I was listening to a podcast recently that discussed the differences between the Wizarding World and the Muggle World in the Potterverse. The hosts made the fascinating argument that the Wizarding World is everything the Muggle World used to be prior to the industrial revolution, but with magic. The primary points of evidence were their unfamiliarity with Muggle technology and their lack of necessity of it. For example, Arthur Weasly’s curiosity about the use of a rubber duck as well as his illegal hoarding of a non-functional car make us muggles look like aliens to be monitored and studied.
Add a little bit of magic, however, and the reasons why the Wizarding World need not require knowledge of the human’s technological means of survival become relevant. If you can cast a spell on a sponge, scrubber, and soap to wash your dishes, then you need not a dishwasher. If you can aparate or travel by floo powder or portkey, then who needs a car (even a flying one)?
It seems, then, that the Wizarding World would be the superior race in that they are able to remain innocuous to the Muggle World. And that’s just the thing: it is only the witches and wizards who can live undercover in the muggle world while us non-magic folk remain ignorant to their existence.
Why?
Why would a witch or wizard who has the entirety of chocolate frogs and efficiency of spell-lived lives even want to dwell among us non-magic folk? And why, by Merlin’s beard, would we be so dense so as to not realize the existence of this earthly paradise?
The answer, in short, is Christmas.
J.K. Rowling, like two masters of high fantasy before her, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, knew that there is no magical world without a mystical one. They knew that behind every magic wand, every ring of power, every professor’s wardrobe, there exists an even deeper, celestial truth: that God Himself became a muggle.
Harry lived among the post-industrialized people whose technological “prowess” was still light years behind the Wizarding World. And yet, here we are, more than 2,000 years removed from the moment of the Incarnation when God came down from heaven and tread upon our world undercover for the first 30 years of His earthly life.
Witches and wizards do something similar in Rowling’s stories; they’ve left their magical paradise to dwell with us muggles. But unlike Jesus, who came to save us from our sins, they seek answers to their deepest spiritual longings through the race in which God Himself shared His DNA. One could argue that they ask themselves questions like “Where does this power come from?” “Is there a God?” and “If God does exist, then why am I even here?”
The answer is Christ, and we know they’ve come to understand this truth when Harry leans toward Ron and Hermione on his first holiday break at Hogwarts and says, “Happy Christmas.”
The same goes for the Hobbits who celebrate Yuletide in Middle Earth, and the Pevensies who helped bring Christmas back to wintery Narnia.
It just goes to show that the fate of the Wizarding World (and any fantasy universe) would be found in some druid dark arts solstice nonsense had it not been for Christ, and it is that truth that keeps any magical race connected to humanity through the mystical bonds of God. He is Who allows us to see one another with the same dignity and love as our Creator.
Hence why all (good) fantasy eventually leads us to Him, for even “the boy who lived” must bow down to the boy who is life.
