For me, two very important events happened yesterday and today.  Yesterday, November 22, 1963, C.S. Lewis died, his death being overshadowed by the assasination of John F. Kennedy.  Aldous Huxley also died that day too.  Lewis is well known for his Chronicles of Narnia books and also for his Christian apologetical works, even giving a series of radio lectures during World War II which would later form the book Mere Christianity.  Among many works, Lewis also wrote science fiction, The Space Trilogy, and also, what I consider to be his best work, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

The second event happened on November 23, 1963.  Doctor Who debuted on BBC Television.  A science fiction show following the time travels of the eccentric and enigmatic Doctor, it has been recognized as the longest running science fiction television show in the world and also the most successful.  It ran originally from 1963 to 1989.  The series was regenerated in 2005 and has continued until present, although no full series was run in 2009.  David Tennant, who played Barty Crouch Jr. in Goblet of Fire, was a fan of Doctor Who in his youth.  Tennant eventually played The Doctor from 2005 through 2010.  The show had an almost cult status in Great Britain and led to a shared experience called “behind the sofa,” in reference to hiding behind the sofa during the scary parts of the show and peeking out to see if they were over.

Connecting all this to Harry Potter, it’s well known that JK Rowling has expressed admiration of The Chronicles of Narnia and of Lewis’ work in general until she started to distance herself from comparisons to him and her work in recent years, for whatever reasons.  However, both share strong literary roots.  Lewis, like Rowling, loved Edith Nesbit and Jane Austen.  Lewis supposedly said of Austen’s works that they had two faults, both of which were damnable, they were too few and too short.  For more on the connections between Lewis and Rowling, there is an excellent book I’ve heard of, by some obscure but brilliant writer, called Harry Potter and Imagination.   As an aside, I think if Lewis had the chance to read the Potter books, he would’ve been delighted!  J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps not so much…

As for connections between Doctor Who and Harry Potter, I’ve not heard of many, besides the mild connection between Tennant’s role as Crouch Jr. and The Doctor.  Doing a bit of brief research, I came across some stories suggesting that Rowling might have been contacted about writing a story for the revived series but could not since she was still working on Potter.  I also saw one story that claimed there was to be a Doctor episode about Rowling but that Tennant shot it down as being too silly even for Doctor Who.  If you’d like to check some of these stories out, just google “Rowling Doctor Who.” Rowling is of an age that she could have watched Doctor Who in her youth.  I’ve never seen any references, though, of her mentioning the show.  Does anyone here know?

Feel free to share your thoughts on C.S. Lewis and on The Doctor.

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Yahoo! states that the Vatican and its official newspaper continue one line of praise of Harry Potter with a positive endorsement of the Half-Blood Prince movie:

The Vatican lauded the latest Harry Potter film on Monday, saying “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” made the age-old debate over good vs. evil crystal clear.The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano even gave two thumbs up to the film’s treatment of adolescent love, saying it achieved the “correct balance” and made the stars more credible to the general audience.

The newspaper said the film, which opens Wednesday, was the best adaptation yet of the J.K. Rowling series about the adventures of the bespectacled child wizard Harry Potter and his Hogwarts chums as they battle Harry’s nemesis, the evil sorcerer Voldemort.

They do qualify their endorsement, arguing that the books show no “explicit ‘reference to the transcendent’.”  (Can’t wait to see how patrons respond to that…)  More than a year ago, L’Osservatore Romano also ran a stringent critique of HP by Edoardo Rialti:

The author recalls Tolkien’s essays about fables, in which he says that “fables can depart from the physical world and the universe created, but not from the moral order: we can imagine a universe illuminated by a green sun, but we cannot bulk to the temptation of presenting as positive a reality in which the moral and spiritual structure are inverted or confused, a world in which evil is good.”

“And this is exactly what happens in Harry Potter,” L’Osservatore says. “Despite several positive values that can be found in the story, at the foundations of this tale is the proposal that of witchcraft as positive, the violent manipulation of things and people thanks to the knowledge of the occult, an advantage of a select few: the ends justify the means because the knowledgeable, the chosen ones, the intellectuals know how to control the dark powers and turn them into good.”

One thing all this makes crystal clear:  If the Vatican feels compelled to offer comment, Harry Potter will continue to draw interest far past its media heyday.

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It’s slated to release sometime next year, but some production art and headshots of characters have creeped out online over time, especially in the last day or two.

And if you’re wondering…  Yes, it is most certainly steeped in Tim Burton’s classic vision of the fantastic.

And yes, the image to the left is Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter.

And, again, yes — it is downright creepy!

If you want to check out some other info, a USA Today article offers some concept art and details some of the story here.  And some other production stills are available at Yahoo! here.

The one thing you can always count on with a story that has been Burtonized:  his ideas will stretch far into a direction you never considered.  At minimum, even if the story isn’t especially compelling, he will always create a visually arresting world that you can’t help but look at.

What do THH patrons think?

(HT to Quint @ Ain’t it Cool News)

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I’ve argued before, as well as in my book, that never does a Christmas go by in a Harry Potter book without some significant plot developments.  You can read a bare-bones version of Christmas at Hogwarts here and get a bit more detail in Harry Potter & Imagination.  What I want to address in this space is what Christmas actually means in Harry Potter, and how it contributes to the storyline and the “certain mood and power” of Faerie in the Potter story.

Christmas to Easter

While I argued in the post linked above that Christmas is a significant event in each book, that post was written prior to Deathly Hallows, and it could easily have been countered that there was nothing about Christmas itself that was particularly special. It makes story-sense to have interesting things happen at Christmas, because there’s a change in the overall feel of the school year – most students are gone. But Deathly Hallows confirmed my suspicions, I think, that Rowling was creating a deliberate Christmas to Easter “feel” in each book.

This is not unprecedented. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe frames the breaking of the White Witch’s power and her ultimate defeat on Christmas and Easter. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship departs on their journey on December 25th, and the Ring is destroyed on March 25th (an old Anglo-Saxon tradition dated the crucifixion to this date; it is also the traditional date of the Annunciation). Tom Shippey, in his book, The Author of the Century, notes the significance, writing that the major elements of the plot of The Lord of the Rings takes place in the “mythic space” between Christmas and Good Friday.

Mythic Space

The mystery of Christmas, with the mind-bending claim that God himself became a baby, is certainly “mythic.” It evokes the mood and power of Faerie. From “no room in the inn” to the widespread attempt on the Christ’s life by Herod, “perilous realm” is an apt description. Never was there a time in the history of the world when Faerie intruded so poignantly. When John the revelator was shown this period of time from heaven’s viewpoint, it was demonstrated with apocalytpic – and indeed mythological – language. The woman is in labor, and a Dragon awaits the child’s birth in order to swallow him up. But the woman is given wings to fly away, and the dragon’s vomitous river is swallowed by the earth.

This “mythic space” contains some of the richest ingredients in Rowling’s story soup. Here Harry battles with his own darkness as the Christmas carols stop, the lights of the church go out, and he finally sets eyes on his parents’ graves. The concept of life after death has no meaning to him in this moment; he is in desperate exile. And moments later, in the town of his own birth, a snake would wait for him, the “Chosen One,” and he would just barely escape.

Harry is in need of the coming of a savior, and that savior takes on the unlikeliest of all forms: “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.” This, of course, is after Harry’s “Epiphany” experience, in which Ron, the always-sidekick, pulls Harry out of the water in his attempt to retrieve the “silver cross.” On Easter morning, as Harry rises out of Dobby’s grave, the journey through this mythic space of Christmas to Easter reaches a climax, and after 6 and 3/4 books, Harry Potter finally looks like a hero.

Incarnation

It is this mythic space that many enter this time of year, having passed through the darkness and exile of the Advent season, looking for the light that was coming into the world. There are many important things to say about Christmas, and one of them is this: the physical stuff matters. That doesn’t sound very profound. Let me quote George MacDonald:

With his divine alchemy, he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries.

The incarnation of the Son of God is the vindication of the created, physical world. Did you wonder why it was so important for Lupin and Bill to try to retrieve Mad-Eye’s body after he fell? Did you notice no one said, “It doesn’t matter; he’s gone on to a better place”? That’s because bodies matter. There is an intention and a purpose in the created world; physical bodies weren’t made as “traps” or containers for spirits. It’s only in the notion of created intent (however long or by whatever process you believe the world came to be) that any definition of evil begins to make sense. We were created for one thing, and we become less than human when we do otherwise. The magic of incarnation has vast implications for what we do with our bodies and what we do with this earth. To do evil is to dehumanize one’s self; to dehumanize one’s self is to do evil. To be less than a fully human being – disregarding the errors of both the over-spiritualizing gnostic and the scientific fatalist – is to do evil. This is why Gothic depictions of evil are pictures of dehumanization – the distorted creatures in The Princess and Curdie, the talking beasts who lose their ability to talk in Narnia, and Voldemort in Harry Potter.

The Politics of Christmas

Another important thing to say about Christmas is that the world has never been the same since that first one. And this is fundamental to fairy tales because if MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, and L’Engle are right, fairy tales actually matter – they make a monumental difference in the way we live, and they can change the world. Whatever you believe about religion and the historical Jesus, was there ever a more profoundly world-changing event than the original Christmas to Easter progression? Not even the previous pagan myths that sorta-kinda sound like the Christ story had anything near the impact of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

But a good number of Christians today forget the kind of person Jesus was. Like it or not, he was a subversive of his time – touching the untouchable, loving the outcasts, forgiving the unforgivable. This is not to try to force Jesus into one particular political stance – being a conservative or a subversive is all about context. A good and just context should be conserved and preserved, and an unjust one subverted. Two years after Jesus was born, all the male infants and toddlers in the surrounding region were murdered. Oppressive political regimes ruled the day (Rome), and within those overarching regimes, smaller regimes maintained oppressive power (Pharisees, Saducees). Oppression and power-lust made up the atmosphere of the time.

Christmas doesn’t let a person become a social crusader without radical inward transformation. People who fight the “War on Christmas” miss the point. People who stoop to be Christmas – self-sacrificial, incarnational love toward all, without discrimmination – these are the ones who change the world. It’s the magic of Christmas that informs and inspires the work of Christmas.

This is the heart of J.K. Rowling’s imaginative fiction. Harry needed 6.9 books’ worth of personal transformation before he could change the world. He needed to pass through 7 cycles of Christmas to Easter before walking his own path to his own Golgotha. You can’t change the world as a social-crusading Hermione. You have to be a self-sacrificial Harry Potter. Spending time in the mythic space of Christmas is transformative, for in it we find both magic and the the most self-sacrificial act in the world’s history.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

If you enjoyed this article, these themes are expounded upon at length in Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds.

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OK, so that’s not really happening.  But my book, Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds, opens with a chapter on the importance of mythological and fairy-tale thinking as opposed to what G.K. Chesterton called “scientific fatalism.”  Richard Dawkins has decided to write the opposite book, positing the possibility that fairy tales are potentially dangerous, because they teach children anti-scientific, magical thinking.  

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.

Prof Hawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.

“I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”.

“I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” he told More4 News.

“I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”

Thoughts?  I happen to think that stories about frogs turning into princes are good for children (and adults!), so if someone wants to arrange the debate, I’d be glad to oblige.  Since that’s highly unlikely to happen, stay tuned for a couple months focusing on fairy tales and mythical thinking, what J.K. Rowling calls, learning to “imagine better,” and pay close attention to this site and Zossima.com for news on the release of Harry Potter & Imagination.

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by Travis

From a USA Today article on Del Toro:

“I’m interested in monsters because, much like archangels and angels, they represent a portion of the human soul.”
“In adult movies, R-rated movies, monsters can signify many different things,” says del Toro. “But in the (PG-13) Hellboy mythology, they symbolize our imperfections and how we can embrace them. If we were more eager and willing to accept otherness, things would be better between people.” . . .
“I’m eager to explore themes that lend themselves easily to metaphor,” he says. “The fantastic is the only tool we have nowadays to explain spirituality to a generation that refuses to believe in dogma or religion. Superhero movies create a kind of mythology. Creature movies, horror movies, create at least a belief in something beyond.”  (HT to The Fire and the Rose)

Del Toro’s an interesting character on this subject.  As a “lapsed Catholic,” he turned down The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardobe, because he couldn’t see himself bringing Aslan back from the dead.

Thoughts on this quote?  Has fantasy become more popular because the concept of religion has become culturally taboo as a means of expressing a sense of the sacred?

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