September 27, 2005
Inside the Department of Mysteries: Time, Death, and the Search for Truth
This room was larger than the last, dimly lit and rectangular, and the center of it was sunken, forming a great stone pit some twenty feet below them. They were standing on the topmost tier of what seemed to be stone benches running all around the room and descending in steep steps like an amphitheater, or the courtroom in which Harry had been tried by the Wizengamot. Instead of a chained chair, however, there was a raised stone dais in the center of the lowered floor, and upon this dais stood a stone archway that looked so ancient, cracked, and crumbling that Harry was amazed the thing was still standing. Unsupported by any surrounding wall, the archway was hung with a tattered black curtain or veil which, despite the complete stillness of the cold surrounding air, was fluttering very slightly as though it had just been touched. —Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 34
The climactic events that burst amid the closing chapters of J.K. Rowling's fifth book of the Potter series are placed within a physical setting of implosive density. For these events—the confrontation between the children and the "Death Eaters"; the frenetic wizard's duel capped by the battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort; and the death of Harry's godfather, Sirius Black—all happen in a place called the "Department of Mysteries," where Harry comes face to face with symbolic images of the three great riddles of human consciousness in the world of form: Time, Thought, and Death.
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Posted by dumbledore at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)
No. 12, Grimmauld Place and The Voices of Neurosis
Pressing a finger to her lips, she led him on tiptoes past a pair of long, moth-eaten curtains, behind which Harry supposed there must be another door, and after skirting a large umbrella stand that looked as though it had been made from a severed troll's leg, they started up the dark staircase, passing a row of shrunken heads mounted on plaques on the wall. A closer look showed Harry that the heads belonged to house-elves. All of them had the same rather snoutlike nose.
Harry's bewilderment deepened with every step he took. What on earth were they doing in a house that looked as though it belonged to the darkest of wizards?
—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 4
In the opening chapters of the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, the fifteen year-old boy wizard is attacked by a pair of "dementors"—malevolent ghouls with the power to suck one's very soul out with a single "kiss." Harry successfully defends himself from this assault and is then rescued from his Muggle home by a group of his adult friends, who take him to an obscure house in a darkened, low-income neighborhood within London. This house is the headquarters of the "Order of the Phoenix," the social defense association that has been hurriedly re-formed in response to the threat posed by the return of Lord Voldemort, the complex embodiment of evil whose shadow floats throughout the Potter series.
Nothing about his new environment is particularly encouraging to Harry: garbage is piled up in the street; dirt and filth seem to define the homes at Grimmauld Place, sticking to their exteriors like a gloomy mood. The door to the place is "black…shabby…scratched"; the darkness inside is dominated by a "sweetish, rotting smell" which gives it "the feeling of a derelict building." Gas lamps are lit, which cast "a flickering insubstantial light over the peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpet"; there are other haunted-house features, such as a "cobwebby chandelier" and "age-blackened portraits" on the walls. The question that occurs to Harry, as he walks through the house at Grimmauld Place, seems entirely natural (the name says it all: "grim and old," or "grime and mould"—throughout these stories, Rowling reveals an uncanny talent with names): what on earth is he doing here?
The question is not answered for him immediately: he only knows that he is in the headquarters of the Order, that it seems an uncharacteristic place for his friends and allies to be calling home, even if only as a temporary measure, and that its pervasive gloom feels poisonous to him. And from a metaphorical perspective, it is, as Rowling swiftly demonstrates in this tour through the realm of the neurotic tenement.
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Posted by dumbledore at 06:41 PM | Comments (0)
Priori Incantatem: Engaging Cosmic Protection
"The golden thread connecting Harry and Voldemort splintered; though the wands remained connected, a thousand more beams arced high over Harry and Voldemort, crisscrossing all around them, until they were enclosed in a golden, dome-shaped web, a cage of light, beyond which the Death Eaters circled like jackals, their cries strangely muffled now." (–Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, from Chapter 34, "Priori Incantatem")
We now find Harry trapped in a graveyard, to which he has been magically transported in one of the darker moments from the Potter series—a scene in which Harry's fellow competitor in sport and love (Cedric Diggory) has been murdered, and Harry himself cruelly tortured. He is now in a desperate and seemingly hopeless confrontation with Lord Voldemort, the embodiment of evil who has threatened Harry throughout his young life—mostly as a merely parasitic or apparitional consciousness. But now Voldemort has, with the help of a twisted rite of transubstantiation, been revived to a skeletal semblance of a human form, and he is intent on destruction. Harry assumes himself defenseless against his antagonist, but decides that "he was going to die trying to defend himself, even if no defense was possible."
Harry thus enters into his first armed encounter against his nemesis in a human body. Harry resorts to the only defense he has learned, the charm designed to disarm an opponent ("Expelliarmus"), while Voldemort employs his trump, the killing curse ("Avada Kedavra"). The red light of Harry's pure anger meets the cold green death-trail of Voldemort's termination mania, and together they synergize into a golden laser beam of kinetic electromagnetism. It is from this composite gold energy that the web described in our lead quote forms itself. Voldemort, obsessed with the notion of completing the kill himself and thus fulfilling his revenge on Harry, orders his servants, the Death Eaters, not to intervene. Meanwhile, Harry simply holds on, trusting in the protective dome around him. Indeed, he has no alternative, but his trust is quickly recognized and affirmed by the invisible realm:
And then an unearthly and beautiful sound filled the air….It was coming from every thread of the light-spun web vibrating around Harry and Voldemort. It was a sound Harry recognized, though he had heard it only once before in his life: phoenix song. It was the sound of hope to Harry…the most beautiful and welcome thing he had ever heard in his life….It was the sound he connected with Dumbledore, and it was almost as though a friend were speaking in his ear….(Goblet of Fire, p. 664)
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Posted by dumbledore at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)