© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 148
The last installment of Harry Potter is on the way. As usual, the fundamentalists will feel threatened by the idea of wand-waving magicians and arcane secret knowledge, knowing that magic is the work of the devil, and everyone who has traffic with demons will be the entrée in a tasteless, eternal barbecue, etcetera, etcetera.
To my mind, it’s a control thing. “Be like us or be dammed.” And in the final analysis, all the righteous bombast is no different from the loyalties of a major football club or the aggrieved justification of a political canvasser caught off guard by an interesting question about a welfare reform that involves cruelty to the poor or a candidate’s inability to string together a coherent sentence.
Small people like big, unsubstantiated statements that fill them with emotion and give them a sense of purpose. And, no doubt, the congregation of some small church will bask in the literal and figurative glow of a pile of burning Harry Potter books.
Burning books is nothing new. Subsequent to the Council of Nicae, instigated by Constantine in the early 4th century, to try to force some form of agreement on the fractious sects and unruly of early Christianity, not one, but two libraries were burned at Alexandria. That Council established orthodoxy that generally precluded knowledge as an underpinning of a healthy spiritual life. Yet in spite of all the impromptu conflagrations involving books, academics and philosophers who defied the orthodoxy, the magic that you see in the Harry Potter series has survived until today, and is still very much in evidence.
Let’s start out with a few of the figures associated with the field: Pythagoras, Plato, Dalton and Newton. Is the penny beginning to drop?
The advent of Luther proved a boon for magicians, at least for a while. In the climate of liberalization of thought, a large amount of thinking was done. Yet eventually the Lutherans could no longer tolerate the challenge to orthodoxy, and called a halt to the practice, duly waving flints and pointing to the large pile of logs in the courtyard.
At that point, one of the most important pieces of thought in the history of humanity occurred.
“If
a strange phenomenon occurs once,” the men with the pointy hats
reasoned, “then it may be ascribed to the miraculous or demoniacal,
not so?”
“Yes,” responded the Lutherans.
“So if it can be observed to occur a number of times, then surely it must be part of God’s natural order?” the men with pointy hats continued.
“Indeed,” the men of the church replied.
“Cool,” said the men with the pointy hats, and bustled off back to their crucibles with grins that left the church fathers feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
And so rational empiricism and latter-day science were born.
There is a moment in one of the Harry Potter movies which perfectly illustrates the impact of that moment. Dumbledore, on some or other secret mission that requires darkness, points his wand at a series of street lights and turns them off. I can, assuming I have the right sort of technology in my home, turn off the lights with a remote.
So there’s the magic for you. Aeroplanes are flying carriages. Cars are horseless carriages. Instead of crystal balls that can see events a thousand miles away, we have computers and the internet. And instead of predictions based on the lines of your palm or crystal balls of the other variety, we have regression analysis, predictive modeling, Gallup polls and all the other interesting strands and offshoots of applied math. In fact, up until a couple of hundred years ago, math was categorised as a branch of magic.
So the magic that the church tried so hard to stamp out is actually all around us and permeates everything we do.
There isn’t much more to magic than science. It’s not knowledge itself that is wicked, but misguided or wicked uses of knowledge. If there is an embodiment of evil, it is the hatred that arises out of fear or the hatred implicit in an angry, unfair judgment in response to differences.
