Water Snakes

Granger does a lot of work on classical numerology in the HP series. In one article he cites an interview with Rowling in which she drops a biggie morsel of meaning: that the 4 houses represent the 4 elements: Fire, wind, Water, and Earth In this system, in her own words, Slytherin is Water (which is why their common room is under the lake level). It just struck me how (completely accidentally on my part) appropriate was the example I used of Genesis 1 being about creation as giving meaning by ordering chaos. The element that is chaotic, over which the Spirit hovers/broods ... is water. For Israel water was a symbol of chaos (unlike their neighbors such as the Phoenicians, who were a maritime culture and made their living from the water). The Psalmist writes of the waters rising and covering him, which is what Yahweh saves him from. This is why Christ calming the Sea of Galilee was so symbolic for first century Jewish Christians. Those like Peter and John had made their living fishing in that sea but it was still always viewed as an emblem of the encroaching danger of the chaotic (what is referred to in modern Hasidic Judaism as the "sitra achra," the "other side," as evidenced in a novel like My Name is Asher Lev by Jewish Author [the late] Chaim Potok.) The serpent is the one who subtly tempts the first couple to evil. He represents the "cunningness" in nature, that element that is within nature and is a temptation to a return to chaos through pride or idolatry (some have even posited ties between the nahash [serpent] of Genesis 3 and the Leviathan or "sea serpent/monster"). The upshot of all this? The upshot of Rowling using the classic image of the cunning of evil, the serpent, to represent the element that symbolized chaos for the Hebrew mind? What does it mean that Rowling has the evil character being a parsel-mouth and coming from a house that has a serpent as its symbol and represents the element of water? It simply means that, to whatever degree conscious or "culturally subconscious" (or what John Henry Cardinal Newman might refer to as the "illative sense"), she is in touch with the deep richness of the Judeo-Christian Tradition and in step with the spirit of it in her use of it in her work.