Prophecy/Fate
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix draws many similarities with William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Throughout the novel, the goal of the Order is to stop Voldemort from attaining the record of the prophecy made by Professor Trelawney, which predicts that a boy born at the end of July will defeat Voldemort. However, the prophecy also indicates that Voldemort will mark this boy as his equal, which he does by choosing Harry Potter, a half-blood like himself, over Neville, a pure-blood born the day before Harry. Having only been made aware of half of the prophecy, Voldemort attempts to prevent it from coming true, not realizing that in doing so, he only solidifies it. When he tries to kill Harry, Lily stands in between, and he transfers some of his powers to Harry, therefore marking him as his equal. As is the nature of prophecies in literature, it is necessary for the prophecy to be heard and recognized for those about whom they are written in order for them come true. Similar to Macbeth fulfilling the prophecy that he will be king by killing Duncan, Voldemort sets in place the final showdown between him and Harry, in which only one of them will live, with one killed by the other.
Choice/Free Will
Harry often finds himself slipping into Voldemort's thoughts. As he feels the wizarding community turn its back on him, he begins to wonder if he himself is actually becoming evil. However, it is his godfather, Sirius, who points out that no person is only definitely good or definitely bad, echoing Dumbledore's wisdom from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that he must choose whether to act on negative impulses or to strive for the light. This points out once again the fundamental difference between Harry and Voldemort, both ambitious, orphaned children able to choose between darkness or light.
Rowling intertwines notions of fate and choice, most notably by demonstrating how Voldemort completes Trelawney's prophecy by making a choice. Having only heard the beginning of the prophecy, Voldemort believes that he can avoid the rise of a sworn enemy by killing Harry while he's still an infant. Voldemort had to choose between attacking Harry or Neville, and thus he chose which boy would become "The Boy Who Lived." Rowling introduces an element of choice in fate, complicating the notion that everything is predetermined. Fate, in Harry Potter's world, is still subject to a degree of free will that shapes the way prophecies manifest.
Rebellion
When the Ministry denies Voldemort's return, it forbids the instruction of practical defense against the Dark arts. Harry and his classmates learn only defensive magic theory, and when he insists that they need to learn real spells to protect themselves from Voldemort, he is tortured by Professor Umbridge. This prompts him to start a secret defense association, Dumbledore's Army, where he teaches his classmates to stand up to Umbridge and prepare themselves for battle. As the lessons progress, Umbridge creates new tactics and continues punishing Harry, only fueling him to rebel against her even more. When Umbridge takes over the school and replaces Dumbledore, Harry leads his rebellion army to the Ministry where they succeed in preventing Voldemort from attaining the prophecy. As a result, Umbridge leaves Hogwarts, and the wizarding world finally accepts Voldemort's return.
Dumbledore's Army is not the only instance of rebellion in the book. The book takes its title from the original model for Dumbledore's Army, the Order of the Phoenix, which operates in secrecy to subvert the efforts of Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Rebellion also permeates the text in smaller ways. For example, when Fred and George leave Hogwarts, they do so with a bang. They wreak havoc through the halls as an act of resistance and inspire their fellow students to do the same in their absence. Hogwarts becomes, in the final weeks of the term, a place of constant rebellion against Umbridge and her tyrannical decrees.
Death and Faith
Throughout the summer before his fifth year, Harry is haunted by the dreams of Cedric Diggory's death. However, having witnessed a death firsthand and understanding the loss over the summer, Harry finds when he returns to Hogwarts that he can now see the invisible thestrals that pull the Hogwarts carriages. This connects him to Luna Lovegood, a quirky witch who has been able to see the thestrals since her first year of school because she saw her mother die. Luna reminds Harry that he is not the only one who has lost a loved one, and she shares her mother's wisdom that the things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end. She points out at the Ministry that lost loved ones exist as if behind a veil but maintains the hope for Harry that he will see his family again one day.
Sirius' death prompts Harry to seek out Nearly Headless Nick and ask him about how wizards become ghosts. Nick explains that when wizards die, they're presented with a choice: they can either pass on, or leave a pale imprint of themselves to roam the earth among the living. As Nick tells Harry this, he's obviously ridden with regret. Rowling characterizes the choice to become a ghost as a cowardly one, and for this reason, Nick assures Harry that Sirius will not return as a ghost.
Rowling portrays the fear of death as a vice, and no where is this portrayal more clear than in Lord Voldemort. During his duel with Dumbledore, Voldemort declares that there is nothing worse than death, and Dumbledore replies, “You are quite wrong... Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness” (382). Voldemort's fear of death becomes a central theme of the series as it emerges as his primary motivation to murder people, split his soul, and deposit pieces of himself into horcruxes. Voldemort's ultimate goal is to attain immortality; the driving motivation of his reign of terror is thus a fear of death.
Luna Lovegood's character represents faith, and Rowling presents faith as a virtue. As Luna puts signs up around the corridors, appealing to her fellow students to return her lost items, Harry offers to help find them, but Luna assures him that they always turn up in the end. This faith that the lost items will just turn up on their own accord mirrors a larger faith in an afterlife that Luna and Harry discuss immediately after.
Love
The theme of love permeates the entire Harry Potter series in the sense that Lily's selfless love for Harry protects him from Voldemort's killing curse. Her self-sacrifice initiates an "old magic" protection over Harry that ensures that as long as he lives with her "blood" (i.e., her sister Petunia), he cannot be harmed by Dark magic. However, Voldemort manages to weaponize his enemies' love for one another and use it against them. Dumbledore admits to Harry that his biggest mistake was caring about him too much over the years. He says, “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act" (393). He intentionally withheld the truth of Harry's prophecy for so long because he thought it would be too much for Harry to handle, but he admits to having waited much too long.
Dumbledore says of love:
There is a room in the Department of Mysteries... that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you. (396)
Of all the subjects studied in the Department of Mysteries, love is the only room kept under lock and key. In this way, Rowling puts love above all other mysteries, including death, evil, consciousness, and the afterlife. Although Dumbledore extols the virtues of love and being able to love (as Voldemort is not), he also admits that love is a dangerous force. Love is, after all, what allows Voldemort to lure Harry to the Department of Mysteries. Voldemort, learning the nature of Harry's relationship with Sirius from the Malfoys (and by extension, Kreacher), uses Legilimency to implant a false vision in Harry's head of Sirius being tortured at the Department of Mysteries, knowing that Harry's love for Sirius will bring him to the prophecy room. Likewise, Sirius' love for Harry drives him to the scene of the battle, where he ultimately loses his life.
Media
Rowling returns to a theme she introduces in book four, which is a critque of mass media. In book four, Rowling's critique of the Daily Prophet and the court of public opinion happens through the character of Rita Skeeter, and here in book five, Rowling brings Skeeter back from her forced hiatus to give Harry a platform for telling his side of the story that is routinely suppressed by the Daily Prophet. In Chapter 25, "The Beetle at Bay," Hermione siezes on an opportunity to sway public opinion in the direction of the Order of the Phoenix. Throughout the book, the Ministry of Magic denies claims that Voldemort has returned. One of the biggest concerns raised by Dumbledore is that Voldemort will recruit the Ministry's army of dementors, the very creatures the Ministry employs to guard Azkaban. Fudge maintains that the dementors remain in his firm control. However, the inciting events of this book hinge on the notion that dementors are already working for Voldemort—when dementors attack Harry and Dudley in Chapter 1, the Ministry knows nothing about it. Twenty-five chapters later, a headline in the Daily Prophet reports that ten former Death Eaters have escaped Azkaban prison. The only explanation for their escape is that they were aided by dementors. The Prophet's report is criticized by readers for offering an incomplete analysis of the circumstances and jumping to conclusions with little to no evidence. With this mass escape of Voldemort's followers, the Prophet's readership starts to believe that perhaps Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore could be telling the truth.
When Harry meets with Hermione, Skeeter, and Luna in Hogsmeade, Hermione offers an out to Rita Skeeter; if she publishes a tell-all interview with Harry in The Quibbler, Luna's father's magazine, then Hermione will release her from the binds of blackmail. The scenario demonstrates a general cynicism towards mass media that the series maintains. In an exchange between Hermione and Skeeter, Skeeter admits to Ministry meddling at the paper, which amounts to government censorship. She says, "Fudge is leaning on the Prophet, but it comes to the same thing. They won’t print a story that shows Harry in a good light. Nobody wants to read it. It’s against the public mood." Hermione responds, “So the Daily Prophet exists to tell people what they want to hear, does it?” and Rita says to her, “The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl" (267). With the introduction of The Quibbler, Rowling proposes a doomed dichotomy of print media where on one side, there is the establishment, mainstream media (i.e., the Daily Prophet), which is influenced by capitalist greed and unchecked government censorship, and on the other hand, there is an anti-government, tabloid-like newspaper that prints mostly conspiracy theories and flouts reliable sourcing and journalistic responsibility (i.e., The Quibbler). Rowling favors The Quibbler, and thus it becomes the platform for Harry to speak the truth about Lord Voldemort to a wide audience. The idiom, a stopped clock is right twice a day, seems to apply to The Quibbler in the sense that it prints a steady stream of nonsense, and every once in a while, one of its stories will resemble the truth. The question then becomes, is The Quibbler discounting what little truth it prints by surrounding it with nonsense? However, the books stop short of scrutinizing The Quibbler, and the general public of the wizarding world seems rather unconflicted about where Harry's interview is printed.
Tyranny
Umbridge is an embodiment of Rowling's critique of bureaucracy and serves as a sort of thesis for how red tape and lack of accountability in bureaucracies can lead to an abusive autocracy. This is what Umbridge creates at Hogwarts with the help of Cornelius Fudge, whose hands-off approach is simply a way of shirking his responsibilities as Minister and holding onto his precious position at the helm of government. The Ministry's educational decrees become increasingly specific (and thus directly reactionary) as the book progresses. The first decree establishes the office of High Inquisitor, then a decree bans public assembly, while later decrees are so specific as to ban The Quibbler, simply because Harry publishes an interview in it. Umbridge demonstrates how absolute power gives the governing class the ability to suppress any ideas they find threatening. By the end of the book, Umbridge admits that she is the one who set the dementors on Harry in Little Whinging; she justifies her actions by claiming that they gave Fudge an excuse to expel Harry, who the Ministry deemed a dangerous influence on their preferred narrative around Lord Voldemort.
