10 Things You Didn't Know About Harry Potter's Scar

1. It's A Passageway For Voldemort's Soul

Harry Potter Lord Voldemort Deathly Hallows
Warner Bros.

It's been established that Harry's scar hurts when Voldemort is nearby (or when he feels a strong emotion), but why? Is it just like a cut or a burn would hurt any of us? What, specifically, is causing that pain?

The answer is... quite horrifying.

The piece of Voldemort's soul that lives within Harry does not want to be there. It wants to be closer to the master soul, and it wants to rejoin the master soul - the piece that remains within Voldemort. So, whenever Harry feels Voldemort's presence (physical or mental) the piece of soul tries to escape his body, using the lightning scar as an exit point. This, in turn, causes the pain in Harry's forehead.

Rowling herself explained this concept in a 2007 interview with The Leaky Cauldron:

"Well, of course the pain he feels [in his scar] whenever Voldemort's particularly active is this piece of soul seeking to rejoin the master soul. When his scar is hurting him so much, that's not scar tissue hurting him. That's this piece of soul really wanting to get back out the way it entered. It really wants to... it entered this boy's body through a wound, and it wants to rejoin the master. So when Voldemort's near him, when he's particularly active, this connection, it was always there. That's what I always imagined this pain was."

So there you go. Whenever Harry screams in pain, he's essentially giving birth to a portion of Voldemort's soul, through a small cut on his forehead. Try and get that image out of your mind...

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Know any other cool tidbits about Harry Potter's scar? Let us know in the comments section!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!