Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the November - December  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: O'Grady, John P. "The Weather Coming Off All Things." Quest  89.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER  2001): 207-211.

By John P. O'Grady

PERHAPS THE PAST IS INTERRED IN THE PRESENT, as some have maintained, and the world is its own enduring monument. Material objects thus possess an inner or spiritual life, just as human beings do, and these things have their own memories, fully capable of being transmitted or passed along to one open to such impressions. Nobody would deny something like this is the case with words, those veritable graveyards of meaning, wherein every until such a Lazarus waiting to be called forth. Why shouldn't the same be true of material objects? At least they observe a kind of etiquette, most of the time, and don't force themselves upon us like some drunk with a story down at the Jolly-O Tavern. Indeed, the things that compose our world are not so rude as to speak directly, nor so coy as to conceal vital knowledge, but instead they give signs. Just like the weather.

On the other hand, there are some people upon whom even the most trifling of objects will advance like an emotional thunderstorm. For instance, my old friend Amy Ursi, the New Jersey psychic. Just as some people can feel in their bones the approach of an oncoming storm, so she responds in her gut to the atmospheric conditions she says surround material objects. Each one is enveloped by a mysterious vapor of presence, the kind of thing said to come up around graves or in dreams when the beloved dead come back to visit. By her account, this strange mist is borne aloft from the multitude of things, as if by winds, to form clouds that circulate in broad patterns across the landscape of the human heart. Lest you take this as a mere figure of speech, I hasten to add that Amy has a stormy temperament. I tend to take her at her word.

Now when it comes to weather in the ordinary sense, meteorologists look at a wide range of phenomena, everything from the jet stream right down to the dust devil swirling across your supermarket parking lot. They use highly sensitive instruments to compile data on minute changes in temperature, air pressure, and humidity. All of this is fed into computers, digested by highly sophisticated programs, then squeezed out in new and presumably more useful forms. These tokens are then "read" by the meteorologists to provide a forecast for your morning commute. Such predictions, shrouded in the same glamorous computer graphics favored by sportscasters, more often than not prove unreliable, yet they somehow suffice to win our confidence. You could say that when it comes to our mental possessions, the wrong ideas are preferable to none.

My old friend Amy is a kind of meteorologist of the soul. Because she is self-taught in these matters, her style of talking about them is more colorful than what passes on the nightly news. She has no degree in atmospheric science nor does she employ any fancy computer modeling; her instruments of choice are astrology and numerology. For her, the air is filled with all manner of unseen angel, demon, and disembodied soul, which—at least by her reckoning—should come as no surprise, since the air itself is invisible yet nobody doubts it is there. When skeptics challenge her, she just cites the until such Upanishad: "Like the wind, like the clouds, like thunder and lightning, all of which arise from space without physical shape and reach the light in their own form, so too those who rise above ordinary perception ascend to the light in their own form." Obscure as Amy can sometimes sound, when it comes to the things themselves she speaks clearly enough: "Be careful what you handle—there's a forecast in every touch."

Amy has the ability to "tune in" to objects, a curious knack she acquired when we were still in high school. During our senior year, she worked as a retail clerk up at the old EJ Korvettes in West Orange. Not long on the job, she realized she could tell, just by its feel, whether a customer's check was going to bounce. "It sets off this strange buzzing in my ear," I remember her saying. Turned out she was right every time, which much pleased her supervisors. They quickly promoted her to "Store Check Approval Officer," a position created just for her.The modest pay raise and enhanced prestige, such as could be had in those days at EJ Korvettes, were enough to convince Amy that she—the only person from our very large graduating class to get into Princeton—really didn't need to go to college. Instead, she embarked on an "alternative" career in psychic detection, which, when compared to the professions of our classmates—bankers, real estate developers, Hollywood actors, corporate headhunters, and politicians—seems far less wrongheaded than it once did.

Nowadays, of course, computer networks have pretty much killed the need for any extrasensory form of check clearing, but lucky for Amy her clairvoyant abilities extend well beyond the cash register. Give her a photograph of somebody she doesn't know, and you'll see what I mean. She puts it up to her forehead and after a few moments of "incubating the images in the henhouse of her mind"—at least that's how one debunkers' magazine described her methods—she provides a detailed account of events from the life of the person in the photo, such as when a broken arm, when a first kiss, when a parent's death, and even, on a good day, when that individual's own death. Amy has a similar flair when it comes to letters and, of late, e-mail, though she prefers to scan these messages in hardcopy rather than press her brow against the monitor. She's also pretty good at "smelling ghosts," able to tell—just by walking in the door and taking a whiff—if your house is haunted.

Amy is fond of saying that a person's breath is just a highly localized form of weather, worthy of at least a little mention on the nightly news if not its own cable channel. In her way of speaking, weather is an allegory for the soul. Sometimes I think she's right—a son one summer afternoon when I stepped out of a Center City Philadelphia movie theater into a furious rainstorm. The whole atmosphere had a greenish pall to it, and the water in the street was running deeper than the city's political grudges. I looked up at the sky just in time to see a dark funnel cloud casually making its way eastward, directly above the buildings along Chestnut Street, as if it were just another tourist from Kansas or Oklahoma come to see the Liberty Bell.

At the same instant I observed two young men not far down the street, engaged in a bitter dispute. They were yelling at each other. One of them abruptly pulled out a knife and plunged it into the thigh of the other, then ran off down a dismal side street, out of sight. The bewildered victim was left hurling curses up into the air as he tried to tend his wound. But then somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, the idea took hold that he should give chase to his assailant so he gave up trying to staunch the flow of his blood onto the sidewalk, and instead limped off, to the best of his diminished ability, still hurling curses up into the air, yet making slow progress toward retribution, until he too disappeared down that same dismal side street.

Later that evening, the television news reported a tornado had touched down on the other side of the Delaware River, causing a bit of damage over in Camden but no injuries. What happens in New Jersey is big news. Yet over here in the City of Brotherly Love it was just another ordinary day—no mention of any stabbing, no report of a washed-out trail of blood and where it might have led. Instead, the fluffy-haired news anchor told us to stay tuned for tomorrow's forecast.

You've probably heard the stories about police departments that use psychics to help crack the really tough cases. Amy is one of the people they call. Contrary to public opinion, the cops don't have a problem with using paranormal methods to solve crimes. On the whole, they are without superstition but not without belief. Since they are pragmatists, they welcome aid from wherever it comes. And Amy always comes through.

Several years ago, an article appeared in one of those check-stand tabloids on the subject of "Psychic Investigators." Amy was just starting out and got some good press here. The article quoted an unnamed Bayonne police detective who had high praise for her abilities: "She hit it right on the head—I mean, I was there when she did it. I don't believe in any of this psychic crap, for the most part, but I think she does have a gift. I've been on this job for a long time and seen a lot of people claiming special powers, but I think Amy comes closest. I found her the most accurate of all of them when it comes to this business."

The case involved the murder of a telemarketing tycoon—or at least the evidence pointed that way—but no corpse had turned up, and the investigation was going nowhere. Having come to their wits' end, the cops brought in Amy. Since she does command a hefty fee, I've often wondered how they report such a charge on their expense forms. I suppose the word "consultation" is versatile enough. In contemporary usage it covers all manner of services rendered, everything from oracles to lawyers, prostitutes to anesthesiologists.

Anyway, the cops handed over to their psychic the one piece of crime-scene evidence they had a small bit of bone believed to have come from the victim. They asked Amy to describe the person and where the rest of the body might be found. The article then recounted how she picked up the bone, pressed it to her forehead, and suddenly screamed out: "A rat! It's a rat! All  I can see is this enormous rat in front of my eyes and it's coming right at me! What's going on, did you guys give me the wrong bone?"

Oh no, the cops assured her, that was the right bone all right,definitely human. "Listen, Amy," they said, "the rat you're seeing was probably what chewed the bone off the hand of the victim in the first place, before the killer was able to transport the body. That's what you're picking up. Take another look. Could you just go past that rat and tell us if you see the victim?" So that's what Amy did. Not only was she able to describe the victim, but she also told the cops exactly where the body lay, out there in the Jersey Meadowlands. They took it from there.

If all such cases went as smoothly as this, every police department would keep a psychic on staff full-time. Unfortunately, big problems arise when a "medium" is brought in, whether by the cops or by somebody who's just in an emotional crisis. Not that a true psychic will fail to"pick up on the vibes" in any case, but they often pick up on the wrong vibes. When it comes to perception, if you make your mind as hospitable to vagrant images as these psychics do, then you're exposing yourself to some pretty chancy stuff. They say it's like walking out of a dark cave into the bright light of an afternoon, or worse, staring directly into the sun to watch an eclipse: your eyes fill up with darkness and you're left groping around blindly. This is just a metaphor, but when something like this happens to a psychic, it's a major embarrassment for all concerned.

Like any sensitive seer, Amy occasionally locks on to information that, well, isn't exactly related to the case. Such as the time she was working with an elephant figurine. She blithely supplied her police audience with a wealth of lurid details about a ménage à trois that she was picking up on, a little drama somebody later described as a"pornographic Nancy Drew Meets the Hardy Boys." As the titillating scene was being fleshed out by Amy, the detective who had handed her the evidence in the first place began to fidget. You could see the thunderheads of anxiety building up over his head, until all attention in the room was on him.

Then suddenly—Boom!—he jumps up and puts a halt to the proceedings. "This is going nowhere," he blurts out as he snatches the figurine back from Amy and bolts from the room, leaving his fellow detectives—with one or two nervous exceptions—snickering indelight.

For her part, Amy has cultivated a degree of circumspection unrivaled in her field. As she once told a reporter, "I try not to tune in to the X-rated stuff. The police worry that I'm going to see things about their sex life or about who they went out with last night or who they're cheating on. So I make it clear right from the start, 'No X-rated stuff—I don't do that.' Or at least I try real hard not to. But sometimes stuff sneaks out.  It's not my fault."

And so, through sad experience, cops come to learn caution when they follow a psychic into the backcountry of common sense, where deadly pitfalls and precipices abound for the unwary. Nowhere is the Boy Scout motto more appropriate: "Be prepared."

Yet, when it comes to getting more than is bargained for in psychic inquiries, it's not just the cops who are at risk, but the psychic as well. Call it a professional liability, but Amy is living proof of the ancient wisdom that when we cultivate our virtues we simultaneously cultivate our flaws.

About ten years ago, she was consulted on a break-in that occurred over in Manhattan. Dozens of Aztec relics had been stolen from an antiquities dealer. The thieves left no fingerprints, not a singletrace. That's when the dealer brought in Amy. He told her that, in making their getaway, the crooks inadvertently had dropped a bit of their loot. He hoped she might tune in to this item and help solve the case. Amy said sure.

The dealer handed her a six-inch sacrificial knife. It was made unrivaled blackest obsidian and was very sharp. The dealer said, "Have at it."

So Amy lays hold on the handle and is immediately pierced by the image of a hill rising from the margin of a dark and tree-lined lake.Thousands of nondescript people are flocking to its summit, where an imposing temple looms over everything below. Directly in front of it is an altar, a huge greenish block of agate or jasper, its top side slightly convex, like the surface of a stony awesome eye. Behind it blaze a pair of ritual bonfires. The air is permeated with a vague stench, which brings to mind for Amy images of the house she grew up in behind the old Jack-in-the-Box restaurant on South Livingston Avenue. Here's her swing set, there's her dollhouse, and now out of the blue appears her long lost collie dog, Laddie. She is aghast to see her own memories mingling with those coming off the grim artifact, as if the whole thing were just some informal cocktail party in the imagination.

Next she observes a half dozen priests emerging from the temple, each one wearing a long cotton robe adorned with hieroglyphic emblems of mystic import. Five of these priests are shrouded in black, while the sixth is mantled in scarlet and holds in his hands the very knife Amy holds in hers. As the procession draws closer, she can see that each priest's hair is matted with blood, the gory tresses flowing wildly over their shoulders. At the center of this gruesome pomp walks a naked and startlingly handsome young man. Given the circumstances, he's just a little too enthusiastic. He's waving to the crowd like a rock star.

When the grim procession arrives at the altar, the five black-robed priests stretch out the eager young man, face upward, upon the glossy surface of the stone. They secure his head and limbs. Now the scarlet-robed one lifts the black knife and holds its flinty tip just above the young man's chest. A deafening roar goes up from the crowd.This young man is definitely the star of the show. There's no going back. Even if he were in some way to falter, have a change of mind and cry out with all his might as the dark blade slits open his chest and a holy hand plunges into the gushing wound to tear out his palpitating heart, nobody could hear it anyway.

Well, maybe Amy would hear it—but she drops the knife at that critical moment and thereby draws the vision to a close.

Needless to say, she didn't solve this particular case, but the dealer was still pleased with her performance. It gave him a pretty good story to attach to an otherwise undistinguished relic, thus quadrupling its value in the marketplace. Combined with the insurance settlement on the lost goods, this meant he came out way ahead. He paid Amy double for her good work. When word got out about the knife, she started getting all kinds of calls from people wanting her to tell them if this sliver of wood they had came from the Cross, or this knucklebone came from Saint Peter and not, as those without faith would have it, from some barnyard pig. A professor who claimed to be an expert on the Shroud of Turin wrote a letter to the Newark Star Ledger demanding that the Vatican grant Amy access to the relic, so the question of its authenticity might be settled once and for all.

Yes, Amy's business really took off, but nothing costs a person so much as something that is given, especially if by the gods. Imagine not having the power to forget, not being able to filter out the innumerable impressions that come via the senses and whatever other routes there are to perception, and instead, like Amy, possessing a Midas touch of memory. Everything you encountered then would immediately burst into image, thousands upon thousands of them, and you'd be swept up in a tornado of one thing turning into something else, an unbelievably violent flux in which nothing is ever fixed, no boundary ever secure. You'd be unable to distinguish between your own experience and that of somebody else—say, your butcher or the bastard who just cut you off in traffic—no longer able to know friend from foe, rich from poor, celebrity from nobody, false from true, weak from strong, foolish from wise, and—taking this where it must lead--one species from another. On and on it goes, until at last a terrible sameness cloaks the entire universe, so that not even the living and the dead can enjoy a blessed separation.

Loss of memory, we could conclude, might just be the greatest achievement of human consciousness. If only those flinty old senators from western states like Idaho and Utah had some sense of the fragility of the hard-won human ignorance in these matters, you could bet they'd be the first to demand the Clean Water Act be extended to include a certain River of Forgetfulness mentioned at the end of an ancient book,where all the disembodied souls about to be reincarnated are forced to drink a measure, that they might enter upon their new lives unencumbered by any clutter from the old.

Such is the nature of Amy's problem. Some say this is all just conjurer's shtick, but I don't know if it's that simple. After all, nobody is required to consult a fortuneteller, to obtain through prophecy or table rapping a treasure more easily acquired through prudence and down-to-earth discretion. No, when it comes to explaining why so many people in this day and age resort to palm readers, psychotherapists, and cult leaders, let's just say that nothing provides more comfort to a desperate person than to meet somebody who is evenmore desperate. This is not to impugn divination as an art, but only to note the pitiable hands into which it has fallen.

In Amy's defense, I would point out that her views about the weather coming off all things are compatible with those held by several ancient philosophers, most notably Anaximenes, who was the first to claim that the soul is made from air. Only a single sentence from his writings survives, but it's a lofty one: "As our soul, being air, both holds us together and controls us, so do breath and air encompass the whole cosmos." After all, we do say that the eyes are the windows of the soul, so it follows that the nose and mouth are the doorways. Thus our psychological houses are more open to the elements than we think. No wonder human beings, even when they have nothing else in common, will find some way to talk about the weather.

I've heard Amy say that when we die our souls fly off to the moon.Once upon a time it was thought that all lost objects—not just souls but garments, childhood toys, luggage, and wedding rings, as well ascourage, virtue, beauty, and passion—found their way to the moon, where they reside to this day, hidden to all eyes save for those of the deity who reigns there. It may be that even one or two ideas have found their way there. All these lost things pass their time on the moon as if in sleep, which is yet another kind of weather, says Amy, and they dream of their former existences back on the disburdening earth, flitting and fluttering around happy with themselves and doing as they please until such time as the dream becomes so vivid they wake up right where they belong, unable to tell if the whole she bang was not itself just one big dream.

As for me, I am relieved that I am for the most part oblivious to the things that cloud Amy's world. The weather around here affords me enough clear days that I can keep track of the moon moving swiftly through her phases, rather like the opening and closing of a vast and sympathetic eye, at times full with remembrance, and at others dark in a necessary fugue. Although nothing gives me greater pleasure than to hear my friend Amy's stories and recount them to others, I myself don't need to see the corpse candles and ghostly beacons that, she assures me, hover over every object, no matter how trivial.

Like I said, I tend to take her at her word.

John P. O'Grady is currently "breaking camp" in Pennsylvania and heading back to the mountains of California, where he will be working on a new collection of essays titled Occult Ecology: Reading Nature Darkly. This is his seventh contribution to the Quest magazine.

Grave Goods: Essays of Peculiar Nature is a collection by John P.O'Grady published by the University of Utah Press in 2001, including this essay (printed here by permission) and six others that first appeared in the Quest magazine. The sixteen pieces in this volume include ghost stories, macabre modern legends, and metaphysical investigations, all informed by the natural sciences, history,philosophy, literature, and mythology. They reveal the natural world as a place of unnatural surprises and strange beauty where Rip van Winkle, psychics, and ordinary people rub shoulders with the Buddha, Socrates, and Stephen King. O'Grady has been called "the cream of the next generation of American nature writers . . . with a wit that arcs between sweetly goofy and canine sharp." Cloth, $21.95, 170 pages. Available from the University of Utah Press at 800-773-6672.

Originally printed in the November - December  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Vachet, Helene. "Harry Potter and the Perennial Quest." Quest  89.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER  2001): 218-221, 227.

By Helene Vachet

THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS have been translated into some 42 languages from Albanianto Zulu and have sold more than 100 million copies. Warner Bros. Studio is responding to the fascination the Harry Potter cycle holds for readers around the world by spending in excess of $100,000,000 to make the first book into a movie, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, to be released on November 16, 2001. What accounts for the popularity of these stories?

The books are about an unwanted, orphaned child (a "cinderlad," as Alison Lurie of Harvard University calls Harry Potter) who finds out that he is a wizard with magical powers. On his eleventh birthday, Harry learns about the secret of his parents' death, the existence of anarch enemy named "Lord Voldemort," and his unexpected enrollment at Hogwarts, a boarding school for wizards. Are these books just for children, or do they have a deep and profound meaning? What makes the stories about Harry resonate within our psyches?

The Harry Potter books have rich archetypal meaning and wisdom, interpretable in many ways. According to the Jungian view, archetypes are the building blocks or DNA of the psyche, the subconscious patterns of the universe, perhaps expressions of what H. P. Blavatsky called "Akasha . . . the indispensable agent of every . . . magical performance." We are aware of the archetypes primarily from ancient myths. Since those myths were formulated, consciousness has undergone many transformations, but these core patterns remain unchanged. Their expression, however, has metamorphosed with the literature of each century. Being attuned to the archetypes connects us with our origins and acts as a form of empowerment. The archetypes in the Harry Potter books include the shadow, character and calling (daimons and guardian angels), synchronicity, the path, and initiation. They are familiar themes, but they appear in a new form in the tales of Harry Potter.

THE SHADOW

In the Harry Potter books, our nonmagical world is in a sense the shadow of the magical world, just as our physical life is a shadow to the life of our higher self or soul. Although there are many shadow figures in the Harry Potter books, the most powerful is Lord Voldemort,who is also the most powerful wizard in a hundred years. Lord Voldemort,"he who must not be named" as he is euphemistically called by most people in Harry's world, killed Harry's parents and then tried to kill the infant Harry with a curse. Instead, through the power of the love Harry's mother had for her child, the curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, who lost his physical body and most of his powers. Harry was left an orphan with a scar in the shape of a thunderbolt on his forehead from the curse that was to have killed him.

Lord Voldemort and Harry are connected in interesting ways. Voldemort in a sense is Harry's shadow. They were both orphans, they both had one"muggle" (nonwizard) parent, and they even looked somewhat alike when they were children. When Lord Voldemort tried to kill Harry, various of the dark wizard's powers were transferred latently to the young boy. Voldemort was a "parselmouth," who could speak to snakes, and Harry finds that he has this ability also.

The shadow archetype is described by Robert Bly, a Jungian poet and writer, as an invisible "bag of thought forms" that we generate from our suppressed thoughts and desires. The shadow regresses and grows stronger when it is suppressed, so our job is to integrate it with our conscious thoughts. The Sufi poet Rumi says, "If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self" (that is, at the shadow within). Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea says, "To light a candle is to cast a shadow." Paul Foster Case's Book of Tokens says, "Yet does every beam of that sun casta shadow also, for in all creation are light and darkness mixed, and their equilibrium is the mystery of mysteries." So the attraction to the Harry Potter stories may be in the joy of uncovering the mystery about ourselves.

CHARACTER AND CALLING, DAIMONS AND GUARDIAN ANGELS

After his parents' death, Harry was taken to live with the Dursley family, muggle relatives who not only hated magic but distrusted anything related to the imagination. When Harry turns eleven, in spite of all efforts to keep him suppressed and downtrodden (his bedroom is a broom closet he shares with spiders), he discovers that he is a wizard. Hagrid (keeper of the keys and grounds at Hogwarts), finds him and delivers to him his acceptance letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Hagrid acts to Harry as a sort of daimon, or guardian angel, the carrier of destiny according to James Hillman in The Soul's Code in Search of Character and Calling. Destiny and calling can be equated with the Eastern doctrines of karma and dharma. Hagrid explains to Harry about his parents and his connection with Lord Voldemort. He also takes him to magical London, Diagon Alley, where Harry purchases what he needs for school at Hogwarts.

The most intriguing of all the fantastic places that Hagrid and Harry visit in Diagon Alley is Mr. Ollivander's wand shop. Harry tries out wand after wand, waiting for something magical to happen and not knowing what to expect. Finally, Harry feels a warmth in his fingers and sparks shoot out like fireworks from the end of a particular wand. Mr.Ollivander says:

I remember every wand I've ever sold, Mr. Potter. Every single wand. It so happens that the phoenix whose tail feather is in your wand, gave another feather—just one other. It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother—why, its brother gave you that scar. . . . Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember. . . . I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter. . . . After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things—terrible yes, but great.

This statement echoes a saying by the Sufi scholar and writer, Idries Shah, "Seeking truth is the first stage towards finding it. After the seeking comes the realization that truth is also seeking the seeker."

The title of the first Potter book, as originally published in Great Britain, was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. To a student of the Kabbalah, Jungian psychology, or alchemy, the significance is obvious. The philosopher's stone was understood by the uninitiated as merely a device to turn base metals into gold and to make an elixir that gave everlasting life. However, to a student of alchemy, the philosopher's stone is a metaphor for turning our base, physical natures into our more spiritual selves. In other words, it is a tool for self-actualization, union with the Higher Self, the beatific vision.

Harry's association with the philosopher's stone makes him a seeker after truth, on a quest to achieve union with his Higher Self. In the game of wizards, called "quidditch" (a ball game played on broomsticks), Harry is also the "seeker," a team member who tries to find the golden snitch (a small ball whose capture ends the game). Yet, sometimes it seems that the snitch is seeking him! The golden snitch can be seen as a parallel philosopher's stone, giving its seeker courage and insight.

SYNCHRONICITY

In his first Christmas at Hogwarts, Harry opens a package to find an invisibility cloak with a note saying, "Use it well." The note and gift turn out later to be from Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts,who often acts as Harry's other daimon or higher self. Harry, in the course of his adventures with this magic cloak, discovers a magic mirror, the Mirror of Erised, which has an inscription written on it:"It shows not your face but what your heart desires." The name of the mirror, "Erised," is "Desire" spelled backwards. Dumbledore helps Harry to discover how the mirror works:

Let me explain. The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is, he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is. . . . It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. . . .this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad,not knowing if what it shows is real or ever possible.

This knowledge of how the mirror works helps Harry finally to safeguard the philosopher's stone. In the Harry Potter books, a type of synchronicity (a meaningful relationship between two unrelated events) is magnified and forces the reader to examine the relationship between events. Jung said that synchronicity is the key to understanding human destiny. Harry's destiny hinges, synchronistically, on finding out who is really seeking the philosopher's stone when he is being punished in the forbidden forest. The mirror gave Harry the wisdom to protect the stone, and the knowledge of who was seeking it gave him the courage.

THE PATH

The metaphysical concept of involution and evolution implies a Path.H. P. Blavatsky wrote a short statement beginning, "There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but yet a road, and it leads to the very heart of the universe." The Christian view of the path is exemplified by Dante's Beatific Vision of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.

The paths at Hogwarts, however, are related to its founders, who more than a thousand years before were the four greatest witches and wizards of the age. The school's four residential houses are named after them: Gryffindor, for the brave at heart; Hufflepuff, for the loyal and true; Ravenclaw, for those who love learning; and Slytherin, for those who will use any means to achieve their aims. Each house represents a different path in life. When new students arrive at Hogsworts, a "sorting hat" is placed on their heads, through which the daimon or higher self speaks and chooses the house they belong to—the path they will follow. In Harry's case, the voice in the hat entered into a dialogue with him:

"Hmm," said a small voice in his ear. "Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind either. There's talent, oh my goodness, yes—and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that's interesting. . . . So where shall I put you?"

Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, Not Slytherin, not Slytherin.

"Not Slytherin, eh?" said the small voice. "Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that—no? Well, if you're sure—better be GRYFFINDOR!"

This small voice bothered Harry all the way into the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, because Harry felt that perhaps he was in the wrong house (or path), but Dumbledore in his characteristic way set him straight by saying, "It is our choices,Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." So the wisdom of Harry Potter is also to look at the choices we make on the Path and in life.

INITIATION

Each of the four published Harry Potter books (out of a projected seven) has one great culminating adventure—a rite of passage or initiation to be passed before going on to the next level. In the first book, the initiation has seven parts.

First, Harry and his companions, Ron and Hermione, must pass through a trapdoor leading to an underground corridor and guarded by a three-headed dog (reminiscent of Cerberus, the guardian of the Greek underworld or the subconscious). "Courage" is the quality needed toget past this monster. The second hurdle is the Devil's Snare, a plant that tightens its hold on its prey with each move of the victim. The quality needed to pass it is "calmness" to save the person from being strangled. The third snare involves illusive winged keys, and "insight" provides the clue to finding the right key. The fourth task is to passliving chessmen, and the "sacrifice" of one of the three seekers is the way to gain a checkmate.

The fifth labor is to pass a troll, but it is already dead. (Since the companions disabled a troll earlier in the book, it was not necessary to repeat this task). The sixth mystery is to figure out which potions to ingest to get out of the room in which they are trapped."Logic" is needed to understand the riddle and solve the problem. The seventh and final test is to obtain the philosopher's stone from the Mirror of Erised, and the quality needed is "purity," for without it the seeker will only see an illusion of living forever or being wealthy, but not the stone.

Courage, calmness, insight, self-sacrifice, logic, and purity are the steps to Harry Potter's and his friends' initiation or self-realization.The meaning and magic of Harry Potter is that he is us. We are seekers on the path of truth or the perennial quest. It is our destiny to integrate our shadows with our conscious self, to listen to our daimon or higher self, to look for the synchronicity between events, and to develop the qualities needed for initiation. This story has been told again and again throughout the ages.

Harry Potter Books

Helene Vachet, MA in Counseling and Guidance, has recently retired from the Los Angeles School District as an Assistant Principal and a teacher of "Myths and Magic." She is a third generation Theosophist and past president of Besant Lodge in Hollywood who is particularly interested in mythology, fantasy literature, and Jungian psychology.

Originally printed in the November - December  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wilde, Dana. "How Ancient China Came to America: The I Ching as Bible." Quest  89.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER  2001): 222-227

By Dana Wilde

AMERICA AND CHINA are as different as two cultures can be. America is young, just over two hundred years old; China has a five-thousand-year past. Their languages are startlingly alien to each other, the currents of their philosophies flow in nearly opposite directions, and their principal religious traditions could not be more distinct. And yet a friend of mine recently remarked, "The I Ching is my bible."

This remark is surprising, not only because the I Ching, or Book of Changes, developed millennia ago in the staggeringly foreign traditions of China, but also because it is not a religious text at all, at least not in any conventional Western sense. It's not scripture, and there's nothing like it in Western religion or literature.

In fact there's another surprising thing about the remark: It was not the first time I've heard it. Several highly intelligent Americans have said the same thing to me in the past few decades. The friend who introduced me to the I Ching in 1974 said it to me. A few years later a woman said it to me in exactly the same words. Another friend, one of the most acutely intelligent people I've ever known, said it to me in the mid 1980s, and later, so did my wife.

The I Ching is utterly unlike the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. It tells no stories, and its text is oracular, a highly metaphorical kind of poetry that is decipherable to Westerners and most Chinese only through the detailed commentaries of both Chinese sage-scholars and Western translator-interpreters. The best known translation and commentary on the I Ching by a Westerner is the one made by Richard Wilhelm, a German scholar who lived in China during the first part of the twentieth century, and it is his translation that my friends referred to, and that I am most familiar with.

The I Ching is neither scripture nor a literary work, nor even a work of rationally coherent philosophy. It is, in fact, a three-thousand-year-old book of divination—a fact even more difficult for scientifically minded Westerners to square with traditional ideas about religious texts. When my friends say, "The I Ching is my bible,"however, they are indicating that the I Ching provides them not with predictions of the future, but with religious ideas or sensibilities in a way that replaces the Bible.

How does a well-educated American come to the conclusion that an ancient Chinese book can function the way the Bible does for Jews andChristians, or the Koran does for Muslims? I'd like to give a picture of Western history that addresses this question. In a nutshell, it was cultural conditions that compelled my friends to cut their ties to traditional Western religion and seek the new in the very, very old.

The story begins two thousand years ago when Christ questioned the authority of Roman law and Middle Eastern religious leaders. But let's skip ahead about sixteen hundred years, only mentioning that during all those years most Europeans remained convinced that some sort of divine authority existed and felt compelled to recognize it. Then around AD1600, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon, and other Europeans began setting religious authority on its ear—often without intending to do so. That is, the methods of objective science emerged and began to reveal that when you look closely at the physical world, it's different from what traditional religions describe.

Galileo encountered serious problems with the Catholic Church when he argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun, instead of the Sun around the Earth, as the Bible indicates. The new science, or New Philosophy as it came to be known, "call'd all in doubt," to quote the English poet John Donne, and questioned the Bible's reliability and therefore the church's authority. This triggered a centuries-long moral crisis for Western culture because religious leaders were the traditional teachers of moral values. To oversimplify the situation, because of the success of science, people's confidence in religious authority diminished.

This did not happen overnight, but gradually over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the mid 1800s, most Westerners were hanging onto their family and community habits of attending church and reading the Bible, but their attention was turning more and more to the material world and the ways science and technology could make them healthier and more comfortable. Traditional moral values taught by the church and Bible began to seem old-fashioned. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and writers like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert in their own ways mounted sharp attacks on the hollowness of European morality. In America, philosophers like Emerson, Thoreau, and William James asked the same questions in gentler ways. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear to many people that the Western world had a serious moral crisis on its hands.

The church was losing its credibility and authority in the face of scientific findings. There was also the serious problem that the church upheld social, political, and economic values that enabled relatively small numbers of wealthy, greedy people to exploit and make profoundly miserable millions upon millions of other people. Just after the turn of the century, World War I (1914-1918) devastated Europe and other parts of the world. It became clear to many educated Westerners that a moral system that could result in such a disaster was bankrupt. The Christian church was seen as part of the bankrupt system, and its congregations and influence declined as the twentieth century wore on. Religion in general was condemned as superstition put to political use by businessmen, landowners, politicians, and scientists.

At the same time, some people realized that human beings' inner lives need attention. In the nineteenth century, organizations like theTheosophical Society and the Unitarian Church sought to create new, fresh forums for the nurturing of religious feeling. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a popular notion that art could replace religion. But more powerful than art in people's consciousness by this time was science itself; science began to be seen as the savior of humanity, and this view continues today. But the trouble is—and many scientists tried to warn of this—science treats the material world, not the inner life, and cannot by its nature offer any moral guidance.

A morality of economics and of politics, which manifested itself as nationalism, grew up from scientific, materialist views of human activity in order to provide a system of community values that would bind people together. Although the notion that economics and politics are the binding forces in people's lives persists today, the fact is that a morality of politics and economics does not work either. This is because economics and politics are not moral systems, even though people try to make them so. Moral systems underpin economics and politics.

The moral crisis was not confined to the Western world. In the nineteenth century, China itself, despite its enormous life independent of the West, had grown very brittle morally as well, and it has wrestled with the same general problems as the Western world. The twentieth century was a shockingly painful time in human history because practically every civilized country was struggling with old moral systems. Things came apart virtually everywhere.

But while moral systems have been torn down everywhere, the world has floundered in replacing them. No culture, country, or civilization can hold up for long without a system of shared values. Since World WarsI and II, the whole world has been in a state of marvelous material possibility but simultaneously a state of moral chaos. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans realized that old moral dicta by and large no longer applied in the modern world, and they rebelled. Young people of my generation refused to go to church. They became cynical about politicians, government, and much else.

So what does the I Ching have to do with all this? The breakdown of the old moral order and the necessity for a new order to replace it makes the I Ching's relation to American cultural history really not so obscure.

In the 1960s, many well-educated young Americans realized that something extremely important was missing from the materialist way of life. Some of the most influential statements of this feeling came from the Beat writers of the time: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder.They and others were searching for meaningful lives. In some ways they botched the job, but the important thing was that they were aware that their physical well-being did not mean they were living a "good life."They were keenly aware that their inner lives—the lives of their minds, emotions, psyches, and spirits—were as real as their bodies, and in someways more real. They realized that part of the bankruptcy of traditional Western morality was that it had given all its attention to the well-being of the body and to scientific rational intelligence, and had essentially ignored the inner life.

Young Americans of the 1960s did not trust the church, so they set out to find a life of the mind and spirit in other traditions. They looked energetically at Buddhism, Hinduism, and Middle Eastern religions and philosophies. Young black people became Muslims. White kids from suburban families became Zen Buddhists and Hindus, or at least they tried to. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made trips to America, and the Beatles followed him back to India. Alan Watts wrote enormously popular books for Americans about Buddhism. I remember being influenced by a  popularization of Hindu philosophy called Be Here Now by a Westerner who had adopted the name Baba Ram Dass.

The 1960s passed. By the late 1970s, people thought of the whole endeavor as a misguided waste of energy and a joke. Most of the young spiritual rebels of the 1960s got sick of living in the uncomfortable surroundings they associated with spiritual life and returned to the comforts of middle-class food, transportation, and money. Those who continued to seek the spiritual life, whether in books or drugs or traditional religions, came to be seen by Americans in general as cranks or misfits. The period saw a resurgence of interest in contacting dead spirits and belief in the power of crystals and mental telepathy. In 1972 I took a college course in the anthropology of magic and religion,and we read books by popular mystics like P. D. materials are and so-called black magicians like Aleister Crowley. They were disturbing books. The UFO phenomenon, which is probably a manifestation of an inner condition, emerged full-blown during the 1960s. People seeking inner meaning tried different kinds of divination, including astrology, tarot cards,and—the I Ching.

I was introduced to the I Ching in this context. A friend showed me how to throw the coins to obtain the hexagrams, and we read the oracles with fascination. What we did was purely superstition, according to the dominant scientific-rational view of reality. Most well-meaning middle-class Americans believed science had long since debunked and disproved all superstitious nonsense about supernatural realities; even the Catholic church was the butt of jokes for many Americans because of its weird rituals with incense and chanting and drinking wine believed to be blood.

I admit I don't know exactly what to think of all this. I do know that, contrary to the jokes now told about "peace, love, and understanding" and deluded spaced-out hippies, and contrary to hard-core scientific cynicism about religion and the existence of an inner,spiritual, and moral life, the impulse during those years to find some kind of spiritual reality was intense and real. It was just that many people failed to find any evidence of it. Many people, but not all.

Those who told me that the I Ching is their bible believe they have evidence of things unseen. Tarot cards and ouija boards mainly dropped out of their lives as either unreliable or dangerous or simply fake. Some of them keep a skeptical eye on astrology. Drugs have long since left their lives as dangerous, short-lived, and largely illusory. But the I Ching remained and actually grew in importance to them. Why?

Well, the initial attraction to the I Ching involved its use as a contact with the spiritual world. You throw the coins, they symbolize lines, and you look up the arrangement of lines in the book, then read the commentary, which supposedly answers your question. Pure superstition. Except that people discovered that things were happening in the I Ching that were not happening, or happening far less satisfactorily, in other kinds of divination. One thing was, amazingly, that the answers were right. Let me tell you a story that still startles me, even years later.

The friend who originally introduced me to the I Ching decided to make a scientific test of its objective reliability. His question was, "Is some ordering force actually at work, or is this merely total random chance?" For his test, he threw the coins randomly, challenging the I Ching to make sense. On the first throw, he ended with the oracle Wilhelm translates as "Youthful Folly"; the original text is translated thus: "It is not I who seek the young fool. The young fool seeks me. If he importunes, I give him no information." This was startling because it would be just the sort of reply you might expect a real oracle to make in response to a frivolous test of its authenticity.

But a stranger thing happened. My friend continued his test, throwing the coins three more times. Three more times he drew the oracle of "Youthful Folly." This can mean only one of two things: Either an extremely improbable and truly fantastic synchronistic coincidence occurred, or the oracle actually (generously) answered a question that should not have been asked, by warning of its foolhardiness. Four times in a row.

I have never known anyone who has used the I Ching to say it was wrong or that it misguided them. In my experience, it has never beenwrong, by which I mean that although sometimes the response is very happening in understand or seems ambiguous, I have never seen a clearly unfavorable response in a favorable situation, or vice versa. And I have frequently seen responses clearly borne out. The oracle has been exact and lucid about favorable and unfavorable periods of my own life,including a troubling period that began soon after a decision to forgo along-term visit to China.

So my friends' religious confidence in the I Ching began with their experiments in occult and mystical activities, what we now call the "NewAge" movement—the interest in occultism and mysticism that grew out of the 1960s into whole ranges of popularizations of Eastern religion and philosophy, Native American mysticism, shamanism, channeling, paganism,myth enactment, psychic healing, meditation practice, past-life hypnosis, and many other similar offshoots, including the quite bizarrealien abduction phenomenon.

The I Ching is different, though. Not only does it seem to reply meaningfully to questions, but it provides two other important things:first, clear, reasonable instructions about living a good life; and second, a coherent picture of the cosmos that integrates my friends'deep sense that the outer, material world and the inner, psychic world are equally real and intimately related. This is critical. My friends say, "The I Ching is my bible," because it provides exactly whatreligion, apart from church politics, traditionally provided: guidelines for living a good life, and contact with the inner or spiritual world. A point of moral orientation is available in the I Ching, which many people believe is not available in traditional Western religions or most of the shallow New Age efforts to formulate a working spiritual life.

What's really interesting is that this point of orientation is available in a text from ancient China. It strongly suggests that themoral values we sense deep inside us are common to widely diverse people. Wisdom, justice, temperance, patience, endurance, perseverance,honesty, courage, piety—virtues taught by Plato, not to mentionJesus—are present not only in Western, but also in Chinese culture. And they are identifiable in South Asian cultures, Middle Eastern cultures,and other cultures all around the world.

If I'm right about even part of this, it means that religion is notan evil political tool. Instead, it means that religious institutionswere used as political tools by some people who did not mean well, as well as by some who did. Further, it means that the religious feeling attached to moral values and to the various kinds of health that are possible for human beings is not an illusion. It is a natural experience and need. And this implies that we share a common consciousness and a common source.

The upshot of all this, finally, would be that after a terrible couple of centuries—especially after what might be described as a collapse or dismantling of morality during the twentieth century—there is now a powerful impulse on the part of people to rebuild a coherent system of moral values: a system that will not result in world wars. To rebuild, we collect moral value wherever we recognize it. The task requires great personal clarity, and cultural clarity, and powerful,unflinching honesty.

But there it is. China is building itself, a giant country of giant possibilities that will come to ruin if no meaningful system of giant possibilities underpins it. America is transforming itself too, a powerful,inventive country of enormous resources in materials and energy. But it has to rebuild a moral system that abandons the hollowness and destructiveness of the old morality and creates a workable, meaningful moral life by doing what Americans are good at: using whatever materials are at hand—including the I Ching—to contact the divine world.

Dana Wilde recently served as a Fulbright lecturer in China, having taught literature and writing in his home state of Maine and Eastern Europe, as well as China. He has published in the Quest,Alexandria, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the North American Review, and Mystics Quarterly. His forthcoming book of essays is titled Infinities: The Inner Dimensions of Outer Space.

Originally printed in the November -December 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Algeo, John. "Harry Potter and the Ancient Wisdom." Quest  90.6 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):220 - 225.

By John Algeo

The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling are a fantastically magical phenomenon. Coming out of nowhere in the publishing world, they rapidly became the best-selling young people's books of our time, and the movies based upon them have been equally popular.

The books are examples of three literary genres. One is the bildungsroman, or novel of the moral and psychological education of the protagonist; Harry Potter is a student at a boarding school, but is also in the great school of Life. Another genre is the quest story, in which the protagonist faces a series of trials, the passing of which results in the discovery of a great treasure—in Harry's case, self-knowledge. And the third is the fairy tale, whose central character is often an orphan; Harry is an orphan and thus a fitting representative of every human being, for we are all, in the words of one of the great Theosophical teachers, members of "poor orphan humanity."

Harry comes from a family of Wizards but has been reared by Muggles, or non-Wizards, and so is ignorant of his background and latent powers. He is called, however, to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he will spend seven years being educated in magic but also in moral and psychological maturity. At or from Hogwarts, Harry will engage in a series of quests that are all part of an encompassing great quest to discover who and what he is.

The four books in print, with three more projected for the series, appeal to the young—both in years and in heart. That appeal is founded on the author's skill as a storyteller, but also on the worldview of the stories, which—it may be suggested—is compatible with the Ancient Wisdom.

Rowling's wide-ranging familiarity with myth, legend, magic, and odd bits of recondite and esoteric information is the web-stuff from which she spins her magical tale. The books create their own world, whose integrity is an essential for good fantasy. Yet they are also interpretable in or, to use J. R. R. Tolkien's term, "applicable" to other contexts, such as Theosophy, with which Rowling has some familiarity, as is clear from her reference in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to the fictitious author "Cassandra Vablatsky" and her equally fictitious book Unfogging the Future. "Vablatsky" is a metathesis of "Blavatsky," and "Cassandra" is an appropriate substitute for Helena, because Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, King of Troy, a prophetess who always spoke the truth but was never believed and because Cassandra's story is part of the great war of the Iliad, fought over Helen. Moreover, the fictitious book title Unfogging the Future suggests Isis Unveiled, Helena Blavatsky's first major work.

Although "Cassandra Vablatsky" shows that Rowling has some knowledge of the Theosophical tradition, one cannot assume that knowledge to be either deep or extensive. And yet, interestingly, much in the Harry Potter books is parallel to Theosophical ideas. Such parallelism need not imply a detailed knowledge of those ideas by the author, but may arise quite independently out of her familiarity with the myths, legends, and symbols in which the Theosophical Ancient Wisdom is embodied or even from deep unconscious levels of the psyche, where the Wisdom is enshrined in the heart-mind of every human being.

Polarities

One of the Theosophical themes of Harry Potter is that of polarity: spirit/matter, life/form, energy/mass, yin/yang, esoteric/exoteric, inner/outer, and so on. Several notable such polarities appear in the books. One is that of Wizards versus Muggles, two kinds of people who inhabit Harry Potter's world. Wizards are wise in the ways of magic; Muggles are muddle-headed, unmagical, although clever technologically to compensate for their lack of magic powers, but also often unimaginative and philistine. Wizards and Muggles are in practice different castes, who seldom mingle and sometimes misunderstand each other:

"Are all your family wizards?" asked Harry . . . .

"Er—yes, I think so," said Ron. "I think Mum's got a second cousin who's an accountant, but we never talk about him." (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 74 -5; all unidentified quotations are from this first book)

These contrasting castes of the wise and the muddle-headed are parallel to the two kinds of people identified in At the Feet of the Master (one of the spiritual classics of Theosophy):

In all the world there are only two kinds of people—those who know, and those who do not know; and this knowledge is the thing which matters.

The knowledge in question is that of the reality of an orderly plan in the universe and of the place of human beings in that plan. Wizards, by etymology are wise ones who know. Muggles are the other sort.

Another sort of polarity is that of good versus evil. And this polarity is quite distinct from that of Wizards versus Muggles. There are good Muggles and evil Muggles, as well as good Wizards and evil Wizards. Indeed, the two archetypal figures of good and evil in the stories are both Wizards. Albus Dumbledore is the headmaster at Hogwarts and the greatest living Wizard. His first name, Albus, is the Latin word for "white," he being a "white" or good magician. The first part of his surname, Dumb, is the English word for "silent, unspeaking," reminding us that true wisdom cannot be told but only experienced; the later meaning of dumb as "stupid" is ironically appropriate, as wisdom is often mistaken for stupidity by those who do not know, for example, in the literary figure of the Wise Fool. In addition, Dumble rimes with humble; and the truly wise are always humble people, for they know how much is still unknown. The last part of the headmaster's name, dore, is a homophone of door, and this wise headmaster is the door through which Harry will enter onto the Path of learning and serving.

On the other hand, the archetype of evil is Voldemort, Harry's shadow and nemesis. Once a student at Hogwarts, as Harry is now, Voldemort adopted that nom de mal when he launched upon his evil path. Vol suggests the German verb wollen "want, wish, desire," and mort is the Latin root for "death." So Voldemort is he who has a wish (Vol) of (de) death (mort), the opposite of wisdom.

At Hogwarts, Harry's two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, are another polarity. Ron is from an old Wizard family; Hermione is from a Muggle family. And they balance each other in many characteristics: Ron is quiet and introverted; Hermione is talkative and outgoing. Ron is shy, with a feeling of inferiority as he is the youngest of six talented brothers; Hermione is confident and assertive, a distinguished achiever. Ron takes risks; Hermione is law-abiding. Ron is full of masculine energy; Hermione, of feminine energy. With Harry, these three form a triangle of energies and personality types.

The Quest

The ultimate quest in the Harry Potter books is that of self-discovery. In that respect, these books share a common theme with the great spiritual guidebooks of humanity. Enlightenment is the ability to answer correctly the question "Who am I?" A Zen student once came to the Zen master and asked what he must do to achieve enlightenment. The Zen master replied, "Who's asking?" The student who can answer that question is enlightened. The same question is the principal subject of all the Upanishads and, indeed, of spiritual treatises in all the great traditions.

Harry is on a great quest to discover who he is—in the simplest, most literal sense of learning about his parents—but also in the deeper sense of discovering his own nature and his mission in life. That great quest is mirrored in a different quest theme in each book of the series. In the first book, it is to find the Philosopher's Stone. "Philosopher" is a traditional term for an alchemist, and the Philosopher's Stone is a magical product of the alchemist's art that turns base metals into gold and produces a drink, the Elixir of Life, that gives immortality. (Apparently the American publishers thought "philosopher" sounded too dry and dusty, so adopted instead the term "Sorcerer's Stone.")

Harry's quest for the Philosopher's Stone takes him and his two friends into the underground cellars of Hogwarts school, where the Stone has been hidden. Their journey into those depths mirrors the ancient theme of a descent into the underworld, which is the unconscious part of our psyche, where we discover hidden truths about ourselves. Harry's underground exploration has seven stages (reduced to five in the movie):

1. He and his friends must pass a three-headed dog guarding a trapdoor entrance to the cellars. The dog, though called "Fluffy" in the story, is Cerberus, the watchdog of the underworld or Hades in Greek mythology. The dog can be put to sleep with music played by Harry and Hermione on a flute that Harry was given as a present. Similarly, Orpheus gained entry to Hades to rescue his dead wife by playing on a lyre. The flute that Harry and Hermione play is an analog of the instrument in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which Tamino and Pamina play during their co-initiation at the end of the opera.

2. When the companions have tumbled through the trapdoor (like Alice down the rabbit hole), their fall is cushioned by their landing on a lushly growing plant, called the Devil's Snare. The tendrils of this plant entrap anything that touches it and grow tighter as its victim struggles to escape. Hermione, however, remembers from her ceaseless study that the plant retreats from light, so she uses a magic spell to produce a bright illumination from her wand. The Devil's Snare suggests that what is soft and easy is sometimes a trap and that evil and oppression can be overcome by the Light of Knowledge.

3. Next the companions come to a chamber at whose far end is a door that can be unlocked only by one particular key out of a flock of winged keys flying wildly around the room. Harry, who is an expert at catching things while flying on a broom, finds it. The symbolism is obvious: we need the key of knowledge to open the door to inner reality, but that key is illusive and can be captured only by one who has trained to accomplish the task.

4. In the chamber beyond the door, the companions find a giant chessboard on which they must become pieces in a game of Wizard Chess, in which captured pieces are smashed to bits by the capturing piece. Ron, who is the chess master of the group, directs their moves and finally sacrifices himself so that Harry can checkmate the opposing king. The chess game echoes that in Alice through the Looking Glass and is a common metaphor for the game of life. Ron's heroic self-sacrifice for the welfare of others puts him in the class of future bodhisattvas, who sacrifice their own welfare for the good of all.

5. Leaving the unconscious Ron behind, in the next chamber Harry and Hermione find a huge and hideous troll that must be overcome. However, the troll has already been vanquished—in fact by the three companions, who had knocked it unconscious in an earlier encounter above ground when it had invaded the school halls. Overcoming the monster is gaining control of our own shadow or Dweller on the Threshold, the embodiment of our faults, sins, and bestial nature. Once that control has been established, however, the shadowy troll is no longer a challenge, but can be dealt with as necessary.

6. In the penultimate chamber, Harry and Hermione are trapped between walls of fire that can be passed only by solving a riddle. Hermione, the brainy one of the threesome, solves it. Harry sends her back to tend to Ron as he goes on alone. The fires of passion can be quenched only by knowing the answer to the riddle of life. That knowledge is gained by the truly intelligent and is, in fact, what intelligence means. We must use our intelligence to pass to the inmost chamber of our quest, and that final passage must be made by each person alone, for the final initiation in the quest is a solitary one, experienced without any aid except that which each of us has within ourselves.

7. In the final chamber, Harry finds both Voldemort, who has corrupted one of the teachers at Hogwarts and occupied his body, and also the Mirror of Erised, which must be used to find the Stone. The Mirror of Erised shows those who look into it, not a reflection of reality, but rather an image of what they most desire. It is the great illusion, and one must know its secret not to be trapped by it. To find the Philosopher's Stone in the Mirror, one must want to find it, but not to use it for oneself. Harry finds the Stone, not to use it for himself, but to save it from evil use by Voldemort. Through Harry's act of selfless courage, the Philosopher's Stone, like Tolkien's One Ring, is destroyed so that it can never fall into Voldemort's hands. True wealth and true immortality are achieved only by those who are motivated by selfless desire. And that is the great secret of the quest.

Hogwarts Lessons of Life

In the course of discovering the great secret, Harry learns a good many lessons, as do the readers with him. Although this is fantastic fiction, its messages are realistic fact. We can identify seven lessons, three of which are preliminary:

1. There is another level of truth than everyday Muggle reality. We are all orphans in this world and Harry Potters in the School of Wisdom, learning the truths of that level.

2. Master teachers, like Dumbledore, are available in the school of life to guide us in our learning.

3. From those teachers, we learn to face Truth, but not foolishly:

   [Harry:] "Sir, there are some other things I'd like to know, if you can tell me . . . things I want to know the truth about . . . ."

   "The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." (216)

   When he starts to ask about Voldemort, Harry calls him by the euphemism "You-Know-Who," which most people use for him, because they are afraid even to name the great evil Wizard, but Dumbledore corrects him:

   Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. (216)

Following those three preliminary lessons are four principal lessons:

1. Discrimination. We must choose our own way on the Path of life: Dumbledore tells Harry: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities" (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 245). The Mahatma Letters tell us: "We have one word for all aspirants: TRY." And in the spiritual guidebook, At the Feet of the Master, the first of four qualifications for entering on the Path is "Discrimination." Moreover, the third Truth of the White Lotus (from another spiritual guidebook, Light on the Path) tells us: "We are each our own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to ourselves; the decreer of our life, our reward, our punishment." This lesson is therefore that of making an effort—of trying—to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the less good and the better, between the transitory and the eternal.

2. Desirelessness. The second principle lesson is that the world is mayavic or illusory, and therefore we must pass through it free from selfish desire. The Mirror of Erised is a symbol of mayavic desire. The word "Erised" is "Desire" spelled backwards, hence wrong desire. The Mirror has an inscription carved around its top: "Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi," which is a backward spelling for "I show not your face but your heart's desire." Those who look into this Mirror do not see themselves as they are, but rather the illusion of what they want to be and do and have. Dumbledore explains the Mirror:

   The happiest man on earth would be able to use the mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is,he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is. . . . It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. . . . However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible. (157)

   The Mirror is a symbol of Maya, the Great Illusion, this desire-governed and motivated world.In At the Feet of the Master, the second qualification for entering the Path is"Desirelessness," that is, freedom from personal desire or, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, acting without desire for the fruit of the action.

3. Points of Conduct. The third lesson is that we must live our lives according to Right Principles, rather than arbitrary rules. Harry often violates school rules, but never moral principles. The third qualification in At the Feet of the Master is "Six Points of Conduct": Self-control as to the mind, Self-control in action, Tolerance, Cheerfulness, One-pointedness, and Confidence—especially confidence in the Plan, which is what those who know, know. And those who know, know that death is part of the Plan. When Harry worries about the effect of the loss of the Philosopher's Stone on the good philosopher-alchemist who achieved it and who must die without it, Dumbledore explains:

   After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was not really such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all—the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them. (215)

4. Love. Harry was saved from the assaults of Evil, both in his infancy and on his quest, by the great love his mother had for him. Dumbledore tells Harry:

   Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand it is love. He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign . . . to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection for ever. . . . Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good. (216)

The fourth qualification in At the Feet of the Master for entering the Path is Love.

These are the lessons that Harry Potter learns in his first year at Hogwarts, and in the first stage of his education in life: to discriminate in making his choices; to do the right thing without personal desire; to be guided by intelligent principles in life, rather than arbitrary rules; and to have confidence in what Dante in The Divine Comedy called "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars." They are Discrimination, Desirelessness, Good Conduct, and Love.

Those are not bad lessons for any of us to learn at the beginning, or at any time, of life.

John Algeo is Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he taught Fantasy Literature in addition to his academic field of the history and structure of the English language. He edited the sixth volume of the Cambridge History of the English Language (2001) and is Vice President of the international Theosophical Society.