LOCK HAVEN, PA—Ashley Daniels is as close as you can get to your typical 9-year-old American girl. A third-grader at Lock Haven Elementary School, she loves rollerblading, her pet hamsters Benny and Oreo, Britney Spears, and, of course, Harry Potter. Having breezed through the most recent Potter opus in just four days, Ashley is among the millions of children who have made Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire the fastest-selling book in publishing history.
And, like many of her school friends, Ashley was captivated enough by the strange occult doings at the Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry to pursue the Left-Hand Path, determined to become as adept at the black arts as Harry and his pals.
"I used to believe in what they taught us at Sunday School," said Ashley, conjuring up an ancient spell to summon Cerebus, the three-headed hound of hell. "But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies."
https://www.theonion.com/harry-potter-books-spark-rise-in-sa...
You got me good.
(There is a chain of toy stores in the UK that will not stock anything Harry Potter-related because of this kind of belief.)
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/occult
- of or relating to magic, astrology, or any system claiming use or knowledge of secret or supernatural powers or agencies.
- beyond the range of ordinary knowledge or understanding; mysterious.
- secret; disclosed or communicated only to the initiated.
But that doesn't make Harry Potter occult literature!
If it did, so are Superman comics. And the X-Files. And James Bond.
Fictional stories about occult figures are at least two steps removed from occult literature. One, they are written about other people studying such material, two they are explicitly fictional. (Three, perhaps, so are the people doing the studying.)
There is actual, primary source occult material out there; confusing this with Harry Potter is precisely what the looney fringes want.
When I say that my family friend thought Harry Potter had occult elements, I do not mean that she thought the content of the stories was about the occult. Of course they are.
I mean that she believed the stories themselves to be as dangerous as primary source occult material: that fiction about the occult is at some level interchangeable with the occult; that it's a primer on the occult.
Which is why the Lewis comparison wasn't well-received. Because it punctures the notion that making up stories about witches invites Satan in.
Also, I bet the conversation actually did go well. :)
It compares even more closely to Millerism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism
... in that a series of prophecies has been made and not come true, and like the Millerites, Q believers have experienced a great disappointment and branched off into other further-splintering schools of belief around Covid vaccinations and The Great Reset.
Church camp did get me listening to Metallica though! Fade To Black was such an amazing song... and no amount of "this song was written by the devil to make kids kill themselves" could ever change that.
I have seen him get angry at a keyboard live. Trent 1, Keyboard 0.
Then "We need to talk about Harry Potter. The story is evil and will corrupt your kids!"
Today "We need to talk about Harry Potter. The author is evil and will corrupt your kids!"
JK Rowling is an anti-trans bigot. She is the one freaking out about how trans women are going to rape children or something like that.
Did she really state that? If so, please provide a citation.
If not, claiming this would be a grave diffamation that cannot be taken lightly, whether or not one dislikes her position on LGBTIQA+.
I _do_ see something about her questioning whether gender self-identification should affect whether someone is allowed to be tried for rape (since, if I understand correctly from the article you linked, the UK seems to not allow women to be tried for rape). It's difficult to follow to the original quote because some of the linked articles and original sources are paywalled.
Btw, the word is "defamation".
Here's an article with some documentation: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/12/j-k-rowling-tweet-paints...
> She uses an Orwell quote which doesn’t refer to rape at all
Third paragraph of the article has a JKR quote directly referencing rape.
Not sure if it backs up the original "freaking out about..." claim, but maybe "by placing undue emphasis, perpetuates the narrative that...".
Not at all. This quote is from a JKR tweet that she made referring to a Times article on the praxis of UK police recording rape crimes as being committed by a women when the perpetrator identifies as female (even if they have male genitalia).
So, neither did JKR (in that quote) equate trans people with rapist nor did she bring up the whole topic. Rather, she reacted to a newspaper article on the topic, and certainly not in a way that could by any stretch of the imagination be characterized as "freaking out".
Thanks!
Those were demonic.
That’s not a value statement or judgement. They were literally based around demons taking over the world and killing all goodness. And there were was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
D&D was ultimately based on Lord of the Rings, so there were demons in it. But it wasn’t demonic in the Cthulhu sense.
No, the latter were never anywhere close to as popular; the deliberate propaganda was targeted at D&D because it was fringe enough that people wouldn't know it was lies and popular enough that it would have impact.
> Those were demonic.
No, they weren't (the in-game fiction may have been, but that was often true of D&D which was like an order of magnitude more popular than anything else in the TTRPG market at the time of the Satanic Panic.)
In fact, using the Lovecraft mythos in D&D, for which it was written up, was more popular than the purpose-built games.
> D&D was ultimately based on Lord of the Rings, so there were demons in it. But it wasn’t demonic in the Cthulhu sense.
D&D was pretty distant from LotR, and had the Cthulhu mythos literally started up in one of the major supplements.
So are the Left Behind books, and those are literally Christian Fiction.
He proceeded to berate the congregation, reminding every one that Harry Potter is a fictional children's book. Witches aren't real. Wizards aren't real. You know who is real? Satan and he's coming for ya, but not thru this fairytale book. Always thought that was pretty funny.