The Astrological Hidden Key to Harry Potter?

I have been neglecting my Harry Potter studies of late with only occasional posts here, for which I hope you will forgive me. Except for talks with my friends the Potter Pundits — James Thomas and Travis Prinzi — for Leaky Cauldron’s Potter Cast, the usual correspondence with readers, and weekly trips to the Hog’s Head Tavern for a Taddy Porter, I’ve been neck deep in Twilight work (talks and interviews to get the word out about my new book, Spotlight) and reading books recommended to me by friends here, most notably, Suzanne Collins’ The starvation Games. So, as you know whether you’ve been stopping by of late, there hasn’t been much going on at Hogwarts Professor.

I don’t usually post just to post but I do have one regret about my distraction from Potter matters. Last December I was sent an intriguing view that may join two of the more interesting qualities of the Hogwarts Saga, namely, the alchemical scaffolding and the chiastic structure of the story circle (a-b-c-d-c-b-a). The notion plus solves something of a mystery about the books: the astrological symbolism that I haven’t heard anyone assemble much sense of. Erin Sweeney, though, may have pulled it off. After too enlarged a day in my “to post” file, here is her theory after a short introduction about why she shared it with me:

Back in May, 2007, I reviewed an alchemy piece at The Leaky Cauldron’s online magazine, Scribbulus. It wasn’t very good and I wrote at some length here about the poverty of the scholarship involved. One of the editors at Scibbulous, who writes under the name ‘Caltheous,’ heard my alchemy talk at Prophecy 2007 the month after Deathly Hallows was published and wrote to me to thank my for my post and talk on the subject of literary alchemy and to ask for book recommendations. In my response to that ask I explained the three schools of alchemy and why I thought that the traditionalist understanding of Titus Burckhardt was better than the Jungian and New Age camps (in short, considering it is more relevant to the subject of literary alchemy in general and in opening up Joanne Rowling’s books specifically).

Fast forward to LeakyCon in Boston last fall. I give a talk there on The Eyes of Deathly Hallows and actually get to meet the woman. She enjoyed the Eyes talk at LeakyCon and wrote to me about the metanarrative-bashing composition of the series, the mirror symbolism, and literary alchemy as it works with astrology. It turns out Ms. Sweeney had read Titus Burckhardt’s Alchemy and found an alchemical-astrological link embedded in the sequence of the novels, Stone to Hallows, that I missed.

Now, I cannot spill all her beans here considering she told me late last year that she was going to be writing that up for Scribbulus. But I have her permission to share the thesis she sent me in her letter, namely, that the seven Harry Potter novels follow the astrological sequence suggested in chapter 15 of Burckhardt’s Alchemy in which the correspondence of metals and planets is used to explain the seven step creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. Here is how she came up with the book-to-planet assignments she has:

In burkhardt’s book, he discusses the stages of lesser metals to gold as – lead (saturn), tin (jupiter), silver (moon), copper (venus), iron (mars), gold (the sun) and with mercury as our catalyst. Now, jo didn’t place her stories that way. Her stories are – saturn, jupiter, moon, mercury, sun, venus, mars – and that puzzled me. It starts out to seem as though she’s following the pattern with the first four, placing the catalyst smack in the middle does produce sense, but thereupon the pattern diverges.

The “lesser work” is the alchemical term used to describe the steps from saturn to jupiter to the moon and the “greater work” are the steps from venus to mars to the sun. Burkhardt: “The “lesser work” achieves the readiness or preparedness of the soul and the “greater work” the spiritual revelation.” Just one more refresher point of note – each of our spiritual parts is in two – soul and Spirit – in which the soul is passive, feminine, and formable and the Spirit is Divine, masculine and active. The point of Alchemy is to unify these parts – the Alchemical Wedding – and produce spiritual god within our selves.

While it appears that the lesser work is in order:

Philosopher’s Stone – Saturn – the start of the “opus” or work – Saturn is a ‘dying to the world’, a withdrawl “from the senses and turning inward” and a ‘mortification’ of earth – From Burkhardt on the first stage of the work, he speaks of the alchemist producing ash by calcining the base metal. He says: “By means of that ash […] he will be able to capture the volatile ’spirit’.” I find that similar to what happened to Voldemort when he was turned to ash and his spirit escaped.

Chamber of Secrets - Jupiter – In Lyndy Abraham’s Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery he speaks of the Basilisk as being the symbol of the Elixir of Life that can transmute base metals to Gold. Burkhardt says of Jupiter that the body “having been earth [in the stage of Saturn] now becomes water and air. that corresponds to sublimation.” He additionally writes: “Morienus says: ‘Whoever knows how to purify and bleach the soul, and allow her to rise upwards, guards the body well and has freed it from all darkness, blackness, and evil odour…’” If you think about Ginny as the symbol of “female soul” that corresponds to Harry’s “male Spirit” in the series the action that happened in Chamber is the passing under water in the girls bathroom down to the chamber where Harry guards Ginny’s white body and next uses the Elixir of LIfe (Basilisk tooth) to stab the book resulting in a removal of black liquid (ink) from her and return her soul to her body purified with the removal of Lord Voldemort’s attempted possession of her. They soon after fly through the air on the phoenix to escape the Chamber.

Prisoner of Azkaban – Moon – in that book we know the moon is a key symbol considering Lupin’s lycanthropy (little werewolf problem) prepare it an ever present aspect of the story.

Goblet of Fire – Mercury – recall that mercury is the messenger of the Gods – Burkhardt writes: “The interpretation of the sign of Mercury as the key to the whole work is confirmed by the role of the God Mercury or Hermes in the Orphic mysteries. The messenger of the gods accompanied the soul after its death – bodily or mystical – through all the realms of the world of shadows, to its final place of rest.”

Harry is quite the messenger in

that story (and not only Harry, in fact). The larger picture is him accompanying Cedric’s body, returning him to his family back at Hogwarts to be put to rest. But lesser acts of data carrying happened all through Goblet of Fire – the name in the goblet, the transference of Harry and Cedric by portkey to the cemetery, accompanying Ron and Fleur’s sister to the surface of the water, the retrieval of the knowledge in the egg, Ron’s data to Harry about the dragons, Harry’s letter to Cedric about the dragons, Cedric’s notice to Harry about the egg, Harry’s messages from his parents during the wand joining, and so forth. There are other examples as well.

After these four books the planetary pattern diverges. We would expect Venus next, thereupon Mars, and finally the sun. But instead:

Order of the Phoenix – Sun – the phoenix, Sirius is a star

Half Blood Prince – Venus – Love – that novel is the Potter book of romance – Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione find their partnerships in that book.

Deathly Hallows – Mars – War – The final war amoung the wizard sides is fought.

Assuming that I’m right with my above order for Jo’s novels and planets it is not in stages of the work as we’d expect whether we were performing alchemy in our home laboratory to produce gold. Burkhardt’s book does show that order, though, in the end of Alchemy’s chapter 15, ‘Stages of the Work,’ page 193. He shows how whether you set up the symbols in parallel they will be the following:

Mercury
Moon Sun
Jupiter Venus
Saturn Mars

And that matches Jo’s order – not the order you’d do the work as an alchemist following the steps from lead to gold – but it is viewed as an image like Burkhardt shows it [adding numbers to the parallel series]

4. Mercury
3. Moon 5. Sun
2. Jupiter 6. Venus
1. Saturn 7. Mars

then it shows the nice link amoung the books [side-by-side]: books 1 and book 7 (Saturn to Mars) , books 2 and 6 (Jupiter to Venus), books 3 and 5 (Moon and Sun). that correspondence is just as Burkhardt explains it. As in:

“From that it is clearly to be seen that for every active aspect there is a corresponding passive aspect. Saturn represents the passive “abasement’, Mars an active “descent”. The first sign expresses the extinction of the ego-bound soul, the second the victory of the Spirit.”

(Notice Philosopher’s Stone was all about Harry extinguishing his ego – not wanting the stone for himself – and how Deathly Hallows was all about the active victory of Harry’s Spirit (and soul) by Lord Voldemort’s. Where in Stone he didn’t have to do anything but be there and be good – in Hallows he had more work to do on his end – he had to actually fight).

“On the next level, Jupiter corresponds to a development of the soul’s receptivity, while Venus corresponds to the rising of the inward sun.”

(Now the two books Chamber of Secrets and Half Blood Prince have parallels in two key ways – the mysterious book present in each AND the love relationship with Ginny and Harry. Specific for passive / active – that’s the key – Ginny’s passive love for Harry was key in Chamber – receptive soul – and Harry’s active love for Ginny came out in Prince – inward sun.) It is further a symbol of the alchemical wedding in which Ginny’s soul is made pure in Chamber and Harry’s’ Sprit is united with her in Prince.

“The moon and the sun themselves embody the two poles in their pure state, and Mercury bears both essences within itself.”

(So, for Prisoner it was the moon considering of Lupin and for Phoenix it was the phoenix as a sun. Lupin and Sirius themselves are vital moon / sun symbols in each story considering Lupin is associated with the moon and Sirius with the star Sirius. I do think that the prophecy might be fundamental – an orb and all that.)

The actual role of Harry, as I was pondering, came clear. In the series itself Ginny would be moon and Harry Sun (soul and Spirit symbols) – OR you could take Harry’s inner moon and sun – as in his soul and his Spirit. In Prisoner he was getting his soul sucked out and in Phoenix his spirit was attacked by Lord Voldemort in the structure of attempted possession. You could see it as though Prisoner was about the defense of his passive soul and Phoenix was about the defense of who controls his actions as in his active spirit.

Well, I’m going to shoot that off to you now or it will be ages before you get it. Thank you so much for all the books you write on Harry Potter – they enrich my experience of the books enormously!

Erin Sweeney

If you didn’t get that all at once, there are a couple of reasons why.

• First, metal-planet correspondences are fairly involved and it’s not easy to keep the parallels straight (see C. S. Lewis’ Discarded Image or Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture for a refresher).
• Second, that was a just short note and she assumed rightly that I had Burckhardt’s book on the shelf and could read the whole chapter on ‘The Sequence of the Work’ and review the planet-metal correspondences to clarify the symbolist foundation traditional astrology and alchemy share.
• Third, she assumes I’m familiar abundant with Potter canon to follow her suggestion that Ms. Rowling followed Burckhardt’s concluding picture of the sequence to lay out her books in a ascending-descending parallel columns with Goblet as the turning point.

As I said, Ms. Sweeney is working on a longish essay for Scribbulus in which you’ll have all the assumptions and alchemical shorthand explained in depth. I include as much as I have to whet your appetite and get you thinking about alchemy in astrological terms — and to point out that that sequence of novels that Ms. Sweeney’s theory explains in light of the alchemical work has been the subject of discussion for some years and is all but accepted by Potter Pundits as demonstrated. (See MuggleMatters and Pastor Joe Thacker, as well as the discussion here of the Chiasm Theory way back in 2006 and 2007.)

We finally have a theoretical framework for an observed pattern — and it matches up with the alchemical scaffolding the author has said set the “magical parameters” of her writing.

That’s a “wow.”

Your comments and corrections are coveted, as always.