1. Introduction
One of the most influential works of magical literature across the centuries, the novels of Harry Potter series have been loved by readers around the world for many years.
Harry Potter series affect generations after generations. It not only creates a large number of catchphrases such as Muggle, but also creates many idols such as smart, independent, brave Hermione Jean Granger. It not only defines a magical world, but also depicts deeply the love, friendship, courage, and responsibility.
The Bible plays an important role in the development of the West world. So to speak, without the Bible, there would be no Western civilization. For Western society, the Bible is not just a book, it also tells people the principles of human behavior and the laws of social history. All aspects of society are deeply influenced by it. The Bible itself has artistic charm and cultural value, making it the fundamental theme of Western literary creation. The Bible contains myths, legends, novels, and poems, smart literature etc. can be said to be very mature literary models. Writer in the West world are also affected deeply by the Bible. For example, Shakespeare has been striving to promote the Christian spirit of brotherhood, forgiveness, and human love in the Bible in his literary works. The Harry Potter series are obviously affected by the Bibble.
There is a great deal of metaphors in the literature, and each of the characters has something to say about it, which will be evaluated later in the text. It is undeniable that the Christian spirituality of “love” and “redemption” is a constant theme of the literature. The author of Harry Potter series expresses the ideal of “Love can conquer everything”. For example, love leads Snape becomes a good and man and achieves redemption. Maternal love protects Harry Potter to escape from death in a great catastrophe. The love among Harry, Ron, and Hermione is the most touching. Harry rescued little elf Dobby from the evil black wizard’s master’s house and set him free. Little elf Dobby saved Harry and his companions with his own life because of the love and gratitude to Harry. The contrast between the kind, justice and sacrifice represented by the Christlike hero, Harry Potter and the evil; greed and life, represented by the Death Eaters, led by Voldemort, once again illustrates the theme of the literature and praises the “love” and “true goodness” of Christianity, while at the same time depicts a considerable amount of witchcraft culture, which also reflects the author’s critical spirit towards Christianity. It is just due to this love and redemption that the Harry Potter series is so fascinating.
This paper will set up these questions by asking: Does Harry Potter series embody the spirit of Christianity? How does the life of a wizard as depicted in Harry Potter differ from that of a wizard in the Middle and what the author want to express? Does it indicate the progress or backwardness? How does the author to illustrate the love, death and redemption through the characters, especially through Harry Potter? My reading of the literature and books on the subject reveals little mention and study of the subject, but previous research adds a wealth of expertise and provides amount of material for further study of the subject, so I will attempt to explore the links between Christian spirituality, witchcraft and this literature in relation to the questions raised above. The first part of the paper will analyze the Christian ideas underlying Harry Potter, including the author’s core Christian values, the Christian concept of “death”, the Christian concept of “love” and etc. The second part will analyze the idea of witchcraft in Harry Potter, including the specific use of witchcraft, the basic construction of the magic world, the portrayal of witches, etc. The third part analyses the mapping of Harry Potter’s characters onto traditional European society.
There are seven books in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The novel was written by the British author J. K. Rowling, who was inspired by a train ride when she saw a very thin little boy with glasses in the carriage who kept smiling at her. A small male wizard gradually became clear in her mind and she was determined to conceive a novel with him as the main character. During the long period between writing and publication, Rowling’s life was exceptionally difficult, with no heating in her room and her fingers freezing and unable to hold her pen, but she persevered. At first, her work was rejected by many publishers, but then a British publishing house, Bloomberg Press, decided to publish her novels, and once Harry Potter was published, it immediately took over the children’s magical fiction market in the UK, and soon became a worldwide phenomenon, with Rowling becoming one of the world’s most popular and best-selling authors of fiction. Among the publishers authorized to publish Harry Potter, Bloomberg Press for the UK, Scholars Press for the US and People’s Literature Press for China are used as references for this article (Rowling, 1997; 2005; 2007) .
The publication of the novel series alone does not represent Rowling’s moment of glory; the film series of the same name is an even greater fan attraction. The first book in the novel series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which was financed by Warner Bros reached to $312 million in 2001 with its debut at the box office, setting eight all-time film records in a row, with each subsequent wave no less than the first, and with the last one Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The industrial impact of the Harry Potter films has been phenomenal, and the director has added his own thoughts and understandings to the original storyline, inserting and altering a number of plot points that provide a source of information for this paper. Therefore, this paper will focus on the novels and supplement them with references to the films, combining both sources to provide theoretical support for the paper.
Harry Potter is the story of a magic world where the forces of good and evil confront each other and good eventually defeats evil. The young protagonist, Harry Potter, is originally one of the most ordinary boys in the town, fostered in his aunt’s house because of the early death of his parents, sleeping in the stairwell and unappreciated and disliked by his family. On his eleventh birthday, he receives an invitation to Hogwarts, the most prestigious school in the magic world, where he officially becomes a student of the magic school. Eventually the world of magic is at peace again.
Academic studies of Harry Potter are complex and varied, with the main body of work focusing on whether the novel has literary research value or exploring the novel’s ideological and cultural connotations. This paper, written under the theme of religion, attempts to examine the development of the novel’s ideas and witchcraft from a Christian perspective (Rudbøg, 2013) . After reading a certain base of references, I have the following summary of the previous studies.
Researchers studied the Harry Potter series from different respects. Mamary’s discussion focused on the role and characteristics of medieval witchcraft, especially alchemy (Mamary, 2017) . Sumerak explained the artistic value of the novel in its literary dimension (Sumerak, 2017) . Jarazo and Pilar explained the meaning of the three elements of life, death and fear in the novel from a cultural perspective (Jarazo-Álvarez & Alderete-Diez, 2020) . Some researchers examined the role and impact of Christianity in the novel from different perspectives (Cohen, 2016; Granger, 2004; Bell, 2010; Killinger, 2009; Haight, 2016; Roper, 2009) . Gibson (Gibson, 2018) and Roper (2013) used a combination of religion and witchcraft in their analysis.
On the above viewpoints, this paper will answer the five questions posed in the second paragraph and explore the mapping of the Christian spirit of “love” and “live to death” in the specific plot of the Harry Potter series.
2. The Discussion of Christian Themes
2.1. Christian’s Love in Harry Potter
The core values of Christ are embodied in the Bible, the canonical classic of Christianity (McGrath, 2016) . The Bible is not only intensely religious in nature, it is also an extremely great work of literature, and many writers have drawn inspiration from reading the Bible. While the Old Testament is mainly an account of the history and cultural development of the Jews and the myths and legends of the origins of the world, the New Testament is a description of what happened after the birth of Jesus, with justification by faith at the heart of the faith. Justification means to be justified by faith, and to be justified means to be judged by God as innocent. The Christian doctrine of original sin states that man’s original sin prevents him from attaining righteousness and that he must be saved from sin by the grace of God and of the Son, Jesus. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Church emphasized justification through good works and holy merit, but the atonement movement led by the willed theologian and Catholic priest Martin Luther became the spark for the Reformation. The Reformation was sparked by the justification by faith slogan, it means to be justification by faith rather than by good works, just as what is said in the Bible Roman: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith (Riches, 2000) .”
As mentioned above, the core belief of the New Testament is justification by faith, so the core value of Christianity is brotherly love. The love of the family and the love of the little family are blended together in a way that is both fraternal and private. The Bible says that “he that loveth not his brother abideth in death”. Thus, Christianity emphasizes love for others.
The theme of love is emphasized throughout the Harry Potter, echoing perfectly the core values of Christianity. During his seven years of growing up, Harry Potter has received or spread many kinds of love.
The love from Family. The love of Harry’s mother, Lily Potter, for her child is the most obvious love expressed in the entire book. When Harry was one year old, Voldemort’s magic grew stronger so he began to purge himself of dissent. When Voldemort laid his clutches on the Potter family, Lily set up a protection spell for Harry at the expense of herself. The powerful force of love conjured up by this ancient magic actually saved the one-year-old baby from death, and Voldemort’s evil spell failed on Harry, leaving only a permanent scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead, instead almost killing himself.
Voldemort took away Harry’s parents for his selfishness, but the love of his parents never disappeared, it just remained buried deep in Harry’s heart. The love and longing for his parents also became Harry’s faith, a spiritual belief and reliance, a reason for him to be strong and uplifting.
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry stumbled into a secret room where he first saw the magic mirror of Erised, which means desire in reverse, so that people can see what they long for most through this mirror. It is the mirror that people can see what they most desire. Professor Dumbledore saw the picture which he was made blood pact with Grindelwald, one of the most powerful dark wizard of the last century, while eleven-year-old Harry Potter saw his parents, whom he has not seen for a long time. “The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them (Rowling, 1997) .”
Love is a two-way street. Parents have love for their children and children have love for their parents, and the overpowering spiritual power of love, on either side, can give a person the determination to overcome anything and the courage to escape from death.
Beyond his parents, Harry has the love of Sirius and his aunt. Sirius was a close friend of Harry’s parents who was falsely accused and imprisoned in Azkaban which is the wizarding World’s prison, and saved by Harry and his friends, who have been on the run ever since. He is the most important family member to Harry besides his parents, and he conveys the love of his family to Harry. Compared to Sirius’ simple love for Harry, his aunt’s love is very complex. Lily was found to have magical talent and was highly valued by her family and was sent to Hogwarts to study, while her aunt had no magical talent and had to stay in the Muggle world as a mediocre housewife, so she was jealous and resented her sister, and in Professor Snape’s recollection, she even called her sister a freak out loud. In Professor McGonagall’s eyes, the Vernons were “so unreliable that Harry could never be entrusted to this family”, but when the Vernons opened their door early on the morning and saw Harry in his infancy, they chose to keep him, despite the fact that they had not seen each other for years. Despite treating Harry very differently to their own son Dudley, the Vernons did their best to keep him safe from Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Aunt’s feelings towards Harry are extremely complex, she insists on destroying every invitation letter sent by the owls for admission, in essence fearing that she will lose Harry like she lost her sister many years ago. It is only in this installment of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that Dumbledore reveals to Harry the reason why he must remain with his aunt: “‘She doesn’t love me,’ said Harry at once. ‘She doesn’t give a damn-’ ‘But she took you,’ Dumbledore cut across him. ‘She may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you, and in doing so, she sealed the charm I placed upon you. Your mother’s sacrifice made the bond of blood the strongest shield I could give you.’ ‘I still don’t-’ ‘While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort. He shed her blood, but it lives on in you and her sister. Her blood became your refuge. You need return there only once a year, but as long as you can still call it home, whilst you are there he cannot hurt you. Your aunt knows this. I explained what I had done in the letter I left, with you, on her doorstep. She knows that allowing you houseroom may well have kept you alive for the past fifteen years’ (Rowling, 1997) .”
Whether it is Sirius’ selfless love for Harry or his aunt’s reserved love for Harry, they have undoubtedly provided Harry with the love of family, and it has always provided Harry with the strength to fight on against evil.
The love of friends. For eleven years of his life, Harry had few friends, and his cousin Dudley was not really a friend to be around. But on his first day at Hogwarts, he was lucky enough to meet his two lifelong friends, Hermione and Ron, who saved Harry from the infinite gloom and continued to shine a bright light on the obscure path before him, and who became the backbone of the destruction of the Horcruxes.
In the novel, Rowling designed Hermione as a girl with “thick brown curly hair”, “big teeth” and “brown eyes”, who is not very pretty but a hard-working and intelligent girl and she is the one of the top students at Hogwarts. She was born in a Muggle family (i.e. neither parent was a wizard). Her both parents are dentists, which at the bottom of the wizarding world, but she had learned more magic than children from a pure-blooded wizarding family. Professor Snape remembered Hermione as a “flamboyant Gryffindor student” and “highly regarded by Professor McGonagall”. Hermione always rose to the challenge of the countless mysteries waiting to be solved, and never let her light go at every test of magic. Although Hermione has some minor flaws, such as her nosiness and tendency to give orders, as Harry says, “Hermione, we can’t live without you”. Hermione has never been shy about showing her friendship to Harry, from fixing his broken glasses and touching up his long, boring essays after class to accompanying him on his search for the Deathly Hallows and participating in the Battle of Hogwarts. She was always there for Harry, always standing firmly behind him, even when she had to cast the Obliviate on her parents before the war, and never for a moment did she doubt the meaning of this friendship.
When it comes to Ron, in Rowling’s portrayal, Ron came across as really mediocre. “Red hair” and “blue eyes” are typical Celtic hallmarks. If “freckled” and “tall and thin” are good adjectives, then “big hands and feet” and “long nose” don’t go down too well together. Ron’s looks are also corroborated by Malfoy’s provocations in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:
“Think my name’s funny, do you? No need to ask who you are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford (Rowling, 1997) .”
Although Ron is an ordinary child, even a little dull and clumsy, there is much to like about him and Rowling has a great deal to say about his portrayal. The fact that he is good at playing wizard’s chess shows that Ron is a very resourceful boy, and his brave and fearless character corresponds to the origin of his name. Ron’s full name is Ronald Billings Weasley, Ronald being the form of Ragnvald, which is derived from the Old Scandinavian Ragnvaldr, where “ragn” means “advice” and “valdr” means “ruler”. The German form of Reginald, which is cognate with Ragnvaldr, is Raginwald, meaning “prince’s counselor”, and Ron is a shortened form of Rhonomyniad, which in Welsh means “assassin’s spear”. Together, Ron’s name means “trusted advisor to the prince”, which coincides with the role that Ron plays at Harry’s side, and what Ron means to Harry is just like Merlin to King Arthur. Also, Ron has a very strong personality. It is difficult for readers to see Ron’s strengths, but Ron is sunny and cheerful, never jealous of Harry, and never takes anyone’s advice to question Harry, Spiders are Ron’s boggart which means the thing that scares him the most in life, but when Harry needs to go to Aragog home, Ron doesn’t let his fear stop him from going along. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the Weasleys all gave Harry the warmth of family when Ron took Harry to his house for staying overnight. Ron is an extremely affectionate man who would give his all for his friends. In their search for the Deathly Hallows, he did not back down from the unknown dangers, but fought bravely and stood firmly by Harry, and cast the only death spell of his life to help Harry destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes. He has a true spirit of self-sacrifice like a knight. He is more than Harry’s partner, he is an ally, a supporter. Without Ron’s help, Harry would never have succeeded in defeating Voldemort.
Hermione and Ron both gave Harry the best friendship and love between their peers, the kind of unquestionable determination, and the courage to live and die together that is what it means to be friends. They both share the Gryffindor traits of bravery, strength and justice. And it is this friendship that dares to stand up to the darkness.
The love of teachers. The first to be explored is the teacher who played a decisive role in Harry’s development, and that person is undoubtedly Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts. At the countless crossroads of choices he faced, Dumbledore always listened gently to Harry’s thoughts and guided him to follow the right path.
In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry cracked the secret hidden in the diary of sixteen-year-old Riddle, fought a giant snake, saved Ginny Weasley from the chamber, and has the following conversation with Dumbledore in Professor McGonagall’s office:
“It only put me in Gryffindor,” said Harry in a defeated voice, “because I asked not to go in Slytherin… Exactly,” said Dumbledore, beaming once more. “Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Harry sat motionless in his chair, stunned. “If you want proof, Harry, that you belong in Gryffindor, I suggest you look more closely at this.” Dumbledore reached across to Professor McGonagall’s desk, picked up the blood-stained silver sword, and handed it to Harry. Dully, Harry turned it over, the rubies blazing in the firelight. And then he saw the name engraved just below the hilt. Godric Gryffindor “Only a true Gryffindor could have pulled that out of the hat, Harry,” said Dumbledore simply (Rowling, 1997) .
After learning that Voldemort had sealed a part of his magic inside himself due to an accident when he sent the Avatar spell at him, Harry questioned Dumbledore about the choice of the House Divided Hat out of disgust and fear of Voldemort, and in fact, doubted his own nature. At this point, Dumbledore saw a deeper level of apprehension in Harry, and instead of treating Harry’s questioning perfunctorily or telling him the exact outcome straight away, he guided him through the process of discovering the answer for himself. Such an approach to education compels him to be a good teacher, and it is true that in The Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (Rowling, 2016) which has mentioned that at that moment Dumbledore was already a beloved professor to all the students at Hogwarts. However, there is much more to Dumbledore’s personality than that, which will be analyzed in detail later on, and only the positive effects on Harry will be discussed here. At the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it is perfectly clear that Headmaster Dumbledore does not follow the typical educational model of judging students by their grades, but rather encourages students to challenge the established rules, to break through and to fight for what they want to defend under a security protect.
“First—to Mr. Ronald Weasley… ‘Ron went purple in the face; he looked like a radish with a bad sunburn.’… for the best-played game of chess Hogwarts has seen in many years, I award Gryffindor house fifty points.” At last there was silence again.
“Second—to Miss Hermione Granger… for the use of cool logic in the face of fire, I award Gryffindor house fifty points.” Hermione buried her face in her arms; Harry strongly suspected she had burst into tears.
“Third—to Mr. Harry Potter… ‘said Dumbledore. The room went deadly quiet.’… for pure nerve and outstanding courage, I award Gryffindor house sixty points.”
“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville Longbottom.” (Rowling, 1997) .
As headmaster, he was the explicit rule-maker and should be the strictest in terms of school rules and discipline, but he allowed his students to explore within certain limits, a rare character as an educational leader who truly respected the ideas of his students, and it was him who could raise outstanding students like Harry who were brave but not reckless, intelligent but not overly humble.
“Yes and no,” said Dumbledore quietly. “It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”
“The Mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry, and I ask you not to go looking for it again. If you ever do run across it, you will now be prepared. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that. Now, why don’t you put that admirable cloak back on and get off to bed? (Rowling, 1997) ”.
When the young Harry missed his parents excessively and spent his days dwelling on the Magic Mirror of Eris, Dumbledore duly came out to stop him, but his words of persuasion were equal, not condescending and without a trace of emotion. So what was even more remarkable than Dumbledore’s noble personality was that his heart was as sensitive as Harry’s, that he understood what was in Harry’s mind and was willing to understand and empathize with him. There was no haughtiness in him, but rather an extremely rare sincerity. It was a great blessing in Harry’s life that he had such a mentor to guide him.
Love from the Lover. When eleven-year-old Harry met the Weasleys on Platform 9 and 3/4, his destiny with Ginny was sealed. Ginny developed a hazy crush on Harry in first year, but in the first few books, Ginny was by Harry’s side as his “best friend’s little sister”, and her feelings for Harry move from youthful to mature to firm. Rowling’s portrayal of Ginny was not designed to be overly direct, but rather metaphorical through a number of depictions of her demeanour. What was undeniable was the unconditional support and everlasting preference that Ginny gave to Harry’s love. Such an emotion as solid as gold and stone was Harry’s spiritual pillar, and the constant flow of love became the ultimate weapon to defeat Voldemort.
As mentioned above, Harry gained the power of love from four sources: family, friendship, teachers and students, which led to Harry’s fraternal spirit, and he spread the love he collected through the same way.
While house elves had suffered discrimination from wizards since time immemorial and their right to live had been ignored, Harry was willing to see Dobby as an equal individual, a trusted friend, and gave Dobby his attention and concern, rescuing him from the Malfoys who served in the times with a sock and fighting for Dobby’s freedom and rights. His act of kindness was also rewarded when Dobby led Harry to escape from Malfoy Manor at a crucial moment when Harry was in danger.
When Harry learned that Peter the Dwarf was the killer of his parents, he did not fight back, but let Peter the Dwarf go for the reason that “even my father would have forgiven him”, and the good deed was finally done, as Peter the Dwarf was driven to release Harry when he was under siege by a power that even he could not believe.
Seeing Hagrid being punished and suspended by the school for adopting the giant spider Aragok, suspected of being the Chamber of Secrets monster, Harry was not compelled by Tom Riddle’s rhetoric, but remained steadfast in his belief that the Chamber of Secrets was not started by Hagrid, and Hagrid ultimately lived up to Harry’s trust. From the moment Hagrid risked his life to carry the one-year-old Harry from the rubble, he bonded with Harry, giving and being given love by Harry, becoming both a mentor and a friend, and contributing to the final battle of Hogwarts.
“And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped (Rowling, 1997) .”
“Those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.” The Christian concepts of “goodness” and “love” are well illustrated in the Harry Potter series. Harry and his friends are empowered by the most sincere goodness and sincerity of youth, and love is the sword that will drive back the forces of darkness and usher in light and eternity.
2.2. Christian’s Death in Harry Potter
The ultimate topic of death is a sacred subject for any religion. The uncertainty of death drives the fear of facing it. These innate emotions have evolved with mankind from the ancient days of witchcraft to the developed religious system of contemporary society, which remains an unsolved mystery.
Have no love for the world or for the things which are in the world. If any man has love for the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Because everything in the world, the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but of the world. And the world and its desires is coming to an end: but he who does God’s pleasure is living for ever (Rowling, 1997) .
Christianity also inevitably addresses the subject of “death”. Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit and were expelled from the Garden of Eden as a punishment from God, and since then women have suffered the pains of childbirth and death for generations, which is the origin of the Christian term “original sin”, a concept that is widely believed to be. “Only the Son can expel the devil and make the heart clean, and only the clean of heart can see God”, that is, Jesus the Saviour. The Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas (born ca.1322), who argued that Christ entered into the human situation, and transformed it. By becoming incarnate, he transformed human nature. By dying on the cross, he defeated sin. And through his resurrection, Christ abolished the obstacles in the way of humanity returning to God, and sharing fellowship with its creator and redeemer. Therefore the need for all to repent, to confess their past wickedness and sins, to follow the teachings of Our Lord Jesus, and through this act to achieve communion with God. For Charles Hodge (1797-1878), a great nineteenth-century Princeton theologian, fallen humanity needs “a savior who is a prophet to instruct us; a priest to atone and to make intercession for us; and a king to rule over and protect us (Riches, 2000) .”
The meaning of “death” and “loss” is explored profoundly in the Harry Potter series, and in the introduction to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling follows a passage from William Penn’s book named Some Fruits of Solitude (Penn, 2000) to make his point about “Death” is a theme that undoubtedly occupies an important place in the novels:
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal (Rowling, 1997) .
There are four main characters in the novels who are closely associated with the theme of “death”: Albus Dumbledore, Gellert Grindelwald, Tom Riddle and Harry Potter. Dumbledore had the spirit of facing death and embodied the positive attitude to death preached by Christian thought. His attitude towards death was showed in the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:
After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was really not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all—the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them (Rowling, 1997) .
The casting of the Sorcerer’s Stone itself coalesced with the desire for immortality, and countless people were consumed by greed. But Dumbledore and his best friend, Nicklaus Lemaire, the builder of the Sorcerer’s Stone, were not in the least tempted by desire and had a unique understanding of life and death, knowing that as long as the Sorcerer’s Stone was in the world, it would attract countless rivalries. Therefore, Dumbledore and Lemuel destroyed the Stone and Lemuel died with it. Dumbledore’s view of death is that it is just one of the four cycles of life, old age, sickness and death, and that it is an inevitable consequence of life’s development and should not be feared. This view is reflected elsewhere in the book. As Harry used the time converter to cross the barrier of time, but was unable to bring his father back from the dead and drowned in the pain of his loss, Dumbledore enlightened Harry, “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him.” This shows that he believed that death is only a physical phenomenon and that the dead will always live in people’s hearts as long as they still remember the little moments of their lives.
Dumbledore realized that there was no point in running away from death, that it was just a way to live, that the only thing he could do was to repent sincerely and gave love and salvation to others, and because of this he was stronger than anyone else, because his concept of death was far beyond that of others.
It was his sister, who was an obscurus gave him this idea. The term “obscurus” appears in the Fantastic beast and where to find them, and refers to a host of dark power, usually means the young wizards who after suffering physical or mental abuse, over-suppress their magical abilities. Albus’s young sister was bullied by three naughty boy in the playground and was mentally damaged that she became an obscurus, at that time, Albus’s father was imprisoned and his mother was seriously injured by the immense power released by her sister and died shortly afterwards. The young and talented Albus had just graduated from Hogwarts and had a bright future ahead of him, but had to return to home to look after his young siblings due to family changes. A young man with a heart of gold, he remained depressed until he met Grindelwald. Two ambitious and talented teenagers met each other, they decided to use the Deathly Hallows to raise the status of wizards among all mankind by finding them through the clues provided in The Legend of the Three Brothers. But his younger brother was so unpleasant that he didn’t allowed Albus to find the deathly hallows, during the argument, Grindelwald attacked him, and he fought back. Albus joined the fight to protect his brother, and during the confusion, a death spell from someone’s wand killed his young sister by accident. Grindelwald escaped that night. As if there was no proof, the death of his sister was the spell that trapped Albus, and he lived out his life with guilt. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Albus drunk poisoned wine to get his hands on the Horcrux, became delirious and chokes back his decades-old sins. So death might be a relief for Albus, whose soul was incomparably pure because he was unafraid of death and transcended human desires, in line with mainstream Christian values. He finished his redemption.
In the end he took the ring—the spirit weapon with the powerful death spell—on his finger, voluntarily choosing death in order to destroy Tom, the best student he had ever taught.
Dumbledore had the courage and conviction to face death and therefore transcended death itself. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry talks with Dumbledore at the King’s Cross station, proving what Dumbledore had said earlier: “that those who truly love you and those you love will always live inside you, and you will find them when you need them.”
In contrast, the best student Dumbledore had ever met since he became a teacher, Tom Riddle, later Voldemort, saw in him the value of “escaping death”. He was the product of a love potion and was orphaned after his mother was abandoned by his father. Dumbledore found him in the orphanage and took him to Hogwarts to study. He entered the forbidden section of the school without permission, and there he learned about Horcruxes, the practice of splitting one’s soul through uninterrupted killing and putting the split soul into a different vessel, by which he could live forever. But such an unethical way was destined to come with a cruel price. In a sense, Voldemort did get what he wanted, but his body also became painfully inhuman and ghostly.
“Aaah… pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost… but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know… I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal—to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked… for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it. Nevertheless, I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself… for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand…”
…
Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse (Rowling, 1997) .
Voldemort’s extremely low self-esteem person. He hated his father, who had abandoned his wife and children, and his identity as a half-blood wizard… The stronger his inferiority hard became, the more he wanted to be recognized by the wizards, and from then on he became obsessed with the study of dark magic, using dehumanizing methods to make Horcruxes. He thought he could escape death, but death is inescapable and inevitable. Everyone wants to be immortal, but no one can escape death.
Both Harry and Grindelwald embodied the idea of “living from the dead”. Harry’s death was the death of Jesus Christ, that is, self-sacrifice. Harry lived because of his mother, so Harry valued his own life, but he also understood that he had a mission to save the world as the only one who could fight against Voldemort. He was willing to fight for justice, even if he was threatened with death. The ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles portrayed the character of King Oedipus with the same spirit of “death”, that is, he was not resist or killed by others, but died willingly and without resistance, using his death to achieve an oracle’s pardon for the city-state, thus redeeming the suffering citizens.
He stood up, looking around. Was he in some great Room of Requirement? The longer he looked, the more there was to see. A great domed glass roof glittered high above him in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace. All was hushed and still, except for those odd thumping and whimpering noises coming from somewhere close by in the mist…
…
Harry nodded and sighed. Leaving this place would not be nearly as hard as walking into the forest had been, but it was warm and light and peaceful here, and he knew that he was heading back to pain and the fear of more loss (Rowling, 1997) .
Like the resurrection of Jesus, Harry, after self-sacrifice, finally rose to death, completing the resurrection in the ultimate sense. In addition, Scheler, one of the greatest German philosopher considered that this spirit as The Christian martyr’s theory of suffering, which is a type of passive resistance value.
If Dumbledore no doubt died for duty, then Grindelwald died for love. As Rita Skeeter explained in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, Grindelwald was expelled from the school for conducting twisted experiments and then went to visit his aunt in Goldrick’s Hollow, where he met Dumbledore. During the summer in the valley, they decided to search for the Deathly Hallows, and coined their own famous phrase, “for the greater good”. The two were so close at the time that Grindelwald’s aunt commented on their relationship as “These two children have tasted the vicissitudes of life too early feel like old friend at first sight”. But when Dumbledore’s sister Arianna was killed in that terrible accident the relationship between them was officially broken.
Grindelwald, actually the first wizard, was powerful enough to threaten the world. But Dumbledore had defeated Grindelwald at century duel in 1945, which was also printed on the back of chocolate frog card. It’s hard to speculate on whether there was a hidden agenda behind Dumbledore’s victory, but we can know about that Grindelwald may show mercy.
Rowling argued about Dumbledore that, “The Dumbledore who was always the greatest champion of love, Harry, love save us, he’s one greatest experience of love was utterly tragic.”
Grindelwald loved Dumbledore, but his feelings were hidden in the depths of his heart, and what he displayed on the surface was his growing ambition and lust for power, the massage only became clear to him during his long years of solitude after being imprisoned in Newmongard. Dumbledore, on the other hand, had been suffering from the pain that guilt had brought to him because of the accident all those years ago, and Grindelwald’s defection had made him refuse to believe in Grindelwald’s feelings for him. But there is no denying that both of them continued the passionate emotions of their teenage years.
It was love that led to Grindelwald’s death in Newmonger’s prison:
At last he said, “Grindelwald tried to stop Voldemort going after the wand. He lied, you know, pretended he had never had it.”
Dumbledore nodded, looking down at his lap, tears still glittering on the crooked nose (Rowling, 1997) .
Grindelwald’s dying also revealed the strength of his heart, “I welcome death! But my death will not bring you what you seek. There is so much you do not understand.” During his decades in Newmongard, Grindelwald realized that power is dust in the face of time, only love is eternal, and this is an emotion that Voldemort did not possess. The death like Grindelwald, who was ignored the law, arrogant, murderous and ambitious, and perhaps the most powerful dark wizard in the magic world designed by the Harry Potter series, was a Christian death, because fundamentally he died for love.
The original novel combines the Christian values of death and love with a highly complex plot and characterization, reflecting the religious nature of the novel to a certain extent and making the reader think about the profound meaning of the Christian spirit, the content of the novel is educational in the field of religious studies.
3. The Discussion of Witchcraft
3.1. Wizarding World in Harry Potter
In the novel, J. K. Rowling constructs a world different from that in which “muggles” (i.e. humans without magic) exist—the “wizarding world”.
The most prominent individuals are include, but not limited to, wizards, goblins, magical creatures, giants, ghosts, house elves, and werewolves. In total, there are at least eleven wizarding schools in this world, all of which are registered with the International Wizarding Union. Hermione mentions that “there is always a fierce competition between the various schools of magic”, so the exact addresses of the schools are kept strictly secret. Seven of these schools are the most prestigious: Boothbottom—the “school endowed by alchemists”, Durmstrang—the “hotbed of black magic”, Ilvermorny—the “school of magic founded by the descendants of Salazar Slytherin”, Ugadu—“The School of Magic on the Mountains of the Moon”, The Magic House—“The Palace made of alabaster”, Castrobosch—“The School under the guardianship of Kybala” and Hogwarts. At the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, students are required to learn many things, all of which are mentioned in the books. Potions, Astronomy, Herbology, History, Defense Against the Dark Arts, spellology, metamorphosis… etc.
As well as learning about magic, students at the school will learn about the life patterns between different species. For example, Giants are an extremely dangerous species, look huge, savage and brutal by nature, and numerous wizards have been harmed by them, so wizards have banished and hunted them down, leading giants to hide in the mountains. The goblins are mainly engaged in making fine artifacts and they are always very greedy for keeping treasures, so together they run the Gringotts bank, the only bank in the wizarding world.
So yeh’d be mad ter try an’ rob it, I’ll tell yeh that. Never mess with goblins, Harry. Gringotts is the safest place in the world fer anything yeh want ter keep safe—cept maybe Hogwarts (Rowling, 1997) .
Like Harry’s friend, Dobby, who is a house elf, his existence is a tragedy under the rule of wizards, because this kind of man are enslaved by wizards, lose their minds and freedom and have no holidays or pay, serving wizarding families for generations and are only free when the host gifts them a clothing.
A werewolf is a half-human, half-wolf creature that turns completely into a wolf on the night of the full moon, losing his sanity and hurting others; Professor Remus Lupin, Hogwarts’ Defense Against the Dark Arts, became a werewolf after being bitten when he was a child.
Magical creatures are usually plants and animals with magical abilities, most wizards don’t really understand them, only wizards like Newt Scamander will notice the spiritual nature in them.
Ghosts are traces of wizards left behind in the world after they die, they cannot enjoy a normal life and have to wander around Hogwarts castle without emotion, but some dead wizards consider it their “own brand”, Nick, the ghost of Gryffindor, chose to stay behind out of fear of death, but he still feels lost because “The truth is, I belong neither here nor there”.
These individuals who live in the wizarding world are full of magic and sorcery and are brought to life through the author’s construction and depiction.
3.2. Witchcraft in Harry Potter
The novel takes many ancient European witchcrafts as example, some of which are drawn from the most primitive and ancient forms of witchcraft. For instance, the method of making Horcruxes is a tribute to The Golden Bough, dividing souls in order to be immortal.
Once a man has enjoyed the pleasure that power brings him, he can no longer conceal his greed and more excessive desires. Throughout history, many emperors have thirsted for immortality. There is a famous emperor in Chinese history, Ying Zheng in Qin dynasty who unified the six kingdoms and became the emperor of the entire empire. But he did not escape this rule either. Towards the end of his reign, he became too obsessed with the art of immortality and coerced magicians to go around searching for an elixir of immortality that even not exist in the world, eventually coming up empty-handed and dying in the desert. He was not an exception, nor was Voldemort. They both desired immortality too much, even at the cost of everything. But energy is constant in the world, there is life and there is death, yet to use the lives of others to seek one’s own immortality is just to linger on without dignity.
The famous historian Salman argued that, “witchcraft is not a belief from the old age, nor is it a superstition. It is an articulation of the world and the invisible forces that drive it.” There are many different hypotheses about the origins of witchcraft, but the available archaeological findings confirm that witchcraft predates the formation of Christianity and has a very deep and ancient history.
According to the Golden Bough, there are two basic laws of witchcraft, “results are similar to the cause” and “what has been touched continues to interact with each other even after it has been removed from contact”, the sorcery in the novel is divided into homeopathic sorcery and contact sorcery.
In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is punished for copying sentences after he contradicts Umbridge, an official sent by the Ministry of Magic, the highest leadership group in the wizarding world, to investigate the situation. When the quill leaves blood-red writing on the parchment, the back of the writer’s hand also feels a sharp pain, as if a knife had been used to write on the hand. It is by applying the principles of homeopathic witchcraft that Umbridge deflects the writing action, leaving the writer with both physical and psychological damage.
In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry, Hermione and Ron broken at least fifty school rules in order to infiltrate the common room of Slytherin House to find Malfoy and extract clues about heir of the Slytherin, secretly boiling a compound potion—a magic potion that temporarily transforms a person into a specific image for a certain period of time. By adding an element of the subject’s body, such as hair, to the prepared potion, the body would melt like boiled paraffin wax, eventually achieving the effect of transformation. The hair, although it has left its host, retains the traits of its owner, which coincides with the definition of genetics in the modern sense, and has a key role in the process of magic casting. A principle of change similar to this magic is contact witchcraft.
In novel, wizards perform magic to the exclusion of some in-between magic, which then leaves only two purposes: to live, or to die.
That summer in Goldrick’s Hollow, Grindelwald, who had the power to see the future, saw the future that they went on separate ways, and he told Dumbledore about this fact and his concerns. They then decided to bind the future together forever through a blood pact. The Blood pact, as the name suggests, is a very ancient ritual. The two individuals performing the ritual used their wands as sharp knives to slice their palms and then interlocked their injured palms with their fingers to fuse their blood together. The powerful will communicated through the blood and condensed into a crystal that serves as a token for them. The two individuals who made the promise were bound by magic to never attack each other with their wands and the blood pact would inform the other person in time if one of them was willing to do harm. George Frazer suggested in the Golden Bough that blood has far-reaching significance in the ancient tradition of witchcraft and is worthy of further study.
There are three unforgivable spells: Avada Kedavra, crucio, and Imperio. The most evil of these spells is the Avada Kedavra, a deadly spell that cannot be defended against or rescued; a wizard struck by this spell would die for sure with a flash of green light, A closer look at the etymology of this spell will trace its origins back to the Middle Ages, when a similarly pronounced witchcraft was applied to ward off illness and misfortune. People wrote the spell in a triangle on parchment, wrapped it around their heads in linen for nine days, and then threw the spell into the river with their backs to the eastward flowing river as a way to ward off the threat of disease and demons and thus protected themselves. The difference is that the starting point of this spell is goodness, whereas the sole purpose of the Avada Kedavra is to kill.
3.3. Religious Persecution of Witches
“Do not allow a sorceress to live.” (Riches, 2000) Clearly that Christianity holds a negative attitude towards witchcraft. “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” (Riches, 2000) And the medieval church always used this as a basis for mutilating and oppressing witches, creating a pagan purge that terrified the witch community.
The Hammer of Witches which was Published in 1487 by Jacob Sprenger (Mackay, 2009) , the Church’s heretic inquisitor, documented a series of interrogation methods for witches, mostly using torture to break the bodies and minds of the hunted witches, causing them to break down and confessing their crimes, facing a brutal death by burning. Regarded as a treasure trove by medieval bishops and officials, this book is partly responsible for the Church’s two-century-long witch-hunt, which reflected the oppression of women by patriarchy and is also known as a guide to witch hunting and is divided into three main sections: firstly, it deals with the bull of Pope Innocent VIII and the identification of witches by the seminary of the University of Cologne, which serves as the theoretical underpinning for the book; secondly, it discusses the relationship between God, the devil and witches and explains in detail how to identify and prevent witchcraft; and lastly, it records the punishment of witches who practice witchcraft; Finally, the punishment of sorcerers is described (Levack, 2013; Stratton, 2007) .
Jules Mishley expressed his views on witch hunting in his book The Witches. He believed that the witch hunts of the time were the work of women, conceived by women in despair that they were nothing more than a series of boundless imaginings of weak women trying to justify themselves in the face of cruel punishments (Wiesner-Hanks, 2019; Hollman, 2021) .
However, the culture of witchcraft is not as evil as Christianity propagates, nor is it a heretical doctrine. The culture of witchcraft has a long history and many Western literary works are permeated with the power of magic and witchcraft, as in the case of the old legend of King Arthur, where Merlin the Archmagician was the most capable minister of the young King Arthur, who put much effort and cost into establishing Albion, the prototype of England, and the stories of elements of prophecy, priests, dragons and so on are all associated with witchcraft.
The positive portrayal of the sorcerer in the book also represents the revival of witchcraft in a new era, when the backwardness of traditional Christianity has led people to question the ideas it propagates, and the glorious image of the sorcerer in the book somehow reflects the equality of human rights and the goodness of nature, overturning the traditional image of the sorcerer, reflecting on the loss of humanity that has long been dominated by male power. It is a reflection of the values pursued by religion in the new time.
4. Discussions and Conclusions
A famous quote said by Nietzsche, “Why are we so happy?—the most significant event that has happened recently—namely, that ‘God is dead’ and that belief in the Christian God is no longer worth believing in Christianity. The fundamental reason why it is a decadent, fallen Christianity is that it is a religion hostile to life, or at odds with strong, healthy life. Since he is against life, life by instinct will eventually rebel against this religion and will kill the Christian God.”
Since the twentieth century, Western culture has undergone a great transformation and Christianity has begun to readjust itself in the hope of achieving a revival, in which it has chosen to retain the best of its cultural values, namely Christian spirituality. This article attempts to explain the Christian spirit of “love and redemption” and “life to death”, as well as the “Jesus-like resurrection” of the main character Harry, and introduces the witchcraft elements embodied in the novel. It also introduces the fusion of the elements of witchcraft and ancient witchcraft, and the evolution of the popular perception of witchcraft from the Middle Ages to modern times.
The paper answers the questions posed in the introduction. After analyzing the novel’s strong Christian overtones, the paper extends this question by exploring the mapping of the Christian spirit of “love”, “redemption” and “live to death” in the specific plot, concluding that love is powerful and can transcend the distance between life and death, that we can all be saved by receiving and transmitting love. Love can help one to finish redemption. At the same time, death is definitely not far away from us, but it is not something to be feared of, and we should be strong and courageous in the face of death. Secondly, the paper adds a great amount of medieval witchcraft and the lifestyle of witches. From the resistance to witchcraft to the study of witchcraft, reflecting the evolution of Christian attitudes as the centuries changed. By contracts to these two slightly deep themes, the paper adds analysis of specific characters, taking Ron as an example, whose name, character and appearance have a very deep allegorical meaning, revealing Ron’s identity as a schemer at Harry’s side. Also, Voldemort’s inferior, suspicious and brutal character then hints at his tragedy through these characters to show the power of love and redemption.