You see me in tears – of joy but also of farewell. I finished today my series Hogwarts and Dante’s 9 Spheres of Heaven. The last pic is painted, the last essay written. Well, now I can start to prepare the online vernisage with contest and all. Stay tuned for it, I will post it soon.
But for now here the essay for Jupiter and the picture and essay for Empyrean Heaven:
They then displayed themselves in five times seven
consonants and vowels, and I saw these letters
singly, and in the order they were traced.
DILIGITE IUSTITIAM — these letters,
placed together, verb and noun, came first,
QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM, last.
Paradiso, Canto 18, Lines 88 – 93
Diligite Iustitiam Qui Iudicatis Terram – Love justice, you that are the judges of the Earth. These are the opening words of the biblical book of Wisdom. It is also the request of the soul sparks on the sixth sphere of Jupiter.
Jupiter is located in Dante’s heavenly order between the hot passionate planet Mars and Saturn, that is usually described as cold star (you will see in the next picture that Dante was of another opinion when it came to Saturn). Jupiter, temperate and pale, balances the two. For the poet it is like a blush of modesty.
A blush of modesty that passes from the face of the heavenly, jovial father – as this is what Jupiter means. The word derives from archaic Latin ‘Iovis’ or Latin ‘(D)is’ = God and Latin ‘pater’ = father. As ‘Heavenly Father’ Jupiter was the king of Roman Gods, ruler of cosmic justice and father of many.
Like a careful knitter he loved knitting patterns. He placed and knotted his threads with deliberation in ever new ways. Occupied with the moment, as the father and ruler of them all he had to consider the overall picture to do justice to all in his rulings, so that his creation became not unbalanced, one sided, unjust – in one word: ruined.
Knitting is a recurrent theme in the Harry Potter series as well. Hagrid knits what appears to be a canary-yellow circus tent in the train to London when he takes Harry for his first trip to Diagon Alley (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5: Diagon Alley). Dumbledore admits freely to loving knitting patterns when he takes Harry to Horace Slughorn to use the Boy-who-lived as a bait the to-become potion teacher swallows unchewed (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Chapter 4: Horace Slughorn).
However, most prominently tied to the subject of knitting is the mother of all – Molly Weasley.
‘I think I know who that one’s from,’ said Ron, going a bit pink and pointing to a very lumpy parcel. ‘My mum. I told her you didn’t expect any presents and – oh, no,’ he groaned, ‘she’s made you a Weasley jumper.’
Harry had torn open the parcel to find a thick, hand-knitted sweater in emerald green and a large box of home-made fudge.
‘Every year she makes us a jumper,’ said Ron, unwrapping his own, ‘and mine’s always maroon.’
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 12: The Mirror of Erised
She even adorns her sweaters with single letters like the ones spelled out by Jupiter’s sparks.
In that torch of Jupiter I watched
the sparkling of the love resplendent there
make signs, before my eyes, of our speech.
And as birds risen from the river’s edge,
seeming to celebrate their pleasure in their food,
form now a rounded arc, and now another shape,
so, radiant within their lights, the holy creatures
sang as they flew and shaped themselves
in figures, now D, now I, now L.
Paradiso, Canto 18 Lines 70 – 78
The last letter that Dante sees on Jupiter is the ‘M’ of terram. Together with the lily that wraps itself around the lines of the M and the eagle flying high above it, the M marks Jupiter as the planet of monarchy and just rulers.
Yet the M can be read also as a symbol for matriarchy, especially as it is the last M of the word terram. The earth is usually seen as an archetypical symbol for the mother. Seen upside down it can also be the first letter ‘W’ of the name Weasley – Molly Weasley.
In the Harry Potter series Molly Weasley is not Jupiter but Jumiter. She represents the ups and downs of the archetype. She is the birth-giving, protecting woman who tries to make the Burrow and later Grimmauld Place #4 as well the most cosy place on earth against all odds. She is the personified fertility and literally the magical authority at her place. In all the poverty the Weasleys live she provides plenty not only to her children but also to everyone she can pull under her wings.
Yet, as already hinted at in the Mercury essay, she represents also the destroying, devouring mother. Like a Norn she is inescapable. Her voice echoes even in the halls of Hogwarts, it is repeated however reluctant by Sirius in the fireplace and follows Percy to London. The image of Percy all tied up in a Weasley sweater unable to move (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 12: The Mirror of Erised) symbols best the way Molly almost suffocates her loved ones with her caring while not considering their needs and wishes.
One could say, her knitting has some flaws. Yet, in the end, when you put everything on a scale, the positive aspects outweigh anything negative – symbolized by Percy’s return. And the motherly dragon spreads its wings one more time to destroy its black aspect – the power hungry femme fatale Belatrix LeStrange.
With the voice and bearing of a guide
who has discharged his duty, she began: ‘We have issued
from the largest body to the Heaven of pure light,
‘light intellectual, full of love,
love of true good, full of joy,
joy that surpasses every sweetness.
Paradiso, Canto 30, lines 37 – 42
In our little excursion through centuries spanning medieval classic to contemporary literature we come now to an end that is really the beginning. Piccarda explained as early as Canto 4 of Paradiso that everywhere in Paradise is Paradise. Yet as a concession to the limited human understanding Dante is introduced to a split up version where the blessed are categorized like in a lexicon.
One could also say the blessed were planted like lovely flowers into different beds of the same garden. The original Hebrew version of the Bible speaks of the Paradise as ‘gan’ what means garden. Only when translated into Greek gan became paradeisos. And as already stated in the very beginning the Greek word paradeisos deceives from a Persian word meaning ‘walled-around place’.
So, the question remains: Is Hogwarts just another ‘walled around place’? Or is Hogwarts Paradise?
‘You all know, of course, that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago – by the four greatest witches and wizards of the age. The four school houses are named after them: Goderic Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw and Salazar Slytherin. They built this castle together, far from prying eyes, for it was an age when magic was feared by common people, and witches and wizards suffered much persecution.’
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 9: The Writing on the Wall
The information ‘over one thousand years ago’ places Hogwarts early years right into the deepest darkness of the medieval, a time not really connected with light, love and joy. Yet it was a time when alchemy was seriously considered by many smart men. And it was also around this time when Dante was allowed his glimpse of Paradiso.
Hogwarts was erected as a school, a place to learn the basics of witchcraft and wizardry. The students allowed are unique in their inborn ability to do magic. As imaginative as the subjects taught sound however, the teachers are no forerunners in the field of modern teaching. It is not only the ghost, Professor Binns, who sticks strictly to the facts and who requests of his students pure memorization of facts.
Memorization is the basic method of teaching at Hogwarts and it is what is asked for in the exams as well. None of the teacher ever asks the students to research the origins of the magic ability or the foundation of spells and hexes. But this would be the basis for creativity, research and development
The closest we get to discover the basis of magic is when Professor Snape teaches the properties of herbs and fungi and how to mix them for a potion. Yet, as his stay lone efforts it is no wonder that most of the students fail completely when Slughorn introduces Galpalot’s Law.
When we then realize that the house system adds tremendous tension to the daily atmosphere at school, Hogwarts is far from a paradisiacal place. However, Hogwarts isn’t what it seems at the first view.
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was so very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other and Harry was sure the coats of armour could walk.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8: The Potion Master
The school alone tickles curiosity. It holds legendary chambers, hidden pathways to the outside and a Room of Requirement that is where for you in times of need equipped with everything you lack. And it is home to many very curious folk: speaking and meandering portraits, walking armours, ghosts, house elves, other students and teachers, who all have their own stories to discover.
If that isn’t enough the library is filled with thousands of books that contain the knowledge of millennia. If you want to discover and research, as a student of Hogwarts you have your space to move. Other as with the Dursleys, where questions and imagination were forbidden, explorative behaviour isn’t discouraged at Hogwarts. In the case of Harry with his invisibility cloak and the Marauders Map it is even actively encouraged.
Furthermore, the castle is thoroughly protected against invasion by ancient magic and every spell available. A constant and direct threat from the outside that could realize every second would be too much as opposites clash constantly in the inside due to the house system. Walled up, hidden and protected as it is, Hogwarts establishes a temenos – a place where individuation can take place.
What Jung called individuation, the miracle of self-realisation, is called in alchemy ‘the squaring of the circle’ – the mysterious is ‘squared’ with physical reality.
Physical reality? Since Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle we know that subatomic particles can’t be accurately defined in time and space. They have, as physicists call it, only a tendency to exist. Hence, as everything existing is build up of subatomic particles, our physical reality and ultimately we humans as well have only a tendency to exist. The physical reality is therefore understood as a constant evolving process and each little thing is a whole world itself. And so the whole universe is in each of us.
The experience of the Self brings a feeling of standing on solid ground inside oneself, on a patch of inner eternity which even physical death cannot touch.
Mary-Louise von Franz, C.G. Jung, his Myth in our Time
Hogwarts is the solid ground that gives the students a home in the outside world as well as in their mind. Only if the students lower their protection and that of the school, Voldemort and the ideas he stand for have a chance to cling to the minds. Otherwise, Hogwarts and his inhabitants are a patch of outer and inner eternity, a temenos, a gan, a paradeisos, the same place Dante saw on Good Friday 1300. Was Dante perhaps truly magical?
Aviva Victoria Brueckner 