The Last British Myth
Harry Potter as a farewell to the old land
I. INTRODUCTION
Ours is a windswept island. Time has carried many peoples and gods from our shores.
Peoples fade, and yet they linger, ever-present in an unspoken British folk communion. At the edges of our psyche, they’re all still there, dim but alive: the druidism of the ancients, the power of the Romans, the folklore of the Anglo-Saxons, the evangelism of the Christians. All live on as layers of psychic sediment which shift, flow, and resurface.
Our greatest king - Arthur - is to be found nowhere in the pages of earthly history. He lives in a different plane; yet it is one to which we also belong. Whatever we need him to be, he is - both chivalric knight of Christ and devotee of the wizard Merlin. Our patron saint - George - lives somewhere between ecclesiastical history and a folklore inhabited by dragons.
Our longest reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, was both ‘Defender of the Faith’ and initiate into the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain - the Gorsedd of the Bards of Britain - revived on the principles of Celtic druidry.
We have always known secret worship: pagan priests on foggy hills, condemned Catholics in forest glades, witches burned for their heresy. Even now, silent prayer is hunted by the authorities.
Our churches are adorned with gargoyles; our nation is one of nations; our democracy adores its kings. Contradictions live in harmony. Our identity is certain and yet unresolved. We live in both earthly and eternal time, never certain which ancestors to honor and which eternity awaits us.
It is only against this background that one can understand the paradox of Harry Potter, the wizard who celebrates Christmas, the last of the great British myths. Like Britain itself, the tale of The Boy Who Lived is a pagan vessel out of which Christian greatness emerges, in a subtle and particular form.
J.K. Rowling’s mythopoetic masterpiece is an attempt at the resolution of the dying British soul. It is a final charge in the war for who we are and always have been. It amounts to a systematic defense of British culture, finding heroism in its eccentricities and beauty in its ways.
I believe that hidden within the work is an entire spiritual history of our land. My task here is to uncover that which lies beneath the surface, from druidic allusions to hidden scriptural quotations.
To do so, we must start at the beginning.
II. DRUIDS
There is a hole in the British soul: a part of our spiritual ancestry to which we will never put names or faces. A ghostly caste whose alien construction adorns our land with unspeaking stones and unreadable symbols.
These are the druids, a lost order of men who were said to be able to commune with the land we call home. They were the keepers of an indigenous moral philosophy which has long been lost.
Who were they? What did they know and do? (Could they walk among us still?)
The druids have been a mystery for all of our recorded history. It was Caesar himself who provided the strongest testimony as to their existence. In his history of the conquest of Gaul, he explained that Gallic druids followed a “rule of life” which originated in Britain, and that devoted druids went to learn their craft on our island. The existence of these figures seems certain to him, and yet he never details an encounter with one, either in Gaul or in his expeditions to Britain. Even then, they were hidden.
By weaving together further commentary from a small number of ancient sources like Tacitus, we can build something of a vision of the ways of these strange men. Caesar explains that their duties included “divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices, public and private, and the interpretation of ritual questions” and that they had “many discussions concerning the stars and their movement, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, the powers of deities”.
Why did they make such a mark in the British consciousness? Why, even now, do many describe themselves as ‘druids’ and flock to ancient monuments on the appointed days each year?
It is very doubtful that anything like as much excitement would subsequently have been attached to these characters of ancient north-western Europe if the Greeks and Romans who wrote about them had simply called them by their own common words for priests or seers. It was the use of a unique native term, translating to modern English as ‘Druid’, which made them seem special and noteworthy: an order set apart from the rest of their own society and from other religious functionaries of their own time and of others. This put the seal on the indication, in those same ancient texts, that these particular priests and seers had indeed been unusual and distinctive in some way; elevated above their own peoples and unlike the priests of other societies.
— Ronald Hutton, Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain
The struggle to find a coherent way to resolve the towering, invisible figures of the druids and their magic into our later identities has plagued us ever since. It seems there is no authentic way for us to revive their ways as they were, given how little we know of them. And so we fill the gaps in our knowledge with that which is more familiar to us, and write our own story back onto them.
It is a particularly English project to find evidence that Britain has always been loyal to Christ, in some hidden and veiled form, ever since men first inhabited these shores. Englishmen still sing Blake’s lyrics which suggest that Christ Himself visited us millennia ago (and that it is here that the New Jerusalem will be built):
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
…
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
The contradictions in the British soul are common to all the island’s sons, but particularly evident in certain great men of her history.
William Stukeley - author of books like History of the Temples of the Ancient Celts and Stonehenge, and friend of Sir Isaac Newton, was the key figure in the revival of British interest in Druidism. He was also a man whose identity convulsed over the many decades of his scholarship, from Roman, to Pagan, to Christian.
…an event which occurred in London during July 1722: the foundation of a Society of Roman Knights to foster interest in the ancient history of Britain. The whole membership took nicknames drawn from native British and Gallic personalities recorded in the history of the Roman period, and all but one chose the name of a tribal chief. The exception was Stukeley, who assumed that of a Druid... The name was Chyndonax, and was taken from an inscription on a cremation burial from the Roman period which had been dug up in Burgundy in 1598.
— Ronald Hutton, Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain
After decades of sympathetic druidic research - and much to the bewilderment of many of his deist and freemasonic contemporaries - Stukeley had a radical conversion event and was ordained into the Church of England. But throughout his ministry, he never could entirely escape his love of the ancient Britons, and sought to reconcile the various strands in his mind into a harmonious whole.
He developed a theory that Druidism was a proto-Christian religion, still awaiting the clarity of salvation, which he called ‘Patriarchal Christianity’. Incorporating aspects of Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, he asserted that ancient pagan music and geometry expressed the Divine order, that the druidic manipulations of the land reflected hidden, holy correspondences, and that druids had erected the stone circles as serpentine monuments which symbolized the Trinity.
Stukeley was exactly the kind of brilliant eccentric who J.K. Rowling populated her universe with. “In 1736, he co-founded a local antiquarian and literary society, The Brazen Nose, with six other founder-members... It held weekly meetings at which they discussed a varied range of subjects; the first meeting involved discussions of astronomy, lunar maps, a wasp's nest, a medieval seal, and a bladder stone the size of a walnut that had been retrieved from a small dog.”
His attempt to connect us to the druids via the continuum of divine time didn’t just make them more accessible to him - it gave him hope that their insights and ways were relevant - perhaps even alive - today.
Could it be, our subconscious whispers, that somewhere in Britain those robed figures still gather around their ancient stones and invoke their unknown powers?
It is into this tradition - of seeking the hidden druids and making them accessible to the post-Christian mind - that Rowling falls. Druidic influences are clear throughout her work: she uses, for example, the ancient Celtic tree calendar to choose which English woods will constitute the wands of her characters (holly, ash, and vine for Harry, Ron, and Hermione) according to their birthdays.
But hers is a Druidism made sensible to us through its entry into the Christian sacrificial economy. In Harry Potter, the divine is not appeased through animal - or indeed human - sacrifice, but by self-sacrifice, into which all the great heroes of the text enter. But more on this later.
III. SAXONS, GERMANIC PAGANISM, & FOLKLORE
In a world where everything was alive with spiritual presences, where the doors between heaven and earth were open all around, then saints, demons, and elves were all equally possible. Such was the world of late Saxon England. Remedies in Christian medical texts using liturgy to cure ailments known from Germanic lore were not a bizarre aberration at odds with the Christian tradition. They were, rather, practical expressions of some of the most central Christian ideas about spiritual and physical well-being. The mutual assimilation between Anglo-Saxon culture and the Christian religion resulted in a unique cultural creation by the tenth and eleventh centuries—an Anglo-Saxon Christianity or a Christian Anglo-Saxon England in which elves were nicely accommodated.
— Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England
Long after our land became Christian, and our people accepted the lordship of God, spaces lived on in which the earlier animistic religions were not eliminated or forgotten but merely subjugated to Christian beliefs. The Pater Noster would be used to ward off troublesome elves, remove witchy curses, and bless fields to increase their fertility. What we now understand as ‘folklore’ was an unselfconscious remnant in a post-pagan age.
One can imagine the Anglo-Saxon praying over his land to ward off the troublesome demons and spirits and to strike fear into the hearts of malevolent elves:
PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.
This could happen because of a certain continuity of approach. In both traditions, the common man wielded the spoken word as a defense against dark forces. The Anglo-Saxon understood that if the priest could issue words, embedded within the ritual of the liturgy, to turn bread into flesh, then they too could wield the word to achieve righteous transformations in their own realities. Folk charms gave way to Latin prayers, but to the common mind, they were not so different.
This was accepted, for a time, because of an accordance with a fundamental Christian idea: the Logos. Logos - truth - is the instrument of God’s will; the word is a bridge between the transcendent God and the material universe. It is a creative and destructive force. God speaks, and the world moves.
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.
— Psalm 33:6
“Is not my word like fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
— Jeremiah 23:29
Rowling gives subtle expression to this tension in her work. In her universe, if one looks closely, magic always respects a certain form: it is incantational and not invocational. That is to say: words are spoken, and events happen - but words are not used to summon demonic forces or spirits which do the bidding of the sorcerer. Hers is a form of magic made apprehensible to the Christian mind.
As a further reassurance to the Christian, one finds that most of her magic is terribly quaint: little spells to mend glasses, lift feathers, and make people drop things. Magical objects are often whimsical: scolding letters and silly clocks. The presence of magic is subtle, rather than grand: enough to let us know that the land is enchanted, but quiet enough that things feel familiar and even cozy. Counterintuitively, the magic in her magical world is largely incidental - is is merely indicative of a world alive - a world which responds to word and will, rather than a place wrought entirely alien by grand magic powers and transmutations.
We might go so far as to describe this as a sacramental world: a world in which every object has human correspondences and metaphysical resonances. A world without soulless machines, alienated of humanity or spirit.
A sacramental world is what makes art and literature possible, for it is only when things really mean things that we can use them as a symbolic language to speak to one another through form, image, and metaphor… Rowling offers us a sacramental world by making every little detail in her world meaningful; from names and spells to potion ingredients and the rules of Quidditch, Rowling imitates the divine Creator by making everything in her world intentional and meaningful. The Harry Potter series is a literary image of the intricately ordered, completely meaningful medieval cosmos.
— Annie Crawford, Hogwarts in History: The Neo-Medieval Vision of Harry Potter
This is reflective of the visible goodness of the natural order endowed by God:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
— Romans 1:20
This correspondence between word and action also has deep parallels with a particularly English idea: the Anglo-Saxon ideal of treowþ: a precursor to our word truth which articulates not ‘factualty’ but faith and loyalty. The word of the man of treowþ is his bond, and his actions must reflect his speech. To give your word is to enter into a covenant: you say what you do, and you do what you say. Speech and action, word and motion, are inextricably linked. (
discusses this in his commentary on Sir Gawain, to which I will return).The Anglo-Saxon epics like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have a cryptic, evolving relationship to Christianity. Beowulf is set in a pagan world, but the many Christian allusions suggest a Christian author. The work marks the beginning of the medieval practice of baptizing their pagan inheritance.
The parallels to the hidden Christian themes in Harry Potter abound. Beowulf, for example, lays down his weapons before battle with the unarmed monster Grendel, in accordance with a sense of justice and fairness. He will only fight virtuously, and indeed it is this that saves him: it emerges that Grendel cannot be harmed by any human-wrought weapon. Thus Beowulf goes into battle bearing the armor of God, rather than that of man.
Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
— Ephesians 6:13-17
Again we see the word: “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Beowulf trusts not in himself, but gives himself up as a vessel of divine providence. We will see, later in this essay, that Harry never attempts to cast the killing spell in his battles with the evil one. He gives himself up as a vessel, unarmed, trusting in virtue rather than might to win the battle. The battle is one of magic, yes; but more than that it is one between God and the powers of this world. And men and their technologies are nothing in the face of the Divine.
Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please do leave a like below.
This concludes Part I of the series. In the next part, we will discuss the archetypical significance of Hogwarts (as Heorot, Camelot, monastery, boarding school), the relationship between freedom and kingship in the Anglo-Saxon mind, Englishman and enchanted land, sacred bestiary, and the hidden scriptural quotations.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Really enjoyed this one and looking forward to the rest of the series! HP, perhaps understandably, catches a lot of flak from both sides of the political aisle. It's refreshing to see a more charitable treatment.
It’s a shame that the social sciences are destroying our culture through immigration.