Why do children love Harry Potter so much? If you take a look at the TV, film, and books aimed at children you will see that a huge percentage of them are focused on magic, witchcraft and the supernatural. Of course, children love magic. What could be better than escaping reality and entering a fantasy world where the children have all the power, and magic is truly real?
Did Harry Potter become one of the most best selling books ever simply because children love it, simply because they told all their friends how great it was? Why was it considered so wonderful that even adults started to read it?
I am extremely sceptical these days that any book, TV show, or film enters the mainstream simply because it’s telling a good story. I’m sceptical even that things enter the mainstream for the sole reason to ‘make money.’ There is something else, an agenda, always an agenda. And I would urge anyone consuming anything remotely mainstream (and that includes youtube channels with large followings) to consider - what is the agenda here? What is being pushed?
You know when facebook started that @everyone tag, and I was suddenly reminded of groups I had joined at some point in the past, that all had the word witch, magic, coven etc. in the title. Magic isn’t just for children. Many of us have got curious about how to use our own ‘personal power’ to get what we want in life, to harness the ‘law of attraction.’ The new age tells us that we can all be Gods and Goddessess taking control of our lives and destinies.
Magic is real. That’s what one woman found when 11 years old, inspired by Harry Potter, she began exploring witchcraft with books from her local library and became a witch. Years later, as an adult, she began to be drawn to Christianity as she realised that although her magic practises were working, opening up to the spiritual realm was causing her extreme anxiety and mental health issues. In another testimony a woman was drawn to Satanism as a teenager, because she had experienced trauma and wanted personal power in her own life.
Magic promises, freedom, power, control, but it actually achieves the opposite. The Bible warns us, ‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against your magic charms with which you ensnare people like birds and I will tear them from your arms; I will set free the people that you ensnare like birds.’ Ezekiel 13:20
The magic-freedom-power myth, is the oldest lie in the world. As old as the garden of Eden when Satan told Eve that if she ate the forbidden fruit, she would become like God and would not die. Instead darkness and death came into the world, thorns and thistles, sin, and trauma and pain. The lie keeps expanding outwards like a big explosion so that even now, thousands of years later, we all fall for it, as we fall into our inherited sin.
It is not an accident that Harry Potter is one of the bestselling books in the world, it is by design. The lie has to keep telling itself, in all of the films, and the books, and the magazines, the lie that we can take control of our lives, and fix things by our own efforts. It is the lie told to our vulnerable children, and it primes us as adults for searching on what we think is an infinite journey, but is in fact an endless pacing of a tiny bird cage.
‘And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’
*
Learn more about Harry Potter and the occult connection from the film Harry Potter The Spirit Conspiracy from Good Fight Ministries.