The Bible and the Latest United Nations Report and…

Recently a UN report predicted that nearly 70 percent of arable land will be subject to desertification by the year 2025, and, having a somewhat erratic mind, I was reminded of the story of Sarah and Abraham, who wandered in a desert and sought water, an ancient symbol for the origin of life.

The story of Sarah and Abraham is a special one, not only because it is a legend about the origin of the Arabs and the Semites, not only because it is crucial to Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism (After all, “Abraham” is almost a perfect anagram for “Brahman,” a Hindu priest, and, as we know, Abraham does some priest-like things…).

Sarah and Abraham are special because, in the Bible, they are the first to laugh and the only ones to laugh at God. Sadly, it wasn’t God’s intention to make them laugh; they laughed at God’s promise that Sarah, at the age of 90, would bear a child to Abraham, who was 100. Now, as you know, laughing at God is hardly a habit or character trait among any religious folks, so I treat this story as a prophecy about the kind of folk who are already coming.

Who is Sarah, the once-barren wife of Abraham? Among other things, Sarah is also African. She is also the Sahara. If I were to tell someone that the Sahara will one day cease to be barren, that it will be made into a garden, people would laugh. And yet, it is both possible and necessary, at least, according to environmental monitors and permaculture pioneers.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/04-0

Suspense as the arch-genre of the world

Suspense, or, the building of expectation, is a crucial ingredient in many works of fiction and non-fiction. The trick is to give readers a trace of what they want, a foreshadowing of something, a hook, and so on. Once the reader is hooked, the author cunningly reels them up a series of minor conflicts, ever closer to the amazing climax before heading down to the wondrous, longed-for resolution. Dogs will chase bones in much the same way. This voluntary submission to hope is arguably the essence of what I, as a writer, resist. I resist it because I have no ability to hope, or yearn; at least, not on good days when laughter, wisdom and cunning are with me. On those days, I have plans, intentions, and a happiness that cannot be suspended.

In some genres, like journalism, a mild form of suspense is created without effort on the writer’s part, as readers come out of sheer curiosity, already addicted to journalistic gossip, eager to escape from both ennui and the overwhelming question, forever hoping they will not be affected by the news, or find themselves in the news, or just the contrary.

Beyond the written word, suspense and hope are nearly omnipresent. Shopping is exciting because its faithful minions never know exactly what they’ll buy, or why they’ll buy it, and when they have it, they’re dying to see how it will improve their value in the eyes of others.

Hope is precisely what should be overcome, cast out of Pandora’s Box … and yes, out of the book, as “book” was derived from “box.”

But what would fiction look like if it were entirely stripped of suspense? How could it still be interesting? Let our hopes be directed here, towards hope’s “end.”

Buffet’s Toilet Paper

Months of reading about the financial crisis have led me to conclude that what has happened is simply a logical outcome of the use of money; and, that this is not a problem of capitalism but of a natural outcome of the foolishness that is the root of all monetary transactions.

Pretty seashells, precious metals, these were the first currencies—and by currencies I mean frauds, for fraud is the essence of money. The first uses of otherwise useless but pretty objects as stores of value may have originated with a childlike understanding of the value of pretty things. Nevertheless, whether value is ascribed to seashells or paper money, such object contain not only symbolic value but an assumed real value, or trusted value. For the creator/discoverer they permit a form of culturally sanctioned theft. The person who accepts the seashell in exchange for food does not think the seashell is a promise to pay something actually valuable in the future; no, the seashell is accepted as payment in full because it’s assumed that the same con can be played on someone else, so if we all con each other and everyone can find seashells the system will be fair. Perhaps, but today a few people control the creation and the origin of money. Today, money is “created” with lightning speed and dumped into banks, who profit from it by simply charging the innocent interest for its use. Consequently, the amount of money in the economy constantly increases, not because the economy becomes more valuable, but because more money is constantly loaned out and needed to pay the interest. This is half the reason for our obsession with growth: growth is necessary to pay debts. And, if all this isn’t enough, today people are gambling, or betting, on other betters. This means that today debts are considered valuable and people buy them—sometimes with loans—as derivatives, shadow shit and other hocus-pocus crap, so that money becomes even more worthless.

In short, today more than ever, we delude ourselves thinking that money is a trustworthy thing, has a noble origin, and has a reliable value.

And yet, even if money’s creation and distribution were regulated, why do we need it? Could we rid ourselves of this bad joke, this medium of our perpetually suspended disbelief, this tool of consensual theft? How can an economy comprised of thousands of specialized professionals manage without money? The old barter system would never do. The current system cannot survive without money.

Good. I have another system in mind. Economics, the market place, a culture obsessed with the pursuit of profit and technological development: these things have no value in the world I seek.

Life of Pi: A Fable

The Canada Council of the Arts has a long history of supporting “Canadian” work, but it may have been bamboozled by Yann Martel. Although Life of Pi, his 2001 novel, flatters the Canadian ego by presenting Canada as safe haven for refugees, which is a remarkable zoological fact, since no other animal species is known to have groups that welcome “foreigners.” Still, there is much irony here. Martel makes Canada a refuge from Ghandi’s noble experiment and, on the surface, has little to say about Canada.

Pi, or Piscine Molitor Patel, is the living embodiment of the liberal, new age belief that all religions are essentially the same goodness. Thus, Piscine practices and believes three religions simultaneously, without prejudice. Wow. How Canadian is that? In Canada, land of the multicultural dream, where different cultures are encouraged to co-exist, such feats almost seem possible, even while religious leaders make no effort to share temples, harmonize doctrine, integrate a bit and not be so damned territorial.

In the multicultural experiment, baboons, zebras, hyenas and tigers co-exist with humans. Actually, that’s not quite true. While various cultures do exist in Canada, it’s largely as décor; the real substance of Canada’s culture is cannibalism—I mean the dog-eat-dog market place of the capitalist system. Anyone who can’t handle it can jump onto the social safety net—i.e. the raft, and feed on Norwegian biscuits (Norway is a rather socialist country).

We have about as much chance of turning our minds into havens for the peaceful co-existence of three distinct religions as we have in co-existing with a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat.

We are all animals. Even in Canada, we have yet to evolve a distinctly human social-political structure. We are still unable to live with alpha leaders and territorialism. Our Prime Minister is our Supreme Circus Director, or a kind of French cook who oversees the devouring of our mother, I mean the Earth. The corporate clan leaders are so many hyenas, or, wait, so many animal tamers who control their willing employees by rationing out token wages.

The Author’s Note warns readers that Life of Pi is “a story that will make you believe in God,” but that was a fine joke. Consider what happens to Piscine’s religious fever? It peaks, regresses into medievalism and obsessive praying as his physical condition deteriorates and as soon as his condition improves, he is miraculously cured, and God gets no thanks from him for his rescue. For that he has already thanked Reason and the imagination that entertained us.

The sinking of the Tsimtsum does not bode well for religion or mysticism, as a good Kabbalist—I mean terminologist—should recognize.

Has Yann Martel pulled the wool over our eyes? Thrown a lemon-pie-fable at our politicians? He’s written a courageous book with many parallels to great literature, jokes for philosophers and a fabulous fable the conflict between religion and zoology, reason and imagination, reality and fantasy … conflicts with no proffered resolution, and where Canada, refuge of machines and bricks, is an illusion.

 

 

King Solomon’s Wisdom

Was King Suleiman (excuse my spelling) wise? If you know what being wise entails, you will know that it does not permit one to live with hundreds of wives. Such an arrangement is more suitable to a honeybee. So, to be wise, either Suleiman must neglect all his wives or fail in the pursuit and maintenance of wisdom. Yet people believe it’s possible to do both. Well, the Bible is not above testing our gullibility; indeed, the Bible may be the largest and most intricate of such tests.

Significantly, the Bible’s compilers did not include more stories about Suleiman’s wisdom, though more existed in Jewish folklore and mystical literature. For example, in extant literature Suleiman’s wisdom is tested by the Queen of Sheba in a test he passes by using his knowledge of the relationship between flowers and bees. It’s a charming story that testifies to the king’s knowledge of nature; consequently, it was excluded by the Bible’s compilers, for they took great pains to represent nature as a curse.

The Bible does include a story that has no precedent in Jewish folklore: the story of Suleiman mediating between the two women fighting for possession of a single child. Surely a man capable of “managing” 700 wives can keep two women happy? Consider his solution: he threatens to cut the child in two on the assumption that the true mother will be the first to cry out against this, as if a cunning thief would not guess his intent from the outset. Of course, according to the text, his test worked, the risk paid off, and few ask the overwhelming question.

Let us consider Suleiman’s solution and apply it to the situation in Palestine/Israel. Here we have two nations arguing for possession of the “Holy Land.” The two nations attend United Nations meetings and nothing is resolved and many, many people suffer. Well, perhaps it’s time we identified the land’s rightful owners by threatening to drop an atomic bomb on Palestine/Israel if the two nations don’t stop fighting.

The problem with this kind of “final solution” approach is that it doesn’t address the underlying problem that both land and children are seen as property, property that cannot be shared for mutual benefit because brotherhood is lacking and motherhood is still mired in animal instincts, where the family is determined by biological descent, and the spiritual notion of family is absent.

Ironically, the Bible sets a good spiritual example on this subject. It is not a pure book created by a single person and belongs to two peoples, Jews and Christians, and not only to them. In fact, the story of The True Mother was largely stolen, I mean borrowed, from a Tibetan folktale about a man who resolves a dispute over a child between two his two wives. The man gives each woman one of the child’s arms and asks them to pull, which they do even though it threatens to tear the child in two. Well, the child goes to the woman who lost courage first, and so she is assumed to be the true mother, as if it never happens that a biological mother can be cruel and abusive to her child. Thus goes the prejudice in all folklore, and the Bible, too. However, blood is no guarantee of love.

The land, or soil, is also a living thing, perhaps more like a mother than a child, and today the fight for her possession is between those who actually want to destroy her, who love her only as tourists and artists, and those who are ready to live and die with her.

Elie Wiesel’s Night

Elie Wiesel’s Night is a poignant cry in the night, a record of a nightmare, and, ultimately, a work of historical fiction. After all, who could remember the words of so many strangers under such horrible conditions? Body and spirit were nearly ground to dust. Moreover, Night, like every testimony of history, is first and foremost a testimony of the author’s state of mind at the moment of writing.

Is Night literature? It is an artistic reflection on the Holocaust, but can any amount of art turn a disaster into something healthy? Why healthy? At least, we can expect literature to be healthy. But Night is more likely to spawn nightmares and stain and corrupt the word “night” so much so that the word will have to be replaced with a new word.

One does not overcome history by turning back to reflect on it, as Lot’s wife did when she turned back to look at the fires of Sodom, for in doing so she turned into a pillar of salt—a synechdoche, perhaps, for tears. Nor does one overcome history through ignorance.

In Ulysses Stephen Daedalus says he is trying to escape the nightmare of history, and he fails, but in Finnegan’s Wake he succeeds, he succeeds by vanishing from a narrative that is not a narrative, a narrative that cannot accommodate human beings, at least, not the illusion of persons who exist as unchanging identities. And that movement may well be Stephen’s promised moral for humanity: destroy the illusion of stasis, of identity, of unchanging phenomena.

The “hero” of Night, Elie Wiesel, is transformed by the Holocaust experience. He loses his faith and seems to grow stronger because of it. Unfortunately, the Holocaust hardly provides the conditions necessary for human beings to grow strong enough to grow healthy and whole and free of illusions. For that one must have ideal conditions: schools, at least teachers and an atmosphere largely free of stress.

Ironically, the pivotal moment in Elie’s loss of faith, i.e. in his loss of illusions, is his hallucination/vision of the Angel of Death. Why does this angel come during the Holocaust? Plenty of Jews and others lose their faith under much more humane circumstances. I lost my own freely, under conditions of plenty. The truth is that the very Jewish Angel of Death (excuse the personification) is always waiting for us, waiting to be confronted and understood. And perhaps it is precisely our refusal to own up to Death, a Death freed of religious trappings that prevents us from understanding the universal, that prevents us from changing and paradoxically brings upon us the deadly, mortifying Revenge of Psyche wherever humanity destroys itself.

I am not suggesting that we forget the Holocaust; I am suggesting that we strip it of its historical dressings so that we can better understand the universal, the kernel. Only in the shallowest sense does that mean we forget the Holocaust.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel identified Israel as “the only nation in the world whose existence is threatened.” How dated that claim sounds in the age of global warming, rising oceans and … well, meteors. In arguing for the preservation of any nation, Elie Wiesel does us no favors. Nations have always served the forces of division and borders are largely the products of empire building. Nationhood itself will one day be a dated concept, replaced, pehraps, by a nobler construct, something more flexible, rational and humane, something born not from greed, or, in Israel’s case—desperation…

Some peoples do not even have “nations” – I speak of the world’s coming artists, comedians, philosophers and all children of joy… They too are being liquidated, aborted, every day, by the forces of the world, since the beginning of civilization. Who will speak for them?

Shakespeare, Or, How to Destroy an Elizabethan Idol

Voltaire and Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare’s works on moral grounds, Nietzsche did so on aesthetic grounds, and yet I went through five years of high school and undergrad and graduate university “English” studies without reading or hearing a single criticism of Shakespeare. Blessed is the life of an idol, and the “priests” who earn their daily bread lecturing on the gospel of Shakespeare must be the last to … bite themselves. Today, literary criticism is a kind of archaeology of bones, an ivory-tower journalism that disguises its irrelevance, cowardice and laziness under a veneer of objectivity and jargon.

To be fair, perhaps the idol to be destroyed is not Shakespeare but Elizabethan Prejudice, which Shakespeare’s works were crafted to appease and validate. To see the appalling extent to which Shakespeare has done this, we must divest ourselves of the gross generalization that all literature is intrinsically dignified and uplifting. Since the right to free speech is relatively recent, Tolstoy and Voltaire may have enjoyed freedoms that Shakespeare never tasted; therefore, we can hardly be surprised that Shakespeare’s work is largely a flattering mirror for Elizabethan Prejudice.

Now for an apparently rhetorical question: How could Shakespeare’s audience enjoy his plays? As this is meant to be a serious questions, let me rephrase it: How could Elizabethean, plutocratic, white, male, Church-of-England aristocrats enjoy Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet or any other Shakespearean drama? Let us think outside our relatively liberal 21^st century box, cease viewing our history as star-struck tourists, and consider all the prejudices of those aforesaid Elizabethan men: hatred of Catholics, hatred of all non-Christians, hatred of other races, hatred of other nations, hatred of women. These and other prejudices are all validated by Shakespeare’s works, and this is not so surprising—not if one considers who paid for Shakespeare’s productions, and—not if one considers that Shakespeare’s world was marked by violent religious persecutions, and—not if one considers that his world did not afford dramatists the right to criticize its bigoted ruling class.

OTHELLO

Shakespeare knew how to capture the interest of his privileged audience. A black – becomes general of a Christian army and marries a Christian woman? This is a challenge to popular prejudice if we ever saw one, or is it?

Sadly, Othello was likely never intended to challenge Elizabethan prejudices as much as to confirm them. If Othello is a good man, a trustworthy man, an honest-dealing man and not a superstitious and sex-obsessed beast, than why does his name allude to brothel and bordello – two synonyms for houses of prostitution while the former actually meant prostitute? It doesn’t help that Shakespeare elicits laughter by having Othello suggest that sex is not a factor in his affair, for he admits he has lost his manly potency. And the matter is not improved by the fact that Othello married Desdemona in secret, behind her father’s back; this fact merely validates the base prejudice that minorities cannot be trusted and ought to be kept “outside”.

Although Othello succeeds in disproving the claim that he used magic to seduce Desdemona, the play validates the Elizabethan stereotype that all Africans are superstitious because Othello is obsessed with the magical properties of his Egyptian handkerchief.

As for Desdemona, please, she’s no feminist heroine, unless rebellion alone qualifies women for the prestigious title. Desdemona’s name contains sufficient warning: demon. A devil, she rebelled against the father and married outside European, aristocratic blood. No audience of Elizabethan nobles—and peasants too—would ever tolerate her being portrayed as a heroine. She is a demon and as such she is not normal, and that is putting it rather mildly in light of her death scene, in which she continues to live and even speak, with no sign of panic, well after her husband starts to smother her.

Furthermore, Shakespeare seemingly warns his priggish audience, be careful with your daughters! Do not invite the Other (the oppressed, the slave, the…) into your home, lest he reveals the horrible truth about how he and his people are abused and your pure, innocent and impressionable daughters are won over to the devil’s side!!!! Eek.

As for Iago, what is he but some greedy, ambitious, money-grubbing ladder climber? Elizabethan nobles would have spat on him and the entire category of men who pursue money and status by means other than war and marriage. Still, though despicable, Iago cannot be executed for causing the deaths of Othello and Desdemona and some other dubious characters.

ROMEO AND JULIET

What a bizarre, unfathomable display of emotional disability. A thirteen- and fourteen-year-old commit suicide over love? Well, why not? Nowadays Korean children of the same age commit suicide over school grades, and American children of similar age go on killing rampages, so maybe Romeo and Juliet is not a fantasy, and children like Romeo and Juliet did exist in Elizabethan times.

But what was the attraction to Shakespeare’s audience? Did this and other Shakespearean tragedies appeal to the morbid fantasies? The Romantic era was still a ways off. Did they treat the play as a warning for aristocratic families to make peace amongst themselves? How could that make sense if, in Elizabethan England, feudalism and spats between aristocratic families had been largely subdued by a powerful national monarchy and government (Civility: A Cultural History. Benet Davetian)? Well, consider that the play is set in post-Renaissance Italy, where national unity was relatively lacking and feuding between powerful families remained in vogue. But Romeo and Juliet is more than a scornful critique of the uncooperative and belligerent Italian spirit; and it is more than an affirmation of the Elizabethan spirit of aristocratic restraint; on close inspection, Romeo and Juliet is first and foremost an attack on the Italian—or Latin—religion.

A new question: Oh Romeo, why did Shakespeare make you such a monster? Barely a teen, yet you lament that Rosaline defended her virginity from your advances too zealously! Immediately afterwards, you kiss Juliet at first sight, commit two murders, receive an official banishment from the city, and take Juliet into the grave with you. Monstrous villain! That—at least, is what Shakespeare’s Elizabethan, Church of England audience must have thought.

In Shakespeare’s time and country, marriage between 13- and 14-year-olds was becoming rare, so his aristocratic audience could enjoy a sense of moral superiority over Juliet’s mother and nurse (the women, of course!) when they pressure Juliet to marry at the age of 13. That sense of superiority would only be magnified by the Capulet’s insistence that Juliet should marry someone named Paris, whose name was already associated with the Trojan adulterer and—in Shakespeare’s time—was likely associated with the abhorrent religion of Catholic France, Paris having been its capital since 508 A.D.

Romeo Montague was not named by accident: he is Rome-o, and therefore he is also semantically associated with the then stigmatized Church of Rome, the Catholic Church. And Rome is legendary for having been built on hills, or mounts; and Montague is a rare English surname from the French meaning peaked mountain. Anyway, the Catholic connection explains why Romeo compares Juliet to a shrine, a saint and a pilgrim; and it also explains why Lady Capulet speaks of Saint Peter’s Church. Etceteras.

J-uliet is Rome(o)’s J-esus. Rosaline is the eternal virgin, or rose, the flower traditionally symbolic of the Virgin Mary, supreme idol among some Catholics. The nurse hints at this kind of letter-play when she says,

“Doth not

rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter?

[…]Ah. mocker! that’s the dog’s name; R is for

the—No; I know it begins with some other

letter:—and she hath the prettiest sententious of

it[…] (Act 2:4, 1351-52, 1362-64)

Some other letter? She speaks obscurely. R is for the—what? The Romans or with the Catholics of Rome, who are identified by and synonymous with rosemary, that is, with the Rose and with (the Virgin) Mary?

Quietly interspersed in this Elizabethan stew of popular prejudices, Shakespeare placed hints and warnings about the education of young people and the danger of a secular form of idolatry that calls itself Love. In fact, Romeo and Julie, Othello and many other Shakespearean plays, are partly intended to promote and validate the conservative prejudice against romantic love and the conservative or noble tradition—the tradition that favored arranged marriages.

KING LEAR

What on Earth could have attracted Elizabethan aristocrats to this exhibition of royal madness and dementia? Were they interested in learning some deep moral lesson about the nature of the human mind? Of course not! They watched because Lear’s exhibition of madness and dementia serves to caricature anyone who worships Apollo and the gods of Nature—and, by extension—it serves to caricature all non-Christians.

King Lear invokes the name of Apollo and is quickly reprimanded by the moral-monster, Kent, for taking his god’s name in vain. Lear believes in the visible gods of the Greek pantheon and he sees nothing beyond the visible world except “nothing,” so “nothing” becomes a recurring motif in the play. Lear’s problem would have resonated deeply with the anti-Catholic sentiments of Shakespeare’s time as part of the argument against the Catholic Church was that it worshipped visible objects like statues of saints and virgins. The wisdom of the Protestant, Church of England belief that a living God exists beyond the visible world is also indirectly touted through mad Lear’s ‘failings.’

Gloucester expresses his despair with the words, “the gods / They kill us for their sport” – a line with little force in a world far removed from state-sanctioned acts of religious persecution, but it was surely onerous and indicative of a grave delusion to Elizabethans.

As for Cordelia’s marriage to the King of France, this either flatters the British sensibility or—more likely—it appals that sensibility because France was officially Catholic and—in Shakespeare’s time—it’s enemy. The Catholic connection explains why Cordelia’s tears are compared to the “holy water” used in Catholic ceremonies. In other words, while we moderns may lament Cordelia’s undeserved death, Shakespeare’s audience would have seen it as a perfectly deserved punishment for a woman who married into the blood of heretics.

Like the other Shakespearean tragedies, King Lear is less a tragedy than a national anthem for bigots, but it distinguishes itself from the other ‘tragedies’ by being half a comedy or mockery. King Lear’s mockery of pagan and ‘unconverted’ kings begins with Lear’s name, which is a homophone for leer – “a sidelong glance suggestive of sexual desire or malice.” The old king is further made to seem ridiculous in virtually everything he says and does: his decision to divide his kingdom before his death but during his dementia, his foolish test of love, his abuse at the hands of his daughters, his voluntary surrender of his best daughter to the king of France (France was not in England’s good books in Shakespeare’s time), his banishment of the only man who cared about him, his failure to recognize the same man in disguise, his talking to nature and to himself, his invocations of Apollo (judging from ancient Greek sources, Apollo was a barbaric and vengeful god whose idea of helping amounted to producing disasters.), and—for good measure—the old man’s failure to recognize his good daughter disguised as the fool, as there’s good reason to believe Shakespeare intended them to be played by the same actor. Similarly, Gloucester’s attempted suicide scene is a grotesque comedy. After all this—is King Lear still a tragedy? Sure, as much as all of Shakespeare`s works mirror the tragedy of Elizabethan values.

Finally, consider the bastard, poor Edmund. Does Shakespeare’s drama attempt to win sympathy and understanding for children born out of wedlock? Ha! You must be kidding. Shakespeare caters to every noble, blue-blooded, monogamistic bigot in his audience with the first line that springs from Edmund’s mouth: “Thou, nature, art my goddess.” You see, he’s not a very Christian bastard, is he? And doesn’t that prove something? Doesn’t that validate a certain prejudice or two? Upon hearing his opening line, Shakespeare’s righteous audience might have thought, “Heathen! Godless, unconverted, swine!” And Shakespeare intentionally plays Edmund into their hands knowing that they would never tolerate a play that challenges their prejudices about children born to ‘unfaithful’ women. And so, not only does he make Edmund a worshipper of the ancient nature goddess, but he makes Edmund a believer in astrology, a forger, a destroyer of marriages, a murderer, a speaker of prophetic gibberish, and … in case this isn’t enough, he makes Edmund utter his own condemnations.

HAMLET

Hamlet is first and foremost a religiously biased play. This should be obvious from the name of its tragic failure, Hamlet, whose name, in Shakespeare’s time, meant a small village without a church. Consequently, Hamlet’s name would have conjured up popular prejudices against the unconverted.

Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s purity and his anger about her quick remarriage is patently Catholic, and, thanks to King Henry VIII, the entire Catholic “problem” was deeply associated with the issue of marriage, divorce, remarriage and purity. Shakespeare’s audience could hardly have watched Hamlet without being reminded of Henry VIII break with the Roman Catholic Church and the cult of the Virgin Mary. (Hamlet’s mother’s name, Gertrude, comes from the Germanic word for marriage, and so is the Germanic equivalent of Mary, whose name could have conjured up the hated image of the pro-Catholic Mary I, Queen Elizabeth’s immediate predecessor. Though Shakespeare’s audience was likely unaware of English-German word play, its presence is consistent with my reading).

Hamlet’s visions of ghosts serves both to appeal to the latent superstitions of the Elizabethan aristocrat and to mock the superstitious leanings of the unconverted. His dead father’s ghost’s complaint that he was condemned to purgatory because he didn’t have the opportunity to ask for a trendy and expensive Catholic deathbed absolution would—in the eyes of an Elizabethan audience—mark him as a Catholic.

Hamlet further fulfills the negative stereotype by neglecting his studies and behaving like a madman towards Ophelia, whom he reputedly approached at night, uninvited, in the manner of a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, with his tights around his ankles. This “abominable” behaviour satisfied the bigoted audience’s inclination to demean the unconverted and the small-town, uneducated riffraff.

MACBETH

Two Shakespeares exist: on the one hand, a Shakespeare who catered to the demands of his narrow-minded audiences, on the other hand, the Shakespeare who wrote to the future.

The first Shakespeare was a brilliant caterer who satisfied the theatre-going public’s demand for lust, violence, murder and conflict. He gave his Elizabethan audiences what they wanted; he appealed to all their lowest fears and desires and he made sure never to offend the ruling class. I understand: he was not independently wealthy.

The first Shakespeare risked upsetting his good white, male patrons with Macbeth, a portrait of a heinously corrupt monster who also happens to be a white man with a decorated military history.  Under no circumstances could Shakespeare have allowed Macbeth to voluntarily, by his own will, murder his king and the king’s sons. Such treason would have produced a bad taste in the mouths of his noble patrons, those good white men and women. What does Shakespeare do to ameliorate the plot? He brings three witches to the rescue. They trick Macbeth into committing his crimes. This is guaranteed to appeal to the sexist, superstitious and Christian-biased beliefs of the noble Elizabethan mind. Hecate, the chief witch, even calls Macbeth a “son astray” just to make sure no one thinks a true Christian could be seduced by witches (btw, the irony of Hecate’s reproaches to her subordinates is sublime). And—just to make sure no common man was offended by Macbeth’s actions, Shakespeare made sure Lady Macbeth’s overpowering rhetoric gives the audience one more scapegoat on which to heap the white man’s crimes.

The second Shakespeare encrypted his critique of England and Queen Elizabeth in his ugliest tragedy, Macbeth. This is why the play bears next to no resemblance to the historical Macbeth, King of Scotland, and refers to another beth, —namely Queen Elizabeth (Beth is the diminutive for Elizabeth), the female tyrant who here serves as a metonym for the murderous, imperialistic British Empire that still washes its hands of its colonial nightmare. The important difference, here, is that the British imperialistic spirit is not driven by witchcraft but by priestcraft and its religious prophecies of future kingdoms, military victories and glory. But, in fact, the difference between witchcraft and priestcraft is entirely illusory, as Macbeth’s visions seem almost lifted out of the Book of Revelations. As historians know, Britain thought and still thinks of itself as the “house of God” – that is, to make a Hebrew pun, it thinks of itself as  “Elijah-beth.”

What, is it true, that we please our audiences best when we give them sickness and sin? Shall we ever take the “conflict” out of out plots and enjoy a little sunlight and fresh air?

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Did Shakespeare make a serious effort to diffuse the anti-Semitism of the Elizabethans with a sympathetic portrait of a Jew or with a general critique of those values to which Jews, no less than others, are beholden? No. Instead we have Shylock. His name likely evoked ‘wedlock’ and thus foreshadowed the Shylock’s loss of Jessica, his Jewish daughter, to the ‘heathen’ Lorenzo. The name may also have evoked ‘Warlock,’ which in Shakespeare’s time referred to the devil as well as to witches.

Shylock is a type of the predatory banker and financier whose greed and hatred of humanity drives him to embody a monstrous parody of Christianity: instead of receiving the flesh of Christ for the purpose of receiving grace from spiritual debt, he demands Antonio’s flesh as a payment for the financial debt of others. Could anything have seemed more abhorrent to a Christian audience?

Shylock’s daughter is named Jessica, a name—like her father’s—which Shakespeare seems to have invented, as if actual Jewish names were lacking. Why Jessica? Was it to invoke the then notorious Jesuits or Jesus Christ and, thereby, to foreshadow the girl’s marriage to a Christian (admittedly, Antonio would be a Catholic Christian, but even in Elizabethan times that would have provided a relative pleasure, for we can safely assume that even then the prejudice against Jews was stronger than the prejudice against Catholics.). Alack—what if Lorenzo converted to Judaism? There’s no evidence that either side converted, but it’s clear that Jessica is operating in defiance of her caricatured father, and so the whole affair suggests that she is saved by Lorenzo, whose name has historical connections to the papacy and to a saint.

Who is Portia? Jessica’s friend! Ha-ha-ha! A Jewish girl befriends a girl whose name means pig, it being the feminine form of the Roman family name Porcius! And the low comedy doesn’t stop here, as three ships come into port.

THE TEMPEST

The Tempest is a most pleasant fairytale about Prospero, the Duke of Milan, a man who was a disciple of the forbidden, very unchristian, black arts. In the moral context of Elizabethan England’s religious mania, which was not so different from the spirit of the Inquisition that marred much of Catholic Europe, any disciple of the black arts deserves whatever suffering he receives. Therefore, the Duke’s forced expulsion to an island is just and good. And, although the Duke defeats his enemies, Shakespeare quite prudently does not let him return to power in Milan without the Duke first renouncing magic.

Voltaire Tolstoy

PREFACE to The Literary Witchcraft of J.K. Rowling: A Counter-Spell for Harry Potter Readers

I

“Don’t ask questions” – that was the rule at the Dursley household, but its power extends far beyond.

[T]he trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them. (TPS 215)

Astonishingly, the Potter series has not inspired a wave of conversions to paganism, and the inquisitors and torches have retreated. But before we give the proverbial sigh of relief, let us ask some serious questions: What if even graver problems than witchcraft exist? What if we discovered that Rowling’s beloved books represented a powerful potion produced by mixing 1) the reality-sweetening techniques of propaganda and advertising with 2) the perceptions and feelings of someone suffering from a number of mental disorders?

And what if these questions hint at the secret of Harry Potter’s powerful spell on the modern child’s imagination?

What does the Potter series have in common with advertising? Just consider this powerful paradox: Harry’s fantasy comprises an unparalleled amount of the real world, and all of it seems wonderful. Gadgets, banks, trains, sports, gambling, automobiles, headmasters and so on—all apparently lifted out of the 20^th century and sweetened with a pinch of fantasy or humour or both. Harry Potter doesn’t just reproduce the material stuff of modern reality, it reproduces all our weaknesses and ills: violence, child abuse, verbal threats and insults, deception, greed, vanity, and so. And, what’s worse, most of it is also sweetened by the fantasy setting or humour.

I can hear my critics laughing, “Oh please, it’s just a children’s fantasy series! Don’t spoil the fun!” I’m sorry, but when a children’s series makes beer drinking, bad tempers, violence, the exploitation of animals and workers, seem ‘interesting,’ cute and even funny, then we must give pause. If we can criticize corporations for pursuing young consumers with gigantic marketing machines, why shouldn’t we be critical when a talented author pursues or attracts young readers by making violent conflicts, a dangerous sport (Quidditch), underage driving, the banking industry and many more highly questionable behaviours and institutions seem cute, awesome, fantastical or slightly humorous? How else does one explain a series that, for example, sweetens the reality of animal abuse by making the exploitation of Harry’s mail-owl seem oh-so cute and neat? How else does one explain a series that constantly pushes readers through a revolving Reality-Fantasy door, for example, by directing our attention to real, headline problems like terrorism (see the opening pages of The Half-Blood Prince) while drawing the reader into a fantasy world whose solutions to terrorism are useless and serve only to help readers escape?

Even the issue of orphan abuse, or—to be accurate—‘Harry’ abuse, serves only to elicit pity from the reader for the hero, and that sweetens the hero, makes him seem more righteous. The spell of pity, however, leads readers to entirely overlook the psychological reading that a disturbed childhood often leads to a number of mental disorders whose symptoms closely resemble the imagined world and the real feelings and behaviour of our dear Harry Potter.

As a reading experience, Harry Potter is a sort of harried Peter Pan, a boy hero who leads his readers into a Neverland contaminated with reality. And yet, despite its contamination, his Neverland is our escape, even when that fantasy becomes a world more horrific than the world he refuses to face. Thus, in the opening pages of The Order of the Phoenix, poor Harry lies in a bed of flowers, beside the Dursley’s open window, blissfully ignoring a blaring news report about the drought and heat wave devastating the real world!! Where was his mind? Probably dreaming about Lord Voldemort.

Given Harry’s education, is it right to expect more maturity from him? I doubt it. Still, I remain ever hopeful and vigilant for the day when he returns, not necessarily to solve the world’s problems, not even to offer readers the medicine of laughter, but—simply to face and wrestle with the real…

II

People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress … the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. (Ellul. Propaganda 108)

According to Northrop Frye, “Any work of fiction written during the last two centuries will reflect the secondary and ideological concerns of its time” (Words with Power 43). Harry Potter also reflects the secondary or ideological concerns of its time. Propaganda, Jacques Ellul calls some of these concerns our Western myths. Of course, since HP is children’s literature, we can hardly expect it to overtly address ideological concerns or even express such concerns through some rebellious characters, right? Perhaps we cannot expect that, but surely a book of children’s fantasy literature does not need to recreate a world that is, culturally speaking, completely identical to ours, conserving all our bad habits with so much artistry that they seem good and normal.

Among the habits or beliefs conserved in HP are the following: that the forces of good have the right to commit violence, that animal abuse is harmless, that education must serve the economic ends and that shopping is necessary. Some of these beliefs are so deeply ingrained that people have difficulty imagining life in any other way.

Perhaps the core myth conserved by HP is the “myth of Youth [and] the myth of the Hero” (Ellul 40), and the belief that we must not “reflect on [our] actions [because] [a]ction must come from the depths of the unconscious” (181). Western media-driven propaganda reinforces these beliefs by appealing to our desire to identify with groups, heroes and political leaders (173) who do nothing to encourage independent thinking and would be embarrassed to pause and think in public for more than a second.

According to Ellul, modern propaganda creates modern democratic citizens who “repeat indefinitely ‘the sacred formulas of democracy’ while acting like a [Nazi] storm trooper” (256). This is an important point not because HP is propaganda, but because many similarities exist between Ellul’s vision of propaganda and this analysis of HP. Harry’s participation in Dumbledore’s Army is a case in point; of course they are the righteous ones striving for justice, but does anyone try to understand why Lord Voldemort exists in order to prevent an unjust culture from creating another Lord Voldemort? No.

In order to deflate the Harry Potter media hype, this paper will look at how, on the surface, HP conserves and glorifies harmful ideologies and cultural norms; while, just beneath the surface, the series mocks and parodies the same traditions it appears to conserve.

EPILOGUE

I

The seven horcruxes are the seven books of Harry Potter, and he who finds them breaks the spell of….

What if all my evidence was fabricated? What if my arguments are slipshod? What if I have slipped into my own esoteric fantasy world? Honestly, I do not worry. Ultimately, if literary criticism is to have any relevance beyond books, the moral questions raised by this critique must be valuable whether they are relevant to Harry Potter or not. The structures and thought processes exposed by my illuminated HP should have value whether they exist in HP or not, and if they do not exist, perhaps they should. Neither literature nor literary criticism should be held hostage to empiricism.

What did Rowling intend? Why did she write an amalgam, a kind of parcel whose wondrous wrapping enthrals the unwary, uncritical and unprepared reader, and whose uncanny contents, if revealed, might produce firm and resounding denials?

What did Rowling intend by cooking up her powerful potion of pity, fear, righteous anger, humour, power, grandiose delusions and glory? Was it a calculated exploitation of children’s basest needs? If so, why does a careful inspection of the potion reveal a level of meaning that completely contradicts the meaning experienced by passive readers?

Perhaps the divided text reflects Joanne Rowling’s own history, a history of a divided person; a person struggling to reconcile humanitarian ideals with the acquisition of immense wealth; a person who throws money both at luxury and charity, hires lawyers to defend her profits and yet feels her own profits are excessive; a person who has worked for Amnesty International and (yet) tries to improve the world in the most magical and instantaneous manner possible, with money. I won’t dispute that money can be put to many good uses, and building orphanages is one, but neither orphanages nor youth counsellors can stop children from being orphaned, for that we must address cultural and psychological errors, errors that should never be sweetened in the books we encourage children to read.

But are error and evil sweetened beyond recognition in Harry Potter? In a series so crammed with signs of parody and blatant stupidity, perhaps the great and shocking question is why the majority of readers don’t notice? Yes, of course, the children must be innocent, but they should not be ignorant, and when they are, who is to blame?

Does HP cater to the market demand for hogwash and positively harmful teachings and myths, such as the necessity of treating death as an enemy and the necessity of power, competition, discrimination, labour exploitation, animal abuse, deprecating language, verbal abuse and so on and so forth? If it does cater to this market demand, who has performed the magical act of sweetening poison and ignoring the whispers of conscience, the fantasy author or the fantasizing reader?

If Harry Potter is as complex and dangerous as I have argued, and if, as I half suspect, Rowling is aware of this, why doesn’t she write a reader’s guide like this? Why is she content to let her fans stumble through her maze, like tourists oblivious to the bones on which they tread? Why does she respond to their silly questions with jokes, lies and irrelevant absurdities instead of helpful words? What does she have to hide?

The danger is not that children cannot distinguish between reality and fiction and grow up into psychopaths; what is at issue here is whether her readers are being indoctrinated into a culture that is unsustainable, a culture that charms us with its glitter and precision while off in the wings, just out of sight, it exploits third world countries, helps to drive millions annually to starvation, drives entire species into the dust and destroys the resources of the present and future. With so few readers choosing Hermione for their hero, and fewer still inspired by her limited conscience, what must we conclude?

If we must issue a moral condemnation of a book written for children, must we also, like Plato, demand the exile of persons who write anything that should not be imitated? Plato wrote,

We shall not admit into our city stories about Hera being chained by her son, or of Hephaestus being hurled from heaven by his father when he intended to help his mother who was being beaten … whether these stories are told allegorically or without allegory. (The Republic 378d)

The last line is crucial. “Whether these stories are told allegorically or without allegory”.  That is, even if the story has some moral subtext or not, if it employs immoral actions, it must be banned.

But surely this is an untenable position, as representations of immoral actions can easily serve a narrative that condemns immoral actions. Besides, as surely as the Bible will not be banned for contradicting science, HP will not be banned by the gatekeepers of a culture whose ideology it seemingly celebrates.

II

According to Maire Messenger Davies, children cannot be moral beings unless they engage in meta-thinking. Children who are unable “to think about a belief as false” will never be able to distinguish between right and wrong beliefs (17). In Conflict and Concensus, Hodges reiterates the importance of being able to take a critical view of things.

Before we judge Rowling a reprobate and a cynical exploiter of childish needs, consider that the primary reason children can be exploited is that, generally speaking, parents and teachers do not prepare them to be more than passive participants in their culture; even when social activism is encouraged, somehow the tendency to blindly follow along survives. Now consider Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Ah, here’s a wondrous antidote to a culture of obedience and authority. Nearly every professor, parent and other authority figure is treated as an object of humour, scorn, or suspicion. Even the upright Dumbledore cannot avoid sniggers at his name.

Is that it, then? Is the redemption of Harry Potter its iconoclastic representation of authority in a world where authority is bogus and an absolute hindrance to intellectual development?

III

Hamil’s critique of television applies, with little qualification, to the printed Harry Potter. Echoing Ellul’s worries about passive readers of propaganda, Hamil notes that “audiences do not participate in television’s imaginative acts” (268). The television viewer is a passive receiver, regardless of whether what it communicates is realistic or not. Active thinking, that is, imagination, does not actually occur in readers of imaginative works until, by more or less consciously raising questions and creating answers they alter the received images and messages. Such altering does not occur when we read HP only on a literal level, and so anyone who reads it literally risks becoming deeply indoctrinated into its surface ideology.

Children who learn to read metaphorically, allegorically, ironically or in any other way but literally, free themselves from the danger of blindly imitating or obeying a literal text. In contrast, passive reading may be stimulating without engaging any cognitive effort.

Jacques Ellul’s argument about propaganda is relevant to this argument about polysemy and ambiguity. Ellul argues that most successful propaganda campaigns depend on a literate population – albeit a population that reads passively. The propaganda machine uses passivity by first overwhelming the reader with upsetting information, thus winning our sympathy, and then by “giving modern man all embracing, simple explanations and massive, doctrinal causes, without which he could not live with the news” (147). And all propaganda must avoid being ambiguous, for “[a]mbiguity is painful for [modern man]” (190).

Kenneth Burke says something very similar in the following, “Further, we cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony” (Language as Symbolic Action, 12). The mature use of language encompasses not only irony but many forms of non-literal meaning, allegories and parables included. Jesus says he speaks in parables in order to “utter things hidden since the creation of the world” (Matt. 13:35); others say he spoke in parables in order to couch spiritual truths in a language peasants understand; the present argument suggests that parables also serve to force the mind to free itself from images and overcome passivity.

This iconoclastic view of images raises serious questions about the value of imaginative literature. Perhaps HP does manifest imagination, but that does not mean it engages higher cognitive faculties more than a work void of imagination. For a work that only presents fantastic images does very little to inspire thought beyond the most immature levels. As Lewis remarked, such “fantastic” books only appeal to lazy people who want to “surrender their imaginations to the guidance of an author” (An Experiment in Criticism, 64). Ultimately, if stories are devoid of question raising devices, then both imaginative fantasy and mundane realism spoon-feed pre-fabricated images to readers. And if these images appeal to immature desires, how can readers develop the ability to think critically?

Although HP presents more than a literal or monosemic flow of ideologically conservative images, but it does too little to help children register the questions lurking beneath those images. We need better clues, and not so much secrecy. Harry, and possibly Rowling, echo my sentiment by complaining that Cedric’s hints should “have been a lot more explicit” (TGOF 378).

IV

One secret of literary bestsellers rarely addressed by literary critics is the dimension of suspense. Suspense is not a genre, it is the secret of all popular writing—that is, writing that prevents reflection, analysis, and demands that readers rush headlong in a storm of excitement, fear, hope and anticipation. Rowling masterfully builds suspense using Voldemort and a hundred other dangers and challenges that crest and recede and climax with the great showdown of the final book. Arguably, without suspense, boredom would ensue and readers would fall from the edges of their seats, utterly asleep. But without suspense, readers might also find the time and energy to care a little less about the end and spend a little more time enjoying the beginning, parts between and the nebulous present. To make that fantastic day a reality, our children must become active readers, conscientious readers, lovers of victories won without violence, lovers of laughter won without victims, lovers of interpretation as transformation and lovers of the magical power to transform words.

V

I want to apologize to all my readers for two matters, 1) for not being thorough and 2) for not providing much evidence from books 5-7. Not every sentence in the series has been analysed, so I hope other scholars will not be too zealous in revealing my hastiness and will venture to apply the patterns presented here.

Finally, while I trust that everyone understands the larger applications of this work, I am only too happy to leave the impression that I have overlooked something. For humanitarian and pedagogical reasons, expert treasure hunters should always resist the temptation of doing too much for others.

CHAPTER FIVE – Odds and Ends

I. The Oxford Inklings

The influence or lack of influence of Lewis and Tolkien on the Potter series is more than I care to elaborate. I will restrict myself to suggesting a link between the Inklings, a literary group that included Lewis and Tolkien, and the Giant Squid living in Hogwarts Lake. Being a relatively un-stereotyped animal, being besides armed with ink and connected to comedy (the twins and tickling), and being a secretive beast, I have an inkling that the Giant Squid probably symbolises the author, Joanne Rowling, but also Lewis and Tolkien, and maybe two other authors whose works influenced Rowling’s. The ‘bread’ tossed by Hogwart students to the squid might be a pun on money (bread=money), which means the children are throwing money at the greedy, inky authors, children (and adults too!) who, being covered by the immense flood of ink produced by these voluminous authors, do not have a inkling about what they are paying for.

Since the Inklings were associated with and met at the University of Oxford, Hogwarts might be inspired by Oxford. The similarities are tantalizing. Ox = animal and Hog = animal. ‘Wart’ and ‘ford’ form a pleasant jingle. Coincidentally, this identification also explains why Hogwarts is full of professors instead of teachers, and a quick glance at the university’s map will reveal a sizeable little lake fit for a squid.

Finally, according to rumours, Rowling has claimed, or joked, that the Giant Squid is Godric Gryffindor, one of the four founders of Hogwarts, and that the squid is the largest known animagus, a kind of enigmatical cloaking form used by wizards. The joke is on us, because Joanne Kathleen Rowling is the animagus of Joanne Rowling (her original name), whose animagus is a bewitching children’s fantasy writer, but who is, in reality, something very different. In fact, her penname, ‘Kathleen,’ likely shares etymological roots with Hecate, the goddess of the underworld associated with witchcraft.

II. Parodies of Lewis?

As shown earlier, Sirius Black’s name stands for light and darkness, good and evil. His name might also have been inspired by C.S. Lewis’ names for the horses of good and evil, Coalblack and Snowflake, names Lewis lifted from Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Similarly, in Plato’s Paedrus,  two horses attached to the soul symbolize the competing powers of appetite and reason, which roughly translate into good and evil. Sirius Black, having both powers in him, and manifesting both in his actions, is therefore rightfully given a name that symbolises his morally ambiguous nature.

In Lewis’ The Silver Chair the fire-dwelling Salamander is a great and almost mystical creature, but in Rowling’s works the firework-spewing Salamander is a Hollowe’en accessory (TCOS 100). Draw your own conclusions about the import of this habit, but not without first questioning received opinions about Lewis’ spiritual allegiance.

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and Rowling’s HP series both comprise seven books. On the very last page of The Last Battle Lewis’ narrator claims that the end of the Narnia series is really “the beginning of the real story.” Rowling alludes to this by titling her last chapter of her fourth book “The Beginning.” In Lewis’ last paragraph the narrator says of the characters: “at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story”. But I will provide more on this cryptic synonymy of the last with the first and the number four in part four, below.

III. The James Joyce Connection

The widespread assumption that J.K. Rowling is just a children’s fantasy writer who writes children’s books—pure and simple—might be dispelled upon a careful inspection of the evidence linking the Potter series to the esoteric literature of James Joyce.

Character Names: We have Dedalus Diggle (HP) and Stephen Dedalus (A Portrait of an Artist and Ulysses ), and Seamus Finnegan (HP) and a Finnegan in Finnegans Wake. Lily is Harry’s dead mother and a character in Joyce’s story “The Dead.” Bloom is the main sur-text character of Ulysses and HP is overgrown with botanical and flowery names like Lily, Lavender, Rose, Fleur, Florence, Florean, Sprout, Daisy, Petunia, and Myrtle. Plump Molly Weasley bears startling resemblance to Molly Bloom, and Molly Weasley’s husband is a kind of surrogate father to Harry, as Molly Bloom’s husband Leopold is a surrogate father to Stephen. Leopold Bloom is a Jew and reappears as Rowling’s Leonard Jewkes and Leopoldina Smetwyk (a somewhat Jewish-sounding surname?). Finally, a character with the initials J.J. appears in Flying with the Canons [sic], a book read by Harry whose errantly spelled title provides a clue Joyce might have appreciated.

Thematic: Joyce’s Dubliners is commonly misunderstood to relate the epiphanies of ordinary people, as HP is commonly misunderstood to relate the truly heroic behaviour of a schoolboy.  Plus, the school years of Stephen Daedelus are arguably as tormented as Harry’s.

Lexical: both writers are prolific creators of words, though Rowling specializes in names and other nouns.

Punctuation and Formatting: Joyce’s last book ends without punctuation, Rowling’s ‘first’ book ends with an ellipsis: they achieve the same effect. Rowling’s first book has 17 chapters, Joyce’s last book has 17. The middle chapter of TPS has a title that echoes it middle position: “The Midnight Duel,” while the middle chapter of FW is unique for being the only chapter not introduced with a blank space.

Autobiographical: In their early adulthood, both authors were involved in radical thinking about the world. Joyce was involved in a Nicolas Flamel club and Rowling worked as a researcher and secretary for Amnesty International. Both authors seem to have consciously refused to write moral or philosophical works, the one choosing to write linguistic-aesthetic experiments (Joyce) that toy with the topical issues of the day, and the other choosing to write children’s literature that, similarly, glosses over the topical issues of the day. The difference may be even smaller given the importance of children’s nursery rhymes to Finnegans Wake and Joyce’s record of treating everything as mere nursery rhyme.

IV. Symmetrical Thanatological Numerology

Surprisingly, numbers play an important patterning role in HP.

In the first sentence of the first book, Rowling mentions Four Privet Drive. The Hogwarts student population is division into precisely four houses founded by four men. The opening chapter of each of the first three books is set in the Dursley house, but the fourth book’s first chapter is set in Riddle House. In fact, the Riddle House is a mirror image of the Dursley house. Each house was occupied by a mother, a father, a son and a fourth person with magical powers.

In the first chapter of book four, the three dark figures in Riddle House are the likely murderers of the three dead people; in the last chapter three people (Harry, Hermione, and Ron) strike Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy unconscious, a state not far removed from death.

As shown above, book four contains a first-last parallel or symmetry that invokes the theme of death. This connection of death to the-first-equals-the-last pattern refers to the fact that death is the last, or end, also always marks a beginning. Additionally, the fourth book marks the centre of the HP series, and death is central to HP.

Additional evidence linking death to the number four requires knowledge of the fact that the number four symbolizes death in the Chinese and Korean tradition. This is significant because the only character with a Chinese or Korean name is Cho Chan.  She first appears in the fourth book, but by the end of the seventh she has had a total of four boyfriends, one of whom dies during their relationship. Cho Chan is also Harry’s first girlfriend and the first girl to kiss Harry, a fact I mention only because kissing is linked to death through the Dementors’ kiss of death.

The entwining of the concepts of death and the beginning occurs with “The Boy who Lived”, that being the very first chapter title in TPS. The boy who lived? Why lived? This either forms an incomplete sentence or a hint that Harry no longer lives and is, well, dead. Let me explain: no other chapter contains a verb, and ‘lived’ is a verb, and to end a title with this verb is to tempt the reader to assume the author meant The Boy who Once Lived…

The entwining of the concepts of death and the beginning also occurs in the last chapter of the fourth book, “The Beginning,” which describes the beginning of Voldemort’s second life.

If the number four signifies death, why did Rowling write a fifth book? Consider the title of the fifth: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The phoenix is famous for its ability to resurrect from death. But Rowling negated the phoenix myth by naming her phoenix ‘Fawkes,’ after Guy Fawkes, whose name is synonymous with failure, and is linked to the subject of religion and resurrection because he failed to help Spain ‘resurrect’ Catholicism in the low lands. Guy Fawkes day is remembered every November 5^th in Britain.

To end this thana-numerical-aesthetical meditation, I ask, who is Rowling’s Golgomath? Is he the new Goliath? Golgogath killed Karkus, friend of the Order of the Phoenix. Karkus might be derived from calculus or Kirk, an old English word for church, and therefore linked to the resurrection theme linked to the phoenix. Golgotha is the name of the place where Jesus was killed.

Each exposure of the subtext reveals the same heresy, parody of Christianity and philosophy. Once I was amazed, now I only wonder why the author chose to whisper what has already been sung, shouted, and announced in public.

V. Harry Potter is Lord Voldemort

While much evidence for this argument already lies scattered above this chapter, I wish to elaborate a little on Christopher Hitchens’ remark that the lightning-shaped scar on Harry’s forehead is a social-marking once used by a now defunct group of British Nazi sympathizers (The New York Times). Most disturbingly, Joanne Rowling likely knew this, judging from what she wrote in the Telegraph.co.uk in “The First It Girl.” Moreover, considered in light of her remarks that Voldemort was partly inspired by the figure of Adolf Hitler, doesn’t Harry’s lightning-shaped scar suggest that Voldemort and Harry are essentially inseparable, that part of Voldemort is still in him? Indeed, when you consider that Harry is short for Harold, an Old English name that meant ‘leader of an army’….