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Real Wizards: The search for Harry's ancestors

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Magic today

Shamans dancing themselves into a trance; druids running with the deer; witches flying in the moonlight, or dreaming of flying. The world of magic is far away and long ago. Or is it?

The success of the Harry Potter books suggests an appetite for stories about wizards and wizardry. And other bestselling authors of the past 50 years - JRR Tolkien and Terry Pratchett - have written, in very different ways, about worlds in which magic is commonplace. Why this hunger for fictional magic?

Wicca and magick

Part of the explanation is historical. Twentieth-century writers such as Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley brought about a widespread revival of interest in magic and witchcraft. Gardner's Witchcraft Today described Wicca as an ancient religion based on celebration of the seasons and the lunar cycle ('wicca' is the Old English word for a male witch). Wicca is now a fully-fledged neo-pagan belief system, with hundreds of thousands of adherents worldwide.

Crowley revived the word magick, which he used to distinguish authentic magic from the magic of conjuring tricks. In his Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley wrote: 'The question of Magick is a question of discovering and employing hitherto unknown forces in nature.' Magic could be both a scientific investigation and a way of getting closer to nature. This approach has been hugely influential in the New Age movement, which embodies many of the elements of magic.

Echoes of the past

But these historical and cultural explanations tell only part of the story. Our society is pervaded with magical thinking. Every one of the main features of the magical worldview finds an echo in our culture:

Divination. We may not consult witches but we all read our horoscope. Not to mention palm-reading, rune stones, the Tarot and the I Ching. Is Russell Grant a 21st-century wizard?
Trance. It used only to be shamans who danced for hours to repetitive beats. It's no accident that 'trance' is now a musical genre. Some clubbers report experiencing a mystical sense of community.
Drugs. Some people use chemical substances which help them attain altered states of consciousness. Others take herbal remedies - or drink herb tea. Both are traditions which go back to the secret lore of witches.
Ritual. Hundreds of years ago, entire communities used to mark the onset of winter by slaughtering their herds, feasting and calling on supernatural forces in order to see into the future. Nowadays, the slaughter has gone, the feasting has been toned down and the invocation of supernatural forces is a bit of a joke. But we still celebrate Halloween.
Wizards. Our fascination with the wizards of Hogwarts echoes the faith we all place in therapists, scientists and political analysts. Among users of the Unix computing system, expert programmers are even called wizards. Our ancestors relied on witches, druids and shamans - people who knew the hidden laws of the universe and could say what was around the corner. Maybe we're not that different.

Powerful or powerless?

From fortune telling to homeopathy, magical thinking is ultimately an expression of our desire to have an effect on the world: 'Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,' Crowley wrote.

A pessimistic view would be that magical thinking expresses our powerlessness in the face of a reality too complex for us to change. But it is surely also the case that magic expresses our hope for better times and our desire for intense, transcendental experience. It also answers some very basic fears.

For all the sophistication of our high-tech civilisation, we're not that far removed from our ancestors: the nights are still dark, winter is still cold and the future is still unknown. And we still turn to magic to help us make it through.

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