Mirrors, Memories and Magic
Originally presented at Azkatraz, July 2009. Posted with permission.
I’m going to talk today about mirrors in the Potterverse, the forms they take their impact. While I’ll be touching on several characters, not just Harry, I’m going to devote some extra time to Voldemort and Snape, whose experiences give us a fuller understanding of Harry’s.
Mirrors, literary and literal, pepper the narrative from Vernon Dursley’s dismissal of the reflection of the cat reading a map in his rear-view mirror, to the epilogue in which Ron Weasley forgets to look in his wing-mirror during his Muggle driving test. Every mirror we encounter on the pages between journey’s beginning and end adds to our understanding of the characters, their development, and the overarching tasks we share with them.
The Potterverse isn’t alone in its use of mirror imagery. Fairy tales and myth are populated with magical mirrors and enchanted reflections, their function often interpreted in mystical terms: as the embodiment of the viewer’s soul, as a mark of the threshold between worlds, or as a shield against evil spirits.
Stepping through the looking glass as in Alice in Wonderland—passing between the world we know and an enchanted one, and scrying the future via mirror are just two examples of this scheme of mirrors as magic.
The Potterverse also gives us a whole array of mirrors. The Muggle mirror used by Hermione protected her against the Basilisk’s murderous gaze. The pair of enchanted mirrors Sirius gave to Harry for communicating with him – subsequently forgotten, then broken, alluding to the isolation Harry experienced throughout his fifth year.
Psychologically, the mirror’s function is no less magical. Jungian psychologists remind us that it’s “the function of the mirror, and it is
also the capacity of human consciousness to turn back on itself in self-critical, self-observing, self-scrutinizing reflection.” Mirrors give us a point of view that we would be otherwise unable to obtain. Without the capacity to reflect, we have no avenue through which to see ourselves.
The mirror, its reflection, and the eye that regards it are each part of the circle within which we obtain self-knowledge. It’s no coincidence that each appearance of Aberforth Dumbledore’s eye in the broken mirror occurs prior to moments of reflection that push Harry beyond his old expectations.
But no matter how appealing self-knowledge may be, there are facets of our selves that are frightening to look at closely, too overwhelming to embrace easily. We split off these shadow aspects until we are capable of recognizing them as part of ourselves and take them back again.
Magic in the wizarding world provides a tangible representation of this natural developmental process. Fragmented reflections, split off and projected out there, frightening and distorted—appear in the nightmares of children, in the flaming breath of fairy tale dragons, and in the menacing forms of Dementors, Basilisks, and Boggarts. The hero’s task, to slay the Basilisk, drive back the Dementor and laugh in the terrifying face of the Boggart mirrors everyone’s challenge to face those monsters and to ultimately contain and reintegrate the shadows in order to become whole.
Harry’s journey ensnares us because this journey—the journey towards integration—is ours as well.
Today, I will focus on three of the mirrors we encounter in the text and the ways in which they aid in these developmental tasks.
The Mirror of Erised; the Boggart; and the Patronus.
The first truly enchanted mirror we encounter in the text is the Mirror of Erised. What Harry sees in that ancient glass seems as real to him as the reflection of his untidy hair in the bathroom mirror.
But it’s Albus Dumbledore, our ever-imperfect guide, who explains to Harry and to us that we must beware of surface appearances, that things are not always as they seem—especially in an enchanted world.
The Mirror of Erised
“… shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts,” Dumbledore explains…
and…
“…will give us neither knowledge or truth… It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
It may not do to dwell on dreams, but here, for the very first time, we, along with Harry, get a tangible glimpse of what has been lost to him, and the depth of his longing for the parents murdered when he was small. And so, despite the warnings of Albus Dumbledore, the mirror does provide knowledge: the sorts of self-knowledge mystical mirrors
often do.
Even after Harry no longer has access to the mirror, what he takes with him is the realization that it matters to have belonged to this
family. He sees his deepest desire in the mirror, to know without any doubt that he belonged to them, with them, that they were people like him, and they loved him.
“The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was
hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.”
Harry instinctively wants to reach beyond the looking glass. It’s not enough to see his wish. It seduces, but it can never satisfy. And yet, the Mirror of Erised gave Harry a gift—permission to feel deeply about the family he lost and to acknowledge his longing to belong with them.
Those attachments were real, they are real, and death alone can’t destroy them. Recognizing them and taking back the longing denied him allows Harry to finally hold his family firmly inside himself, where now he can—and does—find them, especially in times of trouble. The intensity of Harry’s vision in the Mirror of Erised, is paralleled in the text by the terror evoked by the Dementors. Harry, whose most traumatic experience occurred on the night his parents were murdered, is initially debilitated by exposure to these creatures that consume happiness and leave only memories of despair.
It’s likely that even had he never seen his family reflected in the Mirror of Erised, Dementors would still have evoked flashbacks of
that night. But the fact that he has had several years in which to hold on, psychologically, to his parents makes reliving the memories even more terrifying. The mother whose voice he hears is not a mother whose face he can’t remember, but one whose eyes were soft and warm and who cried tears of joy to see him.
It’s apt that Harry’s Boggart—a creature that morphs into the viewer’s worst fear—takes the shape of a Dementor. What Harry fears most is the shadow aspect of himself: his own fear, rage, and despair. Never before permitted to speak or even think about the parents he lost, he was also deprived of the opportunity to mourn them with all the chaotic messiness of grief. The Boggart mirrors for Harry a part of himself that he believes to be weakness—his monstrous (and justified) fear, sadness, and rage.
But until Harry recognizes and assimilates what he fears is a monster inside him, he can’t possibly hope to conquer the unspeakable
monster outside. Until Harry can accept his own frailties and welcome those parts of himself that make him feel small, he can’t
face Voldemort, the monstrous wizard who tore his own soul to pieces to avoid facing his own Shadow fears of abandonment.
But Harry does face the monsters, inside and out… and the enchantment he learns from Professor Lupin to drive back the fear
and despair brings us to our final, and in my view, the text’s most cohesive mirror of the self.
The Patronus.
It’s no wonder that as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Snape had methods he preferred to the Patronus for driving back
Dementors. The corporeal Patronus is perhaps the most accurate and revealing mirror in the Potterverse, and one that Death Eaters
would not only shrink from using if they could, but are, according to Rowling (with one notable exception) incapable of using at all.
In order to understand the nature of the Patronus as a mirror, we need to spend a moment reflecting on souls and memory.
The heart of the narrative—particularly in books 6 and 7–revolves around the consequences of destroying a human soul, and takes us on the journey to find those lost fragments and return them to their source.
Voldemort’s intentional fragmentation of his soul—his self—takes the healthy, normative process of development that I described earlier and turns it on its head. It’s no coincidence that this supposedly menacing wizard appears in the form of a baby prior to the
reconstitution of his body in Goblet of Fire, and again as a torn soul fragment in the shape of a wounded infant at the end of Deathly
Hallows. Instead of facing the normal fears and conflicts of childhood, even a traumatic childhood, and resolving them on the road to maturity, Voldemort refused to face the mirror, turning himself into the most monstrous entity of all – unspeakable, uncontrollable, non-reflective shadow.
When, as the Jungians would say, we face the split off parts of ourselves, seek these sparks of soul rather than disperse them, we gain flashes of insight and self-awareness over time—glimmers of light illuminating dark corners. Ultimately, our job is to gather the sparks together, to find these shining, hidden treasures, so that we can become ourselves, become mature, become whole.
The external mirrors in the Potterverse provide avenues for insight, pathways to find the sparks. But they can’t reflect the essential wholeness of a person and they aren’t meant to.
But memory originates inside a person and can be extracted and viewed, providing an accurate mirror of events, even revealing more than the subject was conscious of at the time.
Memory, with all its attendant emotion, also serves as fuel for the Patronus Charm.
Harry’s early attempts to conjure a Patronus fail not simply because this is “very advanced magic”, according to Lupin, but more
specifically because the memories Harry tries to use aren’t suited for this particular enchantment.
The first time Harry produces a Patronus while we are privy to his emotional state is at the Hogwarts Lake while his three-hour younger self observes from afar, surrounded by Dementors. Desperate to stay conscious, Harry looks across the lake and sees a wizard he believes to be his father—though he knows his father is dead—cast a Patronus that drives the Dementors away.
It isn’t until later that he and we understand that what he was was akin to looking into a mirror.
As he gazes across the lake at the figure bathed in light, Harry sees himself as he can be, as he will be. He sees who he becomes when
he must. He draws upon unspoken knowledge, his attachment to and identification with the father he so resembles to cast himself into the breach and cast a shield against a fate worse than death.
The Patronus, fuelled by memory and attachment, energized by the capacity to love and be loved—this Patronus can take corporeal
shape and protect against even an army of Dementors. And this person, with attachments to others, who is not alone … this person
can reach within him or herself and draw out the greatest weapon of all, the shield Dumbledore attributed to love.
How is it that love can provide such powerful protection?
Feeling love and being loved by another are the building blocks of a person and provide us with resilience against emotional assault.
During the earliest days of childhood—those months, for example, that Harry spent being cared for by his parents—the gleam of
pleasure in a parent’s eye acts as our first and most powerful mirror.
It’s a mirror that reflects not precisely me, but the delight that is conjured as if by magic in you because of me.
It’s a mirror that reflects no less than the connection between two souls.
In the text, we’re shown again and again that the Patronus is a corporeal form that mirrors the caster. We learn by Harry’s example
that we must understand a person’s self in part by the attachments they form. This view is further reinforced when we learn that the
change in Tonks’ Patronus is related to her tenacious love for Remus Lupin.
There is one other character whose Patronus is similarly revealing.
Severus Snape.
Harry knows instinctively the moment the Silver Doe appears in the Forest of Dean that it’s benevolent. He knows without proof, needs no evidence other than the fact of its existence.
Could there be a more dazzling reversal of the shadowed way in which Snape is usually described—oily, sneering, swathed in black,
eyes hidden from view—than this?
“A bright silver light … It was a silver-white doe, moon-bright and
dazzling, … her beautiful head with its wide, long-lashed eyes held
high…”
And of course Snape’s Patronus succeeded in its primary objective: to be a conduit that would be trusted.
A Patronus can be trusted.
A Patronus, a figure of dazzling light—sparks of the soul, fuelled by silver memory, can only be conjured in the reflective gaze of
emotional truth.
Much has been made of Severus Snape’s devotion to Harry Potter’s mother, Lily. Childhood friends, a lifelong love, many understand the Silver Doe to be a tangible representation of Lily, and of Severus’ eternal love for her.
I disagree.
After Dumbledore tells Snape the last bit of information that Harry needs in order to finish off Voldemort for good, we are told that Snape was horrified. Objecting to the Machiavellian treatment of Harry, Snape rails at the risks he has endured for years, all in the name of keeping Lily Potter’s son safe. Provoked by Dumbledore, confronted about his feelings, Snape casts his Patronus in wordless response.
Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he
turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
“After all this time?”
“Always,” said Snape.
More than language could ever say, Snape’s Patronus shows Dumbledore that he loves. He and Dumbledore both attribute the
source of this capacity to Lily – to a mirror outside of Snape. But without the capacity to love, without the memory of attachments that anchor him—that matter to him, he would have no more ability to cast that Patronus than would Tom Riddle.
It isn’t Lily who is responsible for that Patronus but rather Snape’s own capacity to love, and be loved in return. No matter that the object of his attachment was lost, no matter that the person he remembers is gone from this world. The gleaming reflection in the eye of the one you love that exists simply because you do lives on.
Like silver memory transfigured into soul.
And so, in the Shrieking Shack, when Voldemort sends Nagini one last time to “KILL”:
“Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes…”
Memories—silver like the Patronus… like a soul reflected in the mirror. Harry gathers the memories in the flask, but Snape is not finished yet.
“Look. . . at. . . me. . . . ” he whispered.”
Had Severus Snape been capable of lifting his wand and conjuring the magical energy to cast his Patronus as he lay bleeding, he might have—and from the creature of light, and love–from the essence of his self and his intact soul, he could have told Harry what he needed to know. Instead, he gave him the fuel behind the Patronus he could not cast.
He gave him memory.
He gave him a mirror of himself.
“Look at me…” See me true, like the reflection of my soul in a mirror.
“And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?”
See me as I am, not in fragments. See me whole and let me see my reflection in your eyes and the spark that shows me that you understand who I am.
For once.
At last.
And when you do, when you are capable of seeing, you will have what you need to recognize yourself in the mirror—light and dark
together—and then, you will have what you need to make the world right again.