Harry Potter's Bookshelf (22 page)

Which brings us finally to the magic of circles. Everyone who enters the walled Secret Garden of Burnett’s story—including animals and invalids—looks around and around and around in wonder. Colin’s “prayer-meetings” and scientific experiments to explore and invoke the Magic (always capitalized) of the place, too, are held in what Burnett calls “a mystic circle.”

In Theosophy, the spirituality that largely shaped Ms. Burnett’s personal philosophy, study groups are called “circles.” The chanting, processions, incantations, and lectures on Magic in the “mystic circle under the plum tree canopy” in
Garden
are romantic pictures of Theosophical Society meetings. Colin has an especially intense epiphany one day after his lecture in the circle in which he realizes “I’m well! I’m well” and “I shall live forever and ever!” The older gardener then recommends he sing the Anglican doxology, “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” as celebration. Colin is wonderfully taken with this Christian anthem he has never heard, saying “. . . it means just what I mean . . .” about the Magic and that “it’s my song!”

Ms. Rowling’s magic is not New Thought or Theosophical, as we’ll see in a minute. But Rowling’s magic, like Burnett’s “Magic,” has a circle-laden esoteric edge to it that may be as Christian as the doxology. To get there we need only read a little E. Nesbit, a Rowling favorite, for the passage we need to gain an understanding of Luna’s answer to the Ravenclaw door.

The author with whom Ms. Rowling says, “I identify most,” is not her favorite writer, Jane Austen, or the “self-taught socialist” Jessica Mitford, after whom Rowling’s first child is named.
⁶
The distinction of being the storyteller Rowling models herself on as a novelist belongs to a writer of very “funny fairy tales,” E. N esbit.
⁷
“I identify with the way that she writes. Her children are very real children and she was quite a groundbreaker in her day.”
⁸

Nesbit’s influences are everywhere in Rowling’s work. When Harry is facing a year at St. Brutus’ Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys, Nesbit readers think of Maurice being sent away to Dr. Strongitharm’s School for Backward and Difficult Boys in “The Cathood of Maurice” (
The Magic World
, 1912). Fawkes the Phoenix has the name he does almost certainly because the phoenix in Nesbit’s
The Phoenix and the Carpet
(1904) is discovered in that story on Guy Fawkes Day. But it is Edith Nesbit’s “groundbreaking” work of writing fantasy stories featuring real children rather than cardboard Dick and Jane figures in her magical adventures that has been the greatest influence on Rowling. Nesbit’s most famous magical series is a trilogy, sometimes called the
Psammead
after a magical creature in these stories, in which books five very lifelike (and very funny) children argue with and help one another escape death or worse in the ancient past, the far-flung future, and at the British Museum.

Edith Nesbit does not fit our stereotype of a Victorian children’s book author. For starters, she had an open marriage and her life turned on political issues. She was a founding member of the Fabian Society, the egg from which the U.K. Labor Party eventually hatched. Travis Prinzi argues cogently in his brilliant
Harry Potter and Imagination
(Zossima, 2009) that Ms. Rowling’s political argument in her
Harry Potter
stories is for the gradual-change socialism endorsed by Nesbit’s Fabian group. As Rowling names most of Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix for historical leaders of the Fabian Society, she isn’t being especially subtle on the point.
⁹

Beyond being a leader of what was then relatively radical politics, Ms. Nesbit was also a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. You can think of this group as something like the literary wing of the Theosophical Society, because its members included Bram Stoker, Charles Williams, Arnold Bennett, and William Yeats. The purpose of the Order, in a nutshell, was working magic, by liturgy, ritual, and invocation to affect a relationship or communion with the divine. Dumbledore’s secret Order of the Phoenix, because the phoenix as “resurrection bird” is a hermetic symbol of Christ, is a story echo of the Golden Dawn.

Which brings us to Nesbit’s magic circle.

In
The Story of the Amulet
, one of Nesbit’s best-loved books, five children discover an Egyptian amulet. They are instructed to sit in a circle, and one of them speaks an ancient word. The room is plunged into darkness.

Like Frances Hodgson Burnett, Nesbit believes in the magical properties of “mystic circles.” To understand this, we have to talk about sacred geometry to unwrap the metaphysical symbolism of the circle and the center.

So we’re all on the same page, here is a little Euclid to define what it is we mean by “circle” and “center”:
A circle is the uniform radiation of a spaceless point, the center, into space.
All points of a circle are equidistant from a center point, right? This center, then, really
defines
the circle, of which point the circle is only a radiation or extension. Think of a ripple moving away from a rock dropped in the pond. The rock at the center both causes and defines the circle rippling away from it. A circle, which is visible, is only intelligible and understandable because of the defining and spaceless center that is usually invisible and unknowable in itself.

So far, so good, I hope. Now for the harder part. The reason magicians (or children wanting to speak to a magical object) would sit in a circle looking to the center is to invoke the power of the center. As its radiation or visible aspect, the circle is
essentially
the same thing as its defining center or origin. If magic has a shape, it is a circle and it is the circle’s unplottable and defining center that is the heart and power of the magic. Sitting in a circle and saying the magic word, believe it or not, is the symbolic equivalent of saying God’s Name.

The circle is a traditional and profound representation of God as Trinity in Christian art and literature. God the Father is the Center, the Word or
Logos
is the visible circle or sphere, and the Holy Spirit is the radiation proceeding from the center. The Father is only knowable through His Word and because of the Holy Spirit. St. Bonaventure describes God as a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere.
¹⁰

Nesbit’s circle center in
Amulet
is especially heavy on the hermetic Christian symbolism. The center of her circle reveals itself as otherworldly light and speech. Similarly, Christians believe that the Creative Principle, the second person or hypostasis of the Trinity, is the
Logos
or “Word” and that this principle is the “light of the world,” “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9, KJV). Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of this divine light and speech that was “in the beginning” with God. Nesbit here is telling this fundamental Christian doctrine in story form; the magic “voice” and “light” here is an aspect of the cosmic
Logos
that creates all things and is the substance of human thought.

Do most readers see this? Probably not. Burnett’s and Nesbit’s associations with occult groups and doctrines make it a fair reading, though. And internal evidence, which is to say, what we know from Harry’s adventures rather than from a Rowling interview, points to her treading a similar path. The high points of the
Potter
epic involve story circles: the circular structure of each year’s hero’s journey, and even Harry’s name.

The high points of the novels that are circular are Harry’s two face-to-face wand wars with the Dark Lord, first in the
Goblet of Fire
graveyard and last in their Battle of Hogwarts fight to the finish. Harry, as you’ll recall, has been Portkeyed unwillingly to the graveyard where his blood is used as the critical ingredient in Voldemort’s rebirthing potion. Born again, if you will, the Dark Lord summons his Death Eaters to him and they form a circle around him while he speaks:

Voldemort tells this unholy gathering the story of his resurrection and begins to torture Harry before challenging him to a duel. Harry decides to die “upright like his father, and he was going to die trying to defend himself, even if no defense was possible . . .” (
Goblet of Fire
, chapter thirty-four). To Harry’s surprise and Voldemort’s, his desperate “Expelliarmus!” meets the Dark Lord’s death curse and “a narrow beam of light connected the two wands, neither red nor green, but bright, deep gold.” Wands joined by golden light, the combatants are raised out of the circle to rest on a “patch of ground that was clear and free of graves.”

The Death Eaters quickly reform their dark magic circle, but the “golden thread connecting Harry and Voldemort splintered.” It encloses them in a sphere of golden light, “a golden, dome-shaped web, a cage of light.” The web, a creation of the phoenix feather wand-cores, begins to emit phoenix song, an inspiring song of hope Harry feels is “inside him instead of just around him.” Through the magic of
Priori Incantatem
, the shades of people Voldemort has murdered—including Harry’s parents—rise from the Dark Lord’s wand after Harry has willed light from the connecting thread to enter it.

Harry escapes miraculously but we see the same battle three years later in Hogwarts’s Great Hall. In the melee and maelstrom of duels, flying bodies, and curses, Voldemort is described as being in the “center of the battle.” When Harry reveals himself, the “crowd was afraid, and silence fell abruptly and completely as Voldemort and Harry looked at each other, and began, at the same moment, to circle each other” (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-six). Throughout the rematch, they continue “moving sideways, both of them, in that perfect circle, maintaining the same distance from each other . . .”

The battle, truth be told, is less a duel than a debate—with Harry doing almost all the talking. He tutors the Dark Lord in all the things he does not know about Dumbledore, Snape, wand-lore, and, incredibly, repentance. Harry invites him, almost begs him to “ ‘Think, and try for some remorse, Riddle . . .’ Of all the things that Harry had said to him, beyond any revelation or taunt, nothing had shocked Voldemort like this.”

At the moment of resolution, dawn breaks and light floods the circle:

The first thing to note is how many similarities there are between this illuminated circle and the golden dome battle scene of
Goblet of Fire
’s graveyard. They use the exact same spells, for instance, and their spells meet at a point between them, from which center “golden flames” and “golden light” break forth. We have a symbolic circle, not to mention a “Golden Dawn.”

In both
Goblet of Fire
and
Deathly Hallows
, Harry has chosen to die, to give up his individual life, in order to defeat the Dark Lord. Harry tutors his foe and calls him to repentance, “to feel some remorse,” because he has become the power of the circle’s center, the creative
Logos
, of light, knowledge, and conscience. He knows the wand-cores, which in Goblet share feathers of a phoenix, and therefore are representations of Christ, will do his will, because he has identified himself with the Word-Center of the same essential substance.

This wouldn’t be much of an argument if it were just the big battle scenes between Harry and Voldemort that were circular. Every
Harry Potter
adventure is a circle, and like Odysseus’s, Aeneas’s, and Dante’s adventures before him, each conforms to the three steps of separation from the mundane world to the mystical, initiation there, and divine return, usually with a trip to the underworld thrown in.