Magic ... or mystery?

Supernatural more than good vs. evil

Supernatural more than good vs. evil

JASON FLETCHER
STAFF

Is Harry Potter evil?

Goose Creek resident James Hartnett thinks so. Hartnett, 72, is a concerned grandfather who says that, with the recent release of the final "Harry Potter" book and the latest "Harry Potter" movie, he's worried that what he perceives to be the anti-Christian nature of the popular franchise will poison the minds of the young and susceptible.

"Churches should take a stance against 'Harry Potter,' " he says. "Children should avoid ungodly things, (and) we have a big responsibility in shaping the minds of children."

J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" stories, enchanting to hundreds of millions of fans, feature sorcery and the occult and contain no overt Christian elements, Hartnett and other critics say. Good and evil are blurred, they say, and the supernatural is disassociated from God and his kingdom.

"Sorcerers" surely will be sent to hell upon their death, according to Revelation 21:8. "Idolatry and witchcraft" are sinful, according to Galatians 5:20. And magic is broadly condemned in Deuteronomy 18:10-11, which reads: "Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead."

A world in which magic is used to achieve ends that have little to do with Christian salvation, therefore, is idolatrous and an abomination that should be avoided, many Christians argue.

The Rev. Cress Darwin, pastor of Charleston's Second Presbyterian Church, says it might be a matter of semantics, but he embraces the mysteries of his faith, rejecting the idea that magic is part of it.

"I'm very comfortable with the mysteries of life and the mysteries of God," he said. "They are purposeful for our good and efficacious for our wholeness."

While many Christians believe that all magic is inherently bad, some scholars say that magic also can be good. Defined as a harnessing of a supernatural force to influence or change events, objects, people and physical phenomena, magic was once an integral part of most religious practice, and in some cases still is, says College of Charleston religion professor June McDaniel. Whether it's good or evil depends on one's point of view.

"When it's 'our' magic, we call it a miracle; when it's 'their' magic, we call it evil," McDaniel says.

Supernatural practices

Virtually all magic originates with indigenous cultures and their shamans who, through various means, regularly accessed the metaphysical realm and acted as an intermediary between members of the tribe and the gods, scholars of myth and the occult say. This critical role, duplicated in numerous ways by spiritual practitioners throughout the centuries, never has been abandoned. All religions, whether institutionalized, tribal or personal, rely on some form of communication with the divine.

Until the 16th century and the advent of Protestantism in Europe, people tended to conceive of existence in terms of three essential realms, McDaniel says. These were the earthly (mankind and nature), the divine (God and heaven) and the supernatural (spirits, angels, saints, demons and souls, existing in either an ethereal or netherworld).

The latter, supernatural dominion is accessible to humans in the earthly realm and, in fact, enables them to access with the divine, McDaniel says. It was often in this intermediary cosmos that man and God mystically interacted, learning from one another.

To penetrate the supernatural realm and to achieve new understanding, humans have relied on several methods: tarot, hermetics, alchemy, astrology, altered or ecstatic states, ritual healing and mysticism.

Lee Irwin, chairman of the religion department at the College of Charleston and a teacher of religious esoterica, names three basic kinds of magic: the black art, in which demons are invoked for evil purposes; natural, which typically combines certain physical elements, then imbues the combination with supernatural power through ritual; and angelic, which seeks divine intervention from heavenly beings.

In each case, amulets or charms are worn or used in rites to produce a miraculous effect. For example, practitioners of solar healing might combine sundry yellow objects, such as jewels, sunflowers, saffron or other herbs and golden wine.

"You bring these things together in correspondence and create a ritual, and you get a very positive effect," Irwin says. You harness the healing force of the sun. The sun does in fact have healing powers: It helps our bodies produce vitamin D; it warms us when we are cold. It does not require much generosity to appreciate how some believe the sun can also benefit mind and spirit.

Many rituals involve the use of music, Irwin says. Even in the Christian tradition, communal music in the form of hymn singing helps to evoke a spiritual aura, he says.

"Angel magic" in Western cultures typically involves invoking archangels (Michael, Gabriel or Raphael), angels or saints, but doing so carries some risk, he says.

"How do you know it's an angel and not a demon?" Irwin asks. The person calling for intercession must discriminate between good and evil.

Christians today tend to consider such practices sinful and dangerous, Irwin says. Theologically, magic is profoundly threatening, for "the invocation of powers other than God seems to undermine God's authority," he says.

"As soon as you bring in angels, you can't help but bring in demons," he adds. "To avoid being fooled by a demon in the guise of an angel, you stay away from them."

Bert Keller, pastor at Circular Congregational Church and former professor of ethics at the Medical University, says the traditional conception of magic holds that magicians learned the technology that enabled them to manipulate the invisible world. People believed they could harness forces far more powerful than the merely physical.

Sorcerers, driven by ego, practiced personal magic. They used technology — roots, herbs, plants, energies, light, smoke and other materials — to access the supernatural, he says.

But the most harmful kind of "magic" is a dark force called shadow magic, he says. It resides, in part, in humankind's collective unconscious, some believe, and is brought forth to do evil. It's the kind that possibly has contributed to the terrible genocides and wars in history, Keller says, the force that consumes the unthinking mind and easily seduces.

Jewish mysticism

To understand their place in the world, primitive cultures practiced animism, a belief that souls inhabit all objects. It also attributes personified souls to animals. These tribal cultures devised complex mythologies in which a human's life-spirit interacted with various supernatural forces, according to Nevill Drury, a scholar of the occult.

The first monotheistic religion, Judaism, discarded such practices in favor of a single, all-powerful God, who perhaps could best be understood through a mystical use of words, for words themselves held the secrets of the sublime and the force of the divine, notes Rabbi Achiya Delouya.

Delouya, principal of Addlestone Hebrew Academy, says the Jewish faith consists of two main schools of thought: the rational school whose proponent is the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, and the esoteric school, which explains the human experience in mystical terms.

The teachings of kabbalah, which originated at Creation and are manifested in part in the Hebrew Bible, rely on numerology and the power of letters to reveal truth. Kabbalah offers complex explanations about the nature of God, the construct of the human soul and reasons for evil in the world. The word itself means "to receive."

"Kabbalah deals with the internal part of what we do," Delouya says, "that which animates us." And it must be understood in the context of the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, mending the world.

When God created the universe, the light illuminating the world was so vast and powerful it could not be contained by man's Earth and shattered into millions of shards. It is this imperfect universe that mankind inherited, and it is for the Jews to repair it by reclaiming these broken shards of light through prayer and the performing of good deeds, Delouya says.

Kabbalah helps Jews recognize their essence and their function on Earth, he adds. It provides the tools to crack the code of Creation: Hebrew letters, each a creative entity with a corresponding number, sound, color and gender, as well as philosophical interpretation. Kabbalah is a portal to a supernatural world where truth is revealed.

Supernatural examples

Judaism is informed by an oral tradition of folklore and academic study, as well as written Scripture. The Hebrew Bible is full of episodes in which God and man use supernatural force, often to destroy.

The stories of the great Flood, Joseph's experience in Egypt, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the life of Saul and Samuel contain examples of the supernatural, but it is the story of Moses and the Exodus that best demonstrates how God's "magic" is more powerful than man's, McDaniel says.

In Pharoah's court, God transforms Aaron's staff into a snake. Pharoah's sorcerers do the same, but then Aaron's snake-staff swallows the Egyptians', symbolizing the strength of God's Chosen People.

Then follows a series of supernatural phenomena, 10 horrific plagues: blood, frogs, gnats, flies, death to livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and, finally, the killing of the Egyptians' first-born sons. While fleeing Egypt, Moses invokes the power of God to part the Red Sea.

"Moses is the archetypal figure for magicians in the Judeo-Christian tradition," McDaniel says. He could exercise such power and wield such influence because he knew to harness the "right" kind of supernatural force, she says. "It was a matter of the right God versus the wrong God."

The New Testament, especially the Gospels, contains many examples of supernatural power. Its primary practitioner is Jesus Christ, who performs numerous miracles, from healing the sick and disabled to exorcising demons, walking on water and multiplying a few loaves of bread and some fish into enough food to feed 5,000 people.

The Gospels' telling of mystical transformations also demonstrates Christ's power over all realms. In the mountaintop Transfiguration, for example, the figures of Moses and Elijah appear alongside a glorified Christ, striking awe and terror into the hearts of his disciples.

According to the Bible, the Resurrection, which shows how flesh can transcend the earthly realm to enter the realm of the divine, demonstrates Christ's supernatural omnipotence.

In the Catholic Mass, the Eucharist celebration includes a transformation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ, a process called transubstantiation. Catholics believe that in changing the substance of the sacraments, Christ's soul and divinity are made present, according to Catholic doctrine.

These examples are some of the well-accepted mysterious events and practices of mainstream Christianity. But the faith has seen its share of mystics who have mostly remained on the margins over the centuries. The New Testament Apocrypha, including the Gnostic gospels, while not part of the official Christian canon, has inspired arcane practices, including esoteric cosmology and ethics, according to McDaniel.

Hermeticism, a set of philosophical and religious beliefs originally set forth by the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, led to the development of the Rosicrucian movement in the 15th century, which combined mysticism with Christian tradition. Rosicrucians relied on alchemy and divine magic to repair vices and defects of the soul, and, in essence, as a universal cure.

Today, Catholics appeal to saints, Sufi practitioners dance, meditate and read poetry in their quest for divine unity, Jews decipher the numeric symbolism of their Hebrew letters and some Protestants speak in tongues, exorcise demons and heal the sick and disabled through the laying on of hands and invocation of God's grace.

Everyday magic or mysticism

Perhaps the most common method of invoking the supernatural is simple prayer. Believers ask God or Jesus Christ or the saints or angels to intercede in earthly affairs, to influence outcomes, grant wishes and offer protection and oversight. Sometimes prayers are offered before sacred relics — a lock of hair, a tooth, a bone from a saint — for it is thought that such objects wield supernatural powers, that they are still imbued with some soul force, according to religious doctrine.

Jose Mayen says he believes in the supernatural as a force that comes from God. A parishioner at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Goose Creek, Mayen says the saints and the dead intercede in the lives of believers through prayer and ritual all the time, though the miracles expressed by them originate with God.

"People who have died are praying for us, are helping us," he says.

Some, including College of Charleston's Irwin, suggest that consciousness itself — thinking — is magical. Irwin points to meditation and dream states as examples. Dreams are rational ways to access the subtle and sublime, he says. They are our mind's way of working out the issues of the day and conflicts of the past, often using a space that's neither earthly nor divine but somewhere in between.

Many people experience flying dreams in which they are projected into a world where nature and supernature are in harmony, Irwin says. In this often vivid, multidimensional place, spirit and matter are part of a single whole, a realm in which the dreamer expresses himself magically, and sometimes achieves new levels of understanding or awareness, Irwin says.

Most monotheistic people, however, have learned to dismiss or marginalize the supernatural, relegate magical experience to the dust bin of a sinful occult past, Irwin says. But this repression of the sublime, he says, saps the human experience of some of its vitality.

It used to be that humankind relied on that intermediate supernatural realm all the time, McDaniel says. This was the pathway to the divine.

"Now, the only way to access the divine is to die," she says, and wait for the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, she says.

There is no talk of a Christian divine in "Harry Potter." No resurrection of the body. No everlasting life. Just boys and girls learning their craft from wizards and witches, facing challenges and obstacles, and coming to understand the power of love, according to many who read the series.

So is Harry Potter evil?

Darwin, pastor of Second Presbyterian Church, says it's just entertainment and doesn't trouble him in the least. In fact, he likes the moral themes in the series, the good-versus-evil formula and the ultimate defeat of the dark forces. Christians confident in their faith need not fear a little fantasy, he says.

"We are the believers of the mysteries of God," he says. "Things happen all the time in people's lives that are miracles. ... I am changed by prayer. Is that magic or is it a mystery?"

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902 or aparker@postandcourier.com.