Harry Potter's Invitation to the World
by Vickie Ewell
Chapter 10 – Harry Learns About Hogwarts (HP Chapter 4)
After Hagrid’s revelation that Harry was a wizard, everyone in the room went completely silent. All they could hear was the sea and the whistling wind. Biblical scripture tells us that those filled with The Holy Spirit are like the wind. We can hear the wind. We can see its effects, but we do not know where it comes from or where it is going. Neither can we stop it or control it. It comes and goes as it pleases.
Likewise, we don’t see how Hagrid arrived at the shack. We heard him outside. We heard him knock. We saw the door crash to the floor, but we don’t know how Hagrid traveled there, and he doesn’t say. His attitude was also like the wind. He intended on doing whatever he wanted, and right now, his desire was to pick up Harry. No matter how hard Mr. Dursley fought against him, he cannot win. You cannot fight against the wind. The wind cannot be controlled.
When Harry finally found his voice, he gasped. “I’m a what?”
Never had any such thing ever entered his mind. Being a wizard was outside of his reality. Hagrid assured Harry that he will follow in his parents’ footsteps, and that with a bit of training, he will become a good wizard. Hagrid’s words don’t necessarily reveal what Hagrid believed about the concept of good versus evil. He spoke in terms of good and evil, but that might be because duality is what most mortals understand. The best teachers always use concepts and symbols their students can relate to, even if they do not believe in those concepts themselves.
Hagrid handed Harry a new letter. This one was addressed to Mr. H. Potter, the floor (where he was sleeping), at the Hut-on-the-Rock, the sea. It would not have mattered where Mr. Dursley took Harry to hide him. Since Harry was being tracked, Hagrid would have known exactly where he was and how to get there.
We now discover that Hogwarts was actually Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and that its headmaster was Albus Dumbledore, the well-balanced wizard we met in Chapter 1. Dumbledore was of the Order of Merlin. He’s a First Class wizard, a Grand sorcerer, a Chief Warlock, and Supreme Mugwump. He was also a member of the International Confederation of Wizards.
A Hogwart is an annual plant that grows in dry, open areas, and is especially hardy in sandy and rocky soils. Whether seeds fall in sandy or rocky soil, Hogwarts will help those seeds to sprout and grow. Annual means its foliage dies at the end of the year and its roots re-grow a new plant the next. So the kids go home each summer and return in the fall.
A Hogwart is also covered in tan hair that looks like white wool. The school helps its students achieve the White Stone. Hogwarts also contained croton oil, a powerful laxative, so in addition, it carried the power to detoxify and cleanse everyone within its walls.
Overall, Hogwarts represents repentance and salvation, yearly growth from one liberating step to another, and offered an individual everything he or she needed to become passive, loving, and clean. As we see in the last book of the series, Hogwarts can only take you so far. Like all spiritual traditions, it can show you the door at the end of its path, the doorway that leads to the red stone, the perfection of your masculine qualities, but you have to be the one to walk through that door yourself. That perfection occurs elsewhere, outside of Hogwarts.
The letter told Harry that he had been accepted to Hogwarts, that a list of items he needed to bring with him was enclosed. School began on September 1, and they would be awaiting his owl. It was signed by the Deputy Headmistress, Minerva McGonagall, the woman and cat we met in Chapter 1.
Tons of questions raced through Harry’s mind, but the first one he asked Hagrid about was the owl. That question reminded Hagrid that he needed to let Dumbledore know he had arrived safely. So Hagrid pulled a live owl from the pocket inside of his overcoat and quickly scribbled a note to Dumbledore. It said he had hand-delivered Harry the letter and was taking Harry to buy the things that he needed for school himself. He then tied the note to the owl’s leg and threw the owl outside into the storm.
Uncle Vernon had not yet given up hope that he would win the confrontation. He didn’t understand that Hagrid had just notified Dumbledore that Harry was now in his custody. Vernon clearly stated, “He’s not going.” It quickly became a force against force, of will. Hagrid said he would like to see a great Muggle like Vernon try to stop him. When Harry asked what a Muggle was, Hagrid defined it as non-magic folk, and told Harry that it was Harry’s bad luck that caused him to grow up in a family like the Dursleys – the largest Muggles that Hagrid had ever seen.
The Dursleys are firmly tied to the material world and functioning out of their conditioning, but they are not the worst Muggles that Harry could have been brought up by. They are just the densest people that Hagrid had met so far. In the future, Hagrid will meet up with his half-brother and discover there are even more difficult Muggles to deal with than the Dursley’s, but the Dursleys were bad enough to produce within Harry’s heart the yearning and longing for Liberation. That was their role in Harry’s life.
In a sense, the Dursleys represent all of our past lives bundled up into one family, or maybe just the last set of incidents that get us to want out of this man-made world. Unfortunately, Uncle Vernon remained cemented to the idea that he was going to stop all of this nonsense and stamp the Wizard out of Harry. It’s kind of like how some people believe in ghosts and some people don’t. Some people believe in miracles and some people don’t. Those who don’t cannot understand those who do.
It finally dawned on Harry that the Dursleys knew he was a wizard, but hadn’t told him. Harry was a little slow, apparently. But it wasn’t Uncle Vernon who replied to Harry’s accusation; it’s Aunt Petunia. Her envy of her sister triggered an emotional outburst she had been holding onto for years. Her sister, Harry’s mother, had received a letter to Hogwarts the same as Harry, and Harry’s grandparents were proud of his mother. There was insecurity within Petunia’s words, and a false belief that her parents loved her sister more than her.
Perhaps that was why it was so difficult to love Harry, so she had directed all of her love towards her son. Harry’s presence produced memories and emotional baggage she didn’t want to deal with. Rather than looking at the situation clearly, that Dumbledore had chosen her to mother a Wizard that was temporarily under his care, she talked as if she resented her sister and her Wizarding husband getting themselves killed because that was what caused her to get stuck with Harry. Harry had become a daily reminder of how she really felt about herself: less than.
What upset Harry about her outburst wasn’t the way she felt about him, but the fact that she lied about how his parents died. That upset Hagrid as well. “CAR CRASH!” he roared, once again angry enough to send the Durlsey’s running for cover. Hagrid felt the Dursleys have behaved unjustly toward Harry, not telling him his own story, when every child in the Wizarding World knew Harry’s name.
That peaked Harry’s curiousity, of course, and Harry’s desire to know what Hagrid was talking about calmed Hagrid down immediately.
Hagrid told Harry that Dumbledore had warned him that he might have difficulty getting Harry away from the Dursleys, but Hagrid didn’t understand how little Harry knew. The inference here is that the Masters of Compassion respond to our desire for freedom by helping us ascend, but the job of helping us to let go of the physical world wasn’t always easy. The first step was probably just as hard, or harder, than the last one.
The physical world or forces that initially arise in opposition against the Masters (our own mortal conditioning, most likely) makes a gatekeeper’s job rough. It was not a simple matter of contact, because like Vernon, we often tell ourselves that we are just imagining things. It’s not real. It’s nonsense.