Character Discussion: explanation

[Hans Andréa]

No: HPFGUIDX 120986

Dear Friends, one and all,

Please permit me to explain my motivation in sending to this group the
series of posts which examine the characters and symbols in Harry Potter
from an Alchemical point of view. May I ask you all to believe me when I say
that I will be as truthful as a flawed human being can possibly be?

Please also regard all of this as my personal view and belief. It's rather
boring to begin every sentence with, "In my humble opinion".

Just imagine you're a doctor who has studied cancer all his/her life. You
are deeply affected by the fear, grief, pain and bereavement caused by this
horrible disease. Right from childhood you have been drawn to this subject;
you have read every book on it, you have read every website, and you have
spent your whole life in actively fighting the disease in the operating
theatre and in your profession. Obviously you are totally familiar with all
the symptoms and especially the causes. These interest you most, because
that's where the true solution is to be found. You know that the body is
extremely complicated and you understand all those technical words that the
general public has never heard of. You know what triggers this, which in
turn causes the immune system to produce that, making the endocrine system
do whatever. You understand the genes and chromosomes of the human body; in
short, you know the causes and effects of cancer and the human body from A
to Z. And you know what can cure it. You know that the only way to cure
cancer is for people to change their lifestyle quite radically.

Then one day you read a novel which, on the surface, is a book for children.
You read it reluctantly, because you feel you're a bit beyond that sort of
stuff. But after only a few pages, the hairs in your neck begin to prick. It
all seems so strangely familiar somehow. You read on and vague suspicions
begin to form in your mind. This book in some strange way seems to reflect
your own knowledge of the cure for cancer. Just a coincidence, you shrug.
But then you read the other three books. Once again each book seems to tell,
in a symbolic way, how humanity can cure cancer! Astounding, and you can't
believe it yourself. But as you read and study the books, the parallels are
too many and too striking to be just coincidence. 

You start looking for websites to see if anyone else has made similar
discoveries. You find "HP for Grownups" and send your discoveries there to
see how people react. The reactions are mainly of the "huh?" variety, but
you get the occasional private email telling you to keep going. So in April
2003 you post your predictions for book 5. Obviously if you know the whole
story of the cure for cancer you can tell in advance what step 5 is going to
be (see post 55793). Your predictions turn out to be correct on June
21("Coincidence!" I hear you shout). Ever since, you have been reading this
kids' book and discovering more and more symbols which tell you with
unshakable certainty that the author of this book knows everything there is
to know about cancer, and also that she knows exactly how to cure it. Only
she isn't stating it in medical terms but by using symbols and
personification.

This is what I mean:
Say you know exactly what causes cancer, what happens in the body when
cancer cells form, and what happens next. You know why some people get
cancer and some don't. You know why some people are cured and some aren't.
You are deeply affected by compassion for humanity, and you want to do
something for it. You know that the true cause lies in humanity's lifestyle.
If you tell the world in technical terms what happens in the body, and what
people should do to prevent cancer, only a very few will understand you, and
the people who should know, i.e. the general public, will never get to hear
about it. So what do you do? You turn your knowledge of the battle to fight
the causes of cancer into an exciting novel. You do this by personifying
every aspect of cancer, i.e. by giving human names and human characters to
all the organs, chemicals, cells, hormones, medicines etc. involved in
cancer. The really aggressive body chemicals you give startling, evil
sounding names and characters, while the chemicals that fight cancer you
give noble names and characters. The body you turn into a castle, and the
extremely competent doctor becomes a wise old man. The theme of health
versus illness you turn into the theme of good versus evil, and you turn the
atmosphere of the knowledge of medicine into magic. That's not so far
fetched, because people used to think medicine was magic (think of the
"Medicine Man").

Now to make this an exciting novel with characters with which readers, and
especially children, can identify, you make them like real, human beings,
with strong emotions and logical human motivations. You make the leading
characters young kids between the ages of 11 and 18. Obviously children have
parents, so you bring them into it, but the hero is an orphan. The world
you're inventing has to have its infrastructure, and everything has to be
done to make the world logical, complete and self-supporting within your
parameters. Hence there are plot devices that are just there to move the
story along, or are needed to make motivations human. Hormones act in a
certain way because of the laws of biochemistry, but when you personify them
as nasty or good characters, you have to make their motivation acceptable as
apparent human beings. Hence you invent motivations in place of chemical
reactions. 

You have a really good imagination, and so can turn the world of biology
into a really vivid and beautiful world with lots of mythical creatures and
magical events that excite the imagination of young and old. You tell your
story from the point of view of the young hero, who personifies the new
healthy lifestyle people need to change to to defeat cancer permanently. You
give him very strong feelings, and have a lot of bad things happen to him so
people will feel real empathy with him. However, when you strip the whole
story down to its essentials it is and remains the story of the cause of
cancer and the permanent cure.

I'm sure you will all have worked out that I'm not a doctor and that I don't
know any more about cancer than any of you. However if you can regard cancer
as an analogy for the cancer in our human world today, you'll understand
what I'm saying. I'm talking about the cancer of drug abuse, of human
slavery, of child abuse, of terrorism, of war, and of a dozen other things
you could all add to this list. For the last 45 years I have sought
intensively for the causes and cure of evil in the world. And I have found
the Teachings of Alchemical Liberation.

Can we stop there and just make one thing crystal clear? I'm not asking you
to accept these teachings as true. I'm only asking you to accept that they
EXIST. That can be proven. Can you accept as a working hypothesis that the
teachings actually exist, without considering whether they're true or
whether they'll produce the results they claim?

If so, I can tell you that these teachings claim to be able to explain the
cause of evil and the permanent cure to it. And I have studied these
teachings for 45 years. These teachings are known by very few people indeed;
in fact only a few thousand spread over the whole world. And yet!! To my
great amazement and astonishment these teachings known by only a handful of
people are very clearly outlined in the most popular book of all times. I
can understand you all being extremely skeptical about this. I even have to
pinch myself sometimes to make sure I'm awake. I've had doubts and have
re-examined all my discoveries. Yet each time I come to the same conclusion:
the foundation of Harry Potter is the Teachings of Alchemical Liberation.
Never mind whether the teachings are true; the point is JK Rowling knows
them much better than I do and she IS basing her book on them. That is my
motivation for sending my discoveries to this group. I have to tell the
world!

I just want to remind you that I have written an essay, "Harry Potter:
Christian Rosycross in Jeans", and this is the the group's files under
"essays".

I want to assure you all, and I promise with all the honesty I have, that
I'm not trying to convert anyone to Liberating Alchemy. For a start
conversion or even persuasion is against the laws of alchemy, but in any
case that's not the purpose of this forum. Its purpose is to share our
discoveries of what we see in Harry Potter, and that's exactly what I'm
doing. I believe that this group is the right place to tell the world about
the hair-raising discovery of the real foundation of Harry Potter. It's not
in the least important to me what people do with my discoveries. All I'm
doing is telling you about the parallels between Harry Potter and Liberating
alchemy, just as other people are comparing it to Lord of the Rings, the
Bible, or whatever. I'm not result-oriented. People can do with my discovery
whatever they wish.

This email is prompted by comments Geoff Bannister has made, and by messages
about the word "innate".

Geoff stated that Harry is not like Jesus because Harry is imperfect. My
answer to that is that JK Rowling has purposely made Harry a flawed human
being ON THE SURFACE so that we can identify with him. If Jo made him a boy
who can do no wrong we would get sick of him very quickly. What makes him so
lovable is his ability to make mistakes, to jump to the wrong conclusions,
to be hurt by people like Malfoy, and yet to be so noble, loyal and
compassionate when it comes to the crunch. 

To be able to understand what Jo is doing you have to develop a certain way
of thinking. You have to be able to distinguish between what is part of the
foundation of the story and what is just an added decoration to make the
character and the story believable and acceptable. In my posts on Harry I'm
pointing out the things that are essential, like: 
getting the Stone out of the mirror, 
defeating the basilisk, 
freeing Dobby, 
saving Buckbeak and Sirius, 
driving off the dementors, 
letting Cedric grasp the Trophy together with Harry, 
defeating Voldemort in the battle of wills, 
becoming leader of Dubledore's Army, 
driving Voldemort out of his mind.

To say that Jo is successful is an understatement. As Steve has said in his
exquisite post about devastation in the world if Harry dies, Harry is more
beloved than the President (and many politicians in other countries). This
would never have happened if Jo had given Harry the character of a
goody-goody. However as you will see in Book 7, Harry will do the same
things as Jesus, i.e. overcome death.

To the people discussing the topic of whether the main characters of Harry
Potter are INNATELY good, and yet make choices: this sort of discussion is
very interesting, and basically gets back to the old "Nature versus nurture"
debate. It's very useful for helping people understand morality and freedom
of choice, but it will never help to understand Harry Potter. The characters
in Harry Potter are personifications of forces, objects or archetypes on the
Path of Alchemical Liberation, and their motivation is invented by Jo to
justify their actions on a human level. However the way they act in reality
is according to spiritual laws, just as chemicals in the body act according
to the natural laws of chemistry.

This is why I find it difficult to engage in debates such as Del and
Eggplant carry on. I believe, with great respect, that if we take the story
too literally we will never understand the foundation of the story. It's
great to examine things like the human character and its motivations
generally, but that's not what Harry Potter is REALLY about.

I hope I haven't offended anyone. That's the last thing I want to do. Unless
I'm stopped by the moderators or Voldemort I'll post the rest of my series.
I would like to issue a warning that some parts of the Teachings of
Liberating Alchemy put part of the blame of humanity's dire straits on the
traditional religions. That shouldn't be surprising as we've had 2000 years
of traditional Christianity and yet the above problems are prevalent in the
most overtly Christian countries. To go back to our cancer analogy: Despite
the most intense struggle of allopathic medicine to defeat cancer it still
kills more people than ever. It shouldn't surprise anyone that maybe the
solution lies in changing our lifestyle.

If anyone is easily offended by this line of thought I would ask them
politely but firmly to delete all messages by Hans Andra before reading
them.

I welcome reactions to this message. I hope it's clarified many things.

=====
Hans Rieuwers 
see you at Harry Potter for Seekers 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/harrypotterforseekers/
 



	
	
		
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