magic is real if you want it

on disney and harry potter adults and the myth of disenchantment

A lot has been written about the phenomenon of Harry Potter and Disney adults, and the HBO Harry Potter remake has brought a fresh round of takes. These subcultures are pervasive and easy to mock. I have no wish to defend them, but I have found their analysis lacking, being written from inside the same disenchantment they are trying to describe. Cultural criticisms of these fandoms tend to treat them as pseudo-religions, or explain them as a product of a collective longing for myth. There is truth to this, but these readings stop short of the deeper impetus.

Harry Potter and Disney adults want magic, and have been led to believe that a hollow consumerist fantasy is the only kind available to them.

A 2024 survey of more than 1,300 self-identified Disney adults found that 71 percent are between 25 and 44 years old, 80 percent are women, and 91 percent expect to remain Disney adults for the rest of their lives.¹ Fifty-eight percent report spending between $1,000 and $10,000 annually on Disney products and experiences. Roughly 4,000 couples marry at Walt Disney World each year. A 2018 study by StreetLight Data found that only 36.7 percent of Walt Disney World visitors came from households with children.² The majority of visitors are millennial adults.

Harry Potter fandom runs parallel to this, though on a somewhat smaller scale. Morning Consult polling from 2023 found that millennials constitute the largest share of avid fans and that 56 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of the franchise, a figure exceeding the Marvel Cinematic Universe.³ Over 90 percent of Pottermore’s digital users are female.⁴ The franchise has generated an estimated $43 billion across books, films, games, theme parks, and merchandise.⁵ Hogwarts Legacy, the 2023 video game, earned $850 million and sold more than 12 million units in its first two weeks.⁶ When Universal Orlando opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in 2010, park merchandise revenue jumped 104 percent in a single quarter.⁷

The form of enchantment these franchises supply has a specific and predictable structure built on what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth: the story of an individual who is marked from birth with special potential, called to adventure, and returned transformed, bearing a gift for the community.⁸ Campbell believed he had found the universal pattern underlying all mythology, but what he more precisely described was the hero’s journey as a story of individual transformation, stripped of the communal and ritual context in which myths actually operate. Harry Potter follows Campbell’s template: the orphan with the lightning bolt scar, unaware of his destiny; the call in the form of the Hogwarts letter; the mentor in Dumbledore; the road of trials; the willing walk toward death; the return. The majority of Disney Films and those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe all follow the same structure, now so pervasive that audiences perceive it as the natural shape of narrative.⁹

Henry Giroux, author of The Mouse That Roared, argues that Disney “favours tales of hyper-individualistic heroism over collective action. Saving people always comes in the form of superhuman powers.”¹⁰ You are special simply because of who you are. The practitioner’s sole requirement is to show up and pay. Giroux calls Disney a “teaching machine” that produces “strategies of escapism and consumerism that reinforce an infantilised and utterly privatised notion of citizenship.” Infantilisation, he argues, is a form of depoliticisation: “You infantilise people so they can’t think, so they can’t act.” Sociologist Idil Galip notes that the financial and emotional investment “signals a break from regular society or real life.”¹¹ The viral 2019 discourse, ignited when a mother’s Facebook rant against “CHILDLESS COUPLES AT DISNEY WORLD” was screenshotted to Twitter, crystallized a broader anxiety that adults were seeking from a theme park what earlier generations sought from churches, pilgrimages, or the land itself.¹²

Max Weber delivered “Science as a Vocation” in Munich in 1917 in which he declared that the world was disenchanted. “One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits. Technical means and calculations perform the service.” Weber understood that this process left a wound. Science, he noted, “is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”¹³

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), mapped the interior architecture of the disenchanted subject. Taylor distinguishes between the “porous self” of the premodern world, open and vulnerable to spirits, demons, and cosmic forces, and the “buffered self” of modernity, which draws a firm boundary between inner experience and outer world.¹⁴ The porous self absorbed forces already present in the world around it; meanings were not interior but environmental. The buffered self is sealed, master of its own interiority, invulnerable to anything outside. Even so, Taylor argues, people feel pulled toward transcendence: “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured.”¹⁵ The pull has to go somewhere. “So people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane.” Theme parks designed as enchanted kingdoms, sorting ceremonies that echo initiatory rites: these are attempts to simulate porosity from within the buffered condition. The frisson fades, because it was manufactured to fade, because the business model depends on return visits.

Jason Josephson-Storm, in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), argues that disenchantment never actually occurred as a historical event. It functions instead as a “regulative ideal”: a disciplinary norm that leads people to disavow belief in magic and act as though the Western world is disenchanted, even when it plainly is not.¹⁶ The capacity for enchantment never vanished. It was driven underground, forced to express itself through sanctioned containers. A Disney annual pass is one such container. A Hogwarts house affiliation is another. Commodity witchcraft and other types of consumerist spirituality position themselves above these expressions but there is little difference. At the end of the day it’s all just LARPing.

Real magic is constituted by relationship: with the dead, with spirits, with the land, and with community. Bessie Dunlop, tried in Edinburgh in 1576 for “Sorcery, Witchcraft and Incantation, with Invocation of spirits of the devil,” worked with a familiar who offered guidance on brewing remedies and finding lost objects, tried to persuade her to renounce her baptism, introduced her to the Queen of Faerie, and attempted to draw her under the mound into the realm of the dead.¹⁷ The familiar could take the form of a fairy, a demon, an animal, or one of the dead; whatever shape it assumed, it required sustained engagement, and it changed the practitioner.

In Central European village communities, seers, táltos, and wise women served as mediators between the living and the dead.¹⁸ These practitioners were embedded in their communities, serving functions at once spiritual and social, recognized and accountable. The magical systems of fairy belief, sorcery, and witchcraft operated simultaneously within the ecology of village life, woven into the fabric of how a community understood and navigated its world.

This is what magic looks like when it is true: relational, reciprocal, rooted, demanding, and transformative. A theme park visit can be repeated identically a thousand times; a single encounter with the dead can change you forever. The person who spends thousands of dollars a year at Disney World and weeps at a character meet-and-greet is reaching for this kind of encounter, displaced into the only container the capitalist overculture has to offer. Joel Christensen and Sarah Bond, writing on Campbell’s legacy, observe that the monomyth “encourages audiences to see themselves as protagonists in a great struggle and all others as either helping or hindering their journey,” a use that is, they write, “in a way nearly perfectly narcissistic.”¹⁹ The form itself excludes the communal, place-bound, ancestor-connected world where magic was actually practiced, and is still practiced, by people willing to honor it.

Taylor’s cross-pressures describe exactly this: a person caught between the immanent frame that modern life enforces and the persistent sense that the world is larger and weirder than it has been officially permitted to be. The feeling being chased takes the form of nostalgia for childhood, but runs deeper. It is the feeling of a porous self: open, susceptible, in genuine contact with something beyond the closed loop of private interiority. The franchises simulate this feeling without producing it, which is why the return visits are required.

What the cunning folk knew, what the seers Pócs documents knew, what every practitioner working in genuine relationship with spirits and land and the dead knows, is that the porosity was never sealed. It was declared sealed. The buffered self is a social and ideological formation, a learned posture, not an accomplished metaphysical fact. The spirits did not leave because modernity arrived; they were told they did not exist. The land did not go inert; it was fenced, developed, administered, and the practices that maintained human relationship with it were stigmatized out of public life. The dead did not stop pressing at the edges of the living world; the living stopped making space to receive them.

Magic is real and available to you. It always has been. The question is what you are willing to enter into relationship with, and what it will cost you, and whether you can sustain the cost when there is no corporation maintaining the infrastructure and no fandom to validate the experience. I’m not saying that Harry Potter and Disney adults should all go sign their name in the devil’s book, but I’m also not NOT saying that. What I will say is that I guarantee that a glass of water and a candle on a shelf for your ancestors will do more to enchant your life than a fucking funko pop ever will.

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1. Amelia Tait, ‘The “Disney adult” industrial complex’ New Statesman, February 2024. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/02/disney-adult-superfan-industrial-complex

2. “Measuring Travel Behavior by Demographics: Disney World,” StreetLight Data, 2018. https://www.streetlightdata.com/measuring-travel-behavior-by-demographics-disney-world/

3. “Harry Potter Fandom Demographics,” Morning Consult, April 2023. https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/harry-potter-fandom-demographics

4. Susan Jurevics, former Pottermore CEO, cited in “Demographics,” Exploring Pottermore. https://exploringpottermore.wordpress.com/demographics/

5. “The Harry Potter Franchise’s Magical Moneymaking,” LoveMoney.com. https://www.lovemoney.com/gallerylist/122033/the-harry-potter-franchises-magical-moneymaking

6. Jennifer Maas, “’Hogwarts Legacy’ Earns $850 Million, Sells More Than 12 Million Units in First Two Weeks,” Variety, February 23, 2023. https://variety.com/2023/gaming/news/hogwarts-legacy-sales-850-million-1235533614/

7. “Souvenir Sales Double at Universal Thanks to Magic Wands, Other Potter Fare,” Orlando Sentinel, November 5, 2010. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2010/11/05/souvenir-sales-double-at-universal-thanks-to-magic-wands-other-potter-fare/

8. Joseph Campbell, *The Hero with a Thousand Faces* (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949).

9. Joel Christensen and Sarah E. Bond, “The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey?,” *Los Angeles Review of Books*, August 12, 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-behind-the-myth-should-we-question-the-heros-journey/

10. Henry Giroux, *The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence* (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); cited in Tait (see note 1).

11. Idil Galip, cited in “How ‘Disney Adults’ Became the Most Hated Group on the Internet,” Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/disney-adults-tiktok-hated-internet-1370226/

12. “Childless Millennials at Disney World,” Know Your Meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/childless-millennials-at-disney-world

13. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1917/1919), trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf

14. Charles Taylor, “Buffered and Porous Selves,” The Immanent Frame, September 2, 2008. https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

15. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 727.

16. Jason Ananda Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 4.

17. Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), p. 17.

18. Eva Pocs, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999).

19. Christensen and Bond (see note 9).