Thoughts of Merlinus Ambrettus

MS Scores

2007-07-01T01:59:00.001-07:00

yyy

2007-06-11T19:37:00.000-07:00

Tom Waits type shot

2007-06-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

yada yada yada

2007-06-08T19:04:00.001-07:00

just a new pic for the profile

Job and the Kraken in Dead Man's Chest

2007-03-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

Wow ... been a while since I have posted anything ... been too caught up in studies (although I do occassionally post length comments over at John Granger's Hogpro site when something strikes me over there, most recently it has been addressing Dr Bloom's criticisms of Harry Potter).

I just thought I would hop on and catalog this thought/thing I read while going through an article for a paper I am doing on Genesis 1:1-3 and the chaos theories of creation. It comes from a scholar named Bruce Waltke (last semester I had to get familiar with and use a grammar of Biblical Hebrew syntax that he did with another scholar named O'Connor), in an article he wrote in 1975 (in the journal Bibliotheca Sacra, volume 132). In watching the DVD extras of Dead Man's Chest, of course the sceen-writers' commentary was the main thing I was going for, since I have been trying to figure out where these guys are coming from ... contemporary, post-modern, hollywood screen-writers who wind up with a lot of ancient Hebraic symbolism in their work peaks my interest greatly. During the notable moment of high epic style poetry by Davey Jones: "Let no Joyful sounde be heard, let no man look to the skies with hope, and let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake the Kraken" the screen-writers let slip the name of Job. In reading Waltke's article he cites the specific place, Job 3:8 - "Let those curse it who curse the day, who are prepared to rouse Leviathan." Just thought that was a neat piece of info to throw up here.

Further Considerations

Here Waltke is discussing the ancient near Eastern parallells with creation/consmogyny accounts found int he Hebrew Scriptures/Christian Old Testament, foremost among them is the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, in which the seam monster that is killed, and from whose remains the hero god fashions the world, is Tiamat, and is a she-god. If you watch those scenes from DMC where the Kraken attacks, especially the final one where Jack confronts it, whether or not Gore Verbinski and his boys consiously intended it to be this way, there is an undeniable qaulity to the Kraken's physical appearance that resembles feminine anatomy, and when you have Jack standing there with a standard Phallic symbol like a sword ... Im not saying that either the Bible or Verbinski Et Al are misogynist ... with respects to the former [the Bible] the specific passage I am studying, Genesis 1:1-3, is classed by Waltke under its own heading among 4 types of OT creation passages, not under the heading that is the "chaos sea-monster" type, but even with those passages that are the Hebrew authors only seem to pick up the "big chaotic dragon" image, IE with no female overtones [unless you take the word for "deeps" in Gen 1:2, TheHoM, to be a derivative of the name "Tiamat" from the Enuma Elish, but another scholar I was reading, David Tsumara, notes this as highly unlikely precisely because the Genesis term would have completely lost any trace of the feminine morpheme, the letter combination that generally connotes a word as feminine. In regards to the POTC film-makers, I would note my own interpretation of the films as crises or romantic love. Will is having some problems and Jack is connected to them. Will has father issues, the need to save his father from Jones and the need to come to grips with the fact that "Pirate's in you blood boy, and you'll have to square with that!" Hence the precise form of the question of the films is given by the polar opposite evil of the Kraken, the imperious materialist (to the same level of "evil" as the Kraken, but on the materialist extreme rather than the mythical extreme) Lord Culter Becket: "Ahhhh ... a marriage interrupted? ... or fate intervened." Will CAN'T get married till he settles his father and impotency issues (the same writers mentioned in movie 1 that in the cave, when Will whacks Jack over the head with the oar, which is repaid in DMC, that if Barbosa had been going to kill Elizabeth at that point and it was up to Will to save her ... he failed ... she was dead). As one who loves Will Elizabeth gets caught up in this internal conflict of his by becoming and external manifestation of it, IE her onw conflict with the compass and desire for Jack, she is struggling between the "good man" that Will wants to see himself as and the pirate that he is (recall at the end of the first movie, Will is called a good man and she says "no, he's a pirate." Will still ain't "squared with that" in movie 2). Another manifestation of Will's struggle and the fact that he is incapable of marriage as of yet, and has to take a "sidetrip" and accomplish some things first, is that Jack cannot avoid that all of movie 2 is simply "a sidetrip on the way to the gallows" (emerging from the coffin at the beginning of DMC and asking the skeleton beneath him "do you mind if we take a little sidetrip). In short, whatever Jack as free-spirit is and his journey of coming to grips with the "chaos" type of free-spiritedness, it is connected with Will and the crisis of his romantic standing as a man, in which, because it requires him to accomplish these death-defying feats, such as going to worlds end to recapture the pearl and then kill Jones to free his father, he actually would feel threatened by romantic love ... hence Jack's half of it is. In fact, Jack is almost an opposite pairing with Elizabeth: she is torn between two men/two sides of the same man (Will) that are in conflict with each other; Jack winds up at the end of DMC with two female images in conflict - the Pearl (ships always, and indeed all vessels but especially ships, being refered to in the feminine, and you even have language in the first movie of a masculine drive to protect the feminine's purity/reputation: "Stop blowing holes in my ship!" ... perhaps this is part of the source of Will's tension, Jack's mythopoeic outlook enables him to express the feminine as freedom for the masculine, "tha's what a ship really ... freedom" but perhaps Will is unable to come to grips with exactly how free-spirited that freedom is and thus feels the woman as Jack does the ship at the end, chained to the mast ... both of them have to come to grips with it) and the Kraken with its obviously feminine-genital physical characteristics.

Keep in mind that there is also a 3rd feminine image set in that scene, one which has interesting variances in the movies thus far and which, in this particular case I suspect will be how Jack winds up having survived when we meet him in Singapore in AWE ("sure as the tide, Jack Sparrow'll turn up in Singapore" and pictures of Depp in eastern constume and the fact that Chow Yin Fat is an oriental pirate in AWE) ... land. In Hebrew the word for land is feminine and is, in fact, the femine pair (adamah) with the word for mankind, "adam." The dirt that Tia gave Jack was still on the deck of the ship when the Kraken swallowed it, I suspect that, alah Jonah and the whale, that DRY ground is going to give the Kraken an upset stoumach. As far as the Kraken as feminine, note Tia Dalma's identification of the sea with a woman ("No, I heard it was the sea he fell in love with" ... "Same story, different versions! and all are true!" - pointing here at herself, and I think the subtle point is that she herself is the one Jones fell in love with, she has the same locket on her table, but it is possible that she was just pointing to herself demostratively as "A" woman, either way the point stands on the identification of sea and woman). Tia is an interesting character herself ... she lives in the wetland of a river delta, a land that is both "dry-land" and "wet-land." This is different from where Bill found himself when he made his deal with Jones, the ocean bottom - a place that is land but weighed down and crushed by the sea. Even more interesting is the "land" where Jones chooses to hide his heart, the geological opposite of Tia's swamp, a desert island, in the sand (interestingly, it is in the non-desert part of this same island tha we find a defunct church, which the three-way machismo sword duel [criticized wonderfully by Elizabeth, "oh yeah ... let's just pull out oru swords and start banging away at each other!" - note that this is just after Will has commanded her to watch the chest: a man who tells the woman "you just take of the/my heart/'love', while I go off and do my 'serious business'"] passes through ... and what is this place called? the Ille de Crucis, Island of the cross or of suffering/pain ... in moive one there is the island of death).

Actually the themes collide in the person of Bootstrap, or at least I suspect they do - that we will get some MAJOR info on BSB in At Worlds End. Will's pirate issues flow, at least in part, from his father issues. If you watch the DVD of movie all the way through to the end of the credits with the screenwriters commentary on, you not only get the easter egg (the monkey taking a piece of gold from Cortez'z stone chest before the island is claimed by the sea, and hence trapped in undead state in movie 2) but they also give you, as a prize for waiting through all the credits, the proper chronolgy of events prior to the first movie, which includes a niece piece of info on Jack's relationship with Bill. Just as Will sailed the interceptor into Tortuga with Jack during movie 1, so Bill sailed the Pearl into Tortuga, just the two of them, after Jones had raised it from the depths for Jack (then they picked up a crew, including first-mate Barbosa). I suspect something crucial will come out in AWE that puts Jack every bit as much in responsibility for Bootstrap's plight (remember that he originally got tossed over board by Barbosa for defending Jack) as will is responsible for saving him in order to come to grips with his father issues.

I predict that AWE will end with Jones dead (after the spot being removed from Jack's hand ... unless said terrible beastie was undone alreay in spitting Jack up, or unless "being eaten" once removes the spot and said terrible beastie is "satisfied" with regards to Jacks person ... but, on my interpretation of the Kraken I have to suspect that it will make at least one onscreen appearance and have to be settled out as an issue if Will's issues with his feminine soulmate are not settled out eyt going into AWE< which obviously they are not), Will having killed him (Jones, with the knife Bill gave him in DMC), with Jack as captain of the Dutchman - myth redeemed and whole (""one soul bound to crew aboard a ship" ... "but the Dutchman already has a captain"), Bill as first-mate of the Dutchman (symbolizing Will's resolution with his "pirate blood" - that he accepts the death of Lord Cutler Becket (maybe at the hands of Norrington of Gov Swan, or maybe at the hands of Mr Mercer [what a wonderfully wicked character that was] and then Mercer dispatched by Swann or Norrington as the arm of Justice), Swann returns as govenor of Port Royal, Norrington either taking up blacksmithing in partnetship with Will or, more likey, restored as commodore and military counterpart to Swann (but the two of them kind of give up on hunting and killing pirates, due to the fact that Jack now has the biggest baddest mythical ship around ... no use, mate), and Will and Elizabeth finally get married and she finally gets the man she needs ("If not for these bars, I'd have you already" ... the bars are, unrealized by her, actually made by Will's crisis in manhood, she with her fingers dropping in unrequited love as he goes gallavanting off on his mission without even giving her a goodbye kiss) .... and they live happily ever after ... well, we'll see LOL

Further Thoughts on the Stone Statue of Slytherin and Idols

2007-01-29T20:56:00.000-08:00

From James L. Kugel The Bible as it Was pp 138-139

This relates to comments I have made before on how the stone statue of Slytherin in the COS resembles the idol Molech (Ginny between the feet of the statue as children were sacrificed in the arms of Molech) and Voldemort's Horcruxes as idolatrous in a way that even further shows what I think is at the heart of idolatry and connects it to things that are current instantiations of the same thing, only under new guises, but also the same thing in a new and more indluted form (gods of wood and stone have become L Ron Hubbard's and Scientology religion of personal dynamism ... at least the old pagan gods had some idea of something outside of humanity, however polluted it became).

Kugle cites Apocalypse of Abraham chs 1,3: a story of Abrahamhaving found an idol fallen over in his father, Terah's, idol shop (this is an extrpolation of the concept found in the Book of Jubilees that Abraham's being singled out from his father, Terah, and brother, Nahor, by God to be removed from Chaldea and promised a new land and inheritence was the result of Abraham being the only one who would not worhsip the gods of the Chaldeans [and that the material means by which this happened is that the Chaldeans kicked him out for not worshipping the idols]. The support for this is found in Joshua 24:2-3, where it says that the ancestors served other gods in Chaldea, but in Is 51:2 it states that Abraham alone was called, thus the later thinking is that he must not have served the other gods ... In both Jubilees and The Apocalypse Terah is made into an idol manufacturer and idol-worship priest, making his living by offering sacrifices before the idols for others) ... Abraham and Terah try to put the idol back up and the head breaks off in Abraham's hands and Terah simply makes another idol body for it.

Upon this event abraham says to himself (speaking of his father) "Is he not rather a god to his gods?" This connects with my thought that what underlies idolatry (eidos-latria) is worship of the self (what I would term idios-latria ... which I see in Voldemorts making Horcruxes, agreeing with those who see the Horcruxes as referents of the title for the upcoming final Harry Potter book, "The Deathly Hallows" - at least I agree with them on the symbolic level). This citation does not entirely make the case for the connection as I have laid it out but it does show that, at least by the time the Apocalypse was written, some connections had been conceptualized between idol worship and self worshop (a man being a "god to his gods")

The Astonomy Tower

In this same set of pages Kugels embarks on the discussion of Chaldea as the home of Astronomy and Astology. The connection of idol-worship with these practices in Chaldean culture underscores what I have thought about the "sketchy" character of divination seen by Dumbledore and the astronomy tower as the location of his demise in Half Blood Prince. I'm not sure but I think somewhere Hermione or Harry refer to divination as a "wooly discipline" and, I think in Chamber of Secrets, Percy recommends it to Harry (Percy, whom we have seen in Order of the Phoenix and HBP to be politically savvy and adept, but decidedly not what we would call "wise").

Of course, just as Dumbledore is tolerant of divination and it does seem to be a licit and occasionally valid discipline (if a bit "wooly") at Hogwarts, Kugel goes on to describe a further tradition by which it was actually through his unusual skill at doing Astronomy in a legitimate way that led him to the conclusions of montheism.

"Deathly Hallows" thoughts.

2007-01-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

Thoughts made in a comment to this post on Harry Potter book 7 Title on Eyore's blog, responding to the thoughts in the post and tom some information related in one of the comments, concerning the Dutch translation of the title.

2 Thoughts from Antionette's relating the Dutch Title:

1. The standard English translation of the traditional Vulgate Latin of the Lord's Prayer: from sanctifcatur to "hallowed" (be Thy Name)... the Latin is obviously the root from the English "Saint" is coming from (but I'm beginning to sound too much like John Granger there, which I say only jokingly ... just that I thought he stated the case a little too strongly that English speakers in western culture will automatically jump to the Lord's Prayer/Our Father without any other connections coming to mind at a strong level ... given that many, at least those who would even call to mind the line from the prayer, are familiar with the fact that "halloween" [very Gothic, and thus associations with Rowling and Potter right off the bat] comes from "all hallows eve" and that it is the day before All Saints Day and connected with, even if they don't automatically make the connection the "All Hallows Eve" is literally "All Saints Eve" ... which connects with my second thought ... so I will jump to that now).

2. The second thing really interests me, especially being as you have just mentioned here the Riddle graveyard in GOF: From the first time I read the whole thing of the shades emerging from Voldy's wand and circling the dueling pair and assailing Voldy to help Harry escape, that image struck me as "Communion of the Saints" and St Paul's "cloud of witnesses. I'm not saying I think she was necessarily going for that as something specific for the reader "to get" or that she is trying to be a "champion" of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. But I do think that as somebody well familiar with the literature of Western Catholic Europe, she would be familiar with the concept as an image and that the similarity is entirely too striking to be accidental ... I think it is a primary image that she is using here (not nessesarily a primary referent, or thing symbolized, but that it is the primary image that she is using to symbolize what it is thatt she is symbolize, a sense of family/community that helps the individual, that can also extend beyond the realm of "those who are currently 'alive'" and that can utilize and function through/inconnection with the physical universe, such as the traces of the victims left behind in the wand and accessible through priori incantatem ... all of which is a more mystical concept that she is directly symbolizing, although not necessarily the communion of saints doctrine per se that is the direct referent in the symbolization, but I do think it is the image she is drawing on in order to to symbolize what she sis symbolizing).

In this case, as Antoinette's relating of the English translation of the Dutch title points to, from Voldy's perspective, those shades in the Riddle graveyard in GOF(and maybe others that will make an appearance in book 7?) really are "deadly saints." Having said all that I just wanted to toss in a couple extra considerations that have been bumping around in my brain on the title.

Primary (Physical) Referent of (the Deathly Hallows): The Graveyard of the Founders

It seems to me like the most probable referent would be the founders graves at Hogwarts (I'm not really well versed here ... from what you said it sounded like she said it exists there and I am taking your statement that she stopped the director of POA movie from isnerting such a graveyard into movie 3 "because it is not there" as being "there" in book 3 [ie "there" refering to time-text placement in the series], which would lend much support to the specific "deathly hallows" being the founders graves ... if she has had in mind all along that there is a specific set of Graves but did not want the information out yet [although she accidentally leaked it via the interchaneg with the director of POA], which would indicate that it is important information to be gaurded).

I think that these graves will be the specific referents of the title and stated as such in the text (and hence my saying I think them the primary referents. I think that all the rest I am talking about in this comment are/will be really symbolized in the title, but on the level of meaning that is properly symbolic, whereas these concrete graves will be the primary physical referent).

I think that it is also possible that the "location" of departed souls who still have a role to play (ie beyond the veil), maybe as a secondary "physical" referent, and the connection bewteen these referents would be the concept of the departed and their "resting place" (either of the body in a graveyard or tomb or of the soul in that place beyond the veil) and the role that they play as "deadly" to Voldy while still operating from that "place," as well as their threat to Harry - not meaning that they are "menacing" to him in and of themselves, but that his connection with them in the fight against Voldy puts him in a place, or maybe a state, where there is more pull for him to cross that line in a way that makes him no longer able to exist on this side of the veil as a "living person," just by the nature of the place/state itself).

My first line of reasoning as to the foudners graves being the specific primary referent of the title is that in all 6 books thus far the title object is some particular thing or person introduced specifically in that book, and unknown before the point of the particular book. We knew Snape before HBP but we did not know this title, which is almost an alter-persona (actually, "alter" is the wrong word if we take it to mean "other" or "different" ... the title is really the concretization of what he himself sees as central to his person, and thus my temptation to the word "alter" because this concretization represented in the title stands alongside the concretization of his whole person ... ie him as he exists and lives in the real world with all of his characteristics playing in tension with each other). We've known he has a lot of unknown facets to his personality; we have known that he has serious personality/identity issues tied up with his rivalry with Sirius and James, but we did not know that he sort of embodied these issues in this particular "persona" that is indicated on a much more concrete level when he gives it a title.

More importantly, we enounter "the half blood prince" in a specific physical object introduced specifically in HBP ... the potions book. In a way this book is a lot like Riddle's diary in COS ... a sort of concrete encapsulation of this self-cocncept/persona (although not on the level of the diary as a Horcrux, which, as I say in the next point, is, I think, reminiscent of idolatry ...
(Aside: In support of the "idol reading" of Horcruxes I would offer the role Slytherin plays in Voldy's self-conception, the diary as Horcrux and its tight position with the statue of Salazar Slytherin in the end of COS, the depiction of Ginny Weasely laying between the feet of that statue and the standard, and well-known, idolatry image of the god Molech with children being sacrificed in its arms [this article from the Jewish Encyclopedia list numerous OT passages concerning Molech worship: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=718&letter=M ... and this article draws on Smiths Bible Dictionary and the Encyclopedia of the gods and describes the particular element of the burning in the ourstretched arms: http://www.themystica.com/mythical-folk/articles/molech.html ... it is a pretty commonly known image, and one that sticks with you, I knew of it generally as a kid). I think that in book 7 the title will refer to a concrete specific thing that we have not encountered yet (that is on the level of physical referent ... as I say in the next point I like the Horcruxes as a symbolic referent, as "deathly hallows" as in "unholy hallows" ... idols)

Secondly, I think that the graves will be undergound ... as Granger points out in the hidden key, all of the past books have involved the underground (through the trap door in SS/PS, the chamber in COS, the passage under the willow in POA, the Ministry in OotP - in GOF it is a graveyard above ground, but this connects with below ground graves and one can also appeal to the literary tradition on the "location" of the netherworld in Homer and Virgil ... and in HBP, I would say the cave fits the bill, but that there is a neat development befitting a pentultimate book in that it has a second half that is equally far above ground, atop the tower).

The second reason I like the graves below ground is that it hooks up with another etymological connection that some have discovered, the connection with the word "hollow." The place I myslef lit upon this connection of meanings is in Native American religion. A number of years ago I found myself hiking, boating, camping and swimming at Lake Powell in Southern Utah with a friend. It is a large canyon on the Colorado river with many branching side canyons. When they damned the river at the base, the canyon filled, and up one of the side canyons they discovered some old cliff dwellings which they restored ... you just pull up your boat and climb up a little and there is a state personell there that will tell you about the different rooms etc. On the back there is a little room you climb down into, and it is a worship room with a little fireplace and chimney for fire to be used in reverencing the spirits etc. Around the walls there are niches in which they would place carved, for lack of a better term here, idols. In other words, they were places in places in the wall hollowed out for the images of what they hallowed. I am guessing the graves will fit this image type - the hallowed grounds of founders (who were so central to Voldy's self-conception, as evidenced in that he wanted their artifacts to house pieces of his soul, and, on the guesses of myself and many, so central to Harry undoing Voldemort) will be in a place hollowed out, underground.

And my last guess on specifics is that the entrance to the graves will not be in the grounds, but somehwere in the castle itself. I have 2 reasons for guessing this. The first is that from what I can discern in the texts, I stick with a chiastic reading of the structure in which book 7 corresponds to book 1 (rather than the structure suggested by Red Hen and others in Who Killed Albus Dumbledore, where book 7 corresponds to book 3, which, as I have said, does not strike me as being as "tidy" for a meta-structure of a 7 book series, and chiasm is a well-studied structuring device with a well documented heavy usage in classical literature) ... in which case an entrance within the castle itself is more fitting, since the trap door in PS/SS was in the castle, and the locus of final action directly beneath the school itself. My second reason is connected with the whole thing of the "saints" image. It was a well known practice in Medieval Catholicism, the predominant religious cult of the Christian part of the classical literature Rowling studied (and just in case any are not familiar with the word as I am using it here in its technical usage ... I am not using it in the modern sense of "fringe groups that break off from major religions" etc - the technical use is of the material aspects of religious worship - in Biblical Judaism there is the "cult of the Temple" meaning the specific rubrics and objects of Temple Sacrifice - the modern usage owed in part to references to the "cults of the Saints" but originally this means not "fringe groups that got radically and fanatically into this or that saint," but rather the specific practices of veneration, for examples specifically formulated prayers to the particular saint for their intercession, meaning their own prayers to Christ on one's behalf, with emphasis on the aspect that it is only through Christ that any of it is done and Christ is the only one worshipped as deity, the saints are only venerated or honored) ... a well known practice that the bones/relics of saints, especially martyrs, were kept beneath the altar, sometimes with steps leading down to an actual tomb room beneath the altar, somtimes with only a depression in front of the altar and a grill/lattice through which the relics could be viewed and venerated. sometimes touched (cf the movie on Thomas Becket, which begins and ends with the king praying at a tomb underneath the cathedral altar, which is reached by a set of steps that go down under the altar in the front, the tomb of Saint Peter has also be discovered beneath the Bascilica in Rome ... even in contemporary churches in America in which the altars are more portable, the practice is still to have relics in the altar, by way of an "altar stone," a flat stone of standard size with a relic encased/embedded in it, that can be fit into a place made for it [hollowed out, if you will] in the portable altar).

I think that all in all, within the framework of what Granger has discussed as Rowling being a post-modern writer, she is the brand of PoMo who realizes it as a freedom from the "modern," a freedom to draw also upon pre-modern models (which were viewed as "superstitious" and antiquated by the moderns) and find the continuities between the pre-modern and the post-modern, and that her propensity thus far for using the pre-modern in her post-modern work, points in the direction of her finding it attractive to have the entrance to "hallows" be within the building.

Well, make that 3 reasons for an inside-the-castle entrance to the founders graves ... in some interview in recent times Rowling said she had a dream of herself as Harry rummaging through the great hall looking for a Horcrux. AS Narrator she knew where it was and as Harry she did not, but the hall was also operated by the waiters and waitresses at the cafe where she has written much of the work ... it may or may not have been a fully consious fun little very veiled tip off, but I suspect it is at least a subconscious slip in releasing info ... that's my guess on it at least.

Symbolic Referent/s of "the Deathly Hallows"

Horcruxes

I also like the Horcruxes as symbolic referents of the title. This is a brief point that connects mainly with what I mentioned above about the "hollowing" meaning in connection with idolatry. I would avoid making any too rash statement on Native-American religious practice, in light of what could be said on the impact of the Church's thought concerning "insurmountable ignorance" in relation to those religious practices ... but I definitely think Voldy's Horcruxes fit the role of "idols"(in short, I believe that there is a latent but deep connection in idolatry between "image worship" [Greek = Eidos-Latria, or ido-latry] and "self worship" [Greek would = "idios latria", or the worship of things that are peculiar to one's self, like idioms are peculiar to a particular language and idiosynchracies to a particular personality ... and if you take the attachment of the latria [worship] to a particular "crafted" physical object, which is characteristic of idol worship, and combine it with the self worship, the Horcrux works as a pretty neat image, taking a piece of one's soul and attaching it to a physical object)

THE HALLOWING/CALLING/NAMING

I liked what Granger had to say on "hallowing" as a "calling." I need to preface my own considerations on this with a statement of what they are for me. For me they come paritally from study of Judaica and the Old Testament/Hebrew Scripture. It would be a long and arduous task/road to construct a solid "argument" for using these sources for explicating Rowling's work if one is thinking about it in the vein of proof-texting etc, which I'm not. For me, I think the stuff is there, having made it into Rowling's mind in the form of (and by way of) concrete instances where it has come from Biblical and post-Biblical Judaic culture into Medieval Christian culture.

I would offer a couple of instances in support of such occurances being the kind of thing that actually does happen. The first is from a talk presented by Jeanne LaHaie this past summer at Lumos, on Jewish name magic in the middle ages as a possible image source for the fear of saying Voldy's name (which seems to be ubiquetous among both the MOM loyal crowd and the Death Eaters, outside of Harry and DD ... and Voldy himself is definitely pre-occupied with names) and the Jewish legends, first encountered in and around Prague in the middle ages (if I remember correctly from the talk), of a Holy Rabbi making a golem for the protection of the Jewish community there by placing one of the names of God on the forehead of the creature, which is molded out of clay, I think (which, the golem, incidentally, had the danger of becoming unruly if it became self-aware, and might cause trouble by not submitting to its own dissolution by the removal of the name once its purpose of protection had been served ... and the concern with self-awareness/autonomy reminds me much of DumbleDore's comments on how imprudent it would have been of Voldy to make Naginni a Horcrux, making an HC out of something that could move and act for itself).

The second is the AK killing curse, which is obviously modeled on "abracadabra" ... at one point on the MM blog I analyzed the actual AK curse from Hebrew cognates that seemed just too strong to be coincidence, with the AVD and DVR roots in Hebrew (or ABD and DBR - the "b" and "v" being the same letter in Hebrew and other Semitic languages), and a really neat friend/woman from Australia, whose initials also happen to be JKR, came back having looked up the etymology of "abracadabra" and found that several possibilities existed from Chaldean and Aramaic, generally yeilding "vanish like/as a/this word" and that it was used in medieval times on talismans, often in a triangulated repeated formation, as a protection against illness or attempt to rid oneself of such.
(Aside: I once pondered, prompted in my musings by the work that had been done on stage magic in HBP, if at one time the practices within stage magic more clearly mirrored the actual etymologies of the phrases "abracadabra" and "hocus pocus." In present stage magic lore/practice it seems to me like they are thought of as basically undifferentiated as "magic words" - but it would be interesting if at one time in stage magic the former had been used primarily when making things disappear, mirroring the "vanish like/with a/this word" origin, and the latter used primarily when making things re-appear, mirroring that it originally developed as a "magic/voodoo-type" derogitory term as a put down on the vast medieval Catholic consideration of the Mass and the doctrine of Trans-substantiation, as a put down on the Latin words of institution, "Hoc Est Meus Corpus" - thus "Hocus Pocus" used for making things appear magically)

Having said all that, the thing that interested me in John Granger's HogPro ponderings on the Dethly Hallows name, augmented by others here and there, is the "calling" strand of the word. I think that he is on to something with the connection to Harry having a "calling" like the prophets and apostles, but I think it is a more latent or subtle one, not meaning "less there" but that it pervades the texts on a different level of meaning. I just thought I would toss in some other stuff here from what I see in some Hebraic instances that connect it (the meaning of "calling" - from which, as some have noted, our present English word "hello" comes) with "the sacred". In the Hebrew texts there is a verb for "call" that is transliterated "Qara," and it receives a wide range of usages, but most connected with the sacred, actions by the deity or actions connected with sacred roles or with cult. The first is a simple meaning of "read" and, in this context, really "proclaim." Jeremiah tells Baruch to "Qara" to the king the scroll of the "Word of the LORD" (DVR YHWH) that Jeremiah received from the LORD and dictated to Baruch (his scribe). The verb is the same used when God calls the light "day" and the dark "night." It is also used of special naming by humans ... Adam "calls" (same verb) the living creatures, gave them names, in Genesis 2, and he says of the woman that she shall be called (same verb) woman (some strands of exegesis posit that there is a significance to the difference between this instance and the naming of "Eve" after the fall and that the fact that it says "he called her name Eve" is conditioned by the setting of that within the curse/judgment after the fall - that the use of "name" was only with the animals earlier, not with the woman, and that the form here indicates this act of naming, versus the earlier naming, as part of the tension now introduced between the sexes as part of the "fall-out" of the "fall," not an instance of male dominance as a naturally good thing - this is part of a feminist reading, some of which I can see the point of and other parts I might disagree with, but my main interest in mentioning it is the use of the term "name" in a context that has the possibility of being negative somehow and the similarity with the name focus in Harry Potter and Voldy's name and name magic etc - a concept of unique properties in the term/concept ... in Jewish culture and the tradition out of which the Masorete scribes added vowel points to the Hebrew OT text (our present Old Testament is translated from the Masoretic text completed sometime in the 8th or 9th century AD/CE {"Common Era" ... ie in the middle ages} - such pointing in texts began sometime in the 6th Century AD/CE and before that the text had been only consonants, with the vocalization of pronunciation memorized and carried on in meticulous memorization for canting the text in the synagogue], the name of the LORD [YHWH] would not be pronounced in reading in the Synagogue, and so they put the vowel points of "Adonai" [lord] under it to remind the cantor to say "Adonia" rather than "Yahwen" [this is actually where the mistaken name "Jehovah" comes from in the King James ... it is what you get if you don't understand the system and actually try to pronouce the consonants YHWH with the vowel points of "Adonia"], and in current Jewish prayer books [ a Siddur] the copy of the Torah in it does not even have the 4-consonant form at all, it is "HaSheim" - "The Name")
The one that sticks out to me most in connection with the concept of the sacred is that the verb is used formulaicly to refer to cultic worship of Yahweh. In Genesis 4:26, after Seth calls the name of his son Enosh, it says that at this time men began to "call on the name of the LORD" and in Genesis 12:8 Abram builds an altar to the LORD and "called on the name of the LORD" ... all the same verb ... which is also used (to get back to Granger's concept of a "calling" of a person to a mission etc) in 1 Samuel 2: 4 when God calls Sammuel in the middle of the night (the famous passage where Sammuel, as a boy, goes in severl times to Eli, thinking it is Eli who has been calling his name).

All of that to say that while I think the primary referent of the "hallows" in the 7th Harry Potter book will be the graves of the founders underground at Hogwarts, and maybe on a larger level "the grave" in general as the "keeper" of the souls of those who have departed this life via Voldy's AK etc but who still have a role to play in the final undoing of him (ie a "communion of Saints" that includes both the founders as foundational and those such as Lily and James as specific martyrs in what Granger is terming Voldewar I and II), and possibly connected with their place beyond the veil the room in the MOM and the juxtaposition/connection of that location ... while I think this set of images and locations etc will be the primary referents of the title, I think there is also a connection between them the "sideline" meanings of the "hallow" title in the various strands of the English meaning, which seem disparate in English but if you look back further in the Judeo-Christian tradition you can find more actual thematic connection between the seemingly disparate meanings and that that older thematic connection does make it through into the themes of Rowling's work. And I think information like Antionette provided on the Dutch title provides some great supporting info that helps tie together the likely primary meanings with some of the great stuff John and others have speculated on from the English possibilities of the word as secondary or symbolic meanings.

Comments on Snapes Character

2007-01-28T16:54:00.000-08:00

A Comment made on this post on Severus Snape on Eyore's blog.

At the risk of sounding like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, I am going to say "both of you (Pat and Torill) are right." (at one point in a group two characters consecutively express two opposing opinions, both of which Tevye replies to by saying they are right, and a third character interjects, "wait ... he is right, and he also is right? they can't both be right!" ... to which Tevye replies, "you ... are also right." which, from what I have been able to get a feel for in my wanderings in such regions, is actually a very Jewish approach to handling "inconsistencies" ... the movie/film does a very good job of bringing out a very traditionally Jewish "hermeneutic" in a richly humorous way in a lot of places)I myself am officially in the "good Snape" camp (on which I, like a good many of us, could be simply entirely wrong) but NOT in the "nice Snape" camp, or more accurately here, the camp of "the fact that Snape is a white-hat at core and working for the main goal of that camp (and, I would guess, doing so rather effectively, for that main goal of that camp) THEREFORE all of his actions contribute concretely to that goal, or are at least neutral and do not contribute in any fashion at all the goal of the black-hat camp." It is my opinion that that is pert of the richness of Rowling's work - the breadth of character and the way in raises very real-life issues.There are two incidents that come to mind that correspond to the 2 things that seem to me to be the major factors in this one. The first is what I would call the "true grit" factor. In favor of what we might call Snape's, um (for lack of a better handle) "philosophy of education" there is the argument that "it's a rough world and if they (these kids) are going to be able to endure the kind of battle the dark lord and the DEs are definitely going to throw at them, they are going to need thick skin to do it ... 'and he says there's no need to bring protective gloves' (HBP 236)." I think we see some of this in other characterizations in the works. When Ginny confronts Ron after he and Harry happen upon her kissing Dean, she is somewhat brutal on him (HBP 287-288) ... she goes pretty hard and pretty obviously for a pretty sure insecurity. The thing is that, in order to handle the battle ahead, she is going to need to be that tough ... as will Ron (insecurities such as his can provide a pretty decent weapon for DEs, in whom I think we have seen as much of a predilection for taunt as an auxiliary weapon as for magic as a main weapon, which can have a negative impact as we have seen in psychological factors impacting a witch like Tonks' magical powers [assuming she isn't Bella with poly-juice, which I will grant is possible, but for my tastes the PJ party of "everybody is a poly-juiced DE in HBP" got a little out of hand]Now, the second thing to note on this first point is that it can seem a gray area. Even given what I just said (or maybe precisely because of the import of that toughness) ... it is rough and can be brutal .. in fact in the Ginny and Ron instance I just noted, it's fairly harsh for Ginny herself, "who sounded close to tears now." (HBP 288).In regards to Snapes favored approach to "educating" students other than those from house Slytherin ... I think that Torill's points are ones that deserve real consideration. I'm not saying that I think they're "definitively canonically right" in a way that you can point to canon instances and say "see ..." Rather, they're like the real world, they're a judgment call - not a light or insignificant judgment call, but a judgment call. I think this is part of JKR's depth and greatness as a writer is her ability to bring out nuanced areas of issue like this. Like I said, the kids will need to be tough and a decent argument can be made for Snape validly and intentionally being the catalyst for necessary calluses (and Harry definitely has certain very acute sensitivities ... such as his heightened experiences of/reaction to the sensation of apparating, versus say Fred and George who are [in #12 GrimPlace in OotP, I believe] popping in and out of Ron and Harry's bedroom just for the fun of it). But "the truth," I would argue, also requires taking into account the concerns Toril brings up ... the rips on Hermione's teeth in the instance cited, and there are places in POA that seem to me, regardless of the level of misdirection in Harry's limited omniscient perspective, to at least greatly support (if not prove) Lupin's statement in HBP that "Snape hated James!" ... evidenced in the fact that, even taking into account the limited omniscience, that Snape really would like to see James' buddy Sirius get soul-snogged (if we take DD at Harry's word [i.e., if we accept some reliability/accuracy in the view from atop Harry's shoulder, as John Granger puts it], DD straightforwardly seems to admit in the "DD's denouement description" scene of OotP, that there is some real deep-seated animosity there ... and in regards to its effect, it is a contributing factor, although obviously not, by far, the only factor, in Harry's poor performance in occlumency, which leads to Sirius being in the MOM that night)On that matter I will say that I think Granger's notes on "narrative misdirection" and "limited 3rd person omniscient" seem to be pretty unarguably the case, but that I don't think that that means we can disregard everything (which I'm not saying that JG is saying that ... just that it is sometimes entirely easy to follow that that, or any observation, to an extreme that does not mirror reality) ... and I'm not sure I buy the "scripting" at the level it seems to me would be necessary for everything that has occurred to be "on DD's orders ... for intentional lessons for Harry to learn." In other words, I think that when Snape jabbed Sirius about "staying safe" at #12 GP it seems to me like a genuinely uncharitable taunt and that there is some accuracy/truth in Harry's feeling that the taunt had concretely contributed to Sirius making the rash dash to the MOM (a feeling that is noted, at least from his perspective, as coming from a process involving longer and more in depth deliberation than his usual, sometimes rash, judgments [HBP 161]).ANYWAY, on to the second of the two instances/points that I spoke of: the efficacy of Snape's teaching. Somewhere in HBP(I think several places but I'm not sure on that), Harry notes/says that he has learned more from the HBP's potion book than Snape managed to teach him in 5 years. This, again, is, I think, meant to be a hard judgment call for the reader to make, as to whether or not he is right in that (and that this creatively mirrors the difficulty of nuances and judgment calls in real life, where there are many "gray areas" ... not that the truth itself is gray, but that the discernment of it is genuinely very tricky business at times). There is a consideration that without Snape's caustic presentation/persona it might be easier for Harry to connect with the basics of potions or other magic that it really would help him to have a better grasp of going into the final sequence of fighting Voldy. On the other hand, Hermione would have a very strong case to make that Harry did not really learn from the HBP potions books - that Snape actually had the insight to make those brilliant annotations to potions processed but all Harry really got out of his use of the book in potions class was helpful shortcuts, not any real further understanding of the magic involved (as evidenced in the fact that we the reader, at least adult readers of a certain level of learning, can at least discern the age-old principle of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" in Golpalott's 3rd law [HBP 374], whereas Harry interiorly admits, via the narrator, that he couldn't understand a word of it). I suspect that the book will come back into the story (whether the book itself actually "onscreen" or not I don't can't guess) in such a way that we find out that, not to sound to aphoristically trite, Harry actually "learned more than he learned" (that in the process he took in certain information from which he will only later realize and appropriate certain principles and understandings that are helpful in the fight against Voldy, and thus contribute to the meaning of the works as a whole as literature) ... but I think Hermione's (hypothetical) point (that at this point in time Harry has not really learned anything from the prince)deserves genuine consideration too.(it is kind of ironic: Hermione's hypothetical point [meaning that I didn't actually see her say this particularly but it is close enough to her actual "canon" thoughts and statements that I would have to put it closer to "canon" than to being my own "deductive work" ... which is admittedly usually not very clever, not to mention not very concise] would yield that Harry actually underwent more of the valid learning process from Snape as potions master, which might seem to undercut Toril's reading of Snape's character in the books ... but that is only in relation to the subject of potions itself and Hermione really does not ever, that I can remember, give a definitive thumbs up OR down on Snape's efficacy in teaching potions in the classroom [and from his treatment of her, she would have genuine reason to give a thumbs down at least in some respects], and thus if you take her comments on the prince being a "dodgey character" as applying in general to Snape, she agrees more with Toril's assessment of Snape's character ... although it seems to me possible that we may find out in book 7 that some of the annotations came not from Severus Snape but from Eileen [Prince] Snape: evidence in favor of this would be the conspicuous mention of the publication date of the book - obviously Snape did not purchase the book new, and probably not used from another source, but from his mother. Specific mention is made of the books date as being 50 years ago [Lupin suggests looking up the date in "a very frosty Christmas" and then Harry finds it is 50 years old] but not mention is made of the date of the Eileen prince picture in the prophet, but it is "very old" [paper yellowed by age - HBP 537] and so it is at least possible, if not probable, that she fits the 50 yr time frame. There is also Hermione's intuition, earlier somewhere in HBP, that the handwriting looks more like a girls. Evidence against this would be that some of the work [particularly Levi-Corpus] seems fairly certainly to be Severus' work, yet there is no indication given anywhere that I remember of Harry noticing a difference in handwriting anywhere in the annotations. One way or another, I strongly suspect that at the very least, EP was the original owner of the book and that the 50 yr time frame will be significant. First that she was indeed at Hogwarts 50 yrs ago and that this relates to the repeated mention [most particularly in regards to the COS pairing with the other 50 yr old book, Riddle's Diary ... making another books 2 and 6 pairing, which have been noted by a number of people, although with varying structural interpretations] that Riddle was at Hogwarts 50 yrs ago ... I think that, whether through Snape himself or through Hermione's search through old Prophets in the library, Eileen Prince/Snape will be a source of some important information or other on Riddle/Voldy. This also ties into the main debate of the present debate between Pat and Toril in this post, lest I get too divergent [I know I'm divergent, just trying to keep at least a little on course], in that Eileen's being a contemporary of Riddle places the age difference between Voldy and Severus as distinctly that of father-son. I think we will find out in book 7 that Snape has some "father issues" and that part of the magnetism of Voldy for Snape [whether Toril be right and he has never stopped succumbing to that pull, and thus continued to be a bad guy, or Red Hen be right that he never was a bad guy at all and it was all simply part of DD's plan to draw Voldy out ... at least that is how some of RH's comments in the recent Who Killed Albus Dumbledore seemed to read to me ... and thus he has always resisted that magnetism] ... these father issues would be right up the alley of Voldy, who is obsessed in a love-hate relationship with his own parentage.So, again, on both these counts, I think there is a validity in both perspectives: seeing Snape's valid and concrete positive role in the fight against voldy, but also not "flattening" his character in light of that. And I think the possible ambivalence lends a real-world breadth to the works that is part of what makes them so great as literature.But then, "I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron." (HBP 197) Methodological Consideration: Just wanted to add a note here concerning the way I cite stuff above. My aim is not to "proof-text." In considerations like the above I'm mainly offering passages that I think contribute concretely to discernable tenets in JKR's writing and constructing of her world (ie the "Potterverse"), characters and narrative events (which seems to me to be a main question in the difference of responses to the canon-character of Snape, such as between Pat and Toril's responses ... the question of "what exactly is the nature and effect of this thing we call 'Professor Snape? ... taking into consideration that he has several inter-related goals to fulfill: the direct war on Voldemort, but also the education, including the formation, of youth who will go on to engage themselves in that war, either effectively or poorly ... and symbolically in what that fictional war literarily represents, i.e. the war against evil in the real lives of we the readers." ... and the questions of "how well does he do each of these tasks and how do the tasks impact each other?"I am also not a detective writer ... to be honest, I am nowhere near clever enough. However, I also don't prize clever detective work in isolation of other "what does the work mean on a moral/foundational level" considerations ... but I also don't think such detective work meaningless or "trivial ... quaintly and pleasantly trivial, but trivial at best, none-the-less." I think it is integral to symbolist literature (and Granger does much better job of expounding the nature and wonder of symbolist lit in The Hidden Key ... than I ever could) that the "deeper meanings" play out in the concrete material details of the plot (which is, I would argue, a very "Incarnational" with a capital eye nature in great literature). And I think there is real virtue in the kind of careful detective work and attention to detail some have and practice on the works (I say "real" in contra-distinction to what I would call a concept of "mechanical" virtue, as in "yeah ... you serve a purpose, but simply a mechanical one in digging up raw material for the people who can analysze the 'deeper meaning' etc").On the other hand, I think some of the theories get kind of extravagant ... which is what I was getting at in comments above about the level of concrete "scripting" that it seems to me would be necessary on the part of Dumbledore to make them plausible(which I believe you, Pat, mentioned recently over on the HogPro blog in comment concerning some theories that would simply require a very heavy level of "manipulation" on the part of Dumbledore)I think the plot elements and possibilities uncovered by the detective work have to have some congruity with "meanings" that take into account the psychological realism and real breadth of character that are part of JKR's genius and part of the meaning of the works(meaning characters in the plural ... with Harry not being the only character development we ever see ... via the changes in the observations of his limited omniscient narratorial input) ... Tolkien notoriously distrusted "drama" as a genre in general and had beefs with Shakespeare in particular ... but JKR is not JRRT - and she is a noted fan of Shakespeare. On the one end I think not giving the detective work not only its value for predicting plot elements, but moreover its dignity as a legit part of the broader literary enterprise would be to get into what Tolkien rightly criticized as "allegory" (and slight the full literary value of good detective writing done by greats such as GK Chesterton and, as mentioned by JKR herself, Dorothy Sayers). By the same token, at the other end of the spectrum, to limit the consideration of the works to only the detective work on plot prediction etc would be to limit the value of the works to the level of mere "cipher" literature (I'm drawing those definitions in part from Granger's very thorough and good exposition of symbolist literature via the categories of Eastern Orthodox Iconography in The Hidden Key to Harry Potter ... an Excellent example of a work [which I will not refer to as "literature"] that is "mere cipher" in nature is Dan Brown's controversial "novel," as evidenced, for me, in the fact that, having recently read it, I must say that I have encountered better characterization and dialogue in some first-person-shooter video games).Anyway, that is, in any event, my take on it.