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The Girl, The Myth, The Fanfiction

Harry Potter and the Sacred Text: Season 1 Trailer

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Podcasting Potter “What if we take this seriously? What gifts is it going to give us if we love something and we love it with rigor, and we love it with commitment?” ask Vanessa Zoltan and Casper Ter Kuile about the Harry Potter Series. In the podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Zoltan and Ter Kuile choose a chapter from the novels each week and analyze it using traditional religious practices, as if it were a sacred text . The two Harvard Divinity graduates seek to address the “need for spiritual nourishment even for those who identify as atheist,” (Cusack).

This practice doesn’t have to be with Harry Potter. In fact, when Ter Kuile approached Zoltan with the idea, Zoltan was leading a sacred text practice with Jane Eyre. He later said to Zoltan, “this was so, so great. But don’t you think it would be more fun if it was about a book that people actually read?” (Baglione). Thus, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text was born.

Each episode follows a similar outline, beginning with an introduction to the topic for the week and going into a 30 second recap competition between the co-hosts. After the recap, the two discuss the topic in relation to the chapter, bringing up anecdotes and connections to real life. The next section takes up a specific sacred practice from a faith and uses it to analyze the text. In the final part of each episode, each co-host blesses a character in the chapter, acknowledging their positive qualities.

The blessings portion of the podcast is a short but rich meditation on empathy. Zoltan pledged at the beginning of the series that she would only bless women characters ("HP and the Sacred Text," 1:1). In taking up this challenge, she routinely has no choice but to bless the only woman mentioned in the chapter, including characters we see as villains such as Aunt Petunia or Dolores Umbridge, both of whom are portrayed as nasty and irredeemable. The blessing portion offers up a way to acknowledge a character’s shortcomings while still celebrating that everyone has positive attributes and should be treated with respect and dignity. In the season 1 trailer, we see a description of Aunt Petunia that is empathetic rather than judgmental, inviting listeners to identify with the character and look within themselves and ask, “What if you were the villain in someone else’s story?”

While the podcast uplifts Harry Potter to the level of “sacred,” J.K. Rowling is often left out of the equation. Authorial intent matters much less than the interpretations one can make and the rich conversations that come out of this. Vanessa Zoltan explains:
“We’re trying to talk about the books the way that people talk about religious texts in religious settings. The way that you talk about the Bible in church, the way that you talk about the Torah in temple, the way that you talk about the Quran in mosques. And authorial intent is not the way that those things get discussed in those spaces,” (Boboltz)

In the podcast, we see a prioritization of interpretation over whether something is canon. The messages we can find in the text matter more than if they were placed there on purpose. This was seen even more explicitly in the wake of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia scandal, when Casper ter Kuile tweeted: “Remember @hpsacredtext friends - for us sacred reading has nothing to do with authorial intent. The text belongs to you and me and every reader,” (@caspertk).

Similar to written fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text offers its own interpretations of the series as valid and worth listening to. Through their meditative performance of treating the text as “sacred” they are demonstrating a reader’s autonomy to interpret a text. A key aspect of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is that it isn’t a religion nor does it market itself as such, “neither of the creators practice religion but both are interested in practicing faith in something, in this case they chose to have faith that they could learn from the Harry Potter series,” (Dennis, 1). Faith, here, rests on the ritual, the practice of treating something as sacred and spending time with it.
“By reading the text slowly, repeatedly and with concentrated attention, our effort becomes a key part of what makes the book sacred. The text in and of itself is not sacred, but is made so through our rigorous engagement. Particularly by rigorously engaging in ritual reading, we believe we can glean wisdom from its pages.” ("Our Methodology")

Ritual, however, has more meaning within community, something that the creators also cite as an important aspect of treating the text as “sacred.” There are groups all over the world that meet to have their own discussions of each chapter, which is encouraged on the website. Groups meet weekly to discuss a chapter from the books with a theme, but also often make time to meet elsewhere for events like trivia.

This can be done with other books or series. The fact that it’s being done with Harry Potter, however, makes sense. Zoltan explains:
“People are already doing this work with Harry Potter, that’s what’s important. Sorting into the houses is an example we always use. That’s part of how people will identify on Tinder, like I’m a Ravenclaw or I’m a Hufflepuff. And it’s not “If I were to be sorted into a Harry Potter house, it would be Ravenclaw,” it’s “I am a Ravenclaw.” And I think that the work of people who are already living through Harry Potter or seeing themselves in relation to Harry Potter in an intimate way is what makes what we do possible.” (Baglione).
The distinction between “I am a Ravenclaw,” and “If I were to be sorted into a Harry Potter house, it would be Ravenclaw” demonstrates the different form of engagement fans have with the canon text, one in which content from the text claimed part of their own identity. There is a shared language that comes from being a fan of something. Harry Potter and the Sacred Text isn’t fanfiction, but it is still a fan practice, engaging with the canon text and making interventions within it. Unlike in other fan practices, however, the canon is brought into discussion with the “real world.” More similar to Wrock than it is to fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text doesn't shy away from making real-world parallels to the books.

No knowledge is assumed in the podcast of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, making listeners feel less intimidated by both the fanbase and the occasionally political nature of the podcast. In the “resources” tab of their website, the hosts list articles, books, people, and ideas mentioned in the podcast that listeners may not be familiar with, putting them in conversation with Harry Potter and making legible complex concepts of our own human experience. In their analysis of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 12, the hosts chose to center their analysis around the concept of whiteness, specifically in conversation with the magical artifact, the invisibility cloak.
“I think we all saw the Invisibility Cloak as the perfect metaphor for what white privilege is, and the line that really stuck out to me, one of a few lines, is when Dumbledore is watching Harry look at himself in the Mirror of Erised, Harry says to Dumbledore, like “oh I didn’t see you.” And Dumbledore says to Harry, “Strange how near-sighted being invisible can make you. And that just spoke so strongly to me of the real privilege of whiteness, of people don’t make assumptions about you, people don’t make comments about you when you’re white” ("Harry Potter and the Sacred Text," 1:12)

The unlikelihood, in this case, of J.K. Rowling creating the invisibility cloak as a metaphor for white privilege doesn’t matter to the hosts, what matters, instead, is the utility of that conversation and the legibility that the image of the invisibility cloak lends to a concept that many people still grapple with: white privilege. The conversation, however, doesn’t stop there. A simple metaphor isn’t going to unpack the whole of white privilege. It can’t. The hosts, however, open the door and leave it cracked for listeners to explore more, giving listeners resources to continue thinking about what whiteness is and what it does, offering up James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” as suggested further reading ("Resources").

We see the hosts bringing in the world Harry Potter as a way to understand our own world in many other places in the podcast. A particularly powerful episode was “Isolation” an analysis of “Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs,” Chapter 18 of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The episode starts with a story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of Guantanamo Diary.

Episode Breakdown

Throughout this episode, the hosts tackle the complexities of a concept like isolation and survivors of isolation such as Nelson Mandela, Eli Wiesel, Mohamedou Ould Slahi as well as characters such as Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. Ter Kuile starts the episode out hopeful, but Zoltan gives a necessary complication of the perseverance narrative.
“Casper, I think that the crux of all questions about pain and suffering is how quickly do we move to the positive aspects of it? How much time do we spend thinking about the people who never emerge from isolation? Which the text handles really well – we know that there are people who have suffered the dementor’s kiss and are just inside their own bodies trapped forever. But then on the flipside, when do we move to stories of hope and why do we do that?” ("Harry Potter and the Sacred Text," 3:18)

After the opening story, the hosts “recap” the events of the chapter for those who either do not remember the chapter or have not read it. The recap section serves as a way for the podcast to be as accessible as possible to a general audience. After the recap, Zoltan and Ter Kuile start their analysis of the chapter, discussing the different ways in which isolation affects people. Zoltan not only makes references to historical events but how she and her family have been personally affected by isolation, describing her relationship with her grandparents who were all Holocaust survivors. She describes the ways that isolation affected them, negatively and positively and finally arrives at the need to “accept victims as they are, and to bear witness,” ("Harry Potter and the Sacred Text," 3:18)

As the conversation continues, the two hosts make their way into discussing Remus, who isolates due to his lycanthropy and the burden that causes him then, finally, to Peter Pettigrew. I find the conversation around Peter Pettigrew to be one of the most interesting in this episode as we see the hosts start to reference a much larger concept than simple isolation.

Canonically, Peter Pettigrew betrayed his childhood friends and told Voldemort where James and Lily Potter (Harry’s parents) were hiding. He then framed Sirius Black for this betrayal by faking his own death and, in the process, killing twelve innocent bystanders. To hide, Pettigrew lived for twelve years as a rat in the Weasley’s home (Rowling, 1999). Through this story, the hosts talk about Pettigrew’s self-isolation out of fear of the legal consequences of his actions. Though there is little reference to the Wizard justice system other than Azkaban, where dangerous criminals are sent, Zoltan and Ter Kuile begin to talk about how justice could ever be achieved in the aftermath of the First and Second Wizarding War. Casper mentions the insufficiency of prisons to do the work of achieving justice and the hope he sees in community oriented justice. Though they arrive at no solutions, the hosts open a door for listeners to use the framework of Azkaban and a broken justice system to look at our own justice systems. Bringing Harry Potter to our world rather than the other way around, making good on the promise in the podcast’s motto “Reading fiction doesn’t help us escape the world, it helps us live in it,” ("Our Methodology").
Don’t Be a Dursley
Similar to many other fan practices, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text references the canon often but doesn’t give much importance to how J.K. Rowling actually intended for the series to be read or interpreted. Like A Very Potter Musical, Potter Puppet Pals, and countless other unaffiliated entertainment, the podcast uses references to the real world to make certain concepts in the books make more sense to those who may not be as well versed in the fandom. However, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text shares the most similarities not with fanfiction or fan musicals but with Wrock. Continuing with Wrock’s legacy with activism, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text started its own campaign “Don’t Be a Dursley”

The fundraising efforts were helped by no other than Harry and the Potters, who released a song of the same name in which all proceeds go to RAICES. It's not surprising that the two groups worked together as their goals are very similar. Wrock, like Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, recognizes the generative possibilities of fan practices as a way to better the world we live in. Both recognize that the imaginative energy it takes to create performances, live and literary, within an already built fictitious world is the same energy needed to change our own performances in practices in the world we all live in.