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.
Rowling hadn’t spoken at any length about Macbeth until her interview with Emerson Spartz and Melissa Anelli soon after the publication of Half-Blood Prince in 2005:
ES: What if [Harry] never heard the prophecy?
JKR: And that’s it, isn’t it. As I said, that’s what I posted on my site –
ES: I’m glad you put that up.
JKR: It’s the “Macbeth” idea. I absolutely adore “Macbeth.” It is possibly my favorite Shakespeare play. And that’s the question isn’t it? If Macbeth hadn’t met the witches, would he have killed Duncan? Would any of it have happened? Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen.
MA: If everyone would just shake hands and play a round of golf, everything would be fine.
[Laughter.] The Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron Interview, 2005
If you haven’t read Macbeth, you can find copies online with annotations here and at Project Gutenberg. At the end of this post, too, I’ll share links to what I think are the best critical papers available online, to include the book I’ll be discussing in which Rowling may have encountered the soul triptych idea for the first time. Before we go there, however, how about a quick overview of the play and some ideas Rowling may have found in it beside the psychomachian allegory?
Plot Summary/Critic’s admiration
‘Macbeth,’ with ‘King Lear,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘Othello’ is considered one of the four great tragedies by Shakespeare. It is the story of a Scottish Lord and General who encounters three witches, the Weird Sisters, who tell him a prophecy of his becoming king. With his wife’s encouragement and assistance, he murders King Duncan in his sleep, assumes the throne, and descends into a paranoid spiral of violence and tyranny that eventually consumes him. ‘Macbeth’ is the Bard’s shortest tragedy and, though not considered his finest work by those who rank these things, its darkness, the usurper’s madness, and the beauty of its poetry make it a centerpiece of any canon of English literature.
Relevance to Understanding Harry Potter
We know from the author’s interviews that she saw productions of ‘King Lear’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale’ while still a child. She has told us, too, that Hermione was named for the heroine in ‘Winter’s Tale.’ Why should Potter Pundits re-read ‘Macbeth’ for a greater understanding of the Hogwarts Saga?
There are at least three very good reasons beyond psychomachian speculation or Rowling’s confession that “it is possibly my favorite Shakespeare play” (not to mention the Weird Sisters rock band in Goblet of Fire).
Literary alchemy: Rowling has revived and reinvented the magic of literary alchemy, that is, the use of hermetic symbols, colors, and sequence embedded in her stories to catalyze cathartic and transformative reactions in her readers. Shakespeare was not the first poet or playwright to borrow from metallurgical alchemists in this way, but he is undoubtedly the greatest. As Linda Carney explained in the ‘Macbeth’ chapter of ‘Alchemy in Selected Plays of Shakespeare’ (pp 58-65), the ‘Scottish Play’ is an alchemical drama of Paracelsan purgation and restoration of a kingdom after Duncan, a king with golden blood of magical properties, is unjustly murdered. In this, ‘Macbeth’ serves as an introduction and exercise in reading alchemically that is indispensable to Potter Pundits.
Everyman Parable: Martin Lings, a tutorial student and friend of C. S. Lewis and the Keeper of Oriental Books at the British Library, discussed in his Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art (see Chapter VII, ‘Macbeth’) the allegorical and sublime meaning of ‘Macbeth’ beyond the effects of power on human psychology. In brief, Macbeth’s decision to heed the witch’s prophecy and murder the saintly King is a “re-enactment of the Fall” and “it is the victim of their intended outward crime who symbolizes the higher nature [Lord and Lady Macbeth] are seeking to eliminate” (p 61).
If Harry’s adventures are read as parallels to ‘Macbeth,’ i.e., as violence made by a psychopath in pursuit of power and driven by a Prophecy, he is King Duncan, the man with golden blood “whose virtues will plead like angels… at his taking off,” and the Dark Lord is the mad Macbeth. Harry’s power is love, the ‘tincture’ of his mother’s sacrificial death, and allegorically, as mentioned above, he is the spiritual faculty of the heart or ‘eye of the heart; the Dark Lord, in dark complement, is the soul that lives for power, fame, and an immortality of the selfish ego won by sacrificing others. The Everyman morality play in the Chamber of Secrets is a version of this spiritual allegory, except of course that Harry/Duncan lives!
Intratextual Prophecy: As we saw Rowling pointed out in her 2005 interview with fan site leaders, the Prophecy that drives the Voldemort-Potter confrontation is “the ‘Macbeth’ idea.” This is a jewel for Potter Pundits because it is intertextuality – Rowling pointing on the page to a written work outside the novel that is reflected there, “Hey, look! This is just like Macbeth and the weird sisters!” – and intratextuality, the embedding of a text inside the story the characters struggle to understand as an interior mirror to the reader’s struggle with the book in hand.
Rowling’s relationship with her influences, her homage to and transformation of them to serve her purposes (does she really think Shakespeare meant Macbeth to represent the power of choice rather than the agony of fallen human nature?), as well as her meta-fiction dialogue with the reader about the experience of reading are the substance of Potter Punditry. Because of how Shakespeare changes his source material and how the witches’ prophecy acts in ‘Macbeth,’ reading the play is like batter’s practice for serious re-readers of Rowling’s work.
As I explained at HogwartsProfessor, Rowling is fast becoming for those of who grew up reading Harry Potter the literary filter through which they come to understand those ‘Greats’ who came before her. Shakespeare is no exception and it is only in reading plays like ‘Macbeth’ which Rowling folds into her own dramas that we come to a fuller appreciation of her literary artistry and magic and Shakespeare’s.
All of that is very interesting and some of it hints at psychomachian allegory, but did Rowling pick this up by herself from watching, listening to, and reading ‘Macbeth’? That’s a bit of a stretch alongside the over-reach my theory seems to be, but there is a source that was available at the time Rowling was at Wyedean Comprehensive and the University of Exeter in which the soul triptych of ‘Macbeth’ was spelled out. This would be the interpretation of Shakespeare by Martin Lings, noted Perennialist and author of The Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things (multiple editions and titles, but in print since 1966).
Martin Lings (1909-2005) was a student and friend of C. S. Lewis, a disciple of Frithjof Schuon, and, like him, a Sufi Sheikh. He was the Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts in the British Museum and the British Library. Lings has proved to be something like the C. S. Lewis of Perennialism, which is to say, his expositions of esoteric doctrine, Sufi practice, and Islamic history, as well as his works of social criticism from the traditionalist view, while not exactly evangelical, have made neglected and difficult, even inaccessible subjects available to the general public and inviting to the serious seeker. As I wrote in the rejected Perennialist thesis draft that was rejected (unread) by my thesis advisers:
It is Ling’s interpretations of the mature works of Shakespeare, however, that are relevant in a Perennialist reading of J. K. Rowling’s work as psychomachia. These readings are simultaneously rigorously orthodox with respect to the Perennialist hermeneutic, consequently free of any sectarian proselytyzing or preaching, and adaptable for use as a model in elucidating Rowling’s artistry and meaning. Many schoolmen have explored the esoteric and spiritual sides of the Bard; Ling’s perspective and value is unique especially with respect to psychomachia in general and within Macbeth specifically.
Lings argues in his Macbeth chapter of Sacred Art that Macbeth as with Hamlet is a depiction of man’s spiritual fall via characters representing the three faculties of soul and their journey towards or away from sanctification.
Macbeth‘s inciting incident, the murder of Duncan, reveals that the ‘Scottish play’ is about an odyssey to hell rather than heaven. Duncan the king, “his faculties so meek,” who “hath been/ So clear in his great office, that his virties/Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against/ The deep damnation of his taking off ” (I, 7), is the Intellect, and Macbeth, his honored servant and relation, is reason and will, and Lady Macbeth the passions (nB: nous and intellectus being the Greek and Latin words respectively for the ego transcending spiritual faculty of the human soul, ‘Intellect’ here means this faculty rather than ‘intelligence’ or ‘reason’ as it is commonly misused today).
The cause of the Fall of man is traditionally represented as the choice of a forbidden thing loved for its own sake in preference to the whole treasure of Paradisial blessings which are loveable above all for the sake of God whose presence they manifest. We have already seen from Hamlet that this choice constitutes a murder. Primordial man was possessed of two natures: and it is not possible for man to choose evil rather than good unless his human nature discards his spiritual nature. Otherwise expressed, his lower nature has to do away with his higher nature.
Throughout the first act of Macbeth the protagonists are preoccupied with the stifling of their better selves: and as a parallel to this psychological process by which they re-enact the Fall, it is the victim of their intended outward crime who symbolizes the higher nature they are seeking to eliminate. This symbolism is, moreover, subtly implicit in [the I, 7 passage quoted], for each of man’s two natures is kinsman to the other, and the lower is subject to the higher in addition to being its host. The Spirit can never be at home on earth, and insofar as it is present, it is always the guest of the soul (60-61, emphasis by italics in original).
In Macbeth’s castle, an image of the visible body, the figures of the person’s three invisible animic aspects act out the drama not only of the Fall but of what Perennialists describe as the spiritual condition of modernity, that is, the usurping regicide of the Intellect by calculating, ego-centric reason largely in service to the passions. Lings concluded his exegesis of Macbeth as parable of individual spiritual life by drawing the “macrocosmic” parallels with Hamlet and the traditional understanding of history sans ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution,’ the interior soul and exterior political regime understood to be analogous since Plato’s Republic [Lings made this soul-and-state analogy explicitly in his Lear chapter: “This macrocosmic drama serves as a vast and shadowey backcloth for the story of a single individual soul” (72)]:
Macbeth is no anomaly as regards its macrocosmic significance. The plot in its main outlines is very similar to the plot of Hamlet. A good king is secretly murdered by a kinsman; the murderer succeeds in making himself king; he plunges further and further into guilt; things grow worse and worse; and finally the usurper is killed and the country enters upon another state of harmony under a new king. In Macbeth the reign of King Duncan, like the reign of King Hamlet, corresponds to the Golden Age. The reign of Malcolm, like the reign of Fortinbras, corresponds to the Millenium (70).
Lings interpreted the Weird Sisters of the play’s first act less as prophets revealing Macbeth’s future and seductively misleading him than as exteriorizations of his “already formed” “intention to kill the king;” they are “subhuman witches who personify Hell” who “have been drawn up to the human plane by the evil in Macbeth’s soul.” Duncan in turn “represents nothing if not sanctity” so the drama has allegorical figures of each “of the three levels in the hierarchy of the universe” (57) as well as their equivalents in the human interior, body-mind-and spirit.
Harry Potter when read as a re-write of sorts for Macbeth (or Hamlet, really) has Tom Riddle, Jr., as Macbeth, the Boy Who Lived as the dauphin Duncan that the Dark Lord could not kill, and Harry’s best friends as the mind-and-body faculties of soul which support him as catalysts on his journey to sanctification. I prefer reading Voldemort as the serpent who forces infant Harry out of Paradise as the serpent figure (more on this and about my correspondence with a Potter Pundit who champions a catechetical reading of the Hogwarts Saga in future posts, I hope) but the Macbeth reading via Lings’ psychomachian interpretation works.
But What Are the Odds Rowling Picked Up Her Psychomachian Ideas Here?
There are excellent reasons for believing that it is possible Rowling learned about psychomachian allegory and the soul triptych specifically from reading Martin Lings’ Perennialist interpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and, most specifically, Macbeth. Shakespeare is a writer closely studied in all UK schools and a student who had always known she wanted to be a published author would be an especially attentive student. Just as it seems likely to me that Rowling might have learned about literary alchemy during her A Level readings about King Lear when Nicholl’s Chemical Theatre was an exciting new interpretation of that play, so the psychomachian allegory that Lings discusses in Sacred Art as being characteristic of all Shakespearean drama was potentially a discovery she made during her research into what made the Bard, “the Bard.”
It’s possible, then, and I think worthy of note.
Is it probable? I’d love to believe that, especially as so much of Rowling’s “triple play” or “G-spot” (about which more tomorrow) is more easily grasped from a Perennialist perspective. Ditto her traditionalist critique of much of modernism and postmodernism.
But embracing convenience in understanding Rowling’s remarkably traditional Shed artistry — “one interpretative hermeneutic fits all!” — is a big red flag of over-reach, especially when other possible sources for her discovering psychomachian allegory come easily to mind.
Mythology, for instance, is largely about the soul’s struggles towards perfection. Rowling might have read Neumann’s Amor and Psyche, a Jungian interpretation of the myth of Cupid and his human lover whose name means ‘Soul.’ Her Comprehensive teacher that was hot about mythology and her own ‘Classics’ study at Exeter could have lit this flame or placed this literary tool into her writing kit.
The Inkling authors, too, that Rowling is most often linked to, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, despite her allergic reaction to their being noted as obvious influences on her work, have psychomachian allegories at the heart of their mythopoeic fiction. The Narniad books can be read as the repeated encounters of soul aspects with the Intellect-Logos incarnate, which in Narnia, of course, is Aslan the lion. I’ve already mentioned the soul triptych of hobbits on Mount Doom at the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, Sam Gamgee, and Gollum, but Lewis’ Great Divorce allegory of the soul in hell and purgatory is perhaps more obvious.
I prefer Shakespeare and the popular work by Lings to those two alternative possibilities for the reasons mentioned above — and because the Perennialist view within which Lings interpreted Shakespeare is so alien to all the contemporary schools of critical theory, which is to say, ‘Critique.’ Which is to say, even if Lings’ Sacred Art isn’t the book from which Rowling learned about psychomachian allegory while reading about one of her “favorite plays” by Shakespeare, the anti-nominalist hermeneutic is simultaneously edifying to those who use it and a short cut to grasping the singular brilliance of Rowling’s Shed artistry.
More tomorrow on Rowling’s Shed tools and how they work together, time allowing! Here are the best online sources I’ve found, until then, for you to peruse in your study of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its relationship to Rowling’s work. Enjoy!
Best Critical Papers Online:
- Annotated ‘Macbeth’ with Online Resource listing
- Linda Carney, ‘Alchemy in Selected Plays of Shakespeare’ (pp 58-65)
- Martin Lings, ‘Macbeth’ (recorded lecture)
- Marin Lings, Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art (see Chapter VII, ‘Macbeth’)
- Victor [Cakravartin], ‘The Esoterism of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’
- John Granger, ‘On Literary Influence: How Shakespeare and Austen Influence J. K. Rowling and Vice-versa’
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