It is not a secret that J.K. Rowling is fascinated with ancient knowledge, and that her fascination with it supplied the Wizarding World with so much of its logic and detail.
“Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road, then I ditched German, and scuttled off down the classic corridor,” she said, describing her college-aged self.
Yet few, if any, Harry Potter fans, like myself, have a full appreciation of this. Recently, while watching an interview that had nothing whatsoever to do with Harry Potter, I gained a bit more.
The interview was with a psychologist named Jordan Peterson, who spent a decade and a half studying ancient texts and archetypes, trying to understand meaning across human history.
Dr. Peterson has a knack for connecting everyday aspects of our lives to obscure texts and old ideas (probably because he’s made it his mission), and while doing so, he started talking about the Golden Snitch: “That little golden snitch that everyone is chasing is actually an ancient alchemical symbol for the union of chaos and order. I don’t know how in the world she figured that out. It’s called the round chaos. It’s unbelievably obscure. If you look it up on Google I think the only reference to ‘round chaos’ is to my website. I got it from reading Jung; I don’t know how she figured it out.”
Below is a depiction of "round chaos", the winged shape at the bottom:
After hearing this bit of the interview I immediately paused it and searched “round chaos.” Nothing substantive but Peterson’s website came up. I searched for what the Golden Snitch was and got nothing but watered down listicles filled with unimpressive facts, which the author probably pulled out of their hat to meet that week’s quota.
This information, at least for someone as inept with the internet as myself, seems to be most findable on that classics corridor Rowling was talking about; the classics corridor that filled her Wizarding World with obscurities and profundities yet to be appreciated, and that make her books so reminiscent of the great stories that recur throughout the generations, like the Harry Potter books themselves.
