (literally), and he also died in his persona of cowardly murderer. He was reborn as "probably the bravest man [Harry] ever knew" and hero of the resistance against Voldemort. Harry was also transformed by his new understanding of Snape and his self-knowledge at last that he was one of Voldemort's Horcruxes:
Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it. The images of Fred, Lupin, and Tonks lying dead in the Great Hall forced their way back into his mind’s eye, and for a moment he could hardly breathe. Death was impatient. . . .
Harry no longer envies normal people who do not bear his burdens. He fully accepts his duty of care for his supporters and helpers, and for all humankind. He is willing to die for them.
7 - Nagini the Snake
Voldemort made his last Horcrux after the events of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when his servant Peter Pettigrew returned to him and helped him regain a rudimentary bodily form. Not realizing that he already had six Horcruxes, he wanted to make one more so his soul would be split into "the most powerfully magical number"--seven. And, perhaps somewhat chastened by his near-death experience and the weakness of his current state, he did not have the confidence to wait in a possibly-vain attempt to obtain the Sword of Gryffindor or some other significant, high-status vessel.
Voldemort's choice of Nagini for his last Horcrux is emblematic of his sin of Pride. He probably did not particularly want to "honor" a relic of Godric Gryffindor with a bit of his soul. Instead, he chose a snake, symbol of his descent from Salazar Slytherin and reflective of his former pet, the Basilisk from the Chamber of Secrets. It is ironic that Nagini is eventually killed by the should-have-been Horcrux she replaced--Gryffindor's Sword--enabled by the venom from its killing of Voldemort's earlier serpent, the Basilisk. For Voldemort at this point, anything associated with himself and his heritage is worth more than any valuable or historic object he could have found. We now know--thanks to very disturbing information from the Fantastic Beasts movie series--that Voldemort was committing an even worse sin of Pride by enslaving and possessing Nagini, because she was formerly a person, a Maledicta with a "blood curse" to transform permanently into a serpent at some point in her life.
Voldemort uses the murder of the unfortunate Bertha Jorkins to make the Horcrux, after torturing her to strip her of all her knowledge and hidden memories. He immediately begins using and abusing Nagini in almost every possible way. He forces Peter Pettigrew to "milk" her, using her venom to sustain him in the rudimentary body he made for himself with Pettigrew's help. He also uses her venom, along with unicorn blood, to make the potion that restores him to his original body. In the madness of his pride, he uses the information he received from Bertha Jorkins to conceive and carry out his plan of resurrecting himself using Harry's blood, a fatal mistake on his part. Voldemort also uses Nagini to commit murders--the barely-averted death of Arthur Weasley and the death of Severus Snape--and to dispose of the bodies of people he has murdered with the Killing Curse such as Frank Bryce and Charity Burbage. Most disturbing of all, he has her possess the dead body of Bathilda Bagshot and lie in wait to lure and hold Harry in Godric's Hollow. Neville Longbottom can be seen as dispensing the Cardinal Virtue of Justice when he decapitates Nagini, destroying Voldemort's last Horcrux and freeing her from her evil enslavement.
It is fitting that Neville Longbottom is the person to destroy the Pride Horcrux because he has exhibited the Contrary Virtue of Humility since the very first book:
"There's no need to tell me I'm not brave enough to be in Gryffindor, Malfoy's already done that," Neville choked out.
Harry felt in the pocket of his robes and pulled out a Chocolate Frog, the very last one from the box Hermione had given him for Christmas. He gave it to Neville, who looked as though he might cry.
"You're worth twelve of Malfoy," Harry said.
Neville's humility continues to be a motif across the series. In Book 5 we see:
"I'm nobody," said Neville hurriedly.
"No you're not," said Ginny sharply.
Neville discovers his own courage and ability through participating in the rescue mission at the end of Book 5 and helping to lead the resistance to Snape and the Carrows at Hogwarts in Book 7, but his process in killing Nagini is that he volunteers to be humiliated by Voldemort before he breaks free of Voldemort's control and pulls the Sword from the Sorting Hat. Harry also exhibits the virtue of Humility in delegating the responsibility for killing the snake to Neville, just as Dumbledore did in delegating the responsibility for destroying Voldemort to Harry:
"You are very kind, Harry," said Dumbledore, now passing the tip of his wand over the deep cut he had made in his own arm, so that it healed instantly, just as Snape had healed Malfoy's wounds. "But your blood is worth more than mine.
...
"I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you."
Harry, of course, is a Seeker in looking for Nagini, finding her in the Shrieking Shack where he sees her kill Snape. The successful destruction of this Horcrux is associated with Dumbledore, who left the Sword to Harry in his will, with Ginny, whose attempt to steal the Sword results in Harry, Hermione, and Ron realizing that it can destroy Horcruxes due to its imbibing of Basilisk venom, and with Transfiguration because of Nagini's transformation from a woman to a snake. And Neville, of course, is a Leo like Harry, Ginny, and (as best we can deduce from the books) Dumbledore. Dumbledore's besetting sin seems to be Pride, and we learn a great deal in Book 7 of his struggles to overcome it. In his conversation with Harry in the waiting room of the Afterworld, he seems to have (mostly) succeeded:
“Can you forgive me?” he said. “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”
Harry shows that he has defeated his own sin of Pride when he repudiates the Elder Wand and drops the Resurrection Stone into the Forbidden Forest. He refuses the power of being Master of Death but he will take up the mantle of distributing Justice in his duties as the Head of the Auror Office.
To finish the story of Voldemort's soul, the last bit--the portion remaining in his body--is destroyed the same way our story began, by the rebound of Voldemort's own Avada Kedavra curse meant for Harry Potter. Of Voldemort's eight-part soul, five are killed by Basilisk venom (two by a Basilisk fang and three by the Sword that imbibed that venom), two are killed by his own Avada Kedavra curses, and one is killed by Fiendfyre. It is interesting to note that after he "kills" Tom Riddle's Diary at the age of twelve in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry never personally destroys another part of Voldemort's soul. The soul-bits are destroyed, in order, by Harry, Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, Vincent Crabbe, Voldemort, Neville Longbottom, and Voldemort again. You will not be shocked to find that the destroyers number seven in all.
Adding the seven Horcruxes to the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter and correcting the order of the last two Deadly Sins from Pride/Envy to Envy/Pride, we get the following final matrix:
Eeeeeek! I have bumped up against the size limit for a single LiveJournal entry. It is unimaginable that I would repeat Voldemort's mistake and destroy the magical power of a seven-part essay, so I will simply label this LJ entry as Epilogue Section A and the next entry as Epilogue Section B.
Notes:
(51) Note, AGAIN, the symbolic association of eggs with Harry/Ginny.
(52) Chapter XII, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien.
(53) I apologize for referring to a quote that is only in the movies but I couldn't resist.
Part 2: The Key to the Code
Part 3: The Structural Framework
Part 4: The Characters and Concepts
Part 5: The Chemical Wedding
Part 6: The Heart of It All
Part 7: Epilogue Section A
the locket . . . the cup . . . the snake . . . something of Gryffindor's or Ravenclaw's . . .
This Epilogue is being posted in April 2024, nineteen years after the first six parts were posted, which is obviously the right time for an Epilogue. During those years we have had the opportunity to read the sixth and seventh books of the series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and received a superfluity of abundant evidence of Rowling's reliance on the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter or, in other words, the Rule of Seven. Those of us with that deep understanding were not in any way surprised that The Half-Blood Prince was Severus Snape. We knew that the sixth book would be the book of Snape and of Potions as a Hogwarts course, we anticipated the emphasis on Ron's development, that Harry would Go Back into the past to learn about Voldemort's life, etc. We knew that Deathly Hallows would be the book exploring Dumbledore's history and character, that Harry would have to Go Forward (leaving Hogwarts) and be a Seeker, that Ginny would be developed independently of Harry, fighting Voldemort in her own way, that there would be a symbolic Chemical Wedding (Bill and Fleur) in the book, and--obviously--that Harry would marry Ginny and all would be well in the end. We expected that Voldemort's life path would involve a reversal of the alchemical process, where he systematically destroyed his own soul rather than purifying it. And, of course, that Voldemort would try to do so by splitting his own soul into seven parts, but that he would fail, with the result that Harry would need to find and destroy seven Horcruxes. I mean, DUH.
But many things have happened in these nineteen years besides the much-anticipated release of the last two Harry Potter books. We have also, unfortunately, seen the author of those books forget or fail to understand the lessons of her own books and dedicate herself to a denial of her own themes--Death and Rebirth and Moral and Spiritual Growth--as exemplified in her two motifs--Alchemy and Trip to the Underworld. The symbolic applicability of the androgynous, two-sexed alchemist and the process of dying and being reborn into one's true identity to the campaign for transexual rights are too obvious to need explanation here. Which is fortunate, because that is not the topic of this Epilogue. I have (symbolically) returned to King's Cross Station purely to discuss the seven original books.
The last two books of the Harry Potter series revolve around the discovery and destruction of Voldemort's seven Horcruxes, which must be destroyed before Voldemort can be killed. The seven Horcruxes are the culmination of the symbolic structure of the series, intimately tied to its two unifying themes--Death and Rebirth and Moral and Spiritual Growth--and its two primary symbolic motifs--the Trip to the Underworld and the Alchemical Process. The first section of this essay will explain those connections in detail. However, Horcruxes are very far from the only "sevens" that were revealed in the last two books. Some examples are:
- The Seven Potters who helped Harry escape from #4 Privet Drive at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Fred, George, Fleur, and Mundungus Fletcher.
- The Seven Adults who transported the Seven Potters: Hagrid, Tonks, Kingsley, Arthur, Remus, Bill, and Moody.
- The Seven OWLS earned by Harry (and Ron): Astronomy, Care of Magical Creatures, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, Potions, and Transfiguration.
- The Seven Ancient Artefacts: the three Deathly Hallows and the four Founders' Relics.
- The Seven Artefact Owners: the three Peverell brothers and the four Founders.
- The Seven Captives held in Malfoy Manor: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Dean, Griphook, Luna, and Ollivander.
- The Seven People Harry Loves mentioned as he walked toward death: the three living people from his own generation (Ron, Hermione, and Ginny) and the four dead people from his parents' generation (Lily, James, Sirius, and Remus).
- The Seven Hogwarts Students (and future students) in the Epilogue: James, Albus, Lily, Rose, Hugo, Scorpius, and Victoire.
- The Seven Adults seeing them off on the train: Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, Draco, Astoria, and Teddy.
The last two books also re-confirmed what most of us had perceived in the first five books, the geometry of the seven primary child characters, referred to by J.K. Rowling in this interview as "the Big Seven": Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna, and Draco.
The second section of this essay will delve into the geometric permutations of characters that Rowling plays with under her symbolic rubric, but now we turn to ...
THE HORCRUXES
From https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Horcrux
As readers of my previous essays will have known in advance, Voldemort's plan was to make himself immortal by splitting his soul into seven parts, as follows:
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
2 - the Peverell Ring
3 - Slytherin's Locket
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
6 - (unknown object when he killed Harry Potter)
7 - the portion of original soul left in his body.
And, as any reader of my previous essays will also have guessed, this did not work out for Voldemort because the structure of the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter absolutely requires that there be seven HORCRUXES. The seven Horcruxes that Voldemort actually made are as follows:
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
2 - the Peverell Ring
3 - Slytherin's Locket
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
6 - Harry Potter (the accidental Horcrux)
7 - the snake Nagini.
The seven Horcruxes are--of course--destroyed in the same order that Voldemort made them.
Obviously, these seven Horcruxes are directly tied into the symbolic structure of the Harry Potter books. They divide in the traditional way: the first three represent Tom Riddle's family heritage and the final four represent aspects of his life as a wizard. Let's review the symbolic structure that led to the seven Horcruxes (with the Acts of Mercy in the sixth and seventh books corrected):
The Horcruxes are more closely tied to the Trip to the Underworld pattern than to the Alchemical pattern, as can be understood by looking at their 3+2+1+1 structure rather than a 3+3+1 structure. The first three are objects related to Voldemort's life and ancestry, the next two are Founders' relics not directly related to Voldemort, then there is his unintentional living Horcrux and his intentional living Horcrux.
Remember the interpretation rule: Every grouping of seven mentioned in the books is a symbolic marker and every element of every grouping is symbolically related to every other element belonging to the same number.
Given that, let's look at the Horcruxes one by one.
1 - Tom Riddle's Diary
From the books we know that Tom Riddle released Slytherin's monster, the Basilisk, when he was sixteen, near the end of his fifth year at Hogwarts. He killed Myrtle, framed Hagrid on June 13th, and recorded those events magically in a Muggle-made diary, then encased the part of his soul torn off by killing Myrtle into the diary using the Horcrux spell. We have already seen that Book 1 of the series was associated with Harry overcoming the Deadly Sin of Sloth, as he received the call and accepted his destiny as a wizard and a hero. The first Horcrux belongs to Hagrid, the person Riddle framed for the death of Myrtle and to Hagrid's teaching subject, Care of Magical Creatures. It also belongs to the first potions bottle, poison, to the first task, Fluffy, to the Chaser position in Quidditch, to Bill Weasley, to the Heavenly Virtue of Faith, and to the Act of Mercy Feeding the Hungry.
It is easy to see how all this applies to the Diary. It records the freeing of a dangerous Magical Creature, much like Fluffy, whose eyes were destroyed by the singing Phoenix (analogue of the musical flute which caused Fluffy to close his eyes and sleep). The Basilisk's venom is literally poison and it was Harry's Faith in the absent Dumbledore that brought him the aid he needed:
'Help me ... help me ...' Harry thought, his eyes screwed tight under the hat. 'Please help me!'
There was no answering voice. Instead the hat contracted, as though an invisible hand was squeezing it very tightly.
Something very hard and heavy thudded onto the top of Harry's head, almost knocking him out. ... A gleaming silver sword had appeared inside the hat, its handle glittering with rubies the size of eggs. (51)
While Harry overcame the sin of Sloth in answering the call to rescue Ginny, Tom Riddle/Voldemort began his journey of ultimate evil by willfully succumbing to it. Even when pursuing the evil action of "purg[ing] the school of all who were unworthy to study magic," Tom Riddle took the slothful path, letting the Basilisk do his dirty work and, in the end, leaving the task unfinished and passing on the responsibility to some future version of his sixteen-year-old self, whenever it might be released from the diary. Then he turned even that responsibility over to Lucius Malfoy, who in turn sloughed it off onto an eleven-year-old girl. Finally, in the Chamber of Secrets, the memory version of Tom Riddle let the Basilisk fight his battle for him, never attempting to give it any aid, even after it was blinded by the phoenix. Tom Riddle had no Faith, except wrongful faith in himself and his own cleverness. His use of Slytherin's monster, feeding it with the blood of Muggleborns after it had spent long centuries starving in the Chamber of Secrets ("... soo hungry ... for so long ..."), was a corrupt perversion of the first Act of Mercy, Feeding the Hungry. Tom Riddle acted as a Chaser to create this first Horcrux, hunting for the Chamber of Secrets and the monster to bolster his ego-driven pride in his ancestry and indulge his murderous sadism and blood-prejudice. Harry was also a Chaser when he destroyed the Horcrux, following Ginny into the Chamber of Secrets to save her life.
This is how the pattern will go for all seven Horcruxes. Tom Riddle succumbs to every Deadly Sin in sequence when he creates and hides the Horcruxes. Harry is tempted by each Sin and overcomes it in sequence, while exhibiting the Heavenly Virtue that Tom Riddle so markedly lacks. Each Horcrux, like the diary, is associated with a symbolic trip to the underworld and a symbolic (or actual!) death-and-rebirth.
2 - The Resurrection Stone/Peverell Ring
Tom Riddle's next move was to travel to Little Hangleton to steal the Peverell Ring from his Uncle Morfin and murder his Muggle father and grandparents. This happened in the summer, and it would make sense for it to be the summer between his sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts because he would have been seventeen years old then and able to Apparate without the Trace showing his movements. However, the fact that he was wearing the Peverell Ring in Professor Slughorn's memory when he was "by no means the eldest in the group of boys" implies that he was only in his sixth year then, so he must have traveled to Little Hangleton during the summer directly after he killed Myrtle and created the diary.
Of all the Horcruxes, the second Horcrux has the longest and most complicated history, with many subtle symbolic connections. Like Book 2, it is associated with the Deadly Sin of Lust. The creation of the Resurrection Stone is connected to this sin, as the second Peverell brother, Cadmus, demanded the ring to wrongfully bring his deceased fiancée back to life to live with him:
Though she had returned to the mortal world, she did not truly belong there and suffered. Finally the second brother, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as to truly join her.
In the seven tasks at the end of Book 1, lust is symbolized by the creeping tendrils of the Devil's Snare plant, entwining themselves around the two boys. There is a real plant called Devil's Snare, Datura stramonium, also known as jimsonweed. Datura is known in European folklore as an ingredient in traditional witches' "flying ointment," due to its hallucinogenic properties. It is, of course, a poison if taken in excess.
It seems a bit unfair to poor Professor Sprout, but Rowling often uses plant life and Herbology as a marker for sexual desire and sexual behavior:
- ... in March several of the Mandrakes threw a loud and raucous party in greenhouse three. This made Professor Sprout very happy.
"The moment they start trying to move into each other's pots, we'll know they're fully mature," she told Harry.
- Snape had his wand out and was blasting rosebushes apart, his expression most ill-natured. Squeals issued from many of the bushes, and dark shapes emerged from them.
- Fleur and Roger Davies had disappeared, probably into a more private clump of bushes.
- "He put a hex on me, Professor Dumbledore, and I was only teasing him, sir, I only said I'd seen him kissing Florence behind the greenhouses last Thursday...."
- "What's happened to you?" asked Harry, for Hermione looked distinctly disheveled, rather as though she had just fought her way out of a thicket of Devil's Snare.
"Oh, I've just escaped--I mean, I've just left Cormac," she said. "Under the mistletoe," she added in explanation...
- On one such evening, when Ginny had retired to the library and Harry was sitting beside the window in the common room, supposedly finishing his Herbology home-work but in reality reliving a particularly happy hour he had spent down by the lake with Ginny at lunch-time...
It is significant, therefore, that the Gaunt house where the Peverell Ring next appears is described as almost completely swallowed by plant life:
... it was a few seconds before Harry's eyes discerned the building half-hidden amongst the tangle of trunks. It seemed to him a very strange location to choose for a house, or else an odd decision to leave the trees growing nearby, blocking all light and the view of the valley below. He wondered whether it was inhabited; its walls were mossy and so many tiles had fallen off the roof that the rafters were visible in places. Nettles grew all around it, their tips reaching the windows, which were tiny and thick with grime.
In Bob Odgen's memory, we see that the story of the Ring Horcrux is a story of lust--the forbidden desire that Merope Gaunt feels for her Muggle neighbor Tom Riddle. Because he is disgusted by her desire, Merope's brother Morfin jinxes Tom Riddle, leading to Bob Ogden's visit and eventually to both her father and brother being sent to Azkaban. We know that Merope's feelings are lust rather than true love because of what she does to Tom Riddle Sr., taking him against his will and forcing him to marry her by means of a Love Potion. Tom Riddle Sr.'s abandonment of his wife and child after she releases him from the Potion is also emblematic of a classic lust scenario, though of course the details are different from the usual story.
When Tom Riddle arrives to steal the Ring and frame his Uncle Morfin for the murder of his father and grandparents, both the Ring and the Locket are associated with Merope's lust in the text:
... "You look mighty like that Muggle."
"What Muggle?" said Riddle sharply.
"That Muggle what my sister took a fancy to, that Muggle what lives in the big house over the way," said Morfin, and he spat unexpectedly upon the floor between them. "You look right like him. Riddle. But he's older now, in 'e? He's older'n you, now I think on it ..."
Morfin looked slightly dazed and swayed a little, still clutching the edge of the table for support.
"He come back, see," he added stupidly.
Voldemort was gazing at Morfin as though appraising his possibilities. Now he moved a little closer and said, "Riddle came back?"
"Ar, he left her, and serve her right, marrying filth!" said Morfin, spitting on the floor again. "Robbed us, mind, before she ran off. Where's the locket, eh, where's Slytherin's locket?"
Voldemort did not answer. Morfin was working himself into a rage again; he brandished his knife and shouted, "Dishonored us, she did, that little slut! And who're you, coming here and asking questions about all that? It's over, innit ... It's over ..."
...
"So the Ministry called upon Morfin. They did not need to question him, to use Veritaserum or Legilimency. He admitted to the murder on the spot, giving details only the murderer could know. He was proud, he said, to have killed the Muggles, had been awaiting his chance all these years. He handed over his wand, which was proved at once to have been used to kill the Riddles. And he permitted himself to be led off to Azkaban without a fight. All that disturbed him was the fact that his father's ring had disappeared. "He'll kill me for losing it," he told his captors over and over again. "He'll kill me for losing his ring."
We had not--at least not until we read the Cursed Child play!--associated Tom Riddle with lust for physical sexual pleasure. Of course we knew of the other lusts he felt, for power, for vengeance, for distinction and glory, and most of all for life, since he was determined never to die. During his acquisition of the Peverell Ring, Tom Riddle succumbed to lust for vengeance on the father who abandoned him and lust for a material possession, the heirloom Ring.
As is fitting in the symbolic structure, Riddle was a Chaser when he found the Peverell Ring, following the life path of his mother. Dumbledore was also a Chaser when he found it buried in the ruins of the Gaunt hovel, following in the footsteps of Tom Riddle. And here the second Horcrux is associated with Lust again, because Dumbledore had searched for the Ring long before, when he and Gellert Grindelwald were questing for the Deathly Hallows. Dumbledore's sexual attraction to Grindelwald blinded him to Grindelwald's true character, and he tells Harry the he desired the Resurrection Stone so he could go off with Grindelwald rather than stay and take care of his sister and brother:
The Resurrection Stone--to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi! To me, I confess, it meant the return of my parents, and the lifting of all responsibility from my shoulders.
By the time he searches for the Resurrection Stone the second time, and actually finds it, Dumbledore has long since overcome the temptation of the lust he felt for Grindelwald, and he wants to use the Stone only to show his remorse:
“When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts--the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons--I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry, I was ..."
Since Harry is neither the one to find the Ring nor the one to destroy it, one might think that Rowling failed to follow her scheme of having Harry overcome the sin, Lust, associated with that Horcrux. But there is more to the story of this Horcrux! Dumbledore encases the Resurrection Stone in a Golden Snitch and leaves it to Harry in his will.
We have already seen in Part 6 of this essay how heavily gold and Snitches are associated with Ginny Weasley, and Ginny, of course, is the object of Harry's lust as well as his love. If we had somehow failed to associate Snitches with Ginny in spite of the Secret Key of Seven, in spite of her being a Seeker who caught the Snitch right under Cho Chang's nose, in spite of the Snitches on the chocolate egg she gave Harry, in spite of the hummingbird, the fact that she is a Leo with the Alchemical Metal of gold, and all the rest, we are reminded again in Book 7 when "Ginny's new dress" is indeed of great symbolic importance as I predicted years ago in Part 4 of this essay:
Ginny and Gabrielle, both wearing golden dresses, looked even prettier than usual ...
“Yes, my tiara set off the whole thing nicely,” said Auntie Muriel in a rather carrying whisper. “But I must say, Ginevra’s dress is far too low cut.”
Ginny glanced around, grinning, winked at Harry, then quickly faced the front again. Harry’s mind wandered a long way from the marquee, back to the afternoons spent alone with Ginny in lonely parts of the school grounds. They seemed so long ago; they had always seemed too good to be true, as though he had been stealing shining hours from a normal person’s life, a person without a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead ...
If Harry had succumbed to lust, he might have wanted to take Ginny on the Horcrux hunt, in spite of her being underage, or he might have taken advantage of her before he left, rather than virtuously promising Ron to stay away from her until he completed his terrible destiny and was free to love. Harry had a symbolic triumph over lust way back in Book 2 when he rescued Ginny from her would-be ravisher and restored her safely into the arms of her family. But, obviously, lust was not such a personal temptation to Harry at age twelve as it was at the end of Book 6 and the beginning of Book 7. Harry has to overcome the sin of Sloth in each book to continuously accept his fated duty to destroy Voldemort, and in the Horcrux hunt he has to overcome the temptations of lust as well. Harry truly loves Ginny, so he refuses to expose her to unnecessary danger and resolves to leave her free to love another and be happy after Harry's likely death.
When Harry finally frees the Resurrection Stone from the Golden Snitch "at the close" and walks voluntarily to his sacrificial death, he has to overcome his instinctive lust for life ("Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?"), but also his lust for sexual satisfaction with Ginny. She is the last living person he sees as he walks toward the Forest and he is greatly tempted to make himself known to her ("With a huge effort Harry forced himself on"). His last thought before Voldemort strikes is the memory of kissing her ("Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his--").
Harry is able to overcome the temptations of lust because he has the Cardinal Virtue of Hope. When Harry walks to his death, he has not finished destroying the Horcruxes and killing Voldemort, just as Dumbledore allows himself to be killed while his plan to defeat Voldemort is still unfulfilled. But both men have hope because they trust their friends and allies to carry on after they have gone. As is customary, Dumbledore counsels Harry on this Horcrux's Cardinal Virtue in their conversation near the end of the book:
“Voldemort’s got the Elder Wand.”
“True. Voldemort has the Elder Wand.”
“But you want me to go back?”
“I think,” said Dumbledore, “that if you choose to return, there is a chance that he may be finished for good. I cannot promise it. But I know this, Harry, that you have less to fear from returning here than he does.”
Ginny, like Harry, is able to overcome the temptations of immediate gratification, to squash her natural desire to be with her boyfriend, and to send him off on a seemingly impossible quest with a goodbye kiss, because she also has the virtue of Hope. When Harry breaks up with her at the end of Book 6, she accepts it with a "twisted smile" and says:
"I never really gave up on you," she said. "Not really. I always hoped ..."
The Work of Mercy associated with this Horcrux--Clothe the Naked--is very appropriate to counteract Lust. Harry performs this act literally when he wakes up naked after Voldemort "kills" him, and clothes himself with a robe. He performs it figuratively, and refers back to his original Act of Mercy from Book 2, when he wraps Dobby in his own coat before burying him:
Harry wrapped the elf more snugly in his jacket. Ron sat on the edge of the grave and stripped off his shoes and socks, which he placed on the elf’s bare feet. Dean produced a woolen hat, which Harry placed carefully upon Dobby’s head, muffling his batlike ears.
Thus, the second Horcrux shows us a more elaborate pattern than the first one. Not only does Voldemort eagerly succumb to the Deadly Sin associated with it and Harry overcome that same Deadly Sin while exhibiting the Heavenly Virtue, but the person who finds and destroys the Horcrux--Dumbledore in this case--also overcomes the same Deadly Sin and exhibits the same Heavenly Virtue. The connection of the Resurrection Stone to the Trip to the Underworld is too obvious to even mention, but its connection to the Alchemical Process and the Philosopher's Stone is also fairly obvious.
3 - Sytherin's Locket
The story of the third Horcrux is almost as long and complex as the story of the second Horcrux (but don't worry, the 4th through the 7th are simpler, so this essay won't be infinitely long!). Tom Riddle learned of the existence of Slytherin's Locket (if he didn't know already) at the same time he learned of the Peverell Ring, when he traveled to Little Hangleton during the summer before his sixth year at Hogwarts to kill his father and grandparents. He was a Chaser as he searched for it, following the path of his dead mother, and he found it not too long after he finished his education, perhaps a year or two later.
The Locket is associated with the Deadly Sin of Gluttony. Its story begins with Salazar Slytherin, one of the founders of Hogwarts and the owner of Slytherin's Monster, the ravenous and deadly Basilisk. It is associated with Book 3 in the Harry Potter series, which we have seen is replete with images of gluttony, ranging (as I wrote in Part 3 of this essay), "from Crookshanks being wrongly suspecting of having "eaten" Scabbers to Buckbeak's ravenous gulping to the traditional figure of the werewolf ravenous for human flesh to -- most notably -- Harry "blowing up" his Aunt Marge as she is patting her stomach after an "excellent nosh." However, the most powerful image of Gluttony being defeated in Book 3 is Harry driving away the Dementors who want to eat everyone's soul, and saving Sirius from that fate.
Dementors are again associated with the Locket Horcrux in Book 7, as we will see, but Rowling also repeatedly associates the Gluttony of the Locket with circumstances of starvation. First there is the centuries-long starvation of the Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. Then the Locket is passed down in the Gaunt family in circumstances of ever-increasing poverty and want. Even their surname is representative of the look of a starving person. Finally, Merope is so desperate, ragged and starving, that she sells the Locket to Borgin & Burkes for a small percentage of its true worth. Her son Tom Riddle grows up in an orphanage, often associated with hunger. Tom Riddle murders Hepzibah Smith, the owner of the Locket, after she serves him a tray of little cakes:
"Help yourself, Tom," said Hepzibah, "I know how you love my cakes.
Tom Riddle murders Hepzibah with "a lethal and little-known poison" and frames an unfortunate house elf for the murder. Then he turns the Locket into a Horcrux with a part of his soul ripped off by a different murder--according to Rowling in an interview--that of a "Muggle tramp." Again, tramps are associated with poverty and hunger. He hides the Horcrux in a cave he found while on a picnic as a child, protected by an army of Inferi, otherwise known as Zombies, a well-known image of ravenous, mindless hunger. The cave also demands to be fed with blood before it lets anyone in.
Riddle cruelly abuses another house elf, Kreacher, to test his defenses for the Locket, which leads Regulus Black to sacrifice his life to steal the Locket. Kreacher holds it for years, then it is stolen by Mundungus Fletcher and taken from him by Dolores Umbridge. House-elves are the providers of food in the wizarding world, so it makes sense that two of them would be victimized by this Horcrux.
The Locket Horcrux is the first found by Harry, Ron, and Hermione on their Horcrux hunt, acting as Chasers. They work together to infiltrate the Ministry and grab the gold Locket just as the three of them mounted brooms to catch the Flying Key in the Third Task. Their capture of the Locket is associated with Gluttony because they have to hold off the Dementors while taking the Locket from Dolores Umbridge and with the Act of Mercy Visiting the Prisoner because they free Mrs. Cattermole and the rest of the Muggle-borns on trial that day in the same scene. Harry and Hermione work together in the courtroom much like they worked together to free Sirius and Buckbeak in Book 3 (it seems that Harry can never simply visit prisoners; he always frees them--not just Sirius and the Muggleborns at the Ministry, but the captives in Malfoy Manor and the dragon at Gringotts as well).
As soon as they possess the Locket, Harry, Ron, and Hermione begin to suffer from hunger:
This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits, an empty one, bickering and gloom. Harry was least surprised by this, because be had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys’. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences dour. Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron’s turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.
The sin of Gluttony is not particularly hard for Harry to overcome, but it has always been a weakness of Ron's. There are many references throughout the books to his greedy consumption of food. The Locket's exaggeration of hunger attacks Ron the most and he, of course, becomes the destroyer of the Locket Horcrux when he returns after abandoning the Horcrux hunt. His leaving is closely associated with hunger:
“Then GO!” roared Harry. “Go back to them, pretend you’re got over your spattergroit and Mummy’ll be able to feed you up and-”
Ron not only overcomes Gluttony to return and save Harry, he also overcomes Envy. When he tries to overcome the Locket it tortures him, revealing his insecurity and envy of Harry. Envy, of course, is the Deadly Sin I had previously assigned to Book 7 and Task 7, following the general opinion about which Deadly Sin belongs to each circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno. However, the sixth and seventh circles aren't as neat a fit as the first five, and I now think that Rowling reversed Pride and Envy in the sixth and seventh columns of the Secret Key, something I could not have confirmed until Books 6 and 7 were published. Book 6 belongs to Ron, so it is fitting that Envy is his besetting sin. It is also the besetting sin of Severus Snape, the professor associated with Book 6. Book 7, of course, belongs to Professor Dumbledore and Ginny Weasley, neither of whom is particularly troubled by Envy. Dumbledore's greatest weakness is clearly Pride. I have made this change on the Secret Symbolic Matrix below.
The Heavenly Virtue associated with the Locket Horcrux is Charity, a quality greatly lacking not only in Tom Riddle, but in the Gaunts and Riddles, Hepzibah Smith, Kreacher, Mundungus Fletcher, and Dolores Umbridge. Kreacher learns charity when he befriends Harry, Ron, and (especially) Hermione and they, in turn, learn charity toward him. Regulus Black also exhibits charity toward his house elf, and Harry and Ron are able to recover the Sword of Gryffindor and destroy the Locket due to the charity of Severus Snape.
4 - Hufflepuff's Cup
The fourth Horcrux is the first of the twin Beater or Nettle Wine Horcruxes, associated with a Founder's Artifact but not with Voldemort's ancestor Slytherin or his Gaunt family line. The Cup is abundantly associated with the Deadly Sin of Greed. Its owner, Hufflepuff descendant Hepzibah Smith, is a rich woman who hoards all sorts of possessions:
... the elf scurried out of the room, which was so crammed with objects that it was difficult to see how anybody could navigate their way across it without knocking over at least a dozen things: There were cabinets full of little lacquered boxes, cases full of gold-embossed books, shelves of orbs and celestial globes, and many flourishing potted plants in brass containers. In fact, the room looked like a cross between a magical antique shop and a conservatory.
However, Hepzibah is not greedy only for material possessions; she also covets the handsome young man:
Voldemort stretched out a long-fingered hand and lifted the cup by one handle out of its snug silken wrappings. Harry thought he saw a red gleam in his dark eyes. His greedy expression was curiously mirrored on Hepzibah’s face, except that her tiny eyes were fixed upon Voldemort's handsome features.
Voldemort is greedy as well--so much so that he steals Hufflepuff's Cup as well as Slytherin's Ring when he murders Hepzibah, and encases the bit of his soul torn by that murder into the Cup.
Voldemort then entrusts the Cup Horcrux to Bellatrix Lestrange, another rich woman who puts it into her family vault in Gringotts Bank, stuffed with treasures and guarded by a dragon, a tradition symbol of Greed. Appropriately, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are not Chasers for the Horcrux. They do not follow anyone to the Cup; they learn of its location in Bludger-like fashion from Bellatrix Lestrange while she is torturing Hermione.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione perform the corresponding Work of Mercy--Bury the Dead--with Dobby before they begin their adventure to steal the Cup. At almost the same time, Voldemort performs a corrupt perversion of this Work of Mercy by desecrating Dumbledore's grave to steal the Elder Wand.
The Trio's process for obtaining the Cup is a rich examination of the Sin of Greed. They work with Griphook the Goblin. Because of their different understanding of property rights, the two races--wizards and goblins--each regard the other as dishonest and greedy. Harry, Ron, and Hermione promise Griphook the Sword of Gryffindor as his reward for helping them break into Gringotts to steal the Cup, but they intend to cheat him by not giving him the sword until they have used it on all the Horcruxes. Griphook, in turn, runs off with the sword and denounces Harry, Ron, and Hermione to the Gringotts goblins as thieves--which they certainly are! They rightly fall victim to the "Thief's Downfall" and Harry successfully uses an Unforgivable Curse (Imperius) for the first time ever in his desperation to obtain the Cup Horcrux.
The harmful results of Greed are illustrated by the curses on the Lestrange vault that cause the treasure items to multiply rapidly and burn anyone who touches them until the would-be thief is "crushed to death by the weight of expanding gold." Harry, Ron, and Hermione suffer a great deal of pain to obtain the Hufflepuff Cup and they exhibit the Heavenly Virtue associated with this Horcrux, Fortitude, both in the vault and during their terrifying and uncomfortable dragon-ride. This is a clear analogue to the fourth task, the Chess Game. Both the chess game and the bank heist require logic and planning, but in the end success in both tasks depends on having the Fortitude to bear pain.
I don't know if it is intentional or not, but I can't help associating a scenario where our hero steals only a gold, two-handled cup from a dragon-guarded hoard and the villainous owner (Voldemort, in this case) erupts with murderous rage when he finds out it is gone with the similar scene of Bilbo and Smaug in The Hobbit. Voldemort has more cause to be upset than Smaug does but his violent reaction reminds me of Tolkien's famous passage (52):
...Then he missed the cup!
Thieves! Fire! Murder! Such a thing had not happened since he first came to the Mountain! His rage passes description--the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.
Surely that is the quintessential description of Greed.
The Cup Horcrux is finally destroyed by Hermione, with help from Ron. This is appropriate because Greed has never been a sin that Harry is particularly vulnerable to but Hermione is vulnerable to it--not greed for material possessions but greed for knowledge, for books, for magical learning. Think of her third year, when she insisted on taking every school subject offered, or the time she Summoned all of the forbidden library books from Dumbledore's office after his funeral, and carried them (and many, many other books) on the journey in her beaded bag. Hermione's destruction of the Cup, like Ron's destruction of the Locket, is intimately tied to the Ron/Hermione romance. She overcomes her greed for knowledge by relying, for once, on Ron's abilities and ideas to reach the Chamber of Secrets and obtain the Basilisk fangs (or rather, for the second time, since this is a repeat of her and Harry's reliance on Ron's ability and knowledge in the Chess Game task). Even then, Hermione and Ron display a slight case of greed, bringing back as many Basilisk fangs as the two of them can hold, many more than they could possibly need for the two remaining Horcruxes. However, when Ron shows his concern for the Hogwarts house elves, Hermione immediately drops her hoard of Horcrux-killers to embrace him. Finally, she has sorted out her priorities!(53)
5 - Ravenclaw's Diadem
It isn't clear exactly when Tom Riddle charmed the location of Ravenclaw's Lost Diadem from the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw. I suspect it was during his sixth or seventh year after he learned of the existence of Slytherin's Locket and formed the ambition to own something from each of the four Founders of the school he considered "his first kingdom, his birthright." It probably took him a while to gain her confidence and coax the information out of her.
The Diadem is the second of the two "twin" Horcruxes, associated with Fred and George, beaters, and nettle wine. Tom Riddle didn't have to be a Chaser to find it in Albania; the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw told him exactly where it was. Harry was not a Chaser when he found it in the Room of Requirements either. He "heard" Voldemort say that it was hidden at Hogwarts and he remembered seeing it in that room when he hid his Potions book.
The story of Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem is intertwined with the sin of Anger. After her daughter Helena stole it from her, she sent Helena's rejected lover, the Baron, to find her. He found her in Albania:
"He tracked me to the forest where I was hiding. When I refused to return with him, he became violent. The Baron was always a hot-tempered man. Furious at my refusal, jealous of my freedom, he stabbed me."
"The Baron? You mean--"
"The Bloody Baron, yes," said the Gray Lady, and she lifted aside the cloak she wore to reveal a single dark wound in her white chest. "When he saw what he had done, he was overcome with remorse. He took the weapon that had claimed my life, and used it to kill himself. All these centuries later, he wears his chains as an act of penitence . . . as he should," she added bitterly.
After making it a Horcrux with the death of a peasant he slew in Albania, Voldemort hid the Diadem in the Room of Requirements at Hogwarts while he was there to apply to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. Again, Voldemort succumbed to Anger, his eyes burning red several times during his talk with Dumbledore, and he is described as having "features thick with rage". After Dumbledore refused to hire him, Voldemort angrily cursed the position:
"Was he after the Defense Against the Dark Arts job again, sir? He didn't say. . . ."
"Oh, he definitely wanted the Defense Against the Dark Arts job," said Dumbledore. "The aftermath of our little meeting proved that. You see, we have never been able to keep a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for longer than a year since I refused the post to Lord Voldemort."
Harry travels to Hogwarts after he learns from Voldemort's mind that the Diadem is hidden there. His visit takes the form of the corresponding Work of Mercy, Visiting the Sick because the first person he sees is Neville:
The longer Harry looked at Neville, the worse he appeared: One of his eyes was swollen yellow and purple, there were gouge marks on his face, and his general air of unkemptness suggested that he had been living rough. Nevertheless, his battered visage shone with happiness as he let go of Hermione and said again, “I knew you’d come! Kept telling Seamus it was a matter of time!”
“Neville, what’s happened to you?”
“What? This?” Neville dismissed his injuries with a shake of the head. “This is nothing, Seamus is worse. You’ll see....”
While Harry is searching for the Diadem he exhibits a most notable occurrence of Anger in his encounter with Amycus Carrow and Professor Mcgonagall in the Ravenclaw Common Room.
“It’s not a case of what you’ll permit, Minerva McGonagall. Your time’s over. It’s us what’s in charge here now, and you’ll back me up or you’ll pay the price.”
And he spat in her face.
Harry pulled the Cloak off himself, raised his wand, and said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”
As Amycus spun around, Harry shouted, “Crucio!”
The Death Eater was lifted off his feet. He writhed through the air like a drowning man, thrashing and howling in pain, and then, with a crunch and a shattering of glass, he smashed into the front of a bookcase and crumpled, insensible, to the floor.
“I see what Bellatrix meant,” said Harry, the blood thundering through his brain, “you need to really mean it.”
Harry recovers from losing his temper in the company of the delightfully calm Luna and the prudently business-like Professor McGonagall. However, he is soon in danger of losing his temper again when he tries to get information from the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw:
“WAIT!”
He had not meant to shout, but anger and panic were threatening to overwhelm him.
Harry's anger is effective at getting the ghost to confide in him, just as it was effective at neutralizing Amycus Carrow. However, he overcomes the sin of Anger in the actual recovery of the Diadem Horcrux from the Room of Requirements. Harry is ambushed there by Draco Malfoy, Gregory Goyle, and (most of all) Vincent Crabbe, who tries to kill both Hermione and Ron. Crabbe is furiously angry, even at his erstwhile leader Draco Malfoy, and he unleashes the ultimate symbol of Anger--Fiendfyre:
As they turned a corner the flames chased them as though they were alive, sentient, intent upon killing them. Now the fire was mutating, forming a gigantic pack of fiery beasts: Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again, and the detritus of centuries on which they were feeding was thrown up into the air into their fanged mouths, tossed high on clawed feet, before being consumed by the inferno.
Harry, finally, triumphs over what seems to be his most besetting sin. He sees Draco Malfoy trying to rescue the unconscious Gregory Goyle, empathy comes to his aid, and he risks his life to save Draco, while Ron and Hermione risk theirs to save Goyle. Crabbe, fittingly, perishes in the flames of his own rage and the Anger Horcrux is also destroyed. This fifth Horcrux is destroyed by the "bad guy" Crabbe just as the Troll was knocked out by bad guy Quirrell in the fifth task and the Prophecy in Book 5 was accidentally destroyed in the chaos of battle in the Department of Mysteries.
The Corresponding Virtue to the Deadly Sin of Anger is Patience. Patience does not come easily to Harry and he struggles to achieve it several times in the course of his quest for the Diadem Horcrux. The Heavenly Virtue is Prudence. We see that Harry has, at long last, mastered his anger and learned both patience and prudence after he escapes from the destruction of the Fiendfyre. The next thing that happens after that is that Fred is killed, giving Ron and Harry an almost irresistible temptation to fight Death Eaters and revenge Fred's death:
Hermione was trying to restrain Ron, to stop him running after Percy.
“Listen to me-LISTEN RON!”
“I wanna help-I wanna kill Death Eaters-”
His face was contorted, smeared with dust and smoke, and he was shaking with rage and grief.
“Ron, we’re the only ones who can end it! Please-Ron-we need the snake, we’ve got to kill the snake!” said Hermione.
But Harry knew how Ron felt: Pursuing another Horcrux could not bring the satisfaction of revenge; he too wanted to fight, to punish them, the people who had killed Fred, and he wanted to find the other Weasleys, and above all make sure, make quite sure, that Ginny was not-but he could not permit that idea to form in his mind-
“We will fight!” Hermione said. “We’ll have to, to reach the snake! But let’s not lose sight now of what we’re supposed to be d-doing! We’re the only ones who can end it!”
Harry--for once--listens to Hermione and rededicates himself to patiently following the harrowing path assigned to him by Dumbledore. Never again in the book does Harry lose his temper or indulge himself in thoughts of hatred and revenge.
6 - Harry Potter
The sixth Horcrux was accidentally made when Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter and tried to kill Harry. We can guess that Voldemort wanted to encase that torn-off bit of his soul in the Sword of Gryffindor, but he had been denied the opportunity to steal it. Perhaps he had not given up hope of obtaining it to make his sixth and last Horcrux, but instead he was nearly killed and his maimed and bodiless soul fled to hide in distant Albania. The accidental Horcrux belongs to the Potion bottle task and to the sixth bottle that allows you to "Go Back", as Voldemort flees back to his place of refuge in Albania where he had found and enspelled the previous Horcrux. Harry is neither a Chaser, a Beater, or a Seeker for this Horcrux; He doesn't have to go anywhere or do anything to find it because it is already in him. He is the Keeper of Voldemort's soul-bit.
The sixth task/book/Horcrux is tied to Professor Snape, and it is, of course, Snape who has the task of telling Harry that he is a Horcrux, that he bears a piece of Voldemort's soul within him. Harry feels a bond with the "Half-Blood Prince" who owned his Potions book, just as he has a mental bond with Voldemort and he felt an instinctive connection to Tom Riddle's Diary. Envy seems to be the Deadly Sin tied to the sixth place in the matrix, to Snape and Ron and--in a more humorous vein--to all the romantic relationships described in the sixth book. Ron is jealous of Hermione/Krum and Hermione/McClaggan, Hermione is jealous of Ron/Lavender, Lavender is jealous of Ron/Hermione, Harry is jealous of Dean/Ginny, Dean is jealous of Harry/Ginny, Romilda Vane is jealous of Harry/Ginny, and so on. Severus Snape's life, as told in the "Prince's Tale" chapter, was corrosively damaged by his besetting sin of Envy, especially his deep jealousy of James Potter that destroyed his relationship with Lily Evans. Dumbledore gives Snape the task of telling Harry that he must die after Snape expresses envy of Harry's relationship with Dumbledore:
“What are you doing with Potter, all these evenings you are closeted together?” Snape asked abruptly.
. . .
“Information,” repeated Snape. “You trust him . . . you do not trust me.”
The "Prince's Tale" is also a tragic portrayal of Envy on the part of Lily's sister Petunia, who was desperately jealous of Lily's magical talent. Petunia's envy destroys her relationship with her sister and the magical world and leads to Harry's miserable childhood in her care after he becomes the sixth Horcrux. The Contrary Virtue of Envy is Kindness. Petunia manages to find enough kindness to agree to take Harry in and give him the safety of her blood protection, but she cannot go beyond that and actually raise him with loving kindness. Snape, too, repeatedly fails in this regard.
Harry is not as prone to Envy as Severus Snape, Petunia Evans, and his best friend Ron are, but he continuously envies "normal" people who are not famous, not marked by a scar, not burdened with a tragic backstory and a terrifying destiny as The Chosen One. Just as Snape's envy was closely tied to his feelings for Lily Evans, Harry's envy of regular people is repeatedly associated with his feelings for Ginny Weasley:
- "It's been like . . . like something out of someone else's life, these last few weeks with you," said Harry. "But I can't . . . we can't . . .
- “She’s not an idiot, she knows it can’t happen, she’s not expecting us to-to end up married, or-”
As he said it, a vivid picture formed in Harry’s mind of Ginny in a white dress, marrying a tall, faceless, and unpleasant stranger.
In one spiraling moment it seemed to hit him: Her future was free and unencumbered, whereas his . . . he could see nothing but Voldemort ahead.
- Harry’s mind wandered a long way from the marquee, back to the afternoons spent alone with Ginny in lonely parts of the school grounds. They seemed so long ago; they had always seemed too good to be true, as though he had been stealing shining hours from a normal person’s life, a person without a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead
Both Severus Snape and Harry Potter overcome the sin of Envy at the same time, in that Underworld analogue, the Shrieking Shack. Snape, who never wanted "the boy" to know what he felt and did for Lily, who carefully hid his past from Harry by removing his memories before their Occlumency sessions, at the last gives all his memories to Harry. They come out of him like water, symbolic of Giving Drink to the Thirsty, and strikingly reminiscent of Albus Dumbledore re-living his own traumatic memories in the cave with Harry:
“Take . . . it. . . . Take . . . it. . . .”
Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was, but did not know what to do-
A flask, conjured from thin air, was thrust into his shaking hand by Hermione. Harry lifted the silvery substance into it with his wand. When the flask was full to the brim, and Snape looked as though there was no blood left in him, his grip on Harry’s robes slackened.
. . . The stone Pensieve lay in the cabinet where it had always been. Harry heaved it onto the desk and poured Snape’s memories into the wide basin with its runic markings around the edge. To escape into someone else’s head would be a blessed relief. . . . Nothing that even Snape had left him could be worse than his own thoughts. The memories swirled, silver white and strange, and without hesitating, with a feeling of reckless abandonment, as though this would assuage his torturing grief, Harry dived.
In this moment, Snape died (literally), and he also died in his persona of cowardly murderer. He was reborn as "probably the bravest man [Harry] ever knew" and hero of the resistance against Voldemort. Harry was also transformed by his new understanding of Snape and his self-knowledge at last that he was one of Voldemort's Horcruxes:
Dumbledore knew, as Voldemort knew, that Harry would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it. The images of Fred, Lupin, and Tonks lying dead in the Great Hall forced their way back into his mind’s eye, and for a moment he could hardly breathe. Death was impatient. . . .
Harry no longer envies normal people who do not bear his burdens. He fully accepts his duty of care for his supporters and helpers, and for all humankind. He is willing to die for them.
7 - Nagini the Snake
Voldemort made his last Horcrux after the events of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when his servant Peter Pettigrew returned to him and helped him regain a rudimentary bodily form. Not realizing that he already had six Horcruxes, he wanted to make one more so his soul would be split into "the most powerfully magical number"--seven. And, perhaps somewhat chastened by his near-death experience and the weakness of his current state, he did not have the confidence to wait in a possibly-vain attempt to obtain the Sword of Gryffindor or some other significant, high-status vessel.
Voldemort's choice of Nagini for his last Horcrux is emblematic of his sin of Pride. He probably did not particularly want to "honor" a relic of Godric Gryffindor with a bit of his soul. Instead, he chose a snake, symbol of his descent from Salazar Slytherin and reflective of his former pet, the Basilisk from the Chamber of Secrets. It is ironic that Nagini is eventually killed by the should-have-been Horcrux she replaced--Gryffindor's Sword--enabled by the venom from its killing of Voldemort's earlier serpent, the Basilisk. For Voldemort at this point, anything associated with himself and his heritage is worth more than any valuable or historic object he could have found. We now know--thanks to very disturbing information from the Fantastic Beasts movie series--that Voldemort was committing an even worse sin of Pride by enslaving and possessing Nagini, because she was formerly a person, a Maledicta with a "blood curse" to transform permanently into a serpent at some point in her life.
Voldemort uses the murder of the unfortunate Bertha Jorkins to make the Horcrux, after torturing her to strip her of all her knowledge and hidden memories. He immediately begins using and abusing Nagini in almost every possible way. He forces Peter Pettigrew to "milk" her, using her venom to sustain him in the rudimentary body he made for himself with Pettigrew's help. He also uses her venom, along with unicorn blood, to make the potion that restores him to his original body. In the madness of his pride, he uses the information he received from Bertha Jorkins to conceive and carry out his plan of resurrecting himself using Harry's blood, a fatal mistake on his part. Voldemort also uses Nagini to commit murders--the barely-averted death of Arthur Weasley and the death of Severus Snape--and to dispose of the bodies of people he has murdered with the Killing Curse such as Frank Bryce and Charity Burbage. Most disturbing of all, he has her possess the dead body of Bathilda Bagshot and lie in wait to lure and hold Harry in Godric's Hollow. Neville Longbottom can be seen as dispensing the Cardinal Virtue of Justice when he decapitates Nagini, destroying Voldemort's last Horcrux and freeing her from her evil enslavement.
It is fitting that Neville Longbottom is the person to destroy the Pride Horcrux because he has exhibited the Contrary Virtue of Humility since the very first book:
"There's no need to tell me I'm not brave enough to be in Gryffindor, Malfoy's already done that," Neville choked out.
Harry felt in the pocket of his robes and pulled out a Chocolate Frog, the very last one from the box Hermione had given him for Christmas. He gave it to Neville, who looked as though he might cry.
"You're worth twelve of Malfoy," Harry said.
Neville's humility continues to be a motif across the series. In Book 5 we see:
"I'm nobody," said Neville hurriedly.
"No you're not," said Ginny sharply.
Neville discovers his own courage and ability through participating in the rescue mission at the end of Book 5 and helping to lead the resistance to Snape and the Carrows at Hogwarts in Book 7, but his process in killing Nagini is that he volunteers to be humiliated by Voldemort before he breaks free of Voldemort's control and pulls the Sword from the Sorting Hat. Harry also exhibits the virtue of Humility in delegating the responsibility for killing the snake to Neville, just as Dumbledore did in delegating the responsibility for destroying Voldemort to Harry:
"You are very kind, Harry," said Dumbledore, now passing the tip of his wand over the deep cut he had made in his own arm, so that it healed instantly, just as Snape had healed Malfoy's wounds. "But your blood is worth more than mine.
...
"I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you."
Harry, of course, is a Seeker in looking for Nagini, finding her in the Shrieking Shack where he sees her kill Snape. The successful destruction of this Horcrux is associated with Dumbledore, who left the Sword to Harry in his will, with Ginny, whose attempt to steal the Sword results in Harry, Hermione, and Ron realizing that it can destroy Horcruxes due to its imbibing of Basilisk venom, and with Transfiguration because of Nagini's transformation from a woman to a snake. And Neville, of course, is a Leo like Harry, Ginny, and (as best we can deduce from the books) Dumbledore. Dumbledore's besetting sin seems to be Pride, and we learn a great deal in Book 7 of his struggles to overcome it. In his conversation with Harry in the waiting room of the Afterworld, he seems to have (mostly) succeeded:
“Can you forgive me?” he said. “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”
Harry shows that he has defeated his own sin of Pride when he repudiates the Elder Wand and drops the Resurrection Stone into the Forbidden Forest. He refuses the power of being Master of Death but he will take up the mantle of distributing Justice in his duties as the Head of the Auror Office.
To finish the story of Voldemort's soul, the last bit--the portion remaining in his body--is destroyed the same way our story began, by the rebound of Voldemort's own Avada Kedavra curse meant for Harry Potter. Of Voldemort's eight-part soul, five are killed by Basilisk venom (two by a Basilisk fang and three by the Sword that imbibed that venom), two are killed by his own Avada Kedavra curses, and one is killed by Fiendfyre. It is interesting to note that after he "kills" Tom Riddle's Diary at the age of twelve in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry never personally destroys another part of Voldemort's soul. The soul-bits are destroyed, in order, by Harry, Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, Vincent Crabbe, Voldemort, Neville Longbottom, and Voldemort again. You will not be shocked to find that the destroyers number seven in all.
Adding the seven Horcruxes to the Secret Key to the Hidden Truth of the Ultimate Mystery of Harry Potter and correcting the order of the last two Deadly Sins from Pride/Envy to Envy/Pride, we get the following final matrix:
Eeeeeek! I have bumped up against the size limit for a single LiveJournal entry. It is unimaginable that I would repeat Voldemort's mistake and destroy the magical power of a seven-part essay, so I will simply label this LJ entry as Epilogue Section A and the next entry as Epilogue Section B.
Notes:
(51) Note, AGAIN, the symbolic association of eggs with Harry/Ginny.
(52) Chapter XII, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien.
(53) I apologize for referring to a quote that is only in the movies but I couldn't resist.