Alchemy revisited: OOP prediction confirmed

[Richard]

No: HPFGUIDX 80126

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Ivan Vablatsky 
<ibotsjfvxfst at y...> wrote:
<snip>
> Please tell me whether I'm a loony Lucy, a raving idiot or
> whether this is all Double Dutch. Is this theory above your
> head or beneath contempt? 
<snip> 

Says me (Richard) ...

OK, I'll be honest and say that your theory is interesting, but dies 
horribly at the edge of Occam's Razor.  The tale is about love and 
maturation, which is not totally dissimilar from your alchemical 
journey of liberation.

A *MATURE* person is "liberated" from many things over the course of 
his or her life, and many of these "liberations" occur during those 
important adolescent years, though it continues throughout the life 
of a personality that remains "genital" in the clinical psychological 
sense through that life.  In a tale set in an ethos of magic and 
alchemy, alchemical symbolism is not at all out of place.  However, I 
think reading a far deeper (and frankly arcane) symbology into such 
development is a radical over-reach.  Why?  There are many reasons, 
but the simplest is that Harry's Wizarding World is essentially 
devoid of the real historical, mythical and mystical trappings of our 
World's wizardry, witchcraft, magic and alchemy.

We are never told any of the symbolism of alchemical objects and 
ingredients.  Spells are devoid of spiritual invocation.  Magical 
power emanates from the self and from pure object, and not from 
control of any other being, spirit or such.  Rather, we are faced 
with the Wizarding-World-as-Proxy, within which JKR can set many 
synthetic ills as proxies for real world ones, teaching life-lessons 
about tolerance, patience, love and understanding WITHOUT necessarily 
tripping too many real world ideological and religious hair-triggers.

So, nice bit of hypothetical reasoning ... much like Hegel's analysis 
of the ways of this World ... and suffering from the same kind of 
criticism Kierkegaard leveled at Hegel's work (paraphrasing): If 
Hegel had just presented it as a theoretical idea, he would be ranked 
as one of the great thinkers of all time, but as Hegel claimed Truth 
for his ideas he comes out as more than a little crazy.