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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 282: Best of - “Harry Potter” Book 1, Ch. 13-End
02:02:12
This week on The Literary Life, Angelina and Thomas wrap up our encore series on J. K. Rowling’s . Angelina and Thomas begin the episode with some thoughts on their Aristotelian approach to literature as seen in this series of episodes. After...
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- [00:01]
Angelina Stanford
Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.
- [00:22]
Thomas Banks
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me is my partner in crime and part time Muggle, Nicholas.
- [01:42]
Angelina Stanford
Never mind.
- [01:43]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, nice. No, nice. You don't look at day over 650.
- [01:47]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, that's good, that's good. A lot of fruit juice.
- [01:52]
Thomas Banks
Well, welcome back, gang. This is our last episode in this series we've been doing on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, or if you're American, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And today we're going to find out why that's a terrible title and just ruins what the whole book is about. But I get ahead of myself first. Welcome to all the new Patreon members. A lot of people have joined our Patreon and our forum in excitement about this episode. And so welcome. We're, we're glad that you're enjoying the series and are ready to jump in. I happen to think our Patreon forum is the best place on the Internet. The conversations are extremely good. And, and this is a group of.
- [02:33]
Angelina Stanford
I know so many people have signed up for the Patreon that you'd think we had sold out or something like that. And maybe we have, I don't know. But I mean, we, yeah, might start having to, you know, film ourselves wearing, you know, sponsorship buttons and things like.
- [02:46]
Thomas Banks
That, begging for a Mercedes sponsorship for like six months. I'm trying to sell out. Come on, come on, Mercedes. Call my people when you try to.
- [02:54]
Angelina Stanford
Sell out and no one is buying.
- [02:56]
Thomas Banks
Oh, that's the worst. That's the worst. But yes, welcome to all of those people. And a quick reminder, we've had a lot of people join the Harry Potter class. So that's starting. So just a reminder, this series is free, obviously, and is the, basically I'm covering book one free here on the podcast and then the other books will be covered in a series of mini classes that I'm doing. So the first one's a mini class just in just a few weeks here, August 12th. And we'll be covering books two and three then and I hope to cover the rest in a series of mini classes and finish sometime next summer, which will allow people to, you know, read the books at their own pace or even buy them one at a time as their children get old enough to read those books. So that, that'll be there for you because everything we do is live or later. So you can take the live class or you can watch the videos sometime later. It all, it all works the same way. So you can find out about that, of course, at our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click on the webinars tab and you'll find out all the information you need about that Harry Potter class. I think it's going to be really good. I'm excited about it because even though we've said a lot in these episodes and we're going to say a whole lot today, it's really just a drop in the bucket because I'm committed to no spoilers. There's so much I cannot say much more.
- [04:15]
Angelina Stanford
I'm starting to think it might have been a mercy that, that we chose the shortest of these books, that the shortest of these is the first. Because otherwise, I mean, you have what, 30 pages of notes for this episode?
- [04:25]
Thomas Banks
I have 30 pages and notes for this episode.
- [04:28]
Angelina Stanford
Dear Lord.
- [04:30]
Thomas Banks
Exactly.
- [04:31]
Angelina Stanford
I might, I might take a dinner break sometime here.
- [04:35]
Thomas Banks
Don't act like you don't love it when I get monologuing. Something else I thought was really interesting just reading the feedback from these series. And again, as I've said on all the previous weeks, I'm just delighted to hear the stories of kids in the cars, you know, saying don't turn it off, or kids in the cars listening at their mom. And then this is one of my favorite stories. You'll appreciate this. A 16 year old boy who was stuck in the car, trapped, listening to this podcast against his will when he was in the car with his mom. When it was over, he said, you know, I thought that was going to be really boring, but it wasn't. It was really interesting.
- [05:07]
Angelina Stanford
Well, there you Go.
- [05:08]
Thomas Banks
So, congratulations. You're not as boring as people thought you were going to be.
- [05:12]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [05:12]
Thomas Banks
Because I know they're not talking about me.
- [05:14]
Angelina Stanford
Give me time.
- [05:17]
Thomas Banks
So those comments have all been super delightful, but one comment we've gotten quite a bit, actually, that has meant a lot to me is people saying how refreshing it is and nice just to have a conversation about Harry Potter, the books, without having a conversation about all of the controversy surrounding J.K. rowling. And I'm really glad that you guys are pleased with that. And I want to talk just. Just a little bit about that. That was a deliberate choice on our part not to talk about that. And that is because our view of literature is, as I said in the first episode, it's the Aristotelian tradition. And we actually did a whole series on Aristotle's Poetics. And you can catch that if you want to hear us talk all about Aristotle's view of art and literature. But basically, what this means, in the words of Northrop Fry, is that we see literature as an object of study. In other words, we treat literature as art and believe that a work rises or falls on its own merit as art. We steadfastly reject the idea that approval or disapproval of a work of literature should hinge on approval or disapproval of the life or views of the artist. To be frank, that's just some postmodern nonsense that we're dealing with right now. And it's related to so much of what we've been talking about in this whole series. We've talked about art as icon. We've talked about art as a prism reflecting transcendent truth. Well, in the current age, we do not recognize transcendence or spiritual reality. And therefore, the only way we know how to talk about art at all is. Is in terms of the personal rather than the universal. There's a quote from D.H. lawrence that I really like. I bet you Mr. Banks are going to know exactly where he wrote this. You'll probably footnote me, but this is a great quote. He says, never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
- [07:22]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think that's from Studies in Classic American Literature.
- [07:28]
Thomas Banks
I think that's right.
- [07:29]
Angelina Stanford
I'm not entirely certain. I've been quoting that for years, and.
- [07:32]
Thomas Banks
I can't remember where I. Yeah, me too. Yeah, but I think that's it.
- [07:34]
Angelina Stanford
It's a. It's a great line.
- [07:36]
Thomas Banks
It's a great line. And so totally demonstrates what we're trying to talk about here, that the tale is the. Is the. Is the point, right? Not the teller. Okay? And so what we do then here is we look at the art, not at the artist. And you'll notice too. Okay, so what if you're listening right now and you're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you brought up some stuff about J.K. rowling. Well, that's true, but when we have brought in information about the artist, it has always been with the aim of helping us understand the work of art. So we talked about her literary influences, we talked about her understanding of the literary tradition she is working in. We talked about her understanding of symbols, that sort of thing. We did not get into her Twitter account, her politics, or any of that, because that is completely irrelevant to the question of the art. And because I have been avoiding spoilers. And I had to laugh because a few of you on Facebook said that you did not think that I could pull that off. You did not think I could pull off talking about this book without giving spoilers. And I have. But that has allowed us to talk about the nature of art and how stories work. So in this episode, we're going to see how we bring it all together here. This entire series and all these little conversations we've had about how symbols work, how stories work, how art is an icon, it's been building to this crescendo. So buckle up, boys and girls, you're in for one roller coaster of a ride for this last episode on this series. All right, well, let's jump in then to our commonplace quotes. And Mr. Banks, you've got a good one. I'm jealous of your commonplace quote. It's so good.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah. This is a passage which occurs in a letter that Walter Scott wrote around 1820 to a friend of his. And to provide a bit of context, Sir Walter Scott here, who of course is best known for his historical novels, he is deploring the condition of children's literature in his day. I mean, so just to reassure you that we're not the first generation who said, oh my gosh, YA fiction these days. This is terrible stuff. I can't believe they're force feeding children this pabulum. So anyway, here is Walter Scott voicing our thoughts and feelings before we did quote. There is a sort of wild fairy interest in these tales which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken and soften the heart of childhood than the so called good boy stories which have been in later years composed for them in the Latter case, their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks. And the moral always consists in good conduct being crowned with temporal success. The truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild.
- [10:44]
Thomas Banks
Oh, that is so. That is so good. Of course, he was much like the situation we find ourselves in when I gave the 90s background to this story. Sir Walter Scott is writing at a time when Victorian didacticism is very popular in literature.
- [11:00]
Angelina Stanford
It's on the upswing and. Yeah, and a lot of the things we call Victorian, some of them even begin a little bit before the Victorian era, like borization, but. Yeah, but broadly speaking, that's true.
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Thomas Banks
And so, as a romantic, Sir Walter Scott was pushing back against that and looking at stories as works of the imagination rather than, you know, simple moral lessons or virtual lessons. I think he rightly understands here, something we talk about a lot on this podcast, that this. This. This hitting kids over the head with these, like, good boy books has the opposite effect.
- [11:35]
Angelina Stanford
The poor kid who has nothing but, you know, has nothing but his bootstraps to pull himself up by, and he works hard and whatever his vocation is, and becomes rich.
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Thomas Banks
And he doesn't tell a lie because.
- [11:46]
Angelina Stanford
We all know that virtuous people become rich.
- [11:47]
Thomas Banks
Absolutely. An upstanding member of his community and society. But it's a similar situation here. So, you know, Walter Scott wrote romances. We have J.K. rowling here writing romances in a time of, you know, message.
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Angelina Stanford
Fiction, the Horatio Alger sort of thing. Yeah. Of which there were a thousand imitators.
- [12:08]
Thomas Banks
Precisely. Precisely. Okay, so here's my commonplace quote. And it's a quote. Well, it's partially A quote from J.K. rowling and partially a quote about her. And this is. This is from a journal article about fantasy and CS Lewis and the Inklings. You know, I tried to find this one quote, and I couldn't. Google let me down. But I remember before I read the Harry Potter book, so this would have been late 90s, early 2000s. I. When. When people. So it's before I read them, when there was all this controversy, and I, you know, I heard people saying all the things. It's a book about witchcraft. It teaches kids how to be witch and all this kind of stuff. And I remember reading an article where she said she was working in the tradition of the Inklings, and I have not been able to track that quote down. Maybe. Maybe our. Our listenership can try. Maybe you guys have like, you know, access to the dark web and you can find, you know, articles that have been scrubbed from the Internet. But I remembered reading that and thinking, oh, well, I. I bet she's doing something completely different than people think they're doing. And of course, you know, I've read it, and that is, in fact, true. So, anyway, this is a book about fantasy and the Inklings, and this is a quote about J.K. rowling. So it starts off with her talking, I believe in God, not magic. In fact, Rowling initially was afraid that if people were aware of her Christian faith, she would give away too much of what's coming in the series. If I talk too freely about that, she told a Canadian reporter, I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 years old or 60, will be able to guess what is coming in the books. So I'm going to be making the case today that there is a reason why she felt like she needed to downplay her Christian belief. And that is because the stories are essentially, fundamentally, archetypally, symbolically, in every way that they can be deeply, deeply Christian tales.
- [14:03]
Angelina Stanford
Now I'm trying to guess what might be coming next. And I honestly, honestly, I don't know. So I think I feel like I'm the one person who doesn't know the general trajectory and ending of the Harry Potter books. But does. I don't know, do they go around, you know, do they go around and kill, like the firstborn child of every.
- [14:20]
Thomas Banks
Family and then they put the blood on the door. That is the end.
- [14:24]
Angelina Stanford
That's exactly the.
- [14:25]
Thomas Banks
Well done, well done. And then they all march off into the desert.
- [14:29]
Angelina Stanford
I'm guessing some kind of biblical motif is involved.
- [14:32]
Thomas Banks
Seriously, though. But yeah, I. I'll hold my comments till the end here. All right, so when I was thinking about what to talk about in this last episode, you know, there is so much that could be said, so much that we could talk about. There's such wonderful conversations on Facebook and in our Patreon forum of people, you know, pointing out all of these little things and, you know, you guys are exactly right. Of all the stuff about the names, it's amazing.
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Angelina Stanford
I've. It's. I've seen multiple Harry Potter threads in the Lit Live discussion group where nobody anathematized anybody. You would think that would be. Is that even possible?
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Thomas Banks
Good. Good job, everybody. In our Facebook group, we've had some very civil discussions and it's been very, very nice, but there's lots of things we could talk about. For example, when I was saying the thing about the names There are so many references to Greek mythology. If all you did was read the books and find all the references to Greek mythology, you'd quite enjoy yourself. Like, how about this, Mr. Banks. Surely you caught this one. The caretaker of the building's name is Argus Filch.
- [15:39]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yes, Argus, who was the servant of the goddess Juno, or Hera, if you prefer, in Greco Roman mythology, whom she gave the task of guarding. The cow IO Right.
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Thomas Banks
Because he has all these eyes, all these eyes on.
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Angelina Stanford
He never closes more than half of them.
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Thomas Banks
And that's really clever that she named him that because he's like the all seeing eye who's never asleep. No matter what time you sneak out, there he is, and he's going to see you. And that's really. That's really fun. We could talk about all the Tolkien stuff. I have to say, though, a few commenters on Facebook were chuckling that you said, I haven't seen any Tolkien. And they said, oh, just keep reading, keep reading. It's coming. It's coming. Because they're in the other books. We could talk about the misdirects. Now that we know who the bad guy actually is, we can.
- [16:32]
Angelina Stanford
I did see that coming.
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Thomas Banks
What I'm talking about, you did see that coming. So we had the misdirect with Snape and Quirrell that Snape was actually trying to save Harry's life while Kirill was the one actually trying.
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Angelina Stanford
Is it Quirrell?
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Thomas Banks
I think it's Quirrell.
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Angelina Stanford
Quirrell.
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Thomas Banks
Stephen Fry says Quirrell. So I'm going with him.
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Angelina Stanford
All right.
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Thomas Banks
In my head, it's always like, squirrel. Like, he's squirrely.
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Angelina Stanford
Ah.
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Thomas Banks
But, you know, I don't know if that's right.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah. All the attention focused on just Snape is this kind of repugnant, unpleasant, dour character. It's. I was like, yeah, she's obviously setting us up for a surprise.
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Thomas Banks
Okay, good. I would like to believe that all I was able.
- [17:10]
Angelina Stanford
Watch out.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, that you watch with me.
- [17:13]
Angelina Stanford
The person that you're meant to dislike is obviously going to be a red herring.
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Thomas Banks
Now, everybody who's listening, who's already read the seven books, though, is. Yeah, they're yelling at you so much right now. But I'm not going to say anything.
- [17:24]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [17:25]
Thomas Banks
Because I don't want to give spoilers, but you'll be in for a ride with Professor Snape if you keep going. I'll just say that we find out, of course, that Snape is not bullying Quirrell. He's actually trying to stop him. And so in this reversal Again, if you've read the books, you can yell at me in in delight at what I'm about to say. But what we have here is this setup that someone Harry thought was bad was actually good and someone Harry thought was good was actually bad. And part of the way that Quirrell gets the misdirect is that his stammer and his demeanor become his disguise. If you're enjoying this encore presentation of our series series on Harry Potter Book one, then you might be interested in the class I'm teaching this summer. You've heard me say on the podcast that I taught books two and three of Harry Potter in August of 2024. This month, June 2025, I'm teaching another mini class, and this time on books four and five of Harry Potter. The class will meet the last two weeks of June at noon Eastern time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Don't worry if you can't make the live sessions, you'll still have access to the class recordings to watch when you're able. I hope you'll join us for what will be a great class looking at how the Harry Potter series is the gateway to the literary tradition. Go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about this class or last summer's class on books two and three. And while you're there, check out some of our other summer offerings as well. Mr. Banks is going to be teaching a class exploring the Victorian age through the lives of five figures. And Dr. Baxter will be back with a class called how to Read a poem like C.S. lewis and fall in love with poetry again. That's HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to check out our other offerings and see what we've got going on. And now back to our podcast. All right, so yeah, there's lots of little things like that we could talk about, but I don't want to talk about those little things. Instead, I want to get to what I think is the real heart of this whole book. Now, you mentioned earlier, tell our tell our listeners what you were saying about, like, you thought it took a while to get to the moment.
- [19:47]
Angelina Stanford
I think I alluded to this in the last episode, that the first half of this book certainly is. It almost seems like the plot has not really begun. We have our setting, we have our characters. We all know kind of who's who and who conforms to what type of student, but it doesn't seem that a crisis is approaching until very late in the book. It doesn't really seem like much is at risk here and it almost seemed more like each chapter would serve as a distinct short story in a series of, you know, a Day in the Life of Hogwarts students in a sort of magazine serial or something like that. Yes, we have our Quidditch match. You know, we have our popular and unpopular school dynamics and that kind of thing. But, yeah, it seemed she took a fairly long time in what is not a very long book to begin the plot conflict.
- [20:45]
Thomas Banks
Yes, she does the same thing, actually, in the Corman Strike books. I feel like I understand the way she approaches structure. And, of course, if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, I'm completely obsessed with structure of stories, so. So this is. This is my jam. And she makes me very excited and happy with the way that she approaches these things. But the first Corman stripe book's also the shortest, and she spends a lot of time setting up the characters and the world that they're in and the parameters of the characters. Having finished the series, I think you can go back and understand why she does that, because the first half of the book is setting up all of the echoes that's going to happen in the other novels. In fact, I'll be talking a little bit later about how book one is a microcosm of the whole series and has to be approached that way, and so it does take a little bit longer. I also agree that the stakes are much lower in this one, and that is because this one's been for 11 year olds. But as the audience gets bigger and older, as Harry gets older, the series gets much higher. The stakes are much higher.
- [21:48]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. At the same time, there is. There are real things at risk here. You have one character who is killed at the end of the book.
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Thomas Banks
Right, right.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
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Thomas Banks
That also was controversial, you know, that characters die.
- [21:59]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
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Thomas Banks
Why?
- [22:00]
Angelina Stanford
There's this idea that you can't have death in a children's book. That seems absolutely absurd to me. I mean, I actually. One thing, I don't want to sound morbid here, but growing up, I read Tintin comics a lot. I think from between the time I was 8 and 12, that was probably like, half my literary diet, which might be overdoing it. Anyway. I like the fact that characters would actually be killed in Tintin books, and I liked that. Then it seemed that. Yeah, it seemed that, you know, there was a sign that the author was not condescending to what he or she felt that youth can or cannot handle.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
Does that make sense?
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Thomas Banks
No, it totally makes sense. I think that that impulse is the same impulse that wants to take all of the violence out of fairy tales.
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Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah.
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Thomas Banks
They don't understand children's imagination and they're afraid.
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Angelina Stanford
Could just be, like, given a talking to and realize that baking children is bad or something. Repent of her ways.
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Thomas Banks
Exactly. But it's because we think fears about death are something that come from outside a child. But, I mean, we're all born knowing we're going to die. So everyone has a fear of death. And the stories that deal with death in a realistic and appropriate way are actually good. I remember years ago picking up a vintage McGuffey's Readers. And so, like, this was like a third grade primer. And you open it up and there's a short story about a girl whose baby brother died. And I thought, oh, this would never, ever happen. But, you know, it's a reality. It's a reality, right? Children. Children die. And, you know, of course, we just live at a time where we push all of that off, but. Okay, so let's get back to what I was saying about the heart of the book. And yes, it does take us a while to get there. And then when we get there, it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, until the end. All right, so we've been talking about this idea of the journey of the soul. We've been talking about this idea of character as symbol, right? So the characters are visible souls. We've talked about the idea that groups of characters together can be a symbol. And so we saw our trio of Ron and Hermione and Harry being, you know, one person, the picture of the properly ordered man, or the disordered man, as the case may be. And now we're going to talk about.
- [24:15]
Angelina Stanford
That actually reminded me Chesterton somewhere, again, I wish I could cite chapter and verse, but I can't. But he remarks that three men who spend much time in each other's company and form a bond of fellowship are no longer three men, but four. Is that kind of true here? Because.
- [24:36]
Thomas Banks
Do you mean the fourth man is created out of the three? Is that what you mean?
- [24:40]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, because it seems like Harry and Hermione and Ron, it's kind of hard to think of any one of them without. Without, you know, juxtaposing them to the others and their characters become more defined in relation to the other two.
- [24:54]
Thomas Banks
Yes, yes, and we'll. And we'll see that. And in fact, you know, to me, the mark of a great author, and I think she achieves that in these books, is somebody who can take characters who are symbols but also write them In a way in which they are, you know, fully realized human beings. So both of those things are going on. This isn't personification where they just personify the soul. They're fully developed human beings, but they also have a soul. They have also a spiritual implications to their existence. And in fact, I got a real kick out of seeing everybody kind of have that light bulb moment about the tripartite soul and talking about other characters. That's been a lot of fun to read, to see people making those connections. So now we're going to talk about then the entire plot that is the action of the story can also be a series of symbols. And that's what we're going to see here. One of the things that my favorite critic, Northrop Fry says is that reading symbolically is reading spiritually. Okay? So we're going to introduce this idea that we're going to be reading the book spiritually. All right? So one of the principles that I introduce to my students in my classes is a book will tell you how to read it. I've been saying that for years. And then one time someone said to me, yeah, okay, I think I understand what you mean. You know, that sounds kind of like mystical and out there. And I stopped and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is it you think I'm saying right now? Like, I'm not rubbing the COVID of Harry Potter saying, harry, Joanne Rowling, tell me how to read. Like, that's not what I'm talking about when I say a book will tell you how to read it. I'm talking about practical things, Signals from the author that we basically have forgotten how to read, but that are telling us, hey, here's how you figure out what this means. Here's how you should be thinking as you read my book. Okay, so some of those things are quotes, epigrams. So they can be a quote at the beginning of the book, they can be quotes at the beginning of sections, they can be quotes at the beginning of chapters. We made a joke a few episodes ago about the fact that Rowling, in her Corman strike books all uses quotes and epigrams very, very well, but that some of the Amazon reviewers don't understand the purpose of those things, complained and said she needed to stop doing that because it broke up the action of the story.
- [27:20]
Angelina Stanford
Are you kidding?
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Thomas Banks
Not kidding.
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Angelina Stanford
I guess it is an old fashioned device that doesn't get used as much anymore.
- [27:27]
Thomas Banks
Well, that person just doesn't understand that it's not a throw, it's not a commercial break it's not random. It's, it's, it's, it's a clue to.
- [27:35]
Angelina Stanford
How you're supposed to product placement for all these other books. Can't you just stick to her own story, for crying out loud?
- [27:41]
Thomas Banks
The Fairy Queen in the story about a woman on a quest. Why would she do that? If you know, you know, right? So that's one way. Another way that they, the author will tell you how to read the book is allusions to other stories, okay? And so that can be sort of references, indirect or direct. And sometimes there's direct reference, as we're going to see here, to actual, like, historical personages. So not just other stories, but historical people. But one of the biggest ways and one of the easiest ways an author will tell you how to read their story is the title. And so now we're back to what we talked about on the very first episode and the mistake that the American authors made in calling this book the Sorcerer's Stone, because the Philosopher's Stone is a direct reference to legends and, and, and, well, not just legend, but actual history, too. So the Philosopher's Stone is a direct reference to alchemy. And of course, it's not just the title, but it's also a plot point, right? So Harry's literally on a quest to find the Philosopher's Stone. We have all this discussion about alchemy, and the title of the story is about alchemy. Now, I also talk about this a lot in my classes, that anytime I reread a book, I'm at a different place in my life. And I will be rereading it alongside a different set of books, like whatever I'm into at the moment. And that inevitably sheds new light. So what happened, what happened this year when I reread Harry Potter was that I was also doing a deep dive into literary alchemy in preparation for this Alice in Wonderland webinar I'm going to be giving, because Alice in Wonderland is all about alchemy. And maybe after today's episode, you'll be even more pumped about Alice in Wonderland. I've also been deep diving into symbolic and literary alchemy in the Eastern tradition, which is super fascinating. So I'm reading all of that as the same time as Harry Potter. And of course, now I've got my hands on the British version which says the Philosopher's Stone. And it, I mean, just this huge light bulb went off for me and I suddenly realized, okay, that's what these books are about. I get it now. Now I'll Also say I mentioned him in an earlier episode. I mentioned John Granger and his book Harry Potter's Bookshelf, which I enjoyed quite a bit. He also writes about alchemy in the Harry Potter books. And so while I came to my understanding of alchemy by studying Alice in Wonderland, I do want to say, if you're looking for, like, a really good, easy explanation for how this plays out in the books, he's a great author to go to, particularly the book Unlocking Harry Potter by John Granger. You can check that out. In fact, I was just really tickled to. I just happened to find this book in a used bookstore and flipped through it and brought it home, because I saw he was quoting people I quote all the time. Northrop Fry, E.M. tilliard, C.S. lewis, Marcia Eliade. And I thought, okay, well, I don't know if this book's going to be any good, but I think this guy might be my new best friend. And so I brought it home. So, yeah, so I can definitely recommend those books to you. I have not read all of his books. I've dipped into most of them and. And have liked what I've seen. So that's. That's something you can.
- [30:59]
Angelina Stanford
John Grangers.
- [31:00]
Thomas Banks
John Granger, yes. Yes. He also has a sub stack on the Corman Strike books and the ring structure there. So I think he and I.
- [31:06]
Angelina Stanford
But of course he does.
- [31:07]
Thomas Banks
I think he and I could have some good conversations.
- [31:10]
Angelina Stanford
Should I be jealous?
- [31:11]
Thomas Banks
No.
- [31:12]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [31:12]
Thomas Banks
No. You're always my favorite person to talk about books, but you won't read the Corman strike books. You also should not be jealous of Corman Strike.
- [31:19]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [31:19]
Thomas Banks
He's not.
- [31:20]
Angelina Stanford
I read one. I didn't read one of the Corman strikes. I did read a Tough Guy detective novel this summer. I do that every once in a while, and I enjoyed it. But, yeah, I think you go to that stuff much more. Much more instinctively than I do. That's because you get more out of it. I don't know.
- [31:36]
Thomas Banks
Absolutely. Absolutely I do. All right, so the first thing we have to do is get out of our heads this idea that alchemy is some kind of primitive version of chemistry. Oh, the stupid medievals back then, they. They didn't understand chemistry. But we understand better now. So, you know, alchemy, that's just some old superstition thing they did, right, where they were trying to turn base metal into gold. That's not what alchemy is about. That has never been what alchemy has been about.
- [32:00]
Angelina Stanford
Or it's not solely what it's about. Yeah.
- [32:02]
Thomas Banks
It's not solely what it's. Well, there's a. You'll see. You'll see as I explain it. So let me give you a couple of quotes here. Mercia Elada has written a book on alchemy, which I've been. Well, I want to own it, but it's like a million dollars online, and I don't know why, but, you know, I'm. I find quotes here and there from it. So he wrote a book about that.
- [32:22]
Angelina Stanford
They called it a paradox. Like, yeah, I want to buy this really expensive book, but I'd have to, like, turn lead to gold.
- [32:28]
Thomas Banks
I have to perform alchemy to be able to buy the book on alchemy. I see what you did there. That's cute. See, I like you. You don't have anything to be jealous of. He. He, along with another author, Titus Burkhart, are two authors that have written a great deal about the history and meaning of alchemy. And so here's a quote from Titus Burkhart. Alchemy may be called the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this, I am not seeking to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such as the purification and alloying of metals. Their real work, however, for which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or operational symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists on this point is unanimous. Okay, what does that mean? It means that alchemy was primarily understood to be something that was happening to your soul. Okay, Now I'm going to explain this. Like I said, 30 pages of notes right here. Most of it's on alchemy, but. But, okay, if you're saying yourself. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you. What do you mean? These alchemists thought that this had something to do with the purification of the souls. It's kind of like some kind of weird medieval superstition. Like, these guys were, like, secret, you know, Satan worshipers or something like this. Sounds weird. If you're thinking that I have a quote from somebody which maybe will help you to think. This was a little more commonly understood than you might think. And that person is someone who I think made his hill to die on. That he was not a person who had medieval superstitions. And that's Martin Luther. Martin Luther, the reformer. Here's what he said. The science of alchemy I like very well. And indeed, tis the philosophy of the ancients. I like it not only for the profits it brings in melting metals in decocting, preparing, extracting and distilling herbs. I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day. So he also understood alchemy to be a spiritual process, an allegorical and symbolic process. All right, now I'm going to come back to that. Hang on. Everybody's like, all right. Pulling their car over into the Walmart parking lot, furiously. Take notes, because I got a lot to say about alchemy. But there's also other direct references to alchemy in the book. And, and of course, one is the name Nicholas Flamel.
- [35:03]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. So when I read that name in Harry Potter, I, I did a double take because I knew I had come across it somewhere.
- [35:13]
Thomas Banks
Harry. Both. Like, I've heard that name somewhere.
- [35:15]
Angelina Stanford
So I, So I look it up and Nicolas Flamel was a real historical character. He was a Frenchman who lived in the 14th century, the 1300s, and was. Grew famous after. I think he was fairly renowned in his lifetime, but. But afterwards, after he had died, he became renowned as the man who discovered the philosopher's stone.
- [35:39]
Thomas Banks
Yep, Those legends start about the 17th century.
- [35:42]
Angelina Stanford
So, yeah, a couple hundred years after he himself lived. But, yeah, I mean, and to this day, I mean, if you ever find yourself in Paris, there is a Rue Nicolas Flamel, there's. There's a Nicolas Flamel street and any number of public works named after him. And yeah, he was renowned as sort of the prince of his trade.
- [36:01]
Thomas Banks
And he did have a wife named Perenelle.
- [36:04]
Angelina Stanford
And there's also a street in Paris named after her.
- [36:06]
Thomas Banks
And the dates line up. So when Hermione's saying, oh, he'd be 650 years old, and at the time this book was written, that's exactly how old he would have been. And he's actually referenced in Victor Hugo's the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but he's also referenced in Isaac Newton's journals.
- [36:26]
Angelina Stanford
Isaac Newton, by the way, considered alchemy to be as important work as physics.
- [36:35]
Thomas Banks
That's right.
- [36:35]
Angelina Stanford
I mean, so, yeah, Isaac Newton, who. Or excuse me, Newton and Leibniz together invent calculus. But Newton also was very much interested in kind of esoteric biblical studies and was, yeah, kind of one of the last alchemists. I mean, I think after Newton, the study kind of dies away and becomes sort of a shorthand insult for obscurantism and medieval superstition. But it lasts a long time because, I mean, Newton lives in the 17th early 18th centuries.
- [37:11]
Thomas Banks
Right. And I think you'd be tempted to think, oh, Newton, that idiot, good at. Good at calculus, not so good at the alchemy. But that's way reductionist and very dismissive and also has a lot of chronological snobbery. So we're going to try to understand how it is that they viewed. That they viewed alchemy here. And I've got. I don't know that I need to read this. I had the passage marked about Nicholas Flamel, but I think everybody knows the plot. So Nicholas Flamel is known for having invented the philosopher's stone and having achieved immortality as a result of that. Okay, so basically what you have in alchemy is a fundamentally different understanding of reality and the natural world than we have now. We see the natural world in terms of matter. You know, I can, I can touch it, I can taste it. I, you know, I can see it, I can hear it. You know, things we can experience through our senses. And we see that as completely separate from the spiritual realm. Now, some people don't believe in a spiritual realm at all. But even people who do believe in a spiritual realm do not think that it is connected to the natural world. In fact, we are so post Enlightenment secular, so, so Mercy Eliot, his work, you know, the sacred and the profane that we've been talking about. That is, this is what he's getting at when he says people used to have a sacred understanding of reality, and now they have a fundamentally secular view of reality, so that they do not see nature as being charged with a spiritual, you know, reality. We are so, we're so materialist that even a Christian, when introduced to the idea that there might be a spiritual reality in a natural object, thinks that, oh, that's pantheism or that's paganism, or that's some kind of New Age wonky stuff. And they don't understand that this is how Christians for thousands of years understood reality. So this is what you have to understand behind alchemy. For them, metals have a spiritual connection. It's not just a natural thing. And they believed that all metals would kind of grow toward perfection. And so that meant then that you could use these metals as a symbol for the perfection of the soul. So, in short, the base metal represents your own soul, and the base metal goes through a series of procedures to become purified and become gold. And so the soul is going through a similar process. So as the metal is going through this process, your soul is going through this process, and then you can achieve perfection.
- [39:45]
Angelina Stanford
Hence the Allegorical. Since the allegorical properties which Luther referred to in that path that you quoted. So that. That wasn't just an. It doesn't seem that that was just an odd attitude on his part, but something that was fairly widely held, fairly common.
- [40:01]
Thomas Banks
Right. So for our purposes, we're going to talk about the way that alchemy has been understood symbolically and the way it shows up in literature. As I discovered researching for Alice in Wonderland, this alchemy stuff is all over the place. And John Granger does, I think, a really fine job explaining this and showing how it shows up in Shakespeare, and it shows up in CS Lewis. And if you understand the symbols that you're working with, you start to see. Okay, so lots of these authors are using literary alchemy as a. An allegory for the journey of the soul. So we've been talking about the journey of the soul. Right. So your everyman character is moving toward holiness, and he's going to go through a series of obstacles to achieve that holiness. That is going to be symbolically presented then as that soul being transformed from a base metal to gold. Because gold becomes a symbol of immortality. That is why we talked about heaven as having the streets paved with gold. Right. It's. It's. It's. No one really thinks heaven's gonna have gold in it. I hope it becomes a symbol for immortality. All right, so let's look at some of the other direct alchemy or. No, these are indirect. These are illusions. Okay, how about the bank vault where the philosopher's stone was kept? Shout out to K. Pellum. Way to go, K. Who brought this to my attention? Because I did not pay attention to the numbers, but as soon as she said them, I thought, oh, I can't believe I missed that. The numbers on the bank vault where the philosopher's stone was held were 7, 1, and 3. Those are alchemy numbers.
- [41:27]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, so could you go into that more?
- [41:30]
Thomas Banks
I am. I have notes right here.
- [41:32]
Angelina Stanford
She cracks knuckles.
- [41:34]
Thomas Banks
I do.
- [41:34]
Angelina Stanford
I do hold my beer.
- [41:36]
Thomas Banks
If I go out of order, though, I'm gonna.
- [41:38]
Angelina Stanford
7, 1, and 3.
- [41:39]
Thomas Banks
Okay, 7, 1, and 3. So in the book, what we saw there is we had seven obstacles. At the end, we had three people, and we had one quest. Okay, but. Okay, so here's how seven plays out. There are seven stages of spiritual alchemy. Thus, the seven obstacles that Harry goes through at the end, they correspond to the seven metals, the seven heavenly bodies, and the seven organs of the body. And those all correspond to each other. E.M. tilliard in the Elizabethan world picture has a whole chapter on the doctrine of correspondence. So that this is, this is this. I'm, I got to keep this, I gotta break this down easy. We got nine year olds listening to this.
- [42:18]
Angelina Stanford
What nine year old has not read E.M.W. tillard in the last week?
- [42:21]
Thomas Banks
Okay, we can assume, we can assume some things about our eyes. So for example, if you take the metal, gold, that corresponds to the heavenly body of the sun, which corresponds to the organ of the body, the heart. Okay, so they, they go across that way. And from antiquity to the middle of the 18th century, everyone believed that seven metals existed. We now believe that there are more, but that was the common understanding. And there would have been only seven heavenly bodies at that time too. I mean, even now we can't agree on if Pluto's a planet. So, you know, we can't be rolling our eyes at them.
- [42:53]
Angelina Stanford
We can agree that Neptune is a planet though, right?
- [42:56]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I guess.
- [42:56]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [42:59]
Thomas Banks
Okay, so here's what happens. They take their base metal and by subjecting it to repeated cycles of dissolution and coagulation, they then can purify it into a philosopher's stone. Now when you're talking about the symbol here, okay, so we said gold is the sun, is the heart. Very, very often that's going to be a male character and that is going to be portrayed as a hero who saves and cares for his people. Okay, so let's think here. Is Harry associated with gold?
- [43:34]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yes.
- [43:34]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [43:37]
Angelina Stanford
I thought you were going to answer this.
- [43:38]
Thomas Banks
I was going to answer it.
- [43:39]
Angelina Stanford
Fire away, fireman.
- [43:40]
Thomas Banks
Well, he's associated.
- [43:41]
Angelina Stanford
I wasn't even sure if you were asking me a question.
- [43:42]
Thomas Banks
Well, it was kind of rhetorical. But you leaned forward, I thought you were going to answer it. Harry's associated with gold because he's Gryffindor. The Gryffindor has the gold colors. He also is associated with the Snitch, the Golden Snitch. And the people who have read the rest of the books are now screaming into their car stereos. Okay, so he is. And at the end of this book, remember when he, he goes unconscious and the first thing he sees when he wakes up is the snitch and he's just out of reach. Okay, so Harry is definitely associated with gold. I think he's probably associated with the sun too because he's always flying on that broomstick and he's always flying really, really high.
- [44:17]
Angelina Stanford
Right.
- [44:17]
Thomas Banks
Okay, so that male character, that's the heart. We already said that Harry's the chest. Right. That is going to be Paired with a female character who's the brain. I wonder if she knew what she was doing there. And that female character is going to be associated with the moon and silver. Okay, now people out there are saying, but Hermione is also in Gryffindor, so that's gold. How can Hermione be silver? Well, hahaha, here we go. Hermione is the female version of the word Hermes, which is the same as the God Mercury. And Mercury is associated with quicksilver. So Hermione's name is Silver. Okay, now, okay, so we say actually.
- [45:08]
Angelina Stanford
I, if we give a shout out to this book all the time. But much of what? Well, much. Some of the things Angelina is describing here. CS Lewis also goes into in the discarded image.
- [45:19]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
- [45:20]
Angelina Stanford
Particularly the associations of planets with certain metals. And okay, here's something.
- [45:25]
Thomas Banks
I also got this out of Stephen Fry's Mythos because he, he, he connects Mercury and Quicksilver. But anyway, I digress.
- [45:31]
Angelina Stanford
Quicksilver, of course is unstable. Famously unstable. You know, and that is why Shakespeare names Romeo's unstable best friend who, you know, gets involved in a fight he shouldn't and gets killed. Mercutio. Because he's unstable and quarrelsome and kind of pot headed.
- [45:49]
Thomas Banks
Okay. And so that's why you, what you often see is the bickering couple like Benedict and Beatrice and like Ron and Hermione. And why one of those in the bickering couple is going to be associated with Mercury because they're unstable. Okay, Yep, I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay, so we said then that Harry wakes up at the end and he sees the Golden Snitch, but he can't quite catch it. Okay, Thus we're set up for the quest of the whole series of the seven books to turn hairy golden. He's not quite there. At the end of book one, he sees the goal is just out of reach. Gosh, she's so brilliant. Okay, so that's seven then for three, we had the three primes according to Paracelsus. Okay. And that's sulfur, mercury and salt. Okay, so we already said Hermione is Mercury. Right. Hermes. But sulfur is red. And what character is red? Ron. So Ron is red and passionate. Again, that would correspond to the belly, right? Being all the passions.
- [46:51]
Angelina Stanford
All of this is in Granger.
- [46:53]
Thomas Banks
No, no, no. All of this is my own research. Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy. I'm not. All of this is my own research on alchemy. I am also saying that it's also in. Not everything I'm saying is in this book. But he also does a good job explaining alchemy. I did not get this out of this book. The stuff I'm. None of this is in there. Okay. Okay, then. So the sulfur and the mercury then, are working on the third prime, which is salt, and I think that's hairy. Okay. So, you know, the body's made of salt, and it's going to be working toward turning that into gold. All material substances come from these three. The other thing that's at play here is the four elements. And last week we talked about the four elements with the four houses. The four houses. Okay, so that means Harry has to go through a series of purifications so that he can be worthy at the end to grasp the philosopher's stone. So we've kind of hinted at this because sulfur is red. Alchemy colors. And this. And if, you know, you're Alice in Wonderland and you're through the Looking Glass, you're going to lose your mind. Right now, the alchemy colors are red, white, and black. Okay. And then, of course, ultimately gold. But those are the three colors. I didn't want to say too much about this in this book because this comes into much greater play later, but if we think about what J.K. rowling has named her characters and how she has described them, this makes sense. Dumbledore's name is Albus, which means white. White. Okay. And he is almost a fairy tale magical helper. He gives the cloak to Harry. He. He has this wisdom. He allows Harry to find the mirror. He's a mentor and a guide. We also know that Harry's mother is named Lily, which is what color? White. Okay. And we learn in this story that her love for him protected him. So he's got two white figures.
- [48:54]
Angelina Stanford
I was going to say he leads a literally charmed existence.
- [48:56]
Thomas Banks
That's right. He sure does. That becomes very important. Okay, so that's white. And so what you're going to see is the white and the black and the red work together to make the gold. That's my very simplified version. It's actually more complicated than that, but I'm not going to get into that in this podcast. So that's the white. The black. Well, there's going to be a number of black figures in these books, but in book one, that would be Snape. Right. He's dressed in black. He's in a dungeon. He's got black hair. Yeah. So he's. He's the color black. And the black operates as the dissolving agent. He's the one that's going to. Black is what's going to break the metal down. So you can see how then what she does. I said this in the first episode, right? She takes these things like the stock characters of the schoolboy story. So you have the mean, sadistic teacher that's a stock character, but by making him the color black in an alchemy story, he becomes not just the sadistic teacher, but the dissolving agent to purify Harry's soul. Okay? And of course, his name, Severus Snape, means to cut asunder, right? So he's, he's, he's cutting Harry down, he's dissolving them. And then we also have a red character because we have Ron, but we also have Rubeus, Hagrid, and the word rubious means red. Red. We also have a red lion in Gryffindor, okay? So she's setting up all the colors. Again, if you know your Alice in Wonderland, all of those colors are at play too, okay? So what happens is you take the opposites, the sulfur and the quicksilver or the mercury, as we said earlier, okay? And sulfur and mercury are opposites of one another. That's how come you get the bickering couple out of them, the quarrelsome couple out of them. And those two things will work on Harry. So again, we said red. Ron, he's the passions, and we've got Hermione, you know, she's. She's the quicksilver here, okay? So if we combine the idea that Harry's on a journey of the soul to God, okay, and he's on a literal quest to get the Philosopher's Stone, and symbolically, that means he's on a quest to become the Philosopher's Stone, right? To become the gold. What we should see then, as we enter into these last set of obstacles, we should see a picture of a properly ordered soul. Now, a lot of times when I start doing, like the end of a book, and this is how I teach my classes, too, I spend all this time slowly building up the framework, and then when we get to the end, there's the big payoff. And a lot of times my students, you know, they're very impressed with the stuff I noticed. And they'll say, but how did you know to look for it? Well, this is one of those examples. How did I know to look for it? Because she titled this book the Philosopher's Stone. Because we have seen those three characters, the head, the chest and the belly, work to become one. And that means the only way Harry can be a purified soul pure enough to touch and to, to take the Philosopher's stone at the end is if he is a properly ordered man. So what we should see in this last set of obstacles is that he's properly ordered and he can achieve his quest. Okay, so that's what we'll look for here. But before we get to that last set of seven obstacles and if you're following along at home and you're yelling at me, there are only six. Ahaha. Just wait. First we have that important scene in the Forbidden Forest. So not only is it important in terms of the plot, but we get some really, really important symbols in this as well. But the Forbidden Forest I feel like is when it really kind of gets going the story now you know, the stakes have all been set. Yes.
- [52:31]
Angelina Stanford
Lives might be at risk and all that kind of thing.
- [52:33]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, right, right. And this was actually very cleverly done because Hermione and Harry as people who've grown up in the Muggle world don't know anything about this. But having Malfoy there to be freaked out and afraid was a really nice touch.
- [52:49]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, it was.
- [52:51]
Thomas Banks
So that, that makes the, the stakes much higher. So here is where when I was reading the Hobbit at the same time as this book last year, I kept getting them mixed up and in class for teaching the Hobbit I kept calling Mirkwood Forest the Forbidden Forest. So there's a, there's a lot of Tolkien esque stuff going on.
- [53:07]
Angelina Stanford
There was a pretty obvious kinship.
- [53:09]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean obviously we've got. Dumbledore is in a similar situation to Gandalf. Harry's an orphan, Frodo's an orphan. But we also have a connection between Hagrid and Bjorn. And so if I can give just, just the small version, there's a medieval folk character known as the Wild man and he will be somebody who's physically very large. He's going to be surprised.
- [53:36]
Angelina Stanford
I'm honestly surprised that it took us this long for you to bring this up because I thought before we began. Oh yeah, she's going to bring up Hagrid Wildman like episode one or something.
- [53:47]
Thomas Banks
To say it.
- [53:47]
Angelina Stanford
But you're unpredictable, Ms. Stanton. You're unpredictable.
- [53:49]
Thomas Banks
I am unpredictable. In my medieval literature class when I teach the Wild Man I always give Hagrid and Bjorn as the, the examples.
- [53:55]
Angelina Stanford
I was honestly thinking maybe I should bring this up myself because she hasn't done it. Maybe she just overlooked it or something like that.
- [54:01]
Thomas Banks
No, I us to get a little further along so it would make sense. But he's. So a wild man is going to be physically big. He's going to be very hairy. He is going to have some kind of special connection to animals, which, of course, Haggard does as a gamekeeper. Bjorn does. You know, he has a very similar situation. And what he's mostly going to do is he's going to have a house on a border. So Bjorn having his house right before you go into Mirkwood Forest, Hagrid's house is right there on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. So they're kind of a border character. And very often a knight will have to fight the wild man before they can go into the next section.
- [54:40]
Angelina Stanford
Liminal is the word you're looking for.
- [54:42]
Thomas Banks
Well, I know when people say liminal, but I love.
- [54:45]
Angelina Stanford
I love the word liminal. I had a professor who said it.
- [54:47]
Thomas Banks
All the time, like the word liminal, but go right ahead.
- [54:49]
Angelina Stanford
From. From the Latin limen, meaning threshold.
- [54:52]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [54:52]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, they're say it every once in a while. Maybe you'll get used to it. Yeah.
- [54:58]
Thomas Banks
Sibilance. Sibilance.
- [55:00]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [55:00]
Thomas Banks
If you get that joke, fill that.
- [55:01]
Angelina Stanford
Off your bingo card.
- [55:03]
Thomas Banks
Okay, so they go into the Forbidden Forest, and we have two important things here, the unicorns and the centaurs. All right, let's deal with the centaurs first. And if we pull out our bestiary, and if we also look at the way we find centaurs in literature, we can understand what a centaur represents. So, first of all, if you know your Narnia, you should have been thinking of Runewit the centaur in the Last Battle. I think that there's no question Tolkien is pulling. Not Tolkien. Wow. Just called Rolling Tolkien. Take that, Harold Bloom.
- [55:38]
Angelina Stanford
I'm also surprised it took us this long for one of us to do that.
- [55:41]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, Rowling obviously knows her Lewis, and she's pulling her centaur characters from the same kind of medieval world that Lewis is. So what's going on with the centaurs? Obviously, they're kind of mysterious. They're very wise. Runewit, like these centaurs, studies the stars. So symbolically, what you have there is because you have a man's body on top with an animal body on the bottom. That actually becomes another symbol for the properly ordered man. And Plato sees the picture of the properly ordered man as a man on top of a horse, like a man riding a horse. So a center, of course, is a picture of a man riding a horse. And we even use that expression now, like, you know, hold your horses. You Know, meaning control yourself. Right. You know, laying on your horses.
- [56:35]
Angelina Stanford
Plato in the Phaedrus, also, there's a famous image he uses of a man driving a chariot pulled by two horses, one of which is passionate and fiery and unpredictable and needs to be kept in control. The idea of the horse as representative of the passions is. Yeah. At least as old as the Greeks, if not older.
- [57:03]
Thomas Banks
Absolutely, absolutely. So what you have then is just like we said, with the head, the chest and the belly, you have the head. So that's reason ruling the bestial parts of man. Right. So bestial meaning the parts of us that are ruled by our appetites. Because animals are ruled by their appetites, they're not ruled by reason. In other words, if an animal is hungry, it gets food. It doesn't stop and think, this is theft or, this isn't my food. They just act according to their appetite.
- [57:31]
Angelina Stanford
And not always, but often in the older stories we have where centaurs figure it all, usually the horse is predominant and the man is in the service of the beast. With a couple of notable exceptions, one of which I suspect you were about to bring up. Yeah. Chiron, who is the wise centaur, who is the tutor of several Greek heroes, Achilles among them.
- [57:55]
Thomas Banks
Yes, thank you for correcting me on my Greek. Those are words I only say in my head, so thank you. Right, so sometimes you will have centaurs portrayed as more animal and then others as more wise.
- [58:08]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, so Chiron would be the archetypical. Yeah, wise centaur. And on the other end of the spectrum there, if you read in the fifth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, there's a famous battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, where the centaurs, they became the original wedding crashers and tried to carry off various of the bridesmaids at this. At this wedding and got into a fight and various people were killed. And anyway, it was one of those. One of those weddings from hell.
- [58:39]
Thomas Banks
So the centaur, when he's pictured as the head ruling the beast, that is a picture of the properly ordered man, and that is actually the reverse image of a Minotaur, which has a beast head ruling a man's body. So that's the bestial passions. Got that from Northrop, from. And of course, they study the stars. So in that sense, they're like the magi. They're like, you know, the wise people who study the stars to figure out the future. And so, you know, Hagrid keeps saying they're stargazers.
- [59:07]
Angelina Stanford
And.
- [59:07]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, see, Anything weird? Mars is bright tonight. Oh, indeed. Seen anything weird? Mars is bright tonight. Of course, Mars is the God of war. War.
- [59:16]
Angelina Stanford
And so that violence is in the ascendance or something like that.
- [59:19]
Thomas Banks
Exactly. And of course, considering how we know book one ends, it was a war was happening, a battle was happening, and they saw it in the stars. And so we see that the majority of the centaurs feel like we just read the stars. We stay out. But Firenze doesn't have that view and he wants to assist. Harry says, don't you know who this is? This is Harry Potter.
- [59:39]
Angelina Stanford
Also, is there a significance in that? Because Firenze is the Italian name for Florence, the city.
- [59:44]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I don't, Yeah, I don't know.
- [59:47]
Angelina Stanford
Is there some famous mythical centaur associated with Florence?
- [59:51]
Thomas Banks
I don't know. And he's a character later on, so I might have to look that up.
- [59:54]
Angelina Stanford
Up.
- [59:54]
Thomas Banks
I don't know. H, I don't know.
- [59:57]
Angelina Stanford
I mean, it's a cool name.
- [59:58]
Thomas Banks
It is a cool name. But he says sometimes the planets are read wrong. So we also have a little bit of a tension between fate and fatalistically accepting things and saying, you know, you can read the symbols wrong. All right. And then we get to the, to the unicorn, which is a scene in between two centaur scenes. But here we are. Okay, so let's talk about what a unicorn means. And for that we pull out our handy dandy bestiary. All right. Unicornus, the unicorn, which is also called Rhinoceros by the Greeks, is of the following nature. Okay. And what they go on to describe is that his weapon is his horn. So that is how he will kill you. He'll stab you with his horn. And no hunter can catch him, but he can be trapped. And here's how he can be trapped. A virgin girl is led to where he lurks. And there is. She is sent off by herself into the wood. He soon leaps into her lap when he sees her and embraces her. And hence he gets caught. And he goes on to say, our Lord Jesus Christ is also a unicorn, spiritually. Okay. And what they're getting at here is that Christ lay in the lap that is the wound womb of the Virgin. And that is how he was caught by the hunters. Oh, your face. You're thinking about.
- [61:21]
Angelina Stanford
I, I, no, I read that somewhere years ago and I'd forgotten it, but that's amazing.
- [61:26]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Isn't that good? So, so a unicorn is always a Christ figure. So, you know, we'll, we'll get to more of that in just A second. There are a number of references to unicorns in the Old Testament. In Isaiah. Yes, Isaiah, Psalms, Job, numbers, Deuteronomy. In fact, even Strong's concordance says in a note, scholars consider the unicorn to be a symbol of Christ.
- [61:49]
Angelina Stanford
The least fun. Like, just like how to suck the air out of a passage because. And I always thought that was cool when you come across a. Well, a unicorn in the Bible or Leviathan or some other fabulous beast. But there was this one comment I had in a. It was one of those study Bibles. I can't remember which one, but it said, probably the prophet is referring here to a rhinoceros rather than the mythical animal. It was. It was like, wow. Yes. Let's make this less fun, shall we?
- [62:22]
Thomas Banks
All right, so what's going on here? We have a.
- [62:24]
Angelina Stanford
It was this. Sorry. Along the same lines where satyrs appear again in the book of Isaiah, the same comment said that probably he's referring to wild goats. Yeah.
- [62:40]
Thomas Banks
Put the myth back in the Bible.
- [62:41]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I know.
- [62:42]
Thomas Banks
That's my. That's my bumper sticker. All right, so if a unicorn is a Christ symbol, then it's not hard then to understand why unicorns blood would be something that would give eternal life, but that if you kill the unicorn and try to take its blood, it's an eternal life. That's an eternal curse.
- [63:04]
Angelina Stanford
Wasn't a unicorn's hoof also said to have some kind of magical properties?
- [63:09]
Thomas Banks
Oh, you know what? It might. I didn't. And I didn't look that up.
- [63:12]
Angelina Stanford
I think that appears in one of St. Augustine's books somewhere. It's like the weirdest thing ever, but. Yeah.
- [63:19]
Thomas Banks
No, I love those things.
- [63:20]
Angelina Stanford
Its hoof could. I think it was believed in late antiquity by, at least by some people, to be sort of a panacea that could cure all manner of otherwise incurable ailments.
- [63:32]
Thomas Banks
So what you're saying is we need a side hustle where we sell unicorn pellets.
- [63:36]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, something really reputable like that. Maybe out of the back of a wagon or something like that at county.
- [63:40]
Thomas Banks
Fairs, right along our snake oil.
- [63:42]
Angelina Stanford
We keep it classy around you.
- [63:44]
Thomas Banks
Well, you know, this podcast doesn't pay for itself. Okay, so the idea that if you drink the unicorn's blood, to use St. Paul's terminology in an unworthy manner, you're bringing curses on your head. Right, so this makes sense then. We have this. This blood of this Christ figure. Now the fact that Voldemort is down there drinking it. Okay. There has been a lot of vampire imagery around him. So far in this book, of course, Quirrell says he, he, you know, got scared because he ran into a vampire. Later we find out that it's Voldemort he ran into. So Voldemort as this paras sight who can't live on his own, who has to feed on others, is drinking this blood. And part of what's going on in a vampire image is that you've got this eternal life which is really this eternal death, right? So, so she's bringing in all this imagery here. So we've got, you know, this image for Christ has been murdered by this vampire who's trying to drink this blood in an unworthy manner. And he, he gets eternal life, but he's cursed. Now Harry's scar at this time starts hurting him. Okay, that's also going to be a plot point in all of the books. And he immediately knows this is some kind of warning that in the presence of this creature, his scar hurts. Okay, so then they finish up their finals. I love, I love how in the middle of this huge stakes, they're doing their finals. Okay. But we have a moment where they finally realize what's going on, right? That Hagrid has given the key to Fluffy away and that we're in trouble. And so they decide, let's go to Dumbledore. Now, I'm bringing this up because one of the complaints that people give about the book is the kids are naughty and they're lying and they're breaking rules and they're trying to do everything, everything themselves. You know, why don't they just go to a teacher? And here is a clear example. They absolutely went to a teacher. They try to go to Dumbledore, he's not there, but then they, then they tell the whole thing. They. But they don't. They're not lying. They tell McGonagall exactly what they know. And she's like, get out of here, you stupid kids.
- [65:56]
Angelina Stanford
I think the fact that they have a sense of mischief, I mean, Hermione takes a longer to discover hers. But don't we kind of want that in the children in children's books? Because, I mean, I'm just thinking maybe I'm just remembering school and incorporating my own memories into this and I shouldn't do that. But the kids who keep all the rules are always a little bit unbearable.
- [66:24]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, that's the model boy.
- [66:25]
Angelina Stanford
The model boy, exactly. Nobody wants to be the model boy.
- [66:28]
Thomas Banks
Right?
- [66:29]
Angelina Stanford
You don't want the hero of the book to be the model boy.
- [66:31]
Thomas Banks
I agree with you. I think those kinds of criticisms are not appropriate. But my point is they're also an incorrect reading.
- [66:39]
Angelina Stanford
What are you going to do?
- [66:40]
Thomas Banks
Well, what. I mean, they did exactly what you would want them to do. They went to a teacher. Okay. But then of course, after the fact, Harry's going to say, I think, I think Dumbledore kind of wanted me to do this. And of course that's true. He's. He gave him. He showed him the mirror, he gave him the invisibility cloak. He acts very much in the fairy tale like the Magical Helper who gives magical gifts which allows you to go on your quest. So you know, all of that's all that's quite consistent. All right, so they have a moment then where they're arguing about should they go after. Well, they think it's Snape. Should they go after protecting the Philosopher's Stone? And on page 270 we see things coming to a head, okay? And I think that this is really important for understanding what's going on in this last section. So we said that this is a journey of the soul. So we should see something happening before he goes on this last little bit of the. Not a little bit. The whole heart of the quest. He goes to the heart of the quest. Okay, okay. So he says, I'm going after them. And they say, no. Are you kidding? We'll get expelled. We'll get expelled. So this is a perfect example of the sort of good boy books you were talking about because in a good boy book you would never break the rules if you thought you would get expelled, right? This is. You should not. You should not do things that will get you expelled. That's the worst thing that can happen in a schoolboy story. And here's where she see where we see that she has elevated it. Okay, so here's what's. Here's what, here's what happens. He says, I'm going out of here tonight and I'm going to try and get to the Stone first. You're mad, said Ron. You can't, said Hermione. After what McGonagall and Snape have said, you'll be expelled. So what? Harry. Shot, shouted. Don't you understand? If Snape gets hold of the Stone, Voldemort's coming back. Haven't you heard what it was like when he was trying to take over? There weren't won't be any Hogwarts to get expelled from. He'll flatten it or turn it into a school for the Dark Arts. Losing points doesn't matter. Anymore. Can't you see? Do you think he'll leave you and your families alone? And Griff. Gryffindor wins the house cup If I get caught before I can get to the stone. Well, I'll have to go back to the Dursleys and wait for Voldemort to find me there. It's only dying a bit later than I would have because I'm never going over to the dark side. Well, this is, this is a, this is a great scene. That is a fantastic scene because what we see there is the symbolic coming to the surface where he's saying, look, don't you understand? This is a battle, a cosmic battle between good and evil and temporal concerns like getting expelled or house points don't make any difference that what is real here is the eternal. Okay? And I am on a quest for the eternal. So he really kind of goes through a renunciation of temporal worldly things before he can enter this final stage of the quest. So remember as we go through this that Norther Fry says that reading symbolically is reading spiritually. So we'll see that there's a number of symbolic spiritual things happening in these last seven quests because remember, it's seven stages for the purification of the soul in alchemy. So of course he says he's going to go and they say, well, obviously we're going to all go with you. Of course they do because you have to have a well ordered man to face the quest. And it has to be a well ordered man to be pure enough to achieve the quest which is the philosopher's stone. All right, so number one is Fluffy, which we already said was Cerberus. And well, why don't you tell us about what's going on there where that Quirrel played a harp and put Cerberus to sleep.
- [70:20]
Angelina Stanford
Well, Orpheus I would think would be because Orpheus in several ancient poets. And this occurs in Virgil's Georgics and in Ovid again and elsewhere when he is trying to retrieve his dead bride, Eurydice. I almost called her Hermione, but no, Eurydice. From Hades, Orpheus he descends and he begins to perform on his harp, accompanying himself. And his singing and playing are so beautiful that Cerberus is charmed to sleep. Hades sheds a tear and even the, the wheel of Ixion stands still and all the torments of Tartarus cease for a moment.
- [71:05]
Thomas Banks
So, yeah, okay, so here's the cool thing she's doing. So Quirrell is obviously being connected to Orpheus here with the harp but if you know your mythology, you know that Orpheus fails.
- [71:15]
Angelina Stanford
Does not.
- [71:16]
Thomas Banks
That's right.
- [71:16]
Angelina Stanford
That which he came to.
- [71:17]
Thomas Banks
That's right, yeah.
- [71:18]
Angelina Stanford
Orpheus almost, but not.
- [71:20]
Thomas Banks
That's right. That's right. So. So she's setting us up. Quirrell's gonna fail because he's the Orpheus here. And I should also say that they go down a trap door. And in fact, if you look at the language, it's all descent, descent, descent. Each one takes him lower and lower and lower. Okay, well, we're gonna talk. When I. When I get to the end here and I talk about the shape of the story, we'll talk about why it's important that you understand this as a descent. But it's very clearly a descent, as in mythology, the descent to Hades. The Orpheus reference. Quirtle's gonna lose because he's Orpheus. Now, on the other hand, Harry's gonna pick up the flute, right? And he's gonna play that. Now, we already said, you actually very cleverly brought this up early about Hercules and Hercules as a baby fighting off the serpent. Okay. And a couple of people online said, wait, wait, is there a Hercules, Harry Potter thing going on? Because the story starts with Harry as a baby and we find out that Harry has somehow defeated this evil vampire creature. Vampires being associated with serpents as a baby. Is there a Hercules thing? I think there absolutely is a Hercules thing. Because while orpheus fails, who, Mr. Banks does not fail in going down.
- [72:25]
Angelina Stanford
Hercules. He drags Cerberus up to the upper world.
- [72:28]
Thomas Banks
That's right, exactly. So Hercules succeeds. So I think there is a hairy Hercules. Hercules is going down and going to succeed, and Orpheus does not succeed. So right there at the beginning, if you know your mythology, you know what she's setting up. All right? The next thing they do then is they fall into a plant, a plant called the Devil's Snare. And here we see Ron and Harry get entangled, but not Hermione. So there's something about this plant then that entangles the chest and the belly, but not the head. This devil's also.
- [73:02]
Angelina Stanford
They were quicker to jump than she was, were they not?
- [73:05]
Thomas Banks
Well, Harry jumped first when he didn't know. Harry has been the brave one the whole way through. He's braver than anybody.
- [73:09]
Angelina Stanford
So he jumps first, instinctively. So Hermione either is the type to look before she leaps.
- [73:15]
Thomas Banks
Absolutely. And so she jumps up and they're just sitting there and she jumps up first and she's like, don't you see what's happening? So. Right, exactly. So this is an example where keeping your head is what saves you. Right. They're getting ensnared and she does not. And so she's able to free them. There, there. Then we get to the chess match and. Absolutely. This is a huge, huge Alice in Wonderland.
- [73:38]
Angelina Stanford
I thought this was a pretty obvious homage here.
- [73:40]
Thomas Banks
Very, very much so. Where the. The. Because through the Looking Glass, it has as a plot point, the chess game. And I've read I'm not smart enough to be the kind of person who can play a chess game in my head, but my father is one of those people. And I am told that every move and through the Looking Glass plays out as a real chess game.
- [74:00]
Angelina Stanford
Oh. So Ron here. I mean, his particular skills stand him in good stead. I was thinking, though, maybe she. This is all clear later. But wouldn't chess. It says specifically that Hermione was not good at chess.
- [74:17]
Thomas Banks
Very good. I'm glad.
- [74:18]
Angelina Stanford
Which was surprising because that seems like the kind of thing. It's a cerebral game. It's a thinking man's or woman's game. And. Yeah.
- [74:25]
Thomas Banks
Anyway, I thought y' all could see me right now. I'm jumping up and down. I'm so glad that you asked this. Okay. So when I was approaching this section, I knew what I was going to have to see was a picture of the well ordered soul. I had the same moment with Chest. Right. Isn't just a head thing. Okay.
- [74:41]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [74:41]
Thomas Banks
And so I did a little reading on this. Chess is not a head thing. Americans think it's a head thing. What chess is. And that I think that's.
- [74:48]
Angelina Stanford
Is this another way in which Americans are stupid? This is where we're going.
- [74:51]
Thomas Banks
I think this is where we're going.
- [74:52]
Angelina Stanford
This is an un American podcast.
- [74:54]
Thomas Banks
My God, I don't know. What are you going to do? But I think the fact that she says Hermione is not good at chess was a huge indication that chess is not something for the head. What I think we're seeing, and this is why Ron is good at it, is because chest is a battle. It's a battle. Right, okay. And Ron is the. He's the passionate one, you know, the quick to love, the quick to hate. If you notice about Ron, actually through all these sections, and I. I got such a chuckle reading it, looking for Belly stuff. He's the one who stands up for Neville and I'm, you know, I'm gonna fight you. He's the one in the duel who says, yes, we'll fight you, Malfoy. He's the one who gets in a fight with Malfoy in the stands, right? Hermione's saying, don't be provoked, don't be provoked. Of course, Ron's the belly. He jumps up, he's provoked, he gets in a fight. So this is a battle. Now hold on, I'm losing my place and my notes, all right? So they go in. The pieces that they choose I think are significant. Okay? Hermione, she gets the rook. Well, what they call the castle in the British version, but I'm an American, I call it the rook. The rook is interesting because the rook only moves in straight lines, correct? And she's been consistently associated with logic, that very linear kind of thinking. So she's, she's the rookie book. Ron's the knight. Of course he is, right? The chivalry, the fight, the dashing guy, you know, and, and the knight kind of hops around, right? Okay, so of course he's that and Harry, of course, being the good chest here is the bishop, okay? Because of course Harry's the one on the journey of the soul, so he's the bishop. All right, so in the chess, right, what we have is a fight. This is a battle Ron's been the one to fight the whole way through. But we need to see a picture here of a well ordered belly. We saw consistent pictures of a disordered belly, right? He's fighting with Malfoy, he's always getting into trouble with that. He's a hothead. But here we have to see the well ordered belly. So here it's a battle, but it's one that's ordered, right? Ron has to be patient, he has to be slow, he has to be controlled. He must strategize and see and think ahead. So this is a well ordered battle. He also has to sacrifice himself. In fact, we're going to notice that everybody has to sacrifice themselves in this, in this ops, in this final set of the quests. So he has to sacrifice himself. And rowing here makes a big point that physical pain will be involved. In fact, if you go back and read it, she makes a much bigger point about the fact that Ron's going to get beat up by the queen than any of the others. And I think it's because I spent a lot of time thinking about this when the chess match was the hardest one for me to figure out. But I think I've got it and I think the reason she does that is because the belly does not like to be uncomfortable. The belly likes physical comforts and pleasure and so to be physically pummeled would be a great challenge for him. So as the properly ordered belly, though, he successfully fights and sacrifices himself for the greater good. So that's the chess game. Now after that, the next thing they get to is the troll. And this is a non fight because the trio already defeated the troll earlier. So in terms of the plot, you know, they don't need that. They've already defeated the troll. So then they move into potions. Now, this was another Alice in Wonderland moment for me, right? Because Alice is always drinking things before she goes into a doorway. So that was another. She's so good. I don't know. I never saw the Alice in Wonderland stuff the first time I read these books. It's just because I'm doing all this Alice research right now that I'm seeing it everywhere. But that's a lot of fun. So the potions is pure logic, it's not magic, which I thought was very interesting. It's not magic that's winning these things. Chess matches, logic puzzles, a moment of.
- [78:56]
Angelina Stanford
Clarity of thought, things like that.
- [79:03]
Thomas Banks
And so Hermione figures this out, like instantly. She's like, oh, this is a logic puzzle. Boom. Okay, so of course the head can figure out a logic puzzle. Now, if we saw with chess, a properly ordered belly, okay? So that is a belly. So taking that, that desire to, you know, to protect people and to fight, but making it ordered and strategic, that's. That's the properly ordered belly. And so I kept thinking, okay, so what is Hermione gonna have to do? Well, she figured out a logic puzzle, but it was a logic puzzle in which she had to eat something. So that's belly, that's eat. Right? So now she's, she's proper. So the head and the belly are connected there. So earlier the belly had to use his head. This time the head has to use her belly. All right? But she also sacrifices herself. So we had a number of sacrifices here. Now, before she leaves, she says to Harry that you are a great wizard. And he says, I'm not as great as you. And she says, books and cleverness, there are more important things. Friendship and bravery. So again, that's a picture of the chest is the thing that's harmonizing the head and the belly, right? So it's not. The head is not going to be the one to do everything. Everything. She's like, yeah, I'm books and cleverness. But you, Harry, you're the heart, you're the chest. Of course, they also, the three of them, before they got to the chess mask. They flew around, they got the keys. And so that was of course, you know, Quidditch. And Harry being the pure of heart, he's the one who can see. And that's going to come up in the last.
- [80:33]
Angelina Stanford
Does it seem. I don't. And again, I mean, not having read the other books, this might not be the case. But everything, every skill they acquire, every trick they learn in school, even if it doesn't seem really that important, tends to, tends to reveal its necessity, its key usefulness at some climax later in the story. Is that something you see?
- [80:56]
Thomas Banks
A lot of it is. It is. And I was going to talk about that.
- [80:58]
Angelina Stanford
Like why do we have to learn this formula or whatever.
- [81:01]
Thomas Banks
Bring it up. I'll bring it up now since. Since you brought it up. Yes. And so in a typical questing story you will see a number of miniature quests along the way that teach, that give some kind of skill set, like you said, that is used at the end and is also a microcosm of every battle that's to come. If you read the Hobbit like that, it makes a lot of sense. In book one, what I saw was skills like flying on the broom, for example, or even, you know, Hermione learning how to make fire, you know, in a dark. Those specific skills do come in the final quest. But in terms of the quests being a microcosm for every other quest and the big quest, I finally figured out that it's not that each miniature quest in each book leads up to the final quest of that book, but that each separate book is a microcosm of the final quest, if that makes sense. So book one becomes a microcosm for every single book that's going to come after it. So that's how she's setting it up. So it's basically just a much, much longer and more multi layered romance than you might otherwise see. All right, so Harry goes through the door. He's now alone. He's alone to face what he thinks is going to be Snape. And here's where we get the big reveal. And of course the villain explains it all the way. Classic, right? So the puzzle's being solved. This is the classic detective story. And no, you idiot, it was me the whole time. And what we see there is that Harry has been blind, but also that the reader has been blind. We could not make sense of what we saw either. So it's not that Snape was trying to kill him. Snape was actually protecting him. Now something else that's interesting is if we look at the speech of our villain here in this chapter and this is after Quirrell says that it's not just me, it's Voldemort. He's always with me. And now Harry knows you know it's Voldemort on the back of Quirrell's head. And here's what Quirrell says. And this again helps us to see that this is a. This story is about the cosmic battle between good and evil. He is with me wherever I go, said Quirrell quietly. I met him when I traveled around the world. A foolish young man I was then full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil. There is only power and those too weak to seek it. Since then, I have served him faithfully although I have let him down many times. He has had to be very hard on me. Okay? Lord Voldemort showed him there is no good or evil, there's only power. Well, that is a very interesting comment there because that is some nihilistic philosophy, right? There is no right and wrong. There's just.
- [83:50]
Angelina Stanford
But it's inevitable that this person is going to win because of his, you know, his will to triumph, his will to dominate. Therefore, I should throw in my lot with him which sounds a lot like Lord of the Rings. Help me out here.
- [84:02]
Thomas Banks
Oh, Sauron.
- [84:03]
Angelina Stanford
Saruman.
- [84:04]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, Saruman. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, that's very good. I hadn't thought of that. That. And here's where we see that not only do we have this epic quest of good versus evil but she's framing the bad guy in connection to some sort of 20th century relativist philosophy. Right there. There is no right or wrong. There's just your truth and my truth. And so that is being explicitly associated with the bad guys here. A belief that there is no right and wrong. Harry, of course, being the chest in the head, the chest and the belly is ruled by what C S Lewis calls just sentiments, right? So he always knows what's the right thing to do and he doesn't hesitate. And, you know, it's like he says he hasn't even met Voldemort. And he says before he goes down the trapdoor, I'm never going over to his side. Like, that's not even an option. He knows what the sides are and that he will never be on the side of Voldemort. Whereas Quirrell's like, I don't know. He seemed like he was gonna win. So I threw my Latin with Him. Okay, and then we find out the mirror earlier, right, was intentional by Dumbledore. And so it's in the mirror. And, and Quirrell, this is so well done. Okay? Because if what we have here is a journey of the soul and only the pure of heart can get the philosopher's stone, the mirror which reflects your desire is a fantastic image to get across that you have somebody who's impure of heart and somebody who's pure of heart. So because Quirrell can only see in the mirror his deepest desire, which is to please Voldemort, he couldn't find the stone because Harry's deepest desire was for good. He's so pure in his intentions and his desires, he can achieve the philosopher's stone. Okay, now the stone itself, though, is an interesting Christ symbol. It's called the Elixir of life. Okay? And of course, if I, if I was, if I was teaching a class, I'd say, class, and what since is Christ an elixir of life? And all of the kids would say, oh, it's the Eucharist, it's the blood of Christ. He's the elixir of life. If you read my, if you take my medieval lit class, that's an image.
- [86:15]
Angelina Stanford
Over and over the Latin of that elixir vitae comes from.
- [86:18]
Thomas Banks
Oh, it must be.
- [86:19]
Angelina Stanford
I think it must be here.
- [86:20]
Thomas Banks
It must be. Must be. So the philosopher's stone itself becomes a Christ symbol. It's an elixir of life. It's going to be the thing that is going to grant you immortality. It's also described as a. She didn't just describe it. This is so good. She did not describe it as a redstone. She described it as a blood red stone. So making the reference of blood to the elixir of life also more strongly ties it to the idea that it's. That it's a Christ figure. Right? What's the blood that grants eternal life and is also a stone that is the cornerstone or a rock, that. That's Christ. Right? So again, symbols are not just, you know, the author has some private symbolism and she's like, well, here's a, you know, I don't know, here's a can of Coke that symbolizes Jesus. And here's why. Because that's what I think. That's not how symbolism works. That's how people misunderstand symbolism and start to think symbols can mean anything. Symbols are connected to other things, okay? And so it's not just pulling out of the ether here to say the philosopher's Stone is a symbol of Christ. When. When Christ himself says, I'm the stone, I'm the cornerstone, I'm the rock. Or, or that, you know, Christianity itself draws attention to Christ's blood as being that which offers eternal life. Right. So for her to call it a blood red stone, that's. That's pretty much hitting you over the head with what? That's a symbol before. But here's another layer of things. So speaking of things I learned when I was researching for other things, sometime at the end of last year, I was deep diving on the myths of the. The legends of the Holy Grail. And so I was listening to the series of lectures on.
- [87:58]
Angelina Stanford
You were conducting an in depth study.
- [88:01]
Thomas Banks
What did I say?
- [88:02]
Angelina Stanford
A deep dive.
- [88:04]
Thomas Banks
You're right. An in depth study.
- [88:05]
Angelina Stanford
Thank you. Doesn't that sound so much better?
- [88:07]
Thomas Banks
It does. Thank you. I don't really like the phrase deep dive, so thank you for saving me for some. Some bad jargon.
- [88:12]
Angelina Stanford
I have my moments.
- [88:13]
Thomas Banks
You do? This is why we're such a winning team. But I was doing an in depth study of the Grail legends and I was listening to some lectures and I got to this one part in the lecture. I was actually driving. This is a. I think I've said this before on this podcast series. I was driving and I had to pull over and I had to write these notes in my phone. Okay. Because I was too excited because I was yelling, this is Harry Potter. This is Harry Potter. Okay, now let me say this. There's a whole lot of King Arthur stuff in the Harry Potter books. I have not brought any of it up yet. Some of you have asked me about it. I'm going to bring it up in the later books because it makes more sense to bring them up there. But I will bring this part up because this is connected to book one. So we all know the legend of the Holy Grail, right? The knight, he's on a quest to get the Holy Grail. And only the purest knight can get the Grail. Right? Okay. So that's why Percival fails, but Galahad wins. Right. Only the. Only the pure of heart can get this quest. Now, one of the things I found out in these lectures is that we tend to think of the Holy Grail as a chalice. But if you actually read the old legends, it's never a chalice. It's a number of other things. One of them, it's a. It's a magic platter where food just is replenishing. Okay, but it's.
- [89:29]
Angelina Stanford
Wait, seriously?
- [89:30]
Thomas Banks
Yes, yes. This was super fascinating. Okay.
- [89:32]
Angelina Stanford
And do you remember? I actually. I don't even know in which of the Arthurian narratives is the Grail first mentioned?
- [89:42]
Thomas Banks
I don't have the notes in front of me, but those lectures did talk about that.
- [89:46]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [89:47]
Thomas Banks
I think it was a French one. I think the French one. I think it was a French innovation to start doing the Grail.
- [89:51]
Angelina Stanford
Okay.
- [89:52]
Thomas Banks
Because the Grail kind of. You're just making me go off track here. The Grail, I think, kind of comes up separately than the other King Arthur cycles. And then I think. And then after a while, it kind of gets incorporated into the whole thing. Because if you're listening at home. Because they're legends, and that's how legends are. Legends are very episodic. And so you have the legend of this night and that night, and so the Grail legend kind of comes up on its own, and then it makes its way into the cycle later on. But get ready for this. You're gonna love this. This blew my mind. Okay. There's a German version of the Grail legend. Okay. By Wolfram von Eschenbach.
- [90:28]
Angelina Stanford
Very good.
- [90:29]
Thomas Banks
Oh, thank you. I practiced that.
- [90:31]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. I almost jumped in and said, oh, by Wolfram von Essenbach. Because I thought, oh, no, she's gonna butcher this one. But no, you did very well there.
- [90:37]
Thomas Banks
Thank you. Thank you. I should have let you shine that. Of course. You know the German version of the.
- [90:42]
Angelina Stanford
Grail, we have it downstairs and in our library, we have this book.
- [90:46]
Thomas Banks
Oh, we do, yeah. Oh, well, wonderful. We have too many books. We need a librarian. I never can find anything. But that's okay. Put that aside. In this German Grail legend, guess what? The Grail is a stone that gives immortal life.
- [91:05]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, wow.
- [91:06]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Say that whisper louder into the microphone.
- [91:09]
Angelina Stanford
My gosh.
- [91:10]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. So that's why I had to pull the car over. I was like, what are you telling me right now? That's the Philosopher's Stone. Right?
- [91:16]
Angelina Stanford
So.
- [91:16]
Thomas Banks
Right. So I got so excited because, like, this is the Philosopher's Stone. This is it. Okay. Now here's how this particular quest. I love that you're getting excited. If y' all could see my husband's face right now. I always like when I can tell him something he didn't already know. So the stone is guarded by a company of knights. And here we have a company of teachers that are guarding this stone. Right.
- [91:45]
Angelina Stanford
Ah.
- [91:47]
Thomas Banks
The stone will give you youth and immortal life. In fact, in the German version, just by looking at it, you won't die that week. And it keeps everyone in its Presence eternally young. Now, there's a couple of things here which don't come up in book one, but I'm just going to say, because if you've read some of the later books, you're just going to want to file this away because you're going to think this is cool. The Philosopher's Stone here, obviously the Philosopher's stone, though. Sorry, the Grail stone. The Grail stone here is actually very closely connected to the Phoenix. Phoenix, of course, being another Christ figure. So by the stone's power, the Phoenix burns away, turning to ashes, and these ashes also bring it back to life. So this is interesting on a number of levels. Okay, so we, We've said. We said that the Philosopher's stone here is being directly connected to Christ. Here the Philosopher's stone is connected to the Grail, which is connected to Christ. It's connected to King Arthur. King Arthur is also a Christ figure. And we know that only the pure of heart can attain these figures, which are Christ. Right. So now maybe it makes a little sense, what I said, that Harry Potter is an everyman on the journey of the soul to God, because here he is. What has his literal quest been? To get the Philosopher's Stone, which is an image of Christ. This is. This is what you have to be pure of heart to get Christmas. Okay, now I said there were seven, these were only six. What is the seventh? Well, after he gets the Philosopher's Stone, he has to battle Voldemort. That's the seventh obstacle. Right? So now that he has the Philosopher's Stone, which means he's has Christ. Right? Because that's the symbol he meets Voldemort. Now, Voldemort is very interesting here because she's portraying evil as a non entity. Right? Voldemort is not something in and of himself. He's only a parasite. Thus all the vampire imagery he can distort, but he's not a thing on its own. That's a very classical view of. Of evil. Doesn't Augustine have some kind of.
- [93:54]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, he wrote about that quite a lot.
- [93:55]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. About evil being a nothingness.
- [93:58]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. A malum est privatio boni. Evil is the privation or absence of the good.
- [94:06]
Thomas Banks
Right. Okay, there you go. So evil as a non entity, okay, so Harry has to fight Voldemort. And what happens there, right, is that Voldemort says, get him, and Quirrell grabs him, but it burns him up. Okay, now let me catch my breath here. If you listen to our entire series on Dracula, we talked about the vampire. We talked about the Eucharist imagery there. And Dracula cannot touch holy water. Are the wafer right? What happens is it burns him. So let's think about this then Harry becomes this perfected soul that has obtained Christ, right? He has the Philosopher's Stone now because, you know, he's infused with Christ's holiness. Voldemort cannot touch him, just like Dracula, when he touches him, he's burned up. So I think that also connects to the idea that it's the blood red stone, it's the elixir of life, it's blood, it's the Eucharist. Dracula can't touch the Eucharist without being burned by it. Voldemort cannot trust Harry, who is holding the Philosopher's Stone without being burned by it. We also find out, as you said earlier, that he's also charmed by his mother. And I will only say what we've known so far in book one, which is that she had self sacrificial love unto death and that's what protected him. So Harry's charm here, so he's got the Philosopher's Stone, which is Christ, but also he's been protected by someone who was willing to die for him. So that's another layer of Christ imagery. And as Dumbledore explains to Harry about why Quirrell couldn't touch him, he said it was agony to touch a person marked by something. So good. All right. The story doesn't end there though. In his fighting with Voldemort, the section ends with the line, Harry falls into blackness. Down, down, down. And then he tried to cat, you know, when he wakes up, he tried to catch the goal, but he couldn't. We've already talked about that. Right? So the final perfection, the final of turning Harry into goal, is not something that's going to happen at the end of book one. Because she just signaled it with that snitch with the gold, right? It's right there. He can see it, but it's just out of reach. And then he wakes up. And how long was he unconscious for? Three days. Three days, okay.
- [96:34]
Angelina Stanford
So strikes me that there's another book where something like that happens a little bit.
- [96:38]
Thomas Banks
Huh? A little bit. So my students know that falling asleep or going unconscious is always a symbolic death. So he, in his battle with evil, he was symbolically dead for three days. I'll just say this for those who've read the series, you can just file this away. But during Harry's death here, for three days, he was with Dumbledore, very Alice In Wonderland language there when he wakes up, Dumbledore says, well, it's a secret, so of course, everyone knows. So very Alice in Wonderland there. Okay, so now, Harry, we have our exposition, and Harry's asking a lot of questions. Now, before I kind of wrap up that last section, you said something interesting about the way that Rowling wrapped it up that you like.
- [97:22]
Angelina Stanford
I don't think she tried to explain everything. I mean, obviously she knew, you know, finishing this book up that she had six more to go. But, yeah, I. I didn't. Well, the reason for this, Harry, is another 10 chapters or something like that, so I didn't think the denouement was overly prolonged.
- [97:40]
Thomas Banks
All right, so one. I. I agree with you. So, okay, one last thing then, about this scene. If this story has been about the journey of the soul, and I think I've made the case repeatedly in these series that Harry, as an everyman, is acting out what we, the reader, also experience. Right? So all of us are on a journey of the soul to God. And if we think back to what I said, too, about how counterculture this is, that we believe in a time in which we think our lives are meaningless. Us, right, we're just. We're just DNA floating around. One. One of my. One of my daughters says that it's. It's a trope on, like, Tik Tok, that people just say something like, you know, well, I'm just a lump of flesh on a rock curling through space, so nothing matters. Anyway, okay? So that's sort of the tenor of our time. But here we're being told that we're not just lumps of flesh flying around on a rock, that the things that we do are meaningful, that our lives are actually moving towards something significant. And whereas we tend to think in our culture that death is the end of our story, we hear. We hear right here, right here we see rolling, flipping that on its head and saying, death is not the end of our story. So Harry says, what happened to the stone? And Dumbledore says, it's destroyed. And he says, wait, but doesn't that mean Nicholas Flamel's gonna die? And Dumbledore says, yes.
- [99:08]
Angelina Stanford
He was basically all right with it. Yeah, he just kind of accepted it philosophically.
- [99:12]
Thomas Banks
That's right. Let's look at that up. Dumbledore says, instead of acting like, oh, no, to die is the worst thing in the world and to stay alive at all costs is what must be done. Which, of course, is that this is the way our culture.
- [99:26]
Angelina Stanford
After 600 years, he sees you Know, maybe, maybe there's something to be said for the other attitude.
- [99:31]
Thomas Banks
Well, specifically, he says this death is like going to bed. And that is a reference to St. Paul who says, for the Christian, death is but asleep. So rather than death being something fearful, in the end of our story, he said it's just going to sleep. And then he says this to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. So here we have a contemporary children's book that is treating death as if it is not the final act, but it's simply the entryway, the door into the next great adventure for the well organized mind. Which is pretty darn close to saying, for the well ordered soul that has achieved holiness and is one with Christ, death is simply the next great adventure. That means that this book, far from being a book that will lead children to the dark side, is probably, probably one of the most profoundly Christian works of fiction that. Wait, was some of it written in the 21st century? It was okay then. I wouldn't say the 20th century, because I'm not going to put that against Lord of the Rings, but the most profoundly Christian work of fiction in the 21st century. And this is just in book one. And this is a huge, as I said, just a huge counterculture statement. Death is not to be feared for the well ordered soul. Now, just to amuse myself, I looked online and I went to Spark Notes. And Spark Notes is often very, very reliable. Okay, so I'm not, I'm not saying, look how stupid this, I'm taking this as an example of. This is what a reasonably good literature guide would have to say about the scenes we just went over, where I just said, this is the journey of the soul. There is life past death that is more real than the life here. All of these great spiritual themes. And this is what SparkNotes says about its analysis, about the last set of obstacles rolling shows that teamwork is important.
- [101:29]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I think that's all you. I would have felt let down if that was, if that was all, all there was to find in the final chapters.
- [101:37]
Thomas Banks
Well, exactly. And of course, I mean, it is true that they work as a team, but to be a well ordered soul, and you know, you hear me sometimes on this podcast talk about sort of the typical reductionist readings of books and how they just make me groan because they so miss the point.
- [101:52]
Angelina Stanford
But Odysseus, Telemachus and the two swineherds rid Ithaca of the suitors. They show that teamwork is important. You know.
- [102:02]
Thomas Banks
I, I, I roll my eyes because they're missing the real point. Right. If you're a materialist and you think that all that is real is the matter that we can experience through our senses. And of course for them death is the final end. And the best that we can hope for in a book like this is yay, we saw teamwork. But the real meaning I hope we have seen is far, far deeper than that. You know, one of the things I say a lot, and I mean it is when I listen to other people talk about books and they say things like Harry Potter's just a great book about friendship and teamwork, I often will say in response, if that is what I thought literature taught, I would never read another book again.
- [102:43]
Angelina Stanford
I mean you have more of an athletic background than I do. But I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think in the modern world teamwork is one of the more overrated virtues.
- [102:55]
Thomas Banks
Oh yes.
- [102:56]
Angelina Stanford
And it's not. That's not to say that it has no value. Obviously it does. I mean because yes, it does require us to sacrifice something of our own wishes for the good of whatever unit we are a part of. But I mean at the same time though, it's one of those, it's one of those human qualities which you can find even in activities which are themselves objectionable. So it can be like a well functioning organ in a.
- [103:25]
Thomas Banks
You mean if I'm a bank ice.
- [103:28]
Angelina Stanford
I was going to say like a lynch mob could show great teamwork in lynching someone. I mean that's a horrible example, but that would. So yeah, I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I guess other than that it's, I think, yeah, I think it's one of those, one of those virtues or merits which tends to be kind of overpraised as though exhibiting teamwork were a justification by itself.
- [103:53]
Thomas Banks
It's one of these like rah rah aphorisms.
- [103:57]
Angelina Stanford
It's like leadership. I don't know why but like whenever I see see the word leadership I find it a little bit depressing. And it's not because like we don't want good leaders obviously we do certainly in preference to bad ones. But yeah, I don't know, like it seems that too many books are written about this kind of thing. It's like this is something kind of self helpy about much of our talk of these, about these, these attributes.
- [104:19]
Thomas Banks
But what we see though is that you know, for whatever value teamwork might have, it is not a greater value than the journey of the soul to holiness.
- [104:26]
Angelina Stanford
Sure, sure. Amen. Amen.
- [104:29]
Thomas Banks
And then when God, Dumbledore's wrapping it up at the end here she gives us some hints that at the end of this story there's more to the story which will unfold later. One of the things that just really, really impressed me about her as a writer when I started researching this is that she planned everything out before she read, wrote the first book. And she actually, and I won't say what the scene is because it would be spoilers but there was a scene and a line in book seven that she had in her mind and she said when I. I knew that if I, when I got to book seven, if I had led everything up so that that line made sense then, then I knew that I had followed the right trajectory all the way through. And so this, this is all quite deliberate that she's putting these seeds here for the later books. And that book one, she intends to be a microcosm for all the other books. But there's some things that are going to unfold later some questions that Dumbledore can't answer. Like why did Voldemort try to kill Hare, Marry? Will Voldemort return? Why does Snape hate him? All of those things. A romance ends with a wedding or a restoration of family and a feast. Much like a fairy tale, right? The get married and happily ever after are. The parent is reunited with the child. You know, like Hansel and Gretel and this on some kind of feast. So of course we have the feast. We have the end of the year feast here. So we have our fairy tale ending. But I just thought that was such a great nod. He's an orphan, so he cannot be restored to his family. And yet at the end, Hagrid gives him a photo album and that's of.
- [106:00]
Angelina Stanford
His mother and father, of his mother.
- [106:02]
Thomas Banks
Father and his family. And they're all waving to him in the pictures. And that's the first, the first thing he's ever really gotten. So he got, he got something of his family back.
- [106:11]
Angelina Stanford
And it does seem to suggest that his relationship with the Dursleys will be, if not, not like cured of all its ills. At least different. Even the last sentence of the book. Yes, I thought he was going to. Since he, he knows all these magic tricks he's going to have fun with Dudley.
- [106:29]
Thomas Banks
Now you'll find if you keep reading you'll find out what happens with that. But okay, so then at the end, of course they all get rewarded. So we end up, they end up winning the house cup anyway. It's kind of like you. You renounce the temporal things for the eternal things, and you get the eternal things and you get the temporal. Temporal things is kind of that idea. So, you know, they got the eternal thing, you know, evil has been defeated, and they're also going to win the house cup. But that was such a great scene because the biggest reward goes to Neville, right?
- [107:00]
Angelina Stanford
The kid who can't seem to do anything right, really. And. Yeah, but he does, like, you know, he wins the last, what, seven points or something that they need because they're tied.
- [107:09]
Thomas Banks
Otherwise, Neville, who showed with this quiet resolve, this nobility and this. And this heroism. And then, as you said, because these stories are there and back again story, he goes back, he ends up back at King's Cross Station and a return to Privet Drive. And then I'll just throw out this little tidbit saying nothing about anything. That's to come later. But what we see in book one is that Harry gets a wand, a cloak, and a stone, and they all scream into their car radios. All right, now, I still got some other things I want to talk about. We've. We've finished the book, but there's still other things I want to say. No, it's okay. I had planned to go long if need be. I'm getting to the end, though. My husband is tapping to his watch. I know we've been talking for a long time, but I got to get this all in.
- [108:04]
Angelina Stanford
This episode is sort of like the third Lord of the Rings movie in this podcast.
- [108:11]
Thomas Banks
All right, just got my last few thoughts here to kind of wrap this series up. Now, we've talked about Harry as the Everyman. There's some other ways that Harry functions, too. I'm choosing not to talk about that in book one, but to talk about that in the other books as it becomes clearer. Okay, so some of you I know on Facebook had said, is she going to talk about X, Y, and Z? I am. Just. Just not yet. Because, again, I'm trying not to give spoilers. And like, actually, we just. To be honest, we just paused this recording and had a discussion about whether or not I should say my next comment. And my husband thought that was giving too much of the game away, so I won't say it. I know you're saying, no, say it. I'll say it in the classes, but. But I'm not going to say it now, but I'll simply say there is more to say about Harry. There is more to say about the journey of the soul. There is more to say about all of this, I just can't say it it just yet. But if this book is a microcosm of the entire series, then we can say that the whole Harry Potter series is about the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Or as Rowling herself says, Harry faces Voldemort. That's, that's the theme of the book. And that's just like in Christianity, that cosmic battle is described as a battle between two people, Christ and the devil. In the classes, I'm going to talk a lot more about the comedy structure, the romance structure, and how Rowling is using the structure and shape of the stories and how that itself echoes the gospel. But I'm not going to get into this right now in the podcast, but we will be talking about that in the classes. All right, so final thoughts then. Take a breath. Final thoughts. Hopefully. Hopefully. I've blown your mind a little bit, have I? Mr. Banks, when I brought out the symbolic spiritual journey at the end and the alchemy and all that, what would you say?
- [110:05]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, on a scale of, of 1 to 10, I guess I would say cosmic.
- [110:09]
Thomas Banks
Cosmic. Oh, hey, that's, that's.
- [110:11]
Angelina Stanford
I sound really excited, as you can tell. No, this actually is my excited voice.
- [110:16]
Thomas Banks
It is. I actually know this is your excited face. You're just. I married a very understated man. I like to say, between the two of us, we make one normal person, because you're very reserved and I'm very over the top.
- [110:26]
Angelina Stanford
And so the sane person is somewhere in the middle.
- [110:28]
Thomas Banks
That's right. Together we are the well ordered couple. All right, so hopefully, hopefully you have new eyes to see these stories now and you realize that they're not just, you know, fun escapist adventures, but they're, I think, the opposite of escapism. I think that these types of stories actually bring us into the heart of reality. Sometimes people will say, oh, I don't like fantasy. I only like realism, by which they mean people doing ordinary stuff. But I would argue, along with a great many people, Lewis, Tolkien, on and on, that that's not real at all, that that's an illusion. The idea that our everyday, normal, material existence is what's real, cut off from any kind of spiritual or transcendent reality, that's false. The reality is we are not just bodies. We are not just lumps of flesh floating around on a rock. Right? We're souls, we're immortal beings. We actually are on a quest. We are on the journey of the soul, to holiness, to God, to sanctification. Which of course, can only be done through Christ, just as we saw in this story. And that means that these stories are the realest real stories. One way to think about it is for people who, for artists who prefer to express these things in a symbolic way. It's because they think that, they think that spiritual realities are too real to be portrayed realistically. They have to be portrayed symbolically. That goes back to something I said earlier about veiled truth, right? That's the way that we interact with these things. And just as we saw that Harry as a character is a visible soul, it is true then that the plot, the action of the story, the obstacles, you know, the parts of his quest, those are all symbolic too. That is an attempt for internal realities to be outwardly expressed. That's how these kinds of stories work. Work. So in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I hear tons of echoes of in, in this series, Eustace's parents and Eustace himself do not believe in Narnia. They believe in grain elevators, much like the Dursley believe in drills. Eustace goes into the fairy world of Narnia and comes back changed. At the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan says, you don't go into Narnia so that you can stay in Narnia. You go into Narnia to meet me here so that you can then go find me in your own world in that moment at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treasure. That's Lewis explaining how stories work, okay? Contrary to the people who say that we read these stories because we want to escape reality. We go into the imaginative other world, the stories themselves, and we go on the symbolic journey where we are reminded of and given eyes to see the spiritual realities that we are blind to in our own world. But we don't stay there because of our day to day lives in a secular, materialist culture. When I say secular, I don't mean non Christian, I mean secular as opposed to sacred. Because we live in that illusion that the material realm is the only realm that's real. We forget that we too are mortal beings, we are souls on a journey to God, and that our spiritual struggles are real and that good will defeat evil. So we go into that world to have eyes to see that, to have that reminding that the spiritual realm is actually the real realm. And then we come back out of that so that we can see that here, so that we have new eyes to see our world, so that we can be reminded here in the ordinary world of what is real and what is true. So Harry, at the end of this book, he comes out of that world, right? And the Dursleys, they have no clue. They've blinded themselves. They do not want to see. Harry says if he doesn't defeat Voldemort at the end of book one, then Voldemort will come to Privet Drive. That means there are consequences to the Dursleys, even if they don't want to see them. But Harry has new eyes. At the end of the book, he returns to Privet Drive, but he is not the same. And Privet Drive is not the same now. Privet Drive has been transformed from the place at the beginning of the book. This, this living hell that he was in, this place of torture and torment. It's now simply this momentary light affliction. The eternal realm is what he is made for and longed for. As are we. All right, I think those are my final thoughts. Do you have final thoughts about these books?
- [115:39]
Angelina Stanford
No, no, I'm. I'm glad to have finally met them properly, I guess.
- [115:44]
Thomas Banks
And book one is. I don't know if I can convince you to read the rest, but man.
- [115:48]
Angelina Stanford
No, I think I'll. Think I'll revisit them sometime.
- [115:50]
Thomas Banks
Okay. Well, very good. I hope that you guys have enjoyed this series. I've really appreciated the feedback. It was a real challenge for me, first of all, to have no spoilers. Second of all, to try to explain in one podcast series esoteric topics that I often takes a semester to go through. If you're interested in learning more about this stuff, the kind of stuff I'm talking about here and that I've just really kind of alluded to and tried to summarize very briefly. I always fear when I'm summarizing it that I've done such a bad job, I've confused people even more. But I really do go through these things very, very systematically in some of the other classes. My how to Read Fairy Tales mini class is really a crash course in how to read symbolically. And I go very, very deep into all of this stuff stuff and that's available for sale on our website for, for not very much money. That's a mini class. We have year long classes like how to Read Literature where again, I spent a whole year very slowly going through these ideas and showing what they look like in a variety of different genres. So if you're, if you're intrigued with this way of reading, you can certainly get more. You can get more here in this podcast. You can check out the Dracula series We did many, many series we've done. And you can of course take a class or a webinar if you want to go deeper. It's been a lot of fun for us to do this series. It's been a lot of fun for me. It's been a lot of fun to see the feedback we've been getting. And I hope, I hope that what happened was to hear us talk in this old way about this kind of new book, and especially a book that you guys probably know better than I do. But to feel like the way I'm talking about it has given you new eyes to see the book, new layers of understanding. Hopefully that's going to get you excited that there, there is an old way to read that does make these books mean a whole lot more. Not just these books, but all books then we've been led to believe in our culture. We've been led to believe that books are supposed to be relatable. We're supposed to see ourselves, that books are just supposed to be about our ordinary lives and our ordinary ups and downs and not to be placed in some kind of cosmic context. But once you understand how to read symbolically, it's a real game changer and you realize that these books are not anything about what you thought they were about. And they're about the cosmic things, the realest things, the truest things. Well, thanks so much for joining us on this series. As I said, we've had a great time. I've really enjoyed your feedback. If you're finding this podcast way after the fact, join the Facebook group, join the Discord through our Patreon and and I'm sure people are still going to be talking about Harry Potter because I'm going to be spending the next year myself still going through these books with these mini classes. So don't forget, August 12th or live or later will be my Harry Potter class on books two and three. You'll also want to join the mailing list. You'll get the schedule for the podcast there, you'll get some other bonus content and you'll find out what we've got going on in terms of class, classes and webinars and things. So you want to do that on our website again. Houseofhumaneletters.com I'm thinking we'll have Atley on to talk about the Harry Potter movies. I'm not sure if we're going to do that as a podcast episode in September or if we'll do it as a Patreon bonus feature, but you know the schedule will be posted for that. And up next we've got in the next couple of weeks we're going to do a best of series. We're going to repeat of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So we'll be talking more about kind of of, you know, gothic elements and symbolic things there. We're going to have an episode called why Read Biographies, which I'm looking forward to. That'll be coming up. And then in September we will do Dorothy Sayer's Murder Must Advertise, and we'll talk about the detective novel as a romance there. So stick around to the end of this podcast. I hope you always stick around to the end because Mr. Banks always picks just the perfect, perfect poem to end each episode. And as a reminder, we've got our Patreon where you can come on and discuss all of the Harry Potter books. We have spoiler threads and non spoiler threads. We have a very, very lively discussion there about Harry Potter and about all kinds of things. So this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for reading along with us. And maybe now, maybe now you'll have just a hint of what it is that I mean when I say keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at morning time. Join the conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. And check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [121:08]
Angelina Stanford
A selection from Dante's Inferno, Canto 12, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow O blind cupidity, O wrath insane, that spurs us onward, so in our short life and in the eternal, then so badly steeps us. I saw an ample mote, bent like a bow, as one which all the plain encompasses, Conformable to what my guide had said. And between this and the embankment's foot, Centaurs in file were running, armed with arrows, as in the world they used the chase to follow, Beholding us descend, each one stood still, and from the squadron three detached themselves with bows and arrows in advance selected, and from afar one cried, unto what torment. Come, ye who down the hillside are descending. Tell us from there. If not, I draw the bow.