Welcome to Harry Potter Theory. Today we're discussing Voldemort, Bellatrix Lestrange, Death Eaters, and Horcruxes. Let’s kick things off with a brief intro on Horcruxes:
“A Horcrux is created when a wizard takes an object and binds a piece of their soul to it. The purpose is immortality, with the logic going that as long as a piece of your soul survives within the object, then you can never truly die. It’s magic so Dark, so heinous, that it was kept a secret from most of the wizarding world. Yet despite many trying, there are only two known wizards to have discovered how to perform it: an Ancient Greek Dark wizard called Herpo the Foul, who created one Horcrux; and Voldemort, who mastered the spell and created seven. “
But, what I’ve always wondered is, why didn’t the death eaters follow in Voldemort’s footsteps and create horcruxes themselves? Surely Voldemort would have entrusted someone like Bellatrix with the knowledge of how to create one, wouldn’t he?
Dumbledore once described Tom Riddles school gang as “a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking glory, and the thuggish seeking a leader who could show them more refined cruelty”. It was these same students that are considered to be the forerunners to what-would-become the Deatheaters that we see later on in the books and films. Deatheaters are pure-blood radical supremacists that cast unforgivable curses without remorse, and torture muggles, half-bloods, and blood-traitors alike. Death eaters murder people willy nilly, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that they would be willing to MURDER to achieve immortality. Furthermore, the death eaters were hellbent on maintaining pure magical bloodlines in the wizarding community, and one very effective way of doing that would be to remain immortal AS a pure-blood. So, is it just that the Death Eaters were left in the dark by voldemort-unaware of what it was that he had achieved- or was it that the creation of a horcrux was just too imposing. After all, horcrux creation was even too dark to be properly mentioned in a book ABOUT the dark arts.
The following quote from Voldemort suggests that at least some of the death eaters knew SOMETHING about what he had done...