00:44 - 20.08.06
Puzzled
Yesterday I was working through my Archetypes workbook. The written material I had sent off earlier in the week left me needing to clean out some emotional wounds. The archetypes - the great myths/templates - are commonly held in most cultures all around the world, although they take on the local colour and values, of course. I decided I needed to take a break, so surfed to one of the Harry Potter essayists who uses the archetypal system to analyse and interpret the series of JK Rowling. The Fool/Hero Journey. One of the articles in particular seemed to evoke a fairly strong series of images and resolutions to issues I was dealing with in another context. One of the strings of discussion that fascinated me was the speculation about the previous "Dark Wizard" - Gridelwald - who was defeated by Dumbledore in 1945. The story of Beowulf - if Albus is taken to be the hero Beowulf - seems to provide a template for the Harry Potter stories with respect to Dumbledore, even to the confrontation between Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy on the Astronomy/Astrology Tower - an archetypal card in Tarot and mentioned by the divination teacher Sybil Trelawny just prior to the raid of the Death Eaters at Hogwarts. I've often wondered why JKR chose the Motto - "Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus" (don't tickle sleeping dragons) to be set underneath the Hogwarts school crest. She rarely puts any item into her books unless they have an impact on the plot. When Beowulf confronts the dragon, even though he has defeated both the monster Grendel - who lives in a swampy forest=Grindelwald - and Grendel's mother among many others, he is killed. The story mentions a locket, a cup, a sword, and a corslet, not unlike to the horcruxes sought by Harry. It is the corselet that is involved in the confrontation of the dragon that is the bane of Beowulf. Hmmmm. Waking the power residing in Draco Malfoy will likely have a significant impact on the story in the seventh book I think.
One aspect of JKR's background is often missed, but is likely essential to the writing she does, even if not always on a conscious level. She was a researcher for Amnesty International for a period of time, remember. In this particular essay, quite a bit of the AI background becomes apparent during the discussion - the issue of torture, you see. The use of torture is usually carried out in a context to terrify and thus cow those who witness it's effects. It reduces resistance and causes such fear that instead of the population working together, they begin to fear and attack each other - self-harming behaviour. The choice of the torture victim is driven by that intention. People who are trusted and respected in the group are disfigured or destroyed in some fashion, leaving those who saw the victim as indestructible or the model of purity to lose faith and trust in the rest of their peers. At the scene in the cave when Dumbledore drinks the potion - likely created by Snape when he was a Death Eater - it induces in Dumbledore powerful flashbacks to his worst memories. The words seem to indicate that at some point Dumbledore was tortured and forced to watch or participate in the torture of friends or family or both. He was made to feel as though it was his fault and choice that they had been harmed by Grindelwald. That is also a very common practice when torture is used systematically by any group.
I know dear diary, but this is all information I learned when I took the Survivors of Torture course through the Red Cross. It is also what I witnessed directly when working both with the one survivor I was matched with through the Red Cross and also with some of the children and their families I worked with in my sons' classrooms. To say that that chapter in the Half Blood Prince bothered me is a very big understatement. It triggered a lot of painful recollections about other people's suffering that I witnessed directly. When it appeared in the Harry Potter story, my first response was to say to myself that "this is a children's story" and then to suppress those awful memories once again using that mantra. Couldn't be real, right?
Even decades after someone experiences a traumatic event like torture or abuse at the hands of a trusted person/group or in war, small things can trigger flashbacks. A smell, a taste, a sound that was present during the traumatic event. In the fictionalized story, even Dumbledore can be destroyed through retriggering those memories. It is interesting that the potion also mimics the effect that the Dementors have on most people - such as Harry. Dumbledore seemed to be protected from that effect from the Dementors, but was vulnerable when the potion was substituted instead. I am curious to know what the counter curse is for that - maybe the Avada Kedavra curse? It would have to be something counter-intuitive I think.
When one works with someone experiencing a real flashback, one needs to find a way to interrupt the surging memories. That is usually done by the survivor themselves through finding even one little thing that is different from the initial experience. For example, they might look at their shoes and focus on the fact that those were not the shoes they were wearing at the time of the actual trauma. That one fixed item then allows the survivor to focus on a reference point that allows them to rebuild their awareness of the real-time setting that they occupy and thus reduce the power of the memories. If they are unable to do that for themselves, then someone in the area can try to assist by verbally intervening or drawing the person's attention to something they know would not have been part of the initial trauma. It can be a very difficult intervention if the person trying to help does not know all the details. For example, if you opted to hold the person's hand, trying to get them to focus on your presence, it will not work if someone in the initial torture also held one of their hands. The other danger is the psychological damage that may make the survivor transpose you into the place of the abuser. For example, in cases of inter-family incest, the outside world is cast as the perpetrator and the abuser takes to themselves the role of saviour or protector. Especially in the case of small children, since they know nothing other than what the abuser tells them, they have no way of understanding that the "bad feelings" that they experience when encountering the outside world are actually the source of their salvation from abuse.
A similar effect can be seen in populations that are insulated from the outside world because faith issues or a fear imposed by the leaders and the state controlled media that the rest of the world is against them and wants to destroy their culture. Sound familiar?
The power of the internet and why it causes such fear in existing governments is that they can't control voices that are excluded but that need to be heard. I think that was what JKR was trying to get at when the story about the death of Cedric in the "Goblet of Fire" was finally published in the Loony alternate newspaper "The Quibbler" when the mainstream papers chose to follow the Ministry of Magic's demand that Harry be made out to be delusional and disruptive to the safety of the wizarding world at all costs. Of course, I am well aware that the Harry Potter stories are fictional, but that doesn't mean their analysis/portrayal of current human and government behaviour are false.
Anyway time for exercise dear diary. We had a very hot smoke filled day (forest fires). It is just cool enough now that it is safe to do so. Need to burn off some stress you see. Guess you can tell I need to do a lot more work in my archetypes book too. The Hero stories just aren't working out right yet. What is the right question anyway?
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