Harry Potter and the Enneagram - Twos

By Teresa Malcolm

The first person to guide Harry in the Wizarding World is a Two, the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid. Hagrid rescues Harry from the Dursleys, and introduces Harry to his new life, taking him to buy school supplies in Diagon Alley - along the way treating Harry to a birthday cake, breakfast, and later to ice cream, giving him a birthday present, and filling him in about the magical world and Harry's own past.

Harry catches the attention of another Two at the station before he takes the train to Hogwarts: Molly Weasley helps him get to platform nine and three quarters, and when she learns who he is, her concern is tuned immediately to the orphaned boy with the traumatic past. "Poor dear - no wonder he was alone," she says. "I wondered. He was ever so polite when he asked how to get on to the platform." She sternly forbids her son Fred to ask Harry about "You-Know-Who" and the night Harry's parents died: "As though he needs reminding of that on his first day at school."

Hagrid and Molly take a nurturing place in Harry's life - Hagrid at Hogwarts, and Molly during the summer and Christmas holidays. It's not surprising: Twos need to be needed, and as such they are drawn to those who are, in whatever way they may perceive it, needy. An orphan certainly qualifies.

Of course, with Hagrid, horrible monsters also qualify. He nurtures baby dragon Norbert ("Bless him, look, he knows his mummy!"), giant spider Aragog, the hippogriff Buckbeak - all manner of "interestin' creatures" that are feared and rejected by others, and so are in special need of being lavished with Hagrid's love and care.

This habit culminates in Hagrid's adoption of his half-brother Grawp, a violent, full-blooded giant. Grawp is a member of an outcast race as it is, but he is also picked on by other giants for being a runt. "He was bein' kicked aroun' by all o' them - I jus' couldn' leave him," Hagrid explains to the horrified Harry and Hermione, who recognize that Hagrid took Grawp away from the giant community against his will. But Twos' compulsion to help can lead them to force that help on others, and Hagrid chains Grawp in place in the forest adjoining Hogwarts, and refuses to listen to the advice of those who tell him the attempt to civilize the giant is futile. Instead, Hagrid says he is teaching Grawp to talk, "'Cause I reckon if he can talk ter people, he'll understand more that we all like 'im really, an' want 'im ter stay." ("We all" being, it is apparent, no one but Hagrid.)

Still, the attempt is to some degree successful - Grawp is civilized enough at the end of the sixth book to attend a funeral and comfort his half-brother.

Molly shows her own share of the intrusive, meddling side of Twos, mostly directed at her seven children, from pestering the grown Bill to cut his hair, to endlessly battling the misbehaving twins. Harry is treated with a lighter hand, as the family's guest, but he is also an all-but-adopted son. By the end of the fourth year, there's no doubt that Molly loves Harry as her own child, and after Cedric's death and the other traumatic events that end Goblet of Fire, it is shown in one of the most touching scenes in the books:

"The thing against which [Harry] had been fighting on and off ever since he had come out of the maze was threatening to overpower him. He could feel a burning, prickling feeling in the inner corners of his eyes. He blinked and stared up at the ceiling.

"It wasn't your fault, Harry," Mrs. Weasley whispered.

"I told him to take the cup with me," said Harry.

"Now the burning feeling was in his throat too. He wished Ron would look away.

"Mrs. Weasley set the potion down on the bedside cabinet, bent down, and put her arms around Harry. He had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother.

Molly's protectiveness of Harry leads her into a battle of wills with his godfather, Sirius, at the beginning of the fifth year. Who makes the decisions regarding Harry's welfare? Sirius wants Harry informed about the war with Voldemort. Molly says he's too young, and she gets quite possessive of Harry, and quite cruelly personal in her attack on Sirius:

"He's not your son," said Sirius quietly.

"He's as good as,"said Mrs Weasley fiercely. "Who else has he got?"

"He's got me!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Weasley, her lip curling, "the thing is, it's been rather difficult for you to look after him while you've been locked up in Azkaban, hasn't it?"

While Hagrid and Molly show some of the failings of average Twos, they are both at heart decent, loving people who have provided the sympathy, warmth and support that Harry so lacked growing up with the Dursleys. For a picture of a much more unhealthy Two, we turn to Delores Umbridge, the villain of the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix.

Twos take pride in how they are indispensable to others. We've seen Hagrid, for instance, preen at how Dumbledore relies on him. Umbridge also sees herself in this "right-hand" role, and the person she serves is Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge. She shows far more overreaching pride in her place than Hagrid ever has, but because an unhealthy Two could not ever admit to doing anything in self-interest, Umbridge's "furious desire to bring every aspect of life at Hogwarts under her personal control" is all on behalf of Fudge and the Ministry.

So she smiles sweetly and tells the students - speaking to them as if they were little children - "I am here to help. I am your friend." Her self-image of sweetness extends to her fluffy pink cardigans and the horridly cutesy kittens that decorate her office.

When Harry notes her "fussy, simpering demeanor" change to "hard fury," you see the move of a Two to the low side of her Eight connection. That's the side that belies her attempt at sweetness, the cruel side that Harry becomes all too well-acquainted with: persecutory, malicious, violent, but all the while completely convinced of her goodness. She's helping Cornelius and the Ministry, after all.

Finally, we learn how far she'll go to support Fudge's interests: sending the lethal Dementors to attack Harry, and by the end preparing to use the Cruciatus Curse - the illegal torture curse - on him: "What Cornelius doesn't know won't hurt him," Umbridge says. "He never knew I ordered the Dementors to go after Potter last summer, but he was delighted to be given the chance to expel him, all the same. Somebody had to act. They were all bleating about silencing you somehow - discrediting you - but I was the one who actually did something about it."

Molly herself has a temper that can cause her husband and children to cower, and Hagrid has been driven to violent rage - they each have their own Eight connection. But whereas Umbridge's pridefulness and desire for control have become so strong that her offers to "help" always ring false and manipulative, with Hagrid and Molly, their Two compulsions are tempered by their genuine desire to care for their loved ones, including Harry.

Next up, the Threes: the comical, the pitiable, and the ultimate evil.