The Wand Chooses the Wizard

Admit it. You read the title, and you finished the quote in your head.

“The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter...”

Few adventures in history have captured young minds as thoroughly as those of the courageous Harry Potter. His world of mystery and magic, hidden within our “muggle” one, beckons like none other; how one yearns to be a part of it! To receive their Hogwarts letter by owl and sojourn to Diagon Alley.

“Hello, Hello,” Mr Olivander would greet you as you entered his shop. “I wondered when I’d be seeing you. Why, it seems only yesterday Mr. Potter was in here buying his first wand!” (Eleven inches, holly, containing a single phoenix tail feather, of course). What a magical moment it would be!

Throughout her books, J. K. Rowling's prose awakened the imaginative spirit of the masses and seeded a dream: to wield a magic wand and see your inner power manifest. She colored the fantasy genre in powerful mythical lore, embedding the imagery of dueling wands in the public psyche. But more than a mere aesthetic, Rowling used wands to create a narrative device that touched a deep human desire, one that stretches back through our collective subconscious to our ancestors. The desire to see our worth manifest outwardly. To be “chosen” and have our innate sense of self justified as more than a mere Muggle. To be special. To be worthy. The wand chooses the wizard, indeed.

The uniqueness of Rowling's wands is partially explained in how she crafted them. Using a modern Druidic tree zodiac calendar, she aligned the personality traits attributed to various tree woods to her characters. For some, such as Harry, their wands were made from trees associated with their birth months. Whereas others, she assigned wand woods whose properties mimicked the personalities of the characters she was writing, such as Hagrid's Oak wand, a symbol of protection. That is largely what a wand is in Rowling's world: a tangible extension of one's character and symbol of their individuality. It worked wonderfully for her series, but raised a fascinating question. Is this the original purpose of the magic wand in literature?

Short answer. No, it isn't.

Now, I am of the true Harry Potter generation. My people grew up attending midnight book release parties and using backyard sticks as wands even before there were theme parks or commercial toys. Trust me when I say, these stories were formative for me, and I will advocate for Jo and the phenomenal author she is any day of the week. That said, Harry Potter was a springboard for my imagination, leaving a hunger to know more about magic and wands. So I looked deeper, and what I found surprised me.

On the surface, there is a simple symmetry between Rowling's use of wands and their real-world ceremonial application. In the 19th century, a rise in occult spirituality spearheaded in part by a hermetic organization called “Order of the Golden Dawn” in 1888, mainstreamed the idea of wands as tools for controlling and directing elemental forces by channeling your own inner divinity. You can see the relation. In Rowling's world, magic is an inner power that wands help to control and direct externally. So too is their real-world practice in hermetic traditions. In this view, the wand is your individual will and power exerted upon the world. A symbol of a person’s sovereignty. But this is far from the whole story.

The true (and very old) origins of magic wands had nothing to do with personal power or individuality. Rather, they were manifestations of a higher calling. To wield one was to be called by God to serve divine will.

Long before Rowling ever lifted a pen, and even before the rise of the modern Golden Dawn, literature, myth, and folklore from across the globe were chock-full of wand-like instruments, including scepters, staffs, rods, etc.  We see it in contemporary art, such as the wizard staff of Gandalf the Grey, or in Walt Disney’s fairy godmother. Reaching back into antiquity, myth is littered with wands, including the Caduceus of the god Hermes, the wand of the demigoddess Circe, or the serpent-entwined rod of the healer Asclepius (used today as the modern symbol of medicine). And of course, arguably the most famous example is the staff of Moses used to part the Red Sea in the Old Testament.

Ancient sculptures, carvings, and paintings are filled with images of wands wielded with divine power to perform miracles. Any aspiring wand-lore enthusiast will find abundant examples if they know where to look. But in doing so, they will learn, as I have, that rather than amplifying individual human willpower, ancient magic wands were used to enact the will of gods, not men. In fact, the use of a rod or scepter as a symbol of manifesting divine will was so prominent that there are ancient depictions of Jesus Christ performing his miracles with a wand! Not because they were re-interpreting biblical lore, but because in the ancient world, the symbol of wand-like implements was deeply connected to the manifestation of God’s will.

These are a mere taste of the innumerable examples of magic rods throughout history. All of these figures were either divine themselves, or had their wands given to them by a divine power. Each carried with it a specific purpose and duty beyond simple personal desires. This symbology was so deeply embedded in the ancient world that it spilled out of myth and into real common practice.

Unlike the hyper-personal modern rituals of the Order of the Golden Dawn, traditional wand-like scepters had a very different, and arguably more crucial, use. They conveyed heavenly appointments, denoting legal authority and social order. From the pharaohs of Egypt and Mesopotamian kings to Roman emperors and European monarchies, the scepter was a universal symbol of authority. They were even commonly used by priests of various religious practices for the same reason! Most importantly, the scepter wasn’t a symbol of one man's tyrannical will over another (even if that did occur in practice). Symbolically, it was supposed to represent a duty of stewardship assigned by God for the good of the community. It was a higher calling.

Predictably, modern minds might take issue with this point. In our age of hyper-individualism, we are not prone to accepting orders from on-high. Beyond the contempt we would feel for anyone claiming authority over ourselves, if God gave one of us a magical wand along with a job to do, it's easy to imagine our skepticism. And hey, who could blame you? Who wouldn’t question something like that?

Moses sure did.

In the biblical story, Moses was chosen by God to lead his people out of Egyptian enslavement to seek the promised land. God imbued Moses’s simple shepherd's staff and instructed him to use it to call plagues, perform transfiguration, and, of course, part the Red Sea. Importantly, Moses was not empowered by God for personal glory, nor did he want it. In fact, he didn’t want to be chosen at all! Moses frequently fought with God over his own lack of qualifications. Regardless, God commanded him to act, and in the end, he did. But despite everything, on the occasion when he diverted from his duty and used the staff improperly, the consequences were dire. In defiance of God’s express command, Moses once struck a rock with his staff in anger, rather than speaking to it as he was ordered, to make it pour forth water. Moses later learned that his defiance was a violation of his God-given authority, and he was barred from the promised land in punishment.

Moses’s staff wasn't a symbol of individual sovereignty to be used as he wished. It was a badge of office. A symbol of authority given to him by a higher power, for a specific purpose. To violate it was to invite disaster.

A point that Rowling also understood all too well.

Thus far I have highlighted Rowling’s individualistic tropes in her wand lore. But the greater good and higher powers were not themes she ignored. Her story contained an incredible example echoing the original purpose of wands in myth and legend. The infamous Elder wand. Death's own cosmic instrument of exceptional dueling prowess. The story of the Deathly Hallows states quite plainly that any who use the Elder wand for their own glory will be betrayed by it in the end. This becomes a key element of the story when the only man capable of wielding it was the one who accepted its true purpose: to accept one's mortality instead of fighting death. Both Harry and Dumbledore accepted their duty. They made peace with death and used that cosmic spirit’s sacred implement for its divine purpose, not to exert their own will over others. Harry defeated that violator of the natural order, Voldemort, and his abominable Horcruxes, and restored balance to the wizarding world. He became the one true master of the Deathly Hallows by accepting what You-Know-Who he could. No mortal master's death.

There it is. From ancient myth into the grand themes of our most beloved novels, the image of the wand contains an archetypal pattern reverberating across time and culture, deeply embedded in human memory. When the surface aesthetic of the individual is stripped away, the true purpose of the wand is revealed. To wield a wand represents bearing your life's purpose courageously in the face of elemental powers. To act virtuously in accordance with the divine will. Of course, this means that to misuse the wand represents a denial of your own life's purpose.

Now, as neither you nor I are likely to be mythic royalty, clergy, wizards, or ethereal spirits, it stands to question: why should we care about this distinction? Why not live in fantasy and ignore the rest? And to that I answer, because we too are beholden to divine authority.

From the lowest of us to the highest, not a soul alive is without inherent human purpose. We bear a sacred duty as earthly stewards over our homes, communities, and our families. So next time you catch yourself daydreaming of what it would be like to have your own magic wand, try this instead. Consider what your " Wand of Stewardship" might look like. What would it be made of? What God-given attributes of yours would it exemplify? What are its limits? What duty does it call you to perform? And, more importantly, do you have the courage to pick it up and wield it properly...

Ah me, what a thing to ponder.