Essay: Upon Your Own Sword

The Tarot Major Arcana cards numbered one, two and three— the Magician, High Priestess and Empress—are the sequence cards aligned with the first book of the Harry Potter series. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 32: The Mirror and the Stone.) The next three cards—four, five and six—are the Emperor (the “seed card” for this book), the High Priest (also called the Hierophant or Pope) and the Lovers card. These are the cards aligned with the second book in the series: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

In Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols writes: “Culturally as well as personally, the Emperor’s number four heralds a new beginning”. The Emperor is usually depicted sitting on a throne with symbols of his office: a scepter and sometimes also a shield, which may display an eagle (though if there is no shield there may be a statue of an eagle or the image of a live bird present with the Emperor). There are also often rams’ heads on the arms of his throne, which connects the Emperor to Ares, the Greek god of war, as well as to the astrological sign of Aries, just as the Justice card is related to the sign of Libra and the Moon card to the sign of Cancer.

The number four is how humans have described the world for a very long time: the four corners of the earth, the four cardinal directions, the four elements of fire, air, water and earth, etc. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 18: The Wide World.) Since the Emperor on the fourth card is the symbolic ruler of the entire world, the symbolism on this card is concerned with the protagonist of the Tarot story going out to confront the world.

Arthur Weasley is just one character who embodies the Emperor; he is also a Father, the archetype that is equivalent to the Tarot archetype of the Emperor. Arthur is the person responsible for much of Harry’s new experience of the wizarding world outside of Hogwarts in Chamber of Secrets. After Ron and the twins arrive at Harry’s house in the magical car/Chariot that Arthur Weasley created, they take Harry-the-Hermit, who is no longer locked up on Privet Drive, to the Burrow, home of the Weasleys. Here Harry finds countless magical gadgets, talking mirrors, dishes washing themselves, and knitting needles that seem to be on autopilot. Harry also meets Arthur at last, a literal as well as archetypal Father. Harry’s horizons will be broadened even more as the series continues, especially in the fourth book, which is ruled by the Father archetype as well as being ruled by the Emperor card, but he witnesses something new and important in the second book: daily life in a wizarding home, the type of home in which he would have grown up if his parents had not been murdered.

Harry travels by Floo for the first time in Chamber of Secrets, which is something most wizards seem to take for granted—and which can be considered another sort of Chariot, the card numerically linked to the card at the bottom of the second column, the Tower, since the Floo network is a way of traveling that is controlled by magic, like the Chariot on the card.

Harry shops with the Weasleys in Diagon Alley and witnesses Arthur, who shares a name with the legendary King Arthur, fighting with another archetypal Father/Emperor: Lucius Malfoy. Malfoy uses the ensuing chaos as an opportunity to slip Tom Riddle’s diary into Ginny’s cauldron. Ron and Harry also go to Hogwarts in the Chariot that is Arthur’s magical car when they cannot get onto the platform to board the school train. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 33: The Inverted Tower of Secrets.) Even when he is not present, Arthur’s influence runs deep in Harry’s life in the second book of the series.

The cards that are linked to the Emperor (card #4) are Death (card #13, because 1+3=4) and the Fool (since, when it is numbered, it is labeled 22, and 2+2=4). The Fool card being involved here, though tangentially, is particularly interesting because of the tight link, historically, between a ruler and the court jester, or the Fool, who is often the only one able to offer counsel to the ruler without losing his head if his boss disagrees with him; there is a symbiotic relationship between a ruler and a Fool. Peeves usually embodies the Tarot archetype of the Fool, but at times Arthur is both Fool and Emperor, asking Harry many strange questions about Muggles on the one hand, but also giving Ginny sage advice about not trusting something that can think for itself if she cannot see where it keeps its brain.

King Lear and the Fool in the Storm by William Dyce, 1806-1864 (oil on canvas, circa 1851)

The link that the Death card, the other one adding up to four, has to this book takes us back to the basilisk’s Petrifaction victims, frozen statues who seem to be dead. Death is in fact stalking Hogwarts’ corridors and its victims are frozen in an imitation of death. Ginny is also in a virtual death until Harry destroys the diary Horcrux that has sapped her life-force, after which she awakens.

Death appears in many other forms in Chamber of Secrets. The roosters at the castle all mysteriously turn up dead because when Tom Riddle possesses Ginny, he has her kill them, since the rooster’s crow is fatal to the basilisk. Myrtle, gatekeeper to the Chamber of Secrets, is dead, as is Nearly Headless Nick. Harry goes to Nick’s “Deathday Party” and encounters many ghosts there. And finally, Harry is pierced by a basilisk fang at the same time that he kills the basilisk, but is saved from death this time by phoenix tears, by Fawkes.

The High Priest (or Pope or Hierphant) on card #5, the second sequence card aligned with Chamber of Secrets, is yet another “holy man” Harry embodies in this book, which is fitting, since he has his spiritual coming-of-age here, foreshadowed by Ron making him a bishop in the life-sized chess game in the previous book. In the Chamber, Harry voices his faith in the god-figure, Dumbledore, which brings Fawkes to Harry, a symbolic Holy Spirit. Unlike in the story of Pentecost, however, Harry doesn’t receive the ability to speak to the Other at this time; he can already do this, having used his Parseltongue ability to access to the Chamber. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.)

Like the High Priestess, the High Priest sits between two pillars, an indication that he is the gatekeeper to another realm. He holds up two fingers, leaving two pointing downward, symbolizing his being a bridge between heaven and earth, a Liminal Being. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 8: Have You Tried Not Being Liminal?) A triple crown sits on his head—a reference to the Trinity—and the keys to heaven are at his feet, another mark of a gatekeeper. The threshold-guardian Hagrid, for instance, another Liminal Being, is known as “Keeper of the Keys”, also a title of St. Peter, who is supposed to be waiting for the newly dead at the “pearly gates” of heaven. On many High Priest cards, two monks kneel facing him; unlike the Devil’s companions, they are not chained. They have chosen freely to be with the High Priest, just as Ron and Hermione choose to be Harry’s friends and allies.

As a Liminal Being, Harry is repeatedly in an intermediary role in the books, which is the job of a holy person, though he isn’t the only one who fills that role in this book or in the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, which will be ruled by the fifth card in the Major Arcana. He regularly intercedes for others, such as when he frees Dobby. Dumbledore, another High Priest, also intercedes on behalf of others.

Grimm’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, into which Wilhelm Grimm inserted the character of the woodsman to save Red from the metaphorical hell of the wolf’s belly, is retold with Harry as that woodsman, Grimm’s Christ-figure, a holy man and High Priest, while Riddle is the wolf and Ginny is Little Red Riding Hood. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.)

Dumbledore also being a High Priest positions Harry to succeed him; just as Dumbledore intercedes for his people and serves Hogwarts as its leader and head teacher, Harry will take on that role in the fifth book as head of Dumbledore’s Army.

The card linked to the High Priest (card #5) is Temperance (#14, because 1+4=5). The “Angel Temperance”, as it is often called, shows an angel with a “third eye” on the brow, which points to Temperance also being an intermediary between worlds. This card is the Tarot equivalent of the archetype of the Crone. Harry, as a speaker of Parseltongue, is also symbolized easily by the Angel Temperance, and the liquid usually depicted on this card freely flowing between the vessels in the angel’s hands could be symbolically linked to the Polyjuice Potion Harry and Ron use to infiltrate the Slytherin common room, another act of bridging—they infiltrate a world they usually cannot enter.

Harry and Ron going to the Slytherin common room foreshadows both their foray into the forest, when they encounter the giant spiders and must be rescued by the Flying Ford Anglia, and when Harry later enters the Slytherin-created Chamber of Secrets, which can only be accessed by someone who can say “open” in Parseltongue. Harry does this naturally and without effort now but Ron also learns to do this in Deathly Hallows, allowing him to repeat Harry’s coming-of-age from the second book, though Hermione is the one to destroy a Horcrux in that sequence of events.

The symbols for the four evangelists seen on more than one Tarot Major Arcana card as a collective symbol of wholeness link each evangelist—Matthew, Mark, Luke or John—to each Hogwarts house. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 31: The Devil You Know.) The symbol of the winged man, or angel, is linked to Slytherin, and Snape, head of house for Slytherin, is an archetypal Crone. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 6: A Murder of Crones.) It is easy to see why the Tarot equivalent of the archetype of the Crone is the Temperance card when we look at the liquid flowing between the angel’s vessels as potions, and Snape, the Potions master, is one of the most important archetypal Crones in the series.

On the third sequential card, the Lovers, there is often a picture of a young man choosing between an older woman and a younger woman; there is also a Cupid-figure armed with arrows in the sky above him, instigating the romantic story on the card. Some versions depict Adam, Eve and a tree with a large winged angel in the sky above; a serpent is entwined around the tree—the serpent who tempted Eve, which could be another link to this book being a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”, since the little girl is supposed to represent “prelapsarian innocence”, or the innocence that Adam and Eve had before the Fall, before they knew the difference between right and wrong, according to G. Ronald Murphy in his book The Owl, the Raven and the Dove (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Whether it’s the version with the young man choosing between two women or Adam, Eve and the serpent, this card is about choices. Near the end of Chamber of Secrets Harry is worried about having been Sorted into the wrong house, but Dumbledore says, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

The Lovers card also links Harry and Ginny, who play counterparts here but are not a couple until the sixth book. However, the most romantically sought-after character is Gilderoy Lockhart, with whom numerous people in this book are openly smitten, including Hermione, the embodiment of the Empress; on some Empress cards, beside her throne, is a large heart. It is easy to surmise that Hermione sends Lockhart a Valentine because when Harry and Ron ask her if she did, she turns red and stammers. Mrs. Weasley (another Mother/Empress) is also quite taken with Lockhart. Adding to this theme, Ginny accidentally finds Percy and his girlfriend Penelope kissing, which explains Harry and Ron discovering them sneaking about the dungeons, separately, before or after a tryst.

The presence of the Lovers card here foreshadows events in the sixth book, which mirrors the second in many ways, not just by having a Tower thrusting out of the earth rather than inside it. (It is also highly likely that any Freudian symbolism anyone wants to attach to either of those is probably entirely appropriate.) The idea of Ginny and Harry being romantically involved is introduced here and comes to fruition in the sixth book. There is even a Cupid involved in Harry and Ginny’s relationship in the second book, and there is a Cupid figure on the version of the card with the young man choosing between two women. Lockhart hires dwarves dressed as slightly-sinister Cupids to run around the castle delivering cards and gifts on Valentine’s Day, and one of these Cupids delivers Ginny’s singing Valentine to Harry. Plus, the first time that Ginny speaks in front of Harry she defends him from Draco Malfoy, who responds by telling Harry that he has got “a girlfriend”.

When Harry is confronted with evidence that Ginny fancies him, he always regards her favorably, though receiving a singing Valentine in public could be rather embarrassing for a twelve-year-old boy. When he rescues her in the Chamber, it is in a place of abundant sexual symbolism. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.) The Chamber is also where Ron and Hermione go before they kiss for the first time in the seventh book of the series.

Harry as someone involved in romance is only a tangential part of the second book, but this introduction to the issue prepares us for the sixth book to be ruled by the Lovers card. This card (#6) is also linked to the Devil (#15, because 1+5=6), bringing us back to Tom Riddle, snakes-as-wolves and wolves-as-snakes, and the “Little Red Riding Hood” theme that permeates the entire second book and is repeated more than once in the narrative.

Harry is entangled with Snitches from the time of his first Quidditch match. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table  and Episode 11: Wargames.) In Chamber of Secrets Harry collides with and becomes entangled with another item Dumbledore bequeaths to him: the Sword of Gryffindor. Of the six Horcruxes Voldemort meant to make, four were to have links to the Hogwarts houses: Ravenclaw’s diadem, Hufflepuff’s cup, Slytherin’s locket, and the Sword of Gryffindor. Instead Harry metaphorically “collides” with the sword in the second book of the series, and by virtue of becoming entangled with it becomes, in essence, a human Sword of Gryffindor himself.

Ironically, Harry, the ultimate Gryffindor, is also a Horcrux, a vessel containing a piece of Voldemort’s soul, and the same sword Voldemort sought to make into a Horcrux becomes the destroyer of more than one Horcrux, like Harry, who is the means by which more than one Horcrux, including himself, are destroyed. Harry’s lightning-bolt scar marks him as a human sword; Joseph Campbell calls the sword “the counterpart of the thunderbolt” (by which he seems to mean a lightning-bolt). In the end Voldemort does make a sword of Gryffindor (Harry) into a Horcrux—just not the sword of Gryffindor.

In the second book, the Horcrux that Harry destroys, Tom Riddle’s diary, is dispatched by a doppelganger for Gryffindor’s Sword: a basilisk fang. Aligning this Horcrux with the second book may seem overly obvious, since it definitely drives the action, but that is not the only reason that the diary is the Horcrux aligning with the second book. On the High Priestess card, the ruling card for Chamber of Secrets (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 33: The Inverted Tower of Secrets) she holds a book, which we can see as the diary. The High Priestess’s book can also be a link to Chamber of Secret’s Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart, who is famous for writing books.

Like the diary in which Ginny and Harry write, Lockhart’s books mislead people; he did not perform the feats in them but he found those who did, interviewed them, and used memory charms so that they no longer remembered what they had done. This is a reversal of the scene from the past that Harry observes through the medium of the diary, in which young Tom Riddle does not take credit for what he has done (releasing the basilisk), and instead deflects blame onto Hagrid. Riddle’s “memory” (the piece of his soul in the diary) is then destroyed by the fang of the animal Riddle attempted to use as a weapon against others, while Lockhart’s memory is destroyed by his own spell when he attempts to use Ron’s malfunctioning wand to cast a memory charm on Ron and Harry. As Dumbledore puts it, “Impaled upon your own sword, Gilderoy!”

When he hears this, the confused Lockhart immediately says that he does not have a sword but Harry does, since he is still holding the Sword of Gryffindor. This allows the reader to equate the Sword of Gryffindor with the basilisk fang that destroys the “memory” of Tom Riddle—just as basilisk fangs and this sword are equated during the Horcrux hunt in the seventh book. That parallel is first presented at the end of Chamber of Secrets.

Thus, in the second book of the series, ruled by the High Priestess, an archetypal Maiden, the book on her lap ties together a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher credited with many books and the diary Horcrux, both of whom lose their “memories” by being impaled upon their own swords, literal and metaphorical.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry,the Podcast, Episode 34: Emperors, Fools, and Angels. 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.

~ PREVIOUS ESSAY ~

~ NEXT ESSAY ~