Harry Potter and the Eerie Silence

Every evening, my kids curl up with me in our bed, and I read them another two chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Reading Harry Potter has been an off-and-on ritual for the past few years, since they were old enough to handle the first Potter book. It's been an adventure that we've lived together, and I'll be sad to set the last book down.

So my question is: What has happened to the great outcry against the Potter books? An eerie silence has greeted Book 7. There's barely a whimper anywhere.

The bigger question, of course, is why was there an outcry in the first place? After all, it's kind of like a fairy tale. What was the big deal? Why this book, and not a hundred others?

My personal theory is that the Potter books hit on a conservative-Christian nerve. In some parts of the States, conservatives didn't just want their own kids not to read it: they wanted nobody to read it. There were book bannings and book burnings.

Of a kids' book.

Somehow this book got too close to something.

I meant to find out what it was.

The protesters claimed that the books promoted paganism. But if you know anything about paganism, you'd recognize that this is rubbish. Paganism is an anything-goes worldview: it has no concept of a moral evil and a moral good. In the Potter books, good and evil are central to the storyline.

Neither is the book about occultism or satanism, as claimed. No occult events occur anywhere in any of the books, and satan isn't mentioned. Evil takes the form of a person who has shredded his soul in order to escape death. He is not an object of worship, but an object of fear and loathing.

Nor is the criticism that the books will lead children to believe in magic or want to be witches valid either. If kids are old enough to tackle a 500-page book, then they're old enough not to believe in magic.

This was all grasping at straws.

I don't think it was the pagan or magic aspects of the Potter books that drove the conservatives nutty: I think it was the Christian elements.

Rowling, who is not a professed Christian, took 2000 years of christendom--in the form of symbols, legends, archetypes, allegories, and values--and put it into a new story. The books are a feast for the literature-starved: a delicious mix of latin and greek, classical references, quests, myths, ancient symbols, literary references, and above all, Christ's teaching and example. It's as if she took everything in christendom's collective unconscious and wove it into a world we can see and feel. The stories are so true to our unconscious that the places and people seem achingly familiar. We don't just *like* Hogwarts: we *recognize* it.

In effect, Rowling broke the Christian copyright on these symbols. She told the story with new names and let it have new meaning. In many ways, she let the symbols tell their own story.

Take the first two books.

Hogwarts School is clearly a symbol of the church. It is where the chosen youngsters learn the power of magic.

It had four founders, who created the four houses of Hogwarts, paralleling the four authors of the gospels. The inhabitants of the three synoptic houses are ordinary, perhaps earthy and courageous; the fourth is the house whose inhabitants believe they are divine, that access to magic makes witches and wizards above all other humans. From this house comes the evil in these books.

To get to Hogwarts, first-years have to go through a ritual by water, a type of baptism that only needs to occur once to let them in.

There is at Hogwarts a friendly giant, who protects all creatures great and small. There is Dumbledore, the white-bearded God figure, the headmaster of the school, wise and kind, whose sermon is love. His patronus symbol is the phoenix, the mythical creature that dies and then is reborn from the ashes, a resurrection symbol even though it predates the gospels.

Harry is the boy who has been prophesied to conquer evil. His patronus symbol is the stag, which in the medieval bestiaries symbolized the Christ. In case the reader didn't know that, Rowling points out that the stag looks like a unicorn--another symbol of Christ. In Quidditch, he is an instinctual Seeker. Harry and his two friends Ron and Hermione form the trinity that works to keep evil out of Hogwarts. Incomplete on their own, they need each other's strengths and weaknesses to defeat evil.

The weapon of the books is love, also called forgiveness and grief. The team of good guys is known as the Order of the Phoenix, making more use of the resurrection symbol. Evil in the stories is the fear of death. The evil lord is named Voldemort ("vol de mort" = flight from death), and his followers are known as Death Eaters.

In Book 1, the evils are in the attics of the "church" - and the evil one sits in the hat on a teacher's head. Harry has to clean out the temple and banish the evil one. In Book 2, Harry must descend into hell to kill the serpent. In so doing, he is fatally wounded by the monster's poison and faces death; but his wounds are healed by Phoenix tears--symbolic of the sorrow of the Passion story--and he survives and returns from hell.

In the final book, Harry faces his own Golgotha.

I could go on. Many people do. The books are steeped in christendom's symbols, and it's kind of fun to pull them all out. Even the mist-shrouded, train station to the afterlife, where Harry ends up after his Golgotha, is called King's Cross.

Christ's teachings dominate the morals and ethics of the books. One theme is the tender care one owes to the least of one's brothers and sisters, from the powerful wizards down to the enslaved house elves--and it even extends to the bad guys. The antiracism theme develops through all seven books, until the final book, where it becomes the dominant theme--echoes of Nazi Germany pervade the book. And Dumbledore's solution to every problem is love.

Unlike Star Wars and Tolkien, where both heroes and villains kill, in the Potter books only villains use killing curses. The good guys are nonviolent: they use disarming spells, stunning spells, immobilizing spells--and sometimes end up being killed in the process. Yet they resist any temptation to do things that Dumbledore would disapprove of. Acts of love, courage, and self-sacrifice, as well as reflecting evil back onto itself, help them by slow degrees to win the day.

Yet--and this is a big yet--despite being saturated with christendom, the books do not weave in a creed. There is no gospel-based event-by-event allegory, like CS Lewis. Except for "Christmas," "Easter," and "godfather," Christian words are not used, not even where the gospels are being quoted or paraphrased.

And that's what I believe sent the conservatives into howls. They saw what was theirs, stolen.

So then why did the hue and cry suddenly end?

It seems on the surface as if conservative Christians have suddenly decided to accept the Potter books, maybe because the Christian symbolism is so strong, that they believe the books just *have* to be Christian, that Rowling has secretly been a CS Lewis without telling anyone.

I beg to differ.

Book 6 ends with the killing of Dumbledore. Focus, people. There is no God at Hogwarts after that. Harry is left on his own with a few shreds of information to save the world from evil, a task he does not know how to do. He is not a saviour: he is just a kid who doesn't have a clue.

Book 7 is "death of god" theology, told not by philosophers but by our own collective unconscious. God is dead, Harry keeps saying, the Messiah has to be us. And so the trio finds and roots out the scraps of evil's soul until the awful moment when Harry realizes that completion of his task requires him to give up his life. And so he does, without hesitation.

But Harry is not the only Messiah. When his apparently dead body is carried back to Hogwarts, the students find that the power of evil over them is no longer strong. They become their own Messiahs, starting with stuttering, awkward Neville Longbottom, and followed by the others. They resist, refuse to obey, and draw new power over evil, until at least evil is defeated.

In effect, Harry is a Christ figure without the redemption idea. The message is not that Christ died to save us, but that Christ died to show us how to die. We are Christs when we accept the possibility of suffering and death in order to protect love.

There's the nerve that Rowling stepped on.

*****

Interestingly, the epigraph to the final book is from William Penn, on death and dying. Is this the only influence of Quakerism? Maybe just one other thing--the way the Light in children is treated with the same respect as the Light in adults in these books.