RE-POST: Looking for God in Harry Potter

I got this article in Christianity Today. It is pretty interesting, if you ask me :)

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Harry Beasts
The animal symbols in Potterdom are powerful pointers to Christian reality.

An excerpt from John Granger's Looking for God in Harry Potter posted 07/15/2005 09:30 a.m.

Looking for God in Harry Potter
by John GrangerTyndale House,144 pp.; $16.99

Books that are rich in symbolism necessarily support a Christian worldview. The difference between believers and atheists or agnostics is that the secular crowd does not believe that anything exists beyond what can be sensed or measured. Everything is a this-worldly quantity. Christians understand the world to be a shadow of the reality of its Creator and that this greater reality—God—is rightly the focus of our lives. Symbolic literature requires—and celebrates—this otherworldly perspective that magically undermines the worldly, atheistic, and materialist perspective of our times.

This explains, too, why books that are rich in specifically Christian imagery, and symbols are as powerful and popular as they are. Tertullian said that "all souls are Christian souls," and Augustine echoed him in writing that "our hearts are restless 'til they rest in Thee." Since we as human beings are designed for the Christian revelation, stories that retell the Great Story satisfy the longing we are hardwired to feel and answer.

Symbols of the animal kingdomFor most of us, the connection between an animal and its symbolic quality is pretty clear. A dog embodies and radiates the virtue of loyalty; a cat, feminine beauty and grace; a lion, power and majesty; an eagle, freedom; and a horse, nobility.
But the animals in Harry Potter are not your conventional domestic pets or zoo beasts. Rowling has a rich imagination and a special fascination for fantastic beasts; she has even written a Hogwarts "schoolbook," Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, cataloging her favorites, A to Z. Are these products of her imagination symbols in the way eagles and lions are symbols?
Yes and no. No, I don't think a fictional lion (say, the one that occurs throughout the Potter books on the banners of Gryffindor House or the lion Aslan in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia) has the same power to suggest "majesty" as a real lion on the savanna. One works through the sense of vision and the other through the imagination. But, yes, if the fictional beast is capably depicted, both contain the quality that makes the lion regal and stirs the heart.

Many of the animals in Harry Potter are Rowling's own inventions (although the Acromantula reminds Tolkien fans of the giant spider Shelob and of the den of spiders in The Hobbit). However, let's focus on traditional symbols from European literature because of the wealth of references that support the interpretation of their supernatural qualities. If there is a single giveaway of the Christian meaning in Harry Potter, it is in the uniform meaning of the symbols. The magical creatures and figures we will look at more closely are the griffin, the unicorn, the phoenix, the stag, the centaur, the hippogriff, and the red lion. Each is a traditional symbol of arts and letters used to point to the qualities and person of Christ.

The Griffin

I've found only one mention of a griffin per se in the Harry Potter books, and it is a detail mentioned in connection to Dumbledore's office. Professor McGonagall is bringing Harry there in Chamber of Secrets after he has been discovered next to the petrified forms of Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly Headless Nick: "Harry saw a gleaming oak door ahead, with a brass knocker in the shape of a griffin."

The griffin is described in Fantastic Beasts as having "the front legs and head of a giant eagle, but the body and hind legs of a lion."' It is an important symbol in the Potter series, though only mentioned once, because "Harry's House, Gryffindor, literally means 'golden griffin' in French (or is French for 'gold'). "So spell it Griffin d'or." As Harry is considered a "true Gryffindor" in Dumbledore's estimation, you can put a bet on there being great significance on the meaning of golden griffin for the identity of Harry Potter.

How does a beast that is half lion and half eagle symbolize Jesus Christ? Two ways. First, Christ is the God-man, so double-natured symbols are a natural match for him. More important, though, is that the two natures here are the lion and eagle. A beast that is half "king of the heavens" (eagle) and half "king of the earth" (lion) points to the God-man in his role as King of heaven and earth.

The Unicorn

Harry first meets a unicorn in the Forbidden Forest under the worst of conditions. The unicorn is dying or dead; Voldemort, as something like a snake, is drinking its blood, which "tonic" curses the drinker but keeps him alive. Unicorns pop up again in Ms. Grubberly Plank's and Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures Classes.

I remember as a young boy being taken to the Cloisters, a New York museum of medieval art in an authentic castle brought stone by stone from Europe. The highlight of the trip was the tapestries—specifically the unicorn tapestries. The guide told us that the unicorn was the symbol of Christ preferred by the weavers of these giant pieces. Though I was a child of no special faith (or sensitivity), I was moved by the images of the unicorn being chased, captured, and resting its head on a virgin's lap.

A check in Strong's Concordance to the Bible reveals mentions of unicorns in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy, Numbers, Job, Psalms, and Isaiah. [Translations other than the King James use wild ox for the Hebrew word, reem.] One Harry Potter guidebook comments that "these references, to some scholars, indicate that the unicorn is actually a symbol of Christ." Scholars of symbolism as diverse as Carl Jung and Narnia expert Paul Ford confirm this interpretation of the pure white animal whose single horn symbolizes the "invincible strength of Christ."

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the unicorn as a symbol of Christ is essential in understanding the meaning of the dramatic scene in the Forbidden Forest.
That the blood of the unicorn will curse those who drink it unworthily, and that it has life-giving power, echoes Paul's discourse on the unworthy reception of the Communion, which is the blood of Christ. When Firenze the centaur explains to Harry that anyone who selfishly drinks the life-saving blood of the unicorn is "cursed" from the moment the blood touches his lips, he does everything but treat 1 Corinthians 11:23-29 chapter and verse.

The Phoenix

My flat-out favorite beastie in Rowling's menagerie is Fawkes the phoenix, Dumbledore's pet. Harry meets him in Chamber of Secrets on a "dying day" when Fawkes bursts into flame and rises as a chick from his own ashes.

Given Fawkes's role in the defeat of the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets, Harry's draw with Voldemort in Goblet of Fire in the cage of phoenix song and light, and that Dumbledore's adult army in opposition to the Dark Lord is called the Order of the Phoenix, this symbol is central to any interpretation of the books or understanding of their power and popularity. How is the phoenix a symbol of Christ? In the Middle Ages the phoenix, because of its ability to "rise from death," was known as the "resurrection bird." Like the griffin, it was used in heraldic devices and shields to represent the bearer's hope of eternal life in Christ." A sure pointer to this symbolism comes in the climactic battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort in Order of the Phoenix. Voldemort has managed to get the drop on his headmaster nemesis and shoots out the death curse, Avadra Kedavra. Fawkes the phoenix dives between Dumbledore and certain death, swallows the death curse in his place, explodes into flames, and rises from the dead on the spot. The phoenix here, of course, portrays not only the resurrection of Christ but also his having intervened for us and taken the curse of death upon himself.

The Stag

Lupin and Black explain to Harry in the crucible of the Shrieking Shack that his father, James, was an animagus. Harry discovers later that night what form his father took: a majestic stag with a full rack of antlers. His nickname at school, Prongs, came from these antlers, which are the stag's weapon and defining characteristic. That Harry's Patronus likewise takes the shape of a stag gives this already powerful symbol even more importance.

Narnia fans recall that the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe only return to Earth from their Narnia kingdom because they pursue the White Stag into a thick wood. Lewis points to their search for Christ as the cause of their return, because Christ is to our world what Aslan is to Narnia. Paul Ford, in his encyclopedic Companion to Narnia, described the stag as "a beast, the quest of great hunting parties, who was said to grant wishes to his captors. Lewis, as a student of the Middle Ages, would know of the symbolism of the stag for Christ" (emphasis added.) Maybe you don't see how a big deer can link our world and the Christian creative principle.

It's simple, really. The power of the symbolism comes from the antlers. Just as the phoenix is the "resurrection bird" because it can rise from its own funeral pyre, so the noble stag is a symbol of regeneration because of the renewal of its antlers.

As J. E. Cirlot writes in A Dictionary of Symbols, "It's symbolic meaning is linked with that of the tree of life … inexhaustible life, and is therefore equivalent to a symbol of immortality … because of the resemblance of its antlers to branches. … Like the eagle and the lion, it is the secular enemy of the serpent … [and acts] as [one of the] mediators of heaven and earth. … In the West, during the Middle Ages, the way of solitude and purity was often symbolized by the stag, which actually appears in some emblems with a crucifix between its horns."

Given this correspondence, it is no accident that when Harry first sees the stag Patronus who saves him from the dementor's kiss—the living, soulless death worse than death—he sees it "as a unicorn." The stag in Harry Potter, like the unicorn, is a symbol for Christ.

The Centaur

Fawkes is great, but my favorite character in literature may be a centaur out of Narnia because of his last words. In The Last Battle, the centaur Roonwit—literally "he who knows the ancient languages"—reveals to King Tirian the signs that calamity is about to strike Narnia. The king sends him on a dangerous mission, and Roonwit is shot by the archers of invading Calormenes he has been sent to spy on. But he sends this edifying, otherworldly message as he expires: "Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy."

C. S. Lewis, renowned classicist and medieval scholar of Oxford and Cambridge, was certainly familiar with the conventional interpretations and uses of the centaur as symbol. His centaurs in the Chronicles of Narnia are often of this reveling type, but in Roonwit's case the centaur is heroic and sacrificial in service to the King. In Harry Potter, similarly, we have passionate centaurs and one heroic example, Firenze, who saves Harry from Voldemort in Sorcerer's Stone.

The centaur is first and foremost a symbol of man. It has the head and chest of a man and the body of a horse. The head and chest of a man are man's will, thought, and spirit; the horsey bottom is his desires or passions. The centaur is a comic picture of a man's dual nature as angel and beast. When man is right-side-up, his angelic part tells the horse desires what to do, as a rider directs a horse; when the beast is in control, however, the belly of the horse drags the chest and head where it wants like a runaway pony.

(Lewis, by the way, didn't see the horse, the centaur's driving part, as a passionate creature, but as the desires [or belly], in alignment and in service to will and spirit [chest and head], especially when hoisting a human rider. "For Lewis, the Centaur represents the harmony of nature and spirit," Ford writes. It represents the reconciliation "of our spiritual and physical nature.")

The heroic centaurs Roonwit and Firenze are both symbols of Christ because, as caricatures of men, they are also imaginative "images of God." Through these characters, Lewis and Rowling refer to a tradition that links a man on a passionate beast with heroic, sacrificial, and saving actions: Christ riding into Jerusalem in triumph on a donkey.

The traditional Christian explanation of why Christ rides in triumph into Jerusalem on a donkey rather than a noble steed is that he wanted to show the hosanna-shouting assembly on the sides of the road a three-dimensional icon or symbol of the obedient man. Thus the donkey (certainly a picture of willful, stubborn desire) serves his master, Spirit and God incarnate in cheerful obedience. Roonwit and Firenze give us this scriptural image of the God-man and the rightly ordered soul — another symbol of Christ.

The Hippogriff

I confess to initially thinking that Buckbeak the hippogriff was another one of Rowling's mythological innovations—and a hoot. I had certainly never heard of one. Turns out, it is the creation of a sixteenth-century Italian court poet named Ludovico Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso. The original hippogriff, of whom Buckbeak must be a descendant, is a griffin/centaur cross.

"Like a griffin, Ariosto's hippogriff has an eagle's head and beak, a lion's front legs, with talons, and richly feathered wings, while the rest of its body is that of a horse," Allan and Elizabeth Kronzek's guide to the Potter books explains. "Originally tamed and trained by the magician Atalante, the hippogriff can fly higher and faster than any bird, hurtling back to earth when its rider is ready to land." Cirlot describes the hippogriff as "a kind of supercharged Pegasus, a blend of the favorable aspects of the griffin and the winged horse in its character as the 'spiritual mount.'"

Hippo is the Greek word for "horse" (a hippopotamus is a "river-horse"), and griff takes us back to the griffin. A hippogriff, then, is a combination horse/lion/eagle, or a centaur with a lion/eagle "top." We have already learned how the griffin in Gryffindor is a symbol of Christ as King of heaven and earth. As a griffin/centaur, the hippogriff, too, suggests Christ's divine conquest of the passions, as evidenced by his donkey ride into Jerusalem.

Hagrid describes hippogriffs to his students as "proud," but they are not proud in the sense of conceit or vanity. They are great-souled and aware of their virtue, which the ignoble misunderstand (Hagrid loves them dearly; he knows!). The noble—even supernatural—Buckbeak in Prisoner of Azkaban pecks the disrespectful and shameless Malfoy, is persecuted by the godless Ministry, and is almost executed by the Death Eater McNair. He escapes death at the hands of a world that cannot understand him (and that chooses to hate and fear him) to serve as Sirius's salvation. As with the griffin's and centaur's double-natured symbols, Rowling uses the hippogriff as a symbol of Christ, the God-man.

The Red Lion

Narnia fans have told me they do see Aslan, Lewis's Christ figure from the Chronicles of Narma, in the Gryffindor House lion symbol. I think that is a reasonable link, especially in light of the symbolic meaning of Gryffindor and its opposition to the Slytherin serpent. This idea, however, hasn't been "lifted" from Lewis—the lion, and specifically the red lion, has been a symbol of Christ from the first century.

Saint John the Evangelist had no need to explain this usage in the book of Revelation: "Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed" (Revelation 5:5, KJV). It is a theme of Christian literature and heraldic signs, consequently, throughout the Middle Ages. Lewis draws from this tradition both for Aslan (Persian for "lion") and Aslan's devotees in Narnia. Remember Peter's shield? "The shield was the color of silver and across it there romped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it."

The five Harry Potter books are full of alchemical imagery, and even if Lewis was unaware of it (the silver and red in Peter's shield makes me doubt his ignorance), we can assume Rowling knows what the "red lion" means to an alchemist. The "red lion" is the Elixir of Life coming from the philosopher's stone, the end result of the alchemical Great Work was a stone that produced the Elixir of Life (often called the red lion). This magical object, known as the philosopher's stone, gave its owner immortality (as long as the owner drank the elixir) and infinite wealth. Touching any leaden or base metal object to the Stone would make it turn to gold.

Historians of science, religion, and literature agree on very little, in my experience. However, they do agree that the philosopher's stone is a symbol of Christ. There isn't anything else in the world that promises eternal life and golden (that is, incorruptible or spiritual) riches except Christ, so the connection is transparent. The end product or aim of alchemy is life in Christ; English authors and poets of many centuries have used this symbol of Christ, consequently, to dramatize the search for an answer to death and human poverty of spirit. Harry Potter is no exception.

The Stone in the first Harry Potter book, in case we missed this point, is described as "blood red," a symbol of the blood of Christ received in Communion. The red lion, then, is still another symbolic point of correspondence between Christ and the world of Harry Potter.

Stacking symbols

Does it seem odd that there are so many symbols of Christ? There is a big difference between symbols and allegorical figures. Allegories are stand-ins or story translations of a worldly character, quality, or event into an imaginative figure or story. There can be only one figure representing the other, consequently, or it's difficult to translate; I cannot have two Hitler figures if I'm writing an allegory of the Second World War, or the allegory fails.

Symbols, in contrast, can be stacked up. If I am telling a fantasy story with a Christian message, I can include characters and beasties and events that all point to the various qualities, actions, and promises of Christ. If the symbols correspond with these qualities, even if they are not consciously understood as Christ symbols, they open us up to an imaginative experience of those supernatural qualities. A variety of these symbols woven into a story that itself echoes the Great Story will powerfully stir the soul because the heart is made by God to be receptive to this message. Our soul radios are always tuned to the frequency of the message.

The Harry Potter stories, in their formulaic journeys that end every year with love's triumph over death in the presence of a Christ symbol, find their power and popularity in the resonance they create in our hearts. We connect with them because they point toward the Truth Myth that saves us. The gospel has rarely, if ever, been smuggled into the hearts and minds of readers so successfully and profoundly.