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As I've said before, those Harry Potter books have a lot more to teach us than meets the eye. But Lord Voldemort as a symbol of institutional religion? I think so. Here's another excerpt from my book, The Tao of Hogwarts:

Why is it that the Potter books have so inflamed the followers of certain fundamentalist sects of Christianity? It's probably a question that can't truly be answered, because to fully explore it only raises deeper and more significant questions. But it is clear that some violent passions have been aroused by Mrs. Rowling's fiction: the infamous book burnings, especially in the context of the magical themes of the stories themselves, evoke the inquisitions of medieval Europe and the Salem witch hunts in America.

Could it be that these fearful, paranoid right-wing ideologues that burn Mrs. Rowling's books are simply reacting to the terrible reflection of themselves that appears in the characters of Lord Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters?

I think that when we look closely at Lord Voldemort, we find a very accurate symbol of the icy and commanding voice of the group-centered ideological prejudice known as institutional religion.

The very presence of that word, "Lord" in his title, suggests the exposure of the patriarchal and hierarchical face of institutional religion, with its exclusionary voice and racist overtones. Voldemort lives on the blood and energy of others, through the perpetuation of an image of power. His power is enforced (as all power must be) by the means of Laws and Commandments, torture, and slaughter (respectively symbolized by Voldemort's three favorite curses: "Imperio" representing Law and Commandment; "Crucio," torture, including the inner torture of guilt and blame; and "Avada Kedavra," murder.) Like Zeus, he is vain and pompous; like the Judeo-Christian god of the Old Testament, he is vengeful, arrogant, willful, and violent; like Allah, he is hideously demanding, insular, and lives not by love but by mere submission from his priests and followers, who cast the mark of his divinity into the sky, and wear it on their skin, like stigmata.

Lord Voldemort is fundamentally an illusion, an abstraction: he spends most of the stories presented as a vaporous, shadowy, insubstantial parasite. Even after his return to bodily form in the fourth book, he is like a ghoula wasted, skeletal form with the head of a snake. This is a symbol of the apparitionalthe "pretence to piety and benevolence" that Lao Tzu asks us to discard

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