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Three years ago, an alarmist email chain letter heralded a news story headlined "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism." To the dismay of some evangelicals, the article reported that J.K. Rowling's bestsellers had seduced millions of children to abandon the Bible for books of magic. But the email failed to mention one thing. The article was a spoof published in the satirical paper The Onion.
Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture by Bill Ellis Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2003 288 pp. $29.95 
From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural by Lynn Schofield Clark Oxford Univ. Press, 2003 304 pp. $29.95 |
Still, the hoax underscored an existing paranoia. We all know Christians who'd go ballistic at the sight of their children reading Harry Potter, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, doing card tricks, wearing goth, or invoking spirits at a slumber party.
If only these well-meaning guardians of young people's souls understood that—barring rare exceptions—magic is good! It grants refuge to the oppressed. It empowers the powerless. It legitimates the marginalized. It provides a rite of passage to the uninitiated. It subverts repressive hegemonies.
Here's an irony: For all their outrage, the magic-phobic right-wingers will be surprised to learn that they have actually fertilized the soil in which the supernatural flourishes. Who knew? Were it not for Neil Anderson's Bondage Breaker or the demonization of Harry Potter on Christian radio talkshows, the spirit world wouldn't be half as alluring. But, again, that's okay: magic is healthy and useful. Those who castigate it are actually doing others a favor by drawing attention to it.
Yeah, right. Only if you buy the logic of two disenchanting tomes.
First is Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture by Bill Ellis, folklorist and associate professor of English and American Studies at Penn State Hazleton. In his previous book, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media, Ellis argued that when religious institutions embark on metaphorical witch hunts, they can end up doing more harm than the modern equivalents of witchcraft they're ostracizing.1 Now, in Lucifer, he sifts through the ways in which people have trafficked with the supernatural apart from established religion. The bizarre stories he digs up are fascinating, but he's such a clinician about them! Introduced as myths, legends, and folktales, they don't terrify or awe as much as they would had the powers at work in them been taken seriously. But Ellis presents the uncanny tales mostly as proof that the occult has provided ways for many to gain a kind of social authority or autonomy.
Spot an African American carrying a rabbit's foot in certain regions? It's probably her way of challenging "a white-dominant legal system," since "social power resided in being able to take and carry such fetish." And it's not by chance that women and teens, who have lacked power in many societies, have been especially drawn to witchcraft and the occult. Ellis explains that practicing magic has not only given women "ways to vent their own social aggression" but also has empowered them to defend themselves against potential attackers or to obtain autonomy and respect in patriarchal cultures.
The same principle is at work when it comes to teens. If a group of youths visits—and, on rare occasions, vandalizes—a reputed witch's grave, it's most likely just a rite of passage, a way for them to prove their bravery.
Our second genial disenchanter is Lynn Schofield Clark, whose more narrowly focused study examines the psychological and social motives that attract impressionable kids between 12 and 21 to the powers of darkness. In From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, the assistant research professor at the University of Colorado's School of Journalism and Mass Communication argues that, as teens' loyalty to religious institutions is fading, their interest in the supernatural, the afterlife, the paranormal, and even the extraterrestrial, is on the rise. It's a good thing, she contends.
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