*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!!
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