Felix Felicis is the title of a chapter in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It is also featured in the film adaptation. Although, a relatively small vignette in the story it is one that I find addresses a most essential and perplexing human experience. The phrase is another that Rowling has created from latin, translating loosely to, happy luck. Through this vignette she elucidates a paradoxical and enriching experience of luck.
Felix Felicis is a coveted potion within the wizarding world that grants its user a perfect day, ensuring luck in all of one’s endeavors. Harry is awarded a small vile of the potion for successfully brewing the best Draught of Living Death. Harry accomplished this by stumbling onto the slightly altered instructions noted in the margins of Severus Snape’s old textbook. Harry retains his reward for some time, passing on several tempting opportunities to use it. Finally, Harry uses the potion in an attempt to gain a memory from an evasive and resistant professor, Horace Slughorn. This is an ordeal that Harry had hopelessly failed at before and that Dumbledore had previously assigned as imperative for defeating Voldemort.
Drinking the potion, Harry abandons any rational plans for obtaining Slughorn’s memory. Following a brief trance-like pause, Harry confidently states, “I’m going down to Hagrid’s”. Potter strolls confidently onto the school grounds and beyond the safety of Hogwarts’ protective walls. Just before crossing into a precarious nightfall he passes the busy Professor Slughorn who is taken aback by Harry’s attitude. Intrigued, Slughorn insists on accompanying Harry. Ensuing meanderings lead Harry and Horace into an intimate gathering at Hagrid’s cottage. Following revelry and significant amount of Butterbeer, Harry finds himself across the table from an intoxicated and strangely unguarded Slughorn. It is here that Horace voluntarily offers up his most protected secret, a memory of a conversation with Tom Riddle–the young Voldemort–where he discusses the dark magic of the Horcrux–the pivotal piece for unraveling Voldemort’s diabolical plan.
Deep in the perilous adventure and at a most critical juncture in the story luck became necessary. I sensed an ineffable familiarity with what was unfolding in Felix Felicious. Harry was capable of accomplishing this heroic task only by relinquishing control. Felix enabled a surrendering of the will, a position that was open to participation. It seemed something like succumbing to the sound of a moving musical score or the composition and color of an evocative painting. There is an invitation to participate with what is happening. Demands for control fade into the background. Under the influence of Felix it seemed that Harry’s focus diffused, became peripheral. Instead of willing an event into existence he made contact with the present and the particulars of what was happening in the moment. He dilly dallied, marveled. Fascinatingly, it was this kind contact with his surroundings that led toward the accomplishment of his task. It was a kind of blind fecundity. And, perhaps my favorite part, it was enjoyable. The task was accomplished, richly. Harry was deeply curious and concerned for others. His previous personal identification with the task was strangely absent. He seemed to operate with a detachment or maybe a lengthy tether between his object of desire and his self.
Reportedly, too much liquid luck invites the destruction of the user, accordingly, Dumbledore used it only recreationally. Moments of releasing the oars into the water are essential, terrifying and ecstatic, but do not provide a place conscious humans are capable of dwelling. One needs a task, a focus, a discipline, to be psychologically, spiritually, even soulfully alive. I have long been terrorized and hounded by the idea of setting goals. I felt ill just hearing the daily rhetoric within my field of setting goals, and establishing objectives to reach those goals. It usually left me feeling disconnected from my experience, like learning the tango silhouetted through two dimensional shoe prints–a disconnect from the living, breathing, moving world I was experiencing. And, yet I have realized the critical nature of needing a provisional telos to give life a relatable direction and purpose. Without a mark on the horizon, a set course one is inevitably caught in the disorienting cacophony of sirens and harpies, crashed upon rocky shores of dismay and defeat. An acknowledgement of one’s voice, individual authenticity, is equally necessary for the conversation that Felix invites.
Felix is not goal-less. The goal is there but it has gone underground. It is implied, held close to the heart, in the back of the mind, a backdrop. Recently I’ve been having moments that felt very much like Felix. I was very present to my circumstances and engaged in them while at the same time released from my need for the intended object. I felt held by the world, and yet strangely also held by it, subtly influencing it, and being influenced by it, a mutual caress. Mysteriously, throughout the experience I sensed a satisfaction that my task or goal was being accomplished in the only way it could, like destiny. I found that Rowling’s Felix presents luck as a renewing perspective, an opportunity, a quickening that everyday life usually drowns out. Inherently cooperative, Felix breathes life into experience, a reminder that longing and desire are always emerging and accessible. Felix necessitates a faith in the fabric of existence to carry one, and upon approaching in this manner goals and objectives become accessible to the will. Surely this is something the Greek tragedies attempted to portray to their audience; the follies of hubris, attempts to harness the entire experience, the tyranny of the I. Felix Felicis becomes a refreshing paradox, a reminder of the unfolding possibilities present even in the depths of despair, making connection with what has yet to completely reveal itself.
