The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter

by David Colbert

  Examples of this story go back more than four thousand years.

  In ancient Mesopotamia, a powerful king named Sargon was said to have been hidden by his mother, who put him in a basket that she placed in the Euphrates river. He was found by a commoner and raised to be a gardener. In time, he ruled an empire.

  Mwindo is a hero in African folktales. To keep him safe from his father, who fears Mwindo will replace him, Mwindo is placed in a drum that’s thrown into a rushing river. But because even as a child he had great strength and magical powers, he is able to escape. He finds his aunt, a common villager, who raises him. When he’s an adult, he confronts his father.

  Ancient Rome is said to have been founded by twin princes, Romulus and Remus, who took a trip down the Tiber river. Near the center of the city is the spot where a wolf supposedly found them and nursed them. Though they were raised by a shepherd, everyone knew they were special, even as children, and they became natural leaders.

  Greek mythology includes a story about a child named Jason, rightful heir to a throne in Thessaly. To keep him from the danger posed by an uncle, who had taken the throne from Jason’s father, Jason is hidden with a brilliant centaur, Chiron. Eventually, his uncle figures out the deception, and tries to give Jason impossible tasks that will put him in danger. But Jason wins the throne.

  The Bible story of Moses is similar to all these, with a small twist. Moses is born a Hebrew slave, not a prince. Because Pharaoh has decreed that all newborn Hebrew boys are to be killed—again, a prophecy has warnedThe Mwindo legends come from the Nyanga people of what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo. He’s a trickster god like Hermes of Greek myth (Mercury to the Romans), Loki of Norse legends, or Raven in Native American tales from the Pacific Northwest.

  The ancient historian Herodotus credited Cyrus the Great, who ruled a huge Persian empire in the sixth century B.C., with a similarly mythic birth and childhood.

  Pharaoh of the hero to come—Moses is put in a basket that’s floated down a river. But he’s actually found by Pharaoh’s daughter, and adopted into the royal family. The prophecy is fulfilled when Moses leads a slave revolt.

  TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

  The universal appeal of these stories, across all cultures and over thousands of years, suggests that they come from a basic human experience.

  Otto Rank believed they reflect the trauma of being born, and then the disappointment we feel when we discover our parents are not all-powerful monarchs, able to give us what ever we desire. In our childish eyes, our parents become a source of our unhappiness. A father may be a strict disciplinarian. According to Rank, the basket in which the baby is placed is a symbolic womb. The river is the mother’s birth canal. The fantasy royal parents come from our desire to be extraordinary, and to enjoy a life of easy pleasure. We tell ourselves that we’re with our real parents by accident to make ourselves feel a little better.

  Freud had his own ideas about these myths. He believed they arose from the desire of children to imagine fictional parents, toward whom they can express feelings they might not be able to express toward their real parents. He coined the term “family romance” to describe these interactions. (He used the word “romance” in an old sense, to mean “story.” He wasn’t referring to romantic love.)

  Despite their different beliefs about the reasons for these childhood fantasies, Rank and Freud agreed that we needed to leave them behind to achieve adulthood.

  ACCIDENTAL HERO

  Harry’s story also fits the pattern. He’s the son of two exceptional wizards. He’s the heir to the powerful amulets like the Invisibility Cloak. A prophecy that he will threaten Voldemort puts him in danger. He’s rushed away and hidden with an ordinary family. But no matter what he does, he can’t avoid his extraordinary destiny.

  Many people have pointed to Harry’s situation at the beginning of the story to explain the worldwide success of the series. He’s an Ugly Duckling. He’s the hidden prince. He’s in circumstances nearly everyone has imagined at one time or another. Soon he’ll become the hero everyone imagined they might become.

  Well, he does grow up, but not in the wayThis “family romance” is tied to legends of the Trojan War. Because a prophecy had declared the infant Trojan prince Paris would one day cause the ruin of the Troy, he was left on a mountaintop to die. But fate couldn’t be cheated. A shepherd saved him, and in time he returned to the royal family. Then he stole away a queen of Sparta, and the Spartans destroyed Troy.

  Some of the many other heroes who fit the mythic pattern: Oedipus, Perseus, and Heracles of Greek myth; the Hindu god Krishna; Gilgamesh of Sumerian and Babylonian legend.

  the legends suggest. Rowling gives the stories a twist.

  It’s not heroism that leads Harry to adulthood. The battle with Voldemort isn’t what changes him. He doesn’t reclaim an inheritance that someone tried to deny him. Instead of winning great honors at the end of the story, he’s finally relieved of burdensome expectations.

  He grows up when he realizes the illusion of heroism, when he comes to understand that the adults he has been idolizing—his father, Dumbledore, Sirius, and even Lupin—are flawed people like everyone else, rather than ideals he could never hope to equal. Dumbledore had a weakness for power. His father was sometimes arrogant and cruel. Sirius was hotheaded and single-minded. Lupin had a tendency to feel sorry for himself. But Harry doesn’t hate them for it. He doesn’t want to exchange them for perfect versions. He simply takes it all as a sign that he isn’t such a bad specimen after all.

  Harry also grows up when he comes to understand Snape. In the early books, when Harry is very young, he believes that because Snape is mean to him, Snape must be evil. That’s a child’s view. By the final volume, he understands that while Snape was genuinely unpleasant, and sincere in his dislike for Harry specifically, those things had very little to do with the question of good and evil. Harry recognized that Snape had separated the need to help Harry out of principle from the need to help Harry out of affection. Harry no longer had the childish need to be loved by everyone, or the childish vulnerability when that love was withheld.

  For Rowling, who put so much thought into Harry’s development, this growth from child to adult is every bit as heroic as the duels with Voldemort. In an essay for the London Review of Books, the scholar Wendy Doniger, who has written appreciatively of the family romance in the series, identifies a moment from Azkaban that crystallizes the importance of this theme. It occurs just after the Dementors attack Harry and almost kill him:

  Harry encounters himself in the loop where the past and present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognizes: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag that saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see“Snape is a complicated man. He’s bitter. He’s spiteful. He’s a bully. All these things are still true of Snape, even at the end of this book. But was he brave? Yes, immensely. Was he capable of love? Very definitely. He was a flawed human being, like all of us. Harry forgives him. Harry really sees the good in Snape ultimately. I wanted there to be redemption and I wanted there to be forgiveness.” —J. K. Rowling

  See also: Potter, Harry

  who it was, and there’s no one else there; he is the one who sends the stag to save himself in what will be the future. The moment when Harry realizes that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there is: Each of us becomes, in adulthood, someone who lived some thirty years before us, someone who must save our own life.

  Is Harry’s Story About Religion?

  IN AN INTERVIEW AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF

  the seventh and final volume of the series, Rowling acknowledged that Harry’s story has a “religious undertone.” “It’s always been difficult to talk about that,” she said, because to explain her “views of what happens after death an
d so on would [have given] away a lot of what was coming.” But, she added, “My belief and my struggling with religious belief I think is quite apparent in this book.”

  She’s right: The final book leaves no doubt that religion is important to the series; but it’s a view of religion that’s full of doubt.

  LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

  It shouldn’t be a surprise that Rowling’s religion, Christianity, is tied into Harry’s story. Rowling has made references to so many other cultures that it would have been odd to exclude her own.“My struggle is to keep believing.” —J. K. Rowling

  Author Judy Blume in 1999, shortly after Harry Potter was first banned: “I knew this was coming . . . If children are excited about a book, it must be suspect.I’m not exactly unfamiliar with this line of thinking, having had various books of mine banned from schools over the last twenty years. In my books, it’s reality that’s seen as corrupting. With Harry Potter, the perceived danger is fantasy.”

  For a while, a lot of attention was paid to some people who claimed the books were anti-Christian. Those attacks were never believable. The loudest critics seemed to know the least about the books.

  Rowling, when asked by the media, always described herself as Christian. But she refused to link her faith to the story. She told one reporter, “Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether ten or sixty, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.” She meant some readers would have guessed that the story would end like the Bible story of Jesus: instead of fighting his enemy, Jesus allows himself to die so that he can save humankind from its sins, and after dying he comes back to life. That’s similar to what happens at the end of Hallows: Harry chooses not to fight Voldemort but to sacrifice himself, then he seems to die and come back to life, and finally offers Voldemort mercy despite Voldemort’s past sins.

  As it happened, many readers noticed the clues in the earlier books and guessed ahead. In fact, long before the final book was published, some readers were claiming that everything in the Harry Potter books is Christian.

  That’s stretching it. The truth seems to be somewhere between the two extremes. The story borrows many important elements from Christianity—elements that Christianity happens to have in common with many religions. But in the end, Rowling’s personal beliefs, which seem to be different in some ways, prove most important.

  STAG KNIGHT

  Christian symbols certainly appear all through the story. For example, Harry’s father is symbolized by a stag, a classic emblem of Jesus, and his mother by a female version of the same symbol, a silver doe. These are just two of many intentional allusions. Just as the story ends with Harry’s sacrifice in Hallows, it begins with a similar event that took place long before. Harry’s mother sacrifices herself to save Harry, an act that creates a supernatural power. In Chamber, Harry tells Voldemort, “You couldn’t kill me . . . because my mother died to save me.”

  Yet these symbols and storylines aren’t unique to Christianity. C. S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia were meant to have a direct symbolic connection to the ChristianIn chapter 19 of Hallows, Harry follows the silver doe into the forest, where it leads him to “a great silver cross,” which he realizes is the hilt of the sword of Gryffindor. An established motif in folktales is for the hero to be led by a stag to a divine place, or to Christianity itself.

  Cernunnos, in a detail from an ancient carving. His name comes from early Celtic. It means “the great horned one.”

  gospels, liked to point out similarities between Christianity and pagan religions that appeared long before Christ. For example, before the stag became a symbol of Christianity, Celts across Europe worshipped the stag-god Cernunnos. Examples of others like him are found elsewhere. Cernunnos also happens to be one of dozens of gods from all over the world who die and are reborn each year, giving new life to worshippers. Those rites of spring were universal long before the first Easter. Lewis also liked to remind his readers that the ethical philosophy of Christianity was not new: Love and mercy and sacrifice and devotion to God were all ancient ideas even in Christ’s lifetime.

  Of course, Rowling doesn’t go to church to worship the stag-god Cernunnos. To her, the story is connected to Christianity. The many elements of Christianity she put in the books are clearly more important to the story’s themes than the fun allusions to Shakespeare and Greek mythology. It’s no accident that “King’s Cross” is the title of the chapter in which Harry enters what Rowling calls “a kind of limbo between life and death.” Rowling is making an allusion to passages in the Bible that refer to Jesus as the “King of Kings,” and to Jesus dying on the cross. Dumbledore’s gravestone is a direct quotation from the New Testament, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).

  But for all these allusions, Rowling doesn’t seem to share Lewis’s degree of faith.

  REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY

  Harry’s final confrontation with Voldemort is a good example of both Rowling’s belief and her struggle to believe. Harry defeats Voldemort with an action meant to remind us of Christ on the cross, and returns to life as Jesus does in the Bible. In a neat plot twist, Voldemort’s plan goes wrong because he has previously used Harry’s blood to resurrect himself. To a Christian reader, Voldemort may have defeated himself by receiving the Christian sacrament, the symbolic blood of Jesus that is part of some Christian rituals. But then, instead of quickly becoming divine like Jesus in the gospels, Harry remians a regular teenage wizard. Rowling recreates the miracle that’s at the center of her religion, and just as quickly deflates it. Harry’s not Jesus.

  Rowling has left out of the series the central idea in Christianity: the matter of who or what is sacred. In Christianity, it’s not enough to follow the ethical rules. Without faith in Christ’s personal role as savior, it’s impossibleAn exchange in Hallows between Hermione and Xenophilius Lovegood is meant as a defense of religious faith. Hermione insists the Resurrection Stone can’t be real. Resurrection isn’t logical. Prove it, he challenges her. Hermione objects that it’s impossible to prove something can’t exist. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little,” says Xenophilius. For a moment, he’s C. S. Lewis!

  J. K. Rowling is known for playing with words to create names. Did “Evans,” the maiden name of Harry’s mother, come from a rearrangement of the letters in Rowling’s mother’s name, Anne V. Rowling?

  to be saved. That’s the opposite of the lesson in the Harry Potter series. Harry doesn’t want other wizards to put their faith in him personally. For himself, he learns not to have too much faith in Dumbledore and Sirius. There’s no talk about devotion to a higher authority, or of making himself into that authority. God doesn’t make a sudden appearance.

  MOTHER KNOWS BEST

  There is someone in the story who comes close to divine perfection, yet the choice Rowling made there also seems more personal than traditional.

  Of all the characters in the books, including Harry, only Lily Potter seems to deserve idolatry. She’s essentially a Madonna figure, the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Mary is revered in many Christian sects and in Islam. She’s held up as an ideal. She’s favored by God. Her compassion gives strength to many who revere her. These same qualities are mentioned when characters in Harry’s story mention Lily.

  Rowling herself seems to feel the same way. Lily is the only important character who isn’t brought down to a human level in the course of the story. Harry’s father had his moments of cruelty. Dumbledore too. Sirius Black mistreated Kreacher. Harry himself is no saint, as Rowling has said many times.

  It’s this mother figure who saves Harry and who could have saved Voldemort. When Voldemort used Harry’s blood to resurrect himself, he also took into himself Lily’s powerful, protective magic. “Voldemort,” said Rowling in an interview,
“did have a chance at redemption because he had taken into his body this drop of hope or love.” It’s a sacrament, but not a traditionally Christian one. This same mother figure is reason Snape and Harry are reconciled. Harry and Snape are one in their adoration of her.

  Is it an accident that Rowling has elevated the most sacred female in the Bible story? Probably not, given the sense of equality she brings to other aspects of the story. It’s easy to imagine she might have some issues with the abundance of male figures in organized Christianity. Her reverence for her own mother may also be an influence.

  “MY BELIEF AND MY STRUGGLING”

  Questions that we consider religious are at the heart of the series. Harry wonders: Why must I suffer? Are my dead parents still alive in heaven? Does justice exist, or is it a winnerStudy of the Virgin Mary is so extensive it has its own name, “Mariology.” It’s a complicated discipline that sometimes separates Protestants and Catholics. Some Protestants are uncomfortable with the veneration of Mary in the Catholic church, which Catholics believe is misunderstood.

  See also: Voldemort