Witchcraft In HP --A Nod To The Other Side

[Spoiler alert] Those of you tired of All Harry, All The Time are hereby warned to click away and come back later. Since HP fans are accused of not taking the threat of witchcraft seriously enough, let me pose the question directly: What is the treatment of witchcraft in the Harry Potter series?

• About the witches and wizards of the series being of the fairy tale, rather than pagan or satanic variety, enough said. There's no actual, usable witchcraft in the books, and the plot is advanced by wit and guts, not by magic.
  
• I'll grant this much to the HP critics, however. I think it's fair to say that JKR does not herself take the evil of true witchcraft seriously. The Dursleys are said to have a "medieval attitude" towards witches, and there's the occasional joking treatment of witch-burning episodes in History of Magic class. These are light-hearted, throw-away remarks, and take up maybe 4-5 lines in thousands of pages of story, but there it is. JKR is not recruiting for real witchcraft thereby; you can tell she just doesn't think it is real.
  
• A point the critics of HP perpetually gloss over is that in the HP world, witchcraft is not a thing one can be seduced or introduced into --it's an innate talent one either has or doesn't. Moreover, Hagrid explains to Harry in Book One why the world of wizardry must be kept secret from the Muggles (it is not because magic = gnosis).
  

  Blimey, Harry, everyone'd be wantin' magical solutions to their problems.

  Which is an entirely wholesome answer --if Rowling doesn't take the possibility of satanic seduction very seriously, she at least knows the unsound mindset that gets people dabbling and makes it clear it's not for us.
  
• The classes the kids take at Hogwarts are not true witchcraft. There are no actual spells, the reader does not learn anything about actual wiccan or satanic rituals. It's just ordinary education suited to people who have these innate powers --they're learning how their world works. Their classes are: Astronomy; History; Potions (Chemistry); Herbology (Botany); Care of Magical Creatures (Biology & environmental science); Transfiguration (Physics). Then there’s Defense Against the Dark Arts –an Ethics class. In this class we learn the 3 unforgivable curses, which correspond to the culture of life's admonition that every person must be treated as his own subject, not an object. What are the 3 absolutely banned curses? Avada kedavra, crucio ( an obvious allusion to the crucifixion) and imperio (“I rule”) What is it absolutely forbidden to do to another? Kill, torture, enslave. I could wish we taught ethics so forthrightly in real schools! The kids also learn to resist the dark enchantments –to throw off the mind-controlling curse, for example, and to think and do for themselves against great temptation. Again, I wish actual public education were so wholesome.
  

• The one objectionable class is Divination, which is presented in very bad light. The professor is an alcoholic and a quack. She’s the epitome of “A stopped clock is right twice a day,” in that only twice in her life does she actually prophesy anything, and on neither occasion is she even aware of what she's done. Silly students love her, but no one serious does. Hermione storms out of the class after proving that the Professor’s “powers” lie in other people’s gullibility. In the course of the books we learn that Divination is useless at best, with great capacity to do harm, since prophesies can be twisted into all sorts of meanings, none of them necessary. Firenze, the centaur, complains that humans are impatient, unable to read the stars because they always bend what they see to their own selfish desires, and we see in the course of the books that mucking about in matters of this sort inhibits the human capacity to hope, and thus to act in freedom --the idea that one knows the future is a tremendous inhibitor of good acts. Eventually we find that none of this stuff need have happened to Harry at all if Voldemort hadn't paid attention to a stupid prophecy. That's a pretty strong condemnation.
  

People will have to draw their own conclusions, but I can't imagine that any healthy kid could be attracted to actual witchcraft from anything in these books. As I've said in a combox, it's so easy to say, Hon, this is a great story, but in real life any kind of witchcraft is commerce with the devil and we must stay away. Okay, Mommy. I can't imagine keeping my kids from a treasury of great things, based on the great story, on the basis of five throw-away lines. And I'll go farther. I let my Catholic kids read the final volume of Narnia even though it's a pretty mean satire of the Catholic Church. I don't think they picked up on that at all, but as between The Last Battle and HP, I see less objective harm to their faith in HP. How's that for going out on a limb?