Marybeth Baggett

“This argument rests on a mistake. Arguably it’s the critic, not Rowling, who’s blurring real life and fantasy here. Surely there’s a crucial distinction between reading or writing fiction about a practice on the one hand, and engaging in the practice itself on the other. Communicating with the dead is biblically forbidden, but does that mean those who take such teaching to heart ought to decry Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol because it involves a fictional tale of just such a thing? Or C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia because they reference astrology? Unlikely, and for good reason. Writing fiction about a practice is not engaging in the practice itself, and care needs to be taken not to use the term “occult” so freely as to encompass both.”
― Marybeth Baggett, Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture