Cannibalism in Harry Potter

ll those people who criticized me for making Harry Potter jokes will be sorry now. HP has been slapped with a ‘content advisory,’ the new version of a trigger warning, which means it's too scary and/or risqué for children to read. Not because 54 kids and teachers get brutally murdered, but because it contains “outdated attitudes.” It tells you the priorities of those academics.

I happen to prefer the old Outer Limits reruns, like the one where Eddie Albert and his wife, in sort of a sci-fi Green Acres with aliens, buy a farm in the desert and then get kidnapped by sentient tumble­weeds. But I’ll watch any sci-fi as long as it's not ‘woke.’ And that's really what they mean by “outdated attitudes”: It’s a sneaky way of saying HP is not woke enough, meaning it doesn’t lecture to us on the political opinions of the academics. It’s not so much a warning as a political marking of territory by pissing on somebody else’s work.

It’s also another jump-the-shark moment for wokeism. Wokeness is looking more and more like a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, one that may be untreatable (no one in the profession ever uses the term ‘cure’). That’s ironic because psychiatric disorders are the basic theme of HP.

I am still convinced that Hogwarts is actually a psychiatric hospital for severe cases of early-onset dementia. The subtext of HP is developmental neuropsychiatric disorders told from the point of view of the sufferer: one kid writes death threats against herself on the wall in blood and is found lying in a sewer. Another hears snakes telling him to kill and gets terrifying hallucina­tions. Others suffer debilitating bouts of depression, described as an evil being that sucks out one’s soul. The adults seek out these mad children in orphanages and abusive families and gently try to coax them back to reality. For instance, one teacher tells them to overcome their biggest fear by pointing at it and calling it ridiculous. Depression, they’re told, can be driven off by focusing on their happiest memory.

Though the movie shows them as magic spells, they’re actually forms of cognitive restructuring used in cognitive behavior therapy in the real world and they can be highly effective against depression.

Voldemort is a personification of schizophrenia. Snape tells H if it invades his mind he won’t last two seconds. As the prophecy says, neither can live while the other survives. This makes no sense if H and V are two different people. Both were already surviving and could have gone on living indefinitely. The only interpretation that makes sense in this very symbolic story is that V is a allegory for mental illness. Either the madness is destroyed or H would be destroyed.

I credit HP for helping me identify regional UK accents, including the Welsh accent, which I had never heard. Even people in the same family have different accents. And that Asian girl with the Scottish brogue was, as the Brits say, brilliant. HP is also the perfect source for jokes because these days you can only talk about two things without people on the Internet threatening to murder you: fiction and neuropsychiatric disorders.

And I have many HP jokes stored up, so maybe, because today’s one of your Earth holidays, which means those movies are on TV continuously, I might be able to get away with it.

Enough fluff, get to the jokes already

Another subtext in HP is the cannibalism that runs through the pages of those seven books like an invisible trail of blood.

Take the scene, as depicted in the movie, where the kid asks Sirius if the villain, whats-his-name, would be able to see his deceased friends he’s hallucinating about and only he can see. Sirius says, “No. We’re in here, you see.” He seems to want to point to Harry’s heart, but in fact he’s pointing closer to his stomach.

One patient, Voldemort, is always referred to as “he who must not be named” because there’s a curse on the name, but it’s also the case that de-anonymizing a patient, at least in the USA, would violate HIPAA regula­tions. Revealing protected health information such as a patient’s name gets you fined by the HHS or criminally prosecuted by the US Department of Justice, which is a lot scarier than the Ministry of Magic could ever be.

In the last movie, Voldemort starts boasting that Harry Potter is ‘dead.’ Neville replies “He’s still with us—in here” while pointing to his intestines. It’s another clear reference to cannibalism.

(No one seems to know what Voldemort’s first name is. My guess is ’Lloyd.’ Lloyd Voldemort.)

Here are some more examples.

Non-cannibal jokes.

A proposed rewrite of the scene where Ron and Harry return to the tent carrying a horcrux which they smashed after it showed them a deepfake of Hermione looking much, much cuter than she does in real life.

One more, then I’ll stop.

If “outdated attitudes” include people defending their own culture, realizing that they’re screwing up, courageously confronting problems, and having good friends over for dinner, we need more of them. A corollary is that the academics who doubt this are, as a Douglas Adams character called the telephone sanitizer crowd, a bunch of useless bloody loonies.

  * The book says they only ordered two because Harry was invisible and they repaired the café using magic. This would be even harder to explain: “This might be hard to believe, Boss, but an invisible wizard came in . . .”

dec 25 2025, 4:21 am. updated dec 28 2025 and jan 18 2026

Category: short-term articles