Why Horcruxes? (Harry Potter)

In a meta way, the introduction of horcruxes in the Harry Potter series is a means of explaining why Voldemort is the cockroach of evil wizards, the one who never seems to die completely.  Certainly, having horcruxes, with their own rules, artifacts, and infamy within the wizarding community, is a lot more articulate than “Because Magic,” and the task of finding/destroying them gives Harry and co. a real handy quest to go on in the final book.  But almost ever since we first heard about them, I’ve wondered what it is with Voldemort and horcruxes (spoilers.)

It can’t be denied – horcruxes are extremely powerful and useful, in a horrible way.  Through making a horcrux, a witch or wizard creates a safeguard against death.  This potent bit of dark magic allows them to tear off a piece of their soul and hide it somewhere, so that, if their body is destroyed, a part of them lives on and is able to come back.  However, this assurance comes at a high, terrible price:  the spell requires the caster to murder someone.  It’s in fact the very act of murder that causes the soul to tear in the first place, because the soul can’t go through something so reprehensible and remain intact.  This is why the wizarding world isn’t full of wizards who continually spring back up like weebles; the spell is such an atrocity that it seems many in the community won’t even speak of it.

But hey, what’s a little murder to Voldemort?  In The Half-Blood Prince, we learn that, as far back as his sixth year at Hogwarts, future genocidal dark lord Tom Riddle is found researching horcruxes, and already, his ambitions are set high – in a “purely academic” discussion with Professor Slughorn, he asks if there’s a limit to how many times the soul could be split, speculating that six would the ideal, most magically-strong number of horcruxes to create.  Slughorn tries to deny what’s happening in this conversation, but he’s horrified that Riddle would consider even a hypotheticalmagic situation that required him to kill six people.

That’s the thing, though.  Obviously, it’s obscene, just one of many red flags that Riddle is a dangerous psychopath, but why horcruxes specifically?  Even if Riddle doesn’t have particular qualms about killing, what makes a 16-year-old want a sevenfold magical insurance policy (six horcruxes, plus the part of his soul that remains in his body) against death?  I suppose we can posit that, already, he’s making his future plans to rise to absolute power and knows he’ll meet resistance.  Any aggressive power struggle is going to involve physical risk, and since his new world order involves wiping out Muggle-borns, he’ll be seen as an ethnic-cleansing monster.  Viewed this way, it’ll only be a matter of time before an army rises up to fight him or someone tries to assassinate him.  Is his obsession with horcruxes just sadistic forward-thinking?

That’s part of it, I’m sure – he knows he’ll be a target – but I think it goes deeper than that.  I think Voldemort is terrified of dying in any context, and I think he feels magic should allow him power over death.  As a child, when he first meets Dumbledore and learns about his mixed magical heritages, he immediately guesses that his absent father must have been a wizard and his deceased mother a Muggle.  “My mother can’t have been magic, or she wouldn’t have died,” he reasons.  Most people fear death, understandably, but Voldemort’s seems to go beyond that.  His first response to learning that he’s a wizard is to assume that it will automatically prevent him from dying, and when he realizes this isn’t true, he starts seeking a specific way to use magic to do just that, by any means necessary.