Apocalypse: Flight of the Prince (Book 6, Chapter 28)
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This week's episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is where you get farm fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. I don't know about you, but I get tired of just figuring out what's for dinner night after

night, especially on the busy weekdays. The kids are here. They have homework. I have work to do. And I look at my fridge and I'm just like, I don't know. There are a million things I could make. And I'm just doing math in my head. But it's easy to find time to eat well with 50 wholesome, hassle-free meals to choose from each week delivered to your door with HelloFresh. It takes all of the guesswork and planning out of it.

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It had not happened. It could not have happened. Out of here, quickly, said Snape. He seized Malfoy by the scruff. I'm Vanessa Zoltan. I'm Hannah McGregor. And this is Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Hannah McGregor, you and I have never coasted Harry Potter and the Sacred Text together. We have not. It feels so familiar and yet so unfamiliar. Oh,

I love about Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is that it introduced me to you like very early on in our Harry Potter and the Sacred Text journey. Once it was clear that we were going to actually be making a podcast, I was like, I wonder if there are any other good Harry Potter podcasts out there, like any other. And then you were like, oh, one. Yep. And it's called Witch, Please.

And I listened to an episode in which Marcel was breastfeeding while you guys were recording. And I was like, these are my people. I found them. These are my people. And then we reached out and you guys were just like immediately generous to us and like did a voicemail for us. And I just feel like you're a fish that I caught early and just keep reeling in more and more. Ooh.

Ooh, love that. I guess I die at the end of that metaphor. No, baby, never. I throw you back to swim around enough and then I pull you back in.

So now you and I co-host Hot and Bothered together. We do. And you are the host of Material Girls. That as well. Yeah. With Marcel Kosman. It's our sort of replacement for Witch Please because we, you know, read Harry Potter through twice and then we were like, all right, all right, we got to do something else. What Hannah and Marcel do is they pick a piece of text that either for a moment in the past or now was in the zeitgeist.

So, for example, Wicked. And they put it in conversation with a relevant piece of critical theory and introduce you to the critical theory and read that zeitgeisty text through that theme. And so you learn about critical theory. You learn more about a zeitgeisty piece of text.

And you come away feeling like you have just attended the most fun introduction graduate level seminar. Yeah, it's really our attempt to ask, like, what makes something enter the zeitgeist? Like, if something becomes popular and everybody's talking about it, like, well, what happened there? Like, why does everybody want to talk about this thing right now? And that's fun. We like asking. We like asking why. And then just coming up with,

theories because, you know, there's never actually a single correct answer. So I didn't know I was going to do this, but what I am going to now make you do, though, is describe to people our current season of Hot and Bothered. Yeah. In our current season of Hot and Bothered, Vanessa and I are watching a whole bunch of romantic movies, many rom-coms, but not exclusively rom-coms because we do also watch Titanic. Just some com, but not

And in each one, we ask what these movies are telling us about love, what they believe about love textually and subtextually. And along the way, we're having some very interesting conversations about what lessons we received about love from this syllabus of films. Yep. I'm having the time of my life. So I didn't even mean to quote Dirty Dancing while saying that, but I am. I'm having the time of my life.

One more announcement, and then we're going to jump into the episode, and that is just our Patreon bonus conversation. So today's theme is apocalypse. Hannah has a new book out called Clever Girl about Jurassic Park. And in this book, among other things, Hannah explores the idea of apocalypse. And so that is going to be our theme for today's episode. And so what we're going to talk about as our Patreon bonus is apocalypse.

packs. Are you preparing for the apocalypse? If you are, what's in your apocalypse pack? This is actually a key question for why Hot and Bothered started, so I'm really excited to dive into this. Wonderful. But now, Hannah, you have a story for us through this theme of apocalypse. What story do you have? I do. I want to just start off the story with just a gentle content warning for people because I'm going to talk about parental death and suicide. So when I was...

13 years old, my mom was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She'd had cancer already on and off since I was eight. She'd at that point had a full mastectomy, a lot of other surgeries. It was an experience that we were familiar with in the family, right? A new cancer diagnosis, a new round of chemo, radiation, surgeries, another six months, year of really hard times in the

And when I was 13, she was told that she would not recover this time.

I remember really vividly the day that she told me. She waited until the end of my summer vacation. I think she wanted me to have that last summer before I started high school, not knowing, you know, just able to sort of live in that space of not knowing for a while longer. And then she sat me down in this huge square plaid armchair we used to have that could fit two people. And she told me, and...

What I remember so vividly in that moment is thinking there can't be any after to this. She's going to die and there can't be anything after that. I can't conceive of a world after that.

And then for the next two and a half years, we sort of collectively lived inside the fact of her dying, which sometimes with cancer, as we know, is very, very fast and sometimes is very, very slow. And a lot of the treatments that we have for cancer don't really cure it. They just let you live with cancer for longer.

And for a while she did that. She did more chemo and more radiation. And then at some point she said, like, I'm tired of this. I don't want to do this anymore. So she decided to stop pursuing traditional treatment. And then eventually...

Because, you know, the cancer metastasized into her ribcage, into her pancreas, into her brain, into her lungs. We had an oxygen machine in the basement and a tube thrilled up through the floor so that she could always have her oxygen on. Eventually, she made the decision that she didn't want to live like that anymore. And so she waited until everybody in the house had gone to bed. And she took every drug in her drug cabinet.

And I woke up in the morning and she was in a coma. When we woke up, we called the oncologist. The oncologist came and said, you know, you have a choice right now. You can respect what is very clearly her choice, or we can bring her to the hospital, try to revive her. She'll be furious, but we can do that.

And my dad made the decision to respect her choice. I was going to say we made the decision, but like I was 16 and I wasn't making any significant medical or legal decisions. But we made the decision just to wait and see. And the day stretched on and on. And eventually I, the ever practical adultified child of trauma, decided we needed lunch because

And so I went out to get lunch for everybody. And while I was out getting lunch, she died. And I came back and a dear friend of the family had arrived and was in the doorway and was the person to tell me. I mean, that was it. That was the thing that two and a half years earlier, I had thought there's no after to this. And in that moment, it felt like an apocalypse. It felt like

the end of everything that I had known, everything that was familiar. And from the hindsight of many, many years, you know, this was 24 years ago now,

I can recognize both that it was an apocalypse of sorts, right? It was a moment in which my life changed in a way that it would never, ever be the same again. I changed in a way. Something brutal and true about the world was revealed to me, which is that people you love die for no reason and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. But the world didn't end, right? There was a lot of after to it. And there was a lot of

joyful, beautiful after to it. Like my life hasn't been just sad for the next 24 years. It's sometimes been pretty sad, but a lot of it has been remarkable. And that has forever changed my understanding of what apocalypse is, to understand that it can both be true, that something can be so awful that it changes the world forever and it will never be the same.

and also that that's not the end that there's stuff on the other side of it first of all i'm sorry thank you and i think that that is to me the most important thing about apocalypse also right is that there are a million of them all the time yeah we talk about them as this biblical when the zombies come then we'll know it's all over and it's all been for naught

And I just think that there are personal apocalypses like the one that you and your father and everyone who loved your mom went through. And those are full apocalypses. I mean, it's a whole genre of fiction. There is post apocalypse. Yeah. And I think, yeah, just this both are true. Right. Like, you know, everything ended that day. And yet.

So much kept going. Yeah. And the world itself is full of...

thousands of apocalypses, you know, both if we take a step back and look at the sort of long span of geological time, the fact that like whole eras of the earth, everything gets wiped out and it starts over again. You know, Clever Girl is also a book about dinosaurs. And it's like, yeah, yeah, something happened and dinosaurs weren't around anymore.

But also there are like many histories of cultural apocalypse, right? Cultures and civilizations that get destroyed. And some of those don't exist anymore afterwards, but many of them do. In Clever Girl, I quote Kim TallBear, who's a Indigenous science scholar. She has written and spoken about apocalypse quite a bit and says,

She particularly is interested in the idea that we are collectively living right now in what feels very much like an apocalyptic moment, but that the timeline for apocalypse is very different for Indigenous people. She's Dakota. She says, you know, Dakota people have been living post-apocalyptically for generations. The apocalypse was colonization.

The apocalypse was the decimation of the indigenous population and the violent seizure of lands and the cultural genocide that followed colonialism and that continues to endure. And so it's not for her a matter of saying like, no, you're wrong. This isn't an apocalyptic moment. That was an apocalyptic moment. But rather saying like,

We live in and through different apocalypses. And to actually understand what apocalypse means, we have to recognize that the world that, the society that we live in is a result of another apocalypse. Absolutely. And this is a chapter with a certain number of apocalypses, right? One of the parental figures in Harry's life dies right before him, Dumbledore dies. And I would say that this chapter is sort of

The chaos of the moment of apocalypse. Yes. Where people are figuring out in this moment of emergency, who am I now? Yeah. Everybody is getting this information about Dumbledore being dead, which is the end of an era. Yeah. And they are having these immediate post-apocalyptic responses. Yeah. The previous chapter ends with the moment of Dumbledore's death.

And then the following chapter begins with the Hogwarts community collectively recognizing Dumbledore's death. But this chapter is that space, that weird liminal space where it's happened, but you don't quite believe it's happened right. He's thinking like it can't be true. It can't possibly be true because the world can't exist without Dumbledore in it. Like that's not possible. So there must be something.

some way that I can fix this, right? And he's stuck in that moment of like, you know, that sort of magical thinking, like, I just need to catch Snape and put him in the same place as Dumbledore. And that will undo this somehow, because he hasn't yet processed that this isn't a thing that can be undone. And I think importantly, he knows cellularly,

that Dumbledore is dead because the spell broke. Yeah. Right? The Petrificus Totalus broke. I think that even though we think of apocalypse as one of the most final and finite things, it is actually also one of the most liminal things. Yes. Right? Because like you were saying earlier, it's something ended, which means that something else, even if it's just nothingness, is about to have to begin. Yeah. Well, speaking of things that have to begin and end, a 30-second recap has that feature. Yeah.

So good. Thank you. So good. You should teach a masterclass on segues. Okay, my friend, I will go first. Can you please count me in to my 30 second recap? Okay. Three, two, one.

So Harry is like, it's fine. I'm just going to go get Snape. And so he chases Snape and he's chasing after Snape and Snape. And he, Harry is trying to unforgivable curse Snape. And Snape is like, no, Harry, you're not going to be able to do that. No, not tonight. And then somebody cruciates Harry. And he's like, I knew it. Snape is a bad guy. And then Snape is like, no, no crucio. Leave him for Voldemort. And then he goes, I am the half-blood prince. And then Hagrid's house gets caught on fire, but don't worry. They get Fang out and then they put out the thing and the,

the house and then they go and they're standing over Dumbledore and Dumbledore's dead and R.A.B. I did it. Really good. Thank you.

Okay, Hannah McGregor, on your mark, get set, go. Okay, so Dumbledore dies. Harry tries to catch Snape. There's so many Death Eaters, and they're all pew-pewing, as you pointed out. Pew-pew!

Harry brings Hagrid into Dumbledore's body and then they open the locket and the locket's like, psych, this isn't even a Horcrux. And Harry's like, Dumbledore died for nothing. The end. The end. 30 seconds is such a short time. Yeah, I know. What I do is really hard. It's so hard. I am very brave. I was going to say, wow. Thank you, co-host Mindmeld. Yeah.

So Hannah, I mean, obviously there is a level at which just this chapter is an apocalypse, right? Hogwarts has had Dumbledore as its leader for, I don't know, some undisclosed amount of time, 30 years, 40 years. This is the end of an era. This is where I will stop and do the etymology of apocalypse. It's not gonna shock everybody, but it's ecclesiastical, right? It's a Christian idea. It comes from the Greek apokalenton,

which is to uncover or to reveal. And then the un is the reverse of that, right? So it's to cover what's uncovered. And to some extent, that's what this whole chapter is, right? The chaos of the world that is managed by Dumbledore, by rules at Hogwarts, by spells that protect people from coming in and out, that has all been uncovered. But we have to talk, I think, about apocalypse in the way that we think about it now in the last

at least 13 to 1500 years from the book of Revelation, right? And I think a lot of the imagery in this chapter is just from there, right? There are fires. There's going to be pew, pew, pewing like all over the place, right? It is chaotic. It is hot. Things are rising. Injustice is happening, but also great injustice is happening. And so this like chaotic revelation, truths will be revealed. They are not whole truths.

but they are new truths, right? This chapter really is set like the book of Revelation in that way. Yeah, it's a sort of, you know, fire rains down from the sky, monstrous figures appear, the world as you have known it is torn apart, right? We see physical damage being done to Hogwarts, right? The arrival of the Death Eaters and the sort of tearing apart both of this literal space, but also of the sort of

of Hogwarts as a safe and unassailable space gets torn apart and what comes after is by definition different. It just has to be. Hagrid's house catching fire, that to me is just the clumsiest

the clearest sign that Rowling is going for biblical imagery here. That like fire is being rained down in this place of innocence and of love, right? Hagrid is in his house trying to heal Bowtruckles. Right? Like he is trying to mend small stick animals. Yeah. And fire rains upon this. And Hagrid's cottage is so strongly associated with

Harry's early childhood, you know, his first arrival at Hogwarts when he doesn't fit in and doesn't understand anything. It's like the ultimate safe space. Yes. Like you can always trust Hagrid. You can always go there and he'll be ready with a huge mug of tea and a completely inedible baked good. Right. And we see across the series this like as he grows up, you know, they're spending less and less time with Hagrid that they're starting to like

not feel like they can rely on that space of safety, but the burning of the cottage feels like such a powerful image of the end of innocence, the end of childhood.

Yeah, and Hagrid's Hut, again, you know, we've already talked a lot about liminality, but it's on the border of Hogwarts and the Forbidden Forest. It is a place where Buckbeak almost died. It is a place where Hagrid has been arrested from, right? It is a complex site, right?

And yet it still just is a place of safety and a sense of home for Harry. So it's not like nothing bad has ever happened in Hagrid's Hut. It's that it hasn't mattered because it's been Hagrid's Hut. And therefore it's a place where the door is always open to Harry. And it's a place where someone will always be there who wants to make Harry safe. And yeah, that being destroyed, it's like new times. Yeah.

I also think about that image of Hagrid coming out of the hut with Fang. With Fang, I know. Right? This sort of recurring image of Hagrid always being the one who, like, bears people across thresholds. Yep. Patron saint of transitions. Yeah. He is constantly bringing...

Bringing people, right? He's the key holder. He brings you across thresholds. He brings you in and out of worlds. And tens for animals, right? Very St. Francis. Yes, yes, 100%. So this image of him, like, backdrop of the hut on fire carrying Fang out is such a powerful image of, like, another border crossing, another sort of movement into a different kind of space. Yeah.

That is another thing about apocalypses, right? Is Hagrid is going to be changed by this because Dumbledore dies, but he's also not going to be changed by this, right? Hagrid is still going to be Hagrid. Hagrid, just like he's carrying Fang here, just like he carried Harry in book one, chapter one. He's going to carry Harry in book seven. He's going to keep bringing kids across thresholds. He on this level is unchangeable. He's always going to be that person.

of this chapter that really does just like kind of mean a lot to me is the Snape of it all. I, as our listeners know, really can't stand Snape. I have very little forgiveness in my heart for Snape. He's a bully. He's mean to Neville. He is a necessary foot soldier to Dumbledore. That doesn't mean you give him a teaching job. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, in general, Dumbledore's approach to hiring teachers. However, I think Snape is...

a genius character in this chapter. Not like J.K. Rowling wrote him in a genius way. Like, I think he is being so thoroughly caring to Harry while in character. And I don't know why it's taken me this many readings to fully see it.

But this is the chapter where, to me, it becomes clear that Snape understands his call in his bones. Right? Because every time Harry's like, you're a coward, that just annoys Snape too much. He's like, you're a dick coward. Your dad always called me a dick.

And he was actually the coward. And also like Snape has just done something that was so hard and so brave. Like he just killed somebody who he loved deeply. Right. And so he's like, and you don't even know. You don't even know. Yeah. And I can't tell you and you can't know. And you not knowing is part of the entire point.

But really, when Harry is trying to crucio Snape and Snape will not let him. And not only that, he is still teaching Harry. He's like, idiot, you're saying words. I can hear you. Work on your occlumens. Like, it is just so loving. But to me, in terms of this theme, it is like...

This is a chaotic moment. Things are on fire. You, Harry, might feel like this is the apocalypse. It's not. Yeah. This is not where things end. And we all know that when we think things are ending, our previous behavior goes away because it's a new world. And so old laws don't matter. And Harry is trying to throw away the old laws and

And Snape is like, nope, kid, this isn't actually it. Stay focused. Stay you. Yeah. I think without reading it through this theme, it just wouldn't have occurred to me that it's not love. It's like you think this is a thing and it's not. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and because that's so much of this chapter is Harry truly has no idea what's going on. Right. I remember so vividly in our first sort of run of Witch, Please.

reading this book and Marcella and I getting in a huge argument about what was happening because I had never read the last book at the time. So I didn't know. I genuinely didn't know. So I can really deeply empathize with Harry's confusion for I too was deeply confused once while reading this chapter, by the way, he does hit Harry in the scene. Yeah. You know, he is not an angel. He is mad. Yeah.

And he is like an adult who lives fully inside his childhood trauma still. So like that can make you react in inappropriate ways. But also he is navigating an incredibly difficult situation where he has made the unbreakable vow with Malfoy to keep him safe. He killed Dumbledore because Dumbledore made him. He desperately wants to keep Harry safe.

Because he, you know, has made this vow to himself, to Lily. And he has to somehow navigate all of these things at the same time and stay on Voldemort's good side, right? Maintain his position of power within the Death Eaters. So he's got to, like, keep anybody from killing Harry, right?

Make sure that Harry doesn't do anything that will like destroy his life. Right. Like murder someone. Right. Which is like he's really trying to make sure that Harry doesn't do something that he can never come back from. Right. But also like he Snape has to get away and get Malfoy away. Like he's really navigating a very challenging situation. And I just think you're bringing this theme of apocalypse to this scene is so fascinating.

smart because he's the only one here who knows that this isn't actually the apocalypse. Yes. This is the battle before the battle. Yes. And that's what he's doing is he's maintaining that, right? He's managing that. He's like, you all think that this is the end and it's nothing. This is nothing. Yeah.

This week's episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is where you get farm fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. I don't know about you, but I get tired of just figuring out what's for dinner night after

night, especially on the busy weekdays. The kids are here. They have homework. I have work to do. And I look at my fridge and I'm just like, I don't know. There are a million things I could make. And I'm just doing math in my head. But it's easy to find time to eat well with 50 wholesome, hassle-free meals to choose from each week delivered to your door with HelloFresh. It takes all of the guesswork and planning out of it.

Their lineup of prep and bake meals come together with minimal mess and only five minutes of prep, so your oven does most of the work and not you. Get up to 10 free meals and a free high-protein item for life at HelloFresh.com slash HarryPotter10FM.

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Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding Group A. Please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked, old, or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line. And instead, simply go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands for the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus with Galaxy AI on Unlimited Ultimate and a watch or tab. Also on that. Service plan required for watch or tab. Trade in and additional terms apply. See Verizon.com for details.

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You can even design your own jewelry. Right now, save up to 50% at BlueNile.com. That's BlueNile.com. One of the most powerful things about this chapter for me is the way that it manages to be simultaneously fully chaotic.

And also, everything that happens makes sense. And that, for me, underlines one of the things I think is really crucial about Apocalypse, which is that it can feel like incomprehensible chaos. I mean, go back and read Revelations. It's like, this is incomprehensible chaos. No, it is. It's just like, what? So this sense of...

Apocalypse is chaos. And so to keep apocalypse at bay, we must keep chaos at bay.

And that is, you know, a distinctly human fantasy, the idea that we can control the world, that we can keep chaos at bay, that we can fend off apocalypse through not wanting it to happen. But also, often the most harmful and violent things are done in the name of control, of keeping chaos at bay, in the name of insisting that the world has to continue to follow particular rules, otherwise nothing.

all hell will break loose. That's a saying for a reason. And our mistaking complexity for disaster, I think underpins a lot of terrible things humans do, is this fear of complexity and this inability to let go of a version of the world that is the one that we have known and to move into something

a new version of the world, right? An inability to sit with the chaos and complexity of an apocalyptic moment and say, like, all I'm going to do by trying to control this is cause more harm. And the fact that in this moment, what Harry wants to do, I mean, I love the way that you put it, right? That he thinks that

This is the end. And it being the end justifies any kind of behavior, right? It justifies an immediate movement to doing something literally unforgivable.

And Snape, who is the one who understands, I mean, Snape and Dumbledore are the only people who have a view of what's actually happening here. So in this moment, Snape is the only one who understands the complexity that underpins this chaotic moment. And he's the one saying, don't do something unforgivable in the name of trying to wrench this moment back from chaos.

Right? You're going to, in this moment, feel like chaos justifies anything in the name of restoring order. Any level of violence can be justified. And that's like a lot of humanity's worst atrocities have come from that instinct. We're adverse to complexity and to messiness, right?

when we can't categorize something, it feels violent, right? It's like having a pebble in your shoe. You're like, that's not supposed to be here. Where does this go? Where does this go? And it is wild how low our tolerance is for that. And because of the risk of how far we know we will go when we feel that, it is just so important for us to build our tolerance for discomfort. Right.

and for messiness and for complexity and for saying, well, I don't understand that. So I'm going to sit, right? This like, don't just do something, sit there. There are moments where like real action needs to be taken and it's all of our jobs to be constantly assessing, like, is this a moment, right? But

Also, I think sometimes we just really get the wrong cues of like this, the apocalypse. This is the moment where all laws change. And it's like, no, no, this is a chaotic moment. That's not the same thing. And think about the things that in this moment of apocalypse are the right actions, right? They are here. Yeah.

Their care and connection, right? The moment when Harry goes and joins Hagrid and helps him put out the fire. The moment where he pauses to make sure that Neville is okay and, you know, shoots a curse at a Death Eater to make sure that his friend is safe. You know, Hagrid carrying Fang's body out of the cottage. These are the moments in which, like, you can't control this. You can't understand this.

It is too big and too much and too happening right now for you to really get a grip on it. But what you can do is reach out to kin and take care. That for me is the biggest lesson of apocalypse is that trying to control it. And I mean, I'm not saying like...

Lest anybody listen to this and think I'm saying let's not try to come up with solutions to the climate crisis. Or like that Harry shouldn't have Petrificus Totalus, the werewolf going around biting children for fun. Yeah. I don't think what you're saying, no intervention. No, but it's, you know, the moments that get him through this, the moment that gets his community through this so that it can be not

The end are the moments where he pauses to take care of somebody. Yeah. Hannah, we are going to do the sacred reading practice of Pardes today for Step Jewish Sacred Reading Practice. And I have picked a sentence for us. It is, what was now holding him paralyzed against the wall was not magic, but horror and shock.

So step one of Pardes is pshat, and we ask ourselves the intended meaning of the sentence. Well, the intended meaning, I think, is to let us know both that the spell has broken...

That Harry is aware that the spell has broken, that he's not being held by magic anymore. But that in the moment of the spell breaking, he also experiences such a horror that he cannot move. Yeah. And this will come up more explicitly later, but the reason that the spell breaks is because Dumbledore is now dead. Yes. Right. Dumbledore had been like protecting Harry and so far as he's keeping Harry safe.

But also preventing Harry from acting and preventing Harry from interfering with the plans that Dumbledore has and quote unquote saving Dumbledore from Snape, etc. And now all of that is gone now. And so it will later connote the moment that Harry knows that Dumbledore is dead. Yeah. The spell is no longer holding him, but something is still holding him. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that the phrasing of this sentence really hits me because the word magic shows up in these books actually less frequently than I think certain types of people would have us believe. And so the word magic here, what was holding him up was not magic, right? It's like with Dumbledore's death, magic disappears. Yeah. Which it just really hits me.

So step two, we pick a word and trace it through the books thematically to see what new context the sentence can get. What word is standing out to you, Hannah? What was now holding him paralyzed against the wall was not magic, but horror and shock.

A lot of good words. I gotta say the word that stands out to me is horror. Yeah. Yeah. So where else does this word or this feeling of horror come up in the seven books? I think about the sort of monstrous figures, right? The sort of

horror movie-like figures that we've encountered at various moments. You know, we've got werewolves, we've got giant three-headed dogs, we've got all of these sort of monstrous, potentially horrifying figures. And so often in the series,

What seems horrifying at first, we are later led to understand, like, isn't horrifying at all. Isn't really monstrous. Werewolves are not inherently evil. Dragons can be somebody's beloved baby. And so, so much of the seeming horror that we encounter is ultimately revealed to not be really evil.

Yeah. And so in this moment, the arrival of the word horror really signals something of a different order has occurred, right? This isn't the sort of set piece of horror that we're used to encountering, but it's a different kind of beast altogether. Yeah.

thing about horror is how much it's in the eye of the beholder, right? That on our other show, we were just talking about Taming of the Shrew. And I was like, oh, it's a horror story. It

If you care about Catherine, right? She gets starved and she gets tortured. She isn't allowed to sleep or eat. And it's a comedy because the power gaze that we're being shown it through is a patriarchal one. And so there's part of me, you know, and I think I've been too sympathetic to the Dursleys in my reading of this book over the last decade. But when...

Harry shows up on their doorstep and witches and wizards are walking around the street. The horror movie starts for them, right? Like... Yeah. When their normal life, their kid suddenly has a pig's tail, like, they...

that is horror for them. And this is also something you and I talk a lot about on Hot and Bothered, how context changes everything in the context of horror. And I think that we often, or I often think about horror, just like with apocalypse, this is kind of objective, right? Like, no, that is objectively horrifying, right? And because I believe in a kind of morality, I do think that there are

objective horrors while simultaneously knowing that that doesn't mean that we all perceive these horrors the same way, right? We've got plenty of evidence that like things that I would consider to be objective, unthinkable horrors to other people are acceptable. You see that every day. Exactly. It just so happens that you and I are right and other people are wrong. I guess that's kind of part of living in the world as a moral person is that at the

At the end of the day, you got to think that some things are just wrong. Right. And even just this moment, right? Like Dumbledore receives this as an act of mercy and Snape experiences this as an act of sacrifice. Yeah. And for Harry, this is horror. Yeah. And I guess it's just like, it's all of those things. All of those things are true. It's all of those things. Yeah. Yeah.

Step three, we say if this was a piece of liturgy that we were given, what sermon, what lesson would we preach on it? I'll read the sentence again. What was now holding him paralyzed against the wall was not magic, but horror and shock.

I think that I would focus on the lessons that our bodies hold for us. Yeah. The knowledge that our bodies have, that kind of somatic knowledge that is available to you if you pay attention to your body within a moment, right? To actually say...

What is holding me right now? What wisdom does my body have that maybe my brain hasn't tapped into? And if I actually stop and listen to what it's saying, what information is it giving me? What about you? That's something I've been on a path with. I am absolutely someone who...

until around 40 was like, pretty sure I'm a brain on a stick. And now I'm like, oh, no, my body knows things. Yeah. Wild. I'm just now realizing that my body is information as much as emotions are information. Yeah, for sure. Because and this is the next logical step that is really hard to wrap your head around. You actually just are your body. I know. I

Yeah. Wild. Yeah. It's like we're actually just animals. I know. What's really popping out to me is this holding him by Dumbledore freezing Harry in this moment. I do think one of the things that he is saying to Harry is you don't have to do everything. You don't actually know everything. Your interference is not always actually the best thing. My little Gryffindor doer.

There is no version of Harry at 16 that is capable of now just standing there and letting what's going to unfold unfold. But I think Dumbledore was trying to say there isn't always something for you to do. Actually, sometimes you're just going to have to stand there and you would actually just make it worse. I think I would talk about specifically when to let yourself be held by other people, not just like when to not intervene on a like strategic level,

But when to give in to someone else holding you and not having it just be when they magically make it so you don't have a choice. Holding, you're right, is such a powerful image because it does suggest hair. Yeah. Oh, and I think that this was a real act of care. Yeah. Yeah. That he's holding Harry in this moment. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Okay, step four is sewed, which means secret. And the idea is that it is possible that through this conversation we have shaken something loose from the sentence that we had never thought of before. And so I will read it once more. What was now holding him paralyzed against the wall was not magic, but horror and shock. I mean, I think what's occurring to me, this is like slightly extra textual here.

As a super consumer of Grey's Anatomy and just someone who has been in the world, there are like whole scenes in Grey's Anatomy where like there's an emergency and someone is just screaming. Right. They're just like, ah. And there is this instinct where I want to be like, don't just scream, do something. And I think I'm just like, do you know what? Sometimes we are in shock. We are frozen with shock.

Because we don't know what to do because it is not yet clear what to do. Yeah. Or because there's nothing to do. Yeah. And the moment where Harry freezes is not when Hagrid's house is on fire. He's deeply unfrozen in that moment. He's like, this is the spell. It's Aguamente. Like, let's stand together. I know how to solve this. I know how to solve this. But sometimes I think we can get really just hard on ourselves for being frozen in shock. And like... Yeah. Yeah.

I think actually it's because you've just been given a lot of new information to compute. Being the person in the emergency screaming is actually important. It's a siren. It means you're not doing these things that you were talking about earlier of like doing violence in order to maintain normalcy, right? It's actually like it's lament. It's lament. And that's necessary. Yeah. I also think here about

for many of us moving into solution mode is a way of not actually sitting in the reality of what's happening. You know, I think about my 16 year old self being like, well, I can't sit here with this. So I'm going to go buy us lunch. But like, that is still a version of me and one that I'm trying to both be gentle with because it's a, you know, it's a part of myself that was really developing the

the best skills she could at the time, but that part that just wants to solve a problem in a crisis, just wants to do something about it. And that sometimes in crisis, moving immediately into doing is not what's needed. Sometimes you actually just have to sit

with the reality of the thing. You give me an emergency situation, I am ready. I will absolutely not be paralyzed. I will do so many things and I will do them so hard. Me too. Next time you're in a crisis, hand me my phone and I'll catch up on email. Like that's how productive I am in a crisis.

But like, I'm sure you've experienced this as well. It's like sometimes somebody comes to you with a crisis and they're like, I don't want you to solve this. That's how I ended up in div school. Yeah.

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After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. Worried about what ingredients are hiding in your groceries? Let us take the guesswork out. We're Thrive Market, the online grocery store with the highest quality standards in the industry. We restrict 1,000 plus ingredients, so you can trust that you'll only find the best high-quality organic and sustainable brands all free of the junk.

With savings up to 30% off and fast carbon neutral shipping, you get top trusted groceries at your door and you can stop worrying about what your kids get their hands on. Start shopping at thrivemarket.com slash podcast for 30% off your first order and a free gift. This week's voicemail is from Heather. Hi, Vanessa and Casper. My name's Heather. I use she, her pronouns. I'm calling because I want to talk about Harry's experiences through the lens of psychosis.

I have a loved one who lives with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. For a lot of people, this means that they hear voices that no one else can hear. In book two, Harry starts hearing the basilisk through the walls, and no one understands where this voice is coming from, and no one else can hear it. When you're hearing voices no one else can hear, they tend to be really scary voices that give commands or say terrifying things, a lot of like what Harry is hearing from the basilisk.

For my loved one, he experiences paranoid delusions. This means that he sometimes believes that he or his loved ones are in imminent danger. And the hardest part of this is that no one believes him because it's just not the reality for everyone else. In book five, we see Harry getting more and more frustrated when he believes so strongly that Sirius is in danger at the Ministry of Magic. And he even starts acting out of character in some ways because he's so desperate to be believed.

In Harry's case, we know that these are not really experiences of hallucination or delusion, but psychosis is a much more common experience than a lot of people realize. And I think if we consider Harry's experiences through this lens, we might have a better understanding of what it feels like to live that reality. I also believe Harry understands what it means to experience the stigma of mental illness, and at times he even knows what it means to lose some of the privilege of sanity.

So I just want to give a blessing to Harry for having lived through these experiences. And I want to bless anyone who has experienced the reality of psychosis themselves and the fear, loneliness, desperation, and stigma that comes with it. Thank you so much for this community. Heather, thank you so much for that beautiful voicemail. And I hadn't thought of

That as one of the character changing moments for Harry that once he has lived in a way in which he has been perceived as

as being mentally unstable, people believing him becomes more and more important to him. Yeah. I just think that that's brilliant. So when he has these altercations with Dean later, right? It's this, I have not been believed in the past. Yeah. And guys, there was something talking to me through the wall. Thank you. It's so smart, Heather. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. It's a beautiful reading. And I think

Also gets at one of the powerful things about Harry is the way that he grows compassion as he matures. And that some of that compassion grows through those experiences. I think about the moment later on where we see Neville with his parents and the sort of care with which Harry holds that experience.

They're kids. And it's something that Neville is obviously very worried about people knowing that his parents are mad because sanism is like really powerful as a social force and a stigma. And I think thinking about the way that Harry has had that experience of not being believed and

you know, and has had, I think, experiences of ruptures with reality leads him to that kind of greater compassion. Or it could absolutely, and this is just the gorgeousness of Harry throughout the text, all of this could lead him to more hate when it just continuously leads him to more love. Yeah. Heather, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. It is now time for us to honor members of our community who have been loved and lost.

The Goldstein family, Matthew, who was 52, Lila, who was 54, Valerie, who was 22, and Violet, who was 19. A loving family who brought joy to everyone who knew them. Jonathan Nalika, who was 20, brilliant, ambitious, and had a huge laugh. Emily Stein, who was 94, and a loving and beloved grandmother.

May their memories be a blessing to us all. Hannah, we now get to offer our own blessings for a character. The Bless Hagrid. Last time I read these books all the way through, I was committed to blessing women. And I loved that commitment. And I didn't get to bless Hagrid for his clarity of purpose of looking at the house and saying, Fang is in there, going in and getting Fang. And then being like, the bow truckles.

And other than that, just not giving a hoot about any of his beautiful belongings. And he had a lot of beautiful belongings, cherished things. Yeah. And he's just like fang and bow truckles. That's all that matters. Yes.

We love Hagrid for a lot of reasons, but I feel like this chapter, you see just his pure, pure heart, his immediate concern for Harry, his just constant concern for anything that he perceives as more vulnerable than he is. And because he's so large, I think he perceives a lot of things as more vulnerable than he is. And so he takes a lot of things under his wings and he just lives into that so fully in this chapter. Yeah. What about you? Who would you like to bless?

This is really out of character for me, but I actually would like to bless Snape. Do it, man. I'm on the record as not being that big a fan of, but I particularly want to bless 15-year-old Snape.

I want to bless this part of him that it so clearly still lives inside of him that was so hurt as a child who was poor and unpopular and mocked and bullied and who still holds that hurt so close to him. That hurt of not belonging with your peers, that hurt of...

Not being cared for or loved by the person that you love and the way that that hurt kid part of us keeps living inside of us often for the whole rest of our lives. Yep. Yeah. Next week, we are reading book six, chapter 29, The Phoenix Lament with Casper Turquile through the theme of separation.

Everybody, the thing I absolutely have to tell you before we give our thanks today is to go and buy Clever Girl, Jurassic Park by Hannah McGregor. It is a book of

critical theory that is so immensely readable. So if you want to be getting smarter while not feeling stupid, it's a very difficult needle to thread. But Hannah McGregor threads it. And also, close exegetical reading of a piece of pop culture. You're listening to this podcast because you like it. It's your jam. It's your jam. So go read Clever Girl by Hannah McGregor this week.

This was a Not Sorry production. You can get ad-free episodes via Apple Podcasts or by subscribing to our Patreon. We are sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. I'm the executive producer. We are edited and produced by AJ Aramas. Our music is by Ivan Paizao and Nick Bull, and we are distributed by Acast. Heather, thank you so much for your voicemail this week. Ariana Nettleman, Julia Argi, Nikki Zoltan, Courtney Brown, Casper Turquile, Matt Potts,

Anissa Ahmed, Danny Langley, Stephanie Paulsell, and everyone who sent in the names of their loved ones. Thank you. And a special extra thank you to my beloved Hannah McGregor. Thanks for being here, friend. Thank you.