A Jungian Interpretation of Harry Potter & Ulysses S. Grant

My reading of Order of the Phoenix identifies something that Joseph Campbell's framework often underemphasizes. The Road of Trials in the monomyth gets summarized as confrontation with external monsters: the troll, the Basilisk, the named threats with claws and venom. Book five replaces the visible monster with an institutional one. The Ministry of Magic does not bite. It disbelieves, delays, and discredits. Harry's wound in this book is epistemic before it is physical: nobody with authority will confirm what he knows to be true. That is a different trial than slaying a Basilisk.

Possibilities: 

Ordeal with Wizards panel to determine if he could return to Hogwarts 

 Explulsion

 Suspension 

Re-instation

Return of Dark Lord 

Injured by Voldemort 

Death by Voldemort 

Kicked out of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's house 

Go on the run with Sirius 

Rejected or accepted to assist with the Order of the Phoenix. 

Harry DOES have to serve a week's detention for screaming in a prophecy class. The professor is Ministry of Magic affiliated and scoffs at Voldemort's return. Harry feels like he is telling the truth. A sympathetic professor gives Harry biscuits to eat but says the detention holds, Harry needs to learn to manage his emotions (emotional regulation) also the discernment of knowing who to engage with on controversial topics and developing the discernment to stand down when he has a superior who isn't sympathetic to his point of view or experience. 

Arnold van Gennep, the anthropologist who coined the term "liminal threshold", described liminality as the middle phase of any rite of passage: the initiate has left the old status and has not yet been granted the new one. Harry's suspension hearing, his expulsion threat, his reinstatement, his exile to the Dursleys, his recruitment into the Order: each of these is a status question with no fixed answer until the institution renders judgment. Jung's individuation model maps onto this directly. The ego cannot will its way through a threshold stage. It can only endure the ambiguity without collapsing into either despair or false certainty. The professor who detains Harry while also feeding him biscuits embodies that exact tension: an authority figure who is simultaneously kind and institutionally compromised, sympathetic to the person and unwilling to act against the structure she serves. The lesson she gives Harry, emotional regulation paired with discernment about when to stand down, is the Hermes function in classical mythology. Hermes moves between Olympus and the underworld because he knows which messages belong in which room. He is not weak for choosing silence in front of Zeus. He is exercising the only form of power available to a messenger who lacks a throne.

The Grant documentary from History Channel has a similar arc to the Chinese Farmer Proverb. He was a military hero in the Mexican American War who rode on the side of his horse against enemy gunfire to resupply his comrades. Then, was stationed on the West Coast, and had to resign or be court martialed for his excessive drinking. 

He marries into a slave owning Missouri family, and the Grant family doesn't attend his wedding. His wife, like Kary, believed in him. He had a low point of selling firewood in the city to provide for his family. His Southern neighbors looked down on him for working side by side with his slaves and that he wasn't nasty enough/didn't beat his slaves. Builds an alternative family home to gain some independence from his father-in-law. Frees a slave instead of getting $1,000. Shows great character doing a moral act while on the verge of poverty. A historian described it as "walking away from instead of selling a house". 

 Then, begs his father-in-law for a clerk job at the family store. Then, is bored to grief. Is approached by an old military friend to join Lincoln's effort to get 75,000 people. Lincoln is plain spoken, folksy, Grant is the same. Grant's daring allows him to rise the ranks because most other Union Generals are too cautious in their battlefield tactics. Takes back two Southern fortresses for the union. Later with Shiloh, holds the Southern advance but at a huge loss of men, 25,000 dead in two days. Crazy because in the Revolutionary war, the fighting force was smaller than the dead. Smokes 25 cigars a day after he is shipped 5,000 cigars from sympathizers for winning a battle. Later on, becomes a corrupt President. 

Grant's arc gives you a second pattern for the same structure, and a more brutal one because no author shaped it. A man with documented battlefield courage was the same man forced to resign under threat of court martial. A family that owned slaves refused to attend his wedding because he had married beneath them, then mocked him for refusing to brutalize people he held in an institution he never defended morally. The act of freeing a man named William Jones, at the exact moment Grant could have sold him for one thousand dollars while selling firewood to feed his own children, is a documented historical fact and not an embellishment. A historian's description of Grant "walking away from instead of selling a house" captures something Jungians call the shadow integration test: the lowest material point in a life is often the exact point where moral character either breaks or asserts itself without an audience to reward it. Grant chose the second outcome with no one watching and no political benefit available to him at the time. The corrupt presidency that follows does not cancel this. Jung's concept of enantiodromia, the tendency of a psychic position to convert into its opposite once carried to an extreme, explains why heroic figures so often produce a compromised second act. The myth does not promise a clean ending. It promises that the descent was real and that the freed man was actually freed.   

The Chinese Farmer Proverb sits underneath both of these, and you are right to connect it. The proverb's refusal to assign "good" or "bad" to any single event until the full sequence plays out is not folk wisdom in a soft sense. It is a direct articulation of enantiodromia from a different tradition: the broken leg that keeps the son out of war, the war that makes the missing horses return with new horses. Grant's resignation in disgrace becomes the precondition for his return in 1861. Harry's detention and humiliation in this book becomes the precondition for the trust the Order extends to him later. Neither pattern is visible from inside the event. Both are only visible from the far side of it.