Early on in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it is revealed that Harry Potter is the sole survivor of a child massacre (they don’t call him The Boy Who Lived for nothing). He Who Cannot Be Named was wiping out infant wizards (and their parents) in an attempt to destroy the child who one day will grow up to destroy him (that is, HWCBN). When that little narrative tidbit flew by the first time I thought “yeah, sure, standard-issue hero’s journey stuff, what happens next?”

UPDATE: It seems I am incorrect in the particulars of Harry’s beginnings.  In the movie, it is stated that Voldemort rose up and became evil, and killed anyone who stood in his way, including Harry’s parents.  No one, we are told, survived this assault, except Harry.  I put two and two together and mistakenly believed that they had shown Voldemort slaying an innocent child, when what the movie shows, apparently, is Voldemort leveling his wand at the young Harry’s forehead.  I thought they were showing another child’s slaughter instead of Harry’s failed murder.  I maintain that a child would not get the nickname “The Boy Who Lived” if there had not been Boys Who Died, but there is no specific child massacre mentioned in the movie.

This changes, slightly, the viewpoint of the observations below, but I don’t think completely devalues them.  There still exists the threat of child sacrifice by the unnamed (or, in this case, unnamable) evil and the assault on education by the oppressor (which I hope to get to in more detail in upcoming posts).

Now then, I’m reading David Mamet’s recent book on anti-Semitism (spoiler alert: he’s against it) and I come across this observation:

“The memory of absolute wrongs causes absolute trauma in a race, just as in the individual. Incalculably ancient race memory of dinosaurs persists to this day, transformed as an affection for the dragon. Memory of the most traumatic of cultural acts, child sacrifice, can be seen, hidden in plain sight, as ceremonies of transformation, redemption, and, in fact, of jollity. Like the Santa Claus myth, the Akedah, the Crucifixion, are ineradicable race memories of infant sacrifice, and of the deeply buried wish to resume its practice, so racism must be the unresolved race memory of slavery.”

(In a footnote, Mamet explicates on his Santa Claus reference: “The Santa Claus myth is a straightforward account of child sacrifice. It must, however, be read in the mirror. Children can be good or bad. They put their stockings out, and, in the middle of the night, a man comes into their home with a bag. If the child has been bad, the man puts the child in a sack and takes him away. All that is left of him is his stocking, hung on the foot of the bed…It is no great stretch to see, here, the anguish of a family in antiquity, knowing the tribe will choose, at the winter solstice, some child to be sacrificed and to see the parents wish to extend the child’s period of exemption from terror for as long as possible.”)

To the Akedah (that is, the story of Isaac), Santa and the Crucifixion, I will add the Ten Plagues of Egypt, Herod, Noah and King Arthur. JK Rowling has tapped into one of the grandest, most disturbing themes of human history, and that she did so within the context of a “children’s book” about magic and wizardry counts as a stroke of true genius. For, as Mamet notes later in the same book:

“There is an aesthetic quality in fundamentalism, in jingoism, in jihad — a pure joy in the rejection not only of reasoned religion but also, indeed, of science.

“‘Belief’ is such a potent force that it may replace logic: we may burn the heretic books that speak of ‘evolution,’ and we may say the cost is huge: the loss of scientific method, but this is not a loss at all but a gain, the repeal of the taxing concept of cause and effect.”

And I’m going to go ahead and add here that a lot of humanity’s modern anxiety comes from the fact that science, for all its given us, has not satisfied our need for myth, for magic, for surrender to mystery. For tens of thousands of years, the sun came up and went down and waxed and waned and we didn’t know why and there was nothing we could do about it — crops would die, animals would freeze and the big bright circle up in the sky seemed to periodically hate us to death, when the other big circle in the sky wasn’t trying to drown us with swollen tides and the big puffy things in the sky weren’t trying to strike us with bolts of lightning. The mystery of the elements is so deeply ingrained in our ancient psyches that we secretly long to return to the days of paganism and helplessness before Sol Invictus.

Rowling has smushed together magic and science at Hogwarts to come up with something altogether revolutionary. Harry Potter was born to be the savior of his people, the only survivor of a child massacre. He gains knowledge (that is, science) through his education at Hogwarts, but his science is expressed as magic (and, lest we forget, Asimov [or Clarke, see below] once observed that any science, sufficiently developed, is indistinguishable from magic) and through his education he fulfills his destiny. Fundamentalists are always in an uproar against Harry Potter, and now I can finally see why — he needles them from both directions. He’s a wizard, which is heretical, but he’s also a scientist, which is even more heretical. He spends his narrative gathering education about magic, education and magic being two things no fundamentalist can stand. No wonder they want to destroy him.

Placing is protagonist at the center of some of our most powerful anxieties surely counts as a very big zipper indeed and I suggest is a strong reason for Harry Potter’s popularity.

As a postscript, anyone out there know What Voldemort Wants? Aside from power, I mean? What’s his Monday Morning plan? When all the threats against him are destroyed, what is his plan for ruling the wizard world?