Essay: Traitors, Rebels and Hanged Men

In Alfonso Cuaron’s cinematic interpretation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, time is a recurring theme. This extends to the visual joke of a wizard at the Leaky Cauldron pub reading a copy of A Brief History of Time by the Muggle Stephen Hawking. There are numerous lingering shots of clocks in the film, large and small, and the Whomping Willow’s progress through the seasons is also used by Cuaron to illustrate the passage of time.

Unlike many film versions of the books, this manner of shaping the story is perfectly in tune with the book, since JK Rowling shaped the story around a complete Quidditch season, the only one Harry plays in the seven-book series. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 15: Prisoner of Quidditch and Episode 16: The Seeker.) Using Quidditch to mark time prepares readers for the time-travel sequence at the book’s climax. Rowling chose to use a game, not the Whomping Willow, as Cuaron does, and her choice is obviously going to be more in tune with the overarching theme running throughout her seven books. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode1: The Kids’ Table.) But Time is still of the essence in the third Harry Potter book, as the Tarot card at the top of the third column shows.

The third column of cards in our Tarot grid of three rows and seven columns, the column aligning with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, has card #3, the Empress, at the top, the Wheel of Fortune, card #10, in the center and the Star, card #17, at the bottom of the column. Hermione Granger is the character who best embodies the Mother, the ruling archetype for the third book. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 4: Mother, May I?) She also happens to be the character who best embodies the Tarot archetype of the Empress in Prisoner of Azkaban, which is the Tarot equivalent of the archetypal Mother.  Hermione’s actions drive much of the book and she is a key player during the climactic time-travel sequence.

As a young woman now, Hermione is subject to time in a way that Harry and Ron are not: her monthly cycles. As a werewolf, Remus Lupin, who is introduced in Prisoner of Azkaban, also has a “monthly cycle” of sorts, though his is slightly different, and, ideally, when he has taken the Wolfsbane Potion brewed by Severus Snape, it involves less blood.

A typical Empress card depicts a matronly woman on a throne; there may be a shield in the shape of a large heart by her side, with the symbol for woman (a circle with a cross descending); or she may hold a shield with an eagle on it, which matches the shield seen on the card of her counterpart, the Emperor. In Hermione’s case, this is another link to her almost being Sorted into Ravenclaw, which she mentions in Order of the Phoenix, and this version of the Empress also usually wears a blue tunic; blue is both Hermione’s emblematic color (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth), and the chief color of Ravenclaw house, as well as traditionally being associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Some versions of the Empress card show her with a crown of twelve stars for the months of the year, over which she rules, linking her to monthly cycles and to time. If her throne does not resemble the wings of an angel it may be in a field backed by a stand of trees, linking her to nature and growing things. (In the first book of the series, Hermione is the one who has the knowledge needed to conquer the plant called Devil’s Snare because she pays attention in Herbology.)

The Empress card is linked to the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven—another meaning for the crown of stars—and to the astrological sign of Virgo, which is Hermione’s birth sign, since her birthday is 19 September. The Empress is also linked to the Greek goddess of the harvest, Demeter. Many versions show a field of wheat growing at the Empress’s feet. She is also linked to the goddesses Venus and Aphrodite and therefore to love, which makes sense, due to the heart-shaped shield and the symbol for woman on it. The Empress card is linked to Isis as well, the Egyptian goddess of the Dog Star, which is where Sirius, also introduced in this book, gets his name.

The Empress both gives and takes; she gives fecundity/fertility but she also withholds, such as when the goddess Demeter withheld spring while her daughter Persephone was in the Underworld with Hades. Hermione keeps information from both Ron and Harry—the fact that Lupin is a werewolf—which is partly payback for their snubbing her after she has Professor McGonagall confiscate Harry’s new broom, the Firebolt that Sirius sends to him. She credits Snape assigning the third year Gryffindors an essay about werewolves when he is their Defense Against the Dark Arts substitute teacher, but it is logical that Hermione, who is attuned to her own monthly cycle, should work out Lupin’s secret even without this, a secret that flies over Harry’s and Ron’s heads. The links between the Empress, the goddess Isis, and the Dog Star are also fitting for the book in which Sirius Black is the title character, other than Harry.

Hermione becomes a literal Mother in this book, rather than just an archetypal or figurative one, by adopting Crookshanks the cat, who becomes the bane of existence for Scabbers, Ron’s pet “rat”. She is protective of Crookshanks and for a little while is no longer friends with Ron when he believes that her pet ate his. She also researches legal cases in hopes of saving Buckbeak the Hippogriff, who is in danger of being executed in this book. A Hippogriff combines an eagle—depicted on the Empress’s shield on some cards—and a horse—which is an animal linked to the Empress’s element, Earth. This legal activity could also foreshadow Hermione’s eventual career in Magical Law, which is hinted at in Deathly Hallows.

The cards linked to the Empress (card #3) are the Hanged Man (card #12, because 1+2=3) and the World (card #21, because 2+1=3). The Hanged Man is called The Traitor, or Il Traditore, in Italian Tarot decks, in which the figure is sometimes pictured with a bag or two of money, “suggesting Judas with his thirty pieces of silver,” according to Sallie Nichols in her book Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Hanged Man cards usually show a man being hung upside down by one foot, a practice called baffling that was reserved for traitors. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 30: Harry and Tarot.) This card could point to the character of Sirius Black, who Harry believes betrayed him and his parents. He hears about this while eavesdropping on a conversation between Hagrid, Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick and Madam Rosmerta at the Three Broomsticks. But this card could also point to the real traitor, Wormtail, Peter Pettigrew, the true identity of Ron’s pet rat Scabbers. Sirius and Peter swap places by the end of the book after Rowling reveals that there is more to this “rat” than meets the eye and that Sirius was framed for both the betrayal of the Potters and for Peter’s so-called “murder”.

Ron and Harry also feel deeply that Hermione has betrayed Harry by telling McGonagall about Harry receiving a new broomstick, sent to him anonymously. This is fitting, as Hermione embodies the Empress, whose card is numerically linked to The Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man isn’t a card in the Tarot story that is definitively always linked to betrayal, though; Nichols cites the apostle Peter, who shares a name with Peter Pettigrew, being crucified upside down as a “mark of humility”. She also writes:

As history has repeatedly shown, any person whose individual conscience is in opposition to the collective viewpoint can appear as a traitor to the Establishment. Such an individual is subjected to many trials, the least of which is that held in a court of law. Often upside down in relation to his friends, his family, and his government, such a nonconformer can even be branded criminal. [p. 218]

We will see this with Harry’s character in the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, in which he is in fact considered to be “a traitor to the Establishment”—the Ministry of Magic. The fifth book will be ruled by the fifth column of Tarot cards, in which the Hanged Man is the center card, between the fifth card (the Pope or Hierophant or High Priest) and the nineteenth card (the Sun). But this is another way that Sirius can be seen as the Hanged Man in the third book; he is not an actual traitor but is in opposition to the Establishment, and has been branded a criminal because of this, not because he actually did what he was accused of.

Harry is also briefly in this role in the third book. His aunt and uncle tell Aunt Marge that he goes to St Brutus’s Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys—that he is in juvie, essentially. As if fulfilling this “prophecy” of his criminal tendencies, he accidentally inflates Aunt Marge and immediately decides to go on the run, fleeing with his broomstick, trunk of magical books, and other school supplies, intent on becoming a fugitive rather than having his wand broken or suffering whatever punishment Vernon wants to inflict on him after this incident. Harry also later breaks the school rule about not going to Hogsmeade without having his permission slip signed. He has been a rule-breaker before, but does it far more often and with less trepidation in the third book, in which Snape also cites Harry’s father James as someone who repeatedly broke rules.

This rule-breaking culminates in Harry helping a prisoner of the Ministry—Sirius—to escape, as well as aiding the condemned Buckbeak, another Hanged Man who was not actually guilty of the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to death.

The World card, #21, the other card linked numerically to card #3, the Empress, is about completion and wholeness. The figure on it holds two wands, and is surrounded by symbols of the Evangelists, which align with fire, air, water and earth. This links the card to the suits of the Tarot Minor Arcana and to the Hogwarts houses, which are also each aligned with fire, air, water or earth. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 30: Harry and Tarot.)

In Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry masters conjuring a Patronus. To do this, he must think happy thoughts, and what he chooses is revealing: Hagrid telling him that he is a wizard, when Harry learns the truth about himself and feels complete and whole because of this. Harry also thinks about being with his best friends, Ron and Hermione, who make him feel complete and whole as well.  After he wins the Quidditch Cup, he experiences a euphoria that he believes could help him to conjure “the world’s best Patronus”, but he does not use this thought to later conjure the Patronus that will save him, Hermione and Sirius from an army of dementors.

Harry comes to equate his Quidditch training with this skill, with conjuring a Patronus. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 15: Prisoner of Quidditch and Episode 16: The Seeker.) He first goes to Lupin to ask for help fighting dementors in order to succeed at Quidditch, after dementors make him fall from his broom during the first match of the year. Since Harry’s very first match, when he collided with and became metaphorically entangled with all Snitches, Quidditch has been an activity of wholeness and completion for him, and catching the Snitch is like Harry reuniting with a missing piece of himself. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table.)

When he first sees a figure conjuring a Patronus to save him, Hermione and Sirius from the dementors, he believes he is seeing his dead father, James. While he is time-traveling he realizes that he has to have been the one to conjure the Patronus to save the non-time-traveling versions of himself, Hermione and Sirius. We can think of these two Harrys coming together to form the figure on the World card, armed with two wands, and surrounded by symbols of wholeness and completion, the epitome of the spiritual wholeness necessary to conjure a Patronus.

Harry begins to take Divination as a subject in his third year at school, in Prisoner of Azkaban. While the first book had an oblique connection to the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card, #10, which is numerically related to card #1, the Magician, the card at the top of the first column of cards, the column linked to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, this is the first book in which the Wheel of Fortune is a column card, one of the main cards linked to the themes of the book. It is in the middle of the third column, between the Empress card and the Star card. There are many versions of the Wheel card but virtually all of them show a wheel going round, taking two or more creatures who are attached to it either up or down, depending upon your perspective. 

The wheel is usually ruled over by a sphinx, a mythical composite creature, a type of tetramorph made of the symbols for the Evangelists: a human, a lion, an eagle and a bull. Some Wheel of Fortune cards have these symbols in the corners of the card, which again links the card to fire, air, water and earth and thus, again, to the Tarot Minor Arcana suits also linked to these elements, and to the Hogwarts houses. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 18: The Wide World.) The symbols for the suits of the Tarot Minor Arcana are also on the Magician, card #1, which is linked to card #10, and the symbols for the Evangelists are also in the corners of the World, card #21, which is linked to the Empress, at the top of the column for this book. 

Instead of or in addition to the symbols for the Evangelists, some versions of the Wheel have the alchemical symbols for fire, air, water and earth somewhere on the card, but both the elemental symbols and the angel, lion, eagle and bull are collectively one symbol of wholeness.

On many Wheel cards, letters have been drawn on the wheel. When this occurs, it is usually four Roman letters alternating with four Hebrew letters. The Roman letters can spell T-A-R-O, which is TAROT without the final T, or we can think of them as R-O-T-A, rota, the Latin word for “wheel”.

The Hebrew letters on the wheel are yodh, he, vav (sometimes transliterated waw) and he again (יהוה‎). This is the Tetragrammaton, which means “four letters” in Greek). It is derived from a Hebrew verb meaning “to be” and is considered to be the proper name of God. (“I am that I am” or “I am becoming that I am becoming”.) This four-letter Hebrew word is not usually pronounced in Hebrew; when people encounter it, they say “Ha Shem” which means “the name”. It has variously been pronounced by others as Yahweh, Yehovah or Jehovah, among other things, when it is considered appropriate to pronounce it at all (and not everyone agrees on if or when it is appropriate to do so).

In addition to the Wheel of Fortune card being especially appropriate in the book where Harry begins the study of Divination, Harry’s fortunes also rise and fall in this book in a dizzying progression. He is down when he is with Aunt Marge. He is on the upswing when he has the pleasure of seeing her inflated. He is down again when he runs away, but his luck is on the rise when he summons the Knight Bus. He is afraid that he will be expelled for inflating Marge, but he is instead brought under the protection of the Ministry of Magic and permitted to stay in Diagon Alley for the rest of the summer holiday.

The Wheel can also apply to the prisoner of Azkaban himself, Sirius Black, who is one of Harry’s doppelgängers in the third book. They are both prisoners at the beginning of the book, Sirius in Azkaban, and Harry on Privet Drive. They both “break free” at about the same time and they are simultaneously on the run. Harry also gives Stan Shunpike, the conductor on the Knight bus, a false name (Neville Longbottom), which is something a fugitive might do.

When it looks bleakest for Sirius (and for Buckbeak) Harry saves them both, thanks to the Time-Turner, which, in its turning, evokes the image of a Wheel. JK Rowling’s theory of time-travel in this book—though it isn’t hers alone—is also wheel-like, requiring time-travelers to merely walk through the time to which they have traveled and come full-circle back to the present, not necessarily having changed anything but with a different perspective on past events, perhaps better understanding how and why those events unfolded the way that they did.

It is strongly implied in the text that Dumbledore has an epiphany about Buckbeak’s so-called “disappearance” before his scheduled execution. This is probably why he tells Harry and Hermione to use the Time-Turner. Dumbledore seems to already suspect that this is how Buckbeak was saved, so when he tells them to use the Time-Turner, the goal now is to fulfill the timeline that has already occurred, from his perspective, not to change anything. This makes Dumbledore, the archetypal Magician, a card numerically-linked to the Wheel card, crucial to the climax of the book.

The other card linked to the Magician and to the Wheel of Fortune is the Sun (card #19), which is associated with both death and resurrection because the sun sets each evening but rises again the next day. Harry, Ron and Hermione believe, incorrectly, that Buckbeak was executed, so when Harry and Hermione time-travel and find that they have the opportunity to rescue him, to them it is as if Buckbeak has been resurrected. Harry also believes that he sees his own dead father conjure a Patronus to save him, another virtual resurrection, until Harry realizes that he did it.

Just as the Hanged Man card, or Il Traditore, the Traitor, could have one of two connotations in this book—or it could have both, referring to those merely considered traitors or opponents of the state, as Harry and Sirius are at various times, or to an actual traitor, Peter Pettigrew—there is another card connected to this book that can also refer to traitors: card #17, at the bottom of the third column—The Star. One of the best-known stars in myth and folklore is the Morning Star, Lucifer, who was a traitor to heaven. The traitor to Harry’s parents, Peter, AKA Wormtail, is unveiled in the third book of the series after having lived with the Weasley family for many years, first as Percy’s pet and then as Ron’s. Sirius’s given name is also the same as the Dog Star, another quite famous star.

Thus once again, a card could refer to traitors and to two characters: Sirius, thought to be a traitor, and Peter, the one who really was a traitor. It is as if Peter and Sirius are tethered to opposite sides of the Wheel of Fortune; Peter goes from being protected, hiding in his rat form, his true identity unknown, to being on the run, and being known to Harry and his allies as the real traitor, while Sirius goes from being considered possibly the biggest traitor the wizarding world has ever known and a fugitive on the run to having his name cleared, as far as Harry is concerned, who rescues Sirius. Plus, according to Trelawney’s new prophecy, the one she gives to Harry while he takes his Divination final, Peter is probably the one who will help Voldemort to rise again, so he will have an opportunity to again betray Harry, and betray Ron, too, since he was a member of the Weasley family for the past twelve years and is also betraying them by helping Harry’s enemy.

On many Star cards, a woman holds pitchers in each hand, pouring liquid from one of the pitchers into a pool of water and from the other onto the land beside her. There are eight stars in the sky above the woman and the stars have eight points each. The Star is card #17 in the Tarot Major Arcana and numerically linked to the Justice card, #8 (1+7=8). Eight is a very balanced number and the equal treatment of the liquid being poured into water and onto land makes this card about balance again, like the Justice card, which shows a woman holding the scales of justice and which is also a sequential card for this book (to be addressed in the next essay). The number seventeen is also important in the Potterverse; it is the age when wizards are considered to be adults, the time when young magical people must decide who they really are. They must find a “guiding star” and forge ahead into their futures.

Another interpretation of the Star card is that the protagonist of the Tarot story has stopped clinging to traumatic memories through discovering who they really are as a person. There could not be a much better description of Harry being tempted to continue hearing his parents’ voices when he is near a dementor, but later learning to resist this temptation and trusting in his ability to conjure a Patronus, particularly when he realizes that he is the one who already did this, not his miraculously-resurrected father.

The Star card can also point to a generous spirit, someone who shares bounty to improve others’ lives. Sirius (the name of a star) offers Harry a home at the end of the third book, though in the short term he must settle for signing Harry’s permission form to enter Hogsmeade, since he is still a wanted man and on the run from the Ministry of Magic. But he makes this offer to Harry, and makes it to Dumbledore as well, giving him number twelve, Grimmauld Place to use as the headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix in the fifth book.

The Star, card #17, at the bottom of the third column of Tarot Major Arcana cards, points to Harry leaving behind the temptation to wallow in his parents’ deaths, to continue to hear their last words, and instead he is given a new family: Sirius, who was given the Potters as his new family when he left home as a teenager. Harry discovers the truth about his godfather and that he, Harry, not his father, James, conjured the Patronus that saved him, Hermione and Sirius. In so doing, Harry takes another step on the path to wholeness.

Adapted from the script for QuantumHarry,the Podcast, Episode 35: Prisoner of Time. Copyright 2017-2019 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

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