Snakes Through Pipes, Yes!
In accordance with my April 1st tradition, I have resumed my symbolism background and posted an essay on symbolism.
I want to emphasize, however, that this particular essay is 100% serious and in no way a joke. Whatever shortcomings it may have are solely due to my lack of academic background in Jungian psychology and literary criticism, not to facetiousness or frivolity.
The Chamber of Smut
Sexual Imagery in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Introduction
Many people have compared Harry Potter's adventures to the "hero’s journey" as described by mythology researcher Joseph Campbell in books like The Hero of a Thousand Faces. We can see the "Letters from No One" as a classic invitation to the adventure, the half-giant Hagrid as the helper who helps Harry cross the threshold into the magical world, and many other correspondences. The focus of this particular essay is the second novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and its none-too-subtle use of the archetypal "return to the womb" pattern.
Campbell talks about two different "uses" for the symbolic adventures that make up the hero’s journey. One is personal growth and development. These Jungian archetypes are, he says, an outgrowth of the conflicts and crises of the normal human life cycle (as, for example, the well-known Oedipal conflict). We need these powerful universal symbols to guide us through the resolution of these crises, we crave them in the stories we seek out for entertainment, and, if denied them, we will experience them in our nightly dreams. The other use is societal renewal. The hero stories connect us with basic cosmic truths in an emotional visceral way that, according to Campbell, must be repeated time after time. Society forgets, and must be reminded. Society loses its way, and must have its feet returned to the correct path. Each age must tell the old tales in a new way, best suited to meet its own needs and anxieties. One hero - a thousand faces.
Whether Campbell’s assertions are true or not - and they are by no means universally accepted - it is true that certain mythic and symbolic patterns are extremely widespread in stories across all known human cultures, very common in actual dreams reported by large numbers of people, and predictably able to elicit strong emotional reactions when used in stories. One of these patterns is the "return to the womb" motif.
Symbols normally associated with the womb - or, more generally, the female - include enclosed spaces (tunnels, caverns, labyrinths, inner chambers, vaults, domes), water (particularly warm, salty water resembling amniotic fluid), animals (particularly if the protagonist is swallowed by or otherwise inside the animal), the earth, dirt, slime, blood, stillness, compression, quiet, darkness, and roundness. All of these have fairly obvious connections to the womb experience or to women’s sexual and reproductive organs. If we see our hero traverse a long dark tunnel, find a hidden inner chamber, undergo a life-transforming adventure there, and emerge safely, we describe it as a symbolic return to the womb and re-birth. Campbell calls it "the belly of the whale" or "the belly of the beast" and describes it as the fifth and last step of the "Departure" phase of the hero’s journey. It is a rare hero who does not have such an experience as part of his (or her) journey.
Why Return to the Womb?
According to some psychological theories, every human longs to return to the womb. We (subconsciously) remember a happier time when we were bathed in clean sweet-tasting water, always the perfect temperature, when we were never hungry or thirsty, when we were constantly held and caressed by our mother, rocked by the rhythm of her gait and soothed by the beating of her heart, without pain or effort or separation. But this idyllic period was ended and we were forced roughly from our comfortable slumber, into the bright lights and harsh realities of our post-birth lives. Throughout infancy we cling to our mothers for warmth, safety, food, and solace, finding comfort (though never again the perfect comfort of the womb) in her loving grasp. Our earliest and strongest attachment is to our mother.
As we grow older, of course, this attachment must weaken. We must put aside passivity and dependence and choose activity and independence. For girls, we must cease to regard our mothers with near-worshipful longing, and instead emulate them, rival them, and perhaps surpass them. For boys, we must cease desiring to be the passive recipient of our mothers’ warm care and begin desiring to actively woo and win other women as mates. This necessity creates anxiety, which can manifest itself in several ways. Perhaps we experience our mothers’ love as cloying, all enveloping, and smothering. We feel almost as if we are being sucked back into the womb and we must frantically fight free to become independent adults. Or, paradoxically, perhaps we feel that the womb has rejected us and our mother is cold and unloving, forcing us to fend for ourselves before we are ready. We feel conflicting emotions toward our mother - love and hate, longing and fear, submission and defiance.
The return to the womb pattern is a method of resolving these anxieties and conflicting emotions. We deal with our longing to return to the womb by achieving it, symbolically. We return to the womb, not passively, but actively, as part of a willed adventure. We experience a second birth, but in this one we are not forced unwillingly into the world, crying helplessly. In this one, we are reborn on our own terms, victorious. We conquer the womb. We re-enter the womb as a child and emerge as a newly born man or woman.
In the human life cycle, the proper time for this transformational rebirth is at the beginning of puberty, when we reject our childish, dependent persona and re-create ourselves as adult, sexual beings. In the hero’s story, the proper time is when the hero accepts the challenge and enters the adventure realm where he (or she) will perform heroic deeds. The hero must “die” as a normal, everyday person and be reborn as a warrior, or a savior, or a trickster. The return to the womb motif is applicable whenever the hero is transformed into a new level of existence, and may re-occur several times in the journey. It is associated with introversion and introspection, with seeking into the depths of one’s self, one’s past, and one’s inner life. Normally, the return to the womb is accomplished alone, though we may encounter either helpers or enemies in the central sanctum.
The Belly of the Beast
Campbell describes the basic outline of the return to the womb story as follows: the hero is swallowed by a beast - a whale, a dragon, or a snake. The beast represents the mother, often painted as a danger or an obstacle. After a period of time (typically three days), the hero uses masculine sexual symbols - fire, a knife, or a sword - to force the beast to vomit him back up, or to cut his way out through the flesh of the beast (a symbolic Caesarian section). Whales are appropriate for this purpose as warm-blooded creatures of the sea. Snakes are symbols of rebirth because of the way they shed their skins, and they are also known for swallowing their prey whole. Dragons are symbolically associated with snakes, and with water (a female/birth symbol) and fire (a male/libido symbol).
Here is one of the examples Campbell gives:
The Greek hero Herakles, pausing at Troy on his way homeward with the belt of the queen of the Amazons, found that the city was being harassed by a monster sent against it by the sea-god Poseidon. The beast would come ashore and devour people as they moved about on the plain. Beautiful Hesione, the daughter of the king, had just been bound by her father to the sea rocks as a propitiatory sacrifice, and the great visiting hero agreed to rescue her for a price. The monster, in due time, broke to the surface of the water and opened its enormous maw. Herakles took a dive into the throat, cut his way out through the belly, and left the monster dead. [1]
There are four main symbolic components to the "Belly of the Beast" experience. The first is the penetration into the dark, enclosed, womb-like space - the "belly" or "temple."
…the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough. Once inside, he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. [2]
The second is the guardian of the threshold - the dragon or monster or Minotaur who symbolizes the hostile aspect of the mother, and the "death" aspect of the "death and rebirth" experience. This creature can be the womb, as when the hero is swallowed by a whale or a snake, or it can guard the entrance to the womb, or be found at the center, at the Holy of Holies. The hero must either pass the creature or slay it to be successfully reborn.
The third is the weapon. In many human cultures, there is a "belly of the beast" puberty ritual, often involving snakes, where boys pass out of the care of the women and into the training and company of the men. Aspects of the ritual frequently remove cutting or removal of the foreskin and bestowing of adult weapons of hunting or warfare - knives, spears, etc. The symbolic identification of the acquisition of the weapon with the achievement of sexual potency is fairly obvious. In the hero’s journey, therefore, the hero very often finds his weapon in the belly of the beast, in a cave deep within the earth, or in the innermost sanctuary of a temple. The sword in the stone, the ivory knife carved from the whale’s tooth, the magic ring found in the pool of the deepest cavern, the sacred fire conjured in the darkness - all are symbols of the power achieved by rebirth to a higher stage of being.
The fourth and last is the blood or dismembering of the hero. Just as birth is painful and messy, rebirth is painful and involves great sacrifice. To quote Campbell again:
“No creature,” writes Ananda Coomaraswamy, "can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist." Indeed, the physical body of the hero may be actually slain, dismembered, and scattered over the land or sea…
And so it is that, throughout the world, men whose function it has been to make visible on the earth the life-fructifying mystery of the slaying of the dragon have enacted upon their own bodies the great symbolic act, scattering their flesh, like the body of Osiris, for the renovation of the world. [3]
In the life-story of a female, this blood is symbolically associated with the first menses; in the puberty rituals of many males, the foreskin of the penis is sacrificed or the boy is cut or scarred or tattooed in some way to mark him as an adult. In literature, the hero may be gravely injured, may be cut into pieces and re-assembled, or otherwise die and be re-born.
The Chamber of Secrets
For anyone who is aware of the "return to the womb" pattern, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is almost embarrassingly rich in symbolism concerning Harry's transitional state, both as a twelve-year-old entering puberty and as a boy becoming the hero he is fated to be. The name itself could hardly be more appropriate - "Chamber of Secrets" is highly charged with imagery of bedchambers, sexual secrets, the inner sanctums of temples, arcane mysteries, and the hissing 'sss' sounds of snakes. Beyond that, we have mandrakes (traditional symbols of sexuality because their forked roots resemble legs - and sometimes genitals), Ron's broken wand, Hermione's (and other females') crush on Gilderoy Lockhart, Ginny's crush on Harry, Ginny's diary (a modern symbol of awakening female sexuality), Ron and Harry making off with the family car (a modern symbol of adolescent freedom), spiders (traditional symbols of threatening female sexuality), snakes (symbols of both male and female sexuality, as well as rebirth), Petrification (associated in mythology with the serpent-headed Medusa and in psychology with erections), Percy and Penelope kissing in the empty classroom, and a great deal of emphasis on Harry and Ron venturing into a girls' restroom.
But the dominant symbolism is the main plot - the "return to the womb" of Harry’s descent into the Chamber of Secrets. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is, of course, in a girls’ restroom - guarded by Moaning Myrtle. Throughout the book, both Hermione and Myrtle welcome Harry and Ron into this female sanctuary, where they brew the Polyjuice Potion and also find the Very Secret Diary (discarded there by Ginny). Percy, a representative of authority as a Prefect, chastises them for entering it:
"RON!"
Percy Weasley had stopped dead at the head of the stairs, prefect badge agleam, an expression of complete shock on his face.
"That's a girls' bathroom!" he gasped. "What were you -?"
"Just having a look around," Ron shrugged. "Clues, you know-"
Percy swelled in a manner that reminded Harry forcefully of Mrs. Weasley.
"Get - away - from - there -" Perry said, striding toward them and starting to bustle them along, flapping his arms. [4]
But obstructive authority cannot stop a boy from entering puberty, and Harry and Ron end up rebelling to the point that they disarm (symbolically castrate) a teacher - Lockhart - and force him to accompany them into the girls' restroom and into the tunnel that leads to the womb.
There is no way of putting this delicately, so I'll just say it. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is in a girls' restroom, across from the toilets, just as the actual entrance to the physical womb is adjacent to the female body's waste-excreting functions. The symbolic journey that Harry makes is almost ludicrously explicit. The restroom represents the genital region. The first barrier, which Harry (and Harry alone) can breach with his snakelike power of Parseltongue, represents the hymen that guards the entrance to the passage leading to the womb.
Harry looked back at the snake, willing himself to believe it was alive. If he moved his head, the candlelight made it look as though it were moving.
"Open up," he said.
Except that the words weren't what he heard; a strange hissing had escaped him, and at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin. Next second, the sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into. [5]
And a man does "slide into" that pipe - first Lockhart, then Harry, then Ron. The imagery is appropriately dark, damp, and slimy:
It was like rushing down an endless, slimy, dark slide. [6]
Harry, Ron, and Lockhart continue down the wet, dark, curving tunnels - which could hardly be more directly analogous to the vaginal passage - until they reach the abandoned skin of the basilisk, screaming "I symbolize rebirth" at the top of its scaly lungs. At this point, Lockhart attempts to symbolically emasculate Ron, the broken wand backfires on him, and the resulting avalanche ensures that Harry must go on alone - fittingly so, as the return to the womb is traditionally a lone adventure, and also fittingly because the girl who has been used to lure them there - Ginny - is an inappropriate sexual object for both Ron and Lockhart. It is Harry who is the object of Ginny’s emerging adolescent desire, and only Harry can rescue her from her ravisher. Harry gets past the second barrier - analogue of the cervix - guarded by serpents, and finally enters the sacred womb itself:
He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long, black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place. [7]
In the book, the Chamber is connected with water because of the "greenish gloom" and because it is under the Lake. In the movie, the symbolism is more direct - the space is literally filled with water. Truly, this is a place of rebirth, and Harry is not the only one who is there to be reborn. Tom Riddle has forced Ginny into the Chamber to resurrect himself with her life-force - to be reborn into a new, physical life. The first thing Tom does is steal Harry’s wand, leaving Harry emasculated, weaponless, and helpless, a point emphasized by him not even being able to lift the maiden - Ginny - by himself.
At this point Tom is the emasculating male figure denying the hero his right to enter the adult world. The basilisk represents the hostile female aspect that can either Petrify the hero or bite/eat him, keeping him forever in the womb. Ginny represents the reward if he is successful: prosaically, she represents the sexual satisfaction that will be available to him if he passes puberty; more profoundly, his saving her represents the triumph of life over death, the preservation of his adopted home Hogwarts (which will be closed if she dies), and his ability to remain within the magical realm of the Wizarding World. Finally, the aid sent by Dumbledore represents the helpful aspect of the father - the passing on of authority with the traditional masculine symbols of fire (the phoenix) and sword.
Harry invokes the legitimate authority of Hogwarts and is sent the familiar of the Headmaster and the Sorting Hat of the founders. The phoenix (appropriately, yet another symbol of rebirth) blinds the snake - neutralizing its destructive feminine power of Petrification - and Harry finds his weapon, pulling the Sword of Gryffindor (possibly his ancestor and definitely the founder of his House) from the Hat in a gesture with the same sexual symbolism as removing a sword from its sheath. He plunges it into the mouth of the snake (yet another sexual symbol, but also a reference to the hero diving into the mouth of the beast in many "belly" legends), at the same time receiving his death-wound from a venomous fang. Blood gushes out - from the basilisk where Harry has stabbed it, and from Harry’s arm, where he has been stabbed in his turn.
Thus, all four requirements have been achieved - the return to the womb, the vanquishing of the beast, the acquisition of the weapon, and the maiming or death of the hero.
But there is a rival "hero" in the Chamber also seeking rebirth, and Harry must continue to fight. He is brought back to life by the tears of the phoenix (like the tears of Isis which restored Osiris) and reaches out for another weapon - the same poisoned fang that slew him - which he plunges into the diary (yes, another sexually symbolic gesture) releasing another symbolic gush of ink-blood, destroying Tom Riddle and releasing Ginny from her enchanted sleep of death. Harry is free to emerge triumphantly from the womb with the sword, his recovered wand, and the awakened maiden - having died and been reborn as a hero and as a sexually potent male.
Civilized society, however, has its demands, and Harry is only twelve years old. He does not keep the sword, but gives it to Dumbledore, who returns it to its glass case. Nor does he keep the maiden; instead he returns her to the safety of her family, represented by her brother Ron and then by her mother and father in Dumbledore's office. It will be four more years before Harry will be able to enjoy Ginny's embraces and take on the mantle of leadership against Voldemort upon Dumbledore's death. But Harry has been through a - if you will excuse the expression - seminal experience. In the context of the seven book series, he has completed all the steps of the Departure phase of the hero’s journey, and moved into the Initiation phase - the road of trials, meeting with the goddess, atonement with the father, etc. He has claimed his own manhood symbolically thrice over - with sword, fang, and wand - defeated his older rival, slain his dragon, and restored his future love interest from death to life. He has left childhood behind.
After the Chamber
What are the lasting effects of the events in the Chamber of Secrets on Harry's life? In psychosexual terms, he has successfully passed through the puberty crisis and entered an intense training period of identification and rivalry with male authority figures and a search for his own father. He is now sexually aware and able to develop an interest in Cho Chang, to respond to Veelas, to escort Parvati Patil to the Yule Ball, and otherwise explore his growing sexuality. At school, he will be able to choose some of his own courses and be given (or, in Harry’s case, take) the increased freedom of Hogsmeade weekends.
It should also be noted that though the series is about Harry and his passage into puberty receives the most attention in the books, the other main characters are by no means left out. Ginny, in particular, experiences a symbolic return to the womb as richly elaborate as Harry's, though not nearly as fully shown. Her entrance into puberty, like Persephone's in Greek mythology, is precipitated by a dark seducer figure. She is dragged literally kicking and screaming into the womb, forced into giving her life as an unwilling mother figure for a monstrous rebirth. Like Harry, she dies and is reborn anew, walking out of the womb armed not with the bright weapons of triumphant manhood but with the hard-won weapons of bitter experience, lost innocence, and self-knowledge from a year-long struggle for her very identity (a struggle similar to, but much more intense than, what Harry will experience in his fifth year). Ginny’s success and survival in the Chamber of Secrets rests solely on her ability to choose - she chooses Harry over Riddle as the object of her sexual desire, and she chooses to steal the diary from Harry at the risk of being recaptured by it herself. She is rewarded for these choices by having Harry as her champion, and so she is rescued from certain death. The gift (and curse) of attracting male attention remains with Ginny after this experience and it seems she is careful to retain her own power to choose, both to end relationships, as with Michael Corner, and to begin them, as with Dean Thomas.
Ron and Hermione experience slightly less elaborate puberty initiations. Hermione’s role in the books is a bit equivocal - she is in some sense a protective mother figure for Harry, which probably explains why she is removed from the action for so much of this book, to give Harry the freedom to claim his sexuality. Hermione is not present at the Burrow at the beginning of the year, does not accompany Harry and Ron to Hogwarts in the flying car, and is isolated in the hospital wing for long periods of time when she turns herself into a cat and again when she gets Petrified. However, Hermione is not only a maternal figure for Harry; she is also a blossoming girl, experiencing puberty in her own right. On a literal level, Hermione’s developing sexuality is portrayed by her crush on Professor Lockhart. On a symbolic level, she “fights” the basilisk with her own weapons of research and cleverness, passes through the symbolic death of Petrification, and is reborn in the hospital wing thanks to the sexually symbolic mandrakes and (again) the knowledge and ability of her professors. Her unfortunate experience with Polyjuice Potion is also a piece of sexual symbolism, taking place in the girls’ restroom, involving growing hair all over her body and a tail, and… I’d prefer not to elaborate any further.
Ron, too, passes through a variety of puberty-related initiations. The stealing of the Flying Ford Anglia and the breaking of his wand, his suffering through Hermione's crush on Lockhart, his repeated visits to the girls’ restroom, his mission with Harry to the spiders, and his penetration with Harry of the passage to the Chamber of Secrets are the backbone of his story. In the plot as a whole, Harry’s antagonist is Tom Riddle and they are rivals for the affection and person of Ginny. In Ron's subplot, his antagonist is Lockhart and they are rivals for the attention and affection of Hermione. Ron’s broken wand at the beginning of the book is symbolically tied to Hermione’s crush on Lockhart, and it is that same broken wand that defeats Lockhart in the passage to the Chamber of Secrets.
Ron’s fear of spiders also symbolically represents a fear of female sexuality, and he overcomes that fear by looking at Hermione’s empty chair and survives his near-death experience in Aragog’s lair. However, alone of these four characters, Ron does not suffer a death-and-rebirth experience in this book; he does not reach the womb in the Chamber of Secrets, and - though he defeats his sexual rival - he does not triumphantly receive the weapons of manhood. He will slowly receive these over the next few years - a new wand in Book 3, a new broom in Book 5 - and he will finally suffer death and rebirth (in a highly sexual context) in Book 6. Given this symbolism, nobody should be surprised that it takes Ron as long as it does to accept and act on his romantic feelings for Hermione.
Notes:
1. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Part I, Chapter I, 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 9.
5. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 16.
6. Ibid.
7. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 17.
I want to emphasize, however, that this particular essay is 100% serious and in no way a joke. Whatever shortcomings it may have are solely due to my lack of academic background in Jungian psychology and literary criticism, not to facetiousness or frivolity.
The Chamber of Smut
Sexual Imagery in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Introduction
Many people have compared Harry Potter's adventures to the "hero’s journey" as described by mythology researcher Joseph Campbell in books like The Hero of a Thousand Faces. We can see the "Letters from No One" as a classic invitation to the adventure, the half-giant Hagrid as the helper who helps Harry cross the threshold into the magical world, and many other correspondences. The focus of this particular essay is the second novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and its none-too-subtle use of the archetypal "return to the womb" pattern.
Campbell talks about two different "uses" for the symbolic adventures that make up the hero’s journey. One is personal growth and development. These Jungian archetypes are, he says, an outgrowth of the conflicts and crises of the normal human life cycle (as, for example, the well-known Oedipal conflict). We need these powerful universal symbols to guide us through the resolution of these crises, we crave them in the stories we seek out for entertainment, and, if denied them, we will experience them in our nightly dreams. The other use is societal renewal. The hero stories connect us with basic cosmic truths in an emotional visceral way that, according to Campbell, must be repeated time after time. Society forgets, and must be reminded. Society loses its way, and must have its feet returned to the correct path. Each age must tell the old tales in a new way, best suited to meet its own needs and anxieties. One hero - a thousand faces.
Whether Campbell’s assertions are true or not - and they are by no means universally accepted - it is true that certain mythic and symbolic patterns are extremely widespread in stories across all known human cultures, very common in actual dreams reported by large numbers of people, and predictably able to elicit strong emotional reactions when used in stories. One of these patterns is the "return to the womb" motif.
Symbols normally associated with the womb - or, more generally, the female - include enclosed spaces (tunnels, caverns, labyrinths, inner chambers, vaults, domes), water (particularly warm, salty water resembling amniotic fluid), animals (particularly if the protagonist is swallowed by or otherwise inside the animal), the earth, dirt, slime, blood, stillness, compression, quiet, darkness, and roundness. All of these have fairly obvious connections to the womb experience or to women’s sexual and reproductive organs. If we see our hero traverse a long dark tunnel, find a hidden inner chamber, undergo a life-transforming adventure there, and emerge safely, we describe it as a symbolic return to the womb and re-birth. Campbell calls it "the belly of the whale" or "the belly of the beast" and describes it as the fifth and last step of the "Departure" phase of the hero’s journey. It is a rare hero who does not have such an experience as part of his (or her) journey.
Why Return to the Womb?
According to some psychological theories, every human longs to return to the womb. We (subconsciously) remember a happier time when we were bathed in clean sweet-tasting water, always the perfect temperature, when we were never hungry or thirsty, when we were constantly held and caressed by our mother, rocked by the rhythm of her gait and soothed by the beating of her heart, without pain or effort or separation. But this idyllic period was ended and we were forced roughly from our comfortable slumber, into the bright lights and harsh realities of our post-birth lives. Throughout infancy we cling to our mothers for warmth, safety, food, and solace, finding comfort (though never again the perfect comfort of the womb) in her loving grasp. Our earliest and strongest attachment is to our mother.
As we grow older, of course, this attachment must weaken. We must put aside passivity and dependence and choose activity and independence. For girls, we must cease to regard our mothers with near-worshipful longing, and instead emulate them, rival them, and perhaps surpass them. For boys, we must cease desiring to be the passive recipient of our mothers’ warm care and begin desiring to actively woo and win other women as mates. This necessity creates anxiety, which can manifest itself in several ways. Perhaps we experience our mothers’ love as cloying, all enveloping, and smothering. We feel almost as if we are being sucked back into the womb and we must frantically fight free to become independent adults. Or, paradoxically, perhaps we feel that the womb has rejected us and our mother is cold and unloving, forcing us to fend for ourselves before we are ready. We feel conflicting emotions toward our mother - love and hate, longing and fear, submission and defiance.
The return to the womb pattern is a method of resolving these anxieties and conflicting emotions. We deal with our longing to return to the womb by achieving it, symbolically. We return to the womb, not passively, but actively, as part of a willed adventure. We experience a second birth, but in this one we are not forced unwillingly into the world, crying helplessly. In this one, we are reborn on our own terms, victorious. We conquer the womb. We re-enter the womb as a child and emerge as a newly born man or woman.
In the human life cycle, the proper time for this transformational rebirth is at the beginning of puberty, when we reject our childish, dependent persona and re-create ourselves as adult, sexual beings. In the hero’s story, the proper time is when the hero accepts the challenge and enters the adventure realm where he (or she) will perform heroic deeds. The hero must “die” as a normal, everyday person and be reborn as a warrior, or a savior, or a trickster. The return to the womb motif is applicable whenever the hero is transformed into a new level of existence, and may re-occur several times in the journey. It is associated with introversion and introspection, with seeking into the depths of one’s self, one’s past, and one’s inner life. Normally, the return to the womb is accomplished alone, though we may encounter either helpers or enemies in the central sanctum.
The Belly of the Beast
Campbell describes the basic outline of the return to the womb story as follows: the hero is swallowed by a beast - a whale, a dragon, or a snake. The beast represents the mother, often painted as a danger or an obstacle. After a period of time (typically three days), the hero uses masculine sexual symbols - fire, a knife, or a sword - to force the beast to vomit him back up, or to cut his way out through the flesh of the beast (a symbolic Caesarian section). Whales are appropriate for this purpose as warm-blooded creatures of the sea. Snakes are symbols of rebirth because of the way they shed their skins, and they are also known for swallowing their prey whole. Dragons are symbolically associated with snakes, and with water (a female/birth symbol) and fire (a male/libido symbol).
Here is one of the examples Campbell gives:
The Greek hero Herakles, pausing at Troy on his way homeward with the belt of the queen of the Amazons, found that the city was being harassed by a monster sent against it by the sea-god Poseidon. The beast would come ashore and devour people as they moved about on the plain. Beautiful Hesione, the daughter of the king, had just been bound by her father to the sea rocks as a propitiatory sacrifice, and the great visiting hero agreed to rescue her for a price. The monster, in due time, broke to the surface of the water and opened its enormous maw. Herakles took a dive into the throat, cut his way out through the belly, and left the monster dead. [1]
There are four main symbolic components to the "Belly of the Beast" experience. The first is the penetration into the dark, enclosed, womb-like space - the "belly" or "temple."
…the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough. Once inside, he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. [2]
The second is the guardian of the threshold - the dragon or monster or Minotaur who symbolizes the hostile aspect of the mother, and the "death" aspect of the "death and rebirth" experience. This creature can be the womb, as when the hero is swallowed by a whale or a snake, or it can guard the entrance to the womb, or be found at the center, at the Holy of Holies. The hero must either pass the creature or slay it to be successfully reborn.
The third is the weapon. In many human cultures, there is a "belly of the beast" puberty ritual, often involving snakes, where boys pass out of the care of the women and into the training and company of the men. Aspects of the ritual frequently remove cutting or removal of the foreskin and bestowing of adult weapons of hunting or warfare - knives, spears, etc. The symbolic identification of the acquisition of the weapon with the achievement of sexual potency is fairly obvious. In the hero’s journey, therefore, the hero very often finds his weapon in the belly of the beast, in a cave deep within the earth, or in the innermost sanctuary of a temple. The sword in the stone, the ivory knife carved from the whale’s tooth, the magic ring found in the pool of the deepest cavern, the sacred fire conjured in the darkness - all are symbols of the power achieved by rebirth to a higher stage of being.
The fourth and last is the blood or dismembering of the hero. Just as birth is painful and messy, rebirth is painful and involves great sacrifice. To quote Campbell again:
“No creature,” writes Ananda Coomaraswamy, "can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist." Indeed, the physical body of the hero may be actually slain, dismembered, and scattered over the land or sea…
And so it is that, throughout the world, men whose function it has been to make visible on the earth the life-fructifying mystery of the slaying of the dragon have enacted upon their own bodies the great symbolic act, scattering their flesh, like the body of Osiris, for the renovation of the world. [3]
In the life-story of a female, this blood is symbolically associated with the first menses; in the puberty rituals of many males, the foreskin of the penis is sacrificed or the boy is cut or scarred or tattooed in some way to mark him as an adult. In literature, the hero may be gravely injured, may be cut into pieces and re-assembled, or otherwise die and be re-born.
The Chamber of Secrets
For anyone who is aware of the "return to the womb" pattern, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is almost embarrassingly rich in symbolism concerning Harry's transitional state, both as a twelve-year-old entering puberty and as a boy becoming the hero he is fated to be. The name itself could hardly be more appropriate - "Chamber of Secrets" is highly charged with imagery of bedchambers, sexual secrets, the inner sanctums of temples, arcane mysteries, and the hissing 'sss' sounds of snakes. Beyond that, we have mandrakes (traditional symbols of sexuality because their forked roots resemble legs - and sometimes genitals), Ron's broken wand, Hermione's (and other females') crush on Gilderoy Lockhart, Ginny's crush on Harry, Ginny's diary (a modern symbol of awakening female sexuality), Ron and Harry making off with the family car (a modern symbol of adolescent freedom), spiders (traditional symbols of threatening female sexuality), snakes (symbols of both male and female sexuality, as well as rebirth), Petrification (associated in mythology with the serpent-headed Medusa and in psychology with erections), Percy and Penelope kissing in the empty classroom, and a great deal of emphasis on Harry and Ron venturing into a girls' restroom.
But the dominant symbolism is the main plot - the "return to the womb" of Harry’s descent into the Chamber of Secrets. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is, of course, in a girls’ restroom - guarded by Moaning Myrtle. Throughout the book, both Hermione and Myrtle welcome Harry and Ron into this female sanctuary, where they brew the Polyjuice Potion and also find the Very Secret Diary (discarded there by Ginny). Percy, a representative of authority as a Prefect, chastises them for entering it:
"RON!"
Percy Weasley had stopped dead at the head of the stairs, prefect badge agleam, an expression of complete shock on his face.
"That's a girls' bathroom!" he gasped. "What were you -?"
"Just having a look around," Ron shrugged. "Clues, you know-"
Percy swelled in a manner that reminded Harry forcefully of Mrs. Weasley.
"Get - away - from - there -" Perry said, striding toward them and starting to bustle them along, flapping his arms. [4]
But obstructive authority cannot stop a boy from entering puberty, and Harry and Ron end up rebelling to the point that they disarm (symbolically castrate) a teacher - Lockhart - and force him to accompany them into the girls' restroom and into the tunnel that leads to the womb.
There is no way of putting this delicately, so I'll just say it. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is in a girls' restroom, across from the toilets, just as the actual entrance to the physical womb is adjacent to the female body's waste-excreting functions. The symbolic journey that Harry makes is almost ludicrously explicit. The restroom represents the genital region. The first barrier, which Harry (and Harry alone) can breach with his snakelike power of Parseltongue, represents the hymen that guards the entrance to the passage leading to the womb.
Harry looked back at the snake, willing himself to believe it was alive. If he moved his head, the candlelight made it look as though it were moving.
"Open up," he said.
Except that the words weren't what he heard; a strange hissing had escaped him, and at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin. Next second, the sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into. [5]
And a man does "slide into" that pipe - first Lockhart, then Harry, then Ron. The imagery is appropriately dark, damp, and slimy:
It was like rushing down an endless, slimy, dark slide. [6]
Harry, Ron, and Lockhart continue down the wet, dark, curving tunnels - which could hardly be more directly analogous to the vaginal passage - until they reach the abandoned skin of the basilisk, screaming "I symbolize rebirth" at the top of its scaly lungs. At this point, Lockhart attempts to symbolically emasculate Ron, the broken wand backfires on him, and the resulting avalanche ensures that Harry must go on alone - fittingly so, as the return to the womb is traditionally a lone adventure, and also fittingly because the girl who has been used to lure them there - Ginny - is an inappropriate sexual object for both Ron and Lockhart. It is Harry who is the object of Ginny’s emerging adolescent desire, and only Harry can rescue her from her ravisher. Harry gets past the second barrier - analogue of the cervix - guarded by serpents, and finally enters the sacred womb itself:
He was standing at the end of a very long, dimly lit chamber. Towering stone pillars entwined with more carved serpents rose to support a ceiling lost in darkness, casting long, black shadows through the odd, greenish gloom that filled the place. [7]
In the book, the Chamber is connected with water because of the "greenish gloom" and because it is under the Lake. In the movie, the symbolism is more direct - the space is literally filled with water. Truly, this is a place of rebirth, and Harry is not the only one who is there to be reborn. Tom Riddle has forced Ginny into the Chamber to resurrect himself with her life-force - to be reborn into a new, physical life. The first thing Tom does is steal Harry’s wand, leaving Harry emasculated, weaponless, and helpless, a point emphasized by him not even being able to lift the maiden - Ginny - by himself.
At this point Tom is the emasculating male figure denying the hero his right to enter the adult world. The basilisk represents the hostile female aspect that can either Petrify the hero or bite/eat him, keeping him forever in the womb. Ginny represents the reward if he is successful: prosaically, she represents the sexual satisfaction that will be available to him if he passes puberty; more profoundly, his saving her represents the triumph of life over death, the preservation of his adopted home Hogwarts (which will be closed if she dies), and his ability to remain within the magical realm of the Wizarding World. Finally, the aid sent by Dumbledore represents the helpful aspect of the father - the passing on of authority with the traditional masculine symbols of fire (the phoenix) and sword.
Harry invokes the legitimate authority of Hogwarts and is sent the familiar of the Headmaster and the Sorting Hat of the founders. The phoenix (appropriately, yet another symbol of rebirth) blinds the snake - neutralizing its destructive feminine power of Petrification - and Harry finds his weapon, pulling the Sword of Gryffindor (possibly his ancestor and definitely the founder of his House) from the Hat in a gesture with the same sexual symbolism as removing a sword from its sheath. He plunges it into the mouth of the snake (yet another sexual symbol, but also a reference to the hero diving into the mouth of the beast in many "belly" legends), at the same time receiving his death-wound from a venomous fang. Blood gushes out - from the basilisk where Harry has stabbed it, and from Harry’s arm, where he has been stabbed in his turn.
Thus, all four requirements have been achieved - the return to the womb, the vanquishing of the beast, the acquisition of the weapon, and the maiming or death of the hero.
But there is a rival "hero" in the Chamber also seeking rebirth, and Harry must continue to fight. He is brought back to life by the tears of the phoenix (like the tears of Isis which restored Osiris) and reaches out for another weapon - the same poisoned fang that slew him - which he plunges into the diary (yes, another sexually symbolic gesture) releasing another symbolic gush of ink-blood, destroying Tom Riddle and releasing Ginny from her enchanted sleep of death. Harry is free to emerge triumphantly from the womb with the sword, his recovered wand, and the awakened maiden - having died and been reborn as a hero and as a sexually potent male.
Civilized society, however, has its demands, and Harry is only twelve years old. He does not keep the sword, but gives it to Dumbledore, who returns it to its glass case. Nor does he keep the maiden; instead he returns her to the safety of her family, represented by her brother Ron and then by her mother and father in Dumbledore's office. It will be four more years before Harry will be able to enjoy Ginny's embraces and take on the mantle of leadership against Voldemort upon Dumbledore's death. But Harry has been through a - if you will excuse the expression - seminal experience. In the context of the seven book series, he has completed all the steps of the Departure phase of the hero’s journey, and moved into the Initiation phase - the road of trials, meeting with the goddess, atonement with the father, etc. He has claimed his own manhood symbolically thrice over - with sword, fang, and wand - defeated his older rival, slain his dragon, and restored his future love interest from death to life. He has left childhood behind.
After the Chamber
What are the lasting effects of the events in the Chamber of Secrets on Harry's life? In psychosexual terms, he has successfully passed through the puberty crisis and entered an intense training period of identification and rivalry with male authority figures and a search for his own father. He is now sexually aware and able to develop an interest in Cho Chang, to respond to Veelas, to escort Parvati Patil to the Yule Ball, and otherwise explore his growing sexuality. At school, he will be able to choose some of his own courses and be given (or, in Harry’s case, take) the increased freedom of Hogsmeade weekends.
It should also be noted that though the series is about Harry and his passage into puberty receives the most attention in the books, the other main characters are by no means left out. Ginny, in particular, experiences a symbolic return to the womb as richly elaborate as Harry's, though not nearly as fully shown. Her entrance into puberty, like Persephone's in Greek mythology, is precipitated by a dark seducer figure. She is dragged literally kicking and screaming into the womb, forced into giving her life as an unwilling mother figure for a monstrous rebirth. Like Harry, she dies and is reborn anew, walking out of the womb armed not with the bright weapons of triumphant manhood but with the hard-won weapons of bitter experience, lost innocence, and self-knowledge from a year-long struggle for her very identity (a struggle similar to, but much more intense than, what Harry will experience in his fifth year). Ginny’s success and survival in the Chamber of Secrets rests solely on her ability to choose - she chooses Harry over Riddle as the object of her sexual desire, and she chooses to steal the diary from Harry at the risk of being recaptured by it herself. She is rewarded for these choices by having Harry as her champion, and so she is rescued from certain death. The gift (and curse) of attracting male attention remains with Ginny after this experience and it seems she is careful to retain her own power to choose, both to end relationships, as with Michael Corner, and to begin them, as with Dean Thomas.
Ron and Hermione experience slightly less elaborate puberty initiations. Hermione’s role in the books is a bit equivocal - she is in some sense a protective mother figure for Harry, which probably explains why she is removed from the action for so much of this book, to give Harry the freedom to claim his sexuality. Hermione is not present at the Burrow at the beginning of the year, does not accompany Harry and Ron to Hogwarts in the flying car, and is isolated in the hospital wing for long periods of time when she turns herself into a cat and again when she gets Petrified. However, Hermione is not only a maternal figure for Harry; she is also a blossoming girl, experiencing puberty in her own right. On a literal level, Hermione’s developing sexuality is portrayed by her crush on Professor Lockhart. On a symbolic level, she “fights” the basilisk with her own weapons of research and cleverness, passes through the symbolic death of Petrification, and is reborn in the hospital wing thanks to the sexually symbolic mandrakes and (again) the knowledge and ability of her professors. Her unfortunate experience with Polyjuice Potion is also a piece of sexual symbolism, taking place in the girls’ restroom, involving growing hair all over her body and a tail, and… I’d prefer not to elaborate any further.
Ron, too, passes through a variety of puberty-related initiations. The stealing of the Flying Ford Anglia and the breaking of his wand, his suffering through Hermione's crush on Lockhart, his repeated visits to the girls’ restroom, his mission with Harry to the spiders, and his penetration with Harry of the passage to the Chamber of Secrets are the backbone of his story. In the plot as a whole, Harry’s antagonist is Tom Riddle and they are rivals for the affection and person of Ginny. In Ron's subplot, his antagonist is Lockhart and they are rivals for the attention and affection of Hermione. Ron’s broken wand at the beginning of the book is symbolically tied to Hermione’s crush on Lockhart, and it is that same broken wand that defeats Lockhart in the passage to the Chamber of Secrets.
Ron’s fear of spiders also symbolically represents a fear of female sexuality, and he overcomes that fear by looking at Hermione’s empty chair and survives his near-death experience in Aragog’s lair. However, alone of these four characters, Ron does not suffer a death-and-rebirth experience in this book; he does not reach the womb in the Chamber of Secrets, and - though he defeats his sexual rival - he does not triumphantly receive the weapons of manhood. He will slowly receive these over the next few years - a new wand in Book 3, a new broom in Book 5 - and he will finally suffer death and rebirth (in a highly sexual context) in Book 6. Given this symbolism, nobody should be surprised that it takes Ron as long as it does to accept and act on his romantic feelings for Hermione.
Notes:
1. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Part I, Chapter I, 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 9.
5. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 16.
6. Ibid.
7. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 17.