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Lugnasad 2007
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Greetings!
This is Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen's newsletter. You're receiving it because you or someone at that email address signed up at my website, www.celticshamanism.com. Please let us know if you wish to unsubscribe and notify us of any change to your address. Please also make sure that your email server and spam filter will accept email from tuath@btopenworld.com as that's where this mailing will normally come from.
Happy Lugnasad!
I know it's been some time since those of you who've been on my email list for a while have heard from me. I've been a bit swamped. My two small girls, affectionately known as the Diva and the Dumpling, are fine. They're doing a bit of squabbling. Téa (the Diva) recently called Aurora "the English Gnome of Sauron" as an insult. Sauron's the baddie in Lord of the Rings, for those who don't know. It was such an original (and jokey) insult that I couldn't be vexed. I've also been busy with all the usual housework items.
Enjoy!
Upcoming Events
On the 8th of September, I'll be speaking at Druidcon in Glasgow, giving a talk entitled "Slave to Love: Druids and Devotion." Details here: http://www.druidcon.vscotland.org.uk/
I also just got emailed this, which locals may find interesting,:
Hindu Spirituality Conference, Thursday 27 - Saturday 29 September 2007, Edinburgh, Scotland
News
I've just been made a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh where I just finished teaching a class on Harry Potter. The main reason I've been out of touch is Harry related. I realized that the class would make quite a good starting point for a book. I emailed John Hunt at O Books, who'd been interested in a book from me for a while, so I was following my old dictum of going only where invited, as the Spirits once told me.
The title that occurred to me was so self-evident I couldn't believe no one had used it when I checked Amazon. The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter. I made some suggestions for the cover, and even provided the golden snitch, a golden winged disk I made as a brooch around fifteen years ago! You can see the results at: http://www.o-books.com/product_info.php?products_id=479
I was working on another book that is nearly done, but obviously this one is more time sensitive, so I tabled the other one for now. We hope to have it available by Christmas.
Deeper Meanings in Harry Potter
Why a book on Harry, and a newsletter? I couldn't resist the newsletter. Immediately following Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 31st July is also Harry's birthday and my wedding anniversary. Harry is a very Lugh type hero, the whole young son of the pantheon thing.
It's easy to say that Harry Potter is a commercial phenomenon, but that's a bit of a cheap answer. There are many other books and films and tv shows out there seeking, and failing, to be such a mega-hit. Many start out with infinitely more hype than Harry. (A 500 copy print run.) Why Harry?
I've proposed a few papers and roundtable discussions to the upcoming Accio Harry Potter conference at Oxford next summer that I relate to this. The conference details are at http://www.accio.org.uk/.
First, and most simply, the Harry Potter phenomenon has a lot to teach us, even before we get to the books. The phenomenon itself tells us much about what our culture lacks. The books say a lot about how to fill our cultural and personal voids.
A central principal of both prayer and magic is to declare a void, based on the idea that nature abhors a vacuum. To declare a desperate need invokes a force to fill it. Western culture has been declaring its void ever more loudly from at least the eighteenth century forward. Voids of myth, magic and meaning, voids of wholeness, companionship and comfort, voids of loyalty, connection, tribe and totem, lost parents, lost children, lost time, lost lives, loss, loss, loss.
And along comes Harry. As a blues song says, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child." From his first great loss to his ten years of loveless exile in meaning-poor, goods-rich, suburbia, Harry is the very archetype of loss and modern alienation. Even after his initial rescue, he cyclically returns to "the desert of the real" at the Dursley's. However, despite (or because of) all his setbacks, Harry finds everything we often lack: love, courage and a sense of full participation in reality. This comes from his parents' transcendent love, his friends' tangible love, his own efforts and a magical world-view that implicitly acknowledges the wholeness of life. All these things bring Harry enough comfort and meaning to carry on, to play the seeker in the game he's been given.
We've all got to play the game we're given, and I think that some of what sustains Harry can sustain us too. We can bring a deeper sense of the magic and meaning we find in the novels into our own lives.
The Harry Potter novels unite mythic themes from the past with diverse literary genres of the present and aspirations for right action in the future. They contain a vast array of symbols and situations that echo some found in alchemy, mystical Christianity, shamanism and magic. Many people have commented on the variety we find in the Harry Potter books, but they are more than a grab bag of genres and symbols, bound by an engaging narrative. When we look at their deeper layers of meaning, we find a modern mythos where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. When J.K. Rowling used the symbols and mythic themes that she did in the books she couldn't help but invoke the wide range of meanings they have traditionally held. The symbol of the Quidditch 'seeker,' pursuing the winged, golden orb to the game's end, is just one of the most obvious symbols and themes we can look at. It is a role taken by Harry and others in the novels, and a role figuratively taken by the reader.
The Harry Potter books function as myths for many of us. They tell us something about the world, they give us models for behavior, they comfort us and bear repeated re-readings, and their focus seems to shift with our own perspective and stage of life, revealing other layers of meaning.
For example, the four Hogwarts houses, associated with the four elements, also 'map' well on to the four traditional magical precepts: to know (Ravenclaw, air), to will (Slytherin, water), to dare (Gryffindor, fire), and to keep silent, (Hufflepuff, earth.). The patronus relates to everything from the shamanic totem animal to the Holy Guardian Angel of Western ceremonial magick.
The numerous fan debates about the series' potential and actual end calls us to reflect on what truly makes a 'good ending' in art or life. This discussion returns us to where the books began, to the mystery of attaining the philosopher's stone, a goal that's easier than you'd think, but still challenges many precepts of modern western culture. We look at the novels' challenge to action in the world, where we each make the choice between "what is easy and what is right."
The Harry Potter books are rich with themes that reward deeper reading. One of these is the theme of sacrifice. Those of you who've known me for a while will remember the many times I've discussed the sacrificial posture, and it was fantastic to see such a perfect manifestation of its magical potency at the end of the series.
The archaeologist Richard Bradley describes how offering gives, but sacrifice alters. Some of what has been believed to make sacrifice effective in traditional cultures also comes into play in Harry Potter. For example, James Potter's sacrifice failed to protect Harry in the way that Lily's did because she could have stood aside. Various indigenous and ancient spiritual traditions would say that by making a conscious sacrifice Lily adopted the 'sacrificial posture,' an internal state which withholds nothing from the Sacred, and therefore, allows the maximum spiritual power to flow through the individual.
Power brings prestige. Anne Ross has shown that the torc, the ancient Celtic necklace in the form of an open ring, may relate symbolically to the sacrificial noose's symbolism, meaning that those with high status in Celtic culture may also have been potential sacrificial victims. The symbol of great power was also the symbol of great sacrifice. Like the winning team in the Meso-American ball game, those sacrificed left the field as the winning stroke of their lives. This relates to Harry and to others in the books who make great personal sacrifices.
In many cultures sacrifice is a way of mastering loss by consciously offering what may be taken, a posture Harry first wholeheartedly adopts in book six that also comes up in ancient Irish tradition. I believe that the annual 'sacrifices' to Cromm Cruaich at Samhain were actually simply consciously offering what had already been lost throughout the year. We all suffer loss, but if we consciously accept parts of it as necessary parts of the entire creation process, then we become participants rather than pawns. If my Great Grandfather lost a wallet or broke a leg, he'd say, "an offering to the Gods of Shipwreck' who, like You Know Who, must not be named lest they be invoked. By offering the lesser thing, you empowered yourself, by empowering yourself you made a greater loss less likely.
Sacrifice in Harry Potter resonates with Christian tradition as well as Pagan (obviously) and the sacrificial posture can apply to the usually less dramatic sacrifices and psychological states of daily life. On a small scale the posture of sacrifice, of non-resistance, allows us to 'let go and let God' in our daily lives. On a large scale, it's the quality of Christ's sacrifice, or the quality of God incarnate in all creation described in many Animist and Panentheist traditions. In these traditions Spirit or Deity is both immanent and transcendant, and so, experiences all we do, an ultimate form of sacrifice. The power of sacrifice doesn't just manifest when we make large or small sacrifices for loved ones, but when people instinctively puts their lives on the line to rescue strangers. The power of sacrifice is deeply related to love, as it ultimately admits no boundaries between self and other.
There are a wealth of other useful questions we can examine in relation to Harry Potter. Is Harry a consumer, cultural or spiritual phenomenon? Is the desirability of the books, DVDs and trinkets at odds with any anti-consumer messages in the novels? Do they encourage us to find deeper values or entice us up the rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in shallow ways? (That is, once we are fed and clothed, we seek such things as personal fulfillment and transcendent experience. This has come to be used by advertisers to sell us transcendence, joy in a jar or omnipotence in a car.)
The novels also stimulate questions about the nature of reality and our approaches to it. For example, does the fact that so many are drawn to Harry Potter mean that people are happier living in a magical relationship with the universe? Is this a regression to infancy or a more mature, ecologically minded approach? Are scholars and theologians like Buber, Berman and others right, that we're happier in an "I - Thou" relationship to the universe? Should we espouse more 'realistic' views, and whose reality is it anyway — Dawkins', Zukav's, the Dalai Lama's? Are the fruits of various world-views the most objective measure of reality at which we can arrive, and can the Harry Potter novels give us any idea how to get to a philosophy that bears good fruits?
Anyway, these are just a few of the ideas careering round my head at the moment as I work on my book. I hope you've found them interesting!
Till next time,
Le Beannachdan,
With Blessings,
Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen, Lugnasad 2007
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