In Wagner’s version of the story, Alberich is king of the dwarfs, full of hate and ambition. When he discovers a hoard of goldThe name Oberon, which Shakespeare gave to the king of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is an English form of Alberich.
One hero of the Ring Cycle wins a prize from Alberich that will be familiar to Harry Potter fans: an invisibility cloak.
See also: Flamel
guarded by unsuspecting maidens, he does not hesitate to swear off love forever to win it. He uses the gold to make a ring that gives him great power. When the ring is stolen from him, he places a curse on it. Anyone else who wears it will suffer greatly. As the story goes on, others try to win the ring, paying the price for their desire.
PTOLEMY
Claudius Ptolemaeus lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early part of the second century A.D., where he was an astronomer and mathematician. He collected the world’s knowledge of those fields into a book, eventually known as the Almagest, which influenced scholars for more than a thousand years. His most significant conclusion was that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that all other celestial bodies revolve around it. This is known as the “Ptolemaic system.” Although it was disproved in the 1500s by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, Ptolemy’s records of his observations of the heavens are still considered useful to scholars even if his conclusions are
Caution! DO NOT READ THE NEXT SECTION UNTIL YOU HAVE READ Harry Potter and Half-Blood Prince AND Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
A Note on the Final Chapters
BECAUSE THE LAST TWO HARRY POTTER NOVELS REVEAL SO
many plot secrets, I’ve separated the chapters about them from the rest of this book. Wait before reading further if you haven’t finished Hallows and don’t want to know how it ends.
When you do read on you’ll find a few chapters on specific subjects like Horcruxes and the Deathly Hallows, and longer chapters covering major themes in the series—heroism, families, religion, and evil—that can finally be discussed more freely and in detail now that the series is complete.
—D.C.
How Did Seven Become the Most Magical Number?
SEVEN BOOKS, EACH FILLED WITH SEVERAL references to the number seven: You don’t need a calculator to realize these numbers add up to something important.
Some of the references are trivial. There are seven secret tunnels out of Hogwarts, seven locks on a trunk, seven gold Galleons paid for a wand, and seven players on a Quidditch team, to name just a few.
Other references are more noteworthy, starting with the seven books in the series and the seven years of school at Hogwarts. Harry was born in the seventh month. Ginny is a seventh child. The Philosopher’s Stone is protected by seven charms.
Most important of all—number one on the list of sevens—are Voldemort’s Horcruxes. “Can you split your soul only once?” young Voldemort (then Tom Riddle) asks Hogwarts professor Horace Slughorn in Prince. “Wouldn’tA detail that doesn’t appear in the books was added for the Harry Potter films: Harry wears the numeral 7 on his Quidditch jersey.
To clear up a tricky question Voldemort meant to make six Horcuxes. The seventh part of his soul would have stayed in his body. He created a seventh Horcrux by accident, and without realizing it. When he attacked Harry and Harry’s parents, part of his soul entered Harry.
it be better, make you stronger, to have your soul in more pieces? I mean, for instance, isn’t seven the most powerfully magic number . . . ?” Leaving aside the question of whether it’s clever to scatter Horcruxes around—Horcruxes are discussed in the next chapter—Tom Riddle makes a good point. In both Harry’s world and ours, seven isn’t just a lucky number. It’s said to have special powers.
SEVENTH HEAVEN
On her website, J. K. Rowling says a wizard named Bridget Wenlock was “the first to establish the magical properties of the number seven.” Wenlock was an arithmancer, a wizard specializing in mathematics.
Maybe Wenlock had some help from some ancient Muggles. In our world, study of the number seven began thousands of years ago.
It began with observations of the natural world. Before telescopes, seven “planets” were visible: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Many cultures associated these planets with gods. In the Northern Hemisphere, people could find north by looking at the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Another seven-star cluster, the Pleiades, moved along the sky with the seasons, and was thought to control them.
All over the world, people took these phenomena as a sign that the number seven played a special part in the creation of the world. More than four thousand years ago, Babylonians were taught that the world was created in seven days. In Hinduism, the world was created by seven gods born from the mind of the supreme Creator. The stars of the Big Dipper were associated with these “seven sages.”
Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.) saw the divine in the movements of the seven planets:
Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was framed after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might resemble this as far as was possible; for the pattern exists from eternity, and the created heaven has been, and is, and will be, in all time.
Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time. The Sun and Moon and five other stars, which are called the planets, were created by him in order to distinguish and preserve the numbers of time; and when he had madeAccording to folklore, a seventh son of a seventh son will be an especially powerful magician and healer. Seventh daughters aren’t given the same status, although in Roman legend they can see into the future.
In the Bible story, Joshua made the walls of Jericho fall with just a shout because he’d kept the city under siege for seven days, marching around it each day with seven priests. He shouted after marching around the walls seven times on the seventh day.
their several bodies, he placed them in the orbits in which the circle of the other was revolving—in seven orbits, seven stars.
What happened in the beginning was just that—a beginning. Apparently God started as he meant to go on. Egypt had the seven Hathors. Japan’s Shinto has the Seven Lucky Gods. There are religions with seven heavens, and some with seven devils. Mithraism, a religion from the Roman era, had seven ranks. Christianity has too many sevens to count, some of them in the Bible and some added by scholars. They include the seven days of Creation, the seven years of feast and seven years of famine, the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Joys and the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary. In the final book of the New Testament, Revelations, it’s written that a book with seven seals will be opened at the end of the world, a seven-headed beast will appear, and seven trumpets will blare.
Saint Augustine (354-430), one of the most influential figures in Christianity, was fascinated with the symbolism of numbers, and considered the number seven to be a sign of perfection.
BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY
Mathematics, despite its reputation as a cold science, seemed to reinforce the natural symbolism. Except for seven, all of the numbers from one to ten relate to each other as multiples. For example, three multiplied by three is nine. Pythagoros, the Greek philosopher and mathematician of the sixth century B.C., believed this showed the divine nature of seven. It seems to stand apart from the other numbers, as a god stands apart from humankind. The numbers three and four also have special roles in numerical symbolism, but, of course, they add up to seven.
Pythagoras also studied music, and there too he found symbolism in the number seven. The movement of the seven “planets” was believed to create tones, and these tones were believed to create a divine harmony. The major scale in Western music happens to be made of seven different notes.
In some cases, people “discovered” seven because they wanted to see it. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) identified seven colors in the spectrum that make up s
unlight: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. That was an arbitrary number. Newton was looking for seven divisions in the color spectrum to match the seven planets and the seven notes ofPhilosophy and religion were Pythagoros’s true focus. Numbers were studied for their mystical power.
The French Revolutionary (or Republican) calendar was meant to help reduce the Catholic church’s role in French life. The result was bizarre. Days and months were renamed—for example, the new month that included parts of the old December and January was called Nivôse (“Snowy”). Plants and minerals took the place of the saints that had been associated with various days of the year.
a musical scale. He believed there was something naturally accurate about the number.
Another arbitrary seven that we often mistake for natural is the seven-day week. Years, days, and months are all governed by the movement of Earth. The seven-day week is an invention. In the past, cultures have used weeks of other lengths. Most of those weeks were shorter than seven days, but for a brief while after the French Revolution, France adopted a ten-day week.
Though we don’t know the origin of the seven-day week, we know it has been around at least since the Babylonian calendar. We also know that the Babylonians, like many later cultures, and probably some earlier ones, associated the seven days with the seven planets and seven major gods.
The Babylonians also had special rules about the seventh day of the week. They did-n’t work on the 7th, 14th, 21st, or 28th days of the month, which were considered unlucky. That taboo is similar to the day of rest required by Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
“POWERFULLY MAGIC”
“The number seven represents magical power in all its fullness,” writes Éliphas Lévi (the pseudonym of the influential French author of works on magic, Alphonse Louis Constant). “It is the mind reinforced by all elementary potencies. It is the soul served by Nature . . . The virtue of the number seven is absolute in magic, for this number is decisive in all things.”
Controlling that power has often been the goal of magicians. They’ve tried to find magical equations in mathematics; they’ve tried to combine the seven planetary elements in alchemy; they’ve repeated incantations seven times, or in groups of seven, or on the seventh day of the seventh month; and so on.
With the notable exception of a certain seven-volume story, these efforts haven’t had a lot of success in our world. But in Harry’s world they make sense. Tom Riddle’s idea wasn’t crazy, though following through with it was completely insane.
According to alchemists, certain metals are controlled or affected by specific planets. The alchemists could schedule their work to fit with astrological conditions. The planetary elemets and their “rulers” are: Gold (the Sun) Silver (the Moon) Copper (Venus) Iron (Mars) Tin (Jupiter) Mercury (Mercury) Lead (Saturn)
When Would a Muggle Want a Horcrux?
THE WORD “HORCRUX” WAS CREATED BY Rowling. On her website she recalls, “I had tried for days and days to hit upon the right name for ‘the receptacle in which a Dark wizard has hidden a fragment of his soul for the purposes of attaining immortality.’ Finally, after much transposition of syllables, I scribbled ‘Horcrux’ on a piece of paper and knew it was The One. But what if somebody had already used it? With some trepidation, I typed ‘Horcrux’ into Google and, to my delight, saw what I was looking for: ‘Your search—Horcrux—did not match any documents.’ ”
Though the word is original, and Rowling has invented her own rules for the objects, the idea is found in legends of many cultures.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
An early social anthropologist, Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), collected manyJ. K. Rowling’s rule that a murder is needed to make a Horcrux has its origins in old magic. A blood sacrifice of a small animal was sometimes used to give a spell extra power.
Although The Golden Bough isn’t considered scientific by today’s standards, it had a wide and positive influence on anthropology. Its popular success also spread its infuence into literature. The connections it drew between pagan rituals and Christianity captured the imagination of young C. S. Lewis and influenced his writing, including The Chronicles of Narnia.
examples of what he called “the external soul” in his work The Golden Bough. “Stories of this kind are widely diffused over the world,” he says, “and from their number and the variety of incident and of details in which the leading idea is embodied, we may infer that the conception of an external soul is one which has had a powerful hold on the minds of men at an early stage of history.”
It’s found in legends from Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Central Europe, the Middle East, and throughout Asia and Africa; it’s a part of native North American and Australian cultures; there are examples from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
In other words: It’s everywhere.
Frazer writes, “A common version of it is this: A warlock, giant, or other fairyland being is invulnerable and immortal because he keeps his soul hidden far away in some secret place; but a fair princess, whom he holds enthralled in his enchanted castle, wiles his secret from him and reveals it to the hero, who seeks out the warlock’s soul, heart, life, or death (as it is variously called), and by destroying it, simultaneously kills the warlock.”
Leaving out the part about the princess—it’s hard to imagine Hermione or Ginny waiting patiently to be rescued—you have Harry’s quest to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes.
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, OR MINERAL?
Voldemort’s Horcruxes are a rare mix of two kinds: living creatures and inanimate objects. Most legends specify one or the other. The object might be a jewel, or it might be an animal, but usually it won’t be both.
Even more unusual is the fact that Harry himself is a Horcrux. As Voldemort learns, there’s great danger in putting a soul inside another person. In folktales, a soul usually is transferred to keep it safe from harm. That’s why inanimate objects are more common: They can be hidden. An animal or another person may be just as vulnerable, or more so, than the person who wants to hide the soul. “Temporary absences of the soul are often believed to involve considerable risk,” Frazer says, “since the wandering soul is liable to a variety of mishaps at the hands of enemies.”
Of course, the risks faced by a wizard and the risks faced by a Muggle are very different.
Voldemort, like many wizards in legend, wants to hide parts of his soul to preserve his power, to make it last forever. He doesn’tIn some folktales, souls are hidden in a tree or a plant. This is less common than an animal or an inanimate object, because if the plant dies, the soul dies with it.
Transferring a newborn’s soul to protect it from evil spirits is similar to the European folk tradition of criticizing a new baby’s appearance. Praise might draw the attention of the evil spirits.
intend to draw his soul back from his Horcruxes. Frazer noticed this in legends too. “If only the safety of the soul can be ensured during its absence, there is no reason why the soul should not continue to be absent for an indefinite time; indeed a man may, on a pure calculation of personal safety, desire that his soul should never return to his body.”
However, many customs regarding an external soul seem to have a different purpose. A soul might be transferred for safety at certain important moments in a person’s life, and for only a short while. During childbirth, a woman’s soul might be transferred. A newborn or ill child might undergo a similar ceremony. The soul might be transferred during a dangerous (or symbolically dangerous) rite of passage, such as an initiation into adulthood. These are all moments when humans fear supernatural forces or creatures—for example, fairies that want to snatch the life of a child. While a wizard like Voldemort might transfer a soul to heighten or preserve supernatural power, humans sometimes use a similar ritual to keep them safe from the supernatural.
What’s J. K. Rowling’s Idea of a Hero?
AN EARLIER CHAPTER EXPLAINED HOW
Harry’s story mirrors the “hero’
s journey” that appears in many classic epics. That pattern, described by the scholar Joseph Campbell, begins with the hero’s “call to adventure,” which in Harry’s case would be when he’s summoned to Hogwarts.
But in legends, a hero is born, not made. Harry is no exception. Long before he first climbs on to the Hogwarts Express—before he can walk or talk—he has lost his parents, gained a dangerous enemy, and become famous in the wizarding world as “The Boy Who Lived.”
The psycholanalyst Otto Rank (1884-1939) studied similarities he found in the birth and early childhood of legendary heroes. His theories, and those of his mentor Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) tell us interesting things about
Although overshadowed by Freud in the public mind, Rank is considered one of the most important thinkers in the history of psychoanalysis.
The legend of Sargon’s birth is obviously embellished, but his real accomplishments were notable. His empire covered a large area of what’s now the Middle East and Turkey.
More importantly, they seem partially to explain the worldwide fascination with Harry’s story.
THE LITTLE PRINCE
Rank titled his book about this pattern The Myth of the Birth of the Hero because to him it was one myth retold in many cultures.
The short version goes like this: because of a prophecy of danger, usually from a family rivalry, a prince is hidden for safety. There’s often a trip down a river or over an ocean when he’s taken to the hiding place. He’s raised by a person or family from the lower classes of his society—or maybe even an animal—without being told his destiny. But fate controls his life. He meets with his parents and may confront his father, and afterwards is given all the honors he’s due as his birthright.
The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter Page 16
