J.K. Rowling on The Diane Rehm Show, WAMU Radio Washington, D.C., October 20, 1999 (re-broadcast December 24, 1999)
http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/1299-wamu-rehm.htm
DR: Is there a certain amount of very sophisticated mythology that you're trying to work in here?
JKR: There's - I'm not trying to work it in, but... If you're writing a book that, I mean, I do do a certain amount of research, and folklore is quite important in the books, so where I'm mentioning a creature or a spell, that people used to believe genuinely worked - of course it didn't [PM: in her opinion]- but, you know, it's still a very picturesque and a very comical world in some ways - then I will find out exactly what the words were, and I will find out exactly what the characteristics of that creature or ghost was supposed to be. But I hope that that appears seamlessly. Children often, often ask me how much of the magic is in inverted commas "real" in the books in the sense that did anyone ever believe in this? I would say - a rough proportion - about a third of the stuff that crops up is stuff that people genuinely used to believe in Britain. Two thirds of it, though, is my invention.
It's there.
Gee thanks for putting in so much of your own emphasis to make the text completely unreadable so I had to copy it off to notepad and read it normal. Lame obfuscation, and just generally rude.
The question is about mythology and she is discussing folklore, neither of which is the occult. What people “genuinely used to believe in Britain” is not the same thing as the occult, it could be folklore England has plenty of that, could be classical mythology since the Romans did expand to England for a while, could be bad science even but she never did mention phlogiston. None of those are the occult.
I notice your “sources” keep getting older and older. must be because the world finally realized your position is full of crap and stopped writing those stupid things.
People in Britain used to believe the world was flat.
How you managed to post that, yet overlook all the “used to believe” and “supposed to” and other qualifiers, escapes me.
Sort of like all those qualifiers did you.