In whose world would you rather live, and why? That of JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling?

For example, one obvious and crucial difference between the magic of Tolkien and Lewis and that of “Buffy” and The Craft is that the magic of Tolkien and Lewis in its particulars bears little or no outward resemblance to actual occult practices in the real world, instead consisting of obviously imaginary and fantastic phenomena that offer no appreciable risk of direct imitative behavior. For example, whereas in “Buffy” and The Craft one finds quasi-realistic séance-type rituals and summonings of spirits and demons, nothing of the sort happens in Tolkien and Lewis. Instead, there are such things as storybook wizards who can start a fire with a word or cast a spell of invisibility on a mythical race of creatures; enchanted pools capable of revealing distant realities or of turning submerged objects into gold; rings capable of transporting the wearer between worlds or of rendering the wearer invisible; and the like.

Thus, while the young “Buffy” fan can potentially make a go at emulating the quasi-realistic occult rituals she has seen, a young Tolkien fan who might be taken with the idea of creating fire with a word quite simply has no viable course of action — no program to follow, no books or websites to research, no late-night TV tele-psychics who can even pretend to offer help. Should he perchance go so far as to gather together sticks and command them to burst into flame, the result would only be abject failure, not the potential occult entanglement that could well result from experimenting with séances and the like. Because of this, the danger of any slipping from a fascination with this kind of fantasy magic to an interest in the world of the occult, to charms and astral projection and horoscopes and the like, is quite limited.

And, on this fundamental point, it should be noted that Rowling’s Harry Potter books are unambiguously on the “right” side, the same side as Tolkien and Lewis. If anything, the magic in Rowling’s world is even more emphatically imaginary, even further removed from real-world practices, than that of Tolkien or Lewis; and, like theirs, presents no appreciable risk of direct imitiative behavior. For example, the Harry Potter books utilize well-established conventions of fantasy magic, such as flying on broomsticks and waving magic wands — phenomena instantly recognizable as institutions of the fantasy world of Broom Hilda, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Wendy the good little witch (of “Casper the friendly ghost” fame) — not the real world of Wicca, neopaganism, and occult practice.

Even on those occasions when Rowling’s magic converges toward real-world practices, it hardly seems pernicious. For example, in the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry has a class in Divination that includes lessons in reading tea leaves and astrology. Yet Rowling roundly spoofs the class and the teacher, who is almost infallibly wrong about everything she says (a fact confirmed by Dumbledore — in spite of which, however, he does permit the class to continue).

Anyway, even Lewis’s Narnia has an example of astrology (Dr. Cornelius in The Horse and His Boy). The larger point, though, is that no child who puts a broom between his legs really hopes to rise up off the ground.