Tales of Disenchantment: On <i>Harry Potter</i> and Vampire Movies

In his book The Secular Age Charles Taylor talks about how, over the last 500 years, the world has become disenchanted. Five hundred years ago the world was enchanted, full of supernatural forces, witchcraft, and ghosts. A world full of thin places, where the border between this world and the Other world was porous and leaky. People then could become demon possessed or afflicted by magic. The night was full of occult menace. Black cats were bad luck.

Things are much different today. We live in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. We are moderns. Science and technology now rule. With electric lighting the night has been banished. Our cities never sleep. So there's no room for monsters. Medicine and psychiatry have pushed witchcraft and demon possession offstage. Worrying about black cats is superstitious and irrational. Ghost stories are just that. Stories. Fictional tales to scare the kids around the campfire.

But one night a year the world seems to become re-enchanted. Halloween night feels different. That night is spooky and menacing. For one night a year we go back in time and become medieval again. That's what makes Halloween so interesting. It's the last vestige of the Dark Ages. Smack in the middle of our disenchanted modernity.

To see just how disenchanted our world has become consider how science and medicine have chased the supernatural out of places that should be immune to disenchantment. Take our stories about magic and vampires. Surely these stories remain locations of enchantment, even if only in our imaginations? And yet, even these stories are becoming disenchanted. How? Consider this post I wrote a while back about the disenchantment in Harry Potter and vampire movies:


My friend Jonathan Wade and I have a quirky habit: We like to go to vampire movies. Once, on the way home from a movie, we began discussing recent trends in vampire movies and graphic novels. The classic vampire genre cast vampires as evil and occult. They are undead. Thus, the classic genre (CG) has a heavy metaphysical overlay where the spiritual forces of good and evil fight it out. Thus, weapons against vampires are holy water and crucifixes (along with the non-spiritual weapons of garlic, sunlight, and silver).

But increasingly, the modern genre (MG) of vampire movies is moving away from these metaphysical and spiritual themes. The MG, in contrast to the CG, is non-metaphysical. The MG is biological. Increasingly, you see biological explanations for vampirism and its symptoms. The vampire bite is analogous to a mosquito or rabid dog bite causing a gene-altering allergic reaction or viral infection. Further, the vampire’s reactions to garlic, sunlight, and silver are increasingly portrayed as hyper-severe allergic reactions.

In a correlated manner, we thus see the decline of the metaphysical weapons against vampires. If you assault a vampire in the MG, holding a crucifix aloft, the vampire will chide you for being superstitious. The supernatural is absent in the modern vampire genre. Biology—with its allergies, viral infections, naturalistic ontology, and genetic mutations—is king in modern vampire movies.

Further, in many of these MG vampire movies we see issues of race and eugenics emerge as significant plot themes. See the Blade series or Underworld as examples. Again, this is a very biological theme. And this brings me to Harry Potter.

Despite concerns from religious fundamentalists, Harry Potter is a very non-metaphysical series. The magic seems to come from nowhere in Harry Potter. The etiology of magic is unspecified. Magic just is. No occult forces are described. No devils, gods, or demons. True, there is dark magic. But the darkness is largely a moral issue speaking to uses and outcomes rather than supernatural source. “Darkness” is a pragmatic issue, not a metaphysical one.

But what you do see in Harry Potter are heavy biological themes. Race issues—pure-bloods versus mud-bloods—feature predominately in the series. Further, magical ability appears to be transferred via some kind of rare recessive gene. For example, two muggle parents can have a magical off-spring (e.g., Hermione). Lastly, magical ability in the Harry Potter series seems to be a matter of genetic talent. Some of the children are naturally good magicians (e.g., Harry) while others are not (e.g., Neville). But it is more complex than that, hard work is also a part of acquiring magical skill. Hermione is a good example of this. In short, what we see in the magic of Harry Potter is not a metaphysical portrayal but the classical biological conundrum of nature versus nurture.

The point? God is dead in Harry Potter and in vampire movies.

What I mean to say is that even in classically supernatural and metaphysical genres (vampire or magic stories) we see this de-emphasis on metaphysics and the rise of the biological (i.e., scientific) worldview. It really is a startling shift: Science as the coin of the realm in classically occult or supernatural tales.

But if we think about it, all this is simply a reflection of our culture. More and more often, our psychological and moral states are being defined by biology rather than spirituality. Sins are now addictions. And moral failures are increasingly traced back to genetic predispositions. Our debates are less about good versus evil and more about nature versus nurture. We are no longer bedeviled by demons but are harassed by genetic determinism and chemical imbalances in the brain.