I recently completed a draft chapter of a new book about Rowling’s ‘Shed’ artistry, the piece about her use of literary alchemy, the story version of metallurgical alchemy. This subtle but powerful adaptation and deployment of hermetic symbols, colors, and sequences is a parallel and complementary backdrop to the psychomachia or soul-transformation allegories of Rowling’s best works — and the key word there is “transformation.”
The key hurdle for readers trying to grasp this occult narrative tradition in English literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Yeats and Joyce, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, is getting over their received opinion that metallurgical alchemy was the science of Medieval charlatans who pursued get-rich-quick schemes to make lead into gold and an “elixir of life” for immortality. That doesn’t translate to anything that makes sense in terms of story; “literary alchemy” if thought of as “story chemistry” as the modern laboratory science taught in secondary schools everywhere is a head-scratching non-starter. English and chemistry classes today have no common ground.
Traditional, which is to say ‘theocentric,’ alchemy, however, was primarily about the soul of the alchemical adept or seeker, a natural science working to the same end as the revealed spiritual path in which the alchemist lived (there were Muslim, Chinese, Jewish, as well as Christian alchemies). It was, in brief, one of the sacred sciences within the mosaic of said traditions arts and sciences, all of which pointed to the same end, namely, purification and transformation of the soul in hope of divinization in this life or after death.
Perennialists Titus Burckhardt and Seyyed Nasr, both of whom wrote about metallurgical alchemy, put great emphasis on this key point:
Alchemy may be called the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this I am not seeking to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such as the purification and alloying of metals; their real work, however, for which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or ‘operational’ symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists on this point is unanimous. (Burckhardt 1972, 23)
Alchemy was certainly a way of enobling matter, hence its relation to sacred art. But this also means that alchemy is not just a prelude to chemistry, that it is a science of the soul in its relation to the cosmos and making use of external transformations for the sake of that inner transformation which is the ultimate goal of all the traditional sciences. (Nasr 1993, 107)
This is the shared goal of traditional sacred arts, most notably for our discussion of Rowling’s literary alchemy, in written story and staged drama. Through imaginative identification with the story hero or heroine on page or stage, the reader or audience member passes through the transformative and cathartic cycle of the alchemical work, break-down nigredo, purifying albedo, and restorative and illuminating rubedo. Just as the ‘hard darkness’ of lead becomes the ‘solid light’ of gold,’ so the metallurgical alchemist and sympathetic reader feels his soul enlightened by the logos light of the world that is at the heart of the solve et coagula process, “dissolve and recongeal,” shared by the story and laboratory traditions.
Rowling has never been asked about alchemy (!), though she has volunteered quite a bit about the importance of it to Harry Potter, claiming even that it sets the “magical parameters” of that series. Robert Terry, a long time friend of this weblog, pointed out to me recently, though, that, in her Pottermore piece about Draco Malfoy, she points directly to the key piece about metallurgical and hence literary alchemy, that it is not about manipulation of materials but the transformation of the soul for the better.
The Draco page at Pottermore is a delightful capsule review of Draco’s experience before, during, and after his years as a classmate at Hogwarts with Harry Potter, his nemesis. I enjoyed the slightly different but clarifying focus of seeing Draco’s life qua Malfoy, if there is very little new information about him in the story. The piece ends with an ‘Author’s Note,’ which suggests that the much longer summary of Draco’s life was written by Pottermore staff, perhaps from Rowling’s notes. Its psychological points about Draco’s remarkable Occlumency skills versus Harry’s inability to close his mind are invaluable, I think, for grasping Rowling’s thoughts about these two characters, the archetypal Gryffindor and Slytherine fire-and-water pair.
Robert Terry, though, wrote to me about what Rowling shared in her closing paragraphs, her ‘Author’s Note,’ for this piece, namely, new information about Draco Malfoy as a man in the years after his education at Hogwarts:
I imagine that Draco grew up to lead a modified version of his father’s existence; independently wealthy, without any need to work, Draco inhabits Malfoy Manor with his wife and son. I see in his hobbies further confirmation of his dual nature. The collection of Dark artefacts harks back to family history, even though he keeps them in glass cases and does not use them. However, his strange interest in alchemical manuscripts, from which he never attempts to make a Philosopher’s Stone, hints at a wish for something other than wealth, perhaps even the wish to be a better man. I have high hopes that he will raise Scorpius to be a much kinder and more tolerant Malfoy than he was in his own youth.
Draco had many surnames before I settled on ‘Malfoy’. At various times in the earliest drafts he is Smart, Spinks or Spungen. His Christian name comes from a constellation – the dragon – and yet his wand core is of unicorn.
This was symbolic. There is, after all – and at the risk of re-kindling unhealthy fantasies – some unextinguished good at the heart of Draco.
Three quick notes about that:
(1) The pointed aside, “perhaps even the wish to be a better man,” in opposition to “a wish for wealth” that Malfoy does not have, reveals Rowling’s understanding that alchemy is about the transformation of the alchemist’s soul for the “better.”
(2) Her discussion in these concluding paragraphs and the Pottermore review as a whole opens up the discussion of Draco’s journey also being alchemical, in parallel to Harry’s albeit from the opposite ends of the Wizarding World hierarchy of status and values. When she writes about Half Blood Prince Draco, “The ideas that Draco had about himself, and his place in the world, were disintegrating,” the nigredo quality of that year for him is in plain sight. His year apart in Deathly Hallows, even given his misplaced efforts in the Battle of Hogwarts, have albedo elements as well; his refusal to identify Harry at Malfoy Manor reflects his incipient chrysalis. Rowling’s author’s note about his adult study of alchemy, theoretical rather than metallurgical, I think is her saying that he recongealed after the Fiend Fyre nightmare of Hallows into a much better man.
(3) Rowling really doesn’t want the reader to neglect the “symbolic” nature of Draco’s life, hence her bald statement “This was symbolic” in reference to the unicorn hair core of his wand. As explained in How Harry Cast His Spell, the three wand cores favored by Ollivander are each symbols of Christ, the unicorn being the most well known of the three in English letters via the Medieval tapestry tradition. Magic ‘works’ in Rowling’s Wizarding World for the most part because of the interaction of the magical person’s spoken words, specific spells in an arcane language rather than common speech, and the Logos or Word core of a wand. Rowling in writing about “the unextinguished good at the heart of Draco,” by using the word “heart,” the spiritual center or noetic locus of the human person in most of the revealed traditions, in the context of his wand core may be making a larger point about the universality of good in each person however twisted their upbringing. The Light of the world, she might be saying, comes into the world within every man (cf. John 1:9), even the despicable Malfoy heir.
My thanks to Robert Terry for sharing this Pottermore article and its almost explicit statement by Rowling that she understands alchemy as a soul transformative art. The work speaks to that understanding but it is always a help for those who struggle with that idea to have the author’s testimony alongside the textual evidence.
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