The Secret Doctrine of ‘The Secret Garden’

This is the continuation and significant expansion of a previous post on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and its possible influence on Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which post can be read here.

After a hurried re-reading of Garden I felt obliged to do considering of the fun conversation initiated by Josh Harvey, here are my first thoughts. I think we can see significant correspondences amoung and a chasm separating Burnett’s classic about rejuvenation in an English Garden and the Hogwarts adventures. I will list the match-ups here, take a stab at interpreting Garden at the allegorical level beyond noting the Theosophy (by which I mean Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society), Spiritualism, and Christian Science references, and try to explain the most critical similarity and difference within the two novels in intention and execution. I was surprised at the paucity of thoughtful commentary about Garden online, in itself and in connection with Harry Potter; I trust any of you that are more familiar with the children’s literature field will jump in with more informed reflections on these subjects than I can offer here on the fly.

Correspondences amoung Secret Garden and Harry Potter

(Thanks to Josh Harvey for pointing out these correspondences in his Christmas letter.)

1. all through both novels, repeatedly and from nearly every character, the eyes of the lead character are said to resemble the eyes of that young man’s late mother. Colin Craven’s eyes are grey like the mother who died in a fall from a tree in her walled rose garden; Harry Potter’s are green as were his mother’s. She died to save him from Lord Voldemort. Colin’s mother’s name was Lillias; Harry’s mum was Lily.

2. Both adventures are largely the story of two young boys and a little girl. Garden takes place in a singled-out year, early spring to late summer, and involves three children 10-12 years old: a wealthy, spoiled, and sickly young man, a materially poor man-child of the moors, and a cousin of the semi-invalid who is an orphan just home from India. The Potter adventures start when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are 11 years old and continue for the next eight years (with an Epilogue snapshot of their later lives).

3. The poor boy’s mother, the matriarch of a significant clan, in both books adopts the motherless lead character from afar. In Garden, Susan Sowerby is the mother of 12 children and all but penniless but she is known for his wisdom and directs the upbringing of children at Misselthwaite Manor by direct conversation with the Lord of the Manor, through her daughter, and with the help of a school friend. Colin and Mary love her sight unseen and Colin asks her to be his mother on his first meeting her (Chapter 26, “It’s Mother!”). Mrs. Weasley is Harry’s de facto wizarding world mom and becomes his mother-in-law at story’s end. The Weasleys are always short of funds, whether they are a small family compared to the Sowerbys.

4. Colin and Harry both own mansions that are, in Colin’s word, “queer,” and both feature the painting of a mother behind a curtain that is disturbing to the son. Colin and Mary repeatedly describe the Manor as a “queer place” and Colin has covered the picture of his mother’s smiling face considering “sometimes I don’t like to see her looking at me. She smiles too much when I am ill and miserable. Besides, she is mine and I don’t want everyone to see her” (Chapter 13, “I am Colin”). In Chapter 25, The Curtain, he pulls back the curtain in the moonlight and leaves the painting for all to see; “I want to see her laughing like that all the instance. I think she must have been a sort of Magic person perhaps.” The House of Black features prominently in Phoenix and Hallows, it is certainly an odd place, and the painting of Sirius’ mother in the entry hall is kept behind moth-eaten velvet curtains. She is definitely “a sort of Magic person,” the worst sort.

5. The story is about the recovered physical, mental, and spiritual integrity of the rich boy. Though we do not meet Colin Craven until Chapter 13 of Garden, his rebirth is the heart and thrust of the book. Harry Potter is left on the door step of his maternal Muggle Aunt and Uncle and the novels are the record of his preparation to do battle with the dark wizard who killed his birth parents, a battle that is as much interior as exterior preparation. Both boys’ relationships with their two friends are the constant supports they need to become whole again.

6. Magic is what most readers will think of first, I think, whether asked to describe Garden or Potter in one word. In Burnett’s book, ‘Magic,’ nearly always capitalized, is the life force of the moors and garden that revive Mary and Colin and of which Dickon is something of an incantation, that Colin makes the subject of his scientific experiments, Mary uses through positive thinking, and Mother Sowerby explains is the same reality as the God of the Doxology, the ‘Big Good Thing,” and the ‘Joy Maker.’ In Harry Potter, magic is an inborn ability through which a witch or wizard is able, through the focus of a wand with logos-core, to co-create with the fabric of reality through magical speech (usually Latin spells).

And there are smaller touches that resonate as possible influences. Certainly the assonance of ‘Colin Craven’ and ‘Colin Creavy’ shouts ‘hat tip’ from Rowling to Burnett, whether the connection amidst the characters is not obvious (Harry finds Colin’s adoration a little hard to take but we are all touched when we learn the little guy, the youngest member of Dumbledore’s Army (?), died in the Battle of Hogwarts).

The action of Garden is not confined to but is focused on the walled rose garden on the Manor Grounds in which Lillias Craven died when the tree branch she was sitting on broke (Colin was born prematurely consequent to that fall). The father locks the garden, buries the key, and forbids any of the servants to enter or work in that space. After ten years, the ivy has so covered the walls that no one knows where the door to the garden is. A little bird shows Mary the key and the door and she, Dickon, and Colin work to return the garden to its former glory (while retaining a bit of its wildness). The Harry Potter “secret garden,” which is anything but a place of beauty and goodness, is Riddle’s Chamber of Secrets in the book of the same title. A young girl died the last day the Chamber was opened, the entrance has been lost, the key is discovered by the children, and a magical bird is responsible for their ability to construct passage.

I’d plus mention the snakes near the beginning of both books. From Garden, Chapter 1, ‘There is No One Left,’ when 10 year old Mary Lennox finds herself alone in an Indian colonial mansion wiped out by cholera:

But no one came, and as she lay waiting the house seemed to grow more and more silent. She heard something rustling on the matting and when she looked down she saw a little snake gliding along and watching her with eyes like jewels. She was not frightened, considering he was a harmless little thing who would not hurt her and he seemed in a rush to get out of the room. He slipped under the door as she watched him.

“How queer and quiet it is,” she said. “It sounds as whether there were no one in the bungalow but me and the snake.”

Note the stillness and the ‘No One’ of chapter title and presence. The ‘No One’ of the first chapter title probably makes Harry Potter readers remember the third chapter of Philosopher’s Stone, ‘The Letters from No One,’ and the harm-less snake looking Mary in the eye in its rush to escape reminds us, I think, of Harry’s come across with the Brazilian boa constrictor in Stone’s ‘The Vanishing Glass.’

The Secret Doctrine of The Secret Garden

Right up front, I think Madeleine L’Engle was having a poor day when she wrote “Mary’s journey into love is, in fact, her journey into Christ, though that is never said, and does not need to be said.” The Secret Garden is not a Christian story; whether anything, it is an anti-Christian allegory or a New Thought re-writing of the core Christian metanarrative, the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.

You have to be careful when looking amidst the lines not to jump to allegorical or satirical points considering it seems much of Burnett’s work was based on autobiographical experience. She was born in a wealthy Manchester family which the American Civil War all but wiped out; the Hodgsons moved to a cabin outside of Nashville, TN, believe it or not, and survived largely on Frances’ ability to write. The Mary Lennox child in Garden and her experiences of loss and re-location across hemisphere may be more memories than metaphor. The Garden of the story is nearly certainly the walled garden on the grounds of Great Maytham House, where she wrote the book:

The walled garden of provided the inspiration for one of the most famous of all books for children, The Secret Garden. Its author, Frances Hodgson Burnett, lived at Great Maytham Hall from 1898 to 1907, where she found the old walled garden dating from 1721 sadly overgrown and neglected. Aided by a robin, Burnett discovered the door hidden amongst the ivy, and began the restoration of the garden, which she planted with hundreds of roses. She set up a table and chair in the gazebo, and dressed always in a white dress and large hat, she wrote a number of books in the peace and tranquility of her scented secret garden.

Before trying to find the mystagogical referent in the magical Robin of Secret Garden, it helps to know Burnett knew a like robin and it helped her into her walled garden as Mary Lennox is helped by the story’s brilliant bird.

Having said that, and admitting that I have not been able to find a decent essay online exploring Burnett’s esoteric beliefs or a trot like The Annotated Magic Garden (which book, I have to imagine, discusses and perhaps rebuffs what I am about to say), the book is obviously something of a tract for Ms. Burnett’s grab bag of beliefs. Even the Spark Notes for Garden jump right into her being a Theosophist, practicing Christian Scientist, and Spiritualist which beliefs are the meaning of the story:

In The Secret Garden, the events of Mary Lennox’s early childhood mirror those of Burnett’s own. Both Mary and Burnett experienced the death of their parents followed by a reversal of fortune, as well as a great sense of dislocation upon being taken from the country of their birth to one utterly foreign to them. The novel is not merely autobiographical. It was written while Burnett was very much under the influence of the ideas of the New Thought, theosophy, and Christian Science movements, which were enjoying their greatest popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. Burnett’s idiosyncratic fusion of these philosophies held that the Christian god was a kind of unified mind or spirit, with whom any person might commune; that spirit was held to be present everywhere, and particularly in nature. Proponents of the New Thought plus extolled the potential of positive thinking (the fervent contemplation of what one hopes will happen), and held it to be a design of communion with the divine spirit. One could ostensibly cure oneself of illness through that kind of magical thinking, or change the character of one’s fortunes. Such ideas had a profound influence upon the writing of The Secret Garden—particularly as the inspiration for what Colin and Mary shout “Magic.”

There are two academic biographies of Hodgson Burnett that are available and I am confident each explores at length her studies of Christian Science with Mary Baker Eddy, Theosophy with Madame Blavatsky, and positive thinking with the mind-control gurus of New Thought, all as influences on her world view and writing. From the little I know of these movements (and to boost you to read the more authoritative treatments available at your local university library), here are the ‘jump off the page’ connections I caught:

* Disdain for doctors and allopathic medicine: Colin’s doctor is a relative who stands to inherit the Manor whether he dies. His motivations, consequently, are questionable from the start — and he always recommends medicine, rest, and palliatives, as well as the patient’s metal focus on his weakness and infirmities. that is a Christian Science cartoon of MDs.

* The capability of Good Thought and poor Thought The Wikipedia editorial on ‘New Thought’ lists these three elements as “chief tenets” of that movement:

* Divinely attuned thought is a positive force for good.
* All disease is mental in origin.
* Right thinking has a healing effect.

We recognize that as positive thinking mantras — and Secret Garden is full of it. Mary invokes “yes, he can, he can do it, etc” to work the Magic in Colin’s favor when he first tries to walk. Frances Burnett pulls out all the stops at the opening of Chapter 27, ‘In the Garden,’ her reveal-all-cards final chapter:

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In that new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first citizens refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, thereupon they start to hope it can be done, soon after they see it can be done–thereupon it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things public began to find out in the last century was that thoughts–just mere thoughts–are as effective as electric batteries–as
good for one as sunlight is, or as poor for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a poor one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. whether you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get by it as towering as you live.

So expanded as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of citizens and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push her about for her own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and additionally with a moor boy and his “creatures,” there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired.

Not just Mary — every major character’s problems, strengths, and transformations are due to positive thinking in Burnett’s book. As Dickon assures Colin at the beginning of his “scientific experiment” in New Thought, thought is to reality as the sun is to seeds. “It’ll work the same as th’ seeds do when th’ sun shines on ‘em” (Chapter 24, ‘Magic’).

Plenty of air, contact with the vital energy of the earth, and good thoughts are the cure for every mental ailment (and all physical ailments are mental ailments, ultimately).

* Spiritual Science Colin is convinced he is being cured by the Magic. He wants, consequently, to be a scientist who reveals the properties of magic. that is straight out of the Theosophy and Anthroposophy sales pitch to a skeptical public enamored of the physical sciences and engineering as sacred subjects. “We’re not talking superstitious, subjective nonsense; that is science we’re doing.”

From Chapter 23, ‘Magic:’

“I am going to try a scientific experiment,” explained the Rajah. “When I grow up I am going to compose great scientific discoveries and I am going to start now with that experiment.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” said Ben Weatherstaff promptly, though that was the first instance he had heard of great scientific discoveries.

It was the first day Mary had heard of them, either, but even at that stage she had begun to realize that, queer as he was, Colin had read about a great many singular things and was somehow a very convincing
sort of boy. When he held up his head and fixed his strange eyes on you it seemed as whether you believed him nearly in spite of yourself though he was only ten years old–going on eleven. At that moment he was
particularly convincing considering he suddenly felt the fascination of actually making a sort of speech like a grown-up person.

“The great scientific discoveries I am going to manufacture,” he went on, “will be about Magic. Magic is a great thing and scarcely any one knows anything about it except a few humans in old books–and Mary a little, considering she was born in India where there are fakirs. I believe Dickon knows some Magic, but perhaps he doesn’t know he knows it. He charms animals and citizens. I would never have let him come to see me whether he had not been an animal charmer–which is a boy charmer, too, considering a boy is an animal. I am certain there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense decent to get hold of it and prepare it do things for us–like electricity and horses and steam.”

Mary Baker Eddy, founder of “The First Church of Christ, Scientist,” the “Mother Church,” couldn’t have put it better.

* The Emphasis on Stillness and Quiet: One of Madame Blavatsky’s “translated” books (I think we’d say “channelled”) is called The Voice of the Silence. It proposes that everything creative and fundamental comes forth from the quiet, the stillness, or the calm.

Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.

Before the Soul can invent out, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly.

Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united just as the profile to which the clay is modelled, is first united with the potter’s mind.

For soon after the soul will produce out, and will remember.

And soon after to the inner ear will speak –

THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE

Throughout Garden, sensitivity to the Magic is cued to inner calmness, experience of the ‘quiet,’ and silence that characters build out.

* The ability of Earth and Nature The earth is alive and “man and earth are not two.” Vitality is communion with the vital spirits of earth and wild creatures, the Oversoul animating the natural world. The secret garden’s healing ability is, largely, just gardening.

From Chapter 22, ‘When the Sun Went Down’

“Are you making Magic?” [Colin] asked sharply.

Dickon’s curly mouth spread in a cheerful grin.

“Tha’s doin’ Magic thysel’,” he said. “It’s same Magic as made these ‘ere work out o’ th’ earth,” and he touched with his thick boot a clump of crocuses in the grass. Colin looked down at them.

“Aye,” he said slowly, “there couldna’ be bigger Magic than that there–there couldna’ be.”

* World a Dream, folks are Ghosts and Shades When Colin and Mary meet in the middle of the night, they both think the other is a ghost or a dream. Several

characters entering the garden exclaim that it is like entering a dream (all of them “turn round, and round, and round” but more on that in a minute). Theosophy is largely a poor man’s (a very poor man’s) Hinduism; that dream world ‘reality’ is the YA-Theosophist version of Hindu maya.

* Religions All Same in Essence, Different Only on Surface The Theosophical Society, like the other groups in the so called Theosophical Enlightenment of the 19th century, believed they had the essence or kernel of metaphysical truth, of which nuts religions were only the external shells or forms. Susan Sowerby, Dickon’s mother. explains that esoteric, universalist truth to Colin after he explains his excitement in singing the Anglican Doxology and realizing it was about the same reality as his Magic. From Chapter 26, “It’s Mother!:”

“Do you believe in Magic?” asked Colin after he had explained about Indian fakirs. “I do hope you do.”

“That I do, lad,” she answered. “I never knowed it by that name but what does th’ name matter? I warrant they signal it a different name i’ France an’ a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters whether us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million–worlds like us. Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full
of it–an’ signal it what tha’ likes. Tha’ wert singin’ to it when I come into th’ garden.”

“I felt so joyful,” said Colin, opening his beautiful strange eyes at her. “Suddenly I felt how different I was–how strong my arms and legs were, you know–and how I could dig and stand–and I jumped up and
wanted to shout out something to anything that would listen.”

“Th’ Magic listened when tha’ sung th’ Doxology. It would ha’ listened to anything tha’d sung. It was th’ joy that mattered. Eh! lad, lad–what’s names to th’ Joy Maker,” and she gave his shoulders a quick soft pat again.

The Yorkshire mother isn’t going to say “they use the same words in the various religions,” hence her reference to countries she may have heard of (France, Germany). The universalism, though, is patent.

And who is that mother of 12 with such a keen understanding of Magic? An Indian fakir in drag?

* The Magic of ‘Mother,’ Circles, and Grey Eyes

“I saw half-sitting, half-reclining on the carpetless floor, a scantily clad, and, as I thereupon thought, a very unprepossessing woman who was introduced as Madame Blavatsky. She was stout, though not as unwieldly as she subsequently became… her eyes were magnetic and peculiar, with a strange fascination in their blue-grey depths, but were in a sense beautiful.”

[Hannah Shephard Wolfe, newspaper reporter, on first meeting Madame Blavatsky (1874), quoted in The Lady with the Magic Eyes: Madame Blavatsky, Medium and Magician, John Symonds, Kessinger Publishing, 2006, p. 34]

Colin’s mother’s big grey eyes, which Colin has as well, are story referents to Madame Blavatsky’s most characteristic facial feature. Her “magic eyes” were said to penetrate every hidden mental secret and hypnotize everyone present; photographs of her are memorable, even haunting, only considering of the greay eyes.

Perhaps the most famous part of Garden is when Colin realizes that, not only is he is not on the verge of the death, but that “I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!” Burnett soon after writes:

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and next one is quite certain one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn
dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost
makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun–which has been happening every for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One
knows it thereupon for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying
slowly again and again something one cannot quite take in, however much one tries. thereupon sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one certain; and
sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one’s eyes. (Chapter 21, Ben Weatherstaff, emphasis added)

I propose for your consideration that the eyes of Lilias and Colin Craven and the whole person of mysterious Susan Sowerby, mother of 12 and fount of wisdom, are all story-pointers to Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Mother Church, and Anne Besant, Blavatsky’s successor of sorts and champion of India as the ‘Mother of the World,’ are other possibilities but the eyes and three other points form me think we have a devotee making tribute here to her guru Blavatsky.

(1) The 12 children: Madame Blavatsky’s “Inner Circle” was made up of her 12 disciples.

(2) The Circles: As mentioned, every who comes into the secret garden looks “round and around and around” in wonder. Colin’s “prayer meetings” and scientific experiment, too, are held in what Burnett calls “a mystic circle:”

It all seemed most majestic and mysterious when they sat down in their circle. Ben Weatherstaff felt as whether he had somehow been led into appearing at a prayer-meeting. Ordinarily he was very fixed in being
what he called “agen’ prayer-meetin’s” but that being the Rajah’s affair he did not resent it and was indeed inclined to be gratified at being called upon to assist. Mistress Mary felt solemnly enraptured. Dickon held his rabbit in his arm, and perhaps he made some charmer’s signal no one heard, for when he sat down, cross-legged like the rest, the crow, the fox, the squirrels and the lamb slowly drew near and made part of the circle, settling each into a place of rest as whether of their own desire.

“The ‘creatures’ have come,” said Colin gravely. “They want to help us.”

Colin really looked quite beautiful, Mary thought. He held his head high as whether he felt like a sort of priest and his strange eyes had a wonderful look in them. The light shone on him through the tree canopy.

Theosophy study groups are called “circles,” Blavatsky had a personal “inner” and “outer” circle of disciples, and the faux Hindu doctrines she espoused in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine were based on cyclical theories of date and lives (samsara, etc).

(3) The role of the Mother in Secret Garden: Before meeting her, Mary Lennox and Colin Craven are devoted to Mother Sowerby, and, on meeting her, as noted, Colin asks the poor tenant woman speaking in broad Yorkshire accent to be his mother. Incredibly, from story’s beginning, she provides fundamental tools for their well-being (a jump rope!) and even food, though her twelve children go to bed hungry most nights. The last three chapters feature the mother’s image unveiled and embraced (’The Curtain’), the mother herself revealed after the secret gardeners sing the traditional Anglican Doxology (”It’s Mother!”), and the reunion of Father and Son — as arranged and prompted by the mother’s letter (’In the Garden’). As noted above, Susan Sowerby pulls the strings on the Lord of the Manor and two of the workers in his home personally. The Mother, both dead Lillias and lively Susan Sowerby, are the Magic of the garden.

Which brings me to why that is a New Thought or Theosophist story rather than a Christian one: the garden and what happens there. Burnett has written a counter-story to the traditional understanding of Man’s fall in the Garden of Eden and re-written it with a loving Mother ending rather than the Calvinist metanarrative of depraved and suffering humanity under a punishing, negligent Father.

The story begins in the Secret Garden, a rose garden for newlyweds Archibald and Lillias Craven. She falls from a tree branch seat and dies. The son she was carrying was born prematurely, and, though he doesn’t die, death is his shadow. The father abandons him and the son suffers considering he feels his father doesn’t love him.

It’s not an particularly opaque allegory considering it conforms in large part to the Genesis detail of Adam and Eve. The woman falls in the Garden and man is born into the world separated from the heavenly father and forbidden entry into the Garden. The key to the garden is lost and man has no relationship with God the Father. Man is ‘craven,’ i.e., “defeated, vanquished.” I’d propose, too, that Colin’s perversity and selfishness and imperiousness in being craven points to the Calvinist doctrine of the ‘total depravity’ of fallen man.

The Christian version of the story, be it the New testomony, a medieval mystery or morality play, or redemption story a la Pilgrim’s Progress, Rocky, or Harry Potter, now requires a death to self, acceptance of a higher calling, and purification before life-saving trial. But Burnett doesn’t go that way. She gives a New Age version of a Hindu ending as Eddy or Blavatsky might have written it.

A female doppelganger is introduced, that is, a little girl cousin from India (where else?), who is Colin’s equal in being selfish and spoiled, whether she is very receptive to life and to instruction on the Moor, from servants and a robin. She and Colin become the alchemical “quarreling couple,” have a grand fight in the middle of the night, and Colin is set on the right path. What path is that?

The path of Dickon, wood nymph, earth fairy, magical creature — and Son of the Mother, Blavatsky, rather than a redeeming Son of the Heavenly Father. Adopted by the Theosophists a la Krishnamurti, Colin sets out to teach the scientific truths of Magic to the world so everyone can be well and “live forever and ever and ever.” How? Think good thoughts which will harmonize with the God-consciousness that is the only reality.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the The Secret Doctrine of Madame Blavatsky laid by the Garden of Eden metanarrative. The potential of the secret the children all think is so fundamental is that the esoteric truth of New Thought has to be kept from the folks of the Manor who lie about Colin Craven (fallen man) and say he cannot be healed without a miracle or savior considering he was born only for suffering and death. Not until the father sees and escorts the risen man to the father’s house can the house servants believe. The feminine note from the East — Blavatsky’s ‘essence of Hinduism’ delivered Mary Lennox from India — is the path of dharma and moksa rather than sacrifice and love.

Where is the serpent in that story? He is a harmless creature in India, remember? Just a poor thought perhaps, that leaves the house whether you are not afraid of him. It is the quality of your thinking alone that makes you either craven or a Magic scientist in the ecstasy of knowing the “Big Good Thing” and the “Joy Maker.” Throw off those fallen-man-metanarrative mind-chains and be free!

Similarity and Contrast with Harry Potter

The great similarity amidst Burnett’s rewrite of the Garden metanarrative with Harry Potter, of course, is the Logos foundation of reality that is the core of Wizarding World magic. Dumbledore’s final comment to Harry at King’s Cross, as I explain in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, implicitly points to reality being in your head, which, with the description of Harry’s palatial, noetic ‘King’s Cross’ and his identity with the Invisibility Cloak as the Seeing Eye/I, gives us Coleridgean (and patristic) logos epistemology.

That is not a one-to-one match-up with New Thought, Christian Science, or Theosophy — not by a expanded shot — but both are in radical opposition to empiricist epistemology and materialism of Burnett’s date and our own (and, I think, the reason most society like the story). After noting that, with perhaps, the corresponding emphasis (explicit in Harry, implicit in Garden) on the importance of right choosing, and the surface similarities mentioned at the start, we can jump into the differences.

The contrast in the use of the “quarreling couple” and alchemical subject or ‘Stone’ is interesting. Ron and Hermione, Sulphur and Quicksilver respectively, work as supports and catalysts to Harry’s transformation from lead to gold. He is the spiritual heart of the trio and its natural leader but Harry is the one experiencing the remarkable changes. In Garden, Dickon is a personality-free sage and wonder worker. Nice sufficient guy, don’t get me wrong, but as Son of the Mother, his job is to be golden and rush along the transformation of Colin and Mary, the selfish, spoiled nasties of the story, not take the lead or be anything but perfect Magic incarnation.

Colin and Harry, as the subjects undergoing change, too, are different in urgent ways. Yes, they both have their dead mother Lily’s eyes. Yes, they have an adventure with a best boy and best girl friend. Yes, their stories are both about defeating death.

And in that last, we see the chasm open up amoung the stories. Colin defeats death — “I am well! I will live forever and ever and ever!” — by communing with the Magic and thinking positively (not to mention deep breathing, daily gardening, muscle building exercises [!], and plenty of fresh milk, eggs, and potatoes). Death, frankly, is a pushover. Once the garden story is understood correctly, the Tree that brought death to the garden and made Colin craven, will be “the most beautiful of all:”

“That’s a very old tree by there, isn’t it?” he said. Dickon looked across the grass at the tree and Mary looked and there was a brief moment of stillness.

“Yes,” answered Dickon, after it, and his low voice had a very gentle sound.

Mary gazed at the tree and thought.

“The branches are quite gray and there’s not a individual leaf anywhere,” Colin went on. “It’s quite dead, isn’t it?”

“Aye,” admitted Dickon. “But them roses as has climbed all by it will near hide every bit o’ th’ dead wood when they’re full o’ leaves an’ flowers. It won’t look dead soon after. It’ll be th’ prettiest of all.”

Mary still gazed at the tree and thought.

“It looks as whether a big branch had been broken off,” said Colin. “I wonder how it was done.”

“It’s been done many a year,” answered Dickon. “Eh!” with a sudden relieved start and laying his hand on Colin. “Look at that robin! There he is! He’s been foragin’ for his mate.”

Colin was nearly too late but he just caught sight of him, the flash of red-breasted bird with something in his beak. He darted through the greenness and into the close-grown corner and was out of sight. Colin
leaned back on his cushion again, laughing a little. “He’s taking her tea to her. Perhaps it’s five o’clock. I think I’d like some tea myself.”

And so they were safe.

“It was Magic which sent the robin,” said Mary secretly to Dickon afterward. “I know it was Magic.” For both she and Dickon had been afraid Colin might ask something about the tree whose branch had broken
off ten years ago and they had talked it by together and Dickon had stood and rubbed his head in a troubled way.

“We mun look as whether it wasn’t no different from th’ other trees,” he had said. “We couldn’t never tell him how it broke, poor lad. whether he says anything about it we mun–we mun try to look cheerful.”

“Aye, that we mun,” had answered Mary.

But she had not felt as whether she looked cheerful when she gazed at the tree. She wondered and wondered in those few moments whether there was any reality in that other thing Dickon had said. He had gone on rubbing
his rust-red hair in a puzzled way, but a nice comforted look had begun to grow in his blue eyes.

“Mrs. Craven was a very lovely young lady,” he had gone on rather hesitatingly. “An’ mother she thinks perhaps she’s about Misselthwaite many a duration lookin’ after Mester Colin, same as all mothers do when they’re took out o’ th’ world. They have to come back, tha’ sees. Happen she’s been in the garden an’ happen it was her set us to work, an’ told us to bring him here.” (Chapter 21, ‘Ben Weatherstaff’)

Translated back into the garden allegory/metanarrative, that vignette teaches us that man (Colin) must be kept from the story of the Tree of Knowledge and death’s entry into the world (mom’s death, his birth). His Mother brought him back to the garden so we can bypass that punitive Father bit and feel the Magic making us well, defeating death. The roses, symbols of esoteric knowledge (think ‘Rosicrucians‘), will convert the death bearing Tree of Knowledge until it becomes the most beautiful. Just distract the craven guy until the roses can do their work for Mother-God.

Harry Potter’s victory by death is through love and sacrifice. Identifying himself with the unity of existence rather than ego concerns and persona, he dies to save his friends and destroy the ‘old man’ Voldemort soul fragment within him. He is empowered to defeat his external foe, even rise from a seeming physical death, considering of that interior spiritual victory of character. Harry’s triumph by death is in fearing doing the wrong thing more than his own demise. That choice makes him Master of Death.

Forgive me for thinking the Potter novels a much more satisfying, challenging, and edifying reading experience. I finished Secret Garden last night, and, realizing the contra-Christian moral the brilliant writer was trying to communicate, just felt sad. I guess I know too many wonderful “spiritual, not religious” folks who are on a metaphorical treadmill in their basements rather than an authentic Way or Path, folks who have embraced the New Thought info. Colin’s victory, won without significant challenge or cost (and leaving him quite a few ideas and courtesies short of a human personality), seems vaporous, artificial, even sad. Am I supposed to feel inspired to cast out my poor thoughts and embrace only good thoughts to harness the Magic? whether so, the story fails.

Colin’s eyes are the “magic eyes” of Madame Blavatsky. Our looking into Harry’s eyes is the salutary and sacramental vision Dante has seeing the Griffin in Beatrice’s eyes; it is a purifying and self-transcending moment. I do think Ms. Rowling was influenced by the esoteric aspects of Secret Garden and that she tips her hat to the story elements she borrowed through touches like the escaping snake, ‘Colin Creavy,’ and giving Harry’s mum the name ‘Lily.’ The width, breadth, and depth of her story’s meaning and reader experience are so much greater, though, that I don’t think the debt is as profound as I first thought on reading Josh’s letter.

I crave (not craven, please) your comments and corrections. What fun to find a popular story with a spiritual note that is Christian only in trying to exact the Christian metanarrative with a New Thought epistemology and soteriology! I really do look forward to reading what you think — particularly the Secret Garden fans who know much more than I do after my hurried reading yesterday. Thanks in advance for any thoughts you choose to share.