Being Saved by Our Future Selves: Harry Potter and the Power of Our Ideal
A while ago after coming home from work, I walked in on some family members watching Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.
*Spoilers ahead, obviously*
I walked in right around the scene when Harry casts that spell (the Protronus Charm for your nerds out there) to ward off the Dementors and prevent them from killing himself and Serious Black. Now that seems normal, as far as Harry Potter magical stuff goes. Sure, makes sense. Except it’s Harry from the future that casts the spell to save himself in the past. So on top of the magical world of Hogwarts, people turning into animals, and Dementors that literally suck out your soul, there’s also time travel. How are we to rationally make sense of that? You might appeal to the suspension of disbelief and say “whatever” to the time travel because there’s so many other impossible things in the film, but what blew my mind was seeing my mother and sister watching this scene unfazed, as if this was normal.
That’s when I became curious. Forget all the other magical stuff from the Harry Potter world; why is the concept of someone in the present being saved by their future self even a coherent idea? How does this make sense? At least, how does this make sense enough for us to sit through the scene without questioning the plot? The answer I realized comes down to the symbolism of the scene, whether we realize it or not.
So why is it that Harry from the future saves Harry (himself) in the present? Well if truth be known, it can’t be any other way. Mythological stories, like Harry Potter, symbolically represent life and express the human experience. As in life, our future self saves our present self all the time. We are constantly being saved in the present by ourselves from the future. Our ideal self, the thing we want to become and are striving for, is usually what saves us in the present. It’s no coincidence that in the film, the spell Harry from the future casts to save himself in the past is the same spell he’s been working on perfecting throughout the plot of the movie. The ideal he was aiming at was the perfection of this spell, and this ideal in the future is what saved himself in the present. Just like the idea of the person we want to become in the future, also understood as our ideal, saves ourselves in the present.
What do you need saving from? The answer is the temptations of anger, addiction, jealousy, self-loathing, laziness and all the other vices that have plagued the human heart for as long as we can remember. So what prevents us from falling into these seductive caverns of vice that we all intuitively recognize as being undesirable? It’s always the ideal which we aspire towards that prevents us from doing the things we know to be wrong and motivates to do what is good.
I find it interesting that the Dementors who suck out one’s soul and drain the life force of their victims symbolically represent the vices we all face. If we do not resist them, vice will drain our spirit and bring death upon us. We know this to be true. Sometimes these forces of vice have been represented by devils or other demonic entities. Which are also paralleled by the appearance and name of the Dementors from Harry Potter.
So just like Harry fighting the Dementors, we are constantly fighting vices, demons, and other pitfalls that will drain our soul. And then our future self, our ideal, is what saves us and prevents certain destruction. But there’s another layer to this scene that strikes a mythological motif. When we first see Harry’s savior from the future, he believes it’s his father who cast the spell to ward of the Dementors. The archetype or idea of The Father is commonly associated with Tradition and the spirit of our ancestors that imparts on us the wisdom of the past and shapes our values. Part of becoming our ideal is to embody the values and virtues of our ancestors, usually celebrated as revered loved ones or cultural heroes. Once the time comes for Harry to cast the spell to save himself in the past, he is hesitant as he waits for his father, the ancestors, to come save the day. Only when Harry realizes that the image of his father he thought he saw was actually himself, he moves to action and fulfills his ideal. This is also a symbolic idea as it represents that we can’t wait around for the heroes of the past to come save us, we have to save ourselves by embodying their virtues. Once Harry actually embodies the ideal he’s aiming for, he becomes indistinguishable from the ancestral spirit of his father that motivates his former self.
We intuitively recognize this idea of striving to embody the ideals shaped by our Tradition and the wisdom of our ancestors. This is also an indication of how archetypal and intuitively recognizable some mythological ideas are, and how we symbolically see this ideas play out in our own lives. So to answer my earlier question, of why these symbols make sense and are accepted while watching the movie? Why our future selves save us now in the present by embodying our ideal? It’s because we know this to be true and it can’t be any other way.
