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This is the third of three posts about the Lost Mother Golden Thread in the work of J. K. Rowling. The first, Anne Rowling and the Lost Mother Golden Thread in the Works of J. K. Rowling, reviewed Rowling-Galbraith’s regrets at the death of her mother Anne in December 1990 with a listing with brief discussion of the many Lost Mothers in her twenty-three published books. In the second, The Lost Mother Golden Thread and a Key Reason We are Moved by J. K. Rowling’s Stories, John joined the Lost Mother meme to the Ghosts and Mother’s Love Golden Threads to get at the metaphysical ground and beating heart of Rowling’s work. In the video podcast above, Nick and John discuss reader feedback to the Hidden Hold of Horrors Golden Thread conversation, John’s two Lost Mother posts, the implications of his findings for the Strike series’ last two novels, and the work being done on interactive Hogwarts Professor talks and online classes. Please share all the Lost Mother characters, mother and child, in Rowling stories that they missed in the comment boxes below, as well as your thoughts about John’s idea that the “Defining Idea and Power of Rowling’s Work is in the Intersection of the Lost Mother, Ghosts, and Mother’s Love Golden Threads Running Through Everything She Writes.” Before we forget, here are the three things Nick and John promised would be posted ‘Down Below’ in the conversation above: * A Key to Maternal Love in Harry Potter? Mum Crouch’s Sacrifice in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The meaning in the middle of the Harry Potter series, the murder of Barty Crouch by Junior, a son saved by his mother’s love, incorporates the key symbolism of Rowling’s work with respect to sin and death as well as virtue, love, and the victory over death in one family. Conversation with Wayne Stauffer, Beatrice Groves, and Louise Freeman with implications for the understanding of the Hogwarts Saga, Cormoran Strike, and The Christmas Pig. * Death of Eric Wardle’s Mum is first mentioned in Hallmarked Man, Chapter 70: Wardle drank more lager before answering. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My mum’s just died.’ ‘S**t,’ said Strike, who’d had no idea of this. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Yeah. Last month. She was never right, after my brother,’ said Wardle. ‘Broke her heart.’ His words were coming as though each adhered to his throat, and needed to be pulled up, with effort. ‘She chose not to go for a second round of chemo… raised us both as a single mum. We were her life. Terry dying half-killed her, and then April left me, and she didn’t see nearly as much of Liam any more.’ ‘Liam?’ ‘My son,’ said Wardle, with a faint smile. ‘The kid you just saw me put to bed.’ ‘Oh, yeah, of course.’ ‘Anyway… Mum left a lot more money than I expected. She came into an inheritance herself, right before she died… never got to enjoy it. Before she went, I kept telling myself I’d be mad not to hang on at work for the pension, but with what she left, I could still see Liam right.’ * Percival Proudfoot "Plug" Plugsley, Cartoon Character: Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Here are all the links to points and articles Nick and John discuss in today’s video podcast; enjoy! The Ten Questions with Links (John in Red, Nick in Blue) * So, Nick, what did we miss in our review of the Hidden Hold of Horrors Golden Thread (HHH) running through all of Rowling’s work? Tamspells: The bat cave in Tassel’s version of Bombyx Mori * The smuggler’s cave Strike and Pollworth never got to? * IBH - Mother Shipton’s Cave * The silver mines on Sark and the Maid of the Silver Sea Connection Ed Shardlow: * One point of pedantry, the incident on the tracks in IBH takes place at Custom House station, which is on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) rather than the underground, and very much above ground, although there’s still a drop from the platform to the tracks and the onrushing mortality. * There are also lots of cemetery references with Highgate Cemetery itself as a key location, and then the depictions of the cemetery in both the cartoon and the game. Gus’s darkened room perhaps also qualifies? * A few other candidates occur to me in other books, although perhaps these are more concealed treasure than concealed danger - the cupboard under the stairs, Harry’s Gringotts vault, the Old Forge... * Connected to all the mining and masonry in THM, and the silver vault, there’s the archetypal setting of King Solomon’s Temple in the legend of Hiram Abiff, and the recreation of that setting in the vault-like temples of Freemason’s Hall. * Also, the place under the bridge on the canal, where Strike meets Rena, that turns out to be Ben Liddell’s final resting place. * Seems like the subterranean chamber in Church Cottage might be the inspiration from real life not just for the golden thread of caverns, dungeons and cisterns, but also for the Lake in her creative process. Whereas perhaps those raised and well-lit counterexamples are the Shed. * So I wonder if there’s a real world shed to identify too. Maggie S: Strike swims in a pool in Cuckoo Calling. MS Liner Notes-Sideways Bird: In Deathly Hallows, the Malfoys keep their prisoners in a dungeon/cellar * They escape to Bill and Fleur’s home — Shell Cottage, which is on a cliff overlooking the sea. The processing of grief and burial rituals alongside the sea imagery, where Harry tries to make sense of it all and figure out what to do next, are beautiful. I use them as stand-alone passages for grief counseling often. * It has made me want to explore further the juxtaposition of the underground trauma moments with the above ground lake/sea/water processing moments. Like DP and Jack’s final encounter on the beach. * I think there might be a reason Cormoran is drawn to the sea for healing…and maybe a bit hesitant to linger there too long… Gina Sterling: In OoTP, Harry goes down into Snape’s cellar, goes into the Pensieve, and he sees his dad being a jerk to Snape...next to the lake. * My mind is blown! I love that this podcast gives me paradigm shifts once in awhile--with the stories in which I’m most familiar. I’ve never connected the *literal* undergrounds and *literal* waters with the descent to the innermost cave/nigredo. The cave or underground area is always followed by water, the albedo, cleansing moment...where the hero is changed. I’ll never be able to not see this now! John: The two Hidden Hold events I thought of this morning were the “deepest dungeon” in ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’ and the trapdoor concealed by a carpet in Poem and Pretence’s home in Christmas Pig. Both of those are in credibly rich moments in their respective books, the latter the Meaning-In-The-Middle moment of perhaps Rowling’s best book. * You’re the Lake man, Nick, so you probably aren’t surprised that we have two Golden Threads coming out of Church Cottage, Rowling’s childhood home in Tutshill. Are there any others? * In addition to the Hidden Hold of Horrors out of the Church Cottage basement, there is Tutshill echo everywhere in ‘the family with Bad Dad and Lost Mother living in a modest home on the periphery of a Manor estate’ (think the Gaunts and the Riddles, the Knights and the Chiswells, and the Prices in the Wallace’s Pagford). * We need to look at the Ghost of the Lost Mother (Anne Rowling) now and the Upstairs Bedroom Prison as other possibilities (hat-tip Susanna!) * John, you asked me to dig up Rowling’s comments about Anne’s death that were specifically about regrets. What did you make of the three that I found? * See Anne Rowling and the Lost Mother Golden Thread in the Works of J. K. Rowling for full discussion: * ‘If I could talk to my mum again I’d tell her I’d tell her I had a daughter - and I wrote some books and guess what happened?’ The Guardian, 18 April 2001 * ‘Multiple Sclerosis Killed My Mother,’ Sunday Herald, 16 November 2003 * Rowling’s contribution to "Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self" by Joseph Galliano, published by Simon & Schuster 15 October 2009 * Haven’t we talked about this before, John? During the Kanreki? * Yes! The Lost Child Golden Thread had two parts, the ‘Child Survives’ half of which was properly the Lost Mother Golden Thread (LGMT); * Orphan-Neglected Child and Lost Mother almost identical * Lost Mother Golden Thread Review: * See full review and lists at The Lost Mother Golden Thread and a Key Reason We are Moved by J. K. Rowling’s Stories, * Fascinating but So What? Is this just a persistent Lake-Life parallel or is it reflective of Rowling Shed artistry and core messaging? * See the full discussion of the Ghost Golden Thread in John’s post, The Lost Mother Golden Thread and a Key Reason We are Moved by J. K. Rowling’s Stories; * “You think the dead we have loved ever truly leave us?” * Troubled Blood: The Dead Among Us * The Ghosts Haunting Troubled Blood * More Hauntings in Cormoran Strike: The Ghost of Charlie Bristow Comes Calling in Cuckoo’s Calling (Louise Freeman) * More Hauntings in Cormoran Strike: Freddie Chiswell as the Lethal White Horse (Louise Freeman) * Ghosts are a big deal in Rowling-favorites Nabokov, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Greek mythology * Rowling on “indestructible soul,” “obsession with death,” “Mortality and morality” * In HHH we saw that Rowling used the dark damp depths to communicate psychological fears and places of transformation; is there a point to the Shed artistry of recurrent Lost Mothers? * Yes! See The Lost Mother Golden Thread and a Key Reason We are Moved by J. K. Rowling’s Stories for the full discussion of the Mother’s Love Golden Thread in Rowling’s work; * Evan Willis’ Christmas Pig piece “For the Straightforward Path Was Lost”: A Few Startin

This video podcast is the third in a series of three posts about the Hidden Hold of Horrors Golden Thread in the work of author Rowling-Galbraith. A Golden Thread is a plot point, scene, or character type that recurs repeatedly through an author’s stories, a commonality that is evident only when looking at the writer’s writings viewed as a whole. The ‘Hidden Hold of Horrors’ repeated scene is of a location underground, be it a cave, a cellar, a tunnel, a tomb, or a basement pool, in which a frightening confrontation, a Near Death Experience, flat out murder, or transformative revelation occurs. The first post in this series was Nick Jeffery’s exploration and explanation of Rowling’s Church Cottage childhood home in Tutshill and its remarkable cellar beneath a covered access port, what has been mistakenly referred to as a “trapdoor.” In The Hidden Cellar Beneath J. K. Rowling’s Childhood Home, Nick shares why a building in West England on the border with Wales from the mid 19th Century that was built as a Church of England school would have a substantial brick and cement vaulted basement and what this room, originally a cistern to prevent cholera outbreaks, was probably like during Rowling’s childhood. [Golden Thread Image: Wovex.com; Ladder to Cellar Under Access Port: Pinterest] The second post was one I sent out yesterday in which I shared Nick’s and my off-the-top-of-our-heads catalog of everything subterranean, frightening, and damp in Rowling’s oeuvre, that is, her seven Harry Potter novels, eight Cormoran Strike mysteries, the Cursed Child ‘collaborative’ play script, her Beedle the Bard fairy tale collection and Ickabog “political fairy tale,” the three Fantastic Beasts screenplays, her border-line autobiographical Casual Vacancy, and the Dante-meets-Dickens Christmas Pig classic. Rowling Golden Thread: The Hidden ‘Hold of Horrors Downstairs, Beneath the Trap Door Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The morning after posting it, readers are already adding scenes Nick and I overlooked and I am kicking myself for not including the “deepest dungeon” in ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’ and “the trapdoor beneath the rug” concealing the tunnel beneath Poem and Pretense’s sanctuary from the Loss Adjustors, a tunnel reached via a ladder. ‘The Tunnel’ takes them “to the bottom of the mountain” where Compass joins them for their flight to the City of the Missed across the Wastes of the Unlamented, Pig’s story turn and meaning-in-the-middle. As Nick and I note in the conversation above, a comprehensive list will require a repeated reading of Rowling’s complete writings. Please add the ones you think of that we missed in your comments below, especially for Cursed Child, the only book for which Nick and I drew a complete Golden Thread blank. Those first two posts cover half of the four subjects Nick and I tackle in this Golden Thread conversation; the Ten Questions guiding that discussion with the relevant links and notes from our answers can be found below. What I want to write out here briefly are some notes about Golden Threads in general, their place in a Lake and Shed bifurcated critical environment, and then the importance of the ‘Hidden Hold of Horrors’ Golden Thread specifically for understanding Rowling’s work, its inspiration and intentional artistry, and for seeing what will happen in the remaining Strike novels. Not to mention the meaning of Hallmarked Man’s fictional silver oligarch Murdoch’s name! {Lake image source; Golden Thread image source; Shed image source] Are ‘Golden Threads’ Evidence of ‘Lake’ Inspiration or ‘Shed’ Intentional Artistry? Since the time of our first Hogwarts Professor Substack posts and podcasts, Nick and I have described what we are trying to advance here in the niche field of Rowling Studies is Fourth Generation work. For a discussion of the four generations of Rowling scholarship, listen to On Reading ‘On Writing.’ where we discussed the evolution of reader approaches to Rowling-Galbraith texts and how each generation, while typical of a specific time period, continues into the other generations (most of Strike-Ellacott fandom, for example, is reading that series as the ‘Shippers and speculators did the Hogwarts Saga during Potter Mania, the first generation of Rowling Studies). What distinguishes Fourth Generation thinking is, in essence, (1) the incorporation of biographical material in understanding the inspiration of Rowling’s work (per her implicit instruction since the late 2019 Lake and Shed metaphor interview), (2) the creation of a gauge to measure the success or failure of her work out of the intention evident in her choices of literary tools, her Shed artistry, and (3) shifting the critical focus from the latest work and the book-next-in-queue to the oeuvre as a whole, everything she’s written. The bumper-sticker version of that? Lake — Shed — Golden Threads. Lake? Rowling describes the source of her stories’ inspiration as the ‘Lake’ of her unconscious mind, her personal issues, the events of her life, her reading and education. This is the work of Fourth Generation specialists who sift through what is known about Rowling’s life in pursuit of clues to the source material of her stories. Shed? Again, Rowling’s bipolar metaphor for her creative process has a marker, her ‘Shed,’ that represents the alocal place ‘where’ she deploys her traditional tools to craft archetypal story out of her very personal Lake inspiration. These tools — I focus on seven — have a specific quality, both antiquarian and profoundly effective in producing the effect Rowling desires on her reading audience. And, at last, the Golden Threads, which are not explicitly Lake or Shed findings, but, as noted above, “a plot point, scene, or character type that recurs repeatedly through an author’s stories, a commonality that is evident only when looking at the writer’s writings viewed as a whole.” Examples? In two episodes of The Kanreki Series last July (here and here), Nick and I discussed fourteen Golden Threads in Rowling’s work: The Bad Dad, Writing about Writing, Violence against Women, the Evils of Fleet Street, Mother Love, Ghosts, Pregnancy Traps, the Lost Child with Grieving Steward, Evil Government, Occult tropes, the Embedded Author, the Search for the Real, Embedded Texts, and Shadow Doppelgangers. ‘Blood’ makes fifteen (see here, here, and here for that) and my post yesterday about the ‘Hidden Hold of Horrors’ is sixteen. As Nick and I explain in the conversation above, most of these Golden Threads have a Lake element or point of origin, e.g., the Cholera Cistern cellar beneath Church Cottage. Understanding why Rowling returns to them again and again in reinventive ways in her work, though, requires more than a psycho-biographical connection. This is obviously the case with all the underground terrors to be found in Rowling’s stories. [Basement Image from WallPaperAccess.com] How are We to Understand the ‘Hidden Hold of Horrors’ Golden Thread? What does it mean? As I listed at the end of yesterday’s post and the conversation with Nick above, Rowling’s childhood home with its hidden depths beneath the floorboards and neighboring graveyard and attendant ghosts is only one part of the explanation for the Hidden Hold Golden Thread. It’s a wonderful point of origin and launching pad for inspiration, certainly, but restricting the interpretation of her usage of this meme to nightmares and flights of fancy she had as a child about the sublimely subliminal spaces around her is, for lack of a better word, lazy. Her use of these spaces again and again reflects, I’m sure, to a certain degree her psychological Default Setting from childhood memories of the ‘Wet Nightmare Place’ under the dining room table and next door. But Rowling’s mind was shaped as much by her bibliography, the books she read and loved, as by her biography, the exterior circumstances of her life. Her reading is the bridge linking her Lake and Shed creative process and it plays an outsized role in her Golden Threads as well. Granting that the first inspiration of her unconscious mind may just have been childhood fears and fantasies, knowing that Rowling has read Homer, Virgil, and Dante and studied Greek mythology from her time at Wyedean Comprehensive through UExeter means that a Trip to the Underworld to speak to the dead is a touchstone of myth and epic. There’s a word for this commonplace, katabasis, the going-down-and-coming-back. Odysseus visits Tiresias, Aeneas his father Anchises, Dante with Virgil tours the Inferno’s multiple levels — and Psyche is sent by Venus into Hades on the last of her purgative trials.· Rowling, having entered into these stories, knows they are delivery vehicles for the cathartic transformative change to be found in consultation with the dead and in thinking about death. Joseph Campbell famously argued in Hero with a Thousand Faces that per James Joyce, ethnographers, and comparative mythology experts this descent into the nether worlds and return was an essential aspect of the “monomyth” or Ur story underlying all story and myth. Campbell’s more important contribution was arguing that this was not an abstract historical or literary assertion but one fundamentally important in every human being’s life and psycho-spiritual development. The Journey to the Underworld from this perspective is that it represents the conscious entry into the Unconscious Mind, the Hidden ‘Depths’ of the Person Behind the Persona-Mask. Rowling has said that, if the writing dream had not worked out, she would have studied to become a psychologist. It is a touchstone belief of Fourth Generation Rowling Studies that, even though the writing g

Nick Jeffery and John Granger met on Wednesday this week to talk about John’s epic ‘Index to the First Year of Reading Hallmarked Man’ that was posted a week ago. Both were delighted (and a little surprised?) by the range and depths of the work done here and elsewhere to unpack the eighth Strellacott mystery, easily the most carefully planned and unique of the Strike series. Below are the ten questions Nick and John asked one another, brief versions of their answers, and links to points they made for listeners wanting to read more about the subjects and previous work mentioned. The conversation ended with a big THANK YOU to the Hogwarts Professor subscribers and the announcement of an announcement (!) coming next week of Real Time conversation with those supporters. Enjoy this conversation and the links below to highlights from the previous year - and stand by for some exciting news about the coming year’s work at Hogwarts Professor! Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Ten Questions, Answer Notes, and Links: [Nota Bene: Nick’s questions to John are in Blue and John’s to Nick are red; Links with bullet points are Nick and John ‘Rowling Studies’ podcasts; non-bulleted links are posts.] 1 -- Happy Anniversary, John! Can you believe it’s been a year since Hallmarked Man was published? What Should we do in commemoration of the Strike Fandom Holiday? * Three things? First, note how much our thinking about the Strike series has changed from our expectations about Strike 8 to our ever growing appreciation of the complexity and mysteries of Hallmarked Man; * Next, maybe this is just me, but I wanted to chart somehow that progression and change from date of publication to where we are now, if only to get a clearer picture of where we’re headed – and * Last, I want to have some kind of party, right? Some kind of gathering, the virtual kind obviously, to celebrate the milestones and our direction as readers -- 2 -- So, Nick, I spent my weekend collating an Index of our Hallmarked Man Year’s Greatest Hits. The most shocking piece for me, frankly, was the amount of material we put up in the first months in addition to our podcasts. Do you remember the feeling of a second Kanreki blitz? * Nick notes: stories of publisher bread crumbs and gaffes, ‘Robin is Sterile’ and ‘Charlotte was Murdered’ strikes, and fandom shock, disappointment and confusion; * Our ‘hot takes’ here, reader speculations, beginning of Lake and Shed readings From Hallmarked Man Index Post: First Impressions: Overwhelm, Cryptonyms * Three Cheers for The Hallmarked Man! Thoughts After the First Reading * The Hallmarked Man: A ‘Blitz’ Lake and Shed Reading (with a few Golden Threads) Hallmarked Man’s Flood of Names, Characters, and Plots The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part Three Hallmarked Man as Key to Series Ending, Difficulty Intentional * Hallmarked Man’s Three ‘Whose My Daddy?’ Set-Ups to Shock Readers in Strikes 9 and 10 * Why Hallmarked Man is the Best Cormoran Strike Novel and Will Be Considered the Key to Unlocking the Series’ Mysteries Cupid and Psyche Template * The Hallmarked Man’s Mythological Template * Valentine’s Day Special: The Cupid and Psyche Myth within the Cormoran Strike Series: Both a Series Template and Traditional Delivery System for the Fundamental Choice in Human Existence, Eros vs Anteros 3 -- Rowling spurred that, John, with writing a very challenging book but also via the Cupid and Psyche tweet. Which of the flood of Fan Theories we discussed did you find the most intriguing? * Ryan Murphy is Charlotte Campbell’s ‘Dirty Bomb’And Other Mind-Blowing Cogent Arguments and Ideas from Hogwarts Professor Readers * Robin Ellacott’s Imminent Death and Its Out of This World Effect on Strike: The Christian Text-Within-the-Text of Running Grave Subtly Suggests the Ultimate Twist in Cormoran Strike’s Transformation 4 -- Talking about Robin’s Immanent death and the Charlotte Campbell ‘Dirty Bomb’ were fun, but, Nick, the Fiona and Katya revelations about Shanker may have been the Peak of the Year’s Finds and Reveals, no? The Mysterious Suicides of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell Revisited Post Hallmarked Man: Has Fiona Down Under Revealed the Murderers of both Strike’s Mother and Milady Bezerko? Was a Busted Drug Deal with Gangsters and Campbell-Longcaster Incest and Adultery behind it All? Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch C**k: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker: Katya Slonenko’s Deductions from Shanker Comments about His Dear Old Dad in ‘The Hallmarked Man’ * Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ Leda Strike’s Tattoo, Her First Husband’s Real Name, and The Dress: A Conversation with Katya Slonenko about Her Strike-Ellacott Theories and Others from Reddit’s r/CormoranStrike Community 5 -- That was like reading Strike 9 in advance, John, wasn’t it? Shades of ‘Robin is Sterile’! But the wheels almost fell off the cart when it came to the Incest speculation. Funny that it was a Golden Thread through all her work, though, not just Hallmarked Man... Incest Notes and Theories * Jonny Rokeby was both Cormoran and Charlotte’s Father: The Incest Twist Rowling Has Hidden Inside the Strike Series * Is Rowling’s Incest ‘Golden Thread’ the Key to Her Cormoran Strike Finale? That Seems to Be the Strong Trend in the Theories Offered by Serious Strikers at Hogwarts Professor 6 -- But, Nick, what a Year for a Trip to the Lake -- Rowling’s Charlie Kirk tweets, the Charm Bracelet, the Congenital Blood Disease -- was your cup running over? JKR — VWD! Rowling Tweets About Congenital Blood Condition: von Willebrand Disease * Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s Tweets after the Shooting of Charlie Kirk The Troubled Blood of J. K. Rowling: Blood as a Golden Thread in all her Works * Blood! The Crimson Thread: Exploring the Lake Inspiration of Blood in the Works of J. K. Rowling The Christmas Charm Bracelet Conversations with Elizabeth Baird-Hardy: * The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part One) * The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part Two) Rowling Tweets about Changed Beliefs — and Her Beliefs about “Religious Faith” Perhaps the most important of Rowling’s revelations in the past year were the ones she made about her beliefs consequent to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Specifically on 12 September 2025 she wrote about the beliefs she has changed, in which tweet she concluded with thoughts about God and “religious faith:” The distinction implicit in Rowling’s “God conundrum” is between (a) “religious faith,” conformity to the beliefs and practices of a specific revelation, and (b) belief in God. Her posture of enlightened agnosticism with respect to God, being unable to believe “without seeing proof,” while acknowledging the “God-shaped vacuum inside me,” an existential proof of same she experiences, is, frankly, only sophistry. It is verbiage draped over her all-too-human inability to reject those core beliefs she has qua postmodern that religious faith requires she reject for communion with God. [If you struggle earnestly and honestly with these same issues, I recommend to you what I would to Rowling as I have to Nick, namely, that you read James Cutsinger’s Advice for the Serious Seeker and Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. What Chesterton said about Christianity is as true about “religious faith” in general, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting but found difficult and left untried.” Pedestrian agnosticism and adolescent atheism today are less markers of sophistication and thoughtfulness, being ‘above the herd,’ than unthinking captivity to the zeitgeist and to one’s unexamined beliefs.] 7 -- That was a Big Year for us Lake Dwellers, John, but Hogwarts Professor, I think, will always be a Shed site until Rowling agrees to an interview with Veritaserum. And the Shed work we did with Hallmarked Man was significant; what was your favorite part of that? ‘The Group Adventure of Charting Hallmarked Man’ (Fourteen Posts) was a landmark event in Rowling Studies, frankly, and a proof that Strike 8 was one of if not THE most carefully planned novels — which proof serves as a corrective rebuke to readers who thought it was a careless melange of confusing and conflicting plot lines, the “worst of the series.” * The Group Adventure of Charting Hallmarked Man’s Rings: Part Ten and Epilogue, Chapters 117-127 (post to the other thirteen posts in this series are at the bottom of this post) 8 -- For me the Gang of Five independent Ring Reading of Hallmarked Man will always be the stand-out of the past year. But you brought the Lake into the Shed with your Read-Along-with-Nick Book club this year! Two epic poems by the Brownings, a Bildungsroman classic by Dodie Smith, and another C. S. Lewis template -- what was the goal and what was the highlight for you in those readings? Nick’s Reading List Online: Rowling’s Admitted Literary Influences (December 2020) Important Side Texts: The Ring and the Book, Aurora Leigh, I Capture the Castle,‘Till We Have Faces The Ring and The Book – A Rowling Reading * What the Hallmarked Man Epigraphs Reveal About Rowling-Galbraith’s Artistry and Meaning A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh * Talking About ‘A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh‘ A J. K. Rowling Reading of I Capture the Castle * The Most Influential Book Rowling Read as a Child Wanting to Be a Writer is Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle ‘Till We Have Faces C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part One) Is ‘Till We Have Faces’ the The Thematic Template for the ‘Strike-Ellacott’ Series? C. S. Lewis’

Nick and John get together to discuss three HogwartsProfessor posts about the All New Hogwarts House Emblems and Rowling’s commentary via three emojis about the recent trailer for the Bronte Studios adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. You can read those posts via these links: The HBO+ Potter Trailer: The Meaning of Rowling’s Heart, Owl, and Lightning Bolt HBO’s Harry Potter and the Alchemical Symbols The New Hogwarts House Emblems and Their Alchemical and Plant Symbolism Or you can just jump right into the conversation via the questions, notes and links below! Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Ten Questions Guiding this Conversation: Nick in Red, John in Blue 1. G’day, John! Great to see you, your chin, and hairline again! You posted a short piece over at the HogwartsProfessor weblog this week about a seemingly meaningless Rowling tweet that shared a new trailer for the HBO+ adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She only ‘wrote’ three emojis, but, even though you wrote was only several paragraphs long, it said a lot. Why do such a deep-dive into these perhaps offhand fan-servicing signals? * All the signals or emojis are traditional symbols, so, offhand or not, they're markers of the choice a serious reader has to make about understanding Rowling's work properly; * Is it literary sacred art as her Shed tool choices suggest or just creative personal expressions for our diversion and entertainment? * Rowling is signaling us, as you say, that it is the former with these three emojis. * T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ (InterNet Poem) We had the experience but missed the meaning And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form 2. Let’s take a closer look, then! The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt -- what does the Rowling fan, from “ten years old to seventy,” see right away before they stretch for the traditional meaning? * Heart – Rowling is pleased; we should be, too; heart as sentiment, love token. * Owl – Hedwig in Stone, important message being delivered, ‘pet’ project of Rowling’s. * Lightning Bolt – The Boy Who Lived’s signature mark, news out of the blue or ‘news flash’ 3. And there’s more? What traditional meanings do these emojis have? * The Heart to Rowling is a lot more than a token of sentiment. It is a Golden Thread in her work that the Heart is a pulsing symbol of the human spiritual capacity. Only the Eye does as much heavy freight of meaning lifting in her work and I think the Heart surpasses the Eye ultimately in importance except insomuch as she elides their meaning. Read The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center for discussion of the symbolism and the Golden Thread. * The Owl, too, is an ancient and dynamic symbol, the reason frankly there is a Hedwig rather than Hedwig being the meaning of the token. Rowling clearly draws on her experience of owls in Greek mythology (and reading of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad drawing on the same source) in making the owl the vessel of communication and supernatural perception in her Wizarding World. None of the letters written by her witches and wizards need to be addressed because an owl is so attuned to everyone and everything that it is able effortlessly to understand where it needs to go, God’s own GPS. What is usually described as a symbol of Wisdom is clearly much more a revelation of a mind able to grasp the great interconnectedness of things which in turns takes us back to the Eye and the Heart — and what Rowling is trying to bring to readers in her transformative literature. (Contrast this Greek mythology symbolism with what owls represent in Christian scripture; quite the gulf between Athens and Jerusalem there!) * But the wisdom piece is there, too! Rowling is writing at four levels of story that correspond with the four ways of human knowing, of which the last and most important is gnosis or wisdom, the so-called anagogical layer of meaning that no less a light than Flannery O’Connor said was the whole point of writing and reading. If you’re writing for the Heart or to illumine the Eye of the Heart, the goal is transformative imaginative experience fostering wisdom. * And the Lightning Bolt? The forehead scar, the mark of Orestes, the Greek hero who avenged his father’s betrayal and murder, is another polyvalent and profoundly spiritual cipher as a lightning bolt. In it simultaneously the reader experiences simultaneously as we do in a thunder storm albeit imaginatively (1) sudden illumination or enlightenment, (2) from above, the heavens, the super-conscious realm, and, most important, (3) a reorientating shock, a cathartic shaking, the jolting moment that jars us out of our psychological rut and cage to see the world afresh with our ‘eye of the heart.’ * Rowling’s three emojis on her tweet about the fun trailer below can be read as fan servicing variations on the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘hand-clapping’ using tokens associated with the books. No doubt about that reading. * I think it as important to note, however, the possibility that Mrs Murray is signaling to the HBO+ audience as well as the international of readers that this adaptation is about trying to reproduce as much as is possible in an iconoclastic medium some replica of the imaginative and transformative experience to be had in the books. The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt all point to that experience and depth of meaning. 4. Which segues nicely to your brief post, Nick, on the HBO+ adaptations and its choices in how to represent the four Hogwarts Houses: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin. (”Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweek,” anyone?) Can you review what the books say are the proper representations, the heraldic glyphs most appropriate to each house? 5. Has Rowling added content or context for why she chose those specific representations? [Anelli-Spartz Interview discussion of four elements] JKR: But they’re not all — don’t think I don’t take your point, but — we, the reader, and I as the writer, because I’m leading you all there — you are seeing Slytherin house always from the perspective of Death Eaters’ children. They are a small fraction of the total Slytherin population. I’m not saying all the other Slytherins are adorable, but they’re certainly not Draco, they’re certainly not, you know, Crabbe and Goyle. They’re not all like that, that would be too brutal for words, wouldn’t it? ES: But there aren’t a lot of Death Eater children in the other houses, are there? JKR: You will have people connected with Death Eaters in the other houses, yeah, absolutely. ES: Just in lesser numbers. JKR: Probably. I hear you. It is the tradition to have four houses, but in this case, I wanted them to correspond roughly to the four elements. So Gryffindor is fire, Ravenclaw is air, Hufflepuff is earth, and Slytherin is water, hence the fact that their common room is under the lake. So again, it was this idea of harmony and balance, that you had four necessary components and by integrating them you would make a very strong place. But they remain fragmented, as we know. More on Elements and Humours at HogwartsProfessor: * Ben Jonson’s Every Man and His Humor * The Crimes of Grindelwald Group Portrait: A Study in Temperaments 6. Where did the Warner Brothers film adaptations depart from and stick to the page-and-interview House heraldry? * The animal representations as often as not are facing in the wrong direction, sinister rather than dexter and vice versa; AND * The Ravenclaw eagle of the books became a raven and their House colors become dark and light shades of blue rather than blue and copper. 7. But those corrections aren't the most interesting changes or corrections in these new House shields, are they? What are the extras we're given that weren't suggested in the original texts but implicit in the interview material? [Hat Tip to Sad-Ad-9273 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for these screen catches!] * Note the vegetation in the Banners and the Emblems: the acorns in the Gryffindor mean the Oak tree is its symbol; the white berries in Slytherin suggest holly, per Sandra Miesel Kopec, the laurel tree seems a match for Ravenclaw and ivy for Hufflepuff; * Check out a website devoted to these things, ‘What Do Leaves Represent on a Coat of Arms,’ for the meaning of these plant associations with each house or share your own ideas in the comment boxes below! 8. What is with the ornamentation on those triangles? The Slytherin circle, the sideways line and paleolithic horse on Gryffindor, the Ravenclaw ‘V,’ and the Hufflepuff cup and ‘V’? Are these Founder’s treasure tokens that become Horcruxes? If so, are there traditional meanings as well as plot points, e.g., Tarot Card qualities? [Hat Tip to LightAngel452 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for the brilliant graphic! LightAngel also picked up on the alchemical symbols.] * The Emblems material that gets heady involves the melange of symbols and signs in their respective headboards; * Slytherin has an easily discerned ‘S,’ the suggestion of the House’s signature serpent, and the Horcrux locket of Salazar Slytherin; * Ravenclaw’s header with a little head turning and squinting has an ‘R,’ the V inserted looks like a diadem, and simultaneously it has what looks like an eagle in flight from a distance; * Gryffindor does not seem to include the ‘G’ we’d expect, but the Sword of Gryffindor, and the paleolithic horse a Medieval knight be riding are evident; * Hufflepuff gets the best of the lot, though, with its distractingly obvious cup obscuring how the ‘V’ within the inverted triangle and its bisecting line yields both the stripes of a badger and Helga Hufflepuff’s initials! * That’s great stuff, Nick, but the re

Nick Jeffery and freshly Shorn & Clean Shaven John Granger sit down to discuss John’s two posts about the symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in Strike 8. Part One of the series did the necessary work of demonstrating that, yes, the letter ‘G’ is all over Hallmarked Man, from the online guess that the murderer carved that initial into ‘William Wright’s back to the Witness G echoing with Green-jacked Gorilla-bearing man and a bit of calligraphic terrorism on the Agency door at street-level. The first also covered the accepted Masonic interpretations of why the ‘G’ is featured in the Compass and Square symbolism of their fraternity. Part Two was a deep dive into more esoteric meanings given to the ‘G’ by Freemasons and by Rene Guenon, notable Perennialist, and into what associations Rowling-Galbraith tried to make between the seventh letter and the key hallmark of the book. It concluded with three answers to “So What?” including some fun speculation about a possible shape for the series, a shape highlighted in Strike 8, and with a discussion of whether Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal artistry with ‘G’ worked or failed. Perhaps the biggest take-away of this series of posts was to introduce subliminal coloration as the common denominator of Rowling-Galbraith’s signature seven Shed tools. Nick and John open their conversation about the letter ‘G’ with that subject and everything they discuss in the end folds back into that covert artistry. As always, the Dynamic Duo covet your comments and feedback as the best follow-up to their conversation. Please jump right in! Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Ten Questions and Relevant Links 1. Okay, John, let’s talk coloration. You mentioned some examples in famous authors’ work in Part One of your deep dive into Letter G Symbolism in Hallmarked Man; do we have coloration in Harry Potter? Another Strike novel? * ‘Donegality’ in Planet Narnia, Michael Ward, the subliminal artistry of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad; * From ‘Literary Alchemy: Sacred Science, Sacred Art, and the Alembic of Story’ C. S. Lewis, according to Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, also felt appreciating the “manner of the author,” his “various special tricks,” especially those connected to creating atmosphere, were critical to understanding the style of the Greats. Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be ‘cryptic, significant, full of voices, and the mystery of life.’ Lovers of romances go ‘back to fruit tree for its taste; to an air for… what? For itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere – to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness’ (Ward, 16). Donegal was one of Lewis’favorite vacation spots as a child in Northern Ireland. Ward defined Lewis’ stylistic atmosphere as his ‘Donegality:’ By donegality we mean to denote the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. The donegality of the story is its peculiar and deliberated atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavor; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text… the more influentially to inform the work and so affect the reader (Ward 75). Ward’s concern is especially with Lewis’ character Aslan, in whom this donegality is “concentrated and consummated” as a “Christologically representative character” (Idem), but the thesis of Planet Narnia is that the “kappa-element,”[xiv] Lewis’ phrase for the informing, hidden “tutelary but tacit” style of a work, is astrological symbolism, each of the Narnia chronicles representing one of the seven traditional planets. Ward argues that Lewis’ subliminal artistry, the “inner weave” or style of his work in Nabokovian language, is the embedded mythological and astral metaphors to be found beneath the surface of each story. Twain is supposed to have said, “”If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach, but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.” Lewis, believing as he did that “an influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep” (Lewis no date), wrote in astrological glyphs to reach covertly his reader’s unconscious depths or noetic heights. * ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows’ in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, John Granger, and, briefly, here, and 2010 lecture at New York Public Library; and * ‘The Cross Symbolism of Troubled Blood,’ John Granger 2. You list those eyes and crosses and I confess it didn’t strike me on my first and repeated readings that there were so many of those. What made you notice all the ‘G’s in Strike 8? * I confess that I didn’t make anything of the letter ‘G’s repeated appearances in Hallmarked Man until I saw that Rene Guenon, the most famous and profoundly metaphysical of the first 20th Century Perennialists, had written a brief essay in his youth, ‘The Letter G and the Swastika.’ I made that discovery inadvertently when looking for something else in Fundamental Symbols, a posthumous collection of his writing (downloadable as pdf here). 3. Let’s play ‘Name a G passage;’ I’ll start with the G supposedly carved into William Wright’s back and you name another until we’re both out of examples... Robin’s research into the death of ‘William Wright’ in the Ramsey Silver shop vault begins with an online observer saying out of the blue that a ‘G’ was carved into the victim’s back and that this was tied to the Secret Word of Freemasonry and the legend of Hiram Abiff’s martyrdom. Rowling-Galbraith has Robin mention this to Murphy at their first unofficial briefing on the case and Murphy all but explodes; he denies it was a ‘G’ and says he heard it was a “hallmark” instead. The letter is associated with Freemasonry as their symbolic center (GAOTU) via a telephone message and in Strike’s meeting with ‘Hiram’ Hardacre. We learn after Robin’s being attacked in Harrow’s that she was ‘Witness G’ in her rapist’s trial, the letter being to her something like a secret identity. Strike not long thereafter finds a blood Red Letter ‘G’ painted on the street level door to the Agency which he hopes is a Masonic terrorist marker rather than the pointed suggestion that the Angel of Death is coming for Witness G. I’d add that the Gorilla mask and doll of the Green jacket man that haunt Robin have some of their subliminal effect on her and the reader because of the initial guttoral sound of ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Green.’ 4. The Freemason connection is the most interesting one even though the Masonic G isn’t carved into Powell’s back (it’s a Salem Cross and the only other twice played symbol is the orb and cross pendant Strike buys for the charm bracelet Christmas present). Who knew that the capital ‘G’ was such a big deal in Masonry? 5. At the end of Part One, I thought you’d pretty much covered the symbolism and were going to close in Part Two with what God and Geometry are about in Hallmarked Man, hence the coloration. Instead you wrote that the G being a one-letter acronym wasn’t enough. Why not? * not Masonic -- no edges! * not ancient Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit, * not tied to craft symbolism, * not a symbol!, * the catechism answer “By letters four and science five, this G aright doth stand in due art and proportion’.” 6. So was Guenon’s essay the key to Rowling’s use of the letter ‘G’? * Yes and no! * His Symbolism of the Cross, Lord of the World, and The Great Triad chapters help a lot but from ‘The Letter G and the Swastika’ we learn that * yod is God is gamma, * catechism answer means four gammas or four yodhs which both yield swastikas (gammadion cross), * GAOTUmeans Christ the keystone/cornerstone, * the sequence of jumps from letter ‘G’ to Murphy’s Salem Cross... 7. Who backed Guenon up on this connection so you weren’t using the Perennialist hammer to drive in a screw or fasten a bolt? * Cockburn, Crypto Curry, Albert Pike (via Tamara/Tamspells!) 8. If I accept the preponderance of ‘G’s in Hallmarked Man as coloration/Donegality (I do) and the meaning of the symbolism per your readers (I’m withholding skeptical judgement), what effect was this supposed to have on me the reader so I can tell you if it worked or not? If it was supposed to confuse me, boffo job! * Nabokovian potustoronost, * numinous quality in the air, * Robin as ‘Witness G, ‘ * Strike channeling Tyler Powell at finish in Ironbridge 9. Will we see Freemasonry and its symbolism in Strikes 9 and 10? Maybe! [Rowling-Galbraith] certainly has made us long for a big pay-off with respect to ‘G;’ see Sarah Keeler’s idea that it may be a pointer to Gillespie reappearing in Strike 9. I love that possibility and it certainly is in keeping with the HogwartsProfessor working thesis that Hallmarked Man is what it is to set up the next two books. If we’re going to see characters and themes bleed between the first book of the last three and its successors, why not its symbolism? If I had to bet money on it, though, I think we probably won’t see more Freemasonry or Big ‘G’ payoffs. It kills me to say that given the investment I’ve made in books about the Masons (they’re on a shelf beneath the dust-collecting little library on Mormon history and scriptures I collected while writing about Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight books). I just cannot see her w

Late last month, John shared two theories about the Cormoran Strike series of novels, both from Katya Slonenko, a member of the Reddit r/CormoranStrike online fandom: Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch C**k: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker and Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike's 'Mistress of the Salmon Salts' Pudenda Tattoo. John corresponded with Katya while preparing those posts and invited her to join him and Nick for a discussion of her ideas, of life as a Redditor, and her thoughts about Rowling’s artistry and meaning. She accepted the invitation but said she wouldn’t be free until July to talk. Hence the wait! As expected, though, speaking with her about her own journey to expertise in Rowling Studies, her ideas about the clues Rowling has embedded so carefully within the first eight books and especially in Hallmarked Man, and the Reddit posts of which she thinks Hogwarts Professor readers need to be aware was well worth the wait. You’ll want to read those posts from June before listening to get the most out of this conversation, but, regardless of your preparation, John and Nick believe that every Serious Striker and Rowling Reader will be charmed and challenged by Katya’s remarkable insights, generous spirit, and winsome personality. The conversation includes three other Reddit community posts — about Leda’s ‘Carnival’ dress (Arachulia), about the real name of her first husband, and about the Harry Potter tattoo Rowling-Galbraith hid on a Strike novel character’s shoulder — which took the discussion above and beyond the two Katya theories in the June posts. Nick and John close the conversation by inviting her back and they hope readers here will share the questions they want us to be sure to ask her on her return visit in the comment thread below. Or just ask her yourself! As she demonstrated on the threads beneath the June posts, she is generous with her time in responding to other Strike fans. Can’t wait for more Katya Slonenko? Follow her at r/CormoranStrike, on Instagram (Tattoos!), on FaceBook, and check our her older, longer posts on Medium… The Ten Plus Questions with Links 1. Welcome, Katya, and thank you for joining us! The serious readers at Hogwarts Professor have been buzzing about your Shanker and Leda r/Cormoran Strike Reddit posts and we’re thrilled to be able to talk with you about those ideas. First, though, tell us about your first Rowling reading experiences and how you started posting on Reddit about the Strike series. 2. I’m guessing that Reddit Strike fandom may be as unfamiliar to Hogwarts Professor readers as it was to me. What is it about the Pelican_Girl and TopRequirement670 moderated posts and that international community that you love the most? 3. Shanker! I confess -- I hadn’t given him a thought really beyond a doppelganger twin for Strike before Fiona from Adelaide introduced me to the ideas that he had to be involved in the death of Leda Strike and that the Riccis were also somehow party to it. Ed Shardlow shared your Reddit post on the subject and my mind was blown; you made a compelling case soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man last year that Shanker is a Ricci, the illegitimate son of Nico ‘Muccy’ Ricci, but to avenge Leda Strike’s death he has become a Met or MI5 informer. Let’s start with the four pointers that Shanker gave Strike in one conversation that he is a Ricci-by-blood and what made you think of that connection: * Shanker’s statement that his father had dementia or was senile; * Shanker’s report that his dad taught that jewelry was the way to a woman’s heart; * Shanker’s claim that his ‘old man’ was said to have a “nine inch c**k;” and * Shanker’s saying that his begetter “‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.” 4. I see the trigger now that you’ve detailed it but you dug and made four more connections that were buried in the texts of the series’ other books: * Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky, * his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals, * “he deals cocaine and is good with a knife;” and, best of all, * the reaction Robin had to both Shanker and Luca at their first meeting, the fun-house mirror upside-down reflection of the attraction half-siblings feel for another intuitively. Robin is viscerally repulsed and afraid of the half-sibling Ricci boys. We cannot not see these connections after you point them out, but they’re nigh on invisible until they’re pointed out! Why do you think you saw them when we missed them -- and why do you think Rowling has taken such care to make them invisible in plain sight? 5. And Shanker is an MI5 informant? Where does that come from? 5.5 Let’s not forget that you also make an intelligent guess, the first one I’ve heard, about what Shanker’s given name really is, one based on the names of Nico Ricci’s two children out of ten for whom we have names. * Katya shared not only her reasoning about why Shanker’s name is John or an Italian variant of the Evangelist’s name but also her theory about the parentage and name of the other remaining character in the series who also remains nameless: the mysterious ‘Strike’ with whom Leda ran away from Cornwall! (Be sure to read the comment thread for Redditor conversation about other possible Ricci children…) 6. Your thoughts about Shanker all feed into theories about Leda Strike and her mysterious death in the end, which brings us to another aspect of her life and death about which you’ve brought an important and unique perspective. I’m talking about the Mistress of the Salmon Salt tattoo. Did you know anything about tattoos, Katya, before writing this piece? 7. As a tattoo artist yourself, what do you make of Leda’s tattoo placement? 8. Tattoos are meaningful, powerful reflections or revelations of the person’s interior life or self-understanding (see the post about Katya’s ‘Salmon Salt Tattoo’ theory for much more on this). What do you think this tattoo communicates about Leda? Is it another example of Rowling’s text-within-the-text or a variant of her using cryptonyms to signal important information about a character’s inner life? What Tattoos Mean in Cormoran Strike and a Catalog of Examples * From Katya’s 2023 ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt Revisited:’ I hear you asking - why can’t Leda’s be just a tattoo, without any deeper meaning to it? That’s because all the other tattoos in the Strike books have meaning and provide a clue to their wearers’ characters. Here are some examples: * Kelsey Pratt’s One Direction tattoo is an obvious link to her being a One Direction fan. (How Leda’s tattoo is different? She chose the name of the particular song, not the more generic name of the band, to be tattooed on her) * Laing’s rose pierced with a dagger bluntly means violence to women. Rose is a woman in the language of symbols, while the dagger is… well, a dagger. * Polworth’s St Piran’s cross means he’s a Cornish patriot. I’ll be surprised if it also doesn’t mark him as The Hanged Man (a symbolic bearer of a cross) * Portia Bayliss’s trident refers to her Caribbean roots * Edie had a small black heart on the knuckles because she was the creator of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon. * Zoe’s tattoos are of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ characters she identifies with. * Pez Pierce has The Beatles quote around his neck - Strawberry Fields was (is?) a place in Liverpool. * Union Jack, a skull, and a Nordic “Chaos” rune give a good impression of what the Turisaz character will be about (all tattooed on visible spots like head or neck - he wears them proudly!); * Same with Algiz and Uruz, sans the Union Jack and the skull. * Noli Seymour’s tattoo stands for “Golden Prophet”. It denotes her connection to the Universal Humanitarian Church and her status there as the current Golden Prophet. * An ace of spades was inked onto his left cheek, and a tattooed tiger covered his throat. - Jordan Reaney’s tattoos are pretty telling, too. * Not a character, but still - JK herself has a tattoo, “Solve et Coagula”, which means - “I’m a writer of an alchemical detective series!” :D So you see, all these tattoos are chosen to reflect their owners’ personal histories. That’s generally a feature of Rowling’s writing: if she describes a character, every little detail works for the portrait she wants to paint. There are no details put there “just because” - everything is important. How the characters dress and speak, what they eat and drink, what music they listen to, and what tattoos they have tell us something about the character. What does Leda’s tattoo contribute to her portrait? Nothing! In Career of Evil, when we learn of its existence, the tattoo adds literally nothing to Leda’s portrait. Why is it mentioned in the story to which it makes zero contribution, except for serving as a plot device enabling the killer’s obsession? Because it will be important later. * Katya shared in her answer her theory from experience that Rowling-Galbraith had secretly marked a character as a Harry Potter fan by giving her a shoulder tattoo that Potter-heads would recognize! 9. Rowling’s Solve et Coagula tattoo: what do you think she is telling the world about herself? Is there a correspondence or tie between the author’s tattoo and its placement and Leda’s? 10. Whittaker quotes a line from the Salmon Salt song by the Blue Oyster Cult — “She was the Quicklime Girl” — while testifying at his trial on murder charges; what do you think that tells us about her death? Does it suggest it was suicide or murder? Do you think Whittaker did it? 11. And another one to make eleven! You thought at one point because of the meaning of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ that we had to take seriously the possibility that Leda herself was a se

(Credit: Telegraph article, June 2017, J.K. Rowling at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation party in 2007, wearing a floral diamond necklace and matching earrings, cf., Christmas Pig) Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us again to discuss what challenges he faced in collating and synthesizing almost thirty years of interviews for his biography. He also shares the three questions he’d ask The Presence if she’d consent to an interview, questions that he thinks she might answer; Solomon turned the tables on his interviewers who had to improv questions they’d ask without being told their interview with Rowling was over. The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here: * A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com) * A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition * A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery) * Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger) Five Questions for Solomon Schmidt, Author of A Pen to Change the World: 5. I said you didn’t get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews?6. If you had been allowed inside the gates of Fortress Rowling and you were only allowed three questions, what would you ask her? (This is a game John and I regularly play, and usually John’s questions would get him thrown out of an interview!)7. What discoveries that you made in your research were the most exciting to you?8. Rowling has said repeatedly through the years that the critical negative events of her life that reshaped her thinking and her work were the death of her mother and the abusive relationship she had with her first husband. Agree or disagree? What do you think were the most important positive turns in her life?9. Very few people I meet don’t have a fixed opinion about Rowling; the world seems to love and hate her in equal measure with little grey area between the two: adoring fans and political allies on the one hand and those that despise her work, her political efforts, or both. Where do you fall in that divide and how hard was it to represent the other point of view in your biography?10. I assume you’ve started researching your next biography though you’ll be neck deep in this book’s launch for a few months. What will you be working on next? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

(Credit: Neil Wilder, Edinburgh 1999, now in National Portrait Galley) Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us this week to discuss what moved him to write a Rowling biography at the height of her radioactivity as a supposed “transphobe” and the obstacles that Rowling, Inc., puts in the way of unauthorized biographers. He also shares the kindness and circumspection of the people who did agree to speak with him, to include Neil Blair and Jorge Arantes. The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here: * A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com) * A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition * A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery) * Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger) The second part of our conversation with Mr Schmidt will be posted next week. The first five questions he answered were: 1. What moved you to start this project? You've already written a biography of Alan Dershowitz and many more in the History Bites series; what made J. K. Rowling an inviting subject to you? What made it different from the other biographies you've written?2. You wrote in the acknowledgements at book's end that you didn't write the biography as a work of "literary criticism," but you do discuss everything she has written or collaborated on, Philosopher's Stone to Ink Black Heart. What would you have included in those discussions if you had been writing "literary criticism"?3. This is an "Unauthorized" biography which means you were researching and writing outside the gates of Team Rowling, simultaneously shut off from Rowling and her circle of friends and, one would hope, outside her ability to shape the narrative you put together of her life. You did, though, get some push-back from Rowling, Inc.'s legal arm at one point; what was that about?4. You weren't able to interview Rowling, her sister, her husband, her father, her daughter Jessica, Sean Harris, the Sisters of Swing, Michael the boyfriend, Lucy Shepherd, Pearl Biddle, or 'Starsky and Cox.' You did find and scored interviews with Jorge Arantes, Barry Cunningham (the publisher who signed J. K. Rowling to Bloomsbury), Steve Eddy (one of Rowling’s English teachers), Neil Blair (sort of!), and her American cousins, Ben and Bryony Rowling. How did you find these sources and what was it like sitting down to speak with them?5. I said you didn't get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews? Please share your thoughts below as well as follow-up questions you wish we had asked! Part Two will be up in a week… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

‘Fiona F’ is a Hogwarts Professor subscriber in Adelaide, Australia, the truly down under capitol of the South Pacific island-continent. She works as an environmental scientist on the days she isn’t combing through the Cormoran Strike novels of Rowling-Galbraith in search of answers to the over-arching mysteries of that series. The Hogwarts Professor Talking Heads duo invited her to a discussion of her potential solutions to two of the unresolved questions that have to be answered before the epilogue of Strike 10, namely, ‘What really happened in the ruled-a-suicide deaths of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell?’ Fiona seems to have broken both cases using information dropped as asides in Hallmarked Man. The Ten Questions that guided their conversation are below with the promised links and Fiona’s time-lines and comments on the Moderator Backchannel they discuss. In brief, about Leda’s death Fiona notes that we learn in Strike 8 that Shanker is familiar with ‘Barnaby’s, the preferred body-disposal business used by the London under-world, to include the Ricci Crime Syndicate. She connects that dot with (1) Strike’s memory of making a drug delivery for Shanker to the Ricci Godfather way back in the day when the two shared a flat and (2) Shanker’s near panicked warnings to Strike not to investigate the Riccis in Troubled Blood. Fiona’s theory? Means, motive, and opportunity point to the possibility that Leda’s heroin overdose was a Ricci ‘message’ to Shanker that he had better not cross them in a drug deal. Readers have missed this possibility because Shanker loved Leda like a mother, which love unfortunately made her a perfect target for the gangsters to ‘get at’ Strike’s adopted brother. And Charlotte’s death? Fiona, unlike much of Strike fandom, accepts the Jeffery hypothesis (see here, here, and here) that Ms Campbell-Ross did not kill herself but was murdered in a staged-suicide (a la Leda Strike, Lula Landry, Jasper Chiswell, and Kevin Pirbright). After a close reading of Hallmarked Man, Fiona realized that Dino Longcaster, whom Tara Campbell married after she had divorced Charlotte’s supposed biological father, may have been, based on his fathering Rupert Fleetwood in an adulterous relationship, Milady Bezerko’s real sperm-donor daddy (and at home molester). Which possible parentage would have made Charlotte and Valentine Longcaster half-siblings. Fiona theorizes from there that the baby Charlotte says was Strike’s was Valentine’s (a la Rupert and Decima’s Lion), that Jago Ross’ children might have been Valentine’s, or both. Valentine, Jago, and Tara shoot to the top of the ‘Charlotte Murder’ suspect list, with Sasha, Rupert, and Amelia as Tara’s agents all possibilities. Fiona, Nick, and John discuss the various Rowling Golden Threads in play with each of these theories — incest, pregnancy traps, staged suicides — and how both Fiona’s Ricci-Shanker and Secret Charlotte theories are textbook illustrations of Rowling misdirection while planting clues in plain sight. John and Nick are grateful to Fiona for getting up as early as she did to chat with them and for sharing her theories here with the Serious Strikers at Hogwarts Professor. Hats doffed with a bow from the waist in admiration and gratitude! The Ten Questions With Links and Notes 1. Fiona, you, Nick, and I have been chatting on the moderator back channels since May and we’ve shared your Daddy Dino theory in which Charlotte was another Longcaster child conceived in adultery and Valentine was her incestuous lover and abuser. Nick and I discussed that idea on our ‘Incest Golden Thread’ program. But none of us know who you are really and I just learned you’re living in Central Australia. Tell us about Fiona, a Welsh name?, and what brought you to Serious Striker land? 12 April Fiona Comments on Moderator Backchannel: In response to a post by Cheryl Rose Orrocks on 17 Feb 2026, my current theory is that Dino Longcaster is Charlotte’s father and that his son, Valentine Longcaster, will be revealed as her abuser and the possible biological father of Charlotte’s children. Hence the 2nd incest storyline will also involve the Langcaster family. This could be why Charlotte’s mother, Tara, despised Charlotte so much. If Jago Ross is somehow linked to the matter of the DNA test involving Bijou and Strike, it may be because he had Charlotte’s birth children DNA tested to confirm parentage. Maybe Jago discovers he is not the biological father and assumes Strike is, hence the reason he wants to obtain Strike’s DNA results. 2. Nick was telling me the other day that he has been re-reading the series and it’s changed his thinking about how he would rank the books, especially in light of Hallmarked Man. I hope he’ll clarify what he means by that – and that you’ll share, Fiona, where Strike 8 is on your list of best to worst Strike novels and if or how it changed your thoughts about the first seven. 3. By the time this conversation is posted, I hope to have put up a short summary of your Birthday Party Theory, Fiona, or else it will be the text beneath this conversation. In brief, you lay out the calendar dates after Sacha Legard’s birthday party with respect to Charlotte’s death. Can you tell us why you thought that party had something to do with her death and how you went about setting up the time-line? May 6 Fiona note on Moderator Backchannels: In this video, your comments regarding Rupert Fleetwood and Charlotte’s murder (1:00:17) got me thinking. If Charlotte was murdered, her murderer was likely present at Sacha Legard’s birthday party. After checking out several sources (books (physical copies) 7 TRG and 8 THM, Strike Fans, the Farting Faculty Lounge and Hogwarts Professor) I put together a rough timeline to assemble my thoughts. * Saturday 21 May 2016: Sacha Legard’s birthday. Valentine and Cosima Longcaster are at the party. Rupert Fleetwood gatecrashes and he and Valentine have some kind of confrontation (refer THM Chapter. 36, pages 291 and 292). I presume Charlotte and Amelia would have been at the party as they are Sacha’s half siblings, however I have no evidence to support this. * Friday, 27 May 2016: Strike listens to Charlotte’s voicemail messages. (TRG, Chapter 55, pages 421 and 423). * Tuesday, 14 June 2016: Charlotte is arrested for assault on Landon Dormer (TRG, Chapter 59). * Thursday, 23 June 2016: Strike deletes three voicemails from Charlotte before heading up to his attic flat (Chapter 61). Charlotte Campbell dies (commits suicide?). * Friday, 23 December 2016: When Strike goes to the National Theatre to interview Sacha Legard (THM, Chapter 36, pg. 289). Sacha says he ‘was shooting a film in Mexico (Conquest?) when all this business with him [Rupert] and Dessie happened.’ I’m unsure when Sacha was in Mexico (before and/or after his birthday party on 21 May 2016). If he was filming in Mexico after his birthday then he may not have been in London when Charlotte died. If filming in Mexico finished before his birthday, he would have to be on the short-list of murder suspects. As Charlotte loved tension, conflict, and rows, she may have overheard the confrontation between Rupert and Valentine. Presuming the confrontation was about DNA testing and Dino Longcaster being Rupert’s biological father, maybe the DNA results also contained information about other unknown (and related) people with a similar DNA profile to Rupert and the Longcaster’s (Dino, Valentine, Decima and Cosima) and Rupert threatened Valentine with this information. Valentine is scared of his father, Dino, and wouldn’t want the DNA paternity information to reach Dino. If Valentine Longcaster (as possible Charlotte abuser), finds out he is the biological father of Charlotte’s children and realises that Charlotte has found this out, that could be a strong motive for murder, particularly as he was appalled by the incest between Decima and Rupert. It will be interesting to see if Rupert makes an appearance in Book 9. * See Louise Freeman Davis’ Strike and Ellacott Timelines at The Farting Sofa Faculty Lounge. 4. Your conclusion is a mind-blower as I’ve written in my notes you to invite you to wake up early down under to talk about it. To skip to the Big Reveal, you think, if Charlotte was at the birthday party or learned from Cosima or Valentine about the Dino-Decima-Rupert genetic conjunction, that Valentine Longcaster has to jump to the top of the Campbell-Ross ‘assisted suicide’ list. How so? 5. This is fascinating theorizing, Fiona, and it highlights what Nick has said that the complexity and crowdedness of Hallmarked is a marker of Rowling crafting a “target rich” environment for Books 9 and 10 possibilities. You wrote on 4 June that what if, instead of being molested at home by Trevik, her supposed biological father, she had been abused by a schoolteacher. Why did you think that was possible and how would it color your thinking about her life and death? 4 June Fiona Comment Have you considered the possibility that Leda Strike (Peggy Nancarrow) was molested by a school teacher, rather than a victim of incest. Both scenarios are obviously awful. I have been pondering this because Leda/Peggy packed up and moved so often and Cormoran and Lucy never stayed in the same school for very long. 6. On 10 June you sent your magnum opus, the Leda Strike life timeline and a ‘Means Before Motive’ examination of her death. Again, why bother and how did you track down the dates? 7. What did the data reveal about Leda that you hadn’t seen before? 10 June Fiona Timeline for Leda Strike I have been systematically going back through the Strike books using the JKR finder in an attempt to work out who killed Leda Strike. I am relying on Rowling playing fair and that the answer to the question of Leda’s death and the evidence to support this has already been given

Last week Ed Shardlow posted his thoughts about The Hallmarked Man being written in playful but meaningful parallel with Rowling’s “political fairy tale,” ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog.’ Nick Jeffery and John Granger called him up both to congratulate him on Arsenal winning the Premier League Cup — Go, Gunners! — and to learn as much as they could about the parallels he noted. After acknowledging the correspondences with Casual Vacancy, the trio explored Ed’s argument about the Ickabog echoing just beneath the surface of Hallmarked Man, straight up and in inversion. The Ten Questions, Links, and Helpful Notes 1. Nick, can you provide some context for this conversation? How did we get to the point that we expected Hallmarked Man to echo in characters, plot points, and themes either Casual Vacancy or The Ickabog? No one thought that was in the cards when Rowling-Galbraith and her publishers locked down the series at ten books. * ‘Parallels Series Idea’ Pillar Post * Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 2. Open subject for the triumvirate to discuss here: there are a bunch of Casual Vacancy parallels in Strike 8 that have to be acknowledged. Name your favorites; I’ll start this ball Rowling… * Ironbridge and Pagford seemed to be sister cities * each book ‘begins’ with the sudden and tragic death of a man who haunts the rest of the novel, Barry Obama Fairbrother and Tyler Powell * The peanut allergy that Tyler and Andrew Price have; and * The incest secret in the Longcaster and Wall families 3. Having noted those, Ed, why are you so sure that it’s The Ickabog which is the parallel text with Hallmarked Man? Is the quantity of the parallels you and others have found, their quality, or the overarching feel of the works? * Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’ 4. I was surprised by your sheep parallel. I know my Ickabog memories are not fresh, but were there a lot of lambs and ewes in Strike 8? * Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’ 5. And the fish? * Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’ 6. Is there something akin to the Freemasonry of Hallmarked Man in The Ickabog? * Inversion of ‘Political Fairy Tale’ with modern touches and gritty detective novel and Medieval coloration via Freemasonry symbolism and ritual 7. Sandy Hope, our partner in the Group Adventure of charting Hallmarked Man, had a bunch of parallels that she shared in the comment thread to your post: * One of my favorite parallels you mention is the Old Forge and the Ickabog’s cave, in which both Robin and the Ickabog tell tragic stories of birth. The Old Forge also reminds me of the transformation of the dungeon once Mrs. Beamish gets a stove installed and starts baking and feeding the prisoners. Mr. Dovetail’s broken mind is restored by Mrs. Beamish helping him remember better times, and Robin’s own brokenness is soothed by Strike’s transformation from a self-serving, manipulative jerk to a selfless, compassionate listener and genuine friend. In both stories the fire is warm and purifying. Comment Url * One of my favorite parallels was “sticking to the game plan,” the ill-fated idea shared by Strike via Uncle Ted and also Lord Spittleworth. RFM reminds me of Ma Grunter, trying to appear sober when they’re actually drinking on the sly. Dangerous Dick de Lion is not unlike King Fred the Fearless, who both have to learn about being contrite. Robin’s bracelet is rather like Daisy’s bandalore: both gifts are initially a hit but end up secretly hidden or stolen. Comment Url 8. My favorite parallels were between the incest and ectopic pregnancy in Hallmarked Man and the Ickabog’s manner of conceiving children and birthing them. Did you laugh out loud when you figured that out? I did when I read your post -- but it bears some explaining -- * Ed’s Post: ‘The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog’ 9. Let’s go around the table again and talk about the connection between the two books we haven’t talked about yet -- * Avenging Ghost of Beamish and Powell * Eslanda/Jolanda * Sandy Hope’s Footprint Clue * Image of St George * The monster’s cave, the Old Forge on Sark, and an ectopic pregnancy * Woman talking monster into returning to human society * Ed’s brilliant parallel Character list 10. You discuss in your post that you went through two stages before arriving at your conviction that The Ickabog was the model: first the overarching story and then on re-reading The Ickabog for specific detailed parallels. Do you think we should do a re-read of Casual Vacancy -- Nick is always ready for a trip to Pagford -- to see if there aren’t specifics there, too? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

In yesterday’s Hallmarked Man Notes: The Christmas Charm Bracelet Decoded, Tod Jameson and the Ectopic Pregnancy, and Venetian Blinds, Ed Shardlow explained three sub-texts within Strike 8 that, though invisible on first and second reading, pop up during structural analysis and in light of other Rowling-Galbraith notes. * The Christmas gift charm bracelet that Strike gives to Robin, for example, appears to be a ring and a key to Hallmarked Man, a meaning that occurred to Ed in light of Rowling’s own bracelet gift to fandom last year as a key to Sleep Tight, Evangeline; * John Granger’s posts about Strike 8’s cryptonyms similarly encouraged Ed to think about the meaning of ‘Todd Jameson’ and how the “egg-shaped” man had several names and seemed to be stuck on the Tube; and * Ed’s efforts to finish his charting of each Part of Hallmarked Man brought up the theme of Robin’s blindness and mental struggles in Part Three’s chapter correspondences. In conversation with Nick and John explore these ideas as well as the potential importance of A. H. Murdoch, a historical figure that Rowling-Galbraith invented whole-cloth, the meaning of his name (‘Alexander Hughson’), and the passages from his book, Secrets of the Craft, which of course are also Rowling-written. Below are relevant links to the subjects the trio discuss and copies of the ten questions John and Nick asked Ed. Enjoy! Links to Conversation Subjects * Hallmarked Man Notes: The Christmas Charm Bracelet Decoded, Tod Jameson and the Ectopic Pregnancy, and Venetian Blinds Charm Bracelets * The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part One) * The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part Two) * 'Sleep Tight, Evangeline,' Miniature Psalters, and the Head of Persephone: A Conversation with Dimitra Fimi Cryptonyms of Hallmarked Man * The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part One * What do Tyler Powell, Rupert Fleetwood, Jolanda Lindvall, and Lady Jensen Have in Common? * The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part Two * Wet Squibs, Islamic Cub Names, the Seven Strike Series Structure Theories, and How a Human Being Reads a Story * The Lost Child Golden Thread in the Work of J. K. Rowling (Kanreki) * The Pre Natal Infanticide Theory Explaining the Lost Child Golden Thread (Kanreki) Rowling as Sacred Artist: A Perennialist Reading * Ray Livingston's 'The Traditional Theory of Literature' (Chapter 1: Preface and Prologue) * Ray Livingston's 'The Traditional Theory of Literature' (Chapter 2: Man, Society, Art ) * Ray Livingston's 'The Traditional Theory of Literature' (Chapter 3: The Creative Process) * Martin Lings’ The Sacred Art of Shakespeare * J. K. Rowling’s ‘G-Spot’ and ‘Triple Play:’ The Lake & Shed Secret of Her Success The Ring Readings of Rowling’s Hallmarked Man Chapter Sets * Index to the Group Adventure of Charting Hallmarked Man (scroll to bottom) * Ed Shardlow’s ring notes for Part Three A. H. Murdoch’s Secrets of the Craft Excerpt in Hallmarked Man: [Strike skim read the entry under Degree Thirty Two.] The Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret becomes with the degree’s endowment none other than a Christian Knight, the spiritual and legitimate successor of the Knights Templar… When she elevates and illuminates, a pure and chaste woman is as silver, or the moon. The […] Freemason is sure never to mistake base lead for the nobler metal, else he may find himself forever entombed in the dungeons of lust and lasciviousness. (ch 53, pp 400-401) The parenthetic ellipsis is in text, presumably there because “Murdoch’s book hadn’t been properly formatted, but scanned into digital form, so that the occasional word was illegible.” The Ten Questions 1. We have a special guest today, Ed Shardlow, the author of a commissioned post that went up this week, one we begged him to write up. It’s a weird post erven for a site that embraces the exotic, weird in the sense that it’s actually three posts rolled into one. What’s up with that, Ed? 2. So the three topics are: * The charms on the Christmas gift bracelet Strike gives to Robin; * The meaning of Todd Jameson’s name; and * Robin’s sight and memory issues, ‘Venetian Blinds’ Is there a thread running through these ideas? 3. Tell us your charm bracelet idea and the meaning you think each charm has -- 4. And it’s a ring, right? What a hoot. -- 5. I loved the charm bracelet piece, not only because you read it as a ring and showed that the charms together and separately act as something of a cipher for the book, but because you linked it with Rowling’s Strike 9 charm bracelet. Do you think per Shanker’s advice that Rowling-Galbraith is giving us jewelry as a gift, one that acts as a key to the work in Hallmarked and before Evangeline, because she wants to make up with us for the hardship readers are having with the book? 6. True confession, though I was laughing out loud and delighted with your breaking the Todd Jameson cryptonym, I was also pretty disappointed; that name was number 1 on my not-yet-written third cryptonym post. What consoles me is that I doubt I would have picked up on what you saw, which is mind-blowing. Tell us how you figured it out as well as what you found -- 7. Now this is a new variant of Rowling-Galbraith inserting a text within the text. This ectopic sub-story isn’t a written text, a fairy tale, an epigraph, a song playing in the background, an illustration based on a mad detective’s Tarot card throws, or the story the bad guy is selling that we have to unwind and re-write; we’ve seen those books-inside-the-book before. This is Rowling concealing a narrative inside the narrative with really only the name to act as the cipher for the coded message. Hence her talking up the importance of names in this book (e.g. Jolanda -- violets)? 8. You make a fascinating connection with Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, and Todd Jameson, the Son Who Killed His Mother (?). Do you think she finally wrote in a Chosen One echo in the Strike series via Jameson? 9. I want to leave the board here because I know you have to run -- thank you for joining us on such short notice! -- and talk about something you’ve been sharing on the Moderator’s Back Channels, namely, A. H. Murdock. His Secrets of the Craft is another text within a text, right? Have you thought about his name or why Rowling gave his book that title? 10. When will you be done with The Ickabog project? Inquiring minds want to know! This is a public episode. 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Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down last weekend to discuss John’s post, The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? They’d talked about this subject briefly before John had written it up and he came to rather different conclusions in the process of writing and preparing slides for the post, all of which are rolled out in this inquisition. The questions Nick asked are below after the links in the post in case you want to follow up on what is said above about literary alchemy, the sequence of colors and symbols, and about the structural models for understanding the Strike series, especially Extended Play and Tetractys Theory. Enjoy! Links for Follow-Up and Easy Reference: Strike Alchemy * Literary Alchemy – A Primer for Those Interested in J. K. Rowling’s Artistry * ‘Literary Alchemy’ Pillar Post * Metallurgical, Literary, and Psychological Alchemy: Is Jung a Good Guide for Understanding J. K. Rowling’s Artistry and Meaning? * The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? * , ‘The Connection of Ring Composition and Literary Alchemy in the Layout of the Seven Book Harry Potter Series.’ (William Sprague) * ‘Parallel Series Idea’ Pillar Post * Robin Ellacott and Reverse Alchemy: Transformation Through the First Three Strike Texts (Louise Freeman) * ‘Troubled Blood: Strike’s Transformation’ * ‘Water, water everywhere: Baptism, baths, rivers, rain and showers as unifying themes in The Running Grave’ (Louise Freeman) Seven Structural Theories for Strike Ten Book Series * (1) straight up Decalogy, no structural connection between books; * (2) Big Ring Composition, Double Wedding Band (Louise Freeman); * (3) Seven book series with Trilogy finale (Nick Jeffery, John Granger); * (4) Extended Play theory (John Granger per ‘Kathleen’), * (5) Sonnet Corona Form (Robyn Gomillion); * (6) Tetractys theory (Evan Willis with back-up explanations here, follow-up from Evan here); and * (7) Celtic Cross (John Granger) scroll down to bottom). Tetractys Theory in Depth: * Alastair Fowler’s Triumphal Forms * Why the Cormoran Strike Novels are a Ten Book Series: Mythological Clues and Tetractys Parallelism with a Touch of Tarot Reveal the Strike Series Structural Echoes with Rowling’s First Ten Book Set [Evan Willis, 10 July 2023] * Is Tetractys Theory the Best Explanation of Why the Cormoran Strike Series is Ten Books in Length? First Thoughts on Evan Willis’ Numerological Exegesis of Rowling’s Two Ten Novel Series and the Meaning of This Structure [John Granger, 18 July 2023] * Evan Willis: Running Grave Review In which the Tetractis theory is revisited in light of Strike 7 and the Theory is Updated [Evan Willis, 30 September 2023] * See The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? for excerpts from and discussion of each. * The Tetraktys Tarot Card Spread! The Charts! The Ten Questions and John’s Answers (notes!) 1. So, John, you finally got the alchemy post you promised an age ago; what was the hold-up? · Tried to put too much into the posts… · Changed my mind several times as I was writing them! · had to relearn Tetractys ideas! 2. You start off this Alchemy of Hallmarked Man discussion with a review of the literary alchemy of the first three Harry Potter novels; why did you have to reach that far back? · Because of the Parallel Series Idea, not alchemy at all, oddly enough. · Rowling seems to be writing Strike decalogy in parallel with Potter to include its alchemical sequences so I reviewed the ‘Reverse Alchemy’ theory, how that worked for Strikes 1-3 but broke down at 6 and 7 · To get Hallmarked Man‘s alchemical stage right, I wanted to figure out why Ink Black Heart and Running Grave weren’t the alchemical stages we’d expect 3. Some of our listeners may not have the literary alchemy three stages firmly in mind; can you go over what they are and why they’re important in Rowling Studies? · Black, White, Red stages: what each represents in metallurgical and literary alchemy; · Rowling’s one interview comment about alchemy, her PotterMore notes about colors; · Rowling’s use in Harry Potter‘s last three books, fourth book, and first three books; · Galbraith’s use in Strike series’ first three books, fifth book, and six and seven; · Ward on astrology in CSL’s Narniad (’Donegality’); similar use of alchemy in Rowling-Galbraith 4. So the alchemical parallelism seemed to stop at Ink Black Heart but the other correspondences continued? · That’s right, the first seven books paralleled their Harry Potter apposite numbers in structure, plot points, and some symbolism but the last two broke from the alchemical pattern; · I decided that the best place to look for a way that the new pattern could be explained would be looking at the seven theories about the Strike-Ellacott series structure; · If a specific structure had a very clear idea about the alchemical stage sequencing in the books, then I’d have a real head-start in what to look for in Hallmarked Man. 5. The Seven theories -- last time we talked it was six! Remind me what they are and what each says about the alchemy... · No structure, Big Ring/Double Wedding Band, Septology and trilogy combo, Extended Play, Corona Sonnet, Tetractys, and Celtic Cross (see links above!); · Only Extended Play and Tetractys theories had clear theories about the alchemy; and · Oddly enough, they both explained why Hallmarked Man had to be considered an albedo or white novel even though they disagreed about what Ink Black Heart and Running Grave were... 6. We’ve got slides here that help make what seems hopelessly nerdy something you can see. We’ll start way back with the ring structure of The Harry Potter series and work our way toward Evan Willis’ Tetractys ideas. · Harry Potter series, Sprague/Thacker ‘Reverse Alchemy:’ Slides 1 and 2 (see above) 7. And via the Parallel Series Idea we should see those same relationships that were found in the Potter books in the Strike series? · Extended Play idea: Slides 3 and 4 (see above) · Where it breaks down -- Running Grave like Troubled Blood an “aquatic Nigredo“ 8. And you think the Tetractys idea is better. We really need to have Evan on the show to talk about where he learned about this figure, its use in English literature prior to Rowling, and why he thinks Rowling is writing her second ten book series. Can you summarize his two Hogwarts Professor posts on this subject and why Rowling Readers will benefit from learning about this ancient ten point peg board model? · See Tetractys pyramid slides above; · Four levels: meaning of monad, dyad, triad, quaternity symbolism; (first Evan Willis post above) · Pyramid to climb, something akin to four levels of reading and knowledge; [Fowler, Triumphal Forms] · Benefit to Rowling Readers: Willis thinks the second Quaternion parallels Rowling’s first -- and the differences explain the alchemical stage of Running Grave; · It also was used to predict three things about Hallmarked Man: it was all about silver, it would be an albedo or White stage novel, and it would parallel The Ickabog 9. Three bullseyes with a special merit badge for figuring out the silver part before the title was announced. Let’s go to the Tetractys slides for the Potter and Strike series: · All above! 10. Both the Extended Play and Tetractys theories, then, have Hallmarked Man as an albedo. How will that influence your examination of Strike 8 for its alchemical symbols and sequences as well as your interpretation of them? · I’ll be looking for the alchemical signatures of the second stage, leukosis or the ‘whitening,’ · I’ll be looking for evidence that contradicts the albedo dyad idea, and · I’ll be researching if alchemical ideas, as in, say, incest, ‘Jason and the Medea,’ and ‘dog and b***h,’ are best read as white stage tokens This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down to discuss four Hogwarts Professor posts. Here are links to those posts with an excerpt from each and the most relevant urls embedded in them. Enjoy! What is a Squib, Really? And Where Would Rowling Have Met the Word? (John Granger, 27 April 2026) I confess that I assumed the word for barely magical witches and wizards born into magical families in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, the folk she calls ‘Squibs,’ were given that name because of its onomatopoeic source in fireworks; per the Harry Potter Lexicon invaluable online resource, a squib is English idiom for “a dud firework that will not ignite properly.” It sounds like its meaning (as does “dud”) and a reader can feel in it the disappointment of magical parents when their child turns out not to have the gift that will make them full members of their community. I learned this morning, however, that a squib is not a dud firework, or wasn’t originally though it may have that meaning today, and that it is mentioned more than once in one of Rowling’s known literary influences. * ‘Squibbing’ at the Bridgewater Carnival Fireworks Festival (YouTube video) * Toyohashi Tengu: Japanese Quidditch Team (Harry Potter Lexicon) * Tengu — Japanese Fantastic Beast not in Newt Scamander’s textbook (Wikipedia) * Toyohashi Tezutsu fireworks 2022 (Tezutsu-hanabi — Wikipedia) * Dimitra Fimi’s ‘A Kind of Elvish Craft’ Substack site * The Fireworks of Gandalf: in which ‘squibs’ are discussed (not duds!) * ‘The Slow Lord of the Rings Re-Read’ Prof Fimi’s Tolkien Reading Day Introduction * Reading Rowling as Myth Maker and Myth Re-Writer: A Conversation with Dr Dimitra Fimi * ‘Sleep Tight, Evangeline,’ Miniature Psalters, and the Head of Persephone: A Conversation with Dimitra Fimi Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Ray Livingston's 'The Traditional Theory of Literature:’ Chapter 2: Man, Society, Art (John Granger, 30 April 2026) In brief, the Perennialist reading of literature begins with a different idea of what a human being is, which reflects the social environment or society and culture that best fosters his achievement of his end or telos, which reflects what role art in general and story specifically plays in his best life. The human being as primarily spiritual, his end as profound communion with what is most Real, and story as non-liturgical sacred art (not necessarily or even usually ‘religious’) which supports him in his vocation to that end are the premises of the traditional or theocentric understanding of man, society, and art. Which is the title of Livingston’s second chapter and a description of its organization as well as of its contents. It’s not easy reading; the subject matter is quite dense and he covers an enormous amount of ground relatively quickly so he can get to the ‘literature’ in the remaining chapters of the work. Without setting out the premises of the Perennialist understanding with respect to what it means to be human, how a community is designed to make a fully human life possible, and how the art of everyday objects as well as set pieces for appreciation or entertainment — there being no meaningful difference in the value of practical and fine arts here — bring that polity to fruition, discussion of literature from the traditional view would be a waste of time. The Allegorical Cryptonyms of Hallmarked Man, Part 2: Ten More Cratylic Character Names and Best Guesses about their Embedded Meanings (John Granger, 1 May 2026) This is the second part of at least a three part series of articles with supplementary video discussion in which I take a long look at Rowling-Galbraith’s choices for character names in the eighth Strike-Ellacott novel, The Hallmarked Man. For the first posts in this series, in which I explain why this is a worthwhile effort, one critical to Rowling’s intentional artistry and complementary to her other Shed tools, see ‘The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part One’ and my conversation with Nick Jeffery about it ‘What do Tyler Powell, Rupert Fleetwood, Jolanda Lindvall, and Lady Jensen Have in Common?’ Almost half of today’s ten posts are about characters named ‘Lion’ or variants on the leonine theme. I think the number of lions prowling through Hallmarked Man, not to mention the dogs from Hell and the bears benign and grizzly, deserve their own post, especially to contrast it with the predominant swan symbolism of the first seven books. Or are they conjoined in Jonny Rokeby, whose middle name is the lionesque ‘Leonard’ and who plays the part of a Jovian swan in the Leda mating that produced Cormoran Strike (we think?). [Be sure to check out Ed Shardlow’s full catalogue of the lions afoot in the pages of Hallmarked Man!] * ‘I’m an Essex Girl’ (YouTube video) The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? Seeking Pointers to the Hermetic Meaning of Strike 8 within (a) the Extended Play and Tetractys Ten Book Series Pictures and (b) the Parallel Series and Reverse Alchemy Ideas (John Granger, 8 May 2026) There are currently seven theories that I have read about of how best to think of the Strike-Ellacott series structure: * (1) straight up Decalogy, no structural connection between books; * (2) Big Ring Composition, Double Wedding Band (Louise Freeman); * (3) Seven book series with Trilogy finale (Nick Jeffery, John Granger); * (4) Extended Play theory (John Granger per ‘Kathleen’), * (5) Sonnet Corona Form (Robyn Gomillion); * (6) Tetractys theory (Evan Willis with back-up explanations here, follow-up from Evan here); and * (7) Celtic Cross (John Granger) scroll down to bottom). The first idea is that there isn’t a series structure worth noting, which is the default position of the great majority of readers. They (we?) enjoy each book and appreciate the over-arching story parts and conflicts without wondering about the author’s intentional narrative scaffolding. Rowling has repeatedly said that special sauce secret of her success is structure but as story organization artistry is very rarely discussed today in English classrooms even Literature wonks neglect it. The other six ideas have their advocates and rather than review each I’ve embedded links above to these proponents’ online arguments in favor of their best guesses. All of these structure theories have advantages and support from previous work we and others have done in the field of Rowling Studies; all of it, however, it must be remembered is laughably speculative guesswork – we’re not going to grasp the series structure with any certainty until it’s done or Rowling actually answers questions about it or shares the information gratis (neither of which is likely given her history). Those of us who give any time to this, not to name those who are pre-occupied with it, are hunting phantom fandom garlands (as well as having a lot of fun). There actually is, however, a reason beyond personal insecurities and a search for redemption for thinking about how the ten book series is organized before all the books are out. If you’re trying to figure out the alchemical quality or stage of a book already in print, understanding the sequence of books should theoretically reveal the sequence of stages (and vice versa). As explained above, Rowling seems to be writing the Strike series in parallel with her Harry Potter seven books. Until we got to the sixth book in Robin and Cormoran’s adventures, those parallels included the alchemical coloration or stage the Potter numerical equivalent had. Other correspondences between the series continued, most notably, the seven book ring structure and playful plot point parallels (see my conclusions post Running Grave here, here, and here). The alchemy did not. In terms of alchemy, the most compelling ideas I think are Extended Play (EP) and Evan Willis’ four-three-two-one pyramid, the Tetractys figure of the ancients, the ‘Great Quaternion.’ Let’s look at each. * Why the Cormoran Strike Novels are a Ten Book Series: Mythological Clues and Tetractys Parallelism with a Touch of Tarot Reveal the Strike Series Structural Echoes with Rowling’s First Ten Book Set [Evan Willis, 10 July 2023] * Is Tetractys Theory the Best Explanation of Why the Cormoran Strike Series is Ten Books in Length? First Thoughts on Evan Willis’ Numerological Exegesis of Rowling’s Two Ten Novel Series and the Meaning of This Structure [John Granger, 18 July 2023] * Evan Willis: Running Grave Review In which the Tetractis theory is revisited in light of Strike 7 and the Theory is Updated [Evan Willis, 30 September 2023] * Literary Alchemy – A Primer for Those Interested in J. K. Rowling’s Artistry * Metallurgical, Literary, and Psychological Alchemy: Is Jung a Good Guide for Understanding J. K. Rowling’s Artistry and Meaning? The Ten Questions! Introduction: It’s been a busy week, John, with posts on traditional reading, cryptonyms, and literary alchemy. I’ve got a bunch of questions about each subject so let’s jump right in -- with some thoughts about Squibs in Bridgewater and Toyohashi, Japan! 1. Ray Livingston: You’re sending out a chapter of The Traditional Theory of Literature every week to our Paid Subscribers which I think everyone has access to, at least for one or two chapters. It’s no small effort to type up this public domain book that isn’t available anywhere on the internet, especially with the embedded links to the obscure references in the footnotes; why are you bothering? 2. Ray Livingston: The first chapter you sent out went to everyone and included the glossary of terms as well as the Table of Contents, preface, and prologue (chapter one). I’m guessing this is more than throat-clearing and publisher’s data; why does a liter

Golden Threads Last July, Nick Jeffery and I put together a month long review of Rowling’s work in celebration of her 60th birthday, a Kanreki party. Every day we posted conversations about each of Rowling’s works with Nick discussing a ‘Lake’ point, something biographical or bibliographical, and me talking about a ‘Shed’ quality of the work, the author’s traditional tools, artistry, and meaning. That worked great for about twenty days. Then we ran out of books. What to do for the remaining days of the month? We decided to talk about Golden Threads, the plot points, themes, and twists that run through everything Rowling has written. We started out with a survey of the fifteen-plus already identified by Rowling Re-readers and Fourth Generation types (see here and here) and then with more in depth looks at the ones that were controversial or more difficult to see. We closed off the month with the ‘Lost Child’ Golden Thread and the possibility that Rowling’s inspiration for the Harry Potter series was the trauma of pre-natal infanticide (‘abortion’). As disturbing as that Golden Thread was to many Rowling fans and Feminist Gate Keepers, there was another third-rail string we didn’t discuss, namely, the plot point of incest that readers encounter again and again in the Potter and Strike series as well as the stand-alone stories. Incest as Golden Thread Nick and I discuss the Incest Golden Thread on the fly in the conversation above about Strike-Ellacott fandom theories about Sleep Tight, Evangeline and the series finale. Here are some written references if you want to review them by looking at the books in question on your shelf. * Harry Potter The foundation crime of the Hogwarts Saga is the abuse of Merope Gaunt by her father Marvolo and her brother Morfin. The abuse in question in this children’s book series is not explicitly sexual. As with the abuse of Ariana Dumbledore by the Muggle boys, however, that Merope’s father and brother violated her is there between the lines; her trauma is so great that she loses her capacity for magic (as she does after her Riddle lover leaves her) and the family does not send her to Hogwarts lest their shameful secret be revealed. No broken Merope, no Lord Voldemort, no Potter family murder and orphan Harry — no series. Though the Saga’s foundation crime, the Gaunt family’s abuse of its only young woman, is not revealed until Order of the Phoenix, it is the tragedy on which all the core conflicts of the septology are built. * Casual Vacancy Stuart ‘Fats’ Wall is the adopted son of Tessa and Colin Wall. A teenager in Vacancy, he and Krystall Wheedon are the star-crossed lovers around whose choices and behaviors the ensemble drama largely turn. Fats at the end of the book claims responsibility for all the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother posts by means of which the secrets of Padford citizens are spilled. In the climax of the Wall family drama after Robbie’s drowning and Krystall’s suicide, Tessa reveals to Fats his personal history. His biological mother was only fourteen when he was born, an age that sadly means it is possible-to-likely that he is the fruit of incest. Tessa, a diabetic woman unlikely to carry a baby to term successfully, compelled her unwilling husband to agree to the adoption despite his mental fragility. Again, the foundation crime of this very involved story is incest, the abuse of a young woman by her family. * Lethal White In the first of only two Rowling books in which every epigraph was taken from a single work, the fourth Strike novel takes all of its headings from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, a play in which suicide and incest go hand in hand, especially in the White Horse finale. The novel parallels its epigraph source in astonishing ways. The Chiswell family has its secrets. The Minister of Culture hires Strike’s agency to find ‘dirt’ on Jimmy Knight and Geraint Winn that can used as counter “bargaining chips” to end their capacity to blackmail him. He shares neither what information they have that they are holding over his head to extort money and revenge nor what Billy Knight witnessed years ago. If Jasper or Izzy Chiswell had told Strike this information in the beginning, it is likely the pater familias would not have been murdered. The biggest secrets, of course, are about the sexual relationship between Raphael and his step-mother and the step-son’s plans to murder father and eventually Kinvarra in order to be free to spend the millions he’ll make from sale of the Stubbs. Not quite incest, a step-mother in bed with her step-son, but something like it. Rosmersholm‘s family secrets are if anything more disturbing. Kroll reveals to Rebecca that Dr. West, her adoptive father, was very likely her biological father as well. It is implied heavily that after her mother’s death Rebecca’s relationship with Dr. West changed from filial to sexual; Kroll’s revelation about this is something of an Oedipus Rex moment. Rebecca realizes that she had been sleeping with her father and the incest taboo crushes her ability to accept Rosmer’s overdue marriage proposal, a proposal for which she had convinced the ailing Mrs Rosmer to commit suicide. * Troubled Blood The psychopathic murderer and torturer of children that the police and public believe killed Margot Bamborough is Dennis Creed. We learn in chapter 8 of Strike 5 via the Peg-Legged PI reading The Demon of Paradise Park that Creed was the incestuous rape off-spring of Agnes Waite and her step-father Awdry, a man who wanted to kill the child at birth but which the mother prevented (to her eventual regret). Awdry abused the boy all through his childhood, especially after Agnes’ escape as a young woman (reminiscent of Peggy Nancarrow’s flight from St Mawes). Troubled Blood is haunted by the victims of Creed’s madness, all of whose deaths can be traced back to Awdry’s violent sexual violation of his step-daughter. * Hallmarked Man The mystery Cormoran Strike agrees with no little hesitation to try to solve is ‘What happened to Rupert Fleetwood?’ Decima Longcaster Mullins, mother of Fleetwood’s son Lion, believes her baby-daddy was the unidentifiable murdered man in the Ramsey Silver Vault. We learn before that victim’s identity is revealed that Fleetwood fled the UK after he learned that the woman he loved was his half-sister and his son the product of unwitting incest. Rowling-Galbraith reveals only in the epilogue that Ian Griffiths murdered Tyler Powell because the young man was determined to rescue the young woman living with Griffith as his daughter who was pregnant with his child. Once again, the foundation crimes of a Rowling work turn on the intentional sexual abuse of a girl by a father-figure, here compounded by an Oedipus Rex like incest-in-ignorance episode. Incest Notes * Fantastic Beasts As in the Harry Potter novels, there are no explicitly incestuous relationships in the Fantastic Beasts screenplays. The conception of Leta Lestrange, however, checks the ‘rape,’ ‘power abuse,’ and ‘inter-family’ boxes of father-daughter incest nightmare. Her mother, Laurena Kama, was desired by Corvus Lestrange III even though she was married to Mustafa and the mother of Yusof. Corvus compelled her by the Imperius Curse to join him and, while she was under his control, which is to say ‘unable to consent or resist his will,’ conceived Leta, who took his name as if her mother had been his wife. Leta unknowingly avenges the Kama family by her switching her younger half-brother Corvus IV with the Dumbledore baby that results in his death by drowning. * Ickabog Nick Jeffery points out in our conversation that there can be no more incestuous means of conceiving a child than the Ickabog species’ parthenogenic reproduction. If one accepts that as incest, the Ickabog’s death after delivery and the imprinted character of the Ickaboggle by its first contact post partum have to be read allegorically. * Cuckoo’s Calling There is no mention made in the first Strike novel of John Bristow’s having sexually abused his younger also-adopted sibling-sister, Lula Landry. I’m going to include it in these ‘Incest Notes’ because I think it possible that the man who killed his brother Charlie and envied his sister Lula ‘played’ with her cruelly, which fostered her mental instability. I think this is more than imaginative free association head-canon because of Lula’s successful search for and planned meeting her real sibling brother Jonah Agyeman the night of her death. Bristow-Agyeman, the false and true brothers, are figures of erotic and anterotic love in her life, so much that I don’t think incest is a stretch for John Bristow, the unloved chick in the nest. Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. So what? There has been a real up-tick in speculation about how the Strike series will finish in its last two books with the guess work largely turning on how the Big Unresolved Mysteries will play out. The reason I’ve written up these thumbnail etchings of incest occurrences through Rowling’s work is because several of the theories Nick and I are seeing in the comment boxes here and on the YouTube HogwartsProfessor channel are incest driven. To get that, a Serious Striker, beyond grasping that incest is a ‘thing’ to expect in a Rowling piece like Bad Dad, Divine Mother, Violence Against Women, and at least one Lost Child, has to have in sight at all times three ideas that act as premises: * Closing Trilogy Theory: Hallmarked Man the first of a three book finale which introduces the main characters; There’s a real split in Strike fandom about what to think of Hallmarked Man. The great mass of readers on Reddit I’m told and at least one Substack Sage believe it is “the worst book of the series,” a real st

[Apologies but the recording is quite poor at the start, but improves. Please bear with it - Nick] John Granger shared privately with Nick Jeffery that he thought it would be a good idea to read C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, to get a better grip on Rowling-Galbraith’s re-imagining of the same myth in her Cormoran Strike series. Nick, as is his wont, promptly read the book, wrote up the possible connections between the chapters of Till We Have Faces and the books in the Strike series — C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part One) — which ‘Part One’ constituted a challenge to John to write up his contrarian notes as ‘Part Two,’ which he did yesterday. Today? They talk about CSL’s Till We Have Faces, what it tells us (and doesn’t tell us) about JKR’s Strike series, and the reasons why a Serious Striker or ‘every thoughtful reader’ really should read Lewis’ last novel, one he and Tolkien thought was his best. Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Links to everything they discuss can be found in their respective write-ups: C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part One) by Nick and C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part Two) from John. Here is a copy of the ten questions that kept their conversation — for the most part! — between the guard rails. Enjoy! CSL and JKR Tackle ‘Cupid and Psyche:’ The Ten Questions 1. (Nick) So, why, John, are we talking about a book Rowling has never mentioned, in a genre she has never attempted, by an author from whom she has tried to distance herself, and which has no obvious connection to what Rowling is writing today? [See the first paragraphs of John’s Part Two.] 2. (John) Can you give our listeners a quick review of the book’s history, Nick, that is, the story behind the story? [Nick discusses information here not in either of their posts!] 3. (Nick) Which is all very interesting from the Lake side of the reading, but it’s the story itself that is the connection to Rowling. Give us the plot points, structure highlights, and spoil the ending, too, won’t you, John? [John reads Nick’s plot summary from his Part One (below). Another summary can be found on the Faces wikipedia page.] Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis is a first-person retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, narrated by Orual, the eldest daughter of the King of Glome (a fictional barbarian kingdom). Orual frames Part One as a bitter complaint or accusation against the gods, particularly Ungit (a cruel fertility goddess akin to Aphrodite/Venus, represented by a black stone) and her son, the god of the Grey Mountain (the “Shadowbrute” or Brute). She writes in old age as queen, claiming the gods have wronged her, especially by taking her beloved half-sister Istra (whom she calls Psyche). The novel is divided into two parts. Part One (the bulk of the book, spanning 21 chapters) recounts events from Orual’s perspective as she experiences them, portraying her actions as justified love and the gods as unjust. Part Two (a short addendum of about 4 chapter) is written later, as Orual nears death. Here, she gains new insight through dreams, visions, and self-reflection, realizing how her “love” was often possessive, jealous, and devouring—much like Ungit’s. The veil she wears becomes a central symbol: initially to hide her ugliness, later as a barrier to truth and self-knowledge. “Till we have faces” suggests that true self-revelation and honest relationship (with gods or others) require facing reality without masks or illusions. 4. (John) We know for sure that CSL was re-telling the Cupid and Psyche myth here; Lewis and the text make that undeniable. I argued from the text five years ago that Rowling-Galbraith was doing something similar and she suggested strongly by tweet this was the case. In your post, Nick, you swung for the fences to explore the possibility that Till We Have Faces was a model of sorts for the Strike series. Did you establish or eliminate that possibility -- and what were the most interesting connections you found? [See Part One!] 5. (Nick) You’ve recently re-read this, too, John; were you struck by story echoes in Strike from Faces? [John discusses CSL’s wonderful cryptonyms, several of which have alchemical notes, a point he didn’t write up in Part Two, and then talks about the allusion to Psyche as “Artemis and Aphrodite combined” in Faces, the importance of ‘The Real’ in Lewis and Rowling, and the importance of “the riddle” to Lewis and a “debate” to Rowling, all in Part Two.] 6. (John) The key connection, though, of course, is in the use of the myth and how the modern and postmodern authors parallel the original version and depart from it. Care to compare and contrast the two adaptations, Nick? [Nick answers this with some references to Part One and John offers a Planet Narnia inspired opinion.] 7. (Nick) You brought up in our alchemy conversation earlier in the month, John, and in your Faces post that Rowling seems to want to foster a “debate” within and among her readers about how to best understand her work, specifically between a psychological or spiritual interpretation. That seems to be on Lewis’ agenda, too, no, in Faces? [Part Two, Point #4] 8. (John) As fascinating as that parallel is, Nick, the structural one is better, I think. What do you make of Faces’ two Parts and our conversations about how the ten book series seems to be playing out? [Part Two, Point #5] 9. (Nick) You’ve played with the names a bit, John; what do you think is the meaning of the title? There’s a specific passage in which Till We Have Faces is spoken as dialogue and we know Lewis’ preferred title was Bareface, but what do you think Lewis was after with the Faces idea -- and does it have any relevance to Strike? [Part Two, Point #6] 10. (John) So, let’s do another tally of CSL/JKR correspondences. And what are the differences between Lewis and Rowling? List: Ten Points of Correspondence 1. Christian symbolism, 2. kappa atmosphere artistry, 3. literary alchemy, 4. psychomachia, 5. ring composition, 6. the debate/riddle about God 7. Mythic retelling 8. Genre blending 9. Narrative misdirection, big twist 10. Most famous for magical world behind portal Differences: * Violence against women! * Old White Man; Old White Woman * [Fill In Your Best Contrast between CSL and JKR] Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe