Tales and spiritual reality (4)

Second musing; Crucio and ailments/chronic pain.

I’m going to talk about something happening in the Harry Potter stories. I hope people not interested in those still stay for my thoughts. You don’t need to know about these things to understand my end hypothesis.

I’m interested in the Harry Potter stories. In one of my earlier posts about Tales and spiritual reality I already talk a bit about this. To be clear, I’m not reading them anymore, I haven’t watched all the movies, and I keep my distance to the discussion about the author’s current opinions.

I do regularly follow a youtube channel, called Supercarlinbrothers, that makes theories about the Harry Potter magic world. Theories to patch up/explain plotholes, delve into the history of elements of the world, and create their own ‘what if’ scenarios.

One of their videos goes into the history of a certain spell. It’s a torture spell, used by the bad guys. It’s called Crucio. The effect of the spell is described as if all your bones are on fire, “white-hot knives were piercing every inch of his skin, his head was surely going to burst with pain”. (The main character, Harry Potter, experiencing the spell)

What makes the video fascinating, is that it points out that the spell makes one experience pain without falling unconscious, which with normal intense pain is a defence mechanism of the body. Therefore, they argue, with some more arguments along, the origin of this pain is emotional pain, which wants/needs to be felt. They call it emotional pain made physical.

That struck me as fascinating.

There are in the physical world multiple ailments causing chronic pain. Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Migraines, neuropathic pain, to name a few. In anthroposophy one stance to ailments is that they are caused by disbalance in the astral body (‘soul’), which are allowed to linger, which over time puts that disbalance into the etheric body and physical body as an illness/ailment.

The thing what fascinates me is that both paths, anthroposophy and a fictional fantasy story come to the same idea, that the physical pain we feel has it origins in (unfelt) emotional pain.