Harry Potter Series: Light And Dark

HADES; GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD

Philip de László - Portrait of Cecile Rankin, 1937 (detail), oil on canvas

i often feel like one of the many reasons why we are so passionate about the whole dark academia thing is because it gives us the opportunity to live in a fantasy where our passion, whether that’s literature, art, theater, science, feels valid.

we live in a world where we are constantly stimulated, constantly finding new things, constantly pressured into liking more and more stuff because the world keeps going on at such a fast pace and it never stops and it’s so hard to keep up with it and it makes your breath short your mind tired your fears bigger and.

it almost feels like we are trapped because even though we would like to slow down for a bit, we know the world won’t stop with us, for us.

if we turn our phones off it’s unnatural and people start worrying, if we don’t check our social medias during our study breaks we get anxious – no matter how much we want it not to be that way, no matter how badly we would like to dedicate ourselves completely to these passions of ours, we can’t do it entirely, slaves of times so flourishing but so scary. the world has a crushing weight and most of the times we soccombe to it.

therefore, thinking about the dark academia concept is a way of finding comfort not only in our own minds but even on this tiny corner of the internet.

in a certain way the concept softens me, although it can often be extreme.

gathering in the common room at three in the morning, a circle of eager friends with the same thirst for knowledge; the sound of a pen scribbling ideas on a thin sheet of paper; round glasses slipping down the tip of our noses always hidden by the pages of novels and poetry collections; dim lights caressing our backs curved from studying for so many hours those same subjects that make our heart race increase; our stray black cats resting on our bellies as we curl up in bed, notes spread out all around us – on the floor, glued to a wall, in between the pages of big tomes; the rain gently tapping against the window of our dorm rooms as we sit with our backs against the wooden wall, completely lost in between crinkled words with no cellphone, no distraction other than the characters and philosophers speaking to us in ancient languages, voices sweet as honey; our minds getting poisoned as we start to believe in those revolutions so badly we’re willing to lose our sanity after them; having lessons with just a bunch of other people, tea burning our tongues as it runs hot down our throats; and then, when the line between reality and fiction blurs completely, we might lose ourselves – but we wouldn’t feel guilty in the comfort we find when our love for knowledge becomes so warm it eventually starts to burn our skin. God, how sweet it feels to become ashes for these passions of us.

“Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…”

— Paul Woodruff, The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated) 

Julius Grimm (1842-1906)

In 1888, Julius Grimm used photography and telescope observation to create this intricately detailed and precise oil painting of the moon. In the night sky, the moon is always lit from behind you – so the shadows of the craters can never appear as they do in this painting. Grimm instead regarded the moon as if it were a still life, bathed in golden light emanating from the left side of the painting. 

“The picture should only be hung or positioned, that the light falls onto the picture from the side where the arrow is positioned, because otherwise, in the case of incorrect lighting, the effect could be completely lost.”

Medusa in culture

(Medusa c. 1618 Peter Paul Rubens, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon - Stephen Wilk, Medusa On Her Throne Reza Sedhi, Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power - Mary Valentis and Anne Devane, Medusa c. 1640 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Laugh of the Medusa - Helene Cixous, Medusa Robin Isley)

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

A Dark Academic’s Guide to Recovery

Lending yourself to an ancient and forbidden ritual, offering yourself to the pure-selfishness of pulling the roots from underneath you and replanting them again in the wet and dark soil. To feel the candlelight flicker on your lips as you recite an ode to yourself and the divinity within your fingertips. 

Indulge in dark literature. Consume the words with a hunger that becomes insatiable, drinking the stories that haunt your bones like wine brewed from the Cask of Amontillado. 

Accept that thoughts will cut through your mind, and respond to them with poetry. Respond to self-deprecation with powerful epigrams, for you are Aphrodite, and you bend the wills of men, as jasmine flows from your voice; untouchable from cusp of mortality. 

Wear a locket and fill it’s silver lining with a horcrux: a dried petal of the rose from a lover, the black and white photographs of handsome and deceased monarchs or scholars, and the captured air of autumn’s first kiss.

Adore the moon and the moon alone, for you are born from her celestial dust, and you will return to her in your late night walks outside the walls of your favourite library. 

Collapse on the hillside moor and scream into the air as though you were in Wuthering Heights, falling and crying into the heather and dew, releasing the anxieties and fears that only the earth will hear. She will comfort you more than tracing the wet ink along your parchment.