A Note to the Reader:
The idea for this piece first stirred in me as an undergrad in the Consciousness program at the University of Washington. Before entering the first course titled The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, I was a depressed and angry young man fed up with humans and ashamed of being one. It didn’t take long, however, for that all to change, for me to become a person who was falling madly in love with life and the world again - even with being human.
How did that happen? Well, I learned that the Nature of Reality was not at all what I was taught - a dreary, despair-laden wasteland devoid of soul or mythic meaning or purpose. Actually on the contrary, it was as wondrous, beautiful, and awe-invoking as I had suspected (and we all likely suspect) at birth, rife with impossibilities, maddening paradox, and mystery nestled within mystery nestled within mysteries. The world was far more intelligent, curious, and alive than I could have possibly fathomed. What else to call such a thing? The world was magic.
Know that this essay is not necessarily linear. It may take a couple of read-throughs to really “get it.” Or, perhaps, to let it get you.
The Myth That Lived
Here’s a question you probably haven’t been asked today: Is it possible, for a muggle like you or me, to re-magify and re-mythify our clearly broken, numbed out, addicted, atomized, contentious and downtrodden world?
I know, I know. “Magify and mythify our broken world? What in the name of Merlin’s saggy left sock are you talking about, Tytoalba?” Before I try to explain what I mean, I’ll probably need to back up a spell. (I couldn’t help it.)
For the past 10 years, a theory has been brewing in my subconscious as a way to explain the immense popularity of the story known as Harry Potter. Have you heard of it? (Just kidding.) Harry Potter, if you weren’t aware, is not just popular - it is the most famous story of our time. In fact, amidst the weird and wicked wonder that often characterizes our modern age, no story has captivated the imaginative fascination of people more fiercely than the Wizarding World. It has been twenty years since its inception into our culture in 1997 with The Sorcerer’s Stone, and the story’s flames of mythic relevancy appear to have only burned brighter. Their appeal has not been lost on the young today, who still seek the stories out in record numbers (just as my generation had) for some kind of magical aid in the malady that is coming of age in bewildering times. And yet, the story continues to invoke some kind of unnamed longing in those who grew up alongside the characters in the series’ release, right along with our parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and anyone else of any age at all who was utterly transfixed by the Boy Who Lived who didn’t know he was a wizard.1
Harry Potter is the best-selling book series of all time, and that makes it one of the most known stories in the history of the literal, actual world. Think about that seriously for a moment: never before, in but a few generations, has a story become as known, celebrated, and contested in 200,000 years of human time than the tale of Harry Potter.
But it begs the question: Why? How do we honestly account for something like that? First, I believe we have to accept that such a thing is immensely significant. Then, we have to accept that it is no accident, that there is something real in the human condition - in the human spirit or soul - driving it to be true. We can presume that the greater the magnitude a phenomenon's cultural quake, the more compelling the reason ought to be that we are so drawn to it (or repulsed by it) as a people.
In regard to Harry Potter, we could write that reason off as being the result of our culture’s infantilized, fantasy-addicted, escapist populace and call it another night in Muggletown, USA. (Actually, many critics already have.) But how banal would that be? Besides, such thinking subscribes to a dark and down view of human nature that is so antithetical to this mosthuman business, which I believe, once again, mistakes human nature as the source of all the world’s woes. But what if the infantilization, the addiction, and the escaping is, instead, evidence of our human nature in crisis, each an alarming symptom of something below the surface pleading to be explored before it explodes?
Below that surface, and beneath its din, I have come to believe there is something timeless about who we really are - and what the world really is - stirring from a place deep within us, from that ancient realm of the psyche we sometimes refer to as the Unconscious Self. It is from there, from the older and lower, wetter and darker depths of our inner psychic worlds, worlds which appear to us in the strange but wondrous night-time visions we call dreams, that I believe the Harry Potter myth has bubbled up from to greet and wholly captivate us.
Here’s an even more radical statement: Harry Potter is not famous because it is new, but because, in fact, it is actually a very old story from a time long before the age we are currently in. In other words, Harry Potter was not simply born of our time, it was reborn into it.2 If that were true (and I believe there to be evidence that it is), then perhaps its mythic contents - its symbols, themes, and archetypes - represent something we have lost sight of, neglected, or forgotten as a people and world. Perhaps the story stands for realities we once knew but no longer know, and now we need to know them again. Myths, after all (and as it has been said by mythologist Michael Meade) are lies that tell the truth. And so, perhaps this myth was called to emerge once more, from the place where the memories and dreams of our species are kept safe - deep below the conscious watchtower of the highly guarded modern mind - in an attempt to interject its encoded knowledge about life, mystery, and the meaning of who we are into the extraordinarily confounding and socially desperate times we are currently in.
I believe Harry Potter, rather than being a chance expression of fantasy confined to meaning only within the modern age, is actually a timeless myth which has shapeshifted itself to meet the needs of a new age. Why? So that it would be recognizable to us when we met it again, and thus able to “get in” and stir up the deeper, more ancient contents of our mythic imaginations and memories, of longings for things we can’t quite place, which prod us to suspect that the world is supposed to be so much more than it currently is.
If your knee-jerk reaction is to doubt this as a possibility (that a myth can change, as if consciously), then consider this: our dreams, in their transition from ancient to modern times, have basically had to do the same thing, and that is likely because dreams come from the same place as the stories that speak so deeply to us.
What Our Ancestors Saw, We Dream
Studies on dreams show that children, seemingly across the cultural spectrum, are born dreaming in the symbolic form and language of nature. Adolescent dreams often take place in more natural settings, while natural beings such as trees or animals are more likely to make up the symbols their conscious minds must interpret the meaning of upon waking. In unpleasant dreams, wild, fierce, and predatory animals (including monsters like “Wolfman”) are commonly the source of conflict and danger for children, acting as emotional representations of fear, powerlessness, or even unintegrated instincts and desires of the Self.3
That is, until something fascinating happens. It’s as if, day by day, the Unconscious Self within us realizes these natural forces are no longer the settings or threats we humans of the modern age face and are anymore familiar with. And so bit by bit, year after year, those unconscious symbols of nature which have been psychically passed down to us over millions of years of evolutionary time are slowly replaced by what surrounds and would be recognizable to us today: speeding cars with no brakes and chaotic cities, of not studying for tests and failing them, of forgetting to get dressed for school, and for the first time, threats of other humans within our social groups: friends, rivals, or community members who exert aggression or dish out to us nightmarish forms of social humiliation. By about age 18, and with a predictable percentage loss every year preceding it, nearly all natural symbols latent within the original psychic contents of our minds have been adapted and replaced with a modern (and usually non-wild or domesticated) equivalent.4
In other words, we appear to be born predisposed to dream in the symbolic language of nature. Millions of years of evolution have deposited such patterns deep within the mind of our species. But that is not the world we are anymore in, and something in us has noticed. I hope to point out three extraordinary things happening here lest I leave them overlooked.
The first is, like the genetics of our physiological forms (or bodies), we have equivalently inherited a million plus year old intelligence that seems to make up our deeper, psychological forms (or minds). Carl Jung writes:5
“Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists.”
This deeper mind, or Deeper Self, exists as if the sum total life experiences of every ancestor, both human and more-than-human, are somehow stored, encoded, and distilled into the presence Jung referred to as the Collective Unconscious. Again, Jung writes:6
“But not only are the bounds of personal consciousness extended vaguely in sleep so as to cover all the past life of the sleeper. It is even possible to hold that the consciousness of the species, and even its predecessors [he means here our consciousness before being human], may be represented in the psychic organism and reappear in sleep. . . . All that our ancestors lived, felt, and suffered during countless ages of time, all that they condensed into images and faculties and definite movements has been passed on to us, not indeed, as such, but in the shape of latent capacities and possibilities inherent in our neural-cerebral system. And thus it may well be during sleep, when the immediate personal consciousness is inactive, that these latent characters of the psychic organism inherited from our remotest ancestors stir within us, and fill with strange images and unforeseen desires our inner world.”
In fact, it is to this Deeper Self that authentic myth (stories which inspire and stay with us) may be speaking directly to and even originally emerge from. Did J.K. Rowling know she was tapping into the rich mineral layers of an ancient, ancestral well-spring brimming with mythic meaning while she wrote Harry Potter? Perhaps. But most likely she did not.7 Artists and writers often speak of receiving visions like lightning strikes in the night, visions which appear suddenly at the most unexpected times when the conscious mind is relaxed, present, or has exhausted itself completely, as found in the adage “inspiration struck.” But where does inspiration strike from? What is working out the vision (or orchestrating the dream) while the conscious mind takes a break? For Rowling, legend has it that” inspiration struck” so suddenly in 1990 that all she had was a napkin to begin penning the story’s outline while waiting for a delayed train. I would argue that Harry Potter (or any story or myth that has obvious “staying power”) lingers in our mythic imaginations because it both comes from and touches on old patterns and truths, memories stored in myth which are designed to remind us who we actually are, who we are supposed to be, and what we could become. Myths, legends, and fairy tales seem to remind us that no matter what the traumatized, neurotic, modern rational mind might believe is real, something in us suspects reality is more. Jung called these psychic patterns archetypes. In Our Dreaming Mind, Dr. Robert Van de Castle writes:8
“Archetypes are the psychic structural components of the collective unconscious that parallel the physical components of a common human bodily structure. They create predispositions to certain forms of images and contain a large element of emotion. Their presence can be detected not only in dreams, but in the content of myths, fairy tales, psychotic delusions, and religious rituals. An archetype is not a specific image. In volume 18 of his Collected Works, Jung explained:
‘The archetype is… an inherited tendency of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs – representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern.’”
It is clear, in observing these archetypal patterns of our dreams (and their outer cultural equivalents as myths or fairy tales), that these older aspects of the mind communicate and work with images which contain a dazzling multiplicity of symbolic meaning. But how does it choose what we should see and what it will mean? What or who does the choosing? How does it create dreamscapes that can be so seamless and compelling they may feel more real or deep than our waking awareness? And what, exactly, is looking out at the world with us from within us, a presence which has our backs without fail, challenging and guiding us to be actuated in our purpose, gifts, and wholeness?
These questions lead to my second point: that this underlying, unconscious intelligence is obviously very “awake” and bewilderingly aware. It is able to operate independently of us (i.e. the ego), intentionally able to change its strategies to meet us wherever (or in this case, whenever) we are. Something in us, something as alive or real as we are, knows that the Conscious Self cannot recognize the original images we inherited from our more nature-based evolutionary past. And so, it does away with them. Something in us knows we can no longer recognize myths in the forms that they once were in (perhaps it knows we no longer even have those original myths), and so it conjures them up again anew, shifting their shapes so we might recognize them when we need them most.
Dreams of the Cuna Indians vs. the Dreams of Us
There is one last point I’d like to cover before I bring these musings to a close. In living with and studying the dreams of the Cuna Indians of Panama, Dr. Van de Castle observed that there was nearly a “total absence of competition, rivalry, and Cuna-to-Cuna aggression in the dreams of Cuna adolescents…” In other words, in this indigenous population (and we might presume in many others), children almost never dreamt of people within their own social groups as being adversarial or threatening to them. Van de Castle attributes this to the fact that he never saw a child get hit or severely scolded, and that young children never touched the ground because they were always being held by many members of their group. “Such indulgence produced a secure and confident child who felt extremely accepted by every member of the tribe,” he wrote.
Conversely, modern American children, becoming modern teens, and then modern adults, routinely dream of the people around them in total reversal: as a threat to their well-being, social status, and lives. “By way of contrast,” Van de Castle wrote, “almost half of all American adolescent dreams involve aggression and it is generally with other Americans.”9
What We Know, Deep, Deep Down
Let us pause for just a moment. Half of all American adolescent dreams involved aggression with others, while virtually none of the Cuna Indian dreams involved this kind of aggression? That heartbreaking shift from belonging to betrayal may just be the perfect segue back to our original question: What, exactly, is the Harry Potter myth bespeaking to us children of the modern age with such potency and apparent resonance? From what possibly ancient, archetypal well-spring does such a story arise, and why does our Unconscious Self believe it is so important to pay attention to it (as we clearly have)? And to that, I believe the answer may go something like this:
Deep down, we have this unshakable sense that the world is supposed to be more magic than it is. That it ought to feel more alive, be more alive. More aware, us of it and it of us. More mysterious. More real, exciting, and certainly more beautiful than this. The world is not supposed to be dying or dead. People are not supposed to be afraid to dance or sing. Holy-days (holidays) are not supposed to be reduced to a desacralized commercial sprint we grow to hate, and the words ‘earthly’, ‘terrestrial’, and ‘worldly’ should not be antonyms for the word ‘sacred’. We shouldn’t have to work so much to get so little. People are not supposed to be this lonely, addicted, anxious, depressed or sick. We aren’t supposed to have jobs we despise, or even families. Alcohol isn’t supposed to be a necessary substance to numb our pain to these realities, nor caffeine an artificial source of motivation to participate in their making.
And the mythic answer to that question - Why is Harry Potter the most famous story born of our time? - may be encapsulated in the altogether undeniable feeling that you, dear Child of Mystery and Living Earth, as known and longed for in the beauty of your Indigenous Heart, are not supposed to be a muggle.
Harry Potter shattered the records for most copies printed and sold for any book series. The Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are easily regarded as the fastest-selling books of all time, with each record-holding release surpassed only by its own subsequent releases. As of 2018, the series has sold more than half a billion copies and has been translated into eighty some languages worldwide.
I am not saying our ancestors, in their hundreds of thousands of years before the development of writing, were literally telling the story of Harry Potter. Rather, that they were living in an animistic reality, where they understood without question that every “thing” - from moss to rain to stones, from songs to relationships to stories - had spirit, had life. In other words, the universe they inhabited was made up as far from “dead stuff” as seemingly possible. Therefore, any story they told (and lived by) embodied what we might call this most basic indigenous sensibility. This essay is suggesting that any story we encounter today which calls to us deeply is dipping its toes in these ancient understandings. The million-year old self within us still knows them, still recognizes their presence in myth, fairy tales, and dreams. The conscious self has forgotten them, which is why such myths compel us so.
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. 305
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. 305
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. 147
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. 101
I do not want to underwrite the mastery that is required to tap into these rich ancestral substrates of myth and creativity. J.K. Rowling had no doubt paid her dues as a writer to become the profound storyteller that she is. These realities are likely not mutually exclusive: it is only through mastery and humility, of becoming a “hollow reed,” that the deepest levels of creativity can flow through us.
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. 101
Our Dreaming Mind. Robert Van de Castle, Ph.D. 1994. pg. XVIII