Mail Bag: Jordan Peterson talks about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

May 8, 2019 by Leave a Comment

A note from an old friend in Australia, Sharon Jackson:

Hi John,

I was listening to a podcast by highly popular psychologist, author and speaker Jordan B. Peterson today and was interested to hear him give an interpretation of Harry Potter (the second movie) identifying it as an archetypal Christian story, as you’ve been maintaining for years. I thought you might be interested.

Here’s the link: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/s2-e5-lecture-sacramento-june-27-2018/  (The speech was old but the podcast is recently released. He’s releasing recordings of his talks from his speaking tour in his podcasts at the moment). The relevant comments begin at 1:33:20 and go to 1:37:05.

Petersen also comments on the series as a whole as a retelling of the Christian story, the battle against evil; he identifies Voldemort as “Satan, for all intents and purposes” and says this “makes the whole fundamentalist Christian assault on Harry Potter pretty comical in my estimation.” “In order for Harry to finally defeat Voldemort he has to die and be reborn, that’s how the book ends … She’s telling a story that everyone knows. But no-one knows they know it.”

Sounds like something you’ve written, doesn’t it?

These comments fall within Petersen’s answer to a question about Petersen’s beliefs on the physical reality of Christ’s resurrection. This question and the rest of his answer begins at 1:26:05 and goes to 1:37:30. His summary, “I’m not going to answer it casually.”

Just thought you might be interested.

Oh, yeah! Peterson is a rock-star psychologist and he loves Harry Potter, especially the Chamber of Secrets mythology (Peterson is an unapologetic Jungian). Check out this riff:

Does it echo pretty much everything I wrote about Chamber in Hidden Key to Harry Potter in 2002 (now How Harry Cast His Spell), a chapter excerpted and available online since 2003? You bet it does, right down to the mistaken interpretation of Ginny’s name as ‘Virginia’ rather than ‘Ginevra/Guinevere,’ a name derivation that Rowling had not yet told us when I wrote Hidden Key.

I wish, given his popularity today that he’d given me a shout out, but the odds are very good that he came to this “Brilliant In-Depth Analysis” all on his own. Once you see the mythic and Christian allegorical elements, things a Jungian psychologist will surely pick up, you don’t need a Potter Pundit to guide you. Gail Grynbaum, another Jungian, wrote this stuff up years ago also without referencing me because this is the way a Jungian-steeped-in-mythos reads.

Fun, though, to see a celebrity saying what I’ve said for fifteen years as if it were a revelation!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope (2) Joanne Gray

May 7, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Part 1 of this Guest Post from Joanne Gray can be read here: Cormoran and Robin: Echoes of Homer’s Odysseus and Penelope?

Part 2 Of Echoes In Homer’s Odyssey: Possible Echoes In Odyssey Books 17-24 to Strike Books 5, 6, 7

Anteros by Alfred Gilbert, 1893; from the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus. Mistakenly called the Statue of Eros. [1]

On the night that Robin and Matthew became engaged, (March 28, 2010) Matthew chose the Statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus as the right place to ask Robin to marry him. On the surface, the choice seemed very appropriate, but in reality he was actually proposing to her at the statue, not of Eros (Cupid), but of his lesser-known brother, Anteros.

The public has given the statue the name of Eros—the god of love—because we celebrate Eros/Cupid; the cherub who shoots the arrow that ignites the passion for love as the true symbol for lovers. It’s true that Eros is behind the myth of initiating the first wonderful sparks of infatuation. It is less well known that it is actually his brother Anteros who grows those sparks into a long-lasting reciprocal flame of shared love: actual real love which lies beyond the chaotic and highly charged emotions set-off by Eros.

The irony is that Anteros was the god that Matthew and Robin really needed since it was the couple’s inability to grow their initial early infatuation into a more mature and lasting love that doomed their relationship.

The lack of this reciprocal love between them (and also between Cormoran and Charlotte) doomed both their relationships. Both Matthew and Charlotte’s need for Robin and Cormoran to give up their own essential autonomy in order to conform their desires to fit Matthew and Charlotte’s needs (if there was ever to be any peace between them) ultimately doomed both of their relationships.

The Strike series has set Cormoran and Robin up as a couple who would very much reach the Anteros level of true love—having love reciprocated… and returned in full to their partner.

Homer includes two famous couples in The Odyssey Book 3, Helen and Menelaus; Agamemnon and Clytemnestra—2 Spartan brothers married to 2 Spartan sisters. Both couples portray unfaithful marriages and Homer used them as counterweights to the faithful relationship and marriage of Odysseus and Penelope.

It isn’t possible at this point to know how the upcoming books of the Strike series—especially Book 5, Book 6 and Book 7—might contain echoes from Homer’s Odyssey, but with Robin’s upcoming divorce from Matthew, it seems we will at least have a real possibility of seeing some echoes to a very important part of the final Odyssey Books (17-23) regarding Penelope’s suitors. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Guest Posts

Lethal White: Missing Page Mystery (2)

May 6, 2019 by 2 Comments

Way back in October, 2018, soon after the release of Lethal White, I noticed an oddity in the structure of the fourth Cormoran Strike novel (see ‘Lethal White: The Missing Page Mystery‘). There is a page marking the beginning of the second part of the book when the investigation of the dead government minister begins. It reads, ‘Part Two.’ The mysterious bit is that there is no page at the start of the book that reads ‘Part One.’ My thought was and remains that this ‘Part Two’ — and the beginning of ‘Part Two’ being a near exact parallel with the meeting of Cormoran Strike with John Bristow in Cuckoo’s Calling — is a marker of the second half of the series, a seven book series having its natural turn half-way through book four (as Goblet of Fire does in ‘The Hungarian Horntail’ chapter).

Beatrice Groves commented at the time:

I like it John! I think we’ll have to see if the paperback comes out with the Part 1 page (I’m sure that either this is a mistake or you’re right: no-one deliberately leaves off ‘part 1’ pages) before speculating further (do you know when that paperback is due?).

The paperback Lethal White came out in the UK on 18 April 2019, a good month before its publication in the US, and I asked friends in the UK to check to see if ‘Part One’ was included in the new edition. Beatrice Groves reports:

So I went to check for you and 

*drum roll*

…there is still no part 1 page!

I didn’t do an extensive search, but did note that it still misattributes the 1900 Ibsen translation (by Robert Farquharson Sharp) to Robert Farquharson – so it doesn’t look like there has been much proof reading between hard and paper back.

So what? Well, I think we can assume that the Part One page was intentionally left out, that ‘Part Two’ refers simultaneously to the second part of the book and of the series, which suggests as we have suspected for some time but especially after all the echoes of Goblet of Fire and of Cuckoo’s Calling in Lethal White that we are looking at a second seven book series from Rowling (and one that parallels the first).

Thank you, Professor Groves, for the help here. It’s a small thing compared to the inter- and intratextual evidence we’ve done but this marker is an important piece of evidence in itself, a confirmation of sorts for the greater findings.

Filed Under: Beatrice Groves, Cormoran Strike, Ring Composition

Possibility Three: Back to the Future

May 5, 2019 by 14 Comments

Warner Brothers has sold Rowling on a return to the successful formula of the original Harry Potter film franchise: she writes wildly successful novels and Warner Brothers then adapts them for the screen.

This is third of three speculatives posts about why Rowling has ceased from tweeting on her Twitter home page, a social media platform with 14.7 million followers she had been using to share announcements from Lumos and the several Rowling, Inc., enterprises as well as airing her center-left political beliefs about Brexit, anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and President Trump. The first speculative post was “Possibility One: Personal Problems” in which I reviewed the potential reasons Rowling wouldn’t want to make public that are keeping her from tweeting; the second was “Possibility Two: Court Ordered Silence” in which we covered the chance that she stepped back because the Sherrif (judge) in her case against a Personal Assistant ordered all litigants to be silent on social media.

If you’ve read those posts, you know that I think it is a stretch to think any of the reasons discussed in them — disease, addiction, relationship agonies, and a court order — are serious possibilities. None of them, to get right to the point, explain why Rowling’s office staff of four full-time employees and two part timers, not to mention the contractors and employees who work for her directly and indirectly at PotterMore, Bronte Studios, or The Blair Partnership, could not re-tweet announcements from Lumos, Volant Charities, Bronte Studios, Cursed Child, Hacheete Publishing, or Warner Brothers. Even a court order wouldn’t explain silence after the 4 April sentencing of the former PA.

So, we’re left with a mystery. Why would Rowling forsake the use of the largest Twitter platform of followers of any author ever? Instead of looking for causes that would apply to every other human being, which search has pretty much come up empty, it’s time to think about reasons that might apply only to J. K. Rowling, the Master of Narrative Control and Media Manipulation. Think “Hermione and The Quibbler.” Or, better, “Hermione and the ‘Bug’ in a Jar.”

Rather than wondering about the mystery of Rowling’s silence and what might have caused it to happen to the author, we should consider the possibility that the silence is intentional on her part and the effects — heightened interest in her activity (or lack of same) and the enigma of her disappearance — rather than the accidental consequence of forces outside her control are exactly her purpose.

Why would she want to do that? Here are my three guesses. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Twitter

Possibility Two: Court Ordered Silence

May 4, 2019 by 1 Comment

Rowling was ordered by a court to desist from social media posting during the trial’s final phases — and found that she liked it.

Last November I wrote a post about Rowling, Inc., taking one of Rowling’s Personal Assistants to court for “gross misconduct” and to sue for compensation to the tune of $25,000 in supposedly inappropriate and not-approved purchases as well as straight forward theft. ‘Lethal White: Personal Assistant Drama’ spells out what seemed to be an open and shut case at the time, the horrific optics of a billionaire claiming “Financial injury” and “Suffering” from what amounts to pocket change, and the echoes of this affair in the Cormoran Strike novels.

The case has been resolved and, in it, we may have an explanation for why Rowling went silent on Twitter in January. Here are links to various stories posted online about the trial and verdict: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Twitter