Witch is right?

Mark Hughes Cobb
Staff Writer

At the turn of the century, parents were frightened for their children, who were reading fantasy books full of witches, wiz-ards, magical adven-tures and all manner of strange and wild creatures.

Yes, in 1900 there was quite an uproar about L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the first in a series of books, which are now – as is the famed 1939 movie adap-tation – considered family classics.

To ban all mentions of witches, witchcraft and sorcery from the arts would require an enchanted broom to sweep through not only Oz, but Narnia, Shake-speare, “Bewitched,” Arthurian legend, Grimm’s fairytales, Mother Goose and countless other sto-ries both silly and serious.

Yet some fearful parents still seek to repress Harry Potter in the belief that these stories have power to lead children to evil.

“I was told by some leaders that we were going to have to train 1,000 exorcists, so many children were go-ing to become demon-possessed by Harry Potter,” said Connie Neal, a member of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, and author of the book “What’s a Christian to do with Harry Potter?”

“I hope they kept their day jobs,” Neal said, laughing.

Critics of stories featuring witchcraft point to a couple of passages in the Holy Bible, including Exo-dus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and Deuteronomy 18: 10-12, which says, “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an en-chanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with famil-iar spirits, or a wiz-ard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomina-tion unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.”

The Harry Potter books top the list of most-challenged books of the 21st century as compiled by the Ameri-can Library Associa-tion. But the Potter series was also voted the favorite of all challenged books, in a vote at the www.ala.org site.

The attempts at ban-ning Potter probably lead to more, not fewer, readers for the series.

“I abhor intoler-ance, especially reli-gious intolerance,” said Laurie Arizumi, a teacher of Japanese at the University of Ala-bama. She began read-ing the Potter books several years ago, knowing her then-pre-teen daughter would be interested, but also wanting to know what the fuss was.

Instead of sacri-lege, what Arizumi saw was a highly moral set of fables, with the Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore as a savior figure, one who never tells Harry directly what to do, but shows him choices and gives him free will. Dumble-dore also (spoiler alert, for those who haven’t read the sixth book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”) becomes a sacrificial figure for the good of the chil-dren in his care.

Within the Potter world, certain snotty purebloods (those with nothing but witches and wizards in their family) look down on “mudbloods,” those with mixed magical and Muggle (non-magical) family. It’s a simple allegory that can lead parents and children into discussions about racism, Arizumi said.

“There are things in here we should be teaching our children about the value of love and friendship and loyalty,” she said.

Jennifer Berrell is another concerned par-ent who read the Pot-ter books first to scan for objectionable content, before read-ing them aloud to her daughter, Hannah.

“I kept looking for what they were talking about,” she said.

Like Arizumi, Ber-rell used stories within the stories as lessons, to talk to Hannah about empathy for others’ feelings.

The closest she came to controversy was when a stranger ap-proached the Berrells as they read together in a public place. The woman said “I can’t believe you’re reading that to your child.” Berrell asked the woman what she found in the books that was so objectionable.

“But she said, ‘I would never read a book like that.’ So she didn’t even know what she was talking about,” Berrell said.

Avid Potter fan Ra-chel Wesley, a senior theater student at UA, sees the witchcraft as just dressing, tied to the rich vein of fan-tasy in world litera-ture.

“(Author J.K. Rowl-ing) makes up nine-tenths of the so-called witchcraft, the spells and potions,” Wesley said, noting that the spells can’t be considered how-to books if they don’t actually work. And the figures such as cen-taurs, hydras and dragons are directly drawn from mythology.

Though few of the challenges have been successful – one of the more recent, in Georgia, sought to have Potter banned from a school for pro-moting the Wicca re-ligion, thus violating the separation of church and state — the novels have been the subject of at least one book-burning, in Alamagordo, N.M., and have spawned a mini-industry of religious responses in print and film. Neal’s books are among the most con-ciliatory of those.

Neal began reading the Potter books around 2000, because she knew her three children, avid readers all, were bound to come in contact with them.

Like the woman who confronted Berrell, and the Georgia woman who sought to have Potter blocked from her school system, many of those who con-demn the books have not even read them, she noted.

“They not only have not bothered to read them, but it was a point of spiritual pride,” she said.

“It’s like that say-ing, ‘I don’t need to wallow in the pigpen to know it’s dirty,’” she said.

But as a youth pas-tor, Neal read the books, first of all to know what they were about, then secondly to see if some lessons could be found within.

“I realized this is a brilliant fairytale, a showdown of good vs. evil, using magic as a literary motif,” she said.

She notes that Harry is protected more by love – that of his mother and father and his friends – than by magic, and that the evil Voldemort is closely associated with, and in fact re-sembles, a serpent. Harry’s mother saves his life by taking a death curse on her-self, to allow her son to live.

Neal draws on the Potter phenomenon in her books “The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the Worlds’ Most Famous Seeker,” and “Wizards, Wardrobes and Wookiees: Navigating Good and Evil in Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Chronicle of Narnia.”

Even though they’re now seen as clear Christian allegories, C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” books were also once attacked by well-meaning Christians. The land of Narnia, after all, features nature gods and god-desses, witches, magic and talking animals, among other abomina-tions.

“In our country, the Christian community and the secular world have gotten further and further apart, and I don’t think that’s helping anybody,” Neal said.

“It’s a fantasy story that the whole world loves, so why not open a dialogue with some common ground?

“I really want to share God’s love, but it’s not going to hap-pen by trapping some-one in an airline seat and pulling out some tracts.”

Many people – in Christian love, she said – have sent hate mail, worrying about her soul, telling her she was leading people into the occult. She tells a horror story of one woman who was invited to pray for a parishioner with breast cancer. The lay minister, seeing Harry Potter books on the ill person’s shelf, said that the cancer was self-inflicted be-cause she “…opened herself up to evil.”

“That’s an extreme,” Neal said. “I think it’s changing. It seems the Christian community takes about 10 years to move for-ward sometimes. So we’re just about on track.”