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.
