Let’s talk Harry Potter

I realize that I’m late to this, given the speed with which devotees of the series tend to gobble up the books, but I just finished reading the 7th and last book in the Harry Potter series: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. I know, not some people’s idea of “great literature” but I loved this series!! I loved the engaging story, the powerful messages and the fact that so many kids – from young to old – are reading!! I just hope that now that JK Rowling is finished with this series, maybe she’ll do another one, this time with a girl as the hero.

For those of you who may not have been so inclined, I’d like to demonstrate how deeply Rowling gets at human nature in these stories. There are lots of messages in the book that I would call “spiritual” and not in the way most fundies worry about related to witches and warlocks. She wraps a lot of themes around the concept of “soul” and “humanity.” Using Voldemort and his supporters, who are called “Death Eaters,” she explores the dark side of these concepts.
The first of these was introduced in the third book (and my favorite of all of them) “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The guards of the prison are “Dementors” and here is how they are described:

“When they get near me–I can hear Voldemort murdering my mum.”
     — Harry Potter

Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soul-less and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.

Now that’s some pretty dark stuff for a children’s book. At one point Harry asks his teacher Lupin why the dementors seem to be so attracted to him. As you may know, Harry’s parents were killed by Voldemort when he was just a baby and Lupin tells him that the dementors are especially attracted to those who have experienced trauma.

But Rowling, who has known death and depression in her own life, does some wonderful things with the anecdotes to dementors. First of all, when Harry has a brief brush with dementors, the clinic at Hogwarts (the wizarding school) treats him by giving him loads of chocolate to eat (Rowling also has a wicked sense of humor!). But, to battle off the dementors face to face, the spell he has to learn is the Patronus Charm.

The Patronus Charm conjures an incarnation of the caster’s innermost positive feelings, such as joy, hope, or the desire to survive.

The six and seventh book of the series focus on Harry and his friends trying to find and destroy the 7 “horcruxes” that Voldemort has created. This is another place where Rowling dives deep into the human soul to explain the depth of Voldemort’s evil as well as the power of humanity he has given up in the process. Voldermort wanted immortality more than anything else. As a young student he learned that if one commits the supreme act of evil – murder – your soul is split in two and you become less human. This prospect didn’t worry Voldemort though. That’s because he also learned that he could take one half of that split and put it in a “horcrux” to be preserved. The horcrux can be any object, animate or inanimate. But Voldemort doesn’t take any chances, instead of creating just one horcrux, he creates 7 – imagining this gives him immortality.

Here is how Dumbledore explains it all to Harry:

Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call “usual evil.”

But evil does have its limitations. Here’s Dumbledore again in the final book:

That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of children’s tales, of love, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Just how many times do you suppose Cheney’s soul has been split? I would venture to say that it has happened so often that what’s left intact is almost indiscernible as human. But still, he knows nothing…nothing of children’s tales, of love and innocence. And therefore, there are mighty forces of power that will forever remain beyond his grasp.