WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season 1, streaming now on Netflix.
Although there have been numerous schools of magic in fantasy fiction, none has so enchanted readers as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry Potter fans dream of boarding the Hogwarts Express at King's Cross Station Platform 9¾, to be spirited away to the sprawling Scottish castle for classes in charms and configuration, after a sorting into the proper house, of course. But the Academy of Unseen Arts on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not ... that.
Instead, we might consider it the anti-Hogwarts, and not only because it's devoted to the original Dark Lord, Lucifer. There's even a statue of Baphomet, a respectable replica of the real one from the Satanic Temple in Detroit, stationed in its entry hall.
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Positioned as part of the choice Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) must make, as she's expected to forsake her mortal life and embrace her witch heritage, the Academy looms large from the beginning of the season. While (ahem) unseen until Episode 4, the school represents something unthinkable to the teenage witch: the abandonment of her friends, and boyfriend. But surely it's better than Baxter High, where jocks terrorize the weak, and the puritanical Principal Hawthorne (Bronson Pinchot) turns a blind eye. Spoiler: It's not.
After reaching a legal stalemate over her refusal to sign her name in the Book of the Beast, and pledge her life to Satan, Sabrina agrees to attend the Academy of Unseen Arts on weekends, while remaining at Baxter the rest of the week. What's viewed as a victory, of sorts, by her coven, the Church of Night, is merely a ruse by Sabrina to learn what she can in (the perhaps futile) hopes of using that knowledge to defeat the Dark Lord.
The journey to the Academy of Unseen Arts isn't made by a charming exclusive train or a flying car, but instead by an abandoned stretch of railway (yes, Sabrina walks) that runs past a seemingly forsaken Gehenna Station, a reference to the supposedly cursed valley in Jerusalem that became associated with Hell. Yes, on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, school is Hell.
But, of course, the train station isn't actually abandoned. Sabrina is greeted on the steps by a sweet little boy named Quentin, who escorts her inside to reveal the Academy of Unseen Arts in all of its unholy glory. As he explains, the institution was built on the principles of sacred geometry, so that each room is a perfectly proportioned pentagon that locks with the one next to it, forming a chain of, theoretically, infinite rooms. Like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, the Academy is much larger on the inside -- plus, it has its own Satanic statue.
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While Hogwarts has a grandfatherly headmaster in Albus Dumbledore, described by author J.K. Rowling as "the epitome of goodness," the Academy is overseen by the precise opposite: Father Faustus Blackwood (Richard Coyle), who's also high priest of the Church of Night, and, as such, Satan's representative on Earth. Oh, sure, he may occasionally pretends to have Sabrina's best interests at heart, he shows himself at every turn to be rather single-minded in his goal to secure Sabrina for his master, at any cost. He makes Principal Hawthorne seem downright benevolent by comparison.
Likewise, the Harrowing at the Academy would likely make students nostalgic for the relatively mundane bullying in the halls of Baxter High. Sabrina is awakened in the middle of the night by Quentin, who warns not show that she's scared, or else the Weird Sisters -- to call the trio of young witches the "Mean Girls" is a severe understatement -- will kill her. He's not exaggerating, either, as Sabrina is soon subjected to the Harrowing, a "witch tradition" in which a student must endure the torment experienced by the earliest witches in Greendale: Thirteen were hanged, but many more died before that, in the "Witch's Cell." With the help of her familiar Salem, Sabrina makes it through the horrors of the night, but her Academy orientation has only just begun.
Taken the next night into the woods, traveling the path of the Greendale 13, Sabrina is ordered to stand in place until dawn as she's assaulted by auditory hallucinations, of her boyfriend Harvey, her late parents, and of the Beast himself. She's greeted the next morning by Quentin, who informs her she's passed the test, before he goes on to deliver some unwelcome news. When Sabrina expresses concern for the boy's safety, he takes her to a cemetery where he and other victims of the Harrowing were discreetly buried by a former groundskeeper (clearly not Hagrid), who made the task part of his duties. However, "he died many years ago," leaving us to wonder what's happened to the more recent victims. Quentin then introduces Sabrina to "the Others," the ghosts of a dozen or so children, in period attire, who also didn't survive the Harrowing. Anything Slytherin students might dish out pales in comparison.
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Naturally, there's a lesson about bullying at the heart of these revelations, as Sabrina's aunt Zelda (Miranda Otto) dismisses the Harrowing that went on during her time at the Academy as "spirited child's play," even as she continues to mistreat her sister Hilda (Lucy Davis). When Zelda attempts to intervene on her niece's behalf, Blackwood takes the very un-Dumbledore-like position of endorsing the Harrowing as a way to "forge" the coven's weakest links. Undeterred, the Spellmans take another approach, as Hilda, who was harrowed herself, encourages the spirits of the dead children to seek revenge. "They just need someone to give them permission to do it," she says. "Isn't that what all well-behaved children need, permission?"
Indeed, that's all it takes for them to join with Sabrina in ending the Academy tradition of Harrowing, beginning by giving the Weird Sisters a taste of their own medicine. With that, the ghost children find new purpose, as guardians of the school, ensuring there are no more Harrowings. In that regard, then, perhaps the Academy of Unseen Arts is at least a little like Hogwarts, although Quentin & Co. are arguably an improvement on, say, the Fat Friar or Bloody Baron.
Available now on Netflix, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stars Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman, Ross Lynch as Harvey Kinkle, Michelle Gomez as Mary Wardwell/Madam Satan, Jaz Sinclair as Rosalind Walker, Chance Perdomo as Ambrose Spellman, Lucy Davis as Hilda Spellman, Miranda Otto as Zelda Spellman and Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood.