Since my last post, a few people have asked if I think there are any hidden messages in the Harry Potter books. The idea is that J.K.Rowling has encoded deep truths in her books – truths which appeal to our conscious and subconscious minds – thus accounting for their surprising popularity. Lots of people have had a go at identifying such truths; however there is one, I think, that has been overlooked.

Cutting-edge science – particularly String Theory – suggests there might be as many as eleven dimensions to our universe. We, however, are only aware of the first four, namely: length, breadth, height and time. Some religions assert there to be seven. Like the seven colours of the rainbow, notes on the diatonic musical scale and days of the week, they believe the septenary system also applies to the dimensions.

Not that I’m any great expert – most six-year-olds know more about Harry Potter than me – it seems as if Rowling has classified these seven dimensions into four zonal worlds. The defining characteristic of each world is that the higher up one goes, the closer one gets to some profound reality.

Therefore, on one level, zone one represents the ‘muggle world’, zone two the ‘wizarding world’, zone three the ‘grounds of Hogwarts’ and zone four ‘Hogwarts’ itself. As we progress from zone one to four, we sense an increase in the power of magic, magical characters, magical artefacts, and magical adversaries.

I have tried to summarise some of this information in the table below:

These four zonal worlds might correspond to the Theosophical dimensions model, popularised by Helena Blavatsky in the Nineteenth-Century. The correspondence would be as follows: zone one (physical), zone two (astral), zone three (mental) and zone four (causal).

More on this later...