Hogwarts Professor

Robert Terry, long time friend and serious reader, wrote me today to say he’d found two interesting articles about the Hogwarts Saga on Johann Kurtz’ ‘Becoming Noble’ Substack page. The first is ‘The Last British Myth’ and the second is the conclusion of that essay, ‘Freedom.‘

Here is the introduction to give you a taste:

Ours is a windswept island. Time has carried many peoples and gods from our shores.

Peoples fade, and yet they linger, ever-present in an unspoken British folk communion. At the edges of our psyche, they’re all still there, dim but alive: the druidism of the ancients, the power of the Romans, the folklore of the Anglo-Saxons, the evangelism of the Christians. All live on as layers of psychic sediment which shift, flow, and resurface.

Our greatest king – Arthur – is to be found nowhere in the pages of earthly history. He lives in a different plane; yet it is one to which we also belong. Whatever we need him to be, he is – both chivalric knight of Christ and devotee of the wizard Merlin. Our patron saint – George – lives somewhere between ecclesiastical history and a folklore inhabited by dragons.

Our longest reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, was both ‘Defender of the Faith’ and initiate into the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain – the Gorsedd of the Bards of Britain – revived on the principles of Celtic druidry.

We have always known secret worship: pagan priests on foggy hills, condemned Catholics in forest glades, witches burned for their heresy. Even now, silent prayer is hunted by the authorities.

Our churches are adorned with gargoyles; our nation is one of nations; our democracy adores its kings. Contradictions live in harmony. Our identity is certain and yet unresolved. We live in both earthly and eternal time, never certain which ancestors to honor and which eternity awaits us.

It is only against this background that one can understand the paradox of Harry Potter, the wizard who celebrates Christmas, the last of the great British myths. Like Britain itself, the tale of The Boy Who Lived is a pagan vessel out of which Christian greatness emerges, in a subtle and particular form.

J.K. Rowling’s mythopoetic masterpiece is an attempt at the resolution of the dying British soul. It is a final charge in the war for who we are and always have been. It amounts to a systematic defense of British culture, finding heroism in its eccentricities and beauty in its ways.

I believe that hidden within the work is an entire spiritual history of our land. My task here is to uncover that which lies beneath the surface, from druidic allusions to hidden scriptural quotations.

To do so, we must start at the beginning.

Enjoy — and thank you, Robert, for the tip!

From my family to yours, a joyous Thanksgiving!

I’ve written about Joe Posnanski before. Not only is he America’s greatest sportswriter, he is also a real Harry Potter fan. In the most recent post I’ve written about him, I explained Posnanski’s success in losing weight on the Harry Potter Diet Plan and included links to the other HogwartsProfessor posts I’ve written about his love for Rowling’s first and her best selling novels (aside here: I’m a Serious Striker and I love Christmas Pig, but let’s be real; nothing Rowling has written has sold anything close to the number of published and sold copies of any of the Potter pieces).

If you only have time for one article, read either Posnanski’s Katie the Prefect or Katie the Prefect Revisited for perhaps the greatest stories ever written about a dad, a daughter, and their love of the Wizarding World.

Though I no longer follow professional sports teams or leagues, I have a paid subscription to Posnanski’s Substack Page, which is called ‘Joe Blogs,’ a sort of sideways tribute to Princeton Review because of their ‘typical tester’ and to the Joe Bloggs who is the ‘man in the street‘ of the UK. Today in a wonderfully rambling Thanksgiving post, he once again showed his love for the Potter series.

It starts with his new-found obsession with fountain pens. He lists the ‘Best of Price Point’ Categories for these pens with his nominations.

• Under $50: LAMY Safari. All the LAMYs are great—there are those who will tell you that the LAMY 2000 is the best fountain pen ever made—but I totally dig the Safari as just a fun pen. I just bought the Harry Potter collection of Safaris—one pen for each Hogwarts House.* They’re awesome.

*OK, so somebody taught me a trick for figuring out somebody’s Hogwarts House that has worked INCREDIBLY well. I mean, like, eerily well. I’ll give you the key down below, but now ask yourself or your friend this question: “You come upon a locked door. You want to get in. What do you do?”

Gauntlet tossed down… A little while later on, after discussing the arcana of that fountain pen choice, at a sideways prompting retreats into the Sorting Hat Question:

And that leads us to my gift to you. I have now tried this [trick] FOUR times, and it has worked every time. Above, I told you to answer the question: You come upon a door. It is locked. You want to get in. What do you do?

If you answered, “Knock on the door,” you’re a Hufflepuff. Katie answered that way. Katie has long known she’s a Hufflepuff.

If you answered, “Go look for a key,” you’re a Ravenclaw. Margo answered that way. Margo has long known she’s a Ravenclaw.

If you answered, “Pick the lock,” you’re a Slytherin. Elizabeth answered that way. Lis has long known she’s a Slytherin.

And if you answered, “Knock the door down,” you’re a Gryffindor. I answered that way. I have no idea why I answered that way—I couldn’t knock any door down, even on a gingerbread house—but it was the first answer that came into my head, and, yes, I have long known that I’m a Gryffindor. In fact, I once had an exchange with Lin Manuel Miranda about him being a Slytherin and me being a Gryffindor. I wonder how Lin would answer the question.

Anyway, it’s 100% foolproof and… you’re welcome.

It worked for me!