Elemental Houses

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C2802
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: Elemental Houses
Reply To: [Yahoo! #2787] Elemental Houses
Date: 6/25/00 8:39 am  (ET)

> I Love JKR and Harry, but she's very Christian
> writing about some very Pagan concepts

Merry meet, Lady E-Merlin Jess! Blessed Be! I'm a Wiccan, too. I can't
find anything Wiccan or Pagan in the HP books (I wish I could! -- I
want to play in that universe, but I don't want to have to give up my
religion while visiting there).

JKR is just using the word 'witch' for a female magic user with
no religious implication and 'wizard' for a male magic user with no
implication of long study and scholarship -- my frpg friends would call
magic users MUs or mages instead. The magic that they're using is not our
Wiccan magic: you don't see them raising a Cone of Power and visualizing
a goal or praying to the gods, instead you see them memorizing specific
words or specific potion recipes.

I am sure that the official religion at Hogwart's is some mild form
of Anglican Christianity. So they celebrate Easter and Christmas, and
Halloween is about scariness, and nutcase Sybille gets superstitious
about 13 at table.

Even of real magic (as distinguished from storybook magic), it doesn't
have to be connected to any religion. Christians can do magic, completely
secular people can do magic.

The ancient alchemical theory of the Four Elements is not limited to
any one religion: for example, it was the 'scientific' theory on which
professional medicine was based until the 1700s, and the four elements
can be linked to the Four Evangelists -- Man, Lion, Bull, Eagle.

And, while we're at it, the color attributions of the Four Elements are
completely arbitrary. The little 'atoms' or tiny particles of which
Democritos hypothesized that all things are made have no color, just
shapes: sharply pointed for fire atoms, ball-bearing round for water
atoms. The colors just help us humans to tune our mind to that element.

As I mentioned, Yellow Air, Blue Water, Red Fire, Green Earth works for
me as well as for you, but if there is someone for whom it works to use
Blue for Fire (blue-hot, name of nasty Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli is
'Hummingbird-blue on the Left/South'), then he isn't Wrong, he's just
using a symbolism that it will be hard for other people to share if they
want to work with him.

(Digression: Nahuatl has the same word mean 'south' and 'left'. Hebrew
has the same word mean 'south' and 'right' -- Yemen, Bin-yamin.)

JKR is using a Yellow Earth, Green Water, Blue Air, Red Fire symbolism
which is used by several Wiccans whom I know, even tho' I don't like
it.... Altho' I should be able to deal with Yellow Earth -- golden
fields of grain, amber waves of grain -- here in Southern California,
where much of extinct natural landscape was liveoak savannah, from April
until the rains come again (as early as September, as late as February,
maybe not at all), the land is covered with yellow-brown dried up grass
and shrub. My late grandmother came from her home in New York to visit
us in the summer and "I know why they call California the Golden State --
it's the color of all your rolling hills."