Fantastic Beasts and Where to Return Them

Since the final book of the Harry Potter series was released in 2007, J.K. Rowling has taken to Twitter, more than any other medium, to interact with fans and to expand the Harry Potter universe in 140 characters or less. During a Q&A a couple of years ago, one user asked Rowling about the fate of Fluffy, a ferocious three-headed guard dog released into the Forbidden Forest at the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She responded, “He was repatriated to Greece. Dumbledore liked to put Hagrid’s more foolish acquisitions back where they belong — not the forest.” Immediately in the @replies, Rowling’s followers began speculating not on this new piece of Potter canon but about what she was really talking about: the Parthenon Marbles.

If you just did a double take there, you’re not alone. How is a mythological hellhound related to one of the most controversial acquisitions in museum history? For starters, it was February 2015, four months after the Greek government hired Amal Clooney — yes, that Amal Clooney — to negotiate the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens. Coincidence? Probably, but if you know Rowling, you know she’s pretty vocal when it comes to controversial issues. She’s not one to engage in all-out Twitter battles (usually), but she’s taken jabs at everyone from the Westboro Baptist Church to Donald Trump. She’s also used Twitter to expand Potter canon, tweeting on everything from the mundane (tuition at Hogwarts is free) to the heated (Dumbledore’s sexuality).

While these Q&A sessions are usually light-hearted, we often learn more about Rowling’s personality than we do about the Potterverse. Although the likelihood that her tweet about Fluffy was actually about the Parthenon Marbles is slim, it’s not so farfetched to link the two. If Rowling can comment on the state of education and LGBTQ rights under the veil of Harry Potter, she can comment on the Parthenon Marbles.

Conservatives often respond to Rowling’s politics with outrage, but she has made missteps that upset progressives as well. Last summer, she came under fire for appropriating Native American religion, specifically Navajo religion, in her short essay titled “History of Magic in North America.” Released on the Pottermore website in anticipation of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film, set in New York City, the essay describes the origins of magic in North America and equates Navajo “skin walkers” (a taboo subject) with magical Animagi:

A legend grew up around the Native American Animagi, that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.

Pundits like Adrienne Keene took to Twitter to charge Rowling with ignoring the “context, roots, and reality” of Native American stories. The sloppiness of Rowling’s essay undercuts her usual, painstaking methodology: to research and then to adapt. In a word: reception.

Reception and — if you’re feeling fancy — its strictly literary counterpart, intertextuality, receive a lot of buzz in Classics nowadays. You can publish in journals and attend conferences devoted to the reception of Classics in opera, film, pop culture, etc. In general, reception is viewed positively: Without sword-and-sandals epics, the Lysistrata set in Chicago, and, yes, Harry Potter, who would know anything about the ancient world anymore? But more recently, the academic community has been peeling back the layers behind the less savory side of reception: the systematic use of the ancient world to abuse and oppress others.

So what? We’re past all of this, right? Um, no. We’re not. And it’s probably why reception’s formerly academic, now politically charged sister term “cultural appropriation” charged onto the Twitter scene in 2013. But what exactly is cultural appropriation? It’s when a Victoria’s Secret lingerie model dons a war bonnet when she hasn’t earned it. It’s when an American pop star wears a bindi to “express herself.” It’s when you call your friends “homies.” It’s Nashville hot chicken.

I could go on, but in all of these examples, the issue of cultural appropriation centers on a dominant culture (usually white or European or colonial) appropriating a minority culture (usually non-white or non-European or colonized) without due regard, respect, or value given to that culture. It’s a loaded issue, but it’s one now wrapped up in identity politics and political correctness as well as the more “academic” issues of reception and adaptation. It can be hard to separate cultural appropriation from cultural fusion when burrito trucks owned by white women are forced to shutter and Teen Vogue includes stories like “How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation at Coachella” in its summer issue. But when you take something without asking — or even really understanding what you’re taking — you run the risk of not just angering or alienating a whole group of people, but erasing them. And do you really have the right to do that? (Short answer: no.)

So the issue of reception and cultural appropriation and its connection to Fluffy, the Parthenon Marbles, and Native American religion begs a broader question, one of ownership. Who decides when something is taken from its native setting, and more importantly, who gives permission?

Fluffy — or Cerberus — has a long history of being taken from his home against his will.

Enter Heracles. The first person to take Cerberus from his home, Heracles has issues. A lot of issues. As punishment for murdering his wife and children (not exactly Disney-friendly material), the Greek hero’s twelfth and final task was to steal Cerberus from the Underworld unharmed. Most surviving texts treat the episode briefly, a paradigm for the difficulty of escaping the Underworld. We can go way back to Homer, who has Heracles recount his task to Odysseus in the Odyssey, and Hesiod, who’s the first to give Cerberus a name in the Theogony. Few authors focus on the twelfth (or any) labor exclusively (though variations abound in pottery), making anything associated with Heracles easier to allude to or to adapt. Rowling’s own description of Fluffy draws on thousands of years of allusion and adaptation: He has three of everything, three heads, three pairs of “rolling, mad” eyes, three noses, and three mouths with “saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, chapter 9). But when it comes time for Harry and company to get past Fluffy, they take the route of Orpheus, rather than Heracles, and play music to lull him to sleep.

Harry and company don’t steal Fluffy from Hogwarts, nor did they bring him there. Hagrid did, after he bought him from a “Greek chappie” under less-than-legal circumstances (*cough* animal trafficking *cough*). This is a far cry from the violent episode you’re probably imaging with Heracles literally dragging Cerberus out of the Underworld. But Timothy Gantz points out in his 1993 book Early Greek Myth that the iconography of this episode, and its development, depicts a shift in attitude about Heracles’ involvement in this labor. Early vases show him violently storming the Underworld to steal Cerberus; later ones show a more gentle encounter with Persephone allowing Heracles to borrow Cerberus. So while Heracles doesn’t necessarily steal Cerberus every time this episode is recounted, he does participate in the movement of an exotic animal across borders — with no real intention of returning him.

But we shouldn’t pillory Heracles as a proto-animal trafficker. Animal trafficking as we know it, the illicit trade for everything from bushmeat to elephant tusks to illegal house pets, just didn’t exist in the ancient world. What did exist in Antiquity was animal hunting, specifically exotic animal hunting. Think crocodiles from Egypt, panthers from Greece, and elephants from north Africa. Big game from conquered locales played a huge role in the Roman Empire, marching alongside war captives during the imperial triumph. Our earliest account of foreign animals’ participation in processions comes from Josephus’s description of Vespasian’s and Titus’ triumph where “beasts of many species were led along, all decked out with the appropriate adornments” (7.136). Exotic animals, dressed up and subjugated like their human counterparts, were paraded through the streets as prisoners, then later slaughtered in the amphitheater during the ludi, or games. The more fantastic the beast, the better.

So while these fantastic beasts weren’t trafficked, they were displayed as symbols of Rome’s power. And that’s what Cerberus/Fluffy does for his conqueror. Like the emperors Titus and Vespasian, in capturing and later displaying Cerberus to Eurystheus, Heracles didn’t display the might and prowess of the hellhound but his own. Similarly Rowling displays her own literary and cultural prowess when she places Fluffy at the trapdoor leading to the Sorcerer’s Stone. Here, she takes a prominent, seminal image from Western literature and adapts it for her own purposes. And she does so in a pretty clever way by placing Fluffy at the beginning of Harry’s katabasis (a descent into the Underworld) and associating him with heroes like Orpheus, Heracles, and Aeneas.

But who owns Fluffy? The ancient Greeks are no longer alive, and their stories no longer hold any real religious weight. You could point fingers at Rome, but Rome “appropriated” Greek culture long ago (part of a larger drive in Roman society to assimilate conquered cultures). Greek mythology now resides in the foundations of Western literature and art: you can plagiarize its particular iterations but not its general ideas. This is why Greece can argue for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles but not, say, the dismantling of Washington, D.C. And yes, on Cerberus you could argue that Vergil cribbed Homer, and Dante Vergil, but whoever came up with Cerberus first is long gone — and he’s ripe for the taking.

Enter Hagrid. The ethically questionable half-giant groundskeeper of Hogwarts gets Fluffy from a “Greek chappie.” Heracles, maybe? While the Wizarding World plays host to a number of “fantastic beasts” from Greek mythology like centaurs and griffins — even Dumbledore’s pet phoenix Fawkes — there’s no indication that the particular creatures from Greek myth (think Oedipus’ Sphinx, Bellerophon’s Chimaera) roam immortal across Europe. The same goes for our favorite heroes. So even though it would be pretty cool, Hagrid probably didn’t meet Heracles over beers in the Hog’s Head. Still, whether he’s Heracles’ Cerberus or Hagrid’s Fluffy, Rowling’s hellhound is a long way from home.

The same could be said of the Parthenon Marbles. Beginning in 1801, the Turkish government allowed a British noble, Lord Elgin, to remove as much as he could from the Parthenon, at the time a squalid Ottoman garrison and nothing like the gleaming temple we think of today. The original papers have been lost, but a copy exists in Italian. The trade was legal, yet Greece has lobbied for the Marbles’ return since it gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830.

Mary Beard, of course, has something to say about this. In a blog post titled “What We Get Wrong About Lord Elgin,” Beard writes, “the Marbles were not a symbol of ‘Greek nationhood’ when Elgin took them… The Marbles became a national symbol in sense in their loss.” Greece has consistently defined itself in terms of this loss, even as the symbolism behind the Parthenon (Greek imperialism, Greek democracy, etc.) has changed. In some ways, this is reception at its finest. It’s not the Marbles themselves that Greece wants to be returned, it’s what they believe the Marbles to represent, even as Greece itself changes from occupied territory to monarchy to debt- and refugee-beset democracy.

The Parthenon Marbles have been in the news lately, not just because of a certain celebrity attorney but also Brexit. With the triggering of article fifty by British Prime Minister Theresa May in April, the Greek government has once again called for the repatriation of the Marbles to promote European unity and identity. If Britain doesn’t want to be a part of Europe, the reasoning goes, then it shouldn’t own a piece of European history.

But this call for repatriation begs the question, once again, of ownership. Over and over again, the British Museum — and other museums like it around the world — has argued that the Marbles represent the foundations of Western history and belong to everyone. Global museums like the British Museum, it contends, are cultural stewards, not cultural appropriators. And so, regardless of provenance and Britain’s colonial past — two of the greatest factors in cultural appropriation — London continues to house the Parthenon Marbles, divorced from their archaeological and historical context on the Acropolis. Thousands of visitors encounter them there each year, many more than would see them if they were removed to Athens.

The British Museum has a huge audience. So does Rowling. This argument underlies the issues raised by Rowling’s “History of Magic in North America.” Over 100 million copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone have been sold — and that’s just the first book. To say Rowling is influential is an understatement: She is a force. So when Native American scholars and advocates saw her appropriating Native American religion — one that, unlike ancient Greek religion, is still practiced by a marginalized group today — they were, understandably, alarmed.

But what exactly was Rowling appropriating? Keene, on her blog Native Appropriations, decides for us that we don’t need to know the details (again, it’s taboo), only that Native American beliefs, specifically Navajo beliefs, are not just “a scary story or something to tell kids to get them to behave” but deeply rooted in hers and others’ understanding and place in the world. In short, they are religious and sacred, and Rowling, in writing about them from a European point of view, promoted a brutal colonial interpretation of Native American beliefs with the broad audience of Harry Potter and the Internet in mind. (Pottermore is a digital encyclopedia-in-progress, after all.)

But let’s pause for a moment. When you read through Rowling’s essay, it becomes clear that she’s uncomfortable with translating the Wizarding world outside of Britain. Period. Some of the more controversial aspects of U.S. history, like the Civil War and the history of slavery and racism, are glossed over or outright ignored. In the film this essay preceded, laws against interracial marriage are translated into laws against marriage between Wizards and Muggles — all played against the backdrop of a mostly white cast.

Perhaps the reason Rowling and others can traffic/translate Cerberus into their works so easily is because at this point, ancient Greek religion has lost all modern spiritual significance, unlike Native American religion generally, which is still by practiced by tribes across North American today. Heracles and Cerberus have become symbols of Greek mythology and Western literature. Anyone can take Cerberus from his mythological context, not just Heracles — Cerberus is owned by everyone and no one. In much the same way, the British Museum argues that the Parthenon Marbles are international possessions and not the democratic symbols, or even the European symbols, the Greek government would like them to be. (They too have lost their religious context.)

But where physical objects can be returned, images and ideas — regardless of their cultural sensitivity — cannot be extracted from their new literary context. At its worst, reception—or cultural appropriation—is a form of trafficking: a covert activity that transports images and ideas across literary and artistic borders, without permission, without thinking, and for the purpose of oppressing others. At best, it recreates and reimagines these images and ideas for new cultures, new peoples, and new genres. When people say cultural appropriation isn’t all bad, what they’re really talking about is culturally sensitive reception. Fusion. Inspiration.

Fluffy is that. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book introduced the idea of a three-headed dog to a generation of children and reimagined Cerberus for those who knew him from ancient literature and beyond. Her intent was not malicious, it was educational and entertaining. In the same way, she’s attempted to incorporate Native American religious beliefs into the Wizarding World. She’s not acting maliciously, but her ignorance perpetuates a colonizing narrative that continues to marginalize and oppress Native American people today.

Ignorance doesn’t absolve Rowling of her actions—or Lord Elgin’s or Heracles’, for that matter. When we take something that does not belong to us, we all participate in a form of theft. But in returning Fluffy to Greece via Twitter, Rowling acknowledges her cultural debt even as she points fingers at another institution for its failure to do so. Perhaps in the future she’ll treat other cultures with the same sensitivity as she treats her own.

Margaret Day is a PhD student in Classics at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she works on women and animals in Antiquity. Like any good Magizoologist, she’s a Hufflepuff.