Scrimgeour's death was lovely and Rubedo. It symbolised the whole of the
wizarding world's infrastructure coming out firmly and clearly on the side of
Voldemort. Up until Fudge goes, it is possible to Fudge the issue of whether
Harry is the new soul, that can destroy Voldemort, or evil in the microcosm.
Between then and when Scrimgeour dies, it was possible for the candidate to
convince himself that some of his actions were liberating when he was really
serving Voldemort. After Scrimgeour is sacrificed, protecting Harry to the last,
there is no longer any shade of grey about the candidate's choices, he either
supports Harry the new soul or he betrays him to Voldemort.

Although, of course, some apparently evil actions do turn out to be for The
Greater Good.

I love The Greater Good, too. Just like the Deathly Hallows, which you cannot
win unless you do not pursue them, but pursue horcruxes instead, when the
Deathly Hallows become yours as part of the process, you can only achieve a win
for The Greater Good if you do not aim for the greater good at all, but instead
put all your efforts into overcoming Voldemort. Then the results turn out to be
for the greater good. We can only achieve eternal life if we do not aim for
eternal life, but instead aim to overcome evil. We have to sacrifice our own
desires, and give ourselves entirely to the one task we have been assigned, to
defeat evil.

Jo demonstrated beautifully that seeking power is a mistake. Either we
unashamedly seek power, no matter what the cost, and end up making the kinds of
mistakes that Voldemort makes, or else we seek power in order to help others,
For The Greater Good, in which case we make the kinds of mistakes that
Grindelwald makes. The only chance of redemption is to sacrifice our desire for
power entirely, as Harry, Ron and Hermione do.

And Harry returned from the gate of liberation, to liberate wizard and
mugglekind from Voldemort, from evil. He returned from the King's Crossroads,
the King here being represented by Dumbledore, just as in the Alchemical Wedding
when Christian Rosycross returned to become Gatekeeper instead on 'going on'
after his meeting with the King. The difference is that Harry is shown to have a
choice, whereas Christian Rosycross didn't. Actually, I think I like Jo's
version better: neither Christian nor Harry really have a choice, in that they
have made their choice a long time ago, and they couldn't do it any differently
- we know Harry is going to return, don't we? - but Jo is making the
point again that it is our choices that show what we truly are, and is
demonstating the mechanism behind Harry's arrival at that final point in the
liberating path.

At the end of the book, Hagrid is still the gatekeeper for Harry, still in the
role of Bodhisattva, trying to save the spiders, and we see the difference in
size between Grawp and the original giants, and the difference in allegiance,
symbolising the long path that Grawp has followed, in following Hagrid.

When Harry comes back from King's Cross, there are two symbolic gatekeepers. And
the one tied to a tree this time, tied to the cross, is Hagrid. And neither
Harry nor Hagrid physically die. I think that may be the most wonderful part of
the book, the fact that Jo had more than one Jesus (in fact she has had a number
of would-be Jesuses throughout the books, people who sacrifice themselves for
others) and that neither of them physically die. To my understanding, she is
setting the biblical record straight: there is no Harry-Jesus getting killed by
the baddies and thus saving everyone the trouble of having to do anything other
than believe in him in order to be able to stroll into a delightful heavenly
afterlife when they eventually die.. Instead, Harry-Jesus sacrifices his ego,
the scar horcrux, the evil in the head of every human being, and comes back
without it to defeat the evil that remains in his world. And that's how he saves
everyone.

And he saves us, by giving us an example to follow, just as Hagrid does with
Grawp.

To use a biblical metaphor, Jo has written two stories. The one about Hagrid and
Grawp is the milk, the one about Harry is the solid food. Hagrid nurtures Grawp,
and Grawp responds and grows. But he does not know what is happening to him. He
is not self-aware. The story of Harry, however, is quite clear, if we are
self-aware.

And we've got it straight from Jo, as yet without any amendment by third parties
with a vested interest in twisting the story to achieve their own desire for
power, as happened with the New Testament. No Voldemort or Grindelwald has got
his hands on it yet.

Let's use it. Let's unroll the marauder's map and start out on Harry's journey
...

Chris