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August 17, 2005
The Tao of Hogwarts
Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles that were floating in midair over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. At the top of the hall was another long table where the teachers were sitting....Mainly to avoid the staring eyes, Harry looked upward and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars....It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn't simply open on to the heavens.
-J.K. Rowling, from Chapter 7 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking into the Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; that, with the open heart and silver-dollar eyes of a child, you are entering a place that is thought only to live in the realms of fiction and fantasy. See if you can feel the glow of candlelight hovering above your head; see if you can sense the seemingly universal vastness of this immense hall and its boundless firmament of ceiling, as you shuffle forward in a clot of classmates, nearly overcome with a mixture of humility, gratitude, awe, a little dread, and above all, open wonder at the reality of it all. Now hold your awareness there, in that moment, and remain. Continue walking through this spacious, starry hall for a minute or so, and then turn slowly, to look back through the door that had stood, a little time before, between this reality and that dream, and ask yourself the question that - once asked:
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tsu, dreamed I was a butterfly flying happily here and there, enjoying life without knowing who I was. Suddenly I woke up and I was indeed Chuang Tsu. Did Chuang Tsu dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Chuang Tsu? There must be some distinction between Chuang Tsu and the butterfly. This is a case of transformation.
Transformation is the way of natural magic. As Chuang Tsu suggests, transformation is a kind of change; but not merely a changing of outer circumstances-a reordering of the furniture of life. No: transformative movement involves the total being, and starts from within, from "the still point in the center," as Lao Tzu referred to it, where the universal is realized through the liberation of individuality. This book, this journey through the world of Hogwarts and its transformative symbols, is a simple guide to applying the magical stories of Harry Potter's quest to the everyday experience of our own lives, here in the Muggle world. We all have the inborn ability to move freely between the manifest and the unconscious; from matter to energy; between distinction and union, until the divisions dissolve amid a cleansing mist of expansive awareness.
"One thought fills immensity," said the poet of eternal childhood. This is the spirit in which we will here explore the grounds, people, objects, and events of the world of Harry Potter. Since J.K. Rowling brought us this compellingly natural narrative of discovery and transformation-written at a time in human history when the earth was poisoned with hatred and genocide on a scale unseen in at least half a century-these stories, and the inner journey they portray, have struck a universal chord of feeling and wonder that defies any blandly psychological or commercial rationalization. Other books have been more aggressively marketed than were the early Potter tales ; others featured higher drama and a more epic form of heroism; and Mrs. Rowling was certainly not the first writer to draw upon magical themes in weaving a story. I believe that her talent, and her appeal, have to do with her gift of awakening in her readers the natural feeling of transformative potential—the ability to bring the magical and the fantastic back into the realm of the ordinary, which is where they have always belonged. Clearly, the Potter stories are tales of deep imagination; yet they strike universal chords of human experience that reach past the veneer of conventional, escapist fantasy.
I have read each of these stories over at least ten times (encouraged throughout by my ten-year old daughter, for whom there can be no bedtime without a chapter of Potter); I believe that Mrs. Rowling has presented us with something unique. She has written a set of stories that do not endorse an entertainment of mere escapism. Instead, the Potter stories present an allegory of self-discovery, whose persevering purpose is to show us that to live a successful human life in harmony with Nature and the universe, no escape is necessary. For the journey of Harry Potter is an inner voyage of return—to one's personal truth, to one's entire being in all its diversity of feeling, thought, and vision, and finally to one's inimitable connection to the Origin of life and form, made between the open luminosity of individuality and the sable glow of the Source. For the purpose of this exploration of Rowling's world of metaphor, and (admittedly) for lack of a better expression, I call this journey "the way of natural magic."
Inner Matriculation: The Feeling-Sense of Natural Magic
Harry is invited to attend Hogwarts and enter the way of natural magic because he possesses some inborn ability or potential that distinguishes him from the children of the "Muggle," or non-magical world; yet there is no clear-cut definition ever given of what exactly it is about him and other wizarding kids that makes them thus eligible for admission into Hogwarts. There are certainly no genealogical, financial, or class restrictions. Children of every conceivable socio-economic and cultural background are represented at Hogwarts; a child may be born of Muggle parentage yet still have the spark of wizardry within that arouses the call of the magical world. The intuitive point of this serendipitous ambiguity seems obvious: the experiences of Harry and his friends in their response to the call of Magic are meant to speak freely and without restriction to all children. The distinction between "magical" and "Muggle" is the writer's way of emphasizing the transformative message, that what people call "magic" (whether in awe or derision) is really the ordinary human way of feeling and action in the world. Otherwise, as the stories themselves reveal, this division between Muggle and Wizard tends to dissolve. The "Muggle-mind" of the Dursleys, with which the series begins, is presented as a cultural program of repression, accumulation, and artifice; and as Rowling later shows us, there is plenty of "Muggle-mind" to be found amid the magical world as well.
But once again, there is no fixed ideological qualification for an introduction to magic: it appears that the children simply need to have grown enough to be ready. They do not have to perform heroic actions, pay tribute, pass a test or suffer through an initiation ritual; walk through fire, receive ablutions, enter apprenticeship, go on retreat, or perform penance—they only have to grow to be eleven years old. Once they are, the invitation to Hogwarts arrives, and the children go to the wizarding shopping district, Diagon Alley, to purchase supplies, uniforms, and books for their journey of learning. Thus equipped, they go—not by flying broom or magic carpet, but via a slow, daylong journey on that transformative means of modern transportation, the train. Childhood, and especially adolescence, cannot be rushed—to force it to a conclusion in a supersonic moment of linear development is an invitation to disaster and regret. Lao Tzu pointed toward this understanding in Chapter 64 of his Tao Te Ching:
The sage relies on unforced action, And this upholds the dignity of his effort. He doesn't clutch at success, Therefore, he never fails. Others seem to collapse in failure At the very threshold of success; Yet he is humble and cautious Both at the end and the beginning: Thus are his affairs brought safely to completion.
To force conclusions aborts solutions; development that is driven to a fixed point of culturally-defined maturity only sets the stage for a lifetime of regression. Therefore, Rowling takes her young characters on a long journey, pulled by an old steam locomotive, during which they will have time to adjust inwardly, to form relationships, to contemplate, and to literally feel the temporal length and gravitational strength of the transformative process of growth. This is what James Hillman refers to as "growing down":
Hasn't something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally, we come into the world headfirst, like divers into a pool of humanity...Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors of our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.
"Grow up" is a message of forced urgency; often the phrase itself is spoken in a kind of harried impatience, usually to a person who we think is acting immaturely. In the linear, upward model, development is pictured as a rapid succession of stages, which can be compressed and foreshortened through the technologies of progress, until childhood comes to resemble the boot-sequence of a computer. Hillman goes on to point out the frequent consequences of development that is driven by this demand to "grow up":
College kids with bright promise sometimes suddenly...fall off the fast track. They want to "get down." Or drinks, drugs, and depression set in like Furies. Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.
Rowling's Harry Potter novels are marked throughout by this tension between the natural, omni-directional movement of growth, in which the soul "grows down" as the body matures physically, and the culturally-defined "upward and onward" obsession, familiar to nearly all of us. But early on, as she introduces her characters and settings, she is careful to remind us that true magic is found not in the flick of a wand, but during a slow train ride, or through long nights of solitary gazing into a mirror that reveals the images of an unknown and idealized past.
Posted by dumbledore at August 17, 2005 06:41 PM