From Kells to Hogwarts -

A Pictorial Guide from Archaic to Modern Times

Illustration right - Bible Historiale- Paris, 1357. Mark, Matthew, Luke and John take guidance from their four animal guides.

In this article I'd like to look at some early illuminated manuscripts and to suggest their possible influence on the four houses of Hogwarts. I'm not claiming that such a relationship exists by any deliberate effort from J.K. Rowling, or that she's definitely been influenced by Christian mysticism subconsciously. I guess we'll never know for sure, but the parallels between both are funny and strange. So here's a short illustrated guide.

Most people tend to view psychoanalysis as starting with Freud, Jung and their ilk in the 20th Century. However mystical guides to human behaviour can be traced back in art and religion over hundreds of years. Some Buddhist mandalas for example show a balanced shape within a square, surrounded by four demons in the corners. Meditation on the mandala is thought to help the student avoid the extreme atavistic demons and to become a more balanced person. Illuminated manuscripts in the West show the same kind of mandalas often housed with four animals.

Modern psychology has a system of analysis which deals with atavistic behaviour. This is often referred to in modern fancy speak as the transactional analysis grid. The grid explores the four infantile moods of Friendly Weakness, Hostile Weakness, Friendly Strength and Hostile Strength. These raw, bestial moods are best kept in balance, and much like the Buddhist mandalas, we're taught not let the extreme side of any mood dictate our behaviour.
Here follows a quick guide to the extreme and balanced aspects of the four infant moods:

Friendly weakness - Extreme aspects - spineless, clinging vine, easily conned, self critical, easily ashamed, sickeningly passive, too dependent on others.
Balanced aspects - able to criticise self, can be obedient, grateful and appreciative, modest, respectful to others, trustful.

Hostile weakness - Extreme aspects - rebels against everything, sarcastic, never trusts anyone, impatient with other people, frequently angry, petulant, stubborn, always grumbling, bitter, easily hurt, touchy, fakes stupidity.
Balanced aspects - able to doubt others, good at complaining and righting petty injustice, verbally strict with others, very direct with people, healthy sceptic.

Friendly Strength - Extreme aspects - overtly empathetic, generous to a fault, 'loves' everybody, forgives and forgets anything, agrees with everyone, wants everyone's love, gushy.
Balanced aspects - helpful, considerate, cooperative, alert, 'cuddly panda', reliable help when needed in a crisis, protective.

Hostile Strength - Extreme aspects - cold, dictatorial, conceited, snobbish, arrogant, selfish, shrewd, cuttingly nasty and dominating, wants submissive admiration, indifferent to other people's feelings.
Balanced aspects - business-like, self-reliant, able to give orders, self respecting, grudgingly well thought of and admired as a leader, forceful and self confident.

The four bestial moods - often referred to as the four life scripts - also emerge from children's myths. Think for example of The Wind in the Willows with the four leading characters of:

Gentle Mole - Friendly Weakness (Melancholic)
Petulant Toad - Hostile Weakness (Billious)
Hearty Ratty - Friendly Strength (Phlegmatic)
Stern Badger - Hostile Strength (Choleric)

---

The most popular pictorial guide to the four life scripts turns up in the illuminated Book of Kells. The original symbolism in the book however can be traced back to Ezekiel in the Christian Bible.
Ezekiel hallucinated the four archetypes of the Man, Bull, Lion and Eagle. All were seen winged and as such the 'man' morphed into a more fluffy angel. Christian artists and monks later portrayed these characters as being linked to the four Evangelists. They assigned Ezekiel's four sombre guides to act as guardians to illumination. Hence we have:

Matthew - Friendly Weakness	Angel
Luke - Hostile Weakness	Bull
Mark - Friendly Strength	Lion
John - Hostile Strength	Eagle

To the four moods they added the four elements:

Gentle Angel - Water: goes with the flow.
Sullen Bull - Earth: snorting, spitting head down.
Noble Lion - Fire: the welcoming protective hearth (in Baker Street, Gryffindor's dorm, etc)
Mighty Eagle - Air: domination from above.

Ezekiel had his visions covered in the Old Testament, somewhere towards the end of the book, whereas the four Evangelists make up the first four books of the New Testament. It seems that the Christian mystics were happy to take Ezekiel's prophecy and extend it to the new story of Christ.

The Christian tetramorph - detail from Hortus deliciarum (12th cent.) The four archetypes of Angel, Bull, Lion and culmination of the Eagle.

Germaine Greer has noted the four Evangelists in her book, The Whole Woman, where she refers to the four-poster bed:

'Women uttered incantations to keep the womb in its place much as they apostrophized Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to bless the bed that they lay on, in a garbled recollection of the culture of the ruling elite, in one case medical in the other clerical.'

She's talking about the male wish to control chaotic dreamtime and the feminine body. Mind you, men likely prayed to the four corner posts too in order to fortify their dreams from their personal demons. This reminds me of how we used to avoid letting our foot dangle out the side of the bed in 1975, just in case a certain shark might come swimming by with very large Jaws.

So, thought to be a modern trend, transactional analysis dates back to antiquity as shown in these fine examples of mood mandalas:

Aachen Miniature - late 8th Century. Inspired by classical art.

The Book of Kells - two guides to Ezekiel's vision appear in The Book of Kells which is thought to originate from Iona Abbey. One appears below on this page and here's the other one which opens St. Mark's gospel. Thought to be 9th Century.

Paris Miniature - late 15th Century. Nice Xmas aura. Little detail. However it does show the origins of The World trump of the Tarot. With time, Christ and his orb were replaced by a dancing fertile maiden and became part of the Tarot pack.

And now in modern times...

The Hogwarts Mandala - recently the 'H' (Hogwarts) mandala has turned up in the crest in the children editions of the Harry Potter books. Each corner of the 'H' points to a house in the school. The books have strong symbolism dwelling mainly on Gryffindor, the noble Lion. Reference to the mighty Eagle which represents Ravenclaw can be found in the Philosopher's Stone - the bird is not actually a raven. Slytherin the Snake seems to refer to cold, cunning intelligence rather than showing a representation of any bestial mood. As for the house of Hufflepuff, it sounds all fluffy and huggies, although little is said of its loyal occupants. The Badger of course is not a fluffy symbol and typically portrays strength. So while the four symbols of Hogwarts don't provide a guide to the four life scripts they're still fun to analyse for a while. Within the myth itself however there are plenty of characters to play out the four life-scripts. For example:

Friendly Weakness - Luna, Neville...(Gentle Angels)
Hostile Weakness - Draco, Ron...(Sullen Bulls)
Friendly Strength - Hermione, Harry...(Noble Lions)
Hostile Strength - Krum, Severus...(Mighty Eagles)

Please remember that we don't have 'bad' life scripts and 'good' ones. There is no morality in human infancy, which is when the moods develop. So I'm not being rude when I describe Ron Weasley in terms of hostile weakness. He's marvellous in this role, especially with his grumbling. In fact by the last volume he almost turns into a teenage Victor Meldrew. But his hostile weak mood never compromises his strength of character or his moral integrity.

I wonder then, was Ms Rowling's crest of Hogwarts influenced by the quaternity from the Book of Kells? Did Ezekiel's Eagle and Lion slip into the Hogwarts quaternity without her realising it? Funnily enough I watched a documentary about her on television recently and there she was wandering through St Luke's, a small church where she worked as a child. One of the names in the church's visitors book was borrowed for the Harry Potter myth. She jokes about this in the documentary. So who's to say that her unconscious mind didn't also borrow two symbols from Christianity without her initial recognition?

^{Illustration, Book of Kells - Lion, Eagle, Bull & Angel}

If the Hogwarts quaternity was influenced by the Book of Kells then maybe Harry Potter is now influencing other myths. The mandala of a Snake, Eagle, Wolf and Bear recently turned up in another children's popular story, Shoebox Zoo. Unlike sombre, archaic mandalas - which often show the four apostles taking guidance from their assigned animal - the four animals in the shoebox have been turned into toys from a human state.
There is one scene which has the animals coming to life, falling from grace out of a mandalic stained glass window, which is quite magical. Quaternity symbolism turns up constantly in the series including the episode title, 'Where Four Elevens Meet.'

Back with Harry Potter, we can only wonder if Mark's Lion and John's Eagle once floated down to St Luke's when Joanne Rowling was sweeping the floor. I guess it's unlikely that they're portrayed in the church's stained glass windows, but perhaps Mark and John's two guides descended and nestled softly into JK Rowling's unconscious mind as the dust sparkled in the sunlight. Who knows?

I'd like to finish off with a tiny icon from the Harry Potter books - the hinkypunk. It's Ms Rowling's will-o-the-wisp which comes originally from the West Country. Looking up the name, it can be split into two halves, hinky and punk. Hinky is an old word meaning strange, while the oldest meaning of punk is a rotten piece of wood.
Small rotten, faggots are the best feather-light tinder for making fire and sure enough, the most interesting wisps of smoke come from initial fires, due to their heavy smoke and lack of convection. Hand tanners in America still talk of smoking buckskin with punk for curing their skins for example. So it seems that Ms Rowling - a one time fan of the Clash - may have found and rekindled the earliest rotten punks in order to create her will-o-the wisps.
Much like the Hogwarts quaternity we're left wondering if the process is deliberate or by accident, or if her subconscious mind has a life of its own and makes connections while she's looking the other way.