by John Granger
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.
Dominant Contraries to Be Resolved
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.
Literary alchemy is a snapshot of this apotheosis by alchemical transformation. It presents in story form the contrary aspects to be resolved as external contraries in the community, as internal conflicts to be resolved, or as both. In Harry Potter, the Wizarding world is divided largely along the Gryffindor/Slytherin divide, which extends ultimately to the militant factions of these tribes—Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix (with Harry’s Dumbledore’s Army the junior varsity squad) and Voldemort’s Death Eaters. Internally, this is represented in Harry’s mind, as he is both Gryffindor icon and the bearer of a Lord Voldemort soul fragment with its attendant powers and abilities. The drama of the seven books is how both of these conflicts, in the world at large and within Harry, will be resolved—and this resolution of all contraries is a signature of alchemical drama.
Three Stages of Transformation and Their Alchemical Colors
Harry’s annual hero’s journey, consequently, is also the cycle of his alchemical transformation—and each stage of the work has a character or more than one character named for that stage’s indicative color. The first stage of the alchemical work is dissolution, usually called the “nigredo” or the black stage. In the black, initial stage, “the body of the impure metal, the matter for the Stone, or the old, outmoded state of being is killed, putrefied, and dissolved into the original substance of creation, the prima materia, in order that it may be renovated and reborn in a new form.”6 Sirius Black is named for this stage of the work; the book in which he died, Order of the Phoenix, as we’ll see in a second, was the nigredo novel of the series.
The second stage of alchemical transformation of lead into gold is the “albedo” or white work. It follows the ablution or washing of the calcified matter at the bottom of the alembic, the washing of which causes it to show the “peacock’s tail” (cauda pavonis) or the colors of the rainbow before turning a brilliant white. “When the matter reaches the albedo it has become pure and spotless.”7 Albus Dumbledore is the character with the “white” name; “Albus” is Latin for “white, resplendent.”
Frequently used symbols of the albedo stage of the work in pictorial representations and descriptions of it are luna (Latin for “moon”) and a lily. I’ll explain how Half-Blood Prince was Albus’s book in many ways because it featured his tutorials with Harry—and because of his fall from the Astronomy Tower, planned or unplanned, at book’s end. The real work of alchemy is accomplished in the wedding or resolution of contraries in the white stage, a victory that is revealed in the crisis of the red.
The third and last stage of the chemical work is the “rubedo” or the red stage.
When the matter of the stone has been purified and made spotless at the albedo it is then ready to be reunited with the spirit (or the already united spirit and soul). With the fixation, crystallization, or embodiment of the eternal spirit, form is bestowed upon the pure, but as yet formless matter of the Stone. At this union, the supreme chemical wedding, the body is resurrected into eternal life. As the heat of the fire is increased, the divine red tincture flushes the white stone with its rich, red colour . . . The reddening of the white matter is also frequently likened to staining with blood.8
Rubeus Hagrid has the red name; “rubeus” is Latin for “red” (the Latin for “black,” of course, is “niger” so Sirius’s name is translated to the English “black” for obvious reasons). Rufus Scrimgeour also has red meaning and we should note that Fred Weasley’s name is “Red” if we drop one letter. A common symbol of the red work and the Philosopher’s Stone is the red lion, which is, of course, the house mascot for Gryffindor.
The formula for each book in the series is a trip through these three alchemical stages.
In the individual books, the black stage, or nigredo, is almost always launched on Privet Drive, where Harry is treated horribly. The work of breaking Harry down continues each year when he gets to Hogwarts and Severus Snape takes over, a black figure if there ever was one. But Hogwarts is also the home of Albus “the White” Dumbledore, and Hogwarts is where Harry is purified of the failing identified at the Dursleys as he, Ron, and Hermione solve that year’s mystery. The understanding he gains through these trials is revealed in the book’s crisis—the confrontation with the bad guys—in which he always dies a figurative death and is reborn. From Privet Drive to his chat with Dumbledore at book’s end, Harry is purified and transformed. The series taken altogether has a black, white, and red stage, too: Order of the Phoenix is the black book of the series, Half-Blood Prince is the white, and Deathly Hallows is the rubedo or red stage. Let’s review them quickly.
The nigredo, again, is the stage in which the subject is broken down, stripped of all but the essential qualities for purification in the albedo or white work. Order of the Phoenix, darkest and most disturbing of all the Harry Potter novels, is this stage in the series; Ms. Rowling cues us to this not only in the plot points, all of which are about Harry’s loss of his identity, but in the blackness of the book. No small part of it takes place in the House of Black and it ends, of course, with the death of Sirius Black.
More important, though, is that Order of the Phoenix details Harry’s near complete dissolution. Every idea he has of himself is taken from him. Dolores Umbridge teaches him that Hogwarts can be hell. He learns his father was a jerk. No Quidditch! Ron and Hermione outrank him on the Hogwarts totem pole. The entire “girl thing” eludes him except for agonizing confusion and heartbreak. Everything, in brief, is a nightmare for him in his fifth year. His self-understanding and identity are shattered—except, at the very end, after Sirius’s death and with it any hope of a family life with his godfather, Harry learns about the prophecy. That understanding replaces everything else. And that’s the end of the black work.
When Half-Blood Prince begins, we feel we are in a different universe. Albus Dumbledore is not only back in Harry’s life, he comes to pick him up at Privet Drive! The headmaster, largely absent in Order of the Phoenix, is everywhere in Half-Blood Prince. This is his book, which, given the meaning of his name and the work that is accomplished, might be called the “white book.” And, like Sirius at the end of the “black book,” Albus dies at the end of the “white.”
Through the tutorials with Dumbledore and the tasks he is given, Harry comes to a whole new understanding of himself in terms of the prophecy and his relationship to Lord Voldemort. Harry doesn’
t get the whole truth from the headmaster, but at the end of Half-Blood Prince, he has been transformed from a boy who doesn’t believe Dumbledore will show up to one who defiantly tells the Minister of Magic, “I’m a Dumbledore man through and through.”
A Quarreling Couple and an Alchemical Wedding
The American publisher’s decision to change the title from Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone obscures the alchemical title. Which is a shame because if the man in the street knows anything about alchemy, it is that alchemists pursued the Philosopher’s Stone to turn lead into gold. The characters, too, point right at alchemy. Albus Dumbledore, we learn on the first train ride to Hogwarts when Harry reads his Chocolate Frog Card, is an alchemist of some renown. This relationship, it turns out, is the key to unraveling the mystery of what is hidden at Hogwarts in Harry’s first year.
Those alchemical pointers are right on the surface. But there are important alchemical red flags just beneath the surface of the story, most notably—characters representing alchemical mercury and sulfur, and the alchemical wedding.
The alchemical transformation of metals is a series of purifications of a base metal from lead into gold that is accomplished by dissolving and recongealing the metal via the action of two principal reagents. These reagents reflect the masculine and feminine polarity of existence; “alchemical sulfur” represents the masculine, impulsive, red pole, and “quicksilver” or “alchemical mercury,” the feminine and cool complementary antagonist. Together and separately these reagents and catalysts advance the work of purifying a base metal into “corporeal light” or gold.
Alchemical literature often features one or more pairs of characters with these qualities who bicker (in alchemical texts, the reagents are actually called the “quarreling couple”). The bickering alchemical pair in Harry Potter is Ron and Hermione. “Hermione” is the feminine form of “Hermes,” who besides being the Greek messenger god (Mercury), was also the name of the great alchemist Hermes Trismegistos in whose name countless alchemical works were written through the centuries. Her initials (Hg) and her parents being dentists (who use mercury in their work) point to mercury, feminine intelligence, the part Hermione plays in Harry’s alchemical transformation.
Ron, the redheaded, passionate boy, is a cipher for alchemical sulfur. Together with Hermione, and in their disagreements and separation, he acts to transform Harry from lead to gold in each book, as discussed above. For readers who wondered whether Hermione was meant for Ron or Harry in the end, this point suggests the eventual love match of Ron and Hermione.
“Medieval alchemists adopted from the Arabs the theory that all metals were a synthesis of mercury and sulfur, whose union might achieve various degrees of harmony. A perfectly harmonious marriage of the mother and father of metals might produce gold.”9 When Ron and Hermione stop quarreling and hook up, as we saw first in Half-Blood Prince and finally in the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry’s “perfection” is near.
The alchemical wedding doesn’t have to be of this pair, certainly, but we need to see a marriage of contraries that is somehow sacramental. It should also end in death and the appearance of a child—the philosophical orphan.
The rubedo as the final stage of the Great Work features the wedding of the Red King and White Woman, their copulation and death, and the birth of the orphan. The “chemical wedding” is an image central to alchemy, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595) to Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding (1997). Bill and Fleur’s wedding is this marriage of choleric Weasley and phlegmatic Gaul, the Red King and White Woman of the formula we see onstage in Deathly Hallows. The marriage and death of Tonks and Lupin are what give us Teddy Lupin, philosophical orphan.
The chemical marriage of the imbalanced “quarreling couple” of masculine sulfur and feminine quicksilver results in opposing qualities being reconciled and resolved; they must “die” and be “reborn” before recombining in a perfected golden unity. The end of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, which is the transcendence of this imbalance, impurity, and polarity. It is also, you recall, about the creation of the transcendent alchemist, the saintly God/man often represented by a hermaphrodite or “s/he,” a person who is both male and female. Here polarity is not resolved as much as it is transcended and embodied in a harmonious unity, an incarnation of love and peace.
We’ll talk again at chapter’s end about whether Harry has transcended his internal Gryffindor/Slytherin divide and become the Hogwarts hermaphrodite and Philosopher’s Stone. Don’t bet against it.
Doppelgängers
In chapter four we discussed this staple of nineteenth-century gothic and romantic fiction, about a creature or pair of creatures that have complementary figures or shadows, and whose shadows reveal aspects of their character otherwise invisible. Think of Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, Stoker’s Count Dracula, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Rowling points to these shadows in her principal characters in a variety of ways: as Animagi, half-breeds, Mudbloods, threshold characters living in two worlds (Squibs and rebels and double agents), twins, multicross magical creatures, and, most important, Harry and Voldemort, sharing blood and soul pieces.
Many characters in Potterworld—itself divided between magical and Muggle domains—have twins or antagonistic complements, and many others live a double existence between worlds. This pairing is a marker of literary alchemy and points to the anagogical meaning of such work.
Transformation by Sacrifice: Death to Ego and Persona
The alchemical work is about changing the soul from lead to gold—from spiritual atrophy and failing to dynamic virtue—in order to create a person whose character is the conjunction of all contraries. Becoming an embodiment of opposites, the alchemist gains the image and likeness of God. In literary alchemy, therefore, we should look for a hero (or lovers) who dies to ego concerns, sacrificially and out of love for others, a hero who becomes semi-divine in this sacrifice. In Harry Potter, we see just that in the title character’s transformations and near deaths in each and every book—Harry’s “people saving thing.”
This pattern of loving sacrifice and Harry’s acceptance of even the pursuit of death holds from Philosopher’s Stone to Deathly Hallows. Before we look at Deathly Hallows as the alchemical rubedo of the series and at Harry’s walk into the forest in this hermetic light, here are two notable alchemical texts you’ve probably read to illustrate the five qualities I’ve highlighted with Harry.
Romeo and Juliet and A Tale of Two Cities: The Peace of Verona, Paris, and London
As you’d expect in an alchemical writer, Ms. Rowling knows her Shakespeare, and it was Shakespeare who unleashed a flood of alchemical references into English literature. A quick look at Romeo and Juliet, the Shakespeare play most familiar to American readers and moviegoers, illustrates this point.
The play has five acts but the three colored stages of alchemy are hard to miss. You remember Romeo’s melancholic beginnings, his black bile, and the strife and division in the streets of Verona. Nigredo! The white stage begins when the young lovers meet. The agonizing, violent division between Capulets and Montagues is joined when this couple is bound by the sacrament of marriage in Friar Lawrence’s chapel. The story is essentially over when they’re married in the church service and the marriage is consummated. But the accomplishments of the white stage that are hidden have to be revealed on a larger stage in the crucible of the red stage. Through the deaths of Romeo and Juliet in the Capulet tomb, greater life comes to Verona. Juliet’s parents and Romeo’s father promise to erect golden statues of the star-crossed lovers and the city is at peace at last: black depression and division, wedding white, blood red, and gold statues.
The quarreling couple is Mercutio (Mercury, right?) and Tybalt, the two reagents whose combat and death act as catalysts to the resolution of the drama. And it is love, the resolution of male and female contrary identities and individ ualities, that becomes the star-crossed sacrifice of the drama. Neither Romeo
nor Juliet is either Capulet or Montague as they profess in the balcony scene but the union of these contraries. Check off “Resolution and Transformation in Sacrificial Death.”
Is this sort of thing obvious to audiences at the plays? Hardly. But it is a large part of the uplifting spiritual punch that the play delivers. Identifying with this couple (as their parents do in the end), with their love and sacred union, we are made less partisan in spirit. We aren’t turned into gold statues, figures of solid light, as Romeo and Juliet are, but we have experienced vicariously and alchemically their love and light.
I don’t recall ever reading or hearing of a remark by Ms. Rowling about Romeo and Juliet. Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, on the other hand, is a book that she mentions frequently.10
She told the Radio 4 literary programme “With Great Pleasure” that one Sunday [in Paris] she stayed in her room all day reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. “When I emerged in the evening I walked straight into Fernando, who looked absolutely horrified. I had mascara down my face and he assumed I had just received news of a death, which I had—Sydney Carton’s.” The unhappy Carton had taken the place of Charles Darnay at the guillotine because of his love for Darnay’s wife, Lucie, and by his ultimate sacrifice finds salvation. He says, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.” Joanne considers this “the most perfect last line of a book ever written” and one that invariably makes her cry.11