A Landscape With Dragons; Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture
November 24, 2010 Leave a comment
Adjunct to a recent post about the education system reprogramming our children is Michael O’Brien’s book A Landscape With Dragons. With the current culture shift toward paganism, O’Brien discusses how modern children’s literature and cinema re-symbolizes good and evil. The long-standing symbolism of dragons as personifications of evil are now shown to be docile creatures (one example, Disney’s Pete’s Dragon) or as helpful creatures. This creates confusion for the child and, more dangerously, a synthesis of both good and evil is generated in the name of ‘helping’ the story’s protagonist. In his book O’Brien says:
“A powerful falsehood is implanted in the young boy by heroes who are given knowledge of good and evil, given power over good and evil, who play with evil but are never corrupted by it.”
The book provides tools for parents to discern what is good and what is bad about children’s literature from a Christian perspective. The last third of the book contains a list of good, nourishing literature for our children to read.
Landscape With Dragons was published before the Harry Potter series. O’Brien has since published a new book (May 2010) which takes on the occult world of Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture .
In the Preface to Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture, O’Brien describes the spiritual nausea he experienced as began reading the Harry Potter books. He also describes his nightmares:
“…from the day I opened the first page and began to read, a cloud of darkness and dread descended, which was held at bay only by increased prayer. I also experienced nightmares of a kind I had never before experienced in my life. This is totally out of character for me since I am not prone to bad dreams, and usually years go by without me having one. I have had some frightening experiences in my life (far worse than reading a few questionable books) and never suffered a bad dream from it. But from the moment I began my little part in the resistance, I suffered from nightmares of unprecedented power.”
Cindy Wity 