Lecture #10: Harry Potter I

Course: Fantasy & Religion

Lecture #10: Harry Potter I

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J. K. Rowling Biography

J.K. Rowing was born in Chipping Sudbury, July 31st, 1965. Her childhood was generally happy. She studied at St. Michael’s Primary School in Gloucestershire, before moving to Chepstow, South Wales at the age of nine.

From an early age, J.K. Rowing had the ambition to be a writer. She often tried her hand at writing, although little came from her early efforts. Age six she wrote a book about a rabbit with measles. After her mother praised her effort, Rowling replied ‘well get it published then.” She admits it was a ‘bit of an odd thing for a child of six to think. I don’t Know where it came from.”

In her own autobiography, she remembers with great fondness, when her good friend Sean became the first person to give her the confidence that one day she would be able to make a very good writer.

“He was also the only person who thought I was bound to be a success at it, which meant much more to me than I ever told him at the time”

After finishing school, her parents encouraged her to study French at the University of Exeter. She slightly regretted choosing French, saying she would have preferred to study English. However, it was her parents wish that she study something “more useful” than English.

After having spent a year in Paris, J.K. Rowling graduated from university and took various jobs in London. One of her favorite jobs was working for Amnesty International; the charity, which campaigns against human rights abuses throughout the world. Amnesty International, is one of the many charities, which J.K. Rowling has generously supported since she attained a newfound wealth.

It was also in December of 1990 that J.K. Rowling lost her mother, who died of Multiple Sclerosis. J.K. Rowing was very close to her might, and she felt the loss deeply. Her own loss sage an added poignancy to the death of Harry Potter’s mother in her book. She says her favorite scene in the Philosopher’s Stone is, the Mirror of Erised, where Harry sees her parents in the mirror. Eventually, she finished her first copy of the Philosopher’s Stone, and sent it off to various agents. She found an agent, Christopher, who spent over a year trying to get a publisher. It was rejected by 12 major publishing houses. But, eventually, a quite small publisher, Bloomsbury agreed to take the book on. The editor Barry Cunningham also agreed to pay her an advance of L1500. The decision to take on the book was, in large part due to his eight-year-old daughter's enthusiastic reception of the first chapter (However. She was advised to continue her training as a teacher because she was told writers of children’s books don’t tend to get very well paid.

Within a few weeks of publication, (1996) book sales really started to take off. The initial print run was of only 1,000 - 500 of which went to libraries.

First editions are now said to be worth up to L25,000 each. She also received a grant from the Scottish arts council, which enabled her to write full time. After the books initial success in the UK an American company Scholastic agreed to pay a remarkable L100,000 for the rights to publish in America. In 1998 Warner Bros secured the firm rights to the books, giving a seven-figure sum. The films have magnified the success of the books, making Harry Potter into one of the most recognizable media products.

Under the close guidance of J.K. Rowling, the films have sought to stay close to the original plot; also at J.K. Rowling’s request all the actors are British and are filmed in Britain.

On the 22st December 2006, J.K. Rowling finished her final book of the Harry Potter Series-“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. The book was released in July 2007, becoming one of the fastest selling books of all time. J.K. Rowling has said the book is her favorite, and it makes her both happy and sad. She has said she will continue writing but there is little chance of continuing the Harry Potter Series. She has published a dictionary of things related to Hogwarts and Harry Potter, that were never published in other books.

Alchemy is so misunderstood that to say the Harry Potter books are built on alchemical structures and imagery is, to many readers, not much different from saying the books aren’t worth reading or that they are dangerous to read.

One of the first lessons in chemistry class is that it grew out of the pseudoscience, alchemy whose goa! was to create the “philosopher’s stone” that could turn lead into gold and bestow immortality on the alchemist.

What alchemy is really about is turning something common into something special. It was about a spiritual path within the revealed religions to return fallen man io his Edenic perfection. Rowling uses alchemy in Harry Potter as a metaphor for change and as a resource for powerful imagery.

All the great writers, to some degree, use alchemical imagery. Shakespeare’s plays are written on alchemical themes. In a proper tragedy, the audience identifies with the hero in his/her agony and shares in in their passion. the audience experiences their “hero’s journey” and are ‘purified’ along with the actors on stage or in a book.

The idea that reading was entertainment and diversion is a new idea, actually only the past 70 or 80 years. The rule in traditional cultures, and even in cultures such as ours, is that stories, in whatever form, are meant to instruct and change us.

What is Alchemy?

Before getting into how Rowling uses alchemy, I want to first explain where it comes from and what it is.

The whole tradition, including alchemy, comes from Egypt and is known as the Hermetic tradition. It includes not only alchemy, but numerology, Gnosticism and even astrology.

From Egypt there have survived 18 tractates generally known as the corpus Hermeticum. These scriptures of a small, mystic sect which honored the Egyptian God Thoth identified with the Greek god Hermes, under the title Trismegistos’ or “thrice greatest’. They date from the 1st century AD and bring together wisdom from Egypt, Greece and Asia.

All are concerned to declare a divine revelation. Initiation begins with a call to repentance: Then comes personal instruction so the initiate was required to turn away from ignorance, grief, intemperance, sensuality, injustice, avarice, folly, envy, deceit, anger, impetuosity and malice and embrace knowledge of God with joy, self-control, continence, righteousness, generosity, truth, goodness, life and light.

This involved ascetic discipline and self-discipline.

From this the initiate passed to silent meditation in solitude and then the climax was an ecstatic vision of Light, delightful and joyous. This light is described as “the first God” and the knowledge of God is the human’s salvation. By this alone can a soul become good. It is a re-birth and a sense of identity with a creation. Earth, air, fire and water, as well as plants and animals. More, it is to enter into God.

ALCHEMY, wrote Pierre-Jean Fabre in 1636, is not merely an art or science to teach metallic translations, so much as a true and solid science that teaches how to know the center of ail things, which in the divine language is called the Spirit of Life.”

Essential to alchemy is the understanding of “correspondences’ between the material and the spiritual. “As above, so below.”

Thus, the alchemist was seeking under suitable astrological conditions to bring together primary matter and the primary agent (also called secret fire.)

First, to produce a pure mercurial substance, then an incombustible Sulphur and finally the ‘philosopher’s stone’, which had the power of transmuting base metals into gold, but whose discovery was also a necessary part of the realization of the human’s full faculties, and a precondition of the discovery of the panacea, the elixir of life, which would transmute the human body into an incorporate body of light, so securing for the Adept omniscience, omnipotence and the joy of divine love.

Thus, the human being is the true subject of the alchemist’s art. The three principles, Sulpher of his earthly pari, Salt of the intellect and above all, Mercury, the mercury cf the wise, “snowy splendor’, the spark of the soul, the mystical spirit, must be brought together in the Azoth or Philosopher’s Egg set within the Cauldron, which is the human itself.

This is done by the fire of love. than the transmutation of natural into spiritual human may begin.

The first stage of the process is Blackness, the stage of purgation.

The second stage is whiteness, the stage of illumination.

The third stage, or climax, is redness, the color of alchemical gold, and is also called the marriage of Luna and Sol, the human and the divine, the finite with the infinite.

There are many books, including “Lord of the Rings”, that are designed to trigger a powerful experience, but the difference is that Rowling uses these images and symbols extensively and deliberately to great effect. She even talks about it in a 1998 interview. She says:

“I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist. ..... To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy.. . I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic.”

Alchemy appears everywhere in HP. In book titles, the first book was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone out an American editor aidn't think the word philosophy in the title would sell so changed it for American audiences to “sorcerer’s stone”. This obscured the main point of Rowling’s plan and created a real problem with right wing Christian’s.

The characters are alchemical. Albus Dumbledore is an alchemist of renown and a partner to a real famous alchemist, Nicolas Flamel, who was an actual famous alchemist who lived in 14th century Paris. Hermione Granger’s name is the feminine form of Hermes, who, besides being tneTt3messenger of the gods, was also the name of the great alchemist Hermes Trismegistos, in whose name countless alchemical works were written thru the centuries. Even Harry’s father, James, was named for the patron saint of alchemists and his mother, Lily, a symbol for the second purifying stage of the alchemical work.

AS we have already discussed, the alchemical work is about changing the soul from lead to gold, from jailing to virtue. This is evident in each book in Harry’s transformations that take place in each book.

In Philosopher’s stone the orphaned Harry lives in fear of his aunt and uncle w/o any knowledge of who he is. By the books end, he shows himself a champion of remarkable courage and has become reconciled to his parents’ death and to his own destiny as a wizard.

In Chamber of Secrets, he begins the cook as a prisoner of the Dursleys and his own self-doubts and self-pity. At the heroic finish, he risks nis own life to liberate Ginny (read Virgin) and vanquish the villain who is an incarnation of selfishness and seif-importance.

In Prisoner of Azkaban he begins by blowing up his Aunt Marge in anger. In the end, he rescues the man who betrayed his parents to Voldemort by offering his own life as a shield to him. He goes from unforgiving judgment to selfless mercy in a year in the 3rd book.

In Goblet of Fire he is initially consumed by worry of what others think of him and by books end, after trials with his best friend, a dragon, and other problems, he is able to shrug of a front-page hatchet job in wizarding world’s main newspaper, “the Daily Prophet”

In The Order of the Phoenix, Harry is consumed by a desire for news from anywhere. At the end, he is aware of his need to turn inward and to discover and strengthen his inner life. He knows that his dependence on the outer world and its events was his point of vulnerability which Voldemort used to manipulate him and that this weakness caused his godfathers death.

When Harry comes onto the scene in Half-blood prince, he is half asleep as he waits for Dumbledore to come jor him. He is even worried about Dumbledore’s concern for him. by the end he is ready to take on the mission that Dumbledore has given him even though the headmaster is dead.

As with the hero’s journey finale in Deathly Hallows, Harry’s alchemical transformation in that book is the stunning ending to which all previous transformations turned out to be only pointers or foreshadowing.

At books beginning, Harry’s faith in Dumbledore is all but broken by Rita Skeeier’s revelations about him. Harry chooses to believe in Dumbledore. After Dobby’s death, despite his doubts and what he has learned, Harry realizes that the search for horcruxes which will bring Lord Voldemort’s special protection from death to an end is his goal rather than the power of the deathly hallows. This empowers Harry’s great change into the “Christ” figure who rises from King’s Cross after being ‘killed’ by Voldemort.

Harry’s final transformation from doubter to believer and to vanquisher of both his internal failings and the external evil of Voldemort completes the seven-stage alchemical work.

The design of each of the books parallels the alchemical work. Harry’s two closest friends, Ron, the red headed passionate boy and Hermione Granger, the brilliant, cool young woman. Ron represents sulfur and Hermine (HG = symbol for) mercury. Harry’s friendship with these two transform him from lead into gold. Sulfur and Mercury are often called the “quarreling couple” an apt idea for Ron and Hermione.

We have already discussed the hero’s journey in each book, but each book also mirrors the alchemical transformation, the three stages of the journey.

Characters are named for these stages. The first stage, called the nigredo, or b lack stage. The book Order of the Phoenix is the black stage of the whole series and Sirius Black is the feature3d and it ends with his death.

The second stage is purification, usually called the albedo or white work. When matter reaches this stage, it has become pure and spotless, brilliant white. Albus Dumbledore (Albus, is Latin for White) is named for this stage. Other symbols for the stage include the moon (Luna, one of Harry’s friends), and a lily, the name of Harry’s mother. This book, The Half Blood Prince ends with Dumbledore’s death.

The last stage is the recongealing or perfection called the red stage. Rubeus (Latin for red) Hagrid is named for this stage. The red lion is the symbol Deathly Hollows is the big crucible finish to the series. Rubeus Hagrid doesn’t die by Fred Weasley, a red head, does as do many others in battle.

Each of the books in the series follows the alchemical three stages. The black work is the work done in Harry at the Dursley’s and in Hogwarts classroom by Snape, the teacher that seems io hate him.

The white work, or purification occurs under the watchful eye of Albus Dumbledore during Harry’s time at Hogwarts.

The red work is always in the climactic scene and is always underground or in a graveyard, in which Harry dies a figurative death and is saved by love in the presence of some Christological symbol.

The resurrection at story’s end each year if the culmination of that year’s cycle and transformation. The cycle closes with congratulations and explanations from the master alchemist, Dumbledore, and a return to the Dursleys for another trip thru the cycle. Of course, the last book ends with Harry actually dying and rising and ends his journey to perfection.

CONCLUSION:

The reason good authors use these alchemical images Is because the three stages of the alchemical process and the whole “Great Work” of alchemy parallels the spiritual stages of transformation common to all the world’s great religions.

Great writers in the English tradition have used alchemical imagery from the 16th to the present century because it works in grabbing hold of the readers hearts and bringing them to the imaginative place of transformation.

A big piece of this worldwide phenomenon springs from people’s individual and collective response, largely unconscious, to Rowling’s traditional alchemical artistry and the spiritual message it carries. Themes in Harry Potter

THEMES IN HARRY POTTER

How do you decide if a book is worth reading? in these books we find the answer to four principal questions.

In the Harry Potter books, it is prejudice that is the problem. In this regard these are not “kids’ books.’ The message of HP is clear: poisonous prejudice is everywhere, and only constant vigilance and resistance to the regime cf ideas (whose government and media authorities foster and codify this hatred) will free us of it.

The HP books encourage readers to take a step back from the world and recognize what an unloving place it is. This step back is the first necessary step to any spiritual lite. The ladder of divine ascent in every revealed tradition requires recognizing the fallen world for what it is.

It is in Order of the phoenix we find out now inbred and insular the leading magical families have become over the generations and how their narrow belief in eugenics or ‘good breeding’ have taken them into the dark lord’s service. Thus, they have divided their world into pure breeds and mud bloods, those who are witches but are not pure. These have muggle, i.e. human, parents. Hermione Granger is one of these. Itis the same thinking that created Nazi camps and soviet gulags.ad Themes in Harry Potier

What all these characters learn is that none are either all good or all bad. The revelation for her is that we readers are the prejudiced ones. Every novel ends with a surprise that all were not what they seemed.

These books are read and re-read because they offer the right answer. that answer is LOVE. prejudice is a failure in love. We recognize in these stories the desire to see what makes us feel best about ourselves even if it means being unkind or dismissive of others.

Harry has to overcome his prejudice of Severus Snape and accept that it was Severus love for Harry’s mother, Lily, that has kept him alive all these years. Harry was able to sacrifice himself in love for his friends because he has the darkness within himself.

That love as the solution to prejudice so dominates the story line of all these books makes it in the tradition of the Inklings, and Christian literature in general.

DEATH AS HER MAIN THEME.

Rowling lost her mother to MS in 1990, the same year she conceived of the Harry Potter books. She said, “In fact, death and bereavement and what death means.. .is one of the central themes of all seven books.”

Every book develops the theme of love trumping death. However, it is in the first book that she has Dumbledore explain about love and death.

“Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign. . . to have been loved so deeply even the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. lt is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”

Thus, in the opening book, Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling offers explicit teaching of what death is and the importance of the love of those departed that continues to protect us even in their absence. Especially when this love was a sacrificial love.

This is the major difference between Voldemort and Harry. Voldemort, fearing death pursues personal immortality by putting parts of his Own soul into physical objects so if he dies, ne still continues to live. These Horcruxes have been created by killing people. this separates him from any love of others as he invests in material things to survive. Fleeing human death, Voldemort becomes its nonliving, inhuman incarnation.

In contrast, when given Dumbledore’s choice between what is good and what is easy, Harry always chooses the good even though it means the probable loss of his physical life. He does so at the moment of crises in every book.

The war between the forces of good and evil that defines the final three novels of the series is largely between those who think physical life (existence) and advantage or power are the greatest goods and those who think what gives life meaning (the soul’s ability to love and laugh) is more real and important than just what is visible.

So, Rowling is saying that physical death is not the greatest evil but living a soulless existence in fear of death is the true death of the human spirit and the greater evil.

Thus, Harry in the final book, when Severus Snapes, memories reveal that he must die if Voldemort is to be defeated and that he must die without fighting back. Harry walks into the forbidden Forest and lays down his life voluntarily accompanied by his mother and father.

Thus, Harry understood what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. The difference between being dragged into battle to face death and walking into the arena with head held high.

To defeat the dark lord Harry has to transcend his ego concerns, even his inherited prejudices and doubts. That is, He has a destiny, but his freewill choices are what will make the difference between his realizing his prophesied end or not.

Harry Potter/Christian Story

ln her interview with Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling acknowledged that the Harry Potter series had a deep and intentional connection to Christianity. She said, “There is a lot of Christian imagery in the books. That’s undeniable. And certainly, in Hallows [it is] very clear....That’s an allusion to a belief system in which | was raised.”

In a conversation between J.K Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe, Rowling reveals that Albus Dumbledore is “John the Baptist to Harry’s Christ.” This is echoed in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price where Dumbledore says of Harry, “But your blood is worth more than mine.”

When we read the Gospel of Mark, we send to see a John who might be seen was coaching Jesus, much in the manner Dumbledore coaches Harry. It is only after he has gone to see John that Jesus decides to go into the desert and face temptation. I think Rowling is saying something very powerful inter assertion that it is Dumbledore-that is. John the Harry will have to die.

One of the most engaging magical elements of Hogwarts castle is the Room for Requirement. It is a room that magically and intuitively becomes whatever the entrant needs it to be. But the Room has another name; the Room of Hidden Things. When the room becomes the Room of Hidden Things, therein rest the “objects hidden by generations of Hogwarts inhabitants” (See Half-Blood Prince p. 526). When a student comes to hide something, he or she sees every other object that has ever been hidden in the Room. So why would the room of Requirement do something that is not required?

Perhaps it actually is doing something that is required-but what? The Room makes it inescapably clear that | am not alone in my desire to hide indiscretions and bad decisions. The room does not provide easy mercy or undeserved reassurance. It does, however, allow the student who may be at his most lonely and isolated moment to see that he is not, in fact the only one.

He heard the authority of his own voice, the conviction, the voice of purpose that had come. To him as he dug Dobby’s grave” (Deathly Hallows, p. 482).

The younger Harry who had complained about being left to. “Grope in the darkness” without a plan from Dumbledore is a Harry who is still in the last stages of his childhood reliance on guidance. The later Harry, the one who speaks with his own voice, with the voice of purpose and conviction is no longer a child. We must remember that Harry dug Dobby’s grave by hand.

“,..he had set to work, alone, digging the grave...He dug with a kind of fury...On Harry dug, deeper and deeper into the hard, cold earth, subsuming his grief in sweat...understanding blossomed in the darkness....He felt as though he had been slapped awake...Deeper and deeper Harry sank into the grave...Harry lost rack of time....Harry placed the elf into the grave, arranged his tiny limbs so that he might have been resting, then. Climbed out” (Deathly Hallows, pp. 478-80).

Dobby is not the only one who goes into this grave., Harry descends into the “hard, cold earth” as well. There is something of Harry that is buried along with the elf. Yet, even as one part of Harry dies, another part rises.

In Mark 124:35, Jesus asks his Father to “Take this cup from me”. Jesus is “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. We find this scene to be at the center of what it means to think about Christianity. Here we get a Jesus who seems so real and human that it is hard to believe that the text is 2,000 years old. A Jesus who is scared and overwhelmed is a Jesus we can relate to, it is in this scene that we meet, perhaps for the first time, a Jesus who feels fully human to us.

J.K. Rowling built seven beautiful novels that lead us up to the desperately reluctant Harry walking into the Forbidden Forest to face the mania of Tom Riddle. Rowling’s description of Harry’s walk into the woods juxtaposes Harry’s incredible desire to hold only life against his determination to face his calling and responsibility. Rowling gives us no easy superman no confident champion of courage. She gives us a Harry who feels this crazy struggle the way we imagine we would - terrified, despairing, and a hair’s breach from quitting. She gives us a Harry who makes it easy to imagine what all this might feel like if it were happening to us. Rowling’s Jesus does not walk into the woods for us, not in place of us, but as us.

Harry Potter is followed by house-elves and goblins-not disciples-but for the sharp-eyed reader, the biblical parallels are striking. Author J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books have always, in fact, dealt explicitly with religious themes and questions, but until “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” they have never quoted any specific religion.

“To me the religious parallels have always been obvious,” she said. But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because | though it might show people who just wanted to story where we were going.”

Indeed, a its most simplistic, Harry’s final tale can in some respects be boiled down to a resurrections story, with Harry venturing to a heavenly way station of sorts after getting hit with a killing curse in Chapter 35, only to shortly return.

But if she was worried about tipping her hand narratively in the early books, she clearly wasn’t by the time Harry first sees his parents’ graves in Chapter 216 of “Deadly Hallows,” tile ‘Godric’s Hollow.” On his parents’ tombstone he reads the quote “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” while on another tombstone (that of Dumbledore’s mother and sister) he reads “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”

While Rowling said that “Hogwarts is a multifaith school” these quotes of course, are distinctly Christian. The second is a direct quote of Jesus from Matthew 6:21, the first from 1 Corinthians 15:26. As Hermione tells Harry shortly after he sees the graves his parents’ message means “living beyond death. Living after death.” It is one of the central foundations of resurrection theology.

Which makes it a perfect fit for Harry, said Rowling, who was talking about those quotes for the very first time.

They’re very British books, so on a very practical note Harry was going to find biblical quotations on tombstones.” Rowling explained. “But | think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones at Godric’s Hollow, they sum up-they almost epitomize the whole series.”

As the one to bring together all three magical Deathly Hallows, Harry, in fact, becomes the “Master of Death” by novel’s end, able to bring back the spirits of his parents, his godfather, Sirius Black and his old teacher Remus Lupin. It a conclusion that ends Harry’s three=book-long struggle over questions about the afterlife which begins when Sirius falls through veil connecting this world and the net at the end of “Order of the Phoenix.”

That, by the author’s own acknowledgement, “Harry Potter” deals extensively with Christian themes may be somewhat ironic, considering that many Christian leaders have denounced the series for glamorizing witchcraft.

For her part, Rowling said she’s proud to be on numerous banned-book lists. As for the protests of some believers? Well, she doesn’t take them a s gospel. “I go to church myself,” she declared, “I don’t take any responsibility for the lunatic fringes of my own religion.”