believes that only those who have not actually read Harry Potter could make serious claims that the books are antagonistic to Christianity. While accepting that the novels were not written with a specific spiritual agenda, Baptising Harry Potter moves effortlessly through J.K. Rowling’s themes, identifying their Christian essence. So, for instance, Fr Luke claims that the sequence’s portrayal of the parasitic nature of evil sits healthily with traditional Catholic teaching, while the way virtue is hidden and not displayed, in the case of the cloak of invisibility and the House Elf’s low profile, is imbued with the spirit of monasticism. He argues cogently for the doctrine of free will being expounded in Dumbledore’s belief that “it’s our choices … that show what we truly are”, as opposed to the evil Voldemort’s belief in “accident and chance”. On the grand scale, he finds Harry Potter’s resonances with Christianity most pronounced: the ancient resolution of good overpowering evil not by force of arms. His study pinpoints recurring images of the Resurrection, such as the dawn in the great hall when Voldemort is defeated. What about Cardinal Ratzinger’s unequivo - cal condemnation? Fr Luke believes that since the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on which the hit film is based, makes the Christian connections clear, when Pope Benedict XVI finds time to read it, his mind too will be set at rest.


of witchcraft. Owls are one of humanity’s most potent symbols of uneasy ghosts. A reading of Macbeth will reveal this, or a trip to a village in any part of the unindustrialised world where such superstitions linger. The names that J.K. Rowling routinely uses also make reference to this human propensity to burden ourselves with the darkly super- natural. One of her main characters is Hagrid. In the books he is a genial giant, but the ori - ginal meaning of the term “hagrid” was to describe someone possessed by a demon in female form. Language carries the past; and such words bear the elements of a superstition which once imprisoned the human soul, and also led to innocent women being burnt as witches. In many parts of the world, it is still common for people to become ill and even die if they feel themselves to be “hagridden”. None of this is to suggest that the Harry


B


Potter books can be seriously accused of encouraging people to dabble in the occult, and many readers will find Fr Luke’s thesis persuasive that the Christian one is their over- whelming message, which is not surprising since J.K. Rowling frequently describes herself as a Christian.


■Jonathan Tulloch is a novelist and the author of The Tablet’s weekly ‘Glimpses of Eden’ column. Harry Potter: a Christian Reading of J.K.


Rowlingby Luke Bell is published by Hidden Spring.


1 January 2011 | THE TABLET | 13 HEYTHROP COLLEGE University of London


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ut is all this too easy? Right from the moment the famous owl swoops over the page, it is clear that these books are saturated in the imagery


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