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Essay: JK Rowling's Own Private Tarot Game

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JK Rowling never tells her readers about Harry Potter learning about Tarot, nor is it ever mentioned during his Divination lessons. Despite this, Professor Trelawney abruptly reappears in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , even though she is no longer Harry’s teacher by the time he’s in his sixth year. In just about every appearance she makes in the sixth book she is raving about the Tower , also called The Tower of Destruction , or La Maison Dieu ( The House of God ) in French, the sixteenth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. Trelawney ranting about this card is the first overt mention of Tarot in the seven books, and it is a virtual throwaway. It is not, however, the first mention of the name of a Tarot card in the series . In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , Rowling calls the Little Hangleton pub frequented by Frank Bryce, the caretaker at the Riddle House, The Hanged Man. This is the name of the twelfth card in the Tarot Major Arcana. JK Rowling has also invente...
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Essay: The Wand Chooses the Wizard

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In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , Voldemort’s and Harry’s wands refuse to fight each other because they have the same core: a phoenix feather from Fawkes. This was the third wand revelation that JK Rowling gave her readers, the first two being that the wand chooses the wizard and that a damaged wand (like Ron’s wand in Chamber of Secrets ) can backfire on the user or otherwise behave unpredictably. Once we learn more rules of the Wand Game in Deathly Hallows it is clear that Ron’s broken wand is responding as if the he is no longer its master ; the wand/owner covenant is broken. I have written in previous essays about the metaphorical quantum entanglement between Harry and Voldemort, but this is not the only type of metaphorical entanglement in the Harry Potter series. Wizards and their wands are also entangled. After it breaks, Ron and his wand are no longer entangled—if they ever truly were, since Rowling reveals early on that he is using Charlie’s old wand. It is un...
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