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.

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.

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)

And look what we have heard tonight: a man with the blood of hundreds reeking in his nostrils, surrounded by the devastation caused by his own malignant indifference, proposing to bury his criminal negligence beneath a mountain of lucre. It is vile.

He promises to "rebuild this great city." But even he, the most powerful man in the world, and with a personal earpiece connected to the Holiest of Holies, cannot resurrect the dead. Nor can he turn back time and start over again; and he certainly lacks the insight to perceive his own incompetence and hollow incapacity to meet a terrible moment with great and natural leadership. He also lacks the ability to truly admit wrongdoing and accept the cost of his grievous and irremediable error. In short, he can't lead, doesn't even follow very well, and he won't get out of the way.

The rest of us will have to insist on his doing that, with the impetus of the Constitution. Meanwhile, we have to attend to the lessons of these events, these horrible losses to humanity and Nature. We owe it to the hundreds who have needlessly died; to the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—who have suffered and will suffer; that some great sea-change of insight and activism will grow from this mud of ignorance and sloth, and lead us toward a more democractic nation with a more responsive and responsible government.

We must rigorously question authority—question its most hallowed presumptions and most rigid projections made upon our minds and souls. It is a task that much wiser people than I—Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Moyers come to mind—have urged upon us. For example, in 1977, Chomsky wrote about the insidious dangers of propaganda within a democratic state, in the wake of the end of the lost war in Vietnam; his message still resonates in this very moment:

Here we have a marvelous illustration of the functioning of propaganda in a democracy. A totalitarian state simply enunciates official doctrine—clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one's peril. In a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought: supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics...at the other...But we discover that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot—or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force—maybe even too critical for the health of democracy—when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is quite a marvelous system of indoctrination.*

As Barack Obama pointed out last week, the people of New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast were abandoned by this nation's leaders long before a President decided to continue a vacation of bicyle riding and golfing rather than looking into the management of an impending catastrophe in a corner of his realm populated largely by the same destitute masses who had been driven into the depths of poverty by his own administration's policies of malignant neglect. Throwing money in their direction now may cause Barbara Bush to pursue further Marie Antionette-musings on the good fortune of indigents who are dumped by a violent Nature onto the golden doorstep of Power. It will also further enrich corporations and their contractors—many of the same which have profited from the excesses of the Iraqi occupation. But will it restore life to the innumerable people who had been left to a living death by the same imperial forces that now pretend to resurrect them?

Maybe there is no other practical response now; maybe with all that has happened, there is no other recourse but to spend what is necessary to heal the appearances of this disaster. But if that's where we leave it, then the suffering, the death, the poverty, and the negligent homicide of this administration will continue—in another place, at another time, amid other tragedies of man and Nature.

While the story of the Katrina disaster has been told through the images, sound bites, and printed columns of our mass media (and, it must be said, with considerably more truth and courage than we have been accustomed to getting from them), hundreds more have been killed and maimed in Iraq—a continuing carnage of inconceivable horror and human waste. At the same time, more lies, hypocrisy, and posturing have been wrought within the United Nations (see Nicholas Kristof's excellent op-ed on this in the Times); while the suppression of evidence on Karl Rove's crimes and the imperialistic designs revealed in the Downing Street Memo continues in Congress.

All of us must make the effort to expand our awareness of all these crimes of negligence and deceit, so that this nation's leaders are forced by the will of a free and conscious people to dispel the insanity of arrogance and deception that has brought us to this shameful and agonizing moment in American history.
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*Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (1977), in - (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 38-39.

What is evil? What are its defining characteristics? How do you know it when you see it? What can we do about Evil? How can we defeat it?

The fact that such questions arise from a reading of J.K. Rowling’s latest tome in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, tells us a lot both about these stories and about our world. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that this novel was released merely a week after the violent and tragic events in London of July 7; but I am sure that most readers, particularly in the U.K., had to feel a sense of urgent meaning in its pages.

—traditional Eskimo

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

It has been about fifteen years since a young single mother took a train ride from Manchester to London, during which a story of exploration, self-discovery, and magic was born to her consciousness. It has been eight years since the first published installment of this story appeared, with no powerful advertising or marketing machinery to move it before the world. Today, that struggling Mom of a decade ago stands on the greatest stage in the history of letters, this side of the Bible. How did this happen, and what are we to learn from it? How has a children's story—a mere fantasy tale of a boy wizard attending a school for sorcery—captured the readers of virtually every nation and culture on the planet, and made its author the first billionaire writer in history?

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.