Does Harry Potter Promote Witchcraft? Uh, No!
Does Harry Potter promote witchcraft? Harry’s critics have been telling us for a decade that Harry and his friends do encourage young people to dabble in the occult arts. That’s one of the reasons Harry Potter series ranks 7th on the list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books.” So, if you were a wizard promoting a school of wizardry, you might want to take your curriculum to a Harry Potter convention, right? That’s what Oberon Zell thought in July when he took his Grey School of Wizardry to Azkatraz in San Francisco.
Zell has been one of the most colorful and eclectic figures in modern Paganism since he read Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in 1962. Mostly as a lark he and college buddy Lance Christie took up the religion preached by character Michael Valentine Smith, a youth raised by native elders on Mars. Stranger IS a subversive book; Zell’s collegiate geste became, in truth, Smith’s Church of All Worlds. In 1967, Zell identified his religion as “Pagan”, earned a DD, and became first Priest of CAW.
CAW was incorporated in 1968, and Zell began publishing The Green Egg. I was a huge fan of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who wrote a weekly TV column called “The Glass Teat” in the L.A. Free Press. Around 1972 I found an ad for CAW in the Freep ads, and began subscribing to The Green Egg. The Freep and The Green Egg opened vistas for a very young woman from Peoria…but it would be almost thirty years before I identified as a Pagan.
Kids today have a lot of exposure to Paganism and witchcraft, right? They are ripe for the plucking, yes? Well, no, not at Azkatraz… If your name wasn’t Dumbledore, and you weren’t recruiting for Hogwarts, you were just taking up space in the vendor’s room.
Zell’s table was sponsored by Mythic Images: “[An] online catalog and informational resource. We are a family owned company dedicated to the rebirth of mythology and the awakening of Gaia.” Zell is an artist as well as a writer, lecturer, musician, and wizard instructor. The cornerstone of the Mythic Image collect is Zell’s iconic sculpture “Millennial Gaia.”
According to Zell:
Harry Potter fans aren’t interested in Wizardry, Witchcraft, Magick, an online school, or anything that isn’t specifically and only about the Harry Potter stories and characters. The only successful vendor was the one selling licensed trademark Harry Potter merchandise—such as Hogwarts House patches and regalia, movie replica wands, Harry Potter games and toys—and pointy hats.
Mythic Images lost money on their sponsorship, but Zell got the same kind of eduction at the fan convention that I got when I received my first copy of the Freep. You can read about Zell’s trip on his blog: scroll down to “Azkatraz.”
