[HPforGrownups] Re:Wizard of OZ ending?

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 171434

Lois Jamieson wrote:
> Interesting theory overall, but there's one flaw.  Dorothy was throwing 
> water on the Scarecrow, after the witch set him on fire.  Dorothy didn't 
> care about the witch--she was trying to save her friend.  The water splashed 
> on the witch by accident, with unexpected results.

Bart:
Another major difference between Oz and Potter; Baum was familiar with, 
and believed in, a lot of occult concepts; he was a Theosophist, and had 
edited a Theosophical magazine. Notably in the first novel, there is a 
great deal of occult mixed in with the story, as opposed to JKR, who 
mostly made it up from scratch (such as use of semi-Latin for the 
spells). In the Wizard of Oz, the 4 elements are based in the 4 cardinal 
directions, with the feminine elements associated with the good witches, 
and the masculine elements associated with the wicked witches (note that 
  the Wicked Witch of the East was destroyed by Earth, and the Wicked 
Witch of the West was destroyed by Water, the feminine elements).

Compare this with the elemental associations of the 4 houses, where 
Griffyndor and Ravenclaw represented the masculine elements (even though 
Ravenclaw was female), and Hufflepuff and Slytherin represented the 
feminine elements (although Hufflepuff was female). It wasn't any 
special insight; it was that JKR knew about the 4 elements, but almost 
certainly didn't know about the gender associations. She probably didn't 
even know that the 4 elements came from a time when personalities were 
ascribed to substances, and the 4 elements were also personality types 
(although the current Myers-Briggs tests actually parallel those 
associations). None of the card reading or astrology ("Mars is 
especially bright"????) matches any readers' world system.

Isaac Asimov once published his own reasoning that Shakespeare's plays 
were actually written by Shakespeare, because there were scientific 
errors in the plays which were understandable for someone of 
Shakespeare's education, but were not for someone like Roger Bacon or 
any of the several others who supposedly penned Shakespeare's plays. 
Based on JKR's ignorance of readers' world occultism, I would not draw 
parallels between the Potterverse and Oz.

Bart