Harry Potter and Mormon Mysticism

I have been doing some studying and talking with another friend to try and figure out why my Mormon friend blew up at me recently when I mentioned as an example of mysticism that Joseph Smith was a mystic. You can read MY definition of the meaning of mystic in the previous post. There you can see that the problem arose when my Mormon friend got angry but would not tell me what her definition of a "mystic" is.

Another friend and I recalled that our Mormon friend is a serious fan of the Harry Potter series of novels and movies. She stayed up late at a bookstore to get some copy of one of the novels in the series when it was released. Personally, I have never read any of the Harry Potter books and I have trouble sitting thru the movies when they are on TV. This is not to say I think they are good or bad. I just do not know much about them and certainly not enough to use information from them as cultural referents.

Doing some research, it appears that a concept called "mystic" appears in the Harry Potter novels, but that it refers to magic (not my definition of "mystic"). That could be why my friend yelled "Joseph Smith is real and they killed him!!!!!!!" Perhaps she thought that I had blatantly called Mormonism magic. I do not know.  (I did not ever make that claim to her.) As far as I am concerned, you have trained illusionists and the literary concept of magic which is the performance of a ritual WITHOUT faith. Otherwise, magc does not exist IMHO.

I have also stumbled upon a Blogger site called Mormon Mysticism. Now I am not Mormon and cannot really follow what he is talking about, though he does explain ideas and how he sees mysticism within the Latter Day Saints (the name Mormons use to describe themselves) as a possibility. There are some interesting discussions on his first page. There I learned that there are some Mormons who were thrown out of the Mormon religion because they were "apostate." Apparently these folks discuss Mormon Mysticism, but I still do not know what their definition of mystic is. The fellow who runs the MormonMysticism Blog does explain his understanding of mysticism and says that it is consistent with and supportive of the Mormon faith.

This does not really do anything for my friendship with my Mormon friend, but it gives me a clue as to how she was thinking in order to become so terribly irate in a public place when I had not said anything to be mean. The whole thing could have blown over if she would have answered my simple question "How do you define the word mystic?"

Please dear reader, before you get upset with someone, be rational and find out how you and the other person are defining something. Many arguments have ocurred because people were not giving words the same meaning. (That was a big problem in the Protestant Reformation 500+ years ago.)