Mr Riddle

I am a bit of a Harry Potter nut (a Slytherin fan myself), and also being into astrology, it was kinda inevitable that I would end up conjecturing about some of the characters in astrological terms.

I don’t think JK Rowling is a great writer as such, but she has done something extraordinary in creating a world that people can enter into imaginatively and feel quite passionately engaged with, and find both entertainment and a degree of meaning in, and that is no small feat. Any such world tends to take on archetypal characteristics, just as Tolkien, Star Trek or Star Wars have. Rowling’s having made her world a magical one just adds to the connectivity of the story telling.
There are spoilers in the rest of this post.

If you have read the books or seen the films, you will know that Harry Potter’s arch enemy is a character called Lord Voldemort, who begins life as Tom Marvolo Riddle. Voldemort isn’t a subtly drawn character, but he is complicated. If he weren’t so monstrous he would appear tragic and unfortunate, and that is a key to his character in the story. His monstrosity is his personal salvation from his tragedy, and both of these things coalesce in the family history he emerged from so inauspiciously.

What really strikes me about Tom Riddle is that he is a kind of Uranian anti-hero, a mad magician/scientist in search of immortality and moral autonomy. There’s no doubt he has gone way off the rails, but there is also no denying that he is a brilliant magician. Two things that can be associated with the effect of Uranus (aside from many others of course) are trauma, and psychological severance. Uranus is often associated with traumatic shock, and also with a capacity to cut off from that which would otherwise bind one, which is part of Uranus’ brilliance, it can fly where others dare not go, but severance also has a price. This is really enshrined in Rowling’s device of the horcrux, the magic that splits the soul and hides a fragment of it in an object. It’s unclear why Voldemort would have such an obsession with this fragmented survival of his identity, but what comes through is a sense of shedding aspects of the psyche which trouble Tom, and so distill his soul into a purity of personal power. It’s a tragectory which is predisposed to fanaticism, and to fatal oversight of consequences.

Interestingly, speaking of severance, the character who is most key to Voldemort’s downfall is Severus Snape, whose name obviously derives from the same latin root as severance, severe, severity etc. Severus is a character who shares some of Riddle’s characteristics. He has mixed muggle (non-magical) and magical parentage, and there is an air of tragedy and loss about his early life and loves. But Severus bridges severed worlds in a way no one else can, as a double agent and confidant of Voldemort, a position he could only have by belonging to Voldemort’s world of Death Eaters at one time. Severus is a mercurial figure in this way, a psychopomp and go-between, and the one who ultimately leads Voledmort to every one of his deaths, though he can only do it by facing his own tragedy constantly in working with Harry, the son of the woman he always loved but could never be with.

Tom Riddle is indeed a tragic figure before his inhuman self-actualization, and there are family abuse themes that also bring to mind the influence of Nessus. His family are impoverished surivors of a jealously guarded magical blood purity. His mother is a downtrodden and abused girl of the family. When she gets the chance she comes into her own, but turns her magic to enchanting a prominent local muggle she had fallen in love with. The relationship doesn’t last, but Tom is the result. His mother dies, and Tom is brought up in an orphanage until Dumbledore comes to get him as he reaches 11 years old. You can see how much he might feel the need to disengage, forget, erase, cut off, reinvent.

Speaking of forgetfulness (and Uranus is no poor shot at rewriting past and present in the service of its “greater truth”), Rowling uses a memory device to great effect in “Half Blood Prince”, which is the book that unravels the background to the entire saga. The pensieve is an enchanted dish that memories can be poured into, so that one can experience them first hand. This device is another key to Voldemort’s enemies overcoming him, and it is the opposite process to the splitting and severing of Voldemort’s horcrux formation. Severance and remembrance. Just as Severus has to live with all he has been and lost, and Harry has to ultimately uncover his own inner monster, all that has been forgotten through trauma, shock and survival has a need to be reconciled and borne.

Voldemort is an anti-story which attempts to serve the purpose of the split off individual by undoing and rewriting the shared story that oppresses and binds that individual. And that is one of the ways that Uranian trauma and shock can manifest. Naturally it doesn’t usually create a Voldemort, and alternative stories can be important parts of our healing if we understand them as creative imagination. But the anti-story, the narrative voice of erasure, is a particular Uranian tale.