Rowling’s Soul Triptych Psychomachia: Is It From Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’?

September 17, 2024 by Leave a Comment

I began writing about Rowling’s psychomachia, the allegory of the soul’s journey to perfection, in 2002 with the publication of The Hidden Key to Harry Potter, the book that eventually became How Harry Cast His Spell. In brief, I explained then that the three principal student characters in the Hogwarts books, Harry, Hermione, and Ron, were Rowling’s version of the allegory of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus, a conceit that stretched across imaginative fiction to include among many others The Brothers Karamazov, the three hobbits on Mount Doom, and Kirk, Spock, and Bones.

The characters were the respective authors’ depiction of the spiritual heart, the mind or will, and the body with its desires and passions, usually reduced to the formulaic “body, mind, and spirit.” Hermione was the brains of the Hogwarts set, Ron was the body stand-in, and Harry, the scion of sacrificial love and doing the hard, right thing, was the heart or spirit to which the others deferred, at least when things were going well. Together, the three faculties of soul mature through seven alchemical cycles until they vanquish their respective failings and defeat the Dark Lord.

Rowling has worked in other types of psychomachian allegory in different books, most notably the Shakespearean romance model in the Strike series and the transference love of a child and its toy in Christmas Pig. Depicting the perfection of the soul in spirit is what she does, whichever tools she chooses to create the cathartic imaginative effect within her readers. I have argued, again since 2002, that this is what makes Rowling’s work singularly popular; readers come to fiction, per the Eliade thesis, for the oxygen it provides their transpersonal faculty — and Rowling’s allegories of the soul meet that need much more successfully than the other fare on offer in bookstores, the cinema, or in online games.

But where did she first encounter this idea in a book or play? Did she come up with it on her own or did she read about soul triptychs and the like in critical literature about a favorite story? And what inspired her to make the leap from Dostoevsky’s or Tolkien’s triptychs to making the genre formula trio of schoolboy novels with hero, egghead, and swarthy best mate, into a psychomachian drama set piece?

There’s no way of knowing the answers to that question short of Rowling agreeing to answer questions while under the power of a high octane Veritaserum draft. As that has never happened, I think it safe to assume it never will. I have a decent guess, though, namely, that she got the idea while reading about her favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth, and then recognized it in other favorite works, especially The Lord of the Rings and even Star Wars. When inspired to write a schoolboy series of books, she elected to make the formula trio of students into her soul triptych vehicles.

A stretch? Of course it is! After the jump, I’ll share Rowling’s public statements about Macbeth, the widely available critical work on Shakespeare’s plays that discussed the soul triptych within it, and some preliminary thoughts about the likelihood that this was Rowling’s ur source for her Potter soul triptych. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Shakespeare

Ink Black Heart and Deathly Hallows: The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center

October 6, 2022 by 5 Comments

I have two quick points to make tonight about Rowling’s use of the word “heart.”

First, she revealed in Deathly Hallows that the heart is not about emotions and relationships per se but the human spiritual center. In Hallows, the critical moments in the transformation of Ron Weasley and Harry Potter are described with repeated references to their hearts and the light and darkness within and around them. More than Half-Blood Prince or the ‘Hairy Heart’ in Beedle the Bard, this is where we find the clearest references to what it means to have an ‘Ink Black Heart’ and how to overcome it.

Second, this use of the heart as the home of the noetic faculty or ‘Spirit’ is in keeping with traditional teaching across the great revelations, especially Christianity, though a great departure from prevalent Valentine’s Day sentiments about the heart as the metaphorical home for affection and emotion. Harry and Ron’s illumined hearts after their time in inky blackness in Deathly Hallows are signs of their enlightenment and self-transcendence, not emotional or affectionate accomplishment.

More after the jump! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Deathly Hallows Lectures, Shakespeare, Traditional Symbolism

Elizabeth(s) the Phoenix

February 13, 2021 by Leave a Comment

The centrality of Elizabethan imagery in Troubled Blood is hard to miss. The  Faerie Queene epigraphs and structuring, already well documented on this site, show the basis of the connection. That this work is meant to parallel Order of the Phoenix is also well documented. I want to suggest that Rowling has clarified much of the meaning of Order of the Phoenix using this imagery, which in turn continues and strengthens a long-running undercurrent in Rowling’s writing: a extensive set of references to 15th through 17th century English ecclesiastical, political, and philosophical history (earlier work directly touching this set of associations in Rowling’s work can be found in this 2009 post).

My core thought here is this: it is not just the one Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, who we are meant to consider. Instead, I think we are meant to focus on the societal and literary impact of four closely intertwined Elizabeths and their associations with the development of English Christianity and esotericism in its many forms. These four are Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Stuart, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.

I’ll grant that this is a fairly large claim, and I may be hunting Crumple Horned Snorkacks (if I am, please let me know), but I think there is this strong thread here worth tracing.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Agatha Christie, Cormoran Strike, Evan Willis, Literary Alchemy, Shakespeare, Traditional Symbolism

Troubled Blood: Cormoran Strike’s Journey with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner

October 14, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Baird-Hardy and Beatrice Groves have been writing about the Spenserian epigraphs adorning each of Troubled Blood’s seven Parts and all of its seventy three chapters, and, for those few, too-happy few Rowling readers well versed in Faerie Queen this has no doubt been a challenging and rewarding effort in literary exegesis. It is an unstated but key premise to everything we write here, I realized this morning, that Rowling writes and speaks to two audiences simultaneously — to those who read her work for entertainment and inspiration and to those who read her work (to include longer twitter threads as well as her novels and series!) for the text beneath the surface of the text, the narrative undergirding the plot narrative revealing the meaning of narratives in our lives. The Faerie Queen posts are, no doubt, examples of the hidden text within what the Russian Formalists called ‘literariness’ and we owe a real debt to Profs Baird-Hardy and Groves for the slow-mining they do per Ruskin to bring this gold to the light of day.

The problem with this work is that I do not think the overlap portion of a Venn diagram of ‘Readers of Troubled Blood,’ ‘Readers of Harry Potter,’ and ‘Readers of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen‘ constitutes even a very small shared sub-set of serious readers. More to the point, perhaps, in an area proportional Venn diagram in which the three sets of readers are represented in size relative to the number of their living members, the Faerie Queen set, alas, is the smallest of the three — and has virtually no overlap, with the important exception of Profs. Baird Hardy and Groves, with the other sets.

No doubt Rowling labors here to foster interest in Spenser’s epic poem among her faithful as well as her Straussian readers of her public and hidden texts, of her surface and hidden meanings, just as she did with Silkworm’s Jacobean Revenge Drama epigraphs and Lethal White’s chapter heading glosses from Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. But Faerie Queen is by far the biggest ‘ask’ in this regard, one with rewards proportionate to the time and effort necessary to enter Spenser’s realm, and the prompting I have to think that will be the least likely to be taken, even with the encouraging glosses written by Serious Strikers.

What I wish to offer today for your consideration is a much less obvious parallel text within Troubled Blood, one that many more if by no means most Troubled Blood readers have already read and which all could read with understanding in less than an hour. This work, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ when read in parallel with Troubled Blood, highlights essential artistry and meanings of Rowling’s latest, of Rowling’s oeuvre taken as a whole, and even of the references to Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare in Strike 5. Join me after the jump for a deep dive into the parallels between Mariner and the fifth Strike novel, an Estecean interpretive journey through Troubled Blood! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Agatha Christie, Beatrice Groves, Cormoran Strike, Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Shakespeare

Looking for Your Next Celebrity Storytime? Try These!

May 14, 2020 by 1 Comment

While we may all get a little tired of being told that we must use these odd times for self-improvement and intense personal growth, there is no denying that many people have taken both comfort from and interest in reading. Libraries are realizing that the rural Bookmobile concept is actually pretty amazing, something I knew as a child when the magical delivery service visited my aunt’s house. It was like a traveling Scholastic Book Fair. Amazon is, of course, doing a rip-roaring business, but they aren’t delivering only books, as people are shipping everything including a kitchen sink (if Amazon doesn’t have one that suits the shut-in home-improver, I’m sure Home Depot or Lowe’s will). Local bookstores, many of which are only doing online or appointment sales, are a nice choice, and a good idea if you’d like that bookstore to be there this time next year.

One of the most popular ways to enjoy a good book, though, is to hear it read aloud. There is something magical about the read-aloud. It conveys safety and connection for many of us, reminding us of our childhood and of family reading time.  I may have complained mightily about reading any chapter in which I had to do my extravagant voices for Voldemort, Bellatrix, Dobby, and/or Snape, but I wouldn’t trade those sore throats for anything, as reading the Harry Potter books aloud to my children remains one of the most precious experiences we have shared (and I do still do the voices sometimes for laughs, although my daughter has truly made Luna her own. My grandchildren will have a ball with that one).

Celebrities are, of course, taking up the task of bringing storytime comfort, and the Wizarding World has been featuring appropriate readers for Philosopher’s Stone. Daniel Radcliffe, the Boy who Lived to most filmgoers, has read us the first chapter. Noma Dumezweni of Cursed Child took on “The Vanishing Glass.” Newt Scamander himself, the delightful Eddie Redmayne, reads chapter 3, and has an Aunt Petunia voice I truly envy. Artwork from contributors adds to the reading, but Spotify also has all–auditory versions. Many other famous voices are lined up to read aloud each chapter over the coming weeks.

While we wait for the next chapters to be read by the next celebrity readers, you may be in need of another reading companion.  Thankfully, there are some wonderful choices available. Here are a few I like and which you might want to try, but also hope you’ll comment below with suggestions if you have found some that you have discovered and enjoyed. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Shakespeare Tagged With: , , ,