Public lecture at Tele2 Art Space, Yelagin Island, St. Petersburg, August 26, 2023.
Video recording: YouTube
Joan Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are not the primitive teenage fiction that certain intellectual circles like to dismiss them as. This is a major work that has generated a genuine subculture. I am firmly convinced that no hollow piece of writing can be elevated to cult status through advertising alone, however aggressive. Every genuinely good work contains multiple layers of meaning.
I use the metaphor of a matryoshka doll: from the most surface level all the way down to the deep social and religious meanings that require specific competencies to read.
Layer One: Fairy Tale Structure
At the most superficial level, Harry Potter is a classic fairy tale built on entirely conventional foundations. Lovers of structuralism will think of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but our own Vladimir Propp identified these elements forty years earlier in his Morphology of the Folktale. Propp distinguished seven character types: the donor, the magical helper, the not-very-bright protagonist, his companion, and so on. All of these elements are fully present in the Potter series.
Let us be candid: structurally, Rowling’s novels are quite uncomplicated. This is not Joyce’s Ulysses. Harry Potter himself, for all his courage and kindness, is not exactly an intellectual. He is the classic simpleton hero helped by magical objects (the wand, the Invisibility Cloak, the Deathly Hallows) and clever companions like Hermione. Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, and Harry Potter are structurally the same character: an orphan who suddenly hears the call to adventure and defeats a world-threatening evil.
The main antagonist, Voldemort, is a classic Koshchei the Deathless who has hidden his death in Horcruxes — though instead of dropping them to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he distributed them among the most recognisable magical artefacts imaginable.
The idea that love conquers all is as old as storytelling itself — but it works. Rowling writes excellent popular fiction, and this first layer of fairy tale is the foundation that makes the books a pleasure to read.
Layer Two: The Coming-of-Age Novel
Beneath the surface, we find a Bildungsroman. The books mature alongside the reader: the first two are almost childlike in tone, the third grows darker, the fifth is the most depressing, and the seventh sees many characters die. Rowling writes psychology well, and we genuinely care about her characters’ fates.
Layer Three: Literary Allusions
Rowling studied classical literature at university and embedded a rich network of allusions to British cultural tradition throughout the text.
The Sword of Gryffindor, which only a truly brave person can draw from the Sorting Hat, is a direct allusion to the Celtic myth of King Arthur and the sword in the stone.
Severus Snape — brooding, solitary, shaped by a difficult childhood, hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with one woman — structurally echoes Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
There is another beautiful allusion to Snape in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The character Sydney Carton sacrifices himself to save the husband of the woman he loves, who rejected him, saying on the scaffold: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
Even the name of the caretaker’s cat — Mrs Norris — is not arbitrary. It is a reference to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where a disagreeable woman of the same name tormented the subdued heroine.
Layer Four: Social Criticism
This layer contains serious themes: inequality, slavery, bureaucracy, the stigmatisation of illness.
Manipulative media. Rita Skeeter is a brilliant portrait of tabloid journalism. She fabricates facts out of thin air. For young readers, this is an excellent lesson in critical thinking: newspapers can publish outright slander.
Ruthless bureaucracy. The Ministry of Magic is an entirely negative institution. Its dysfunction is on full display when Minister Fudge denies Voldemort’s return on the principle of “see no evil, hear no evil.” Most tellingly: as soon as it became permissible to be fascist in the Wizarding World, the Ministry was the first to adopt fascist methods, beginning the registration of Muggle-born witches and wizards.
The stigmatisation of illness. Professor Lupin, infected with lycanthropy, is an allusion to HIV-positive people — something Rowling has said directly. He is forced to conceal his condition and resigns from the school because of social fear.
Racism and Nazism. The concept of “purity of blood” is a direct reference to Nazism. As with Hitler, who did not himself meet his own Aryan standards, the leading advocate of pure blood, Voldemort, is a half-blood. And the chief fascist within the Ministry turns out to be not a conventional villain but Dolores Umbridge — a woman in pink who loves kittens. This is one of Rowling’s most brilliant observations: behind an ostentatious suburban gentleness, the most thoroughgoing sadism often hides.
House-elves. They exist in slavery, yet for them service is the meaning of life, and Rowling does not resolve this tension easily. Dumbledore says something important: “Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards over many, many years.” Treat any social group with empathy and respect — that is the moral, and it is clear.
Layer Five: Religion and Christian Theology
This is the deepest layer. Religious meanings operate in three dimensions: how churches respond to the books, how religion appears in the narrative itself, and what theological meanings are encoded in the text.
Inquisition from two directions. Religious fundamentalists despise Harry Potter, accusing it of promoting witchcraft and Satanism. This is absurd: magic in the fairy tale is simply a tool, like talking animals in cartoons. Interestingly, Rowling is also attacked from the other direction by sceptics who accuse her of promoting divination and numerology. Both sides are blind to context: Professor Trelawney, the Divination teacher, is portrayed as the most marginal and ridiculous figure in Hogwarts.
Religion as background. Magic differs from religion: a magician commands the universe (top-down), while a believer petitions it (bottom-up). In the Potter universe, magic does not negate religion.
The hospital is named after the real Catholic Saint Mungo, patron of Glasgow. Sirius Black is Harry’s godfather, and Harry himself becomes Lupin’s godson. Baptism is a central Christian sacrament, and Rowling uses it deliberately.
The existence of souls in the Potter universe — extracted by Dementors, split in the creation of Horcruxes, manifesting as ghosts — makes a naturalistic, materialist worldview impossible. Religion in such a world is more than plausible.
The ghosts of Hogwarts are people who were afraid of death and could not bring themselves to pass into the afterlife. These are not mere fairy-tale spirits; this is a specific religious claim.
The theology of death and self-sacrifice. The entire point of the Potter series is the overcoming of death. Rowling, who is herself a believer, places direct biblical quotations on her characters’ gravestones.
On the Dumbledore family grave: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).
On Harry’s parents’ grave: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). This is a text about Christ conquering death.
Voldemort is pathologically afraid of dying. Dumbledore teaches that for a well-organised mind, death is the next great adventure. The intermediate station of King’s Cross, where Harry arrives after the Killing Curse, is classical Purgatory.
Dumbledore is a figure of an imperfect but all-knowing guide who shapes destinies and demands sacrifices, while carrying guilt for the mistakes of his past.
And finally, the central point. Harry Potter chooses the path of faith without evidence. In the seventh book, he decides to walk the road of self-denial and self-sacrifice that Dumbledore has mapped for him. Harry consciously goes to his death for the sake of others, and then is resurrected — in this way retracing the fundamental Christian path.
This is not simply a story about a magic wand. It is a parable about the idea that genuine victory over death comes through love and sacrifice.