Harry Potter and the Jungian Archetype

Introducing a Harry Potter project.

Edit: As anyone who follows my work might have guessed, this is an abandoned project. I read and analyzed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and then quit halfway through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I simply lost my enthusiasm for it. I may return to this project someday, but I don’t plan on picking up these books again any time soon.

When I was a kid, everyone was talking about Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling claimed a generation. The series’ reign lasted from the publication of the first book in 1997 to the release of the final movie in 2011. If you assume that the series really took off after the release of the first movie in 2001, then that still leaves ten full years of Harry Potter madness. I have no idea when Harry Potter first showed signs of its future omnipresence. I was just turning nine years old when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in 2007. I don’t remember much from this portion of my childhood, but I remember devouring that book over the course of a weekend in Pennsylvania, barely ever putting it down, and feeling absolutely devastated when it was over. I had been a long-time fan by that point. I’m not sure when my first exposure to the Harry Potter movies was, but I am sure that it occurred before I started forming lasting memories. My mom was an elementary school teacher, and she absolutely loved the series. I vaguely remember seeing Prisoner of Azkaban in theaters (I was five, almost six, and absolutely horrified by the Dementors). I read the books as soon as I was old enough to comprehend them, and read the series a total of three times, the last time in high school. Harry Potter was a defining feature of my childhood.

It’s crazy, how easy we forget. After a recent binge-watch of the movies, I realized how little I remembered. I used to be able to watch the movies and fill in the parts that were missing but that were in the books, but re-watching them as an adult, with the book series only a vague memory, there were times when I was actually confused. To the films’ credit, it’s hard to adapt a six hundred page novel into a two and a half hour movie, especially when you’re used to working with source material that is a third of the size. That being said, the books are basically required reading if you’d like to fully understand what’s going on in Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, as the movies are a bit sparse on their own. With all of my book-knowledge lost, I knew that I only had one option. I had to reread the series.

There were a couple of reasons why I decided to embark on yet another journey through these books. For one, Harry Potter is easily my favorite story of all time. Watching the movies, I was completely awestruck (and even a little jealous) that J.K. Rowling was able to come up with all of this stuff. Although I’m too old for the school now, it appears my yearning to attend Hogwarts will never die. Much of my ambition to reread the books came from a genuine desire to enjoy the story again. I also am very curious to see how the series will look from adult eyes. There were several things that I had never noticed before in the films, most notably the Ministry of Magic’s striking resemblance to the Nazi party in the latter half of the series. I’m sure the more “adult” books will be an absolute gold mine.

Recently, I’ve also been enjoying the “Biblical Series” of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. In the series, Dr. Peterson talks extensively about Jungian archetypes, and the ways that certain narratives and themes seem to present themselves over and over again throughout the history of human mythology. I have to admit that I am only intelligent enough to comprehend maybe forty-five percent of what he says, but what I have gathered so far is that there are certain narratives which are pervasive and almost universally appealing to us because they are deeply and fundamentally true; they come from the realm of the “collective unconscious,”¹ and serve as an internal roadmap of sorts for the way that we should be. Considering how every organized society throughout history has made up its own mythology, and how despite emerging completely separately from one another these myths seem to all contain similar themes, and considering that these themes tend to generally reflect the currently agreed-upon “rules” of human morality even in today’s secular society,² I think that this theory holds some weight.

In one of the early episodes of his Biblical Series, Jordan Peterson mentioned Harry Potter. I think he was talking about the “hero” archetype, but he also may have been talking about the common mythological theme of good versus evil. I am not going to go into too much detail about the archetypal significance of Harry Potter today, but I am planning a longform essay upon my completion of the series in which I analyze the series from a Jungian (and I guess Petersonian) perspective. For now, I will just say this: the reason why the Harry Potter series became the worldwide phenomenon that it did was because it was an archetypal story.³ It appealed to so many people because it tapped into a part of them that spoke to them about themselves, and that may have needed accessing. In the words of George Orwell:

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”⁴

I just recently finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, if you’re not a pea-brained American),⁵ and am extremely impressed with the detail that J.K. Rowling put into the book. Expect to see some notes on it soon. I plan on doing this after I finish every book in the series, for the purpose of gathering my thoughts for my final long-form analyses (of which there will probably be two or three).

If you are not a Harry Potter fan, don’t panic. I have another project up my sleeve which will unfold simultaneously, and both of these will be interspersed with lots of other topics. However, I urge you to give the Harry Potter project a chance anyway. As mentioned before, Harry Potter is an archetypal story, and I believe there is something of value in it for everybody.

1. The “collective unconscious”: a portion of our psyche that we cannot consciously access, but which we all share. If this at first strikes you as spiritual nonsense, think of the existence of “human nature,” or the fact that humans are biologically predisposed to be afraid of animals such as snakes. It has been clinically proven that it is much easier to condition a human to be afraid of a snake than a manmade object with no biological significance (a fact that I also am borrowing from Jordan Peterson’s podcast, although I’m not sure which episode). This is likely explained by evolution, i.e. many of our ancestors were killed by snakes, so we are now born with an instinct to avoid snakes. No matter your hypothesis for why this is the case, the fact remains that we as humans are all predisposed to certain fears. If we can inherit fears from our ancestors, is it that much of a stretch to assume that we may also be able to inherit values?

Furthermore, if you are someone who believes that you “make your own morality,” and that your values do not come any outside authority or church, then this theory is actually for you. Jung describe is exactly this: people recognize the moral codes which exist inside their own unconscious and communicate them consciously through myths. Although this morality is by definition collective, I would argue that it is impossible for anyone to form an “individual” morality. We all communicate, and if you do not believe that morality comes to us by nature, then it follows that it must come from nurture, i.e. our interactions with others. Is “constructing one’s own moral compass” not just picking and choosing from our social experiences to decide which values to retain and which to reject?

2. Allow me to argue for why you can be a staunch atheist, completely against the idea of any higher power, and still find value in this theory of archetypes.

3. This is another idea borrowed from Dr. Peterson. One of the most interesting aspects of his work is that he views this phenomenon—making archetypes conscious through narrative—as an ongoing process that is still happening to this day. While the content of our stories is different from that of the Biblical stories or the mythology of the ancient Greeks, their form and function is still largely the same.

4. From George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

5. “Philosopher’s Stone” was changed to “Sorcerer’s Stone” in America, ostensibly because publishers were concerned that American children would not know what a philosopher was. I think that “Philosopher’s Stone” is a better name for a number of reasons, but will admit that “Sorcerer’s Stone” has a nicer ring to it.