Monday 27 April 2015

The Dragon's Head

On 25 December 800, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, a delegation of Eastern monks was present in Aachen. They sang a Greek hymn which pleased the pious emperor (who rose daily at 5am for Matins) so much that he had it translated into Latin. The various stanzas of the hymn were used as antiphons, which were used eventually at the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. So our liturgy teacher told us. The fourth antiphon runs:

Caput draconis contrivit Salvator in Iordanis flumine; ab eius potestate omnes eripuit.
‘The dragon’s head the Saviour has crushed in the Jordan river; out of his power He has torn all men.’

The initial words of this antiphon sounded familiar, and so they were:

At the very end of the corridor hung a portrait of a very fat woman in a pink silk dress.
‘Password?’ she said.
Caput draconis,’ said Percy, and the portrait swung forward to reveal a round hole in the wall the Gryffindor common room, a cosy, round room full of squashy armchairs.

This, as you will have divined, occurs on Harry Potter’s first evening at Hogwarts. The password of Harry’s house is the first part of a liturgical antiphon celebrating Christ’s victory over the devil, just like his parents’ gravestone in the last book contains a Biblical quote looking forward to the Resurrection.

I was excited about this discovery and decided to double-check. This was rather a let-down. It turns out that the password also has a place in a different symbolic universe: that of geomancy. Geomancy is a practice which seeks to know the future through reading patterns of soil, rocks or sand tossed on the ground. Wikipedia identifies 16 geomantic figures, consisting of four rows referring to the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth); each row can have either two points (passive) or one (active). 2 possibilities for each row * 4 rows = 16 figures.

The most ‘active’ figure is Via (the Way), which looks like this:
   x
   x
   x
   x

The most ‘passive’ figure is Populus (the People):
x    x
x    x
x    x
x    x

And this is Caput Draconis:
x    x
   x
   x
   x

This figure, Wikipedia tells us, is generally neutral, but fortunate with starting or beginning new things – such as a Hogwarts education. But there are stronger indications that Rowling was making a reference to geomancy. For one thing, Fortuna Major is one of the 16 figures and also functions as a Gryffindor password at some point.

Then there is an reversed pair of Albus (‘white’) and Rubeus (‘red’), which Harry Potter readers cannot fail to recognize as the first names of Dumbledore and Hagrid. The figures resemble, respectively, an upright and an overturned goblet. Albus stands for ‘peace, wisdom and purity’, and while the disagreeable elements of Rubeus have been excised from Hagrid’s character, it still refers to ‘good in all that is evil, and evil in all that is good’ (like a good heart in a fierce and towering appearance, seeing the spirited beauty in dangerous creatures, and unmasking overly smooth politeness?).

Anyhow, given the plurality of interpretations possible in any literary work, I’ll just stick with my own reading while acknowledging a potential tension with the mind of the human author.

P.S. I skimmed the Geomancy article on Wikipedia, which describes the formation of any chart of geomantic figures. The first four of these are random, or ‘inspired’ (take your pick); the other figures are computed from the first four. Thus one ultimately arrives at a chart of sixteen figures; or sometimes fifteen, in these troublous times, for so the section concludes:

A sixteenth figure, the Reconciler or superiudex, is also generated by adding the Judge and the First Mother, although this has become seen as extraneous and a ‘backup figure’ in recent times.

Who could have believed that the Judge and the First Mother would generate the Reconciler?