A/N: All right, y'all, here's the first of the two presentations I, well, presented. At Lumos in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. The first one is structured AS a presentation; the second one is structured more as a paper. The D/G content was added for this archive, since it wasn't appropriate for the conference, really.

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Love potions in HBP: their presence relentless, their theme constant. They are everywhere. What are they doing here? Well, there are a lot of theories, and we will get to those. But what I really want to concentrate on in this presentation is looking at the entirety of the presence of love potions in HBP. We’re going to see the context of love potions , how they fit into a much larger theme, and at last, how they relate to Harry’s emotional and character arcs, and his final decisions at the end of the book. While ships are absolutely not the focus, I do mention them eventually, and yes, this is a relentlessly non-shippy presentation, and if you want to see how I do that, stick around.

LP’s have shown up before HBP. In PoA, Hermione, Ginny, and Molly Weasley getting very giggly about LP’s And in GoF, Pansy Parkinson also accused Hermione of dosing Viktor Krum with an LP..However, HBP is the place where we see love potions by far the most.

First, we see them in the past.
1.) We first see Merope being obsessive about Tom Riddle, Sr.; Morfin points out that she’s always looking at him, peering through the hedge, hanging out the window. We see the behavior of someone who will use a love potion.

2.) Next, Dumbledore actually tells Harry that Merope did use a love potion.


Seven times in the present,
1.) Fred and George show Hermione and Ginny the WonderWitch love potions, we see that a lot of girls are clustered around them

2.)We see there’s a ban on these items at Hogwarts, and we learn later that this refers to love potions, since Romilda and the other girls did sneak them in.

3.) This is where Slughorn shows Amortensia to Harry in the Potions class, (where Harry feels “great contentment,” and Ron “grins lazily.” (pg. 231 HBP.) It’s the “most powerful love potion in the world.” And it’s made clear that “Amortentia doesn’t really create love… this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room.” (pg. 235 HBP) )

4.) "I'm not talking about your stupid so-called prince," said Hermione , giving his book a nasty look as though it had been rude to her. "I'm talki ng about earlier. I went into the girl's bathroom just before I came in here and there were about a dozen girls in there, including that Romilda Vane , trying to decide how to slip you a love potion. They're all hoping they're going to get you to take them to Slughorn's party, and thay all seem to have bought Fred and George's love potions, which I'm afraid to say probably work --"

5.) Then they discuss the fact that LP’s can still get into the school, even though WWW products are banned—because they’re disguised as “perfumes and cough potions.” And Hermione says they “aren’t dark or dangerous.” (pg. 386 HBP)

6.) After this, Romilda Vane shoves Chocolate Cauldrons into Harry’s hands, and he takes them. We later find out that these are indeed dosed with LP, as these are the ones that Ron eats later.

7.) This is the chapter where Ron eats the Chocolate Cauldrons that have been in Harry’s trunk for two and a half months, since he took them from Romilda Vane.

Love potions are here a lot. But their presence is even greater than just the number of times they literally show up, because they fit firmly into the much larger theme of deceptive magic in HBP, there’s more than in any other HP book, and almost every last bit of it relates to the manipulation of people’s behavior and especially their emotions. I wish I had time to spell out all of the general deception in HBP on the part of most of the characters, we will get into that a bit later, but the most important examples are the two that are not literally love potions, but are strongly related to them.

The first is Felix Felicis. In the same scene where we see Amortensia in Slughorn’s Potions class, we see this profoundly deceptive potion. It doesn’t really manufacture good luck, it only tweaks the circumstances, as Hermione will later say. HBP) Harry uses Felix or plans to use it three times, so let’s look at that. One time is against Slughorn to get the Horcrux memory; its use seems very justified, but he is being very deceptive and manipulative.
We see Harry pull off a very complex deception with Felix. He fools Ron into thinking he’s been dosed when he hasn’t, and when Hermione confronts him about it, reminds her of the deceptive magic SHE used on McClaggen. This whole incident emphasizes the “placebo effect”, the deceptive use of potions to control or change behavior, and/or to manipulate the subject’s emotions, can even work when the potion hasn’t actually been used. This is a really important point to keep in mind later, when we start talking about why love potions might be in HBP.

The third example takes place in the Sectumsempra chapter, and the layers of deception all through it—in terms of plot, structure, the psychology of the characters—is astonishing. But what we’re looking at is, when Harry wants to take Felix in order to succeed with Ginny, to “tweak the circumstances,” to alter events by the use of a potion. And then he goes on to decide that the final Quidditch game could do the same thing. (has “become inextricably linked in Harry's mind with success or failure in his plans for Ginny. He could not help feeling that if they won by more than three hundred points, the scenes of euphoria and a nice loud after-match party might be just as good as a hearty swig of Felix Felicis.” (pg. 660) So Harry himself believes in a “placebo effect.”

The second love potion-related theme in HBP is Fleur. I think she’s so prominent in HBP for many reasons, but a huge one is, Fleur is and always has been a living LP, her effects on everyone who’s ever seen her are the same as the way the effects of love potions are described in HBP. There’s much more to say about Fleur, but I don’t have time, if anyone wants to know, please ask me in the Q&A section.

So, love potions and themes related closely to them are all over this book. Morally speaking, what are they in Harry’s world? This is very important, I think, when we begin to look at their structural meaning. Are they really harmless, as Hermione says? No, and I think it’s made clear.

Slughorn saying they’re dangerous, Tom/Merope, But something that stands out for me most of all is the way that they are connected to the Imperius curse. If we look at the way that the action of LP’s is unquestionably shown—(Ron/Romilda, Tom/Merope, Fleur’s effect on men and boys,) and compare it to the way that the effects of Imperius have been described, especially on Harry in GoF, the similarities are amazing. And then we see this scene:

Dumbledore asks: "Can you not think of any measure Merope could have taken to make Tom Riddle forget his Muggle companion, and fall in love with her instead?"
"The Imperius Curse?" Harry suggested. "Or a love potion?"

So Harry himself specifically links LP’s with the Imperius Curse.

Knowing that love potions are not presented as harmless, let’s go deeper and look at the structural level of HBP and how love potions tie in. Several characters go through a metaphorical journey in HBP through deception to facing the truth. Especially Harry . As a part of this, Harry is manipulated by Dumbledore (specifics) But maybe, just maybe, Dumbledore is being smart here, because when he sees how Harry is behaving, he doesn’t trust Harry with this information.

Harry deceives others and himself. We’ve seen a little of this with Felix, but It really begins after he gets HBP’s potions book, which has spells to manipulate people’s behavior, to deceive, to hurt people, and uses minor spells at first, but he gets led further and further into magic that he should not use. Eventually, he uses Levicorpus, the exact spell that disturbed him so much when he saw his teenaged father using it. That was one book ago. In HBP, there Harry is, blithely using that exact spell.
Finally, after he’s gotten in deeper and deeper with all this deceptive use of magic, he uses Sectumsempra. At first, Harry is “horrified by what he had done,” (pg. 663,); he’s covered in Draco’s blood, but this doesn’t last long, it doesn’t seem that as much as it bothered him to see his father hang Snape upside down in a memory, what Harry himself did was a lot worse.

At the end, though, Harry does have an undeception, when he renounces the HBP’s book and realizes that he has to go on with the quest alone. But how does this tie into the theme of love potions? Well, let’s look at the way that the traditional big reveal we’ve seen at the end of every book is handled in HBP. How surprising are any of the revelations at the end we actually get? They’re not. A lot of people even figured out that Dumbledore had to die. We know after the second chapter that Draco is going to be up to something, and that Snape will be, too. Harry tells everyone constantly that he knows what Draco’s up to, and he turns out to be right. But we were never really deceived on anything but the specific details of how Draco did it. The only real surprise about Draco is where he ends up at the end of his emotional journey, which is a very different place from what we’d been led to expect..And this is all fundamentally different from how the mysteries in previous books were handled. The real revelations at the end of this book are about emotions, and I think that’s why when Harry realizes who the HBP actually was, it’s an emotional realization, it’s about his feelings of betrayal, of having been used and fooled by that book. And then, he does have his emotional revelation about his quest.

And this is how the nature of the big revelations relates to the entire idea of love potions. What they’re really about is people facing the painful and difficult truth about their genuine emotions, when they’ve spent the whole book trying to deceive themselves—and yet, it’s also about a number of mysteries remaining that have not been answered or cleared up yet.

All of this is why, when we look at how this all fits together, that I can’t buy one idea about it. That LP don’t mean anything, they were just something JKR threw in there to be interesting. That dog won’t hunt. It just won’t hunt. Love potions are there for a specific reason that is thematic, and that is structural.

Some people would say that there’s a whole separate and yet intertwined body of evidence that Harry was deliberately dosed with LP, and that will be a big plot point in Book 7, and I’m one of those people.

However, there is another idea is that LP’s are an extended metaphor about the plot and character arcs of this book of emotional deception and finally the beginnings of emotional undeception. .

This I think is supported, by everything we’ve just seen: the relentless presence of love potions, the constant themes of deception and manipulation through the use of magic, and the instances in HBP of a kind of “placebo effect”. And finally because of the theme of the absolute necessity of finally facing one’s true emotions, the theme we see so strongly with Draco, Harry, Ron, and Hermione..

In this way, and looking at LP’s as a metaphor, Harry’s full emotional journey through deception into being undeceived makes sense including… well, here’s the shippy part and yet the relentlessly nonshippy part—the difference between emotional arcs in this book. Ron and Hermione, Bill and Fleur, and Tonks and Remus face their emotions and come together; Harry faces his emotions and parts from Ginny. When Harry decides to do this (and yet does not try to stop Ron and Hermione going with him on his Horcrux quest,) it is something that needs to be understood in terms other than shippy shippy shippiness. This choice is about plot structure. It’s a necessary part of Harry’s undeceiving himself at last about where he’s headed now, and his capacity for emotion at this point—whether it involves a literal love potion or not.

So finally, when you put all of this together, I think this is why LP’s are the key to HBP, whether they refer to the actual use of LP’s in the narrative or whether they are meant as metaphor. LP’s involve both emotion and the magical manipulation of human emotions. But sooner or later, the deception starts to break down and everyone has to at least begin to face the truth. Love potions encompass this major theme of HBP and they’re the only aspect that does.

Now when it comes to the specifics of why they were used, everybody is going to have their own opinions. We debate because we care. We come together in our differences; by respecting them, by respecting each other and ourselves, we show our respect for these books that we love so much.


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P.S.: As y'all might have noticed, there's very little in here about the Creamtea/Anise Love Potion of Doom. Well, that was basically because Creamtea couldn't afford to come all the way from England!! Not to mention the fact that it's basically already been argued in her essays, as beta'ed and added onto by me. :)

However, what this presentation does is to lay the foundations for why the CLPT works. The biggest problem a lot of people have with it, I think, is that it all seems so unbelievable, and that "JKR wouldn't do that." But this essay talks about why JKR would do it.

As for Draco/Ginny, I talk a lot more about the canon possibilities of our favorite pairing in the other essay, which will be posted next. However, I will say this: before HBP, D/G looked about as likely to become canon as, oh, Harry/Hedwig. After HBP, I think it's in the realm of possibility. I actually would be willing to bet-- not the family farm or anything, but maybe, oh, about $100.00 or so-- that we'll find out in Book 7 that Draco's been interested in Ginny for a long time. Whether that interest is the least bit two-way, or will become so in canon, is more like a quarter bet, to be honest. But we're going to talk about why this possiblity even exists in canon, not fanon, in the epilogue to the next essay.

*Harry’s Loves, Harry’s Hates: A New Key to Their Mysteries
Or
The Dumbledore Code

This is the second and longer presentation. A big site in the Netherlands just asked to put it on their "Articles" section! Yippee skippee. I'll include a link later.

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The Harry Potter series-- it’s the most extraordinary publishing phenomenon of our time—and for a lot of us, a real investment of our interest, our intellect, and our emotions. We’ve read all six of these books over and over again, we’ve seen the movies, we’ve pondered the meanings, we’ve bought the replicated magic wands, we’ve spent untold hours on the discussion boards. We argue because we care. And there are some very contentious issues up for discussion in the fandom right now. There are a lot of reasons why, but I think the one that sums up best is explained by a quote from JKR herself. She told us that Book 6 and Book 7 are really like two halves of the same book. There is more left unresolved, much more, than at the end of any of the previous books, which is something I talk about a little more in the other presentation about love potions. But the 3 most contentious unresolved issues right now are: What about Snape? How will this series end, exactly? And what’s going on with the Harry ships? Never being one to shy away from controversy, as y’all know if you’ve seen my previous work, I’ve created a presentation that tackles them all. Just to make sure we haven’t missed anything controversial, we’re going to see at the end how all this might finally relate to JKR’s unorthodox Christian beliefs and to modern biblical scholarship.

Basically, I think I’ve figured out what the end of this series has to be, and I’m going to take you on a step by step journey through how it works and how we get there, using information from the HP series itself and from some other sources. However, this presentation is not just “I’ve cracked the end of Book 7,” but an analysis of what certain aspects of the story arc actually are in terms of the kind of narrative it is, because this puts a very problematic issue in the right context: Harry’s relationships.

Now, I think there’s a very big single reason why they are so important to figure out. There is a central piece of information that has never really been explained. We know that the climax of the series—defeating Voldemort—depends on Harry’s power to love. But what is this power and what kind of love? We’re going to see how all his relationships do show the importance of a certain kind of love and no other. And finally, we’ll see how this relates to a very specific narrative that I think JKR may have been thinking about when she planned the end of the series.

I should tell you that this will all be strenuously nonshippy, and here’s why. For one thing, Harry’s non-romantic relationships are very important, and while you can go there with shippy Harry/Snape and Harry/Dumbledore, I guess, I will not. But it’s more that shippy arguments cannot seriously relate the questions about relationships to the question of what’s going on in the series. Now, I do come to some conclusions about certain ships that don’t include the phrase “and they’re going to live happily after.” This is because I think that’s where empirical evidence and empirical reasoning lead us as critical readers. But this presentation is not another entry in an endless shipping debate, nor an attempt to show which ship will “win.” And to understand how love and relationships work in this narrative,first we need to take a little time to look at what kind of narrative this is.

The idea that the narrative of Harry Potter is a hero’s journey is far from new. Many people, have already charted this argument extensively. We certainly do have all the aspects of a traditional hero’s journey in these books. For reference, the basic pattern of departure, initiation, and return is included in the paper on CD that goes along with this presentation. Please turn to page 2. The three most important events in the HJ as far as Harry Potter are the meeting with the goddess/temptress, atonement with the father, and apotheosis or victory. We’ll see those in the course of these arguments, But the point I’d really like to emphasize here is what specific kind of hero’s journey the series is. This is a foundation we have to build in order to finally see how JKR might have taken the ending from one specific heros’ source.

There is a problem from the beginning, though, because HJ’s tend to be structured as either wars or quests or both. How does this fit in with the Harry Potter series? We have yet to see an actual full-out war. And if this is supposed to be a quest for Horcruxes, we didn’t even learn all about the Horcruxes until almost the end of the sixth book.

I would say the HP series is a quest, but it’s really for knowledge. The entire study of magic is the study of mysterious knowledge that what witches and wizards know and what Muggles do not. This is how the magical world defines itself as what it is, in addition to the fact that every book is about getting some specific secret knowledge that we learn at the end. In this context, the fact that JKR has actually said she loves to pull the wool over her reader’s eyes takes on new meaning. The point of a mystery is to find out the secret knowledge that is not available to everyone. This is very important to remember, because I’m going to tell you exactly what I think this means at the end.

However, you could also say that the quest is to kill Voldemort, again we’ve been told that the one thing Harry has that will accomplish his enemy’s defeat is love. This is not the weapon we usually picture when we think about the hero destroying his enemy! How does this work? How do the hero’s relationships even fit into a quest narrative?

Well, for one thing, in a traditional heros’ journey, or narratives that owe a lot to it, like Iliad, Gilgamesh, Star Wars, LotR, relationships and love are actually very important, although it’s never romantic love. But more importantly, Harry himself doesn’t know what this power of love is We keep coming back to this central mystery; Dumbledore definitely never explains what he means by the idea and yet it IS absolutely central. So a major piece of knowledge we need is what kind of love is meant here. He and we are on the quest for this knowledge. We’ve almost never gotten specific information about this in the text, so the best thing we can do is to analyze what kind of love has appeared in Harry’s relationships. Something we also see when we do this is that Harry either gets knowledge or refuses to get knowledge through every one of them.

I’m laying this out in terms of the traditional figures that appear in the hero’s life, please turn to page 3:

The Mentor
The Shapeshifter, whose trustworthiness is often in serious doubt
The Adversary
The Dragon, who may or may not be the same thing as the Adversary
The Goddess
The Temptress

In this context, I will divide Harry’s most important relationships up into three categories: father/mother/mentor, romance/friendship, and enemy/adversary/shadow. We’re looking for three types of love, please turn to page 4: agape, or sacrificial love, philos, or friendly/companionate love, and eros, or romantic love.

First, let’s look at Father/Mother/Mentor figures, please turn to page 5. (points to board)

Harry/Lily, Harry/James.

Harry’s relationship with his dead is real important because of the simple fact that he lives in the magical world, where, as Dumbledore said, “the ones we love never really leave us.” In the Muggle world, this may be only a metaphor, but Harry has the opportunity to see his parents again and again. So—they’re vital.
Lily Potter is and has been a big Goddess figure in Harry’s journey to date. She’s still a near-total mystery to him, and I think that both he and we have much more to learn about her in Book 7. However, we do know one important point from Lily’s example: her sacrificial or agape love is what saved Harry at the start of the whole series, and this is the only kind of love that we know has saved anyone to date. Over and over, we will see this theme.

Now, the Harry/James relationship. Harry idolized his dead father until he saw for himself how James Potter had actually behaved. This deeply disturbed Harry. He takes big risks to try to find out the truth, and he never really has yet. Actually, as JKR has made clear in interviews, James also sacrificed himself for Harry rather than trying to escape Voldemort. More agape love.

Harry/Sirius.

As we know, Harry originally thought that Sirius Black was an adversary who had caused his parent’s deaths (the place that Snape later fills.) When Harry learned otherwise in PoA, he immediately accepted Sirius as a new father When Sirius dies, Harry, in essence, loses his father for a second time.

In fact, Sirius is arguably the one living being that Harry has loved the most in his life. This may help to explain Sirius’s importance in terms of the theme of the series. Just about the only specific clue we have ever been given about the nature of Harry’s power of love is contained in the events at the Department of Mysteries in OotP. Voldemort tried to fully possess Harry, and failed. Dumbledore later told Harry that Voldemort simply couldn’t possess a body so filled with love. Clearly, this is Harry’s love for Sirius; there’s nothing else it could have been at the time, (particularly since when Harry thought he was dying, he actually welcomed it—he thought that death would allow him to be with Sirius again.) As with Lily Potter’s sacrifice, this is another major piece of evidence bolstering the argument that only agape can defeat Voldemort. And Sirius also showed agape by sacrificing himself for Harry.

Harry/Dumbledore.

Dumbledore is clearly Harry’s mentor. It’s safe to say that he, more than any other character, is the gatekeeper of knowledge for Harry. However Even in HBP, when it seemed that Dumbledore changed his tune about sharing knowledge with Harry, this is not quite the case. He gave Harry more information—about the Horcruxes and Tom Riddle’s past, for example-- but he still doled it out bit by bit, on his own terms and timing. There’s so much he’s never explained. And Dumbledore may not have shared a central secret about Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy, which is an argument that will be expanded later. I think we clearly see that as brilliant as Dumbledore is, he doesn’t always make the right decisions, J.K. Rowling seems to realize this too, as we see from some of her quotes. And yet, Dumbledore may also be smart here, because he doesn’t see Harry as being enlightened enough yet to handle this knowledge. We’ll come back to that point later.

Overall, though, the most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to Dumbledore is that he is both mentor and father. He shows agape to Harry by sacrificing himself, drinking the poison on Horcrux Island. When he dies, Harry has lost a father for a third time. And again, all four father/mother/mentor figures sacrificed themselves for Harry, demonstrating agape love.

The next installment: Harry's Romances!!

A/N: Well, here's Part 2, y'all. This is the part that (I think) caused all Teh Controversy of Doom, complete with threats, although that was clearly based on some weird misunderstanding of what was actually going to be IN the essay. :P Anyway, read it and see what you think!


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What really helps us to see the answer is to look at the roles his partners either do play or might play in the hero’s journey narrative, and that’s what I’m going to do. What we’re basically doing is looking at four relationships in terms of the meeting with the goddess/other half, or the woman as temptress, and how this relates specifically in this HJ’s narrative to both love and knowledge. In fact, the four girls all have divine/goddesses’s names, as others have pointed out previously. Cho relates to Chomolungma, the Tibetan mother goddess of the world, and to the Chinese goddess Chang O. Luna is a Roman lunar goddess. Ginny’s real name, Ginevra, is a variant of Guinevere, who represents the Celtic triple goddess of maiden, mother, and death-crone. Hermione is the Roman messenger-god Hermes, the traveler between worlds.
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Harry/Cho.

This relationship is not analyzed much anymore, and it’s easy to see why. J.K. Rowling has definitely sunk this ship. We know that Harry and Cho’s relationship is completely over, and that, in her words, “they were never going to be happy together.” However, his romantic interest in her wasn’t a brief fling. It lasted for three years, they did, in fact, have a relationship in OotP, and there’s one very important piece of information about what Cho represented to Harry. It is more than worth taking a good, hard look at this.

As we know, Dumbledore’s Army, (the student organization for the secret transmission of knowledge that Harry founded, and it’s very important to remember this specific definition) was betrayed by Marietta, who was Cho’s close friend. Cho then defended her friend for what she’d done, and for Harry, that was simply the last straw. He ended their relationship. In essence, Cho was the one who had betrayed Harry’s secret knowledge, and this was what he finally could not forgive. She became a false or failed Goddess figure as a result.

This betrayal became known because of Hermione’s spell; otherwise, Cho probably never would have been connected with it because Marietta wouldn’t have been caught. So in this situation, Hermione was the one who defended and protected knowledge for Harry, which puts her in a fascinating role vis a vis the theme of the entire series. No wonder Harry/Hermione was a popular ship! Yet it didn’t happen and was never going to happen, and now we know that it never will. This dissonance is very important to explore, because it helps us to understand what different kinds of relationships mean in Harry’s world. Also, it’s a good segue into Harry/Hermione.

Harry/Hermione.

The very first time we ever see Hermione, the first time she meets both Harry and Ron on that same Hogwarts train, she provides knowledge—she knows a spell that Ron doesn’t. And she also gives a lot of information—who she is, how much she knows about Harry, the books she’s read, the houses at Hogwarts, and so forth. This first meeting really sets the tone with Hermione Granger as much as it does with Ron Weasley, because her main role throughout the series has always been the provider of knowledge. She gives knowledge when she helps Harry solve the mysteries that face him in every book, from the Devil’s Snare and the Potion Riddle in SS/PS to her ceaseless struggle to find out the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. And she’s definitely filled many roles traditionally associated with the Goddess as well where Harry is concerned. It can honestly be said that she has a kind of unconditional love for Harry.

But the paradox here is that Hermione knows more about Harry’s inner life, his secrets, his torments, his quest, his destiny, than any girl he has ever dated, and she’s done more to help him. Yet she has never been and will never be Harry’s lover,( his other half in the “mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World,” as Joseph Campbell puts it (Hero With a Thousand Faces, pg. 109.)

Untold thousands of pages were written before the release of HBP, all trying to prove that the opposite was going to be the case. J.K. Rowling flatly sank this hypothesis with both her writing of Ron/Hermione in HBP, and also her statements in the 2005 Mugglenet interview. What J. K. Rowling says in interviews can be very ambiguous, but this statement, like her earlier sinkings of Draco/Hermione and Neville/Luna, was not. And yet, the people who believed that Harry/Hermione was going to be true romantic love cannot be described as “delusional” (to use a word that J.K. Rowling herself, in fact, refused to use.) Hermione has seemed to fit into the hero’s journey Goddess/Other Half slot in lots of ways. Harry’s relationship with Hermione really does contain a lot of the goddess material we see in other hero’s journey narratives, where the goddess provides aid and help. Hermione does this constantly, just as the Queen of the Danes does for Beowulf, or Vivian for Arthur, or Helen for Paris Alexander.

Clues have always been present that, in another book, would absolutely have meant that Hermione was destined to be Harry’s love object. In this series, they didn’t work out that way, and it’s unfortunate that this tends to only be seen in a shippy way, because what this points to is which kind of love will be the most important in the series. Harry’s love for Hermione, and hers for him. is not eros, but philos and agape.

Yet another way we can see this is that a lot of Harry’s emotions and his inner life are directed towards Ron, in some ways more so than towards Hermione. So let’s take a look at that.

Harry/Ron.

From his very first meeting with Harry on the train headed to their first year at Hogwarts, Ron has represented companionship and close friendship. He plays a role similar to the one that Patroclus played to Achilles in The Iliad, or Enkidu to Gilgamesh in The Epic of Gilgamesh. These types of figures represent philos, or an affectionate or friendly love. Certainly, there are also times when Harry’s love for Ron also approaches agape, or self-sacrificial love. The best example of this has to be in GoF, when Ron is the thing that Harry will most miss. Clearly, at that point, he is the object of Harry’s greatest capacity for affection—and although Harry never spells it out to himself in quite the way that he does for, say, Sirius, it is still a strong emotion. Let’s just say that it’s easy to see where all the Harry/Ron slash comes from!

But Ron also imparts knowledge in his way, because he’s Harry’s source of information about the magical world from its inside in a way that no other character ever is. He’s really the only intimate Harry has who is both in his own age group and truly familiar with the wizarding world. Sometimes, though, Ron does represent ignorance as well. He’s lazy. He’s intelligent, but he doesn’t want to think through things too deeply sometimes. He doesn’t want to do intellectual work, and as we’ve frequently seen, he encourages Harry not to do it, either. Certainly, he offers Harry agape as well, but on balance, he’s not a great source of knowledge. In fact, there have been times when Ron has shown distinct disapproval when Hermione has shared knowledge with Harry. Since Ron plays the role of Harry’s best friend, however, Harry does share knowledge and information with him, and he serves as a valuable emotional repository because of this. We saw this more clearly in HBP than ever before when Harry told Ron about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, R.A.B., and so on. So again, the Harry/Ron relationship points up philos and agape love as being extremely important.


Harry/Luna.

Clearly, we don’t know if this will ever become a romantic relationship or not. In some ways, though, it’s more interesting to speculate on whether or not Harry will admit Luna into his circle of trusted friends in Book 7; whether, in other words, she will become a true object of both philos and agape. Luna represents esoteric and unorthodox knowledge, and in this way, she is truly the opposite of Hermione. The kind of knowledge that she offers to Harry is fundamentally different from what Hermione has given him. When she first meets him, for example, she is reading the Quibbler, a newspaper that contains a lot of strange information—but we have reason to believe that like Luna herself, it also contains “uncomfortable truths.” In OotP, she is responsible for getting Harry’s dangerous and secret knowledge about Voldemort’s return through this same vehicle. She also is the one who tells him the secret of the thestrals, and shared information about the possible nature of the veil behind which Sirius disappeared. On the whole, my money is not on Harry and Luna ever getting together romantically (it’s a possibility in an epilogue, I suppose,), but it will be fascinating to see what does happen between them in the future. I would bet that she’s ultimately going to have knowledge to share with him that he needs and can’t get from anywhere else.

Harry/Ginny.

This is, of course, the touchiest Harry relationship of all to discuss. The reason, I think, is that the H/G we got in HBP almost seemed calculated to please no one who really cared about it either way. Harry and Ginny did date, but they were only together for about three weeks before breaking up. Harry was extremely happy, but he finally admitted that the entire experience was “like living someone else’s life.” J.K. Rowling rhapsodized about Ginny in the Mugglenet interview, but literally a minute or two earlier, she had this to say:

“I had always planned for them to come together, and then part.”

The best way to handle the H/G question, I think, is to analyze what Ginny was and could be to Harry in terms of the themes of this particular type of hero’s journey. This strikes the middle ground of taking a realistic look at the actual quality of Harry and Ginny’s interactions throughout the series, including HBP.

There is one theme of the relationship between Harry and Ginny that we see over and over and over throughout all six books and that is… he constantly rejects the knowledge she has to give him, and he does not share his knowledge with her, in very sharp contrast to the way that he does share it with both Ron and Hermione. And I honestly do not think that any other position on this question can be logically defended with any of the tools normally used for empirical reasoning. But it has to be understood and analyzed in a non-shippy way, by looking at the importance of this fact for the arc of the series as a whole rather than trying to twist it around into either extreme of “H/G= twu wuv foreva!” or “H/G sucks and is evil!”, to borrow a couple of fandom phrases.

First of all, how do we actually know that this theme exists? Well, Harry doesn’t respond to Ginny’s overtures of interest through SS/PS, CoS, PoA, and GoF, He actually speaks an average of ten words to her or less per book (and I have Creamtea’s list that outlines this fact) until after Hermione informs him that Ginny is no longer romantically interested in him (OotP.) But even more to the point, he doesn’t ever have any curiosity about who she really is,.or what she’s really been through, and he needs to have it for his own sake. That’s why it’s so remarkable that he never wants to know anything about what happened to her in the CoS, and even tells her (in OotP) that he forgot all about her being possessed. For all that he says he is sorry and “means it,” that really isn’t the point. He never wants to know anything about her experience with Tom Riddle. In HBP, she is alarmed when she finds out that he’s been taking instruction from a magical book. But it just doesn’t seem to occur to Harry that he needs to find out much more information on the whole topic from someone who did the same thing, as Ginny has.

The more we analyze this fact, the stranger it seems. His ultimate goal is to defeat Voldemort, yet he never asks advice or information from the only person in his life who has intimate knowledge of Voldemort, from the inside. And this is of a piece with the fact that he shares nothing about his quest or his goal with her at any point. This does not change after they start dating near the end of his sixth year. Harry never tells Ginny about the prophecy, the Horcruxes, his mission, the locket, R.A.B., the quest, or anything else—for all we know, he doesn’t even tell her he has a quest until the breakup scene. He doesn’t ask knowledge from her, and he doesn’t give knowledge to her.

Harry thinks about how happy he is when he’s in the relationship with Ginny, and we have no reason to doubt that he is, but the sad truth in the hero’s journey narrative is that when the hero tries to find personal happiness with a partner before the quest is fulfilled, it very rarely ends well. In fact, in many cases, such as Pilgrim’s Progress (Lady Vanity) and the Odyssey (Circe), the very fact that the hero finds temporary happiness with a woman means precisely that she is the temptress, who tries to lure him away from his quest with earthly pleasures. There is a paradox here too, however. While Ginny does play the role of the temptress in some ways in that she does distract Harry’s attention from his quest (getting the vital memory from Slughorn, for example,) she herself is not presented as a temptress character. J.K.Rowling made this point especially clear when she spent a remarkable amount of time in last summer’s Mugglenet interview in talking about Ginny’s positive qualities—warm, compassionate, tough, and so on. Whatever her ultimate role is in Harry’s journey, it has been carefully planned, as J.K. Rowling also made clear when she talked about her plan to have both the reader and Harry gradually discover Ginny as “pretty much the ideal girl for Harry,” and her plan to have Harry and Ginny “come together and then part.” Yet the very cognitive dissonance between these two statements means that we do not yet know the final nature of the entire plan.

The final clue as to the central truth about this relationship is, I think, what Harry actually decides to do in the end. He breaks up with Ginny right after seeing several examples of genuine love: Bill/Fleur, Tonks/Remus, Molly/Arthur, mother-son love as Molly/Bill, the beginnings of Ron/Hermione. And yet he does not try to stop Ron and Hermione going with him on his Horcrux quest. They are the only ones taken into his inner life, his emotions, his knowledge. This is why Harry/Ginny is something that needs to be understood in terms other than shippy shippy shippiness, she’s out of the way, now we’re going to get Harry/Luna, Harry/Giant Squid, or Harry/Hedwig! Harry spends a lot of HBP fooling himself about many different things. But here, he faces the truth about his capacity for emotion at this point. He does not have the capacity for eros, for romantic love, in him at the end of Book 6. That’s another reason why the evidence leans a lot towards the idea that romantic love is not going to be the love that Harry will use to defeat Voldemort, whether he’s with Ginny or with anybody else. In this way, the entire idea of Harry-shipping may well be a dead end.

In fact, eros in HP—erotic, sensual, lustful love-- can be and often is downright deceptive and false. We saw that with Ron/Lavender, and most certainly with Tom Sr./Merope. In fact, Molly Weasley believed for a long time that Bill/Fleur was eros alone, and only gave it her blessing when she saw that it wasn’t. Remus Lupin only accepted Tonks’s love once they had a genuine, meaningful exchange that proved her feelings for him were more than just eros. And even great romantic love in the Harry Potter series has no track record we have yet seen as far as actually saving anyone. (James/Lily certainly didn’t; Lily’s sacrificial mother-love for her son was what saved him.)

So Harry may get back together with Ginny, and he may not; he may fall for Luna, and he may not, he may be the Lone Hero (my favorite theory,) or he may not; he may swim off into the sunset with the giant squid, and he may not. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. All opinions need to be respected. But we don’t have the information we need at the moment to know anything for sure. The Harry Potter series partakes of the mystery genre to a very large extent. J.K. Rowling has not seen fit to inform us of exactly what aspects of the writing fit into that genre, and which do not and will be more predictable. When we’re dealing with a mystery, we’re not going to be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. And we can’t whip out 13th century Franciscan theologian William of Occam’s infamous razor to fix this little problem, because the entire mystery genre is designed specifically to subvert the idea that the simplest and most obvious solution is probably the correct one. (That idea is itself a serious misunderstanding of William’s actual philosophy, but that’s another essay!) So we don’t know. And since we don’t know, we might all be well advised to just try to get along and sing the Happy Shipper Unity song.

In summary, all of this is why the romantic, potentially romantic, and “gee, they really should have been romantic” Harry-ships have to be understood in nonshippy terms. Otherwise, we miss all the clues they provide to what’s happening with the narrative, particularly that Harry has often been reluctant to accept knowledge through them.

And now, let’s move on to the most intriguing set of ships of all: the enemies, and the adversaries, or shadows.

Harry/Tom Riddle/Voldemort.

This one’s obvious. Voldemort is Harry’s main adversary. Without his never-ending attempts to kill our hero, there’s simply no story, and we’ve known since we learned the prophecy that once one of them kills the other, it also will be the end of the storyline. The knowledge that Harry must finally have is the knowledge of how to defeat Voldemort once and for all—which, again, is going to be through his power of love. Yet given this reality, the truly fascinating thing is that in so many ways, Voldemort/Tom Riddle is Harry’s shadow self.

We’ve seen this hammered home over and over again. When Voldemort failed in his attempt to kill Harry as a baby, he put something of himself into Harry. In the ultimate CoS scene, the shade of Tom Riddle recognizes and explicitly states similarities between himself and Harry. In OotP, the entire plot revolves around the fact that Harry and Voldemort are connected, and that Harry thus has access to a lot of knowledge that nobody else has. According to Dumbledore, however, this knowledge is too dangerous to have; it’s not worth the price.

In the climax of OotP, of course, we see one big reason why: Voldemort was able to plant false information in Harry’s head, leading him to the Department of Mysteries. If this had not happened, Sirius would not have died. There definitely seems to be a theme in OotP of Harry getting too much knowledge on the one hand and too little on the other, and both extremes are harmful.

Yet I wonder, too, if this is the only reason why it was so dangerous for Harry to have access to Voldemort’s mind and thoughts. I believe that there remains a great deal to be seen in Book 7 on this topic, and that we do not yet know enough to judge what the conclusion of the relationship between Harry and Voldemort might be, although I will speak to that issue further in the conclusion of this presentation. So—very important, and yet, Harry’s adversarial relationship with both Draco and Snape is at least as significant in terms of looking forward to how this series could end.

Harry/Draco.

Clearly, this relationship could be a whole day-long lecture in itself. To try to keep it under some kind of control, I will cover primarily Draco’s role in the hero’s journey narrative.

As with many other relationships in Harry Potter’s world, the tone for Harry and Draco Malfoy’s entire relationship is set at their first meeting. It’s important to note that on that occasion, Draco offers Harry not only philos—friendship-- but also knowledge about the wizarding world. And Harry turns down both philos and knowledge from Draco, accepting them from Ron instead. This refusal wins him Draco’s enmity from that day forward; it’s fascinating, in fact, to speculate on how differently Harry might have ended up feeling about Draco and how much knowledge he might have if he’d accepted Draco’s offer of philos. Since he did not, however, Draco became the subverted or shadow companion.

He plays the role of the Dragon, which is a very important one in the hero’s journey. However, Draco is really a subverted dragon as well, playing the part of the dragon that is the one within the hero’s self. “Slaying the dragon” in a hero’s journey can refer to the killing of actual dragons (such as the myth of St. George and the dragon) or monsters (such as Beowulf,) or it can be a metaphor for the hero’s inner quest. In light of the idea that Harry’s true quest is for knowledge, this idea is especially interesting.

One thing that Draco has consistently done throughout the entire Harry Potter series is to pretend to have knowledge that he does not have, and to attempt to get more. His role in CoS is really fascinating from this point of view, particularly since Hermione, Ron, and Harry Polyjuice themselves and descend into the underworld of the Slytherin dungeons in order to find out what knowledge he has. A bit later in the book, Draco actually holds Tom Riddle’s diary in his hands briefly, before Harry gets it back. In other words, he touches knowledge, but cannot hold it. And that’s really the end of Draco playing a major role in the series until HBP, when he comes back with a vengeance.

In HBP, the most obvious central mystery is exactly what Draco knows that no-one else at Hogwarts is ever able to find out, but Harry suspects. At the end, of course, we learn that Draco has received knowledge at last—he is a Death Eater, he knows Voldemort, he knows how to get other DE’s into the school, , but that it is tainted—dark, dangerous, and forbidden, the shadow side of the knowledge that Harry is trying to get. Ultimately, Draco is willing to give up this knowledge, although he does not quite get the chance to do it. This, I believe, is the real reason why Harry feels his very first positive emotion towards Draco. Although we don’t know exactly what will happen with Draco in Book 7, I do talk about this idea at the very end.

In a lot of ways, Draco is paired with Snape in terms of the roles these characters play for Harry, so now, finally, let’s look at Snape.


Harry/Snape.

Harry’s relationship with Severus Snape is a complex, tumultuous, and violent one, and to me, is the most fascinating and the most enigmatic in the entire series. Again, the tone for all of their subsequent interactions was set up at their very first meeting. Snape has secret knowledge, and he made it clear from the first Potions class in Harry’s first year at Hogwarts that it was available only to a select few. And he makes it painfully clear that he doesn’t think Harry will be one of them. This is like a prophecy that finally gets fulfilled in OotP, when Harry repeatedly fails at his lessons in Occlumency with Snape. This also helps to explain the mystery of why so much time and page space was spent on these lessons—they represented Harry’s failure of knowledge where Snape was concerned. In OotP, Harry learns about his father’s moral failings through Snape, and blames Snape for goading Sirius to his death. In HBP, Harry learns that Snape was his parent’s betrayer, and he sees Snape kill Dumbledore. In other words, Harry now blames Snape for the loss of all three of his father figures (and his mother as well.) He actually expresses more literal hatred for Snape than for Voldemort. He even hates himself, I think, for unwittingly getting so much tainted/dark knowledge from Snape through the HBP potions book. For him, the mere idea of getting either love or knowledge through Snape now is anathema.

So, we’ve analyzed Harry’s relationships, and through this, we’ve seen how agape love is presented as being the only kind that is at all likely to defeat Voldemort. We’ve also looked a little at how Harry searches out, receives, and disseminates knowledge—and how he refuses to do so through some relationships in his life. How does all of this come together in order to predict what might happen in Book 7—and what about Snape? This part is speculative, I will warn y’all, and it gets more so as it goes on. It all begins with this quote from an interview that J.K. Rowling gave in 2000 about her religious beliefs:

''Yes, I am [a Christian],'' she says. ''Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.'' (Rowling, J.K. Interview with Geordie Greig. Tatler Magazine)

This quote is generally overlooked—but this is a mistake, since I believe that by analyzing it, we can find the ending of the series. So let’s look at how this is done.

At first, I looked for the answer on the most obvious level, which I do think is what J.K. Rowling is literally talking about here, given that she said any intelligent reader could guess it. Both Snape and Voldemort are Harry’s enemies; in fact, at the end of HBP, Harry was expressing more actual hatred towards Snape. So the love that Harry will have to find within himself in Book 7-- and the love that will be so very difficult to find-- will be the central tenet of Christianity, the ultimate agape: love for his enemy. He'll have to forgive and love his two traditional human enemies in this series: Snape and Draco, but Snape will be a whole lot harder and more significant. Every other task Harry has accomplished will seem easy, next to that. All of the other types of love (point to board) have only led up to this.

Some, such as Lynne Milum, have believed that ”Harry’s potential to redeem Voldemort would be the greatest victory of all.” (Milum) So in this paradigm, Harry’s forgiveness would have to be directed towards Voldemort rather than towards Snape and Draco, and that would be his redeeming power of love. There are a couple of problems with this, though.

Perhaps Harry really does have to accept the idea that Voldemort is his shadow self, and I think this was hinted at very extensively in OOtP. But the way that the young Tom Riddle is portrayed in HBP makes this particular interpretation very hard to really believe. We don’t see Tom shown with all the little ambiguities and grey areas that Draco Malfoy had in the first five books, for instance. Tom is an unrelievedly bad seed from the very beginning, from torturing fellow schoolmates to killing bunny rabbits to poisoning witches to murdering his uncle.

An even bigger issue, however, is that actual forgiveness is far more likely to happen between Harry and Snape (and also Draco,) because as normal human beings, Snape and Draco can accept it and Voldemort cannot. Also, in keeping with the traditions of a hero’s journey narrative like Tam Lin, I think that all of Harry’s friends and mentors must be stripped away near the end, at least temporarily. In this case, his relationship with his greatest human enemy, Snape, is then the only key to salvation. The key here is that the way his hatred for Snape is described in HBP and the way he felt Voldemort’s hatred in himself in OotP are the same. Harry has to reject hatred in himself,-- his negative feelings towards Snape and also Draco have been a huge theme in this books, he has to overcome them, I also think that The Atonement with the Father—comes in Book 7, whether it’s with James, Sirius, or Dumbledore, or maybe all three, and I think they’re going to give him the final strength he needs to do this.

However, I also believe that this is not quite the entire story. Now, as most of you probably know, there is a theory that Dumbledore got Snape to agree to kill him during the school year. Dumbledore knew that he was going to die anyway, and he wanted to keep Draco from becoming a murderer. Because Harry had already failed to master Occlumency, he could not be told about this plan. This is a fascinating idea, and I think it’s true, but… I think there’s a very specific hero’s journey narrative that JKR had in mind as a model for this, and it helps us understand exactly how it might play out.

+++
Thanks to all the reviewers! :)
There's one part of the essay left, and then there's the extra D/G info, which wasn't included in the presentation. I might tack that onto the end of the essay, or it might have its own section-- depends on exactly how long it turns out to be.

The next chapter of KC is done!! Y'all know that I like to wait until I have a few, though. But it's a nice one... :)

Thanks to all the reviewers, especially:

Embellished, cancertopia, adorame, Sarah Prowess, Judibry, mugglemum, tudorrose1533, beckysue2, WG, Anya, and jandjsalmon.

Here it is, y'all... the last chapter. It has the stunning secret-squirrel ending to Book 7, as well as the extra D/G arguments. R and R!

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J. K. Rowling’s obvious hints in that interview, I think, really did only refer to the obvious—and yet, if she is only talking about the central idea of mainstream Christianity in that quote, why does she define herself in opposition to the “religious right?” Is there something about her religious ideas that may not be quite orthodox? Well, we do know that she writes about magic, and that the central idea of the magic we see here is special knowledge available to only a limited number of initiated people. We do see this exact idea in one specific hero’s journey narrative, and it is completely tied up with the power of agape love.

To understand this hero’s journey, which I will finally name in a minute, we need to look at its historical context, which may also apply to exactly what JKR was talking about: Gnostic Christianity. It is a term applied to modern revivals of various mystical religions that were very active in the first few centuries A.D. These belief systems tend to piggyback on Christian tenets, they do have their own set of apocryphal gospels, and they “typically recommend the pursuit of special knowledge, or gnosis, as the central goal of life. They also commonly depict posit a marked division between the material realm… and the higher spiritual realm.” (Naj Hammadi Gospels, pg.xvii.), to be Gnostic should be understood, but as being specially receptive to mystical or esoteric experiences of direct participation… it is a knowledge of divine mysteries for the elite.” This summation of Gnosticism is itself a good summary of the entire Harry Potter series. But there’s more.

Gnosticism as a whole, in fact, has always been strongly related to magic, alchemy, in some ways, it is the very definition of magic. Simon Magus, the historical founder of Gnosticism, is the archetypal magician, Gnosticism defines itself in separation from the mundane, unenlightened world, just as the world of witches and wizards is sharply separated from the world of Muggles. (And this finally provides a reason for the strange juxtaposition of the hero’s journey genre with the mystery genre in Harry Potter, because this is the very heart of Gnosticism—a quest for knowledge that is shrouded in mystery.)

The final clue-- to this being what JKR actually had in mind, that is-- may lie in a very strange detail in HBP. In the first Potions class with Horace Slughorn, Draco mentions his grandfather, who was named Abraxas Malfoy. Who is Abraxas? Historically, Abraxas was the extremely widespread general name of a Gnostic Christian god who incorporated both good and evil. He was always associated with Lucifer (and, of course, Draco’s father is named Lucius.) In addition, Abraxas was always pictured wrapped in a snake or dragon-- Draco. So all three male Malfoys—grandfather, father, and son—have been given names that clearly refer to Gnosticism. And the Malfoys are inextricably tied up with Snape.

Although we can’t know for sure if J.K. Rowling was talking about her Gnostic beliefs in that interview (unless she ever chooses to clarify the point further,) it does make sense that she was referring to some popularized ideas from Gnosticism that have filtered down to the present day. The next question, of course, is what precisely this might mean. One idea that has saturated public consciousness recently is the Cathars’ concept that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen, and that she was the Goddess figure, as seen in The Da Vinci Code. I actually considered this one (Harry/Ginny/Luna/Giant Squid, anybody?) The canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-- are hero’s journeys, because we have all the elements, they follow the departure, initiation, and return structure, they include atonement with the father and apotheosis, and what the Gnostic gospels add is meeting with the goddess/other half. But we run up against the same old problem: it’s been repeatedly established that eros does not save anyone in Harry Potter’s world.

I think that there is still one more central secret, one that brings together Harry’s powers of love, hate, and forgiveness, his need to destroy Voldemort through these powers, and his ultimate quest for knowledge.( I’ve already established that I don’t think the key is in romantic love, and that even the idea that Harry must show agape to Snape is not quite the entire story). So what is it? I began to consider another Gnostic idea that has recently become quite well known due to the very recent work of National Geographic: Let’s look at The Gospel of Judas.

This is one of the so-called “Gnostic gospels” written at some point in the second century A.D., similar to the gospels found at Naj Hammadi that were translated in 1949. This gospel has been known for almost two thousand years through the writings of Bishop Iraneus, so J.K. Rowling would have had every chance to learn about it; the only thing that is new is the National Geographic translation. ( In fact, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote The Last Temptation of Christ in 1951 and it was translated into English in 1960, and a huge part of its plot is taken from the Gospel of Judas.)

It follows the basic storyline of the canonical gospels, but with one vital difference: in his betrayal of Jesus Christ, Judas was a hero, not a villain, and he acted out of perfect love. . He performed this task because Jesus instructed him to do it knowing that he had to die, and he did it to release the spirit of Christ from its physical constraints. The other disciples were kept ignorant of this plan because they were not enlightened enough to understand it.

If we recast these roles as Dumbledore, Snape, and Harry, it all comes together. Snape killed Dumbledore not only in order to keep Draco from the task; but to release Dumbledore from his human form, which traditional Gnostics believed to be a prison. Dumbledore knew that when he was no longer confined to his physical body, his power would be greater. This is a very familiar theme for the mentor in hero’s journeys, as we see with Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and it also explains the theme of the phoenix. (We certainly know since the NYC interview that the phoenix theme doesn’t refer to Dumbledore literally coming back from the dead. He isn’t going to pull a Gandalf, remember?) I believe also that Dumbledore had some kind of final esoteric mysterious knowledge we can’t even guess right now, probably about Voldemort. Harry hasn’t been able to receive it yet, which I think was foreshadowed by the way he couldn’t receive Ginny’s knowledge about Voldemort. He can only do it after forgiving Snape, and offering him sacrificial love, or agape, and I think accepting sacrificial love from him, as he did from Sirius, James, Lily, and Dumbledore. Only in this way can he complete his hero’s journey, and understand the true meaning of his power of love.

And so it all comes together. We already knew that the Harry Potter series was much more than a group of simple children’s books, but we see now that it is far more multi-layered than we ever dreamed. It draws from the vast well of our unconscious mythology, combining a thousand ancient ideas in new and exciting ways. And it differs from historical Gnosticism in one vital way: we, too, may become initiates into its secret knowledge. It invites us, the readers, to take a vastly complex hero’s journey with Harry—one that may bring us all to a place of wisdom, and of love.

~end~



A/N Addendum, not included in the original presentation and/or essay:

Well, that’s my Predicting-the-Ending-of-Book-7 presentation. It got a good response at Lumos, I think. We had some long discussions afterward about the Gnostic Christianity aspects. Oo! Oo! It just got added to Hans Andrea’s archive!
http://harrypotterforseekers.com/articles/thedumbledorecode.php
So, check it out there.

Anyway, yep. This is really what I think is going to happen at the end of this entire series. Of course, as you may have noticed, it’s rather thin on specific details. So do y’all want to know my FFE (Favorite Fantasy Ending) for Book 7??

(Anise whips out crystal ball…)

Snape, acting in his double agent role, convinces Voldemort that Draco is salvageable, primarily because he knows the big secret about Harry and Ginny. Lucius Malfoy gets out of Azkaban in order to help Draco kidnap Ginny and bring her to Voldy as bait for Harry. Of course, the LP blowup has happened by now, and Ginny has done something along the lines of running off alone, racked with misery after Harry gets furiously angry with her. (As if he didn’t have any responsibility for what happened, and the way he treated her like crap and a disposable snogdoll all during HBP… well, that’s a topic for another essay. Let’s move on, shall we?) So Draco and Lucius get her. However, Lucius decides to work with Draco and Snape for the good side.  (All kudos to Rainpuddle for the redeemed!Lucius idea!) God and JKR only know exactly how the plot plays out then, but it ends up with Ginny realizing that Draco’s been fascinated with her for years, and finally (probably in the epilogue) returning his feelings. Sigh.

Seriously, though? I actually do think that we really will see certain aspects of that ending in canon. We just don’t know which ones. We do have canon evidence that there’s at least an extremely strong possibility that Draco has been watching, noticing, thinking about, and perhaps even obsessing about Ginny for many years (see my addendum arguments to Creamtea's earlier Draco essay.) It’s a long shot that Draco and Ginny will end up together at the end of Book 7, but I do think that at least their way has been cleared. It’s pretty clear that Draco dumped Pansy, and I’m more convinced than ever before that Harry and Ginny did not have a genuine romantic relationship in HBP, and will not have it in Book 7. I’ve argued all the reasons why in excruciating detail on ARGH, but my favorite new piece of evidence is definitely JKR’s most recent comments in her NYC press conference. One thing she said was a staggering blow to that particular idea about romantic H/G. Basically, she said one of the main things that I’ve been arguing for months on end. So I’m a tad bit smug. ;) I’ll be opening a 1-900 psychic hotline soon. Only $4.99 a minute…

On that note, I’ve made a list of the “H/G-related” endings to Book 7, in ascending order of their likelihood—the least likely first, in other words.

Z.) H/G (or H/Anyone Else) becomes The One True Love That Will Defeat Voldemort.

This presentation details all the reason why this is so very unlikely to happen, but the shortest possible summary is that J.K.Rowling has already repeatedly established that romantic love-- eros-- does not save anyone in this world. Selfless love-- agape-- does do this. It has already worked for Harry four times.

So why isn't this possibility numbered, rather than lettered? Because it's an adjunct rather than a distinct theory of its own. It tends to get tacked on to any possible permutation of an actual plot-related theory, which are the ones we see coming up next.

Theoretically, it could apply to Harry and anybody else. The Eros That Saved the Universe is no more likely to happen between, say, Harry and Luna, or Harry and Susan Bones, but we clearly see that H/G is the only relationship argued in this way. The rules that J.K. Rowling herself has set up throughout this entire series preclude this from happening. Again and again, we will see this theme when it comes to H/G in Book 7. So now, let's move on to the specific possibilities...


7.) It’s explicitly revealed that H/G was a great relationship, genuine, true, and a wonderful idea from beginning to end in HBP, and it continues on this basis into Book 7. As y’all can see, I don’t think this is going to happen; I actually believe it to be the least likely scenario. We discuss all the reasons why this is the case in excruciating detail over at the ARGH board on FIA, but I really think it’s best summed up in this presentation itself.

In brief, there is nothing for Ginny as a person in the H/G relationship—no curiosity about who she is, no discussions about her past, no sharing of ideas or secrets or plans or information, no meaningful conversations, no nothing. Why is this important?

Well, these aspects of H/G do seem absolutely horrible in terms of an actual relationship. Chest monsters do not make for decent romantic partnerships in the real world. But in a way, none of that is the point. It would not be enough to doom H/G within a work of fiction, because a fictional narrative operates according to the rules that the author has set up, and these may not be the same that we live with in everyday life.

However, it is these rules that do form H/G’s fatal flaw, because it does not follow them. We’re hit upside the head over and over and over again with the canon fact that the exact qualities H/G lacks are the ones necessary for good relationships in the HP world, as is outlined in this presentation.

Hermione states that Cormac McLaggen hasn't asked her a single question about herself during the ill-fated Halloween party date, and Harry never asks Ginny anything about herself, even going so far as specifically informing us through his internal narrative that he will not deign to do this after The Kiss of Doom. Ron and Hermione have been fighting, bickering, and arguing constantly for six books before they get together romantically, and Ron avoids any conflict whatsover with his snogdoll relationship with Lavender Brown. Tonks yells at Remus. Harry and Ginny do not argue, do not work through their differences. Tonks explicitly states that she "does not care" about the obstacle that Remus tries to put in her way to stop their relationship, and also states that Fleur "does not care" about Bill's handicap. But Ginny asks Harry "What if I don't care?" (In fact, this is the very next time that the word "care" is used is a verb in the text.) When Harry refuses to engage with her in the way that Remus engaged with Tonks, she drops it. And so on, and on, and on.

So the way in which meaningful relationships have been defined by J.K. Rowling in this narrative preclude Postulation #7 from becoming… well, Book #7.

Of course, we can’t ever rule out the possibility that J.K. Rowling will be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Zoltar, who force her to write this kind of H/G in the last book as part of their evil plot to take over the universe. That’s why #7 is on the list at all.

6.) H/G becomes eternal true love in Book 7 without ever really dealing with its exact nature in HBP. This has most of the problems of #7. It’s more likely to happen than the previous example, but this is only because there are degrees of everything in life, as true-crime author Vincent Bugliosi tells us.

5.) It’s revealed that H/G in HBP was not genuine or good, but Harry and Ginny find each other on a deeper level and bond in Book 7.

4.) Ditto, but the bonding happens in the epilogue.

#’s 4 and 5 aren’t seen very much at all. Actually, apart from my own essays, I’ve never seen them presented as possibilities after HBP.

Arguments about H/G before HBP could be quite different, such as Red Monster’s very well-known essay. There was a lot to admire about it. She did a good job of outlining Ginny’s obsession with Harry, although the arguments had a tendency to fall apart logically when they came to Harry’s feelings about Ginny. We discussed her essay, and I think she was surprised at just how much of it I actually did agree with. The main problem was that it (and essays like it) postulated a certain way in which the H/G relationship would develop: Harry and Ginny would become friends, and slowly, they would come to understand their emotional connection, which would be a genuine one. Exactly the opposite happened in HBP. So the older arguments have been discarded, which is too bad, because they represented the only realistic chance that H/G has in Book 7.

Now, I truly hate H/G on so many levels that we could be here all day if I tried to explain them all. I can’t stand the lack of logic and careless disregard for the rules of empirical reasoning that are almost always found in the arguments supporting H/G after HBP. I don’t like all the sloppy thinking that surrounds H/G. Also, to be perfectly honest, H/G has become a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus for me. (Remember how Pavlov rang those bells just as the dogs were being fed? They started to drool when they heard the bells, even when there wasn’t any food around. The bells were a conditioned stimulus.) Just reading about it makes me feel kind of ill. I will always associate it with the threats and online stalking, even though they were the work of a few disturbed individuals, and most H/G supporters would never do anything as crazy and stupid as that. So, the point is that I just despise H/G.

But as much as I hate H/G, I will play devil’s advocate and say that nothing in the text precludes it coming to pass in Book 7 under the specific circumstances of #4 and #5. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think it will happen. However, I am not interested in Teh Shippy Arguments of Shippiness, only in logic and empirical evidence. And that’s what the empirical evidence says: it’s not impossible if it happened in this way. And that’s how you know that you can trust what I say about other things: I don’t twist the facts around into more appealing shapes because I don’t like where they logically might lead.

3.) CLPT is true in, essentially, every detail. It’s a very important part of the plot, as outlined in Creamtea’s essay.

2.) Love potions were meant thematically as metaphor, as explained in the first essay in this series. The plot aspect is basically the same, although not in its specific details. Harry was not literally dosed with actual love potions, but his relationship with Ginny was actually not significantly different than if he had been.

#2 would explain why love potions have such a looming presence in HBP, and why, in fact, they appeared several times in the series before HBP. It would explain why we saw them once in the past (Tom/Merope) but seven times in the present. It also would explain all the mentions of the “placebo effect” in HBP, which are otherwise pretty strange. Yet it’s also more palatable to a lot of people, because it doesn’t require believing that Harry actually was given an LP at any point.

But why do #2 and #3 occupy the positions that they do? Why aren’t they switched? Why isn’t #3 actually #1? I presented the CLPT theory and had input into it, after all. So why aren’t I championing it as the only possibility?

The answer’s pretty simple: because there’s no way to predict exactly what J.K. Rowling is going to do. I don’t think that anyone could possibly make a prediction that was correct in every detail. We’ll always be surprised by something in her writing. For that reason, the idea that Creamtea and/or I got every single last thing right is not the most likely thing in the world. I won’t be surprised if we both got some things wrong. However, I don’t think that us CLPT folks are going to be as surprised as many others when Book 7 comes out! ;)

So now let’s move on to…

(drum roll)

1.) Love potions were literally involved in some way in the present tense of HBP, but not exactly in the way that Creamtea or I thought they were. We were wrong in minor points, but right in major ones. The plot aspect is basically the same.

This, I think, is the most likely scenario of all. There are too many little details that simply aren’t explained any other way than by the idea that someone, somehow, at some point in time actually gave Harry love potions during his sixth year. They range from the strange inclusion of Hermione’s using a Confundus charm on Cormac McLaggen and never admitting that what she did was wrong, to Harry’s weird behavior after the Quidditch head injury, to Fred and George’s jokes, to all the page space spent on Harry’s unusual ability to resist the Imperius curse, to Fleur, to… well, you get the point.


Y’all might have noticed that none of this addresses whether Harry could end up with Luna, or Parvati, or Hedwig, or the giant squid. From the information we’ve been given in canon, I don’t’ think we can know who he might end up with—if anyone. I still don’t think that Harry is going to get a ship, and if he does, I honestly believe it’ll be in the epilogue and not in the main narrative at all. I wouldn’t be astonished to see him paired with Luna in a ten-years-later epilogue, although I’m not sure how likely it really is, either.

Also, we don’t really know what’s going to happen with Ginny as a character. I have a rather unformed feeling that she will be important, but that it will be in her own right. She’ll take action on her own; she won’t need to be joined to Harry at the hip, with her only possible importance as Teh Squishy Girlfriend of Doom. I think that’s the best way to interpret JKR’s continuing highly ambiguous comments about H/G, juxtaposed with her glowing comments about Ginny.

But when you get right down to it, nobody knows what’s going to happen. Except JKR, So wait, and find out… and in the meantime, read lots of D/G fanfic!!

~end~

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