The Alchemist’s Tale
Harry Potter & the Alchemical Tradition in English Literature
by John Granger
In her Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling looks at the world diagonally and sees its magic. I believe this diagonal vision springs from her classical education and its ideas of truth, love, and beauty, and her consequent discomfort with modernity and with modern ideas and institutions. She conveys the world’s magic as a traditional English writer writing within the traditions of her genre. And one of these traditions is the use of alchemical symbolism to convey spiritual realities.
We think of symbolism, after being trained by mechanical teachers and lifeless texts, as cardboard signs saying, “this represents that.” “The white whale is a symbol for God, Mrs. Johnson,” we all learned to say in tenth-grade English. An authentic symbol, however, is a means of passage and of grace between the shadow-world of time and space in which we live and what is real. As Martin Lings, a student and friend of C. S. Lewis’s, wrote in his book on mysticism and alchemy in Shakespeare’s plays:
Symbolism is not arbitrary, but is based on the very nature of things, on the make-up of the universe. According to all cosmological and metaphysical doctrines, whether Eastern or Western, earthly phenomena are nothing other than the shadows or reflections of spiritual realities. The symbolism of a thing is its power to recall its higher reality, in the same way that a reflection or shadow can give us a fleeting glimpse of the object that casts it; and the best symbols—the only ones worthy to be used in sacred art—are those things which are most perfect of their kind, for they are the clearest reflections, the sharpest shadows, of the higher reality which is their archetype.1
The reason many of the great authors of the English tradition used alchemical symbols—Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Blake, Joyce, and Lewis, for example—is that they are what Lings calls “the best symbols,” “the clearest reflections . . . of the higher reality.”2 These symbols do the job literature and drama set out to do.
Understanding the Harry Potter books as alchemical writing in the tradition of the English “Greats” will explain otherwise bizarre events, plot turns, and names in the novels. It will also help explain the worldwide popularity of these books (because they speak to deep spiritual desires), in what way Christian objections to them are ironic (because they miss Rowling’s point), and why the almost uniform approach of scholars to the books as cultural artifacts to be dissected is a typically modern mistake (ditto).
So I have three tasks. First, I briefly explain what alchemy is and what it isn’t, then explain why its imagery is so fit to express spiritual themes and meanings, and last, explain how Rowling uses alchemy in the Harry Potter novels. Readers should know that the following will give away some of the plot and requires a little knowledge of the five books published so far, though no more than someone who has never read the books will have gathered from all the news stories about them.
What Alchemy Is
What modern people know of alchemy in my experience is almost inevitably wrong, so wrong that the use of alchemical imagery in English literature must seem absurd. One of the first things you learn in chemistry classes is that chemistry grew out of a kind of medieval voodoo called alchemy, a pseu-doscience whose goal was to try to isolate a philosopher’s stone that could turn lead (meaning base metals) into gold and bestow immortality on the alchemist.
John Granger is an Orthodox Reader and the author of several books about Harry Potter, including How Harry Cast His Spell (SaltRiver, 2008) and The Deathly Hallows Lectures (Zossima Press, 2008). His website is HogwartsProfessor.com.
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