The attraction of Harry Potter

Fairy tales are full of magic from Snow White to Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty. Even the granddaddy legend of them all, King Arthur, has the wizard Merlin. Walt Disney himself used the pixie Tinkerbell to announce the Sunday evening Disney movie, such as, Mary Poppins.

As a kid I watched the 60s TV show Bewitched. And we've all seen the image of the magician with the hat, the cape, and the wand uttering the words "abra cadabra" and then pulling a rabbit out of the hat. Though it could never actually happen there was always the secret wish to be able to do magic. To wiggle one's nose or use a wand or cast a spell to make something happen. The popularity of Harry Potter indicates that a great many people have this same wish.

It isn't just about doing magic that draws people into the story though, it is also about the parallel world it represents. The works of fantasy I've read or watched often leaves the ordinary world behind by means of a portal, Alice in Wonderland being a prime example. In Harry Potter the magical world co-exists with our own. In fact, it is the same world. The only difference is that the magical world has been deliberately hidden from the ordinary viewer. In Betelgeuse, the goings-on of the after-world are deliberately hidden until during the wedding the parents are finally able to see the ghost-world. It is a theme played out in many stories and movies including the science fiction film The Matrix.

This is a common theme not only in fairy tales and other works of fiction but in the realm of spiritual teachings where the deeper dimensions of life are revealed to the earnest seeker of spiritual truth. We call these folks mystics. Unfortunately, in the words of Petunia Dursley, they are often called "freaks."

Just as Charles Dickens took great pains to establish that Jacob Marley was dead, dead as a door nail in fact though what was particularly dead about a door nail escaped Dickens, J. K. Rowling made sure we understood from the very beginning what it means to be "normal." This reminds me of the muggle story Peyton Place and the kind of conformity it imposed upon its residents despite the actual reality of their lives.

We all know about the difference between how things appear and how they really are but we often go along with the charade of keeping up appearances even when it is a lie. Of course the Durselys are a caricature, an exaggerated version of people we've all met and known. This is after all a children's story. The muggle drama of Peyton Place leaves little room for imaging a different world or a different way of living and being. With such constrictions it is no wonder that so many people desire to escape the strait jacket of having to be utterly "normal" and seek entry into the magical world of Harry Potter. The Harry Potter stories is like finding the door to the Room of Requirement enabling us to enter the co-existing world of wonderment.

Going even deeper however, is the nature of our own existence and how it is treated by others. In the Dursley household Harry is treated wretchedly. He is made to sleep in the cubby under the stairs among the spiders, barked at and treated like a slave echoing the life of Cinderella. And then, like the fairy god-mother in Cinderella, Hagrid shows up and changes everything in Harry's life. Unbeknownst to Harry, he is the most famous person in the magical world as "the boy who lived."

So along with the secret wish that magic is real and that a magical world exists, there is also the deepest and most secret desire to be thought of as special, that somewhere inside of us is a unique gift or talent hitherto unknown and undiscovered however reluctant we may be to actually find it. In our own world are all those rags to riches stories or of someone being "discovered" by a movie producer. And so Harry Potter represents not only our own desire to escape the "normal" world of muggles but to also discover the true nature and value of our own life in the grand arena of time and space we call existence and then to find our place in it in relation to the others we find here. This desire marks the entry point for all who have ever sought and traveled the path of spiritual awakening. Welcome to Hogwarts.