Cadmus Peverell was a pure-blood wizard from the Middle Ages and the second of the three legendary Peverell Brothers. He is best known from the wizarding fairy tale, The Tale of the Three Brothers, as the original owner of the Resurrection Stone, one of the three Deathly Hallows. Described as an arrogant man, Cadmus sought to humiliate Death by bringing a loved one back from the grave. His story serves as a cautionary tale about the folly of defying the natural order of life and death. He is a direct ancestor of the House of Gaunt and, consequently, Lord Voldemort.
According to the legend recounted by Xenophilius Lovegood and written in The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Cadmus and his two brothers, Antioch Peverell and Ignotus Peverell, were powerful wizards who once “cheated Death” by magically creating a bridge to cross a treacherous river. An angered Death pretended to congratulate them and offered each a prize for their cleverness. Cadmus, an “arrogant man,” decided he wanted to humiliate Death still further and asked for the power to recall others from the grave. Death picked up a stone from the riverbank, gave it to Cadmus, and told him it would have the power to bring back the dead. This became known as the Resurrection Stone. Cadmus returned home and used the Stone to call back the spirit of the woman he had once hoped to marry, who had died an untimely death. She appeared before him, but she was sad, cold, and separated from him by a “veil.” She did not truly belong in the mortal world and suffered greatly. Seeing her misery, Cadmus was driven mad with hopeless longing. Unable to truly be with her, he killed himself to properly join her in the afterlife. Albus Dumbledore later theorized to Harry Potter that the Peverell brothers were not met by a literal personification of Death, but were instead “unusually gifted and dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating” the Deathly Hallows themselves. In this interpretation, Cadmus was the brilliant but tragic creator of the Resurrection Stone.
The books provide no physical description of Cadmus Peverell. His personality, as described in The Tale of the Three Brothers, is primarily defined by his arrogance. His desire was not simply to see his lost love again, but to possess a power that would make him a “master of Death”. This pride led to his tragic downfall. He was also clearly a man ruled by deep-seated grief and an inability to accept loss, which ultimately consumed him.