Lord Voldemort, “the villain of thousand and one faces”

As hateful and charismatic as Darth Vader, Voldemort is the real object of interest in the Harry Potter series, which owes its success to its antihero more than its hero. This heroism and seduction of evil is the result of a fictional trap that Rowling sets for her readers. Here we study the workings of this trap, in connection with the universal pattern of heroic stages defined by Joseph Campbell in his comparative mythology essay, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).