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Did Voldemort Die?
Does the popular anime, Full Metal Alchemist, hold the key to undertanding what happened to Voldemort in Harry Potter?
The first question that I have never been asked—it has probably been asked in a chatroom but no one has ever asked me—is, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” Not, “Why did Harry live?” but, “Why didn’t Voldemort die?” The killing curse rebounded, so he should have died. Why didn’t he? At the end of Goblet of Fire he says that one or more of the steps that he took enabled him to survive. You should be wondering what he did to make sure that he did not die—I will put it that way.
--JK Rowling at the Edinburgh Book Festival; Sunday 15 August 2004
Death As We Know It
Voldemort has had many chances to die, most infamously that one time he tried to kill baby Harry Potter. We have all been going along thinking, "Oh la la, but the curse hit him and didn't kill him. How odd that the curse didn't work." What if it did work?
The Gate in Full Metal Alchemist and the Veil in Harry Potter
In FMA, every person has a gate inside him or her. This gate, "The Gate," is the same gate that appears whenever an alchemist tries to revive someone from the dead. This Gate is the way to the other world, the one we go to when we die. If your mind is jumping excitedly around the veiled archway in the Department of Mysteries, then good job! You are making my connections.
The Gate in FMA is opened when the connection inside a person is broken. Every person has a connection between three things: mind, body, and soul. This connection is broken naturally when a person dies, but it can also be broken artificially. Dante, an alchemist in FMA, opened the Gate using a baby because the connection is "still weak." The baby did not die, which is fascinating because it shows that someone's Gate can open and they can survive.
In FMA, too, a person can return from the Gate if they are sent there without dying. It takes a lot of external energy, however, such as that acquired from another person's life force. Have you read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy? This has great connections to his concept of life force, too, but that is a discussion for another day.
Coming back to HP: In Order of the Phoenix, Sirius passes behind the veil and dies, according to Remus Lupin and JK Rowling. Luna Lovegood tells Harry Potter that the world of the dead is behind that ancient, veiled gate. Like other things in Harry Potter that seem to deal with alchemy, Sirius' death scene is vague and confusing. JK Rowling does not spell things out for us, but Sirius is somehow dead anyway.
Something similar to Sirius' death happens in FMA: Edward Elric, the older brother, is sent beyond the Gate by Dante (using a baby to open it, yes). Edward wakes up in another world, similar to his world except for the fact that alchemy does not exist there. He is in an alternative world that looks like ours during World War II. (This concept of parallel worlds, also, has similarities with Philip Pullman's trilogy. Ooo... I should write another comparison for that series.)
In this parallel world, Edward finds his father, who tells him that the only way to get back would be using an immense amount of energy. It seems unlikely that he will ever find a way back, especially without alchemy. By some twist of fate, however, a zeppelin falls near him and explodes. He is trapped in a fire and dying. Somehow he uses his own life to open the Gate and go back to his own world. I don't think Sirius Black will do that, but it makes you wonder.
Avada Kedabra
In my defence, the Latin is deliberately odd. Perfect Latin is not a very magical medium, is it? Does anyone know where avada kedavra came from? It is an ancient spell in Aramaic, and it is the original of abracadabra, which means “let the thing be destroyed”. Originally, it was used to cure illness and the “thing” was the illness, but I decided to make it the “thing” as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine.
--JK Rowling, at the Edinburgh Book Festival; 15 August 2004
We know what the Avada Kedavra curse does: It kills. Yes, true, but that is such a simple answer. Drowning kills, fires kill, bleeding kills. Each of those causes of death has a reason: Water is not death, but it can most certainly cause death. With science, we can study what happens to a drowned person and uncover the real reason of the death. Similarly, there must be a more detailed explanation for the deaths caused by Avada Kedavra.
So think. Let's think.
What do we know?
We know that the Avada Kedavra kills without leaving a trace. Usually. We have had this fact reinforced countless times: The opening chapter of the Goblet of Fire recounts how the Muggle forenstic team can not come up with a reason for the Riddle deaths. The Moody impostor tells Harry's class that the curse kills without a trace, before demostrating it on a spider. Cedric Diggory dies immediately, without coughing or an expression of pain or anything.
That means that Avada Kedavra unbalances a living being enough to kill it, but it does not affect the physical body. Usually. This means that the curse must affect another part of the mind-body-soul triangle. Usually. This is fascinating, considering what happens to Voldemort.
When Voldemort tries to kill baby Harry Potter and fails, the curse rebounds onto him. Just the curse rebounding is unusual, but we can attribute this to Lily Potter's sacrifice. She saves Harry with her own life, according to both Albus Dumbledore and Tom Riddle tell us.
But there is more to this.
When the curse goes back onto Voldemort, he does not die as we assume he should, but neither is he left unmarked and invincible. The Avada Kedavra takes Voldemort's body completely. Voldemort loses connection with his physical self and becomes the floating entity Vapormort.
I must continue to stress this: The Avada Kedavra curse turned Voldemort into Vapormort; it broke his mind-body-soul connection; his body disappeared.
And when you consider it this way, it all begins to makes sense: This must be how the curse kills.
Until now, the Harry Potter fandom has assumed that Avada Kedavra did not do what it was supposed to. I argue that it did. I argue that Avada Kedavra is supposed to break the mind-body-soul connection; death is merely a result (a side-effect) of that break.
Read carefully what Voldemort says in Goblet of Fire:
I miscalculated my friends, I admit it. My curse was deflected by the woman's foolish sacrifice and it rebounded upon myself. Aaah... pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit., less than the meanest ghost... but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know... I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal -- to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it apppeared that one or more of my experiments had worked... for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it.
--Voldemort, GoF, ch. 33, p. 653
Notice that Voldemort does not say or hint that Avada Kedavra behaved differently, but rather says that one of his experiments saved him. He does not say that Lily Potter did anything to his Death Curse except deflect it. Voldemort firmly believes that he himself is responsible for the odd happening. He must have done something to prepare for the break of his mind-body-soul connection.
Where Voldemort's Body Went
I have wondered about this pecularity for a while and now I think I have the answer.
When Avada Kedavra is used, the death gate (the veiled archway seen in the Department of Mysteries) takes something from the cursed person. Mind, body, or soul. I expect the thing that is supposed to be taken is the soul, or perhaps the life force itself. Maybe both, since that would differentiate it from the Dementor's Kiss, which leaves a person alive biologically.
Avada Kedavra usually leaves the physical body intact and the person dead. JK Rowling has gone through this curse many times and that has always been the case. Only in Voldemort's situation does it seem to be different. Something that should have stayed is gone, and something that should have gone has stayed. He is bodyless; he is alive when he should be dead.
Voldemort must have done something to preserve his life force. As things stand, it seems that he "traded" his body for his life force.
Alchemy usually works on the principle of equivalent exchange, but this principle does not hold when we are dealing with the Gate. Dante, an alchemist in FMA who preserved her life using the Philosopher's Stone, gives Edward a big lecture about that before she sends him across the Gate. Voldemort may have broken the rule of equivalent exchanged, too. In fact, his name implies that.
Vol de mort comes from French, the language JK Rowling studied in school.
Vol comes from the verb Voler, which can mean either "flight" or "theft."
Like in other Romance languages (e.g. Spanish), de means either "of" or "from."
Mort is simply "death."
Vol de mort, then, can mean "flight from death," "theft from death," "flight of death," or "theft of death."
Except for "flight of death," the other combinations all mean more or less the same thing. They do not prove, but they do lend a little extra credibility to this theory. They imply what I have said: Voldemort cheated the Death Curse.
One more analogy for the science people out there
For those of you who like chemistry (the modern cousin of alchemy), consider a how a chemical reaction changes a compound. The mind-body-soul triangle is a solid three-element compound. The life force is the lattice energy that holds it in place. It is not "part" of the compound in the same way the three elements are, but it is necessary for the compound to be solid. Avada Kedavra is like a catalyst for a chemical reaction that causes you to lose the structure of the compound. Death is the separation of the three elements (and thus the loss of the compound), not the catalyst that leads to it.
Something Extra: Which Gates Opened and the Voldemort-Harry Connection
If Voldemort's mind-body-soul connection was broken, what happened to baby Harry?
Harry's gate opens too, but his connection is not broken. In the final episodes of FMA, we learn that a baby's connections are still weak and can be manipulated without causing death. Lily Potter's sacrifice must have prevented them completely breaking, just as something Voldemort did prevented the loss of his life.
In FMA, when the Elric Brothers try to resurrect their mother, they see the Gate. Edward Elric, specifically, sees inside the Gate and catches a glimps of the secrets of life. He does not remember exactly what he sees, but he finds that his alchemy is very strong. In fact, he can perform alchemy without drawing up complicated transmutation circles. A perfect parallel in Harry Potter's world would be wandless magic.
I would note that Dumbledore the alchemist is a powerful wizard who has performed some wandless magic, but I cannot prove that this is a result of alchemy. The reasons might be switched:
It might be that because he is powerful, he has worked with alchemy. So, no, I will not mention Dumbledore.
Harry has shown a couple of instances of wandless magic. Some, when he was was a child, are manifestations of his developing magical powers. Others, such as the summoning of his wand at the end of Goblet of Fire and the "Lumos!" at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix (during the Dementor scene when he was looking for his dropped wand), are manifestations of wandless magic during times of extreme anxiety. Neither of these types of wandless magic is unusual in Harry's world, I think.
The unusual powers I am thinking about are not those instances of wandless magic, however, but the powers that Harry received from Voldemort. Instead of glimpsing the secrets of life like Edward does in FMA, baby Harry gained the secrets of Voldemort's powers.
This is my little addition to the "What happened to Voldemort" theory above. I do not have as much evidence to expound it, but it is a thought on why and how Harry Potter and Voldemort are connected.
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NEXT: Homunculus (coming soon!)
Back to FMA/HP Contents - Part of The Hogwarts Tower of Time
Created June 2005, Updated July 2005
