Indestructible - Part V - The Wheels of Heaven
This is a long one, so I've broken it up into sections. There's an introductory section, section V.1 on the principle of Ma'at, section V.2 on the gravity assist, and a postscript.
There a HUGE amount I could have included here but didn't, for the sake of length, but I'll get to it at some point if I can. I promise it all eventually has to do with dear Severus, metaphorically at the least.
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Indestructible V - The Wheels of Heaven
Circles.
Circles are fundamental. When you start looking for them, you can find circles everywhere. Literally, metaphorically, conceptually…everything sooner or later can be related to a circle. I think the circle might be the closest thing there is to a base form for the universe, a single fundamental truth from which to derive all others.
From the tiniest particles to cells, to the planet we live on and the movements of that body and all others in the cosmos, orbiting together, in everything we can find circles, seen from different angles, in different dimensions.
A point: a circle shrunk down to no dimensionality. A sphere: a circle expanded to three dimensions. Expansion and contraction. A spiral, and other such curves: a circle seen in motion through time. Even its seeming opposite - the straight line - is really a circle in disguise. According to the laws of perspective geometry, a line is just a circle taken to infinity. Our finite perspective of something infinite. And so, even things appearing to be made out of straight lines, like triangles and so on, can be understood as just the finite bit we can see of infinite things intersecting.
Circles are also paradoxical. Including while excluding, a symbol of all while - by - selecting and containing a small portion of the whole. Having no beginning, and so being endless.
Circles and lines also describe time, or our perspective on it rather. We have linear, ordinary time - shooting ahead of us, extending behind us, on and on. And we mythic time, circular repetitive time in which everything old is new again, the same things happen over and over, or are always happening at the same moment even, the same situations and stories and figures encountered again and again. Put them together and we get the spiral, progression (or regression) by returning again and again to the same place but from a new angle, in a new form. Reincarnation, history repeating itself, psychological integration, evolution, the paths described by every orbiting body in a solar system or galaxy…there are a thousand places to see this pattern.
You get the idea.
We have repetition, and repetition with difference. Static and dynamic forms of the same fundamental pattern, lower and higher incarnations of the same essence. Stillness and motion. Everything is both always the same, and always changing. Perspective is key.
So to give us a slightly different perspective on matters, permit me a brief excursion to that place the Weasley family chose as their vacation destination before I get back to work on the wheels here. That is to say, let’s go to Egypt for a moment.
Part V.1 - Ma’at
The ancient Egyptians modeled their fundamental mythic and moral understanding of the universe on a concept called ma’at, embodied in their pantheon by the goddess of the same name. Her distinguishing mark in art was the single feather she wore on her headdress. It was this feather against which the hearts of the dead were weighed by Anubis in the underworld to determine their fate; the hearts of those who had failed to keep ma’at were too heavy, and were devoured by the monstrous chimaera-like goddess Ammit, preventing the unworthy dead from going on to eternal life in the beautiful field of reeds with Osiris in the Duat.
Usually translated as ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and the like, but also translatable as ‘creation,’ ‘balance,’ ‘harmony,’ among other things, and tied fundamentally to the recurring journey of the sun through the sky and the yearly flooding of the Nile that structured and made possible ancient Egyptian life, ma’at is a tricky concept to pin down at first. Ma’at’s opposite number is the concept of isfet, usually depicted symbolically by the great demonic serpent A/pep that tries to devour the sun god Ra every night. The A/pep is not really a being at all however, not properly - it’s an expression of an impersonal force, that of pure destructiveness with no hope of renewal, absolute uncreation. The negation of everything that is and of all future possibility as well. Death is a part of ma’at; murder and uncreation are not. Even the god Set (or Seth) - a god of chaos, the dry lifeless desert, foreigners, and other things threatening to the Egyptian mindset, and usually falsely mischaracterized today as the “God of Evil” (nonsensical term) because of his role in the slaying of Osiris - was ultimately an upholder of ma’at. Indeed, it is his strength upon which the world’s continued existence depends: Set is the god who stands in the prow of Ra’s solar boat and slays the serpent every night. He is the one god, in fact, who is strong enough to do so, and his scepter is both his personal symbol and a symbol of strength in general. (Yes, I have strong feelings about Set. And another frequently misunderstood myth figure, the Norse god Loki, who I might or might not make reference to sometime later.)
I understand ma’at myself as a dynamic term, referring less to the attempt to preserve one static state of affairs than the attempt to continue finding and refinding the right, balanced choice in relation to both oneself and others in an alive and changing world. In Ian Malcom’s little speech about chaos theory at the beginning of the book The Lost World we are presented with the idea of “life at the edge:” life exists, and evolution occurs, at the place where dynamic growth is possible. Both stagnation in old forms and too-rapid, too-chaotic change bring death and close down possibility. But stable transformation is possible, on that knife-edge, and we are always dancing right on that edge. I think this is where ma’at is, at the heart of the dance, stepping a little to this side of the line, then to that. Balance in a dynamic sense. Isfet is not one pole, with ma’at the other; isfet is where the two ends of the spectrum dissolve out into nothingness, and ma’at is the tipping point at the heart. The place where everything turns, where a fine nuance or tiny shift in angle can be as great a decider as an immense difference. The place where you can step off the cliff, or - or perhaps and then - fall upwards.
It’s a place of paradox. Of choice. To live in ma’at, you must be the master of your own choices. You may not be able to determine all the circumstances of any choice you have, you may not have the full range of choices others have from which to choose, but you can and must choose and own that choice, if you want to live with integrity.
(Integrity… The language we use to talk about this stuff is so packed full of revealing metaphors that I could spend years unpacking them and never get to the end.)
I do believe that, however we read him, Severus Snape ultimately kept ma’at. For himself, and, hence, for everyone. Indeed, he may be the clearest single expression of what I’m calling ma’at - what you could also call alchemy, the Great Work - in the series.
Though I think he’d get bored in a field of reeds. There’s a phoenix that went missing back in HBP, you know. I suspect there may have been one more pair of eyes on Severus in that shack than the trio knew, and that Fawkes knew very well who and what Severus was and what to do when. I doubt he was really just Dumbledore’s phoenix. He was the school’s. Or what the school represented. Or possibly a gift or gift in waiting from Flamel, as swythyv posits, ready to go on to a new master when he presented himself.
Harry wasn’t ever exactly the most perceptive observer of what was going on, now was he? Especially in regards to Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.
But then, because of Albus, Harry - like so many others in Albus’ care before him - had never been properly taught to recognize, value, and make independent moral choices. Because Albus himself had never quite grasped the character or importance of them. Albus fundamentally misunderstood the nature of moral choice from the beginning, and never did quite learn better. (Trying to game that trial in the cave even at the last moment…)
Severus Snape, eventually, learned and understood. Because he taught himself. Because he was open. Not unafraid, but willing nonetheless. Because he had courage. Because he had heart.
They’re the same thing, you know, at root. Our ‘courage’ is just a borrowing from an Old French derivative of the Latin cor, heart, from which we also get ‘core.’
Harry ultimately got something right, in his own partial way. The bravest man I ever knew. Oh, Harry, if only you did know...
Severus Snape was not and is not a hollow man, unlike both of his masters. Severus’s greatest strength was and is his, ultimately indestructible, pure core. (I can’t help but see him as having a wand cored with unicorn hair. For all that he’s a figure of transformation and fierceness of heart, I think that healing purity is even more fundamental to his nature. More on this later though.)
His pure core, however, is also what may have been the one thing that others’ and his own actions may have put at the greatest risk for him in the series. Especially if he, as I speculate he may have in my shadow reading, had to resort to a gravity assist in order to rescue himself and everyone else from the path of potential destruction that Albus’ and Voldemort’s hollow-hearted war games cast them all into.
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Part V.2 - Gravity Assist
Returning to circles here.
One of the basic things we learn in science class, when we study astronomy (that class nobody could quite figure out the reason for including in the Hogwarts curriculum…), is that the Earth isn’t really flat. Though it appears so from our grounded perspective, in truth the ground is curved. The Earth is a (slightly imperfect) sphere, condensed by the force of gravity from an ancient cloud of loose material, into a solid whole of different layers, rotating endlessly. Around it orbits another sphere, the moon - our satellite, captured by Earth’s own gravity. This pair then orbits the sun, an immense heavenly furnace in which the force of gravity has drawn together enough material tightly enough that it begins to burn, fuse, and transform, providing energy and light over a span of eons as it works through its material. Other planets also orbit this sun, some with moons of their own (Viva La Pluto!), as do asteroids, bodies on sharply elliptical paths called comets, and so on. Drawn by gravity’s workings.
(Gravity, we should note, is not exactly a force exerted directly by objects on each other. It is, rather, the effect of the fact that every single object with any mass affects the fabric of spacetime merely by existing, changing its shape just a little. The metaphor of balls of different weights sitting on a rubber sheet, creating pockets that draw in any other marble rolled across the sheet, is a classic.)
The sun is, of course, just one of billions of stars, in one of billions of galaxies filled with stars and clouds of gas and particles, in a galactic cluster, in a small corner of the universe. Clouds condense into stars, burn, and collapse in upon themselves, ultimately ending up in one of two states: either expanding to a hollow shell and exploding outward, scattering cosmic material throughout the area, and then collapsing inward and dying into cool, burnt-out husks called dwarf stars; or collapsing so far under the power of their own gravity that they seem to hollow themselves out and become black holes, Black holes are objects so dense that even light cannot escape once drawn into a black hole’s gravity well, but orbits endlessly around the object instead. Objects that - it is theorized - may be so heavy they tear through the fabric of spacetime itself and open wormholes into other corners of the universe or other times, if we could but pass through the event horizon and survive the unthinkable pressure and torqueing of everything. (You did see Interstellar, right? Remember that wormholes are three-dimensional, spherical holes, not flat portals, and they warp everything, even time.)
And everything is in motion. Constant motion, never quite the same twice, everything spinning and circling everything else. The cosmic dance, the music of the spheres.
Let’s think about the Potterverse, magically and morally, as a universe proper here for a moment. Bodies in motion around each other, exerting influence on each other and thereby affecting both the makeup and the paths of each other as they move.
And remember that the key terms we’re dealing with here are fundamental: life, death, transformation. The physical and the spiritual. Knowledge. Sight. Choice. Love. That sort of thing.
Well, what can hypothesize for starters? What sort of bodies are we dealing with? (Allowing for a little flexibility in the metaphor here…)
Albus? Albus is a red giant - old, cool, swollen and hollow, his best matter long ago used up. He might manage to go nova and shed his outer layer in a brief explosion before collapsing and dying to a brown or white dwarf, or he might draw himself in so far that he begins to suck in light itself. Whatever his end, he has a habit of drawing in satellites and keeping them in tight orbits, and he’s influenced the paths of a number of other bodies and variables here. Not all of which he’ll tell you about, leaving them to come careening in like comets at inconvenient moments, from unexpected angles.
Voldemort, it should be obvious, is a black hole. He long ago collapsed completely in on himself, far past the point of no return, and so he swings through the world dragging in after him and warping everything that gets near him, even light. Tearing through himself to hollowness, inverting the very meaning of the terms life and death. He flees relentlessly from physical death, which he fears above all else, but he (unconsciously) embodies the very essence of spiritual death. And he deals out both happily - it’s the one thing you can be sure of receiving from him: death or death. There’s no reversing his course now; only the smallest deviations regarding the details are possible. He seems to have been potentially a clinical psychopath from childhood - he was always going to be potentially dangerous and needing careful care - but not every clinical psychopath turns into a ravening dark lord bent on pure destruction. That’s Albus’ doing. The kindest thing that could be done for Voldemort was to kill him - send him and the scattered pieces of his soul (I refuse to accept that they may be destroyed) back to the other side of the Veil, where they can reunite and perhaps hopefully one day he’ll have another chance. But until then, he and his train of satellites - he’s as happy to collect them as Albus - are happy to swoop through the neighborhood and sweep away everything they can.
Severus is the real curiosity here, because he keeps changing. A satellite, a ship trying to navigate its own way; a young star trying to get started. A star-ship? (I did say we have to be flexible here. ;) )
Harry and Draco and the students: other young clouds of possibility, still in the process of forming but with a general enough shape; will they be satellites or masters of their own fates?
I think you get the general picture.
Now, going back to orbital mechanics for a moment.
There’s a maneuver you often see deployed in sci-fi movies and books, in which a ship needs to alter its course or speed, but there’s a limited amount of fuel available. So the crew decides to take advantage of the gravity well of some nearby celestial body and slingshot around it. This is called a gravity assist, or gravitational slingshot, and it’s based on fundamental principles of classical mechanics. When done properly, it can be enormously useful - it’s how we got the Voyager flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things.
It just takes tremendously careful calculation to get right.
Here is the Wikipedia page for the concept, if you want to read about it. In brief, the idea is to use the relative movement of one massive object (A) to influence the movement of another, smaller object (B). It can be used to increase or decease speed, and/or to alter direction. The gravity of A will - depending on the direction and angle of approach - either drag B forward, adding to its momentum, or pull it back, slowing it down, and as it circles A, B can exit the gravity well heading in a different direction than it had been previously. Indeed, it can even reverse course completely and gain enormous speed:
“…if the spaceship travels in a path which forms a parabola, it can leave the planet in the opposite direction without firing its engine, and the speed gain at large distance is indeed 2U [twice the planet’s own speed] once it has left the gravity of the planet far behind.”
Here’s a picture.
Now, an often-ignored detail of this little trick is that, according to the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, the little spaceship or what have you, B, isn’t the only object being affected. Small though it is, the ship or what have you does have a gravity of its own, and this affects the course of the planet, A, that it is slingshotting around. Since planets are so much more massive than ships, the effect is usually so slight as to be negligible, and is left out of calculations.
But a small, potentially measurable change does occur.
Remember that. It’s a clue.
Now, what does a gravitational slingshot have to do with alchemy?
Well, one of the fundamental principles of alchemical work is that, in order to achieve the Stone, to reach a higher stage, decay and destruction are necessary. You have to go through the nigredo, through stages of putrefaction and confusion and having all that was solid dissolve, the old burnt away, before you can achieve the new. The golden phoenix must reduce himself to black ash in order to renew himself and his healing power, just as the serpent must shed his skin.
It’s mirror logic, mythic logic, the logic of the spiral and of the spiritual trial of Merlin's Cave. You must go down in order to go up. Virgil and Dante must go to the lowest pit of Hell (reserved for traitors, interestingly enough, and frozen in ice) and climb Satan’s very body in order to reach the shores of the mountain of purgatory and the way to paradise. (Do remember, also, that Satan’s other name is Lucifer, the brightest of angels, and he was once the teacher of all the other angels. Paradox abounds.)
You must fall, to fly.
It’s just that falling is inherently risky. Like brewing Felix, like slingshotting around a massive celestial body, there’s always a chance that you smash into the ground and die in the attempt.
So you’d best prepare as well as you can before you set out. (A concept Gryffindors do struggle with…) Or have a reliable guide.
At best, though, a guide can only ever take you part of the way anyway. Isn’t that so, Severus? And he didn't have the most reliable ones...
The key to remember is that what matters above all here is motion. Not static circles or lines, but spirals. (An image that, as a brewer, I imagine Severus found familiar and easy to think in. The liquids spiraling down into the cauldron as you stir, the steam spiraling up…)
Next up I think will be a discussion about Severus Snape’s fundamental values, his relationship to Voldemort, and what his boggart might have been. We know his patronus - though I want to say more about that later - but we must speculate as to what shape his fears took. I have an idea though.
Also, some discussion of the nature of Severus’ occlumency and thoughts on the Dark Mark.
Then we can get to the nature of the awakening I think he had somewhere between the end of GOF and the opening of HBP, how Albus’ betrayals affected him, and the particular peril he thought he might be facing and how he got through it.
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By way of a postscript: I imagine that, were he to put it in geometric terms, Severus might very well agree with me and describe the idea of the moral life, of being a good man, as something of an asymptote - at best, with no deviations, approaching the true line every closer without ever quite perfectly achieving it. Ma’at is dynamic, after all, and there is always a new choice to make, with new ramifications. And we all deviate at times; it’s a fact of human nature. But consider that there are often more dimensions to things than we at first see, and that the alchemical work continues, again and again. Consider then the curvilinear asymptote - a curve spiraling around a line asymptotically - and imagine what a three-dimensional curvilinear asymptote might look like when reduced to two dimensions. When seen either head-on, or from the side.
You’d get a point within a circle, for the one. And a line with gradually decreasing fluctuations above and below it, for the other.
And then remember how, with all these spiraling images we get, there’s often a reversal. A flux point. Mirrored spirals. And remember that velocity is variable too.
I promise this is all relevant. Bear with me.
(There’s just so much I could talk about. The hydra and the immortal jellyfish (it’s a real thing), Dark Arts and morality, what the hell being a “Death Eater” even means… The Tower and the Cave, purity, all the grail quest stuff. Severus’ archetypes, the fact that he’s a healer and a traitor as well as a teacher, the description of Spinner’s End, green fire, all the bird and serpent imagery and the constellation Scorpio as the eagle and serpent, the axis mundi. Now I know why swythyv felt overwhelmed. And I should be writing my dissertation!)
There a HUGE amount I could have included here but didn't, for the sake of length, but I'll get to it at some point if I can. I promise it all eventually has to do with dear Severus, metaphorically at the least.
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Indestructible V - The Wheels of Heaven
Circles.
Circles are fundamental. When you start looking for them, you can find circles everywhere. Literally, metaphorically, conceptually…everything sooner or later can be related to a circle. I think the circle might be the closest thing there is to a base form for the universe, a single fundamental truth from which to derive all others.
From the tiniest particles to cells, to the planet we live on and the movements of that body and all others in the cosmos, orbiting together, in everything we can find circles, seen from different angles, in different dimensions.
A point: a circle shrunk down to no dimensionality. A sphere: a circle expanded to three dimensions. Expansion and contraction. A spiral, and other such curves: a circle seen in motion through time. Even its seeming opposite - the straight line - is really a circle in disguise. According to the laws of perspective geometry, a line is just a circle taken to infinity. Our finite perspective of something infinite. And so, even things appearing to be made out of straight lines, like triangles and so on, can be understood as just the finite bit we can see of infinite things intersecting.
Circles are also paradoxical. Including while excluding, a symbol of all while - by - selecting and containing a small portion of the whole. Having no beginning, and so being endless.
Circles and lines also describe time, or our perspective on it rather. We have linear, ordinary time - shooting ahead of us, extending behind us, on and on. And we mythic time, circular repetitive time in which everything old is new again, the same things happen over and over, or are always happening at the same moment even, the same situations and stories and figures encountered again and again. Put them together and we get the spiral, progression (or regression) by returning again and again to the same place but from a new angle, in a new form. Reincarnation, history repeating itself, psychological integration, evolution, the paths described by every orbiting body in a solar system or galaxy…there are a thousand places to see this pattern.
You get the idea.
We have repetition, and repetition with difference. Static and dynamic forms of the same fundamental pattern, lower and higher incarnations of the same essence. Stillness and motion. Everything is both always the same, and always changing. Perspective is key.
So to give us a slightly different perspective on matters, permit me a brief excursion to that place the Weasley family chose as their vacation destination before I get back to work on the wheels here. That is to say, let’s go to Egypt for a moment.
Part V.1 - Ma’at
The ancient Egyptians modeled their fundamental mythic and moral understanding of the universe on a concept called ma’at, embodied in their pantheon by the goddess of the same name. Her distinguishing mark in art was the single feather she wore on her headdress. It was this feather against which the hearts of the dead were weighed by Anubis in the underworld to determine their fate; the hearts of those who had failed to keep ma’at were too heavy, and were devoured by the monstrous chimaera-like goddess Ammit, preventing the unworthy dead from going on to eternal life in the beautiful field of reeds with Osiris in the Duat.
Usually translated as ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and the like, but also translatable as ‘creation,’ ‘balance,’ ‘harmony,’ among other things, and tied fundamentally to the recurring journey of the sun through the sky and the yearly flooding of the Nile that structured and made possible ancient Egyptian life, ma’at is a tricky concept to pin down at first. Ma’at’s opposite number is the concept of isfet, usually depicted symbolically by the great demonic serpent A/pep that tries to devour the sun god Ra every night. The A/pep is not really a being at all however, not properly - it’s an expression of an impersonal force, that of pure destructiveness with no hope of renewal, absolute uncreation. The negation of everything that is and of all future possibility as well. Death is a part of ma’at; murder and uncreation are not. Even the god Set (or Seth) - a god of chaos, the dry lifeless desert, foreigners, and other things threatening to the Egyptian mindset, and usually falsely mischaracterized today as the “God of Evil” (nonsensical term) because of his role in the slaying of Osiris - was ultimately an upholder of ma’at. Indeed, it is his strength upon which the world’s continued existence depends: Set is the god who stands in the prow of Ra’s solar boat and slays the serpent every night. He is the one god, in fact, who is strong enough to do so, and his scepter is both his personal symbol and a symbol of strength in general. (Yes, I have strong feelings about Set. And another frequently misunderstood myth figure, the Norse god Loki, who I might or might not make reference to sometime later.)
I understand ma’at myself as a dynamic term, referring less to the attempt to preserve one static state of affairs than the attempt to continue finding and refinding the right, balanced choice in relation to both oneself and others in an alive and changing world. In Ian Malcom’s little speech about chaos theory at the beginning of the book The Lost World we are presented with the idea of “life at the edge:” life exists, and evolution occurs, at the place where dynamic growth is possible. Both stagnation in old forms and too-rapid, too-chaotic change bring death and close down possibility. But stable transformation is possible, on that knife-edge, and we are always dancing right on that edge. I think this is where ma’at is, at the heart of the dance, stepping a little to this side of the line, then to that. Balance in a dynamic sense. Isfet is not one pole, with ma’at the other; isfet is where the two ends of the spectrum dissolve out into nothingness, and ma’at is the tipping point at the heart. The place where everything turns, where a fine nuance or tiny shift in angle can be as great a decider as an immense difference. The place where you can step off the cliff, or - or perhaps and then - fall upwards.
It’s a place of paradox. Of choice. To live in ma’at, you must be the master of your own choices. You may not be able to determine all the circumstances of any choice you have, you may not have the full range of choices others have from which to choose, but you can and must choose and own that choice, if you want to live with integrity.
(Integrity… The language we use to talk about this stuff is so packed full of revealing metaphors that I could spend years unpacking them and never get to the end.)
I do believe that, however we read him, Severus Snape ultimately kept ma’at. For himself, and, hence, for everyone. Indeed, he may be the clearest single expression of what I’m calling ma’at - what you could also call alchemy, the Great Work - in the series.
Though I think he’d get bored in a field of reeds. There’s a phoenix that went missing back in HBP, you know. I suspect there may have been one more pair of eyes on Severus in that shack than the trio knew, and that Fawkes knew very well who and what Severus was and what to do when. I doubt he was really just Dumbledore’s phoenix. He was the school’s. Or what the school represented. Or possibly a gift or gift in waiting from Flamel, as swythyv posits, ready to go on to a new master when he presented himself.
Harry wasn’t ever exactly the most perceptive observer of what was going on, now was he? Especially in regards to Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.
But then, because of Albus, Harry - like so many others in Albus’ care before him - had never been properly taught to recognize, value, and make independent moral choices. Because Albus himself had never quite grasped the character or importance of them. Albus fundamentally misunderstood the nature of moral choice from the beginning, and never did quite learn better. (Trying to game that trial in the cave even at the last moment…)
Severus Snape, eventually, learned and understood. Because he taught himself. Because he was open. Not unafraid, but willing nonetheless. Because he had courage. Because he had heart.
They’re the same thing, you know, at root. Our ‘courage’ is just a borrowing from an Old French derivative of the Latin cor, heart, from which we also get ‘core.’
Harry ultimately got something right, in his own partial way. The bravest man I ever knew. Oh, Harry, if only you did know...
Severus Snape was not and is not a hollow man, unlike both of his masters. Severus’s greatest strength was and is his, ultimately indestructible, pure core. (I can’t help but see him as having a wand cored with unicorn hair. For all that he’s a figure of transformation and fierceness of heart, I think that healing purity is even more fundamental to his nature. More on this later though.)
His pure core, however, is also what may have been the one thing that others’ and his own actions may have put at the greatest risk for him in the series. Especially if he, as I speculate he may have in my shadow reading, had to resort to a gravity assist in order to rescue himself and everyone else from the path of potential destruction that Albus’ and Voldemort’s hollow-hearted war games cast them all into.
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Part V.2 - Gravity Assist
Returning to circles here.
One of the basic things we learn in science class, when we study astronomy (that class nobody could quite figure out the reason for including in the Hogwarts curriculum…), is that the Earth isn’t really flat. Though it appears so from our grounded perspective, in truth the ground is curved. The Earth is a (slightly imperfect) sphere, condensed by the force of gravity from an ancient cloud of loose material, into a solid whole of different layers, rotating endlessly. Around it orbits another sphere, the moon - our satellite, captured by Earth’s own gravity. This pair then orbits the sun, an immense heavenly furnace in which the force of gravity has drawn together enough material tightly enough that it begins to burn, fuse, and transform, providing energy and light over a span of eons as it works through its material. Other planets also orbit this sun, some with moons of their own (Viva La Pluto!), as do asteroids, bodies on sharply elliptical paths called comets, and so on. Drawn by gravity’s workings.
(Gravity, we should note, is not exactly a force exerted directly by objects on each other. It is, rather, the effect of the fact that every single object with any mass affects the fabric of spacetime merely by existing, changing its shape just a little. The metaphor of balls of different weights sitting on a rubber sheet, creating pockets that draw in any other marble rolled across the sheet, is a classic.)
The sun is, of course, just one of billions of stars, in one of billions of galaxies filled with stars and clouds of gas and particles, in a galactic cluster, in a small corner of the universe. Clouds condense into stars, burn, and collapse in upon themselves, ultimately ending up in one of two states: either expanding to a hollow shell and exploding outward, scattering cosmic material throughout the area, and then collapsing inward and dying into cool, burnt-out husks called dwarf stars; or collapsing so far under the power of their own gravity that they seem to hollow themselves out and become black holes, Black holes are objects so dense that even light cannot escape once drawn into a black hole’s gravity well, but orbits endlessly around the object instead. Objects that - it is theorized - may be so heavy they tear through the fabric of spacetime itself and open wormholes into other corners of the universe or other times, if we could but pass through the event horizon and survive the unthinkable pressure and torqueing of everything. (You did see Interstellar, right? Remember that wormholes are three-dimensional, spherical holes, not flat portals, and they warp everything, even time.)
And everything is in motion. Constant motion, never quite the same twice, everything spinning and circling everything else. The cosmic dance, the music of the spheres.
Let’s think about the Potterverse, magically and morally, as a universe proper here for a moment. Bodies in motion around each other, exerting influence on each other and thereby affecting both the makeup and the paths of each other as they move.
And remember that the key terms we’re dealing with here are fundamental: life, death, transformation. The physical and the spiritual. Knowledge. Sight. Choice. Love. That sort of thing.
Well, what can hypothesize for starters? What sort of bodies are we dealing with? (Allowing for a little flexibility in the metaphor here…)
Albus? Albus is a red giant - old, cool, swollen and hollow, his best matter long ago used up. He might manage to go nova and shed his outer layer in a brief explosion before collapsing and dying to a brown or white dwarf, or he might draw himself in so far that he begins to suck in light itself. Whatever his end, he has a habit of drawing in satellites and keeping them in tight orbits, and he’s influenced the paths of a number of other bodies and variables here. Not all of which he’ll tell you about, leaving them to come careening in like comets at inconvenient moments, from unexpected angles.
Voldemort, it should be obvious, is a black hole. He long ago collapsed completely in on himself, far past the point of no return, and so he swings through the world dragging in after him and warping everything that gets near him, even light. Tearing through himself to hollowness, inverting the very meaning of the terms life and death. He flees relentlessly from physical death, which he fears above all else, but he (unconsciously) embodies the very essence of spiritual death. And he deals out both happily - it’s the one thing you can be sure of receiving from him: death or death. There’s no reversing his course now; only the smallest deviations regarding the details are possible. He seems to have been potentially a clinical psychopath from childhood - he was always going to be potentially dangerous and needing careful care - but not every clinical psychopath turns into a ravening dark lord bent on pure destruction. That’s Albus’ doing. The kindest thing that could be done for Voldemort was to kill him - send him and the scattered pieces of his soul (I refuse to accept that they may be destroyed) back to the other side of the Veil, where they can reunite and perhaps hopefully one day he’ll have another chance. But until then, he and his train of satellites - he’s as happy to collect them as Albus - are happy to swoop through the neighborhood and sweep away everything they can.
Severus is the real curiosity here, because he keeps changing. A satellite, a ship trying to navigate its own way; a young star trying to get started. A star-ship? (I did say we have to be flexible here. ;) )
Harry and Draco and the students: other young clouds of possibility, still in the process of forming but with a general enough shape; will they be satellites or masters of their own fates?
I think you get the general picture.
Now, going back to orbital mechanics for a moment.
There’s a maneuver you often see deployed in sci-fi movies and books, in which a ship needs to alter its course or speed, but there’s a limited amount of fuel available. So the crew decides to take advantage of the gravity well of some nearby celestial body and slingshot around it. This is called a gravity assist, or gravitational slingshot, and it’s based on fundamental principles of classical mechanics. When done properly, it can be enormously useful - it’s how we got the Voyager flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things.
It just takes tremendously careful calculation to get right.
Here is the Wikipedia page for the concept, if you want to read about it. In brief, the idea is to use the relative movement of one massive object (A) to influence the movement of another, smaller object (B). It can be used to increase or decease speed, and/or to alter direction. The gravity of A will - depending on the direction and angle of approach - either drag B forward, adding to its momentum, or pull it back, slowing it down, and as it circles A, B can exit the gravity well heading in a different direction than it had been previously. Indeed, it can even reverse course completely and gain enormous speed:
“…if the spaceship travels in a path which forms a parabola, it can leave the planet in the opposite direction without firing its engine, and the speed gain at large distance is indeed 2U [twice the planet’s own speed] once it has left the gravity of the planet far behind.”
Here’s a picture.
Now, an often-ignored detail of this little trick is that, according to the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, the little spaceship or what have you, B, isn’t the only object being affected. Small though it is, the ship or what have you does have a gravity of its own, and this affects the course of the planet, A, that it is slingshotting around. Since planets are so much more massive than ships, the effect is usually so slight as to be negligible, and is left out of calculations.
But a small, potentially measurable change does occur.
Remember that. It’s a clue.
Now, what does a gravitational slingshot have to do with alchemy?
Well, one of the fundamental principles of alchemical work is that, in order to achieve the Stone, to reach a higher stage, decay and destruction are necessary. You have to go through the nigredo, through stages of putrefaction and confusion and having all that was solid dissolve, the old burnt away, before you can achieve the new. The golden phoenix must reduce himself to black ash in order to renew himself and his healing power, just as the serpent must shed his skin.
It’s mirror logic, mythic logic, the logic of the spiral and of the spiritual trial of Merlin's Cave. You must go down in order to go up. Virgil and Dante must go to the lowest pit of Hell (reserved for traitors, interestingly enough, and frozen in ice) and climb Satan’s very body in order to reach the shores of the mountain of purgatory and the way to paradise. (Do remember, also, that Satan’s other name is Lucifer, the brightest of angels, and he was once the teacher of all the other angels. Paradox abounds.)
You must fall, to fly.
It’s just that falling is inherently risky. Like brewing Felix, like slingshotting around a massive celestial body, there’s always a chance that you smash into the ground and die in the attempt.
So you’d best prepare as well as you can before you set out. (A concept Gryffindors do struggle with…) Or have a reliable guide.
At best, though, a guide can only ever take you part of the way anyway. Isn’t that so, Severus? And he didn't have the most reliable ones...
The key to remember is that what matters above all here is motion. Not static circles or lines, but spirals. (An image that, as a brewer, I imagine Severus found familiar and easy to think in. The liquids spiraling down into the cauldron as you stir, the steam spiraling up…)
Next up I think will be a discussion about Severus Snape’s fundamental values, his relationship to Voldemort, and what his boggart might have been. We know his patronus - though I want to say more about that later - but we must speculate as to what shape his fears took. I have an idea though.
Also, some discussion of the nature of Severus’ occlumency and thoughts on the Dark Mark.
Then we can get to the nature of the awakening I think he had somewhere between the end of GOF and the opening of HBP, how Albus’ betrayals affected him, and the particular peril he thought he might be facing and how he got through it.
*
By way of a postscript: I imagine that, were he to put it in geometric terms, Severus might very well agree with me and describe the idea of the moral life, of being a good man, as something of an asymptote - at best, with no deviations, approaching the true line every closer without ever quite perfectly achieving it. Ma’at is dynamic, after all, and there is always a new choice to make, with new ramifications. And we all deviate at times; it’s a fact of human nature. But consider that there are often more dimensions to things than we at first see, and that the alchemical work continues, again and again. Consider then the curvilinear asymptote - a curve spiraling around a line asymptotically - and imagine what a three-dimensional curvilinear asymptote might look like when reduced to two dimensions. When seen either head-on, or from the side.
You’d get a point within a circle, for the one. And a line with gradually decreasing fluctuations above and below it, for the other.
And then remember how, with all these spiraling images we get, there’s often a reversal. A flux point. Mirrored spirals. And remember that velocity is variable too.
I promise this is all relevant. Bear with me.
(There’s just so much I could talk about. The hydra and the immortal jellyfish (it’s a real thing), Dark Arts and morality, what the hell being a “Death Eater” even means… The Tower and the Cave, purity, all the grail quest stuff. Severus’ archetypes, the fact that he’s a healer and a traitor as well as a teacher, the description of Spinner’s End, green fire, all the bird and serpent imagery and the constellation Scorpio as the eagle and serpent, the axis mundi. Now I know why swythyv felt overwhelmed. And I should be writing my dissertation!)