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Worlds
of Magic By Peter Wood,
associate provost, Boston University |
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The movie adaptations of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring are, of course, but the latest manifestations of our half-remembered pagan heritage. J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien exploit that heritage in opposite ways. Rowling imagines an England in which the ancient Druids, instead of dying out, evolve a hidden, parallel, but fully English society, complete with bureaucracy, the public-school system, bankers, small grocers, and a love of sports. Rowling's world has its dangers, but it is basically a place of good cheer, and the occasional cross-ups in which the magical and Muggle (ordinary) worlds meet are mostly humorous. (At the beginning of the fourth book in the series, however, an innocent Muggle is struck dead by the magical villain, Lord Voldemort. Darkness is, after all, darkness.) Tolkien, by contrast, plays out his magnificent imagining in "Middle Earth," a place with no acknowledged connection to our world. The Lord of the Rings trilogy nonetheless turns the debris of Arthurian romance and English fairy tales into a compelling moral vision by reshaping those elements into an allegory of England's struggle against Hitler. The peaceful, home-loving Hobbits of the Shire in the northwest face the powerful and implacably evil eastern tyranny of Sauron, Lord of Barad-Dur, in the Land of Mordor. Victory against overwhelming odds requires heroic resolve, willingness to endure terrible sacrifices, a strong alliance with other nations, and — above all — spiritual commitment to goodness in circumstances that suggest that evil has the upper hand. The New York Times has just reprinted W. H. Auden's review of The Fellowship of the Rings (1954), in which Auden writes that he "cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present." And yes, the sparkling freshness of both Tolkien's and Rowling's magic-imbued worlds does seem somehow to connect with the breathless childhood pleasures of Christmas. The oddity of this is not lost on everyone. Here and there, devout and literal-minded Christians grumble that the nativity of Jesus shouldn't be celebrated with stories about witches and warlocks, or fables reconstructed from old pagan beliefs. A few of the more severe sects, of course, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, have long derided the whole complex of Christmas celebrations as so much warmed-over paganism. From this perspective, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins are just more of the same: solstice ornaments for the old fir-tree worshipping cults of the northern European forest. Anthropologically, this criticism makes some sense. The Christian celebration of the nativity was deliberately overlaid on the pagan European calendar. The missionaries who carried Christianity into the hostile northern kingdoms derided local gods but frequently adapted their rituals and reinterpreted local customs by assigning them Christian meanings. But the Christian absorption of the symbols of earlier faiths does not mean that, deep down, Christmas is a pagan holiday. Rather, the identification of the nativity of Christ with the turning point in the solar year and the promised return of warmth and light is a demonstration of Christianity's universality. Christianity is a religion of solace and redemption that offers to find and renew what is best in us and to overcome our inner darkness. The emissaries of the Church converted the European tribes and kingdoms not by disdaining local cults, but by showing that Christianity encompassed what was true in them and superceded what was hard, cruel, unforgiving, or merely iron-clad tradition. Christianity offered the pagans of northern Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome essentially what it has offered peoples as far-flung as South Pacific Islanders and sub-Saharan Africans in the last 150 years: a broader horizon of spiritual understanding. With our modern cynicism, we often look back on the Christian era as a period of warring orthodoxies, autos-de-fé, forced conversions, and repressive shadows. We should indeed readily acknowledge that legacy of human weakness, but not allow it to obscure the larger story. What Christianity triumphed over in Europe was worse in every way, and what it offered was an open-mindedness and generosity that had no precedents in the local cults ruled by magicians. In Europe, the old pagan traditions were, in effect, domesticated. They went to the nursery, the harvest festival, and the country fair. They added a flavor to folk medicine and popular tales. A belief in faeries, trolls, and spirits of all sorts settled in as a residue in the minds of ordinary people, a stratum of odd knowledge associated mostly with childhood and rarely seen as conflicting with orthodox faith. We owe our fullest portrait of this European folk tradition to Sir James George Frazer, who combed through it in his famous twelve-volume study, The Golden Bough. The pagan tradition lives most fully, however, in English literature. From Malory's semi-Christianized Le Morte d'Arthur though Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, the English have distilled from the pagan ingredients an elixir that makes us half-remember a world of magical possibilities. Some of these writers, like Rowling, gleefully reveal that this is the magical world, hidden in plain sight from the literal-minded Muggles. Others, like Tolkien, evoke a different, but strangely familiar world, in which the magical terrors and intensity of childhood grow into adult proportions. Rowling and Tolkien both offer keys to a luminous world in which the humbly good strive successfully against imperious evil. If the medium is ostensibly pagan, it is a paganism that has been inwardly transformed by Christian sensibility and moral insight. And as these are stories about the coming of an unpretentious child-hero who appears at a dark time and saves the world, I, like Auden, cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present. |
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hristmas this
year follows unusually close on the heels of Halloween. The restless
souls, the ghouls and demons, and the humans who tap unseen powers
whether to assist or combat our supernatural enemies have stayed
on past October 31, and are to be found in a theatre near you.
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