Harry Potter's Bookshelf

by John Granger

  And Deathly Hallows?

  In Deathly Hallows, Harry doesn’t rise from the dead in the presence of a symbol of Christ. As we saw in the last chapter, he rises as a symbol of Christ. I think it’s safe to say here that all the previous deaths and resurrections were just pointers and prefigurings of Harry’s ultimate victory, his “mastery of death.” Ms. Rowling has said that the last third of Deathly Hallows was the fixed part of the storyline that drove every other element of the previous books. All the stories do point to Harry’s trip into “The Forest Again.”

  Third, two violations of journey formula happen at the end of Half-Blood Prince: we don’t get our meeting with Dumbledore (he’s attending his own funeral) and we don’t go to King’s Cross station. That omission is understandable; as Ms. Rowling said before the finale, books six and seven slide together at the end into one story. We make up for it, though, in Deathly Hallows, where we get two Dumbledore denouement scenes and two trips to King’s Cross. Harry’s encounter with his mentor at his King’s Cross vision is the most curious of these scenes and trips.

  On her Open Book Tour press conference in Los Angeles, Rowling said she thought the Christian content of the books was “obvious.”11 I think we can all agree that Harry’s arriving at “King’s Cross” after his sacrificial death in love for his friends points to Calvary and not an especially obscure reference. But why meet with Dumbledore there, and underground?

  To answer those questions, I think we have to discuss why poets and novelists return again and again to the hero’s journey. If you grasp the spiritual meaning of the circle, you’ll understand Luna’s answer to the Ravenclaw door as well as why Harry’s final return from the dead guaranteed his eventual victory over the Dark Lord.

  Mythic Return: The Power of the Circle Center

  The hero’s journey isn’t a story formula, ultimately, or just a mechanical structure on which to hang a plot. It’s really about the symbolism of the circle and the center we discussed above.

  Harry’s adventure completes a circle every year: from his life with the Dursleys at Privet Drive, through his adventures in the magical world, back to being picked up by the Dursleys at King’s Cross Station at year’s end. If you have a piece of paper handy, draw a circle with the beginning point at the bottom being the Dursleys, Hogwarts being diametrically across from it (up in Scotland?), and the circle coming to a close again at the Dursleys, who meet Harry at King’s Cross.

  Now every hero’s journey is a figurative, completed circle, if not a geometric one, and from what we’ve discussed before and seen in Secret Garden, in Amulet, and in Harry’s circular showdowns with the Dark Lord, the circle is a symbol of God and creation, specifically of the unknown center defining and creating the visible circle.

  And this has what to do with Harry’s annual journey?

  A hero completing a circular journey has ritually arrived by his circumnavigation at the defining center because the circle he or she has completed is one with the center. To repeat myself: As its radiation or visible aspect, the circle is essentially the same thing as its defining center or origin. If magic has a shape, it is a circle and it is the circle’s unplottable and defining center that is the heart and power of the magic.

  Harry ends every year and the story has its most important turn at King’s Cross because the cross, like the circle, is defined by the center point at which a horizontal and vertical line meet. Draw a cross in your hero’s journey circle to divide that circle into four pie pieces. This point that defines the cross, the circle, and the end of the journey brings the hero into the “sacred space” or point creating the world.

  Harry makes this trip to the crossing point defining the circle of his journey seven times. I explain the symbolism and importance of the number seven in Unlocking Harry Potter; but, as you’ve read the stories, you know how central the number seven is: the number of Quidditch players, Horcruxes, Years of Magical Education, Harry-clones escaping Privet Drive in Deathly Hallows, etc. If you’ve studied Arithmancy with Professor Vector or Pythagoras or even Lord Voldemort, you know this is the most “magically powerful” number.

  Having completed the circle and achieved the center the seventh time, this last time by sacrificing himself without hope of gain, Harry, in effect, has executed his ego or died to himself, thereby returning to the center or transpersonal self before Voldemort kills him. Harry survives the Killing Curse again. How? In the story, it’s a function of his connection with the sacrificial death of his first savior, Lily Potter, and the magic of this sacrifice that exists in her blood, blood that flows in both Voldemort and Harry. No doubt this is a tip of the hat to the goddesses of Homer and Virgil and Dante’s green-eyed Beatrice, who save their respective heroes.

  I think it is as credible—and maybe even easier to understand—to look at Harry’s survival within the context of his repeated circular journeys. From this view, Harry survives as the center because no point on the circle can destroy the center defining that circle. By transcending himself, Harry steps out of time and space, if you will, and into eternity and the infinite of the Origin, which Ms. Rowling portrays quite appropriately as a place called King’s Cross.

  When Harry tells Dumbledore he thinks they are at King’s Cross, do you remember the headmaster’s reaction?

  “King’s Cross Station!” Dumbledore was chuckling immoderately. “Good gracious, really?” (Deathly Hallows, chapter thirty-five)

  Dumbledore, unlike Harry, undoubtedly has studied Arithmancy, sacred geometry, and Christian scripture (hence the tombstone verses in Godric’s Hollow). Of course, he finds Harry’s intuitive choice of “locations” (after his sacrifice makes him “master of death”) quite humorous. Dumbledore laughs because the hero’s journey is a circle for much the same reason that the events of Calvary (the King’s Cross) have their meaning and why Christ died on a geometric cross. In achieving the symbolic Center, Harry has become, if not one, then “not two” with the transcendent Absolute.

  By choosing to return to time and space after this apotheosis, Harry broke the power of the Dark Lord. Harry went underground repeatedly in Deathly Hallows, most importantly in choosing to dig Dobby’s grave on Easter morning, because each descent into the underworld was a dying to himself from which, remember, he either saved lives, recovered lost treasure, or was enlightened. Imagine the world as a circle; every descent was Harry’s movement toward the center and source of life and away from the periphery of ego and the fear of death.

  It’s important to note that the end of Deathly Hallows is not just the completion of Harry’s journey in his seventh year, but the joining of the circle with the beginning of his journey in Sorcerer’s Stone. There are too many connecting points and echoes to go into here, but you probably noticed in the first book that Hagrid carries Harry’s body from the ruins of his childhood home to safety on Sirius’s motorcycle and he escorted Harry from his about-to-be-destroyed house on Privet Drive on the same motorcycle and, in the last, carries Harry’s body from the Forbidden Forest to Hogwarts as an echo of that event.

  Harry returns to Godric’s Hollow in Deathly Hallows for the first time since Hagrid took him to the Dursleys and learns on Christmas morning what happened to him and his parents on that Halloween long ago. Ted Lupin becomes the philosophical orphan whose parents were murdered by the Dark Lord’s Death Eaters, completing and repeating another circle.

  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.

  Conclusion: The Mystical Questions of the Ravenclaw Common Room Door

  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

  Harry Potter as Alchemical Reading Magic

  Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Artistry Changing

  Readers’ Hearts from Lead to Gold

  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:I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter. To invent this Wizarding world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I’ll never use in the books, but I have to know what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic.1

  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.

  Alchemy: What It Was and Wasn’t

  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 work
ing 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.

  Alchemy and English Literature: The Drama Connection

  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