Essay: The Crone and the Heretic
Harry Potter is a
bishop in the life-sized chess match in the first book of the series, the
fourth obstacle to the Philosopher’s Stone. He is a holy man and intercessor
again in the Chamber of Secrets, when he has his spiritual coming-of-age (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina), a symbolic confirmation or bar mitzvah, embodied
by his statement of faith in Dumbledore bringing Fawkes-the-Phoenix to him (a
symbolic Holy Spirit). In Order of the
Phoenix, Harry is on the front lines of a political and religious war, a church-state
conflict. He is still loyal to Dumbledore, the High Priest or Pope figure; both
he and Harry are labeled heretics and traitors, fighting in the spirit of the
perpetually burning and reborn Fawkes—both Dumbledore’s pet and his namesake, the
most notorious traitor in British history: Guy Fawkes.
In the grid of Tarot
Major Arcana cards numbered one through twenty-one, the column of cards aligning
with the fifth book in the Harry Potter
series has the Pope, #5 at the top of the column, the Hanged Man, #12, in the
middle row, and the Sun, #19, at the bottom of the column. In the second book
of the series, cards 4, 5 and 6 were sequential cards, and the fifth card in
particular, the Pope or High Priest, was linked to Harry’s spiritual coming-of-age
and his role as an intercessor for others, a link between worlds. The figure on
this card sits on a throne with two monks or priests kneeling, facing him.
These figures are even more important in this book than the second, with a metaphorical
pope-figure who is also a rebel leader; they are his comrades, his lieutenants
in the rebellion.
Harry and
Dumbledore both fill the role of High Priest at different times in the fifth
book. Dumbledore’s death in the sixth book is foreshadowed as he segues from
filling this role himself to Harry doing it, something for which Dumbledore
trains him formally in Half-Blood Prince, though Harry has started to
play the role of Dumbledore’s successor in Order
of the Phoenix. The role Dumbledore fills and passes on to Harry is notably
not that of a political or military leader, like the Emperor with the symbols
of war on his throne, but that of a religious leader.
Harry trades
places with the headmaster as spiritual leader of Hogwarts when
Dumbledore departs the castle upon Dolores Umbridge’s discovery of Dumbledore’s
Army, the “evidence” the state needs to label Dumbledore as a traitor, a role
in which the Ministry’s propaganda has already cast him. Umbridge also hopes to
expel Harry from Hogwarts, but the group’s name—Dumbledore’s Army—means that the headmaster is able to take the fall
for Harry. As metaphorical Pope of the “old religion” Dumbledore is the one to
whom Harry owes his loyalty. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20:The Order of the Rebel; Episode 21: Remember, Remember; and Episode 22: The Phoenix Games.) These are the book’s
themes, now in Tarot form.
Harry and
Dumbledore are not just Popes/High Priests but also Hanged Men. Sallie Nichols
writes in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey:
Fudge tries to
have Dumbledore arrested, but the headmaster has no intention of “coming quietly”
and goes on the lam. He knows that the last thing the Ministry will do is give
him a fair hearing, and he must continue to operate behind the scenes as head
of the Order of the Phoenix. Harry is on trial at the start of the book and is cleared
thanks to Dumbledore. However, defending himself for performing magic in front
of a Muggle and outside of school is soon the least of his troubles.
Dumbledore and
Harry each embodying card #5, the Pope/High Priest/Hierophant, and both embodying card #12, the Hanged
Man merges into one archetype: The Heretic. They are both seen as apostates who
embrace beliefs that run afoul of the establishment, making their conflict with
the Ministry more like a religious war than a political one. Harry is specifically
in trouble with Umbridge because he is not willing to alter his beliefs. With the zeal of a martyr,
he goes to one detention after another consisting of actual torture, which is
designed to convince heretics to recant
heretical beliefs. Harry takes on the role of a heretical revolutionary
leader when he heads Dumbledore’s Army and Dumbledore accepts this mantle when
he learns of the group’s name; he’s eager to shift blame onto himself, more
willing to be a martyr than to make Harry into one. He no doubt feels that
Harry being literally martyred will happen soon enough.
Nichols describes
the clerics on the fifth card as near-twins. In Chamber of Secrets, when
this was a sequential card, the Weasley twins, Fred and George, come to Privet
Drive in a flying car, to rescue Harry from his metaphorical Hermitage, which
relates to the Hermit, the middle column card for that book. Rowling now uses
the Weasley twins, loyal to Harry and to Dumbledore, as able lieutenants in a
rebellion against the “new religion”.
Umbridge’s reign
of terror includes the confiscation of artifacts, such as the Quibbler with Harry’s interview (the “gospel”
according to Harry Potter). This is similar to the English Crown confiscating
rosaries and “popish” items before and after the discovery of Guy Fawkes and
the gunpowder beneath Parliament in November of 1605, the event commemorated
ever since as Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night. Fudge and Umbridge also spy on
Ministry employees friendly with Dumbledore, just as the English Crown spied on
known Catholic sympathizers, especially those suspected of hiding renegade priests
who still declared that their first allegiance was to Rome, not to the Crown.
The Weasley twins
make Umbridge’s job impossible as their parting gift to Hogwarts. Their
“weapons” in this war are linked to a central element of the celebration of
Bonfire Night: fireworks. The unpredictable influence of the Fool card, which
can be played at any time, adds to this chaos when the Fool incarnate, Peeves, does
his bit, escalating the mayhem abetted by Professor McGonagall, a woman who embodies the Father archetype. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 5: Our Father.) The Father is equal to the Emperor in the Major
Arcana, who is in turn numerically linked to the Fool (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 34: Emperors, Fools and Angels), so perhaps we should have expected all along
that McGonagall and Peeves would turn out to be kindred spirits.
The card
numerically linked to the Pope (#5) is Temperance (#14), the Tarot equivalent
of the archetypal Crone. This is why the Crone is the fifth mythic archetype,
which rules the fifth book in the series. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 6: A Murder of Crones.) The figure on a
Temperance card is often winged, like an angel, and this figure has a “third
eye” in the center of the brow, indicating that this person can see across
barriers, like the archetypal Crone. The character who best embodies the Crone
in the fifth book is Luna Lovegood, who also “sees” what others cannot,
including Thestrals and that they are the best way to quickly reach the
Ministry of Magic when Harry believes Sirius is in danger. It is significant
that Harry, a Pope/High Priest/Hierophant, and Neville, who takes Harry’s place
as intercessor at Hogwarts for anyone at Hogwarts who doesn’t follow Voldemort,
are the others who go to the Ministry to rescue Sirius who can see Thestrals.
Luna is also instrumental in helping Harry cope with Sirius’s death near the
end of the book.
The Crone
archetype and the Tarot archetype of the Pope as interchangeable entities makes
sense historically, since “Wise Women” in many communities sometimes continued
to observe holy days and rituals dedicated to local gods or other supernatural entities
after the advent of Christianity in Europe, and as a result were often accused
of being witches. The Wise Women in most villages were healers and links to the
Mother Goddesses in many pre-Christian religions. The “new religion”,
Christianity in this case, often displaced Crones/Wise Women who were links to
the “old religion”, so Rowling making the Crone the ruling archetype in the
fifth book is another case of an “old religion” triumphing over a new one, in
addition to the allegorical church-state battles in the book also depicting
this type of conflict. Rowling effectively reinstating the Crone in the Realm
of the Gods, the first row of seven cards, as the equal of the Pope, rounds out
the six gender-and-age-related archetypes. The creators of the Tarot Major
Arcana relegated her to the Realm of Equilibrium, the second row of cards, but
it’s worth noting that her placement in the fourteenth position means that she
“trumps” or triumphs over Death, at number thirteen.
Other connections between the Pope and
Temperance are Harry’s role as heretic/rebel and his link to Voldemort. In each
case he sees what others don’t, like a Crone, or someone with a third eye. However,
what he has seen—Voldemort’s resurrection—works against him, since Umbridge
forbids him to tell the truth about Voldemort’s return. Voldemort also takes advantage of his link to
Harry—the meaning of which seems to escape him, that Harry is a Horcrux—by making
Harry believe he is torturing Sirius at the Ministry, a lie designed to lure
Harry to the Hall of Prophecies.
The cards linked numerically
to the card in the center of the fifth column, the Hanged Man (#12) are the
Empress (#3, because 1+2=3) and the World (#21, because 2+1=3). As the best embodiment
of the Mother archetype and equivalent Tarot archetype, the Empress, Hermione
helps Harry establish Dumbledore’s Army. Cho Chang, another Mother/Empress, is linked
to another Hanged Man: Marietta Edgecomb, who betrays Dumbledore’s Army.
The World card, a
symbol of integration and completion, points to Harry’s opposition to Occlumency,
at which he was bound to fail because it required him to divide his mind. His
Occlumency tutor, Severus Snape, embodies both the archetype of the Crone
(though he is neither female nor elderly, at only 35 years of age) and the
archetype on the Temperance card, which shows not only a messenger, as Snape is
when he spies for the Order of the Phoenix, but a figure pouring what could be
considered “potions”, Snape’s specialty, between two vessels. However, Harry is
whole and integrated; he cannot and should
not be dividing his mind, despite both Dumbledore and Snape being convinced
that this is necessary. Harry’s inherent wholeness and love for Sirius,
symbolized by the World card, protects him and drives Voldemort from his mind.
The fifth column’s bottom card, the Sun, #19,
has not been a column or sequential card in previous books, though it is numerically
linked to the Magician and Wheel. The Sun links directly to the title of the
book, since the phoenix is a symbol of the sun in ancient myth due to the sun
metaphorically ‘dying’ each night and being ‘reborn’ in the morning. Phoenix
lore includes tales of a reborn phoenix sealing its ashes in an egg that it
takes to the altar of the sun god, Ra.
Pages from the Aberdeen Bestiary
In the Middle Ages,
the phoenix entered Christian lore as a symbol of the Resurrection and emblem of
immortality. Fawkes-the-phoenix, named for Guy Fawkes (a traitor or freedom-fighter,
depending on your perspective), provides Dumbledore’s escape. The historical Fawkes
was sentenced to death because of his loyalty to a literal pope, while Rowling’s
Fawkes is loyal to a symbolic Pope, a Guy Fawkes figure. On Bonfire Night, Guy
Fawkes is burnt in effigy, and the holiday was also called “Pope’s Day” or “Pope’s
Night”, when it was common for the pope’s
effigy to also be burned (or for his effigy to be burned instead of Guy
Fawkes’s).
George Washington was so worried about
alienating the largely Catholic French-Canadian troops who joined in the fight
against the British during the American Revolution that he banned the practice
of celebrating Pope’s Day/Night and burning an effigy of the Pope amongst the
troops of the Continental Army. This probably contributed to the holiday not being
observed in the United States, though it also makes sense for the leader of a
rebel army to discourage an observation that grew out of a squashed rebellion.
The Sun card could
be called the Phoenix card. Many modern decks show a phoenix on this card and
call it the Phoenix; the image above is one example. On older versions of the
Sun card, there are two children who appear to be twins, making twins prominent
in the top and bottom cards in the fifth column. This can, again, point to Fred
and George’s roles in the war on Umbridge, especially since their fireworks can
look like suns rolling through the sky, particularly their Catherine Wheels, named
for a martyred Catholic saint.
A phoenix is reborn from its ashes. At the Ministry,
Fawkes takes the brunt of the Killing Curse for Dumbledore while he duels Voldemort,
and Fawkes is reborn from his own ashes. Sirius, in turn, is a symbolic phoenix. Named for the Dog Star,
a minor sun, Sirius is killed by the life-ending archetypal Crone Bellatrix
Lestrange, and Harry is reborn from Sirius’s ashes. His love for Sirius ejects
Voldemort from his mind, ensuring that he will never again venture into Harry’s
thoughts, lest he encounter the overwhelming love that is integral to Harry.
The Sun card (#19),
at the bottom of the fifth column, is numerically linked to the Wheel of
Fortune (because 1 + 9 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1). It is also linked to the Magician
(#1). The Wheel card brings us back to Fred and George’s
rebellion-by-fireworks, in which they make prominent use of Catherine Wheels,
named for the patron saint of fireworks, because of the “breaking wheel” that
was used to torture her. In heraldry, a Catherine wheel in a coat of arms
points to a willingness to undergo great trials for one’s faith.
Harry encounters a
horizontal wheel in the Department of Mysteries, a circular room of doors that
spins, disorienting Harry and his friends and making forward progress or escape
difficult. Hermione marks doors they’ve gone through with flaming crosses (an
obvious Christian symbol) and once they’re marked, the spinning flaming crosses
become another Sun or a Catherine Wheel—a wheel of light with Harry and his friends
at the center. Each time they try an unknown door they’re playing a real-life
Wheel of Fortune game.
Dumbledore is the epitome of the Magician, Pope
of the “old religion”; because of this, the Sun card evokes not only death,
resurrection and phoenixes, but the archetypal Magician himself, as well as
spinning wheels of light (evoking the Sun and Wheel cards), both at the Ministry
and cavorting through Hogwarts’ corridors in a rebellion with game-like
qualities.
The sequential
cards for this book are Death (# 13), Temperance (#14), and the Devil (#15).
Sirius Black dies in this book, which seems like an obvious link to Death, but this
card is also about new beginnings. Like a phoenix. Harry rises from Sirius’s
ashes by the end, no longer a Hanged Man, heretic, and traitor, which is what
people once thought Sirius was.
Death is a constant
companion for Cho Chang in the fifth book, who doesn’t cope well with Cedric’s death.
This comes between her and Harry almost as much as her sympathy toward her
friend Marietta, who betrays everyone in Dumbledore’s Army. In contrast to Cho,
Harry’s eyes aren’t veiled by tears due to witnessing death; instead they’re
opened to the new, to Thestrals.
In addition to the
third eye, the winged figure on the Temperance card, #14, often called the
Angel Temperance, holds two goblets with a stream of liquid flowing between
them. An angel is a messenger (the meaning of ἄγγελος
in Greek, which is where “angel” comes from) and a “messenger” is a good label for
Luna Lovegood, the means for Harry’s interview to appear in The Quibbler. She is a messenger in
another way when she helps Harry cope with Sirius’s death by talking about her
late mother; though chronologically a young woman, Luna, an archetypal Crone, is
an apt representative of the Angel Temperance.
The third sequential card, #15, is the Devil.
This obviously refers to Voldemort, but another character also fills the role:
Dolores Umbridge. Like Voldemort, Umbridge requires everyone to be in agreement
with her; no diversity of opinion or deviation from what she deems acceptable
is permitted. She is not a Death Eater but is
a kindred spirit to Voldemort, despite her fearful denials that he has returned
to power. In the seventh book, she fully supports the campaign against
Muggle-born wizards; when Harry meets her again it is in a hellish underground
Ministry courtroom where she is in the process of condemning Muggle-born wizards
for a lack of magical ancestry.
The card linked to
the Devil (#15) is the Lovers (#6, because 1+5=6). One version shows a young
man, a woman who might be his mother, and a young woman. This could be seen as
Harry choosing between Cho and Ginny. Cho and Hermione are repeatedly contrasted
in this book as permutations of the Mother/Empress, but Cho and Ginny are also
contrasted: Cho comes up with ‘DA’ for the name of the secret society Harry is
asking people to join, but Ginny suggests it stand for ‘Dumbledore’s Army’,
rather than ‘Defense Association’. Ginny dates Michael Corner at the beginning
of the book but by the end he’s seeing Cho Chang. Most significantly, in the
Quidditch final, Ginny catches the Snitch, a symbolic Harry, from “under Cho’s
nose”, winning the match and Quidditch cup, but also winning Harry. He hasn’t
chosen yet, as the young man on the Lovers card is still choosing, but this
card shows what his choices are; in the next book, with this card is at the top
of the column, he does choose.
The Horcrux aligned
with the fifth book is Slytherin’s locket, which first appears in Order of the Phoenix (when Harry,
Hermione, Sirius, and the Weasleys spend the summer cleaning Grimmauld Place). The
Sun card is at the bottom of the column aligned with the fifth book, and the
locket is another reason that the symbolism of this card is central to the book,
since it plays the role of a metaphorical Sun in Deathly Hallows when Harry, Ron, and Hermione go to the Ministry to
retrieve it from Dolores Umbridge,
the DADA teacher in this book.
Umbridge is
consistently described as “toad-like” in the fifth and seventh books, and Harry
has no doubt that she has the locket when Mundungus Fletcher, who bribed
Umbridge with it, describes her this way. For him to know her name is
unnecessary; Harry knows it cannot be anyone else. The incident in which they take
the locket from her in a courtroom JK Rowling compares to a well (where one
usually finds water) is a retelling of part of the Grimm fairy tale of the Frog
King/Prince, which begins with a princess getting help from a frog to retrieve a
symbolic sun from a deep well. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 28:The Grimm Campaign.)
The locket Horcrux
could have ended up anywhere after it was stolen, but it went to Umbridge, the
fifth book’s DADA teacher. In one of Rowling’s many ironies, Umbridge bans
Harry from Quidditch for life, but he still “catches” the locket from her. Like
the other Horcruxes, including Harry, it is a symbolic Snitch, proving that no
one, not even the High Inquisitor, can keep Harry from playing Quidditch, real
or metaphorical, or from being the ultimate Seeker.
As the last of the three middle books in the series,
this book, like the previous two, has five more alignments: #3 - its house is
Slytherin and #4 - its element is Water; #5 - Sirius is the Marauder aligning
with this book; #6 - Ron is the Trio member aligning with the book; and #7 - Viktor
Krum is the Champion of whom Ron was jealous.
There are many
pointers to Slytherin being this book’s house, alignment #3: the locket Horcrux
was Slytherin’s; Umbridge puts only Slytherins on the Inquisitorial Squad;
Sirius, who dies in this book and is the Marauder aligning with it is a virtual
Slytherin, just as Viktor, alignment #7, the Champion for this book, was a
virtual Slytherin when he sat at that table in the Great Hall. In fact, until
Sirius went to Hogwarts, all members of the Black family were in Slytherin. Sirius’s
Slytherin cousin Bellatrix kills him; and his Slytherin brother Regulus—another
Seeker—stole Slytherin’s locket from the cave where Voldemort hid it.
Water, the element
for this book, alignment #4, is also linked to Sirius, alignment #5, the
Marauder for this book, because he is Harry’s Godfather and an embodiment of
the Godfather-variant of the Wise Old Man archetype. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 2: This Old Man.) In the book with
Water for its element, which is used for baptisms, Harry loses his Godfather,
which is reflected in the fifth threshold that Harry crosses with Hagrid or
with his help in the first book: crossing the lake upon arrival at Hogwarts, a symbolic
baptism. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20: The Order of the Rebel.) Harry and Dumbledore
(and Regulus and Kreacher before them) must go through both water and the
potion in the bowl in the cave to reach the locket that is the Horcrux aligned
with this book (or its doppelgänger, since Harry and Dumbledore discover that
someone else has already taken the locket). The obstacle to the Philosopher’s
Stone aligned with this book, the troll, is conquered by Quirrell for Harry,
but he and his best friends are bonded together earlier by an interchangeable
troll incident, in a girl’s bathroom, with quite a lot of spraying water. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 22: The Phoenix Games.) And, as
mentioned above, the courtroom where they must go to obtain the locket is
described by Rowling as a well, a place where one obtains water, though
she uses this description for Ministry courtrooms at no other time in
the seven-book series.
The third book’s
element of Air links to the destruction of that book’s Horcrux, since Harry flies
on a broom in a mock-Quidditch match to destroy the diadem; the fourth book’s
element of Earth relates to the destruction of Hufflepuff’s Cup, that book’s
Horcrux, since Harry, Ron and Hermione go underground to the Lestrange vault to
retrieve it, and Ron and Hermione then go underground to the Chamber of Secrets
to retrieve a basilisk fang to destroy it.
When Ron, the
member of the Trio aligned with this book, alignment #6, returns to Harry and
Hermione in Deathly Hallows, he must
go into Water, this book’s element, to save Harry, who is being strangled by the
chain on which he wears the locket, the Horcrux aligned with the fifth book (alignment
#1). Ron retrieves both Harry and the Sword of Gryffindor from the water, Harry
and the Sword again being equated here, as they are both necessary to destroy
the locket. After Harry speaks the word “Open” in Parseltongue, Ron uses the Sword
to destroy the Horcrux. In this episode, Ron morphs from being a plain
archetypal Wise Old Man to the Godfather variant of the Wise Old Man, like
Sirius; he plays John the Baptist to Harry’s Christ-figure when he pulls him
out of the pool.
Alignment
|
Prisoner of Azkaban
|
Goblet of Fire
|
Order of the Phoenix
|
Horcrux
|
Diadem of
Ravenclaw
|
Hufflepuff’s Cup
|
Slytherin’s
Locket
|
DADA Teacher
|
Remus Lupin
|
Barty Crouch,
Jr.
|
Dolores Umbridge
|
House
|
Ravenclaw
|
Hufflepuff
|
Slytherin
|
Element
|
Air
|
Earth
|
Water
|
Marauder
|
Remus Lupin
|
James Potter
|
Sirius Black
|
Trio member
|
Hermione Granger
|
Harry Potter
|
Ron Weasley
|
Champion
|
Fleur Delacour
|
Cedric Diggory
|
Viktor Krum
|
Each
of the three Champions who are not Harry have a link to a Snitch-equivalent analogous
to the Horcrux for each book; Viktor, a Seeker, catches actual Snitches, and
the locket is a mock-Snitch captured in a mock-Quidditch match (in a courtroom);
Cedric, another Seeker, takes the Tournament cup with Harry in the book whose Horcrux
is Hufflepuff’s cup; and Fleur wears a tiara/diadem at her wedding to Bill
Weasley, who is equated with Remus Lupin at the end of the sixth book, after he
is bitten by Fenrir Greyback. Remus is the DADA teacher for the third book,
with the diadem as its Horcrux.
Through
the cards at the bottom of each column for these three books, the Star, the Moon
and Sun, the Horcruxes can be matched to each book, though other cards also
provide links between the aligned items and these books. Rowling again juxtaposes
three with seven, like the three Deathly Hallows and seven Horcruxes, but here
it is three books and seven items aligning with each book, another part of her
incredibly complicated Harry Potter Game.
Adapted
from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 38: The Order of the Heretic. 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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