Harry Potter, Christmas, and “Mythic Space”

I’ve argued before, as well as in my book, that never does a Christmas go by in a Harry Potter book without some significant plot developments.  You can read a bare-bones version of Christmas at Hogwarts here and get a bit more detail in Harry Potter & Imagination.  What I want to address in this space is what Christmas actually means in Harry Potter, and how it contributes to the storyline and the “certain mood and power” of Faerie in the Potter story.

Christmas to Easter

While I argued in the post linked above that Christmas is a significant event in each book, that post was written prior to Deathly Hallows, and it could easily have been countered that there was nothing about Christmas itself that was particularly special. It makes story-sense to have interesting things happen at Christmas, because there’s a change in the overall feel of the school year – most students are gone. But Deathly Hallows confirmed my suspicions, I think, that Rowling was creating a deliberate Christmas to Easter “feel” in each book.

This is not unprecedented. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe frames the breaking of the White Witch’s power and her ultimate defeat on Christmas and Easter. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship departs on their journey on December 25th, and the Ring is destroyed on March 25th (an old Anglo-Saxon tradition dated the crucifixion to this date; it is also the traditional date of the Annunciation). Tom Shippey, in his book, The Author of the Century, notes the significance, writing that the major elements of the plot of The Lord of the Rings takes place in the “mythic space” between Christmas and Good Friday.

Mythic Space

The mystery of Christmas, with the mind-bending claim that God himself became a baby, is certainly “mythic.” It evokes the mood and power of Faerie. From “no room in the inn” to the widespread attempt on the Christ’s life by Herod, “perilous realm” is an apt description. Never was there a time in the history of the world when Faerie intruded so poignantly. When John the revelator was shown this period of time from heaven’s viewpoint, it was demonstrated with apocalytpic – and indeed mythological – language. The woman is in labor, and a Dragon awaits the child’s birth in order to swallow him up. But the woman is given wings to fly away, and the dragon’s vomitous river is swallowed by the earth.

This “mythic space” contains some of the richest ingredients in Rowling’s story soup. Here Harry battles with his own darkness as the Christmas carols stop, the lights of the church go out, and he finally sets eyes on his parents’ graves. The concept of life after death has no meaning to him in this moment; he is in desperate exile. And moments later, in the town of his own birth, a snake would wait for him, the “Chosen One,” and he would just barely escape.

Harry is in need of the coming of a savior, and that savior takes on the unlikeliest of all forms: “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.” This, of course, is after Harry’s “Epiphany” experience, in which Ron, the always-sidekick, pulls Harry out of the water in his attempt to retrieve the “silver cross.” On Easter morning, as Harry rises out of Dobby’s grave, the journey through this mythic space of Christmas to Easter reaches a climax, and after 6 and 3/4 books, Harry Potter finally looks like a hero.

Incarnation

It is this mythic space that many enter this time of year, having passed through the darkness and exile of the Advent season, looking for the light that was coming into the world. There are many important things to say about Christmas, and one of them is this: the physical stuff matters. That doesn’t sound very profound. Let me quote George MacDonald:

With his divine alchemy, he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries.

The incarnation of the Son of God is the vindication of the created, physical world. Did you wonder why it was so important for Lupin and Bill to try to retrieve Mad-Eye’s body after he fell? Did you notice no one said, “It doesn’t matter; he’s gone on to a better place”? That’s because bodies matter. There is an intention and a purpose in the created world; physical bodies weren’t made as “traps” or containers for spirits. It’s only in the notion of created intent (however long or by whatever process you believe the world came to be) that any definition of evil begins to make sense. We were created for one thing, and we become less than human when we do otherwise. The magic of incarnation has vast implications for what we do with our bodies and what we do with this earth. To do evil is to dehumanize one’s self; to dehumanize one’s self is to do evil. To be less than a fully human being – disregarding the errors of both the over-spiritualizing gnostic and the scientific fatalist – is to do evil. This is why Gothic depictions of evil are pictures of dehumanization – the distorted creatures in The Princess and Curdie, the talking beasts who lose their ability to talk in Narnia, and Voldemort in Harry Potter.

The Politics of Christmas

Another important thing to say about Christmas is that the world has never been the same since that first one. And this is fundamental to fairy tales because if MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, and L’Engle are right, fairy tales actually matter – they make a monumental difference in the way we live, and they can change the world. Whatever you believe about religion and the historical Jesus, was there ever a more profoundly world-changing event than the original Christmas to Easter progression? Not even the previous pagan myths that sorta-kinda sound like the Christ story had anything near the impact of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

But a good number of Christians today forget the kind of person Jesus was. Like it or not, he was a subversive of his time – touching the untouchable, loving the outcasts, forgiving the unforgivable. This is not to try to force Jesus into one particular political stance – being a conservative or a subversive is all about context. A good and just context should be conserved and preserved, and an unjust one subverted. Two years after Jesus was born, all the male infants and toddlers in the surrounding region were murdered. Oppressive political regimes ruled the day (Rome), and within those overarching regimes, smaller regimes maintained oppressive power (Pharisees, Saducees). Oppression and power-lust made up the atmosphere of the time.

Christmas doesn’t let a person become a social crusader without radical inward transformation. People who fight the “War on Christmas” miss the point. People who stoop to be Christmas – self-sacrificial, incarnational love toward all, without discrimmination – these are the ones who change the world. It’s the magic of Christmas that informs and inspires the work of Christmas.

This is the heart of J.K. Rowling’s imaginative fiction. Harry needed 6.9 books’ worth of personal transformation before he could change the world. He needed to pass through 7 cycles of Christmas to Easter before walking his own path to his own Golgotha. You can’t change the world as a social-crusading Hermione. You have to be a self-sacrificial Harry Potter. Spending time in the mythic space of Christmas is transformative, for in it we find both magic and the the most self-sacrificial act in the world’s history.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

If you enjoyed this article, these themes are expounded upon at length in Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds.