WHAT TECHNOLOGY IS THE MUGGLE VERSION OF THE HORCRUX?

It was Voldemort’s party piece. He split his soul, and hid fragments of it in objects outside his body. Then, even if his body was attacked or destroyed, he could not die, as part of his soul was transcended; it stayed earthbound and undamaged. The word used for a magical object in which a person has concealed part of their soul in this way is a horcrux. And it’s a fantastic vehicle of transcendence.

To create a horcrux, a wizard had to commit calculated murder. The act of murder would damage the soul of the wizard. And that damage could be used to cast a spell, which would rip off a damaged fragment of the soul and encase it in an object. If the wizard were later killed, he would transcend death, living on in a non-corporeal form. But there were also ways of re-possessing a physical body.

Voldemort pushed his soul to the limit in creating his seven horcruxes. It rendered his soul volatile, and liable to break apart if he was killed. The process began when he created a horcrux during what was his fifth year at Hogwarts. Horcruxes were originally thought of as being singular, but Voldemort created seven, presumably in the hope that seven would make him stronger than just one.

In fact, as in fantasy, humans have long sought to transcend our reality into some kind of new existence. Historically, the idea of transcendence has mostly been within the domain of faith. But, increasingly, the notion grew that science may somehow be able to move us beyond our physical limitations. The technology of transcendence may be just around the corner.

Transcendence and Elec-trickery

Einstein once remarked, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” When a fascination with electricity crackled into life, the notion of transcendence swiftly sparked into being. Benjamin Franklin had brought electricity down to Earth through the lightning conductor. Michael Faraday conjured a cocktail of electricity and magnetism in the dynamo. And the exposed sciatic nerve of a frog’s leg kicked Luigi Galvani into the discovery of bioelectricity.

Yet some felt there was darker magic still. The first science to materialize after Newton, electricity had a long and legendary history. From ancient times, people had treasured the doctrine of affinities. The attraction of amber illustrated the very idea of virtue dwelling within a special substance. As if through magic, the magnet’s enchanting property of virtue was bestowed on other objects through touch alone. The possibilities seemed endless.

Into this climate came Mary Shelley and her epoch-making Frankenstein. In June 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her intended, Percy Bysshe Shelley, had visited Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. That year without a summer, it had seemed the entire planet was frozen in a volcanic winter triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora the previous year. Kept indoors by the incessant weather, the romantics turned to conversation. Their reading matter was mostly fantasy, including Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German ghost stories that talked of animating life. One experiment credited to Erasmus Darwin reported that a piece of vermicelli, preserved in a glass case, had begun to move with voluntary motion. Mary later fell into a waking nightmare in which a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” haunted her. The nightmare was the seed of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is essentially a tale of transcendence. Victor Frankenstein is the Faust of the New Philosophy. The subtitle of the novel, The Modern Prometheus, also compares with Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods for profit. Victor’s dream is unlimited power through science, a power brought about by human, not supernatural, agency. Victor rejects the dark arts of old world alchemists Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, and Cornelius Agrippa, and turns to face the future. He becomes obsessed with the essence of life. He manages to unravel the agency through which dead matter may be given the vital spring of life. Intending his creation to be beautiful, Victor builds a mechanically sound but grotesque creature using cadaver spares from charnel-houses. Only when inspired by the new unbridled science, is he gifted this terrible triumph of creation.

With the story of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley tapped into the excitement about electricity at the time. Throughout Europe there was a thrill about the use of this new force, and feverish research on the potential of electricity to sustain, create, and even transcend life itself. The potency of this new power is evident in Victor Frankenstein’s words about the new science and its wizards, “They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air that we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows.”

Darwin Among the Machines

The first promise of electricity was never realized. But the new technology of transcendence is machine intelligence. Darwin’s theories of evolution were first taken into the machine world by British novelist Samuel Butler. In his 1872 book, Erewhon (an anagram of the word nowhere), the hero travels to a future society that has banned technological evolution. They feared that machines would evolve, become intelligent and aware, and enslave their human masters.

“Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organized may it not become in another 100,000 years? Or in 20,000? For man at present believes that his interest lies in that direction; he spends an incalculable amount of labor and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better; he has already succeeded in effecting much that at one time appeared impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation.” —Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The perils of allowing machines to think were therefore present from the very early days of fantasy fiction. And yet, scholars now think that humans might actually become the machines. Once artificial intelligence is advanced enough, engineers will be able to upload human consciousness to a machine. The assumption is that consciousness can somehow be replicated into a series of brain emulations, and so the person concerned can be encapsulated in the same way a soul would be encased within a horcrux.

If this happened to you, you would be transcended. Your new sleeve or body could be robot or android, or you could simply live in virtual reality. You would think and act a thousand times faster, and be very much fitter for the future. In fact, like Voldemort, why stop at one? If your consciousness can be uploaded, why not decant yourself into seven different sleeves, in the same way Voldemort created his seven horcruxes?

How would it feel, to be transcended? Perhaps we can try answer that question by considering Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the 1994 movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Robert De Niro. Unlike the novel, Brannagh has Victor Frankenstein reanimate the murdered Elizabeth, the love of his life. It is a strangely moving, yet disturbing and grotesque sequence in the film where Frankenstein’s reanimated dead love realizes the unnatural and utterly horrific thing he’s done. The reanimated Elizabeth goes berserk, alienated by the monstrous state of limbo in which she finds herself. Maybe this is what it would be like, to be transcended.