Essay: The Half-Dead Headmaster

In the grid of Tarot Major Arcana cards numbered one to twenty-one, the sixth column, which aligns with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has the Lovers (#6) at the top of the column, Death (#13) in the middle row, and Judgment (#20) at the bottom.

In the book with the most romance, it’s fitting that the Lovers card is prominent here. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, love moves to center stage. Harry and Ginny’s relationship, foreshadowed by the Lovers being a sequential card in the second book, and by the Lovers card being linked to a sequential card in the previous book, finally blossoms in the sixth, but they are not the only Lovers in the sixth book of the series. A person torn between two partners is shown on many versions of the card, and we can see the torn person as more than one character: for instance, Ron’s romantic choices are Lavender or Hermione; Hermione’s are Ron or Cormac McClaggen; Ginny’s are Dean or Harry; and Harry’s are Ginny or Romilda.

The Lovers card doesn’t just depict a choice between potential partners, however; the women on the card could be a Mother and Maiden, with a Youth, the ruling mythic archetype for the sixth book in the series (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth), choosing between leaving childhood and dependence on a parental figure behind, moving to the next stage of development, when his mother will no longer be the central figure in his life, or staying with his family and postponing choosing a romantic partner.

Faced with a choice of his mother on the one hand, representing his family, or Pansy, Draco chooses Narcissa, protecting her and his father. His mother doesn’t want Draco to have to bear this burden, though, which is why she goes to Snape to ask him to take it from her son’s shoulders. It would be easy to read about this and respond by saying, “But he’s from a rotten family and he’s being asked to murder to keep them safe!” However, Dumbledore is sympathetic to Draco’s plight. He wants to protect the entire family and offers his mercy to Draco not to avoid his own death, since he has already asked Snape to kill him, but so Draco will not rip his soul by committing murder. Dumbledore does not fear death; he knows he is dying and is attempting to control the manner of his death as much as possible. He fears Draco irrevocably damaging his soul more than his own demise.

Harry has a choice similar to Draco’s: his duty to the wizarding world or romance with Ginny, which he calls “blissful oblivion”. After experiencing a little happiness with her he decides he cannot turn his back on his duty, so he breaks up with her to protect both her and the rest of the Weasleys. The archetypal Youth growing up and away from his family is a necessary, healthy development, but needs to be well-timed; first he must fulfill his obligations. The Youth on the Lovers card is on the cusp of that very choice.

The card linked to the Lovers (#6) is the Devil (#15), which is Voldemort’s chief Tarot archetype. This was the last sequential card for the fifth book (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 38: The Order of the Heretic) and is at the bottom of the column aligned with the first. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 31: The Devil You Know.) Voldemort is tied to both Harry’s and Draco’s choices; everything they consider must take into account what he has done and might do.

Death (#13), in the middle of the sixth column, is also at the center of the sixth book. Voldemort has ripped his soul repeatedly, creating Horcruxes through murder so that he can use them to hold fragments of his soul. In the memories in Dumbledore’s Pensieve, Harry sees one victim after another, not realizing that Dumbledore is also slowly dying because of the cursed ring that is both a Horcrux and a Hallow; ironically, a stone that brings back the shades of loved ones to an undead existence is killing the headmaster.

Dumbledore wields the Elder Wand, another Hallow, and it is possible that this is the reason that he wants Snape to be the one to kill him. Since Snape would be doing Dumbledore’s will, Dumbledore would not be defeated by Snape, and therefore the true master of the Elder Wand would be dead and the wand without a master. Snape grows more and more reluctant to perform this duty, though it is a mercy-killing for someone already slowly dying. It is also the only way, short of Dumbledore killing himself, for the wand to be without a master upon his death. More importantly, it is the only way to keep Voldemort from becoming Master of the Elder Wand, since he would be defeating the headmaster if Dumbledore were to die from the cursed ring, and Voldemort would then be the wand's master. Both Snape and Voldemort embody the Tarot archetype of Death, the one who cuts the thread of life, in addition to their other Tarot archetypes, but Snape does so only reluctantly.

The cards linked to Death (#13) are the Emperor (#4, because 1+3=4) and the Fool (#22, because 2+2=4), even though the Fool does not fit into the grid of twenty-one Tarot cards laid out in three rows and seven columns; the Fool makes his presence felt from time to time despite this, and in fact he can pop up at any time, just as the Fool card can be played at any time during a Tarot game; it functions as a “wild card” in games of trumps. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 30: Harry and Tarot.) As with Cedric in the fourth book (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 37: The Goblet of Memory), Harry plays the Fool to Dumbledore’s Emperor, obeying his orders without question in private lessons, but especially when they go to the cave to seek the locket Horcrux. But, also like Harry and Cedric, Harry and Dumbledore trade places; Dumbledore becomes the faithful retainer to Harry’s Emperor, preparing him to take his place after he is gone. This swap does not take place once—Harry and Dumbledore go back and forth in these roles throughout the book.

Dumbledore has embodied both the mythic archetype of the Wise Old Man and the Tarot archetype of the Magician (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 2: This Old Man and Episode 31: The Devil You Know). Despite some people thinking that he has foolish ideas, and his loving jokes, toys, sweets, games and fairy tales, Dumbledore has not embodied the Fool before. He takes Harry, again playing the Emperor (as he did after Cedric’s death) to visit Slughorn, the Potions Master before Snape, to ask him to resume this position while Snape becomes the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in Harry’s sixth year of school.

A Fool is not always utterly foolish; sometimes he is “…like a Zen master who clarifies with riddles and cuts through misconceptions with ease,” as Robert M. Place writes in The Tarot: History, Symbolism and Divination. [New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005, p. 90] This aptly describes Dumbledore seeing through Slughorn’s deception at the beginning of Half-Blood Prince, when he tries to fool Dumbledore into thinking he has come to an empty Muggle house, only to have Dumbledore reveal his hiding place, and again when Dumbledore and Harry penetrate Voldemort’s defenses at the cave where they seek the locket Horcrux.

Harry as the Fool who sees through artifice to aid his Emperor is a theme running throughout the book; he echoes Dumbledore’s earlier actions when he successfully convinces Slughorn to give Harry the real version of the tampered memory he originally gave to Dumbledore, a memory that confirms that Voldemort first began pursuing information about Horcruxes while he was still the Hogwarts student known as Tom Riddle. Because Dumbledore is slowly dying throughout the sixth book, it is fitting that the Fool is linked to both the Emperor and the Death cards. It is also fitting that Harry, in the role of the loyal Fool, follows Dumbledore’s orders faithfully, and, like the Fool in King Lear, he witnesses his sovereign’s “fall”. Afterward, he is heir to the task of bringing down Voldemort, the mission for which Dumbledore has been training him.

On the Judgment card (#20), at the bottom of the sixth column, an angel blows a trumpet, calling the dead to rise. In the cave that formerly held the locket Horcrux, the dead rise horrifyingly, and Dumbledore and Harry must fight Inferi grasping at them from the churning water. The Judgment card is also about finding a true calling, as Harry does by the book’s end, but it is about letting the past go as well, which he does after seeing the past in the Pensieve and learning from it.

The cards linked to Judgment (#20) are the High Priestess (#2, because 2+0=2) and Strength (#11, because 1+1=2). Ginny, who embodies both the archetypal Maiden and archetypal High Priestess, is a huge Strength for Harry (“his best source of comfort”) and is the choice he must set aside now. Instead he chooses a quest (another sort of game) that Dumbledore has bequeathed to him before he can be concerned with romance and his future.

The sequential cards for the sixth book are the Tower (#16), the Star (#17) and the Moon (#18), which have also influenced previous books. Here the Tower in question is above-ground, not inverted, underground, as the Chamber of Secrets was in the second book and the entrance to the Shrieking Shack was in the third. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 33: The Inverted Tower of Secrets and Episode 35: Prisoner of Time). Draco confronts Dumbledore on a Tower and disarms the headmaster, becoming master of the Elder Wand. However, Snape, embodying both the archetype of the Crone (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 6: A Murder of Crones), and the archetype of Death, the center column card for this book, is the one who kills Dumbledore, who falls from the Tower like the figures on the “The Lightning-Struck Tower” card, a common name for the sixteenth card of the Tarot Major Arcana and the title of the twenty-seventh chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

This is also the name Professor Trelawney gives the sixteenth card of the Tarot Major Arcana when she rants about it turning up in her readings repeatedly, presumably upright and not inverted, which points to doom and gloom (and which is probably why she goes through so many bottles of sherry in Half-Blood Prince). It cannot be easy to believe that you are Seeing a future that is so very gloomy and feeling like you cannot do anything about it—it will come, regardless of whether you tell people about it or not. JK Rowling did not choose to include Tarot in the curriculum Trelawney taught to Harry in his third, fourth and fifth years, but she evidently could not resist pointing very clearly to her own personal game of Tarot with the title of this particular chapter.

Though “the Tower” as a symbol seems self-evidently to refer to the Tower from which Dumbledore falls, it can also symbolize Hogwarts as an institution, since Hogwarts is under attack from Death Eaters at the end of the book. Because of that, it can also symbolize Dumbledore himself, a god-figure, an axis mundi, a link between worlds, just as Trelawney teaching Divination in her tower is a symbol of her being a link between worlds in a slightly different way, since she is an archetypal Crone who sees what others cannot. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 6: A Murder of Crones.)

Thus, while Dumbledore embodies a god-figure, in the sixth book it is a specific god: Odin, the All-Father of Norse mythology, in which gods can die. In Chamber of Secrets, Harry echoes the actions of Thor, Norse god of thunder, simultaneously slaying a supernatural serpent and being poisoned by its venom. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.) Dumbledore’s death in Half-Blood Prince is nothing less than JK Rowling’s Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, a story from Norse mythology that also involves a cursed ring. While Dumbledore speaks to Draco on the tower, Harry sees him grow weaker and weaker, either from the potion he drank in the cave or that and Dumbledore having been dying all year from the cursed ring, whose deadly effect Snape only manages to slow down, not halt altogether.

Götterdämmerung is German for Ragnarök, the name for the story in Old Norse. In this tale, Thor kills and is killed by the world-serpent, but Odin is swallowed by the great wolf called Fenrir. Rowling does not have her werewolf, Fenrir Greyback, kill Dumbledore, but it seems uncoincidental that she includes this exchange when Death Eaters join Draco on the tower:

“Is that you, Fenrir?” asked Dumbledore.

“That’s right,” rasped the other. “Pleased to see me, Dumbledore?”

“No, I cannot say that I am.”

Greyback also suggests that he will physically attack the headmaster, saying, “I could do you for afters, Dumbledore.” And when Draco hesitates to kill Dumbledore as Death Eaters egg him on, Fenrir volunteers to do it. When Snape finally arrives, Dumbledore pleads with him, a clear request to kill him, which Dumbledore already asked him to, but now it also seems like a plea to save him from Greyback’s brutality. Though as a Master of Death he has chosen the time of his dying, Dumbledore seems to dread repeating Odin’s death too precisely.

The Tower card also symbolizes old, false beliefs falling apart, suddenly and violently, so that the protagonist of the Tarot story can build afresh on truth. A prominent role in this book for an upright Tower card, rather than an inverted one, implies that we cannot expect the inverted meaning, a bad situation ending well; Dumbledore’s death means that there is no way Harry can consider this to be a happy ending, which is clearly why Trelawney is alarmed by the card turning up repeatedly in her readings. A new, unknown world is the result of pushing past the upheaval of the Lightning-Struck Tower.

The card linked to the Tower (#16) is the Chariot (#7), a fitting card for Harry’s travels with Dumbledore, since the Chariot is the Tarot equivalent of the archetype of the Liminal Being. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 8: Have You Tried Not Being Liminal? and Episode 9: We’re Here, We’re Metaphorically Queer.) When Harry and Dumbledore are together, the young Metaphorically Queer Liminal Hero is with the old (not-just) Metaphorically Queer Liminal Hero, two axis mundis, links between worlds, who will both, during their lives, conquer a Dark Lord.

In the third book of the series, when it was the first sequential card, the Chariot was about travel and transportation. Harry learns to Apparate in the sixth book, which is the final type of magical travel he experiences. This foreshadows the Chariot being at the top of the column for the next book, which is ruled by this card, a book in which travel is an almost constant activity for Harry, the Liminal Being embodying the Chariot card, who spends the book journeying “home” to Hogwarts.

The Star (#17) follows the Tower in the sequence of Tarot cards and points to Harry needing to find his path, follow his star, find his true calling. This is more likely now that the (metaphorical) Tower of Lies is gone. The Star card shows a young woman with vessels of liquid that she pours evenly on land and into a body of water, and potions, poisons and other liquids—such as the Pensieve—play a key role in this book.

Someone Harry has never met also embodies the Star: Sirius’s brother Regulus Arcturus Black. Like Sirius, which is the name of the Dog Star, Regulus is named for a star, one that happens to be in the “heart” of the constellation of Leo the Lion. Thus, while Sirius is a Gryffindor with a Slytherin background, Regulus may be a Slytherin with the heart of a Gryffindor. Regulus has stolen the locket Horcrux before Harry and Dumbledore go to the cave to retrieve it, though JK Rowling does not reveal this until Deathly Hallows. Like Harry, Regulus was the Seeker on his house team, but though he catches the locket “Snitch” and is a Slytherin, he cannot say “Open” in Parseltongue and destroy it, just as only Harry can speak the “magic words” to the Snitch from his first match to open that and receive the Resurrection Stone before going to his death.

The card linked to the Star (#17) is Justice (#8), an issue that arises repeatedly in the Pensieve memories Dumbledore shows to Harry. This was also true when Harry entered Dumbledore’s Pensieve in the fourth book. All of the memories Harry witnessed then took place in courtrooms in the Ministry of Magic. Voldemort commits many crimes to make Horcruxes, but this card does not only point to Justice in terms of comeuppance for Voldemort, delivered by Harry-as-Justice.

Dumbledore seems to feel that it is just that he is slowly dying after he puts on the ring with the Resurrection Stone, since he yielded to temptation. In a similar vein, Harry is appalled by the result of his cursing Draco in the bathroom with Sectumsempra, though Draco is someone he has hated for years and believes is working for his mortal enemy. In spite of this, Harry accepts the Justice meted out by Snape: a long series of detentions. Voldemort, in contrast, not only does not feel that he is escaping Justice, but that his actions are justified by his goal: everlasting life. He also believes it is just for him to expel all Muggleborns from the wizarding world, and anyone who sympathizes with them. Dumbledore and Harry recognize that they are in the wrong, though Harry does not give the Potions book to Snape as he demands, instead hiding it in the “Junk” Room of Requirement. He eventually remembers seeing Ravenclaw’s diadem there when he hid the book, so it is actually a flaw of Harry’s that helps to bring about Voldemort’s defeat.

The landscape that Harry and Dumbledore encounter on their way to the cave could come straight from the third sequential card, the Moon (#18), with dark waters separating them from their goal. The moon, wolf and dog on this card can also point to Fenrir Greyback, the werewolf who bit Remus and who bites Bill Weasley when the moon is not full, making him a pseudo-wolfman (in other words—a bit like a dog). The Moon’s reflectiveness also links to the watery Pensieve, with its many memories.

The card linked to the Moon (#18) is the Hermit (#9), which again could point to Harry and Dumbledore leaving the school, a place of scholarly pursuit, and going into the world, like the card’s wandering hermit. The Hermit is one of the depictions of a holy man in the Tarot Major Arcana, which both Harry and Dumbledore have been since the first book; Dumbledore, the old Hermit, trains his heir to hunt Horcruxes to make Voldemort vulnerable to death. It is an esoteric education conducted in secret, on a soon-to-be Lightning-Struck Tower, under a merciless Moon, with Death (and Death Eaters) poised to strike at any moment.

As with all of the previous books, there is again a link between the Horcrux aligned with the sixth book in the series and the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for the sixth book that can be illuminated by the Tarot cards aligned with this book. The Horcrux aligned with the sixth book is one of two that Voldemort made from living beings: the snake Nagini (the other being Harry). Paired with Nagini is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in Harry’s sixth year: Severus Snape, head of Slytherin house, whose symbol is a snake. Harry’s ability to speak Parseltongue re-enters the plot in Half-Blood Prince when he understands the snake-language spoken in the Gaunt house in the Pensieve memory that introduces Voldemort’s family to Harry, including Voldemort’s mother, and when Harry first sees their house, a dead snake hangs on the door like a horrible talisman that the Gaunts no doubt hope will ward off potential visitors.

The Lovers card (#6), linked numerically to the Devil (#15) can refer to both Nagini and Snape. She is a symbolic mother to Voldemort, her venom serving as mother’s milk to nourish him before he regains his body. Voldemort clearly feels more connected to his mother’s heritage than his father’s and it is through her family that he can speak to snakes. Plus, on some versions of the Lovers card there is not a Youth choosing between two women but Adam, Eve, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, around which a snake is twined. This represents the serpent form that Satan used to speak to Eve, convincing her to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which led to the Fall in the Genesis story, bringing us back to Voldemort embodying the archetype of the Devil.

Severus Snape, on the other hand, seems to be using a Tarot deck with a Lovers card showing the Youth and two women. In his life choices, he opts for the younger woman: Lily Evans Potter, the reason he faithfully serves Dumbledore and spies on Voldemort. However, Snape’s mother is also important, since she is where the title Snape creates for himself comes from, “the Half-Blood Prince”, based on her maiden name being Prince and Snape’s father being a Muggle, which makes Snape a half-blood, like Voldemort. Also, when Hermione discovers Eileen Prince in an old library book, without knowing that she was Snape’s mother, the reason Eileen Prince is in the book is her membership in the Gobstones Club—a club dedicated to a game, a link, once again, to the central theme of the series. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table.)

The Death card (#13) is at the center of the sixth column, and Nagini is how Voldemort kills Snape. Thus, both Snape and Voldemort are linked to at least one mother figure, seen on the Lovers card (the version with a Youth and two women). Snape kills Dumbledore at the top of the Lightning-Struck Tower, the first sequential card for this book. As he is a Slytherin, one could say that Snape was channeling Nagini, the real, not metaphorical serpent, who eventually kills him. The one Snape kills, Dumbledore, has been his guiding Star (#17), the second sequential card for this book. On this card, the woman pouring liquids onto land and into a body of water, treating them equally, sends a message about balance and duality. This could be another reference to Snape’s proficiency with Potions, but perhaps also a reference to his dual life, in which he pretends to be a loyal Death Eater while working as a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. Nagini has another link to potions; in ancient Greek the same word is used for potion and poison, and Nagini’s venom seems to share this dual nature. To most people her venom is fatal, but while Voldemort is on the path to again having a corporeal body, it is the equivalent of a balm for him, of mother’s milk.

Finally, while he is dying in Deathly Hallows, Snape gives Harry memories, which are linked to the Moon, the last sequential card for the sixth book. Harry views these memories in Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a body of liquid from which one can see bodies rising, like those on the Judgment card at the bottom of the sixth column. This means that Snape and the snake that kills him, a living being that is a Horcrux, like Harry, both connect to all of the column cards and all of the sequential cards aligned with this book. The relationship between these cards, this book’s Horcrux and the DADA teacher makes it even easier to see why Snape’s death occurred the way it did, though it was entirely wrong-headed for Voldemort to think killing Snape was the only way for him to be Master of the Elder Wand. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 25: The Wand Game.)

JK Rowling could have written a DADA teacher in the first book who was not pursuing the Philosopher’s Stone, protected by the Mirror of Erised, a double for the ring with the Resurrection Stone, the Horcrux for the first book; this book aligns with the first column of Tarot Major Arcana cards, at the bottom of which is the Devil card, showing minions in chains made from linked rings.

In the second book she could have written a DADA teacher who did something prior to working at Hogwarts other than write books, the Horcrux for Chamber of Secrets being a book, also seen on the Tarot Major Arcana card at the top of the second column of cards, which rules the second book.

Rowling could have had a DADA teacher in the third book who was not connected to the dictatorial round of time represented by the starry diadem on the Empress card, a diadem like that book’s Horcrux.

There could have been a DADA teacher in the fourth book who was not convicted of committing a crime with the family whose bank vault hid Hufflepuff’s cup, that book’s Horcrux, and Harry could have learned about that trial through some other medium other than Dumbledore’s Pensieve of memories, memories being intimately linked to the Moon, the card at the bottom of the fourth column of Tarot Major Arcana cards.

And Rowling could have had the Slytherin locket, the Horcrux for the fifth book and a symbolic Sun (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 28: The Grimm Campaign), the bottom card of the fifth column of Tarot cards, end up anywhere in the world other than with the fifth book’s DADA teacher, Dolores Umbridge.

Likewise, Rowling could have had Voldemort use the Killing Curse, or poison, or any number of murder methods, such as setting Greyback on Snape. But no—he chose Nagini, the Horcrux aligned with the book in which Snape is the title character other than Harry, and in which he is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Instead she connects Snape with the Horcrux for the book in which he holds that position and to the Lovers card at the top of the sixth column that shows a snake entwined around the tree in the Garden of Eden, continuing her elaborate Tarot game and again bringing us back to the theme of games, toys, fairy tales, children and childhood in general that unifies her seven-book series.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 39: Love, Death, and Judgment. 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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