Structure and function in Harry Potter

¶ … Ritual Magic of Rites of Passage in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Magic, or at least the human belief in it, is at least as old as human civilization. It is the most basic form of explanation of and attempts at interaction with the natural -- and the supernatural world, and yet magic rituals, beliefs, and rules can be just as complex and integral to a culture or society as any more extensively developed religion. In recent times, magic has been taken out of the realm of the fundamental cultural phenomenon, and through fiction has provided another way of understanding our own culture. The stories in the Harry Potter series, for instance, provide a way of looking at coming of age from a magical perspective. Rites of passage have always had a strong presence in worlds of magic, and the world of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is no exception.

Harry Potter is marked -- physically, emotionally, and fatefully -- from the time he is one-year-old, in what can only be seen as an obscure and uncommon -- entirely singular, in fact -- Rite of Passage. Voldemort's murder of his mother, who died protecting Harry, left a mark and some sort of connection between Harry and his nemesis, as well as setting up the infant with a special path in life. The magical rule in operation here is similar to the "sympathetic magic" noted by Frazer in early cultures (Geertz 8). Though Harry did not ingest anything or even consciously participate in the ritual, he was altered in an important way by a transfer of power and spirit that took place on the night his parent's died and Voldemort's curse backfired. It was this unwitting rite of passage that created the Harry Potter readers know, and the ushered in a very specific life for the boy.

The rites of passage in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone appear throughout the novel, but another fairly large one occurs at the very end of the book, as Harry comes to grips with the events that formed his first rite of passage detailed above. Harry must overcome the loss of his parents in order to grow into the next stage of his life, but this comes with an acceptance of their memory rather than a denial of his loss. The Mirror of Erised and the photo album Harry receives makes this presence far more real in the magical world than in the world outside the fiction; the "ancestor soul" that supplements the Western concept of the single soul in many magic-practicing cultures is rendered explicitly corporeal here (Harris 18). Harry's rite of passage in this sense allows his soul to become complete, or allows all of its components to come together in a more unified manner.

Neither of the above rites of passages, though both are important and definitely bound by rules of magic, are especially ritualistic in a participatory sense. In this regard, the many layers of security that Harry and his friends must get through in order to arrive at the Sorcerer's Stone is the most clear example in the book. Each trial on the way to the room that contains the Stone tests some of the skills and knowledge that Harry, Ron, and Hermione have begun to acquire on their journey through adolescence and to adulthood, making the journey past each obstacle a very literal interpretation of a rite of passage. Each of these obstacles ends up requiring some literal form of the world's magic, usually in the form of a spell, in order to be overcome, tying magic to the rites of passage in a manner that is at once quite explicit and direct, ye also highly symbolic in the context of the full narrative.

One of these rites of passage, the game of life-sized wizard's chess that Ron plays, in which he must sacrifice himself, is especially important in terms of the evolution of magical thinking, and specifically of ideas concerning witchcraft. In a discussion of "liminal fluids' -- those that were of the body but no longer are -- James Brain argues that "what makes these substances so deeply threatening is that they remind us of death" (285). Though the fluids of sacrifice that Brain is discussing are not actually present here (this book can be considered the PG version of witchcraft), the effect of Ron's apparent death are similar -- he becomes tainted, and Harry must leave this sacrifice behind in order to progress towards his goal. There is a symbolic shedding of fluid in the symbolic death that Ron suffers, and this becomes a necessary element for Harry's rite of passage into adulthood.