Lifespans?... Phoenix in particular / Phoenix Symbolism

[Allie]

No: HPFGUIDX 171110

Hi everyone, I'm Allie and I'm a student from New York, USA.  This is
my first message to this group, so please be gentle!

I see that this topic has been inactive for a while (since before the
HBP release, in fact), but I think some of the issues brought up here
remain quite relevant to the outcome of DH and I'd like to try to
resurrect the discussion.  I've been interested in the concrete and
symbolic roles of the phoenix for several years, and I hope no-one
minds my briefly hijacking this thread to summarize my thoughts on the
function of the phoenix to date, my interpretation of the implications
for Book Seven, and some questions that I'm interested in discussing
more over the next few weeks.

I'd like to start out by listing the powers of the phoenix that
Dumbledore described to Harry back in CoS:

1. "[They] burst into flame when it is time for them to die and are
reborn from the ashes."
2. "[They] can carry immensely heavy loads."
3. "[Their] tears have healing powers."
4. "[They] make highly faithful pets."

Bearing these qualities in mind, I have traced what I consider the
most significant references to the phoenix throughout the series. 
I've done my best to substantiate my ideas with strong canon support,
but of course deciding which scenes to highlight was a subjective
process, so I'd like to hear whether there are any other excerpts that
you feel deserve emphasis.

1. The phoenix is first mentioned in CoS.  Harry enters Dumbledore's
office because he has been witnessed near the scene of Justin
Finch-Fletchley's petrification.  He is very nervous, but the sight of
the phoenix nonetheless mesmerizes him ("Harry stared at it and the
bird looked balefully back.
  Harry had forgotten what he was there
for," CoS, pp. 206-7).  Harry is stunned when Fawkes bursts into
flame, initially thinking him to be an ordinary bird ("Harry yelled in
shock and backed away from the desk.  He looked feverishly around in
case there was a glass of water somewhere," CoS, pp. 207).  Dumbledore
enters and explains all the properties of the phoenix to Harry.

2. At the end of CoS, Fawkes carries the Sorting Hat into the Chamber
of Secrets, where Harry is having his confrontation with Tom Riddle. 
In this scene, Fawkes demonstrates all of his powers and then some to
save Harry.  He comes when Harry shows loyalty to Dumbledore ("'He's
not as gone as you might think!' Harry retorted," CoS, pp. 315),
blinds the Basilisk ("Harry looked straight into its face and saw that
its eyes, both its great, bulbous yellow eyes, had been punctured by
the phoenix," CoS, pp. 319), sheds tears over Harry's wound to save
his life ("A pearly patch of tears was shining all around the wound –
except that there was no wound," CoS, pp. 321), and carries Harry,
Ron, Ginny, and Lockhart out of the Chamber of Secrets ("'He looks
like he wants you to grab hold 
' said Ron," CoS, pp. 325).

In CoS, the reader is introduced to Fawkes and his powers in the most
basic sense; Fawkes never bursts into flame in the heat of the action,
for example.  However, he proves to be a symbol of hope for Harry
("[The music] was eerie, spine-tingling, unearthly; it lifted the hair
on Harry's scalp and made his heart feel as though it was swelling to
twice its normal size," CoS, pp. 315), as well as a reminder of
Dumbledore ("'This is what Dumbledore sends his defender!  A
songbird,'" CoS, pp. 316).  When Harry hears the phoenix song, he
immediately feels more secure and capable of taking on Riddle
("'Fawkes?' Harry breathed, and he felt the bird's golden claws
squeeze his shoulder gently," CoS, pp. 315).

The phoenix is mysteriously absent from PoA, but then again, most of
the action is centered on the Marauders and Voldemort is basically
absent as well.

3. In GoF, Fawkes never physically enters the graveyard where Harry is
chained to Tom Riddle's headstone.  During the priori incantato scene,
however, Harry finds himself "speaking" with music that reminds him of
phoenix song ("I know, Harry told the music, I know I mustn't," GoF,
American paperback, pp. 664), and says that the music gives him a
"fortified" and hopeful feeling, which leaves him better able to cope
with Voldemort and the Death Eaters ("It was a sound Harry recognized,
though he had heard it only once before in his life: phoenix song,"
GoF, pp. 664).

4. Fawkes heals Harry's injured leg back in Dumbledore's office after
the graveyard scene at the end of GoF ("
 thick, pearly tears were
falling from its eyes onto the wound left by the spider.  The pain
vanished.  The skin mended.  His leg was repaired," GoF, pp. 698).

By this point, Harry has mentally established the association between
"phoenix song" and "hope" and "Dumbledore" ("It was the sound of hope
to Harry.
 It was the sound he connected with Dumbledore, and it was
almost as though a friend were speaking in his ear," GoF, pp. 664). 
In CoS, he was simply glad to see another being in the Chamber besides
himself, Riddle, the Basilisk, and unconscious Ginny Weasley.  By GoF,
he is consciously correlating phoenix song with hope even though a
phoenix is not physically present in the action.  Contrary to CoS, in
which J. K. Rowling prolongs Harry's "dying moments" and Fawkes acts
as a savior by healing Harry's Basilisk wound, in GoF, the fact that
Fawkes heals Harry's leg is almost incidental to the phoenix symbolism
that I am attempting to trace; Harry already knew of this property of
the phoenix before Book Four began.

5. The most obvious phoenix symbolism comes in Book Five.  To start,
the name of the anti-Voldemort group: the Order of the Phoenix.

6. At the end of OotP when Dumbledore and Voldemort duel at the
Ministry of Magic, Fawkes flies in front of Dumbledore and swallows an
Avada Kedavra curse, thus saving his master ("Fawkes swooped down in
front of Dumbledore, opened his beak wide, and swallowed the jet of
green light whole," OotP, American hardcover, pp. 815).  Fawkes bursts
into flame and is reborn on the floor ("He burst into flame and fell
to the floor, small, wrinkled, and flightless," OotP, pp. 815).

John K said:

"Incidentally, perhaps this has been discussed, but why was the Order
of the Phoenix so named?  Is Fawkes one of their methods of
communication, or might this be of significance for future books?"

Allie replies:

At this point, we begin to consider the fourth and final property of
the phoenix that Dumbledore explains in CoS.  In addition to carrying
heavy loads, having healing powers, and being faithful, the phoenix is
able to swallow Killing Curses, die, and then reincarnate; in other
words, the phoenix dies for new life to be born.  This is exactly what
the Order of the Phoenix does as well.  As Sirius told Harry, Ron,
Fred, George, and Ginny after Arthur Weasley was attacked by Nagini,
"there are things worth dying for" (OotP, pp. 477).  The members of
the Order of the Phoenix have gone into service aware of the
possibility of death, but they have done so to preserve lives that
otherwise could have been lost to Voldemort.  Fawkes also gave one of
his incarnations to save Dumbledore's life.  Therefore, we now see
that in addition to functioning as a symbol of hope, the phoenix is
the ultimate symbol of self-sacrifice.

In a quick break from discussion of individual scenes, I would like to
summarize the implications of the role of the phoenix in the first
five books.  If all of this logic proves to be correct, Dumbledore is
bound to die.  In an interview at the August 2004 Edinburgh Book
Festival, J. K. Rowling stated that Dumbledore's patronus is a phoenix
"for reasons that are quite obvious."  A patronus represents a
person's inner personality traits in the form of an animal. 
Therefore, if a phoenix represents hope and self-sacrifice for new
life, we can make an analogy in which Dumbledore is the phoenix and
Harry is the new life (as we know from the end of OotP how important
Harry is to Dumbledore – "'I cared about you too much,' said
Dumbledore [
] 'I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love
to act,' OotP, pp. 838).  This means that as a symbolic phoenix,
Dumbledore will provide hope for Harry, which he already has (among
other examples, Harry felt a new sense of hope when he saw Dumbledore
arrive at the Department of Mysteries).  It also seems to imply that
Dumbledore will sacrifice his life to save Harry's.  Similarly, other
members of the Order of the Phoenix will die (this is obvious for
reasons that extend beyond phoenix symbolism).  Sirius has already
died by this point, and he is not going to be the last to go.  We move
on to phoenix allusions in HBP 


7. Fawkes himself – exhibiting new properties and powers, at least –
is absent from HBP until the final chapters of the novel, when he then
takes on arguably his most important symbolic role in the series thus
far.  After Snape kills Dumbledore, Fawkes sings his lament and
disappears from Hogwarts ("Fawkes had stopped singing.  And he knew,
without knowing how he knew it, that the phoenix had gone," HBP,
American hardcover, pp. 632).  Whether Fawkes will return in DH
remains unclear, although J. K. Rowling has told us that he was
Dumbledore's pet – not property of Hogwarts – which suggests to me
that Harry will be able to call him at some point in the future.

8. There is one other mention of the phoenix in Book Six which I,
along with the rest of the Harry Potter fandom, consider particularly
significant:

"Then several people screamed.  Bright, white flames had erupted
around Dumbledore's body and the table upon which it lay: Higher and
higher they rose, obscuring the body.  White smoke spiraled into the
air and made strange shapes: Harry thought, for one heart-stopping
moment, that he saw a phoenix fly joyfully into the blue, but next
second the fire had vanished.  In its place was a white marble tomb,
encasing Dumbledore's body and the table on which he had rested."

I will address the significance of the "Phoenix Lament" and Fawkes's
seeming immortality in the next paragraph, but it is the second
passage from HBP that it is in my mind particularly important.  I have
ready a variety of theories concerning the phoenix that flew out of
Dumbledore's grave – Dumbledore is a phoenix Animagus and he didn't
actually die, since Dumbledore sacrificed himself, a new phoenix was
born from his grave, etc. – but personally, I choose to interpret this
scene as a confirmation of the "Dumbledore :: phoenix" analogy.  His
patronus is a phoenix, the smoke animal that flies out of his tomb is
a phoenix; Dumbledore is The Phoenix of the Harry Potter series.  He
has made the ultimate sacrifice to protect Harry's life: as he said
himself, "your blood is worth more than mine" (HBP, pp. 560).

Chys said:

"Also, can a phoenix ever die?  I just got that newt scamander book
and it said they have (i'm not quoting) an extensive lifespan so do
they ever die, or do they just keep existing?"

Allie replies:

So now, like Chys, I wonder 
 is there any way that a phoenix can be
killed?  In my view, if a phoenix could be killed, Voldemort would
prevail.  This is because the phoenix's first incarnation (Dumbledore
and the generation of the Order of the Phoenix) would die and then the
second incarnation (Harry and the generation of Dumbledore's Army)
would die and never be reborn in the next generation (which would be
their offspring, who would presumably pursue the struggle against
Voldemort).  If all those people die, and with them, the anti-Dark
Side ideals, Voldemort will inevitably live.

When you look at things this way, the matter of whether a phoenix can
DIE die – i.e., go away and never come back in a new incarnation or
otherwise – is one that cannot possibly be ignored.  The answer may
well be the solution to the question we're all wondering about: will
Voldemort or Harry be the one to go at the end of Book Seven?  Here I
will turn to mythology beyond J. K. Rowling's invention.

According to Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese folklore, the phoenix
holds most of the properties that J. K. Rowling has already introduced
in Books 2 through 6 – fidelity, virtue, grace, power, and seeming
immortality.  It is the characteristics of the phoenix in Arabian
mythology, however, that interest me the most; the Arabian phoenix is
characterized by its melodious cry and its very long lifespan (500 to
12,994 years), and the phoenix also takes three days before rising
from its ashes to be fully reborn.  All of these qualities, in my
opinion, make enormous sense in the context of HBP, and since we
already know that J. K. Rowling frequently makes allusions to
astrology (get the whole Sirius, Andromeda, Regulus deal) and
mythology (see Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback), I find it perfectly
legitimate to draw conclusions about her books based on the Arabian
definition, so to speak, of the phoenix.

The "melodious song" is already accounted for in the Harry Potter
books – the "Phoenix Lament" at the end of HBP is described as "a
stricken lament of terrible beauty" (HBP, pp. 615) – and although
Fawkes is reborn within minutes of his "death" in CoS, if we are
looking at the phoenix from a purely symbolic perspective, I believe
there is a valid argument that the "three days before rising from its
ashes" represents Harry's emotional trauma in the immediate aftermath
of Dumbledore's death in Book Six.  At the end of HBP, he does not
seem too eager to go hunting for Horcruxes ("He felt no curiosity at
all about R.A.B.: He doubted that he would ever feel curious again,"
HBP, pp. 631); this indicates that although the first incarnation of
the phoenix (Dumbledore) has died, the second incarnation (Harry) has
yet to be fully "born," i.e., he is not yet ready to take up the war
against Voldemort entirely on his own.  The lifespan of "500 to 12,994
years" gave me some pause at first, although I have subsequently
researched Arabian mythology and found that this is in reference to
the lifespan of each incarnation, not the entire phoenix.  This makes
sense; we know that the lifespan of a wizard is long, too.  We have
yet to hear of one who has died of natural causes.

Now I'm looking at the immortality (or mortality, as the case may be)
of the phoenix as a major symbolic question in the series.  There are
others, too – how the first incarnation of the phoenix is born, for
instance – but it is clear to me that if the phoenix can never be
killed, the Dark Side will be vanquished and Harry will live; it means
that Dumbledore and Harry's ideals will never be crushed.  If the
phoenix is mortal, however 
 I fear things are looking rather grim for
the Order.  Mythology in conjunction with thematic evidence (a topic
for a different discussion, perhaps), however, leads me to believe
that Harry will survive and Voldemort will be killed.  Perhaps this
entire message was circuitous, in that I've arrived at the same
question of the phoenix's mortality that other readers started out
with two years ago, but I hope I have presented the question in an
even more immediately significant context, and I am interested in
hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,

Allie