The Combat Myth and the Gospel's Apocalypse in the Harry Potter Series: Subversion of a Supposed Existential Given

There appear to be strong parallels between the Christian Gospels and Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series that have gone largely unnoticed in the literature to date surrounding the Potter phenomenon. Identification of these correspondences likely indicates that Rowling performed a fantastical representation of the Gospel in one of the most popular novel series ever written. René Girard's anthropology of violence and religion is employed here to illuminate the shared content of battling ideologies. The similarities between these writings appear in the use of equivalent literary techniques by the respective writers: combat myth plot and imagery, subversive Hebrew-style parallelism known as the "reflection narrative," and metaphors of consumption creating an abstract understanding of the psychosocial pursuit of life, all of which engage to form a polemic between two types of logic: violence and love.