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As a former professor I also enjoy deep mining. My interest is the philosophers stone. Is it literally real? I have read Burkhardt’s “Alchemy.” He has a whole chapter devoted to The Flamels in which he states that they did claim IN FACT to have created the stone and used it to MAKE both silver and gold, even commenting on the malleability of the gold that they produced. JKR certainly treats it as real in volume 1. I find symbolic interpretation of it to be convincing. But I cannot take the making of this stone and its alleged powers LITERALLY. Yet Burkardt and JKR both seem TO DO SO. It fits in Harry’s pocket and its elixir has kept the Flamels alive for centuries. And it can be and has been destroyed.To me all that seems just impossible! Do you believe these assertions??
Hi there,
Will you be writing a continuation to the “Looking for God in Harry Potter” for the last remaining books?
The last update to ‘Looking for God in Harry Potter’ was published in 2008 as ‘How Harry Cast His Spell.’
My book on the series finale is ‘The Deathly Hallows Lectures.’
Has anyone else noticed the following? In “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” Scene 51, Gellert Grindelwald is inside a car, surrounded by a riot made up of his supporters. His acolyte Rosier tells the driver, “Take us around back. It’s not safe here.” Grindelwald contradicts Rosier, telling her to roll down the window. Then, over Rosier’s terrified objection, Grindelwald gets out of the car, into the mob. This seems to be a parallel to former President Trump, struggling to get his Secret Service team to drive him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It seems eerie that the authors included these actions, well before testimony about President Trump’s actions came out. [posted July 28, 2022]
Have been re-reading the Harry Potter novels, looking for connections to the Fantastic Beasts movies. Finally found this, in Chapter 22, “The Deathly Hallows,” of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, page 436. “The visions [Harry] and Voldemort were sharing had changed in quality; they had become blurred, shifting as though they were moving in and out of focus. Harry was just able to make out the indistinct features of an object that looked like a skull, and something like a mountain that was more shadow than substance.” This passage occurs after Voldemort discovers that Gellert Grindelwald stole the Elder Wand from Gregorovitch, and before Voldemort visits and kills Grindelwald at Nurmengard. Seems to me that the “skull” might be the “skull-hookah” that Grindelwald uses “to see snatches of the future.” Seems to me that the “mountain” might be the “Angel Eye” mountain in China, where the Qilin gives birth. Maybe these visions are fuzzy because Voldemort is trying to read Grindelwald’s mind, and so they are being filtered through Grindelwald’s mind, Voldemort’s mind, and Harry’s mind. [posted August 30, 2022]