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Voldemort, who had been magically destroyed in trying to kill Harry himself. We thus realise how, in classic Rags to Riches fashion, the boy hero has been singled out for some special destiny. Harry is initiated into the magical world and sent to Hogwarts, a school for young would-be wizards. Here he finds himself caught up in a cosmic battle between light and dark which eventually centres on a race to secure the `Philosopher's Stone, an object of immense magical power. The spirit of Voldemort needs this to become reincarnated, to carry on his evil work. But when, at the story's climax, Harry finally wins the Stone, it disappears. He is then told by Professor Dumbledore, the `wise old man' who is the school's headmaster, that this is just as well because the powers of the Stone, like those of Tolkien's and Wagner's rings, can only really be used to serve dark and selfish ends. Like the rings, in short, it is a symbol not of the Self but of the ego. Harry had only been able to win it because he did not want it for himself but only in the name of a selfless, world-saving cause. Like Frodo's ring on Mount Doom, it can then disappear back into the `One' from which it had been separated.

6. The role played by Papageno in The Magic Flute helps to illumine the significance of that played by Caliban in The Tempest. Like Papageno, although he is much darker and less good-natured, Caliban stands for `natural man': someone living more or less unconsciously and instinctively, understanding nothing. Papageno's darker side is split off and represented by Monostatos. Caliban's mother Sycorax `was a witch and one so strong that could control the moon, make flows and ebbs'. Like the Queen of the Night, she is `Mother Nature. It is in this respect that Caliban is the opposite to Prospero, who lives on such a lofty plane of consciousness, understanding almost everything; although as master and servant the two are intimately connected, just as Monostatos is the shadow of his master, the Wise Old Man Sarastro. So long as Prospero himself is not yet completely whole, Caliban stands for the unregenerate remnant in Prospero's kingdom - i.e., in Prospero himself ('this thing of darkness I do acknowledge mine'). But at the moment when Prospero finally achieves wholeness, Caliban is brought to the light. The last vestige of natural, unconscious man has been purged by the arrival of complete understanding.

1. Aristotle was not of course alone in using the word hamartia. It also appears in the New Testament, where it has usually been translated into English as `sin' - a word which itself may originally have derived from the same root as `sinister; meaning everything that is done in the `left' way as opposed to the `right' way (compare, for instance, the Russia phrase, na levo, `on the left, applied to anything which is crooked, underhand, `not quite right'). In the Lord's Prayer, hamartia was translated into sixteenth-century English as `trespasses; or `stepping over the bounds, linking it back to the original meaning of hubris. At the roots of language all these ideas - missing the mark, stepping over the bounds, not doing things in the right way, sin, error - are related.

1. Michael Holroyd in his biography of Shaw brings out the tortured nature of Shaw's relationship with his mother, whom he loved but who showed no love for him. She had a strong antipathy to all men, particularly her husband. The one exception was her music teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, who shared the family home in Dublin, taught Mrs Shaw to sing and may well have been her lover. Shaw, according to Holroyd, based Eliza loosely on his mother and Higgins on the teacher who had moulded her into a singer, much as Pygmalion had moulded and brought Galatea to life in the original Greek myth.

2. In fact we learn from a later film in Lucas's Star Wars sequence that, although not his mother, Leia is the next best thing, as Luke's older sister! I have here treated the original Star Wars as a story standing alone in its own right, as was intended when it first appeared. But in the succession