Harry Potter's Bookshelf (24 page)

There is Neville Longbottom, too. In
Sorcerer’s Stone
, Dumbledore awards Gryffindor House the five points it needs to overcome Slytherin, because of Neville’s courage. In
Deathly Hallows
, of course, it is Neville’s courage and faith in the face of almost certain death that brings him the Sword of Gryffindor to destroy the Nagini, the last Horcrux.

And remember Harry’s “resurrection” in
Sorcerer’s Stone
? He doesn’t quite get to King’s Cross in his first year, but it does take him
three days
to return to life. No doubt, Dumbledore “chuckled immoderately” then on the Chosen One’s rising on the third day.

The hero’s journey in
Harry Potter
, especially the journey he starts and finishes in
Deathly Hallows,
which also completes the circle and finds the center and crossing point of the whole series, explains in large part why we love the books and why Voldemort couldn’t defeat Harry in the end. Having achieved the Absolute and Transcendent unity and whole, the origin of life, Harry could not be defeated by the peripheral fraction of a man fearing death that Voldemort had become.

And we, having experienced Harry’s journey alongside him, had some imaginative experience of our own hope of defeating death. No wonder we read and reread these books! Privet Drive to King’s Cross is the journey from a “private” or ego-driven conception of self to the illuminating experience of the point defining the circle, the Cross, and everything in existence. Sacrificing ourselves in love for our friends alongside Harry, we perceive and experience the eternal verities as much as our spiritual capacity allows.

I certainly understand if you’re skeptical about the anagogical meaning of the circle and Harry’s hero’s journey. Harry’s becoming the mythic defining point and Creative Principle has to seem a bit of a stretch for what almost all of us think of as a series of entertaining stories for children. I’m satisfied if at this point you’re just willing to suspend your disbelief in a larger meaning to the stories, a spiritual meaning to which readers respond.

Think back to the Ravenclaw door’s questions and the answers of Luna and Professor McGonagall, though, if you just cannot believe that Ms. Rowling put these metaphysical meanings of the circle in her story as did Homer, Virgil, and Dante, and, more recently, Frances Hodgson Burnett and E. Nesbit.

The eagle in the door asks Luna, “Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?” Right away, we have to acknowledge the wizarding equivalent of the chicken-and-egg joke—and that Ms. Rowling’s version involves a phoenix, a symbol of Christ the Center, and flame, the word she uses to describe the light coming from the center of Voldemort’s and Harry’s last stand. Think Gubraithian Fire, the nonconsuming flame in
Order of the Phoenix
’s allegory-within-the-story, “Hagrid’s Tale,” and the lights of Mounts Sinai and Tabor.

Luna’s answer—“A circle has no beginning”—is as illuminating. A circle has no start or finish in itself but is defined by an origin that cannot be seen—the “no beginning,” which is the sacred center. The door congratulates her on her “reasoning” because she has put her finger on the
Logos
that is the fount of all knowledge and reason. There is nothing rational per se in her symbolic answer.

The door later asks McGonagall “Where do Vanished objects go?” Her answer—“Into nonbeing, which is to say, everything”—is, again, to point to the Divine Center that cannot be known in itself that St. Bonaventure says is everywhere and the origin of everything existent. The door compliments the professor on her “phrasing” because the Word that is beyond being and the unity of existence is divine speech.

Wildly metaphysical, I know. But Burnett and Nesbit are not freaks or even especially peculiar in pointing to a divine reality greater than matter and energy that is the light in every person (John 1:9). They choose to deliver this message, though, in story, like the Divine Center who taught in parables, so that those with ears to hear might hear it and the rest might enjoy a good story.

Burnett wrote once that literature “offered a far greater significance to the happiness of men and women than any scientific discovery can give them.”
¹²
I don’t doubt that she was referring to the reader’s experience of identifying with characters transformed by magic and illuminated by the center.

Harry Potter’s name means “Heir of the Potter,” which, because “potter” is a biblical metaphor for God, “shaper of the human vessel,” used from the Book of Genesis to Revelations, points to his being a Christian everyman and spiritual seeker. In the next two chapters, we’ll go “further up and further in” on our slow-mining adventure to unveil the anagogical meaning of his adventures as his transformation from God’s image to his likeness. The first stop on that tour is to visit Shakespeare and Dickens to reveal how Rowling’s stories are literary alchemy about Harry’s change from spiritual lead to gold.

CHAPTER NINE

 

 

 

 

 

The
Potter
magic formula Ms. Rowling uses is hard to deny. Every year we journey from Privet Drive, to a magical escape, to a mystery ending in confrontation, to a loss—no, to a victory and resurrection. Other than the end of
Half-Blood Prince
—the book Ms. Rowling says really slides right into
Deathly Hallows
—we always wind up at King’s Cross and, figuratively, at the point defining the cross and the circular journey.

The alchemy Ms. Rowling uses as each story’s scaffolding and structure is more obscure. Because of a misspent childhood, I knew enough about the history of alchemy and the stream of literary alchemy in English letters that I recognized it in Ms. Rowling’s work even before I knew the first book was originally titled
Philosopher’s Stone
rather than
Sorcerer’s Stone
.

I learned quickly, though, that however obvious this was to me, readers found the idea that Ms. Rowling was writing in the alchemical tradition of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Yeats, and Joyce more than just hard to believe. Fandom critics and at least one notable academic thought—and said loudly and publicly—that the idea of a hermetic “hidden key” to these children’s books was absurd. Then, in February 2007, Lisa Bunker, a librarian in Arizona who headed a worldwide staff of Internet mavens collecting Ms. Rowling’s every statement for
Accio-Quote.org
, found an interview from 1998 in which Ms. Rowling talked about alchemy:

That’s as close as we’re going to get, I’m afraid, to an affirmation from the author that the books are alchemical in structure. Let’s talk about what literary alchemy is in light of historical “lead-to-gold” alchemy, how Ms. Rowling actually uses it in her novels, and to explore the uplifting meaning and mythic effect it has on readers.

I grew up in twentieth-century America and was indoctrinated by inoculation like everyone else with the popular ideas that define our age. Every age has them. Perhaps the most important spell or charm that entrances us as modern people is the belief that nature, specifically matter and energy, is all that exists.

Alchemy is everything that scientific naturalism and materialism are not. It is the modern empirical worldview turned inside out.
²
Alchemy, in a nutshell, was the science of working toward the perfection of the alchemist’s soul. This heroic venture is all but impossible today, because the way we look at reality makes the concept itself almost an absurdity. Unlike the medieval alchemists, we moderns and postmoderns see things with a clear subject/object distinction; that is, we believe you and I and that table are entirely different things and there is no connection or relation between them. The knowing subject is one thing and the observed object is completely “other.”

To the alchemist that was not the case. His efforts in changing lead to gold were based on the premise that he, as the subject, would go through the same types of changes and purifications as the materials he was working with. In sympathy with these metallurgical transitions and resolutions of contraries, his soul would be purified in correspondence as long as he was working in a prayerful state within the mysteries (sacraments) of his revealed tradition.

Historically there was an Arabic alchemy, a Chinese alchemy, a Kabbalistic, as well as a Christian alchemy; each differed superficially with respect to their spiritual traditions. In every one, however, the alchemist was working with a sacred natural science or physics to advance his spiritual purification.

This was only possible because he looked at the metal he was working with as something with which he was not “other” but with which he was in relationship. The alchemist and the lead becoming gold were imitating and accelerating the work of the Creator. The alchemist’s aim was to create a bridge so that as lead changes to gold, or material perfection, his soul in sympathy would go through similar transformations and purifications.

To the alchemist, lead is hard darkness and gold is light made solid; sanctification beyond salvation or virtue is the illumination of the soul, its identification and communion with the light of the world in all men (John 1:9), that light shining into our spiritual darkness. Just as the Circle is the extension of and essentially identical with the Center, and the hero by completing his initiatory journey takes on the divine qualities of the Creative Principle, so the alchemist, in directing the resolution of contraries that are the visible activity of the Word in creation, becomes the eternal light and knowledge of the defining point.

Metallurgical alchemy as a sacred science was never an American adventure. It was history long before the pilgrims set sail. This spiritual science went into precipitous decline from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment when it was eclipsed by the materialist view and priorities of modern chemistry. American readers, consequently, are almost unaware of alchemy. This is perhaps no great loss, but it does have one consequence that touches on
Harry Potter
fans: Alchemy is near the heart of great English fiction.

English literature is rich in alchemical language, references, themes, and symbols from Chaucer to Rowling; to be ignorant of this language and imagery is to miss out on the depths and heights of Shakespeare, Blake, Donne, Milton, even C. S. Lewis and James Joyce. Ms. Rowling, as I will demonstrate in a moment, is not ignorant of literary alchemy. The
Harry Potter
books individually and as a series are built on alchemical structures, written in alchemical language, and have alchemical themes at their core.
³

I think the connection is probably most clear in drama. Eliade even suggests that the alchemical work grew out of initiatory dramas of the Greek mystery religions.
⁴
Shakespeare doesn’t just make asides to alchemy in his plays; many if not most of them are written on alchemical skeletons and themes.
The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost
, and
The Merchant of Venice
come to mind.
⁵

Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, among others, used alchemical imagery and themes because they understood that the work of theatre in human transformation was similar to alchemical work. Alchemical work, of course, claimed to be more than just an imaginative experience, but the idea of purification by identification or correspondence with an object and its transformations is “spot on” with the purpose of theatre. We identify with the characters, and we are transformed.

Alchemists, like all traditional people, thought of the visible world as a reflection of the Creator’s nature. God is transcendent or “other,” totally apart and distinct from us as creatures, and, at the same time, He is even closer to us than our breath, the cause of our existence. In His unity, God is the resolution of these absolute contraries and every aspect of creation has the fingerprint of contraries on their way to resolution. The revealed religious traditions, in this view, are means of humanity’s return to the still point of love and peace out of which the contraries of time and space, male and female, heaven and earth, as well as all the complements of sense perception (hot/ cold, near/far, loud/quiet, hard/soft, sweet/salty) proceed.