Running Grave: The Literary Alchemy
Running Grave Placeholder Post, Number Six! The Alchemical Artistry of Strike7 —
It’s something of a Publication Week tradition here at HogwartsProfessor to provide an online space for Serious Strikers to share their discoveries as they find them, an alocal place for specific topics we have explored here in the past. It’s a community gathering place — and it creates a record of findings for topics that otherwise become hopelessly jumbled in the threads of various posts. The seven I am posting for Running Grave are:
- The Gaffes
- Deathly Hallows Parallels
- Cuckoo’s Calling Parallels
- Lethal White Parallels
- The Ghosts
- Literary Alchemy
- The Occult
I have been writing about Rowling’s alchemical coloring and symbolism since 2002 (see my Hidden Key to Harry Potter if you’re into literary archeology or How Harry Cast His Spell for the post-Hallows update). Back in the day, the idea that Rowling, single mother on the dole, was crafting stories using hermetic sequences a la Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce, was the butt of jokes in the critical community. We have arrived, though, because the pile of evidence has grown so high to the stage where books are devoted to the subject, at the point of consensus, per Walker Percy, where “everyone has always known that” and the initial eye-rolling and scoffing has been forgotten. See the Literary Alchemy Pillar Post if this is the first time you’re encountering the idea; almost every one of the many links there will take you to an introduction to the subject.
What alchemical points are Serious Strikers looking for in Running Grave? I think there are at least three.
The first is the structure of the book in hand; do we see a nigredo breakdown at the beginning followed by an albedo cleansing or purging of character that ends in a rubedo climax of revelation, confrontation, resolution, and transformation with the attendant colors and symbols of these stages?
The second is its place in the series; is it a rubedo book that closes a story cycle as did Deathly Hallowsin the Hogwarts Saga?
The third is an alternate view of its series role; is it the last of the three albedo books per Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory?
I suppose I am obliged to include a fourth possibility, namely, ‘Is there little to no evidence of alchemical symbolism in Strike7?’
Let me know what you found in the comment boxes below!
I was invited out of the blue last week, as something of an afterthought it seems, by the editor of a book soon to be published on the subject of the literary alchemy in Harry Potter to make a contribution of some kind. It turns out the well-meaning editor had not read anything I’d written on the subject other than the chapters in 
This seemingly inexplicable ignorance on the part of a very smart person reminded me that I had been advised two years ago to create what are known as ‘Pillar Posts’ for the sidebar of HogwartsProfessor. The purpose of these posts on a weblog is to create easy access in one spot to the material on a specific topic of special interest that is otherwise just spread throughout the archives of a long-lived site in no particular order. If I am obliged to note, Gilderoy mask in place, that the editor of the upcoming book on alchemy and the Hogwarts Saga is at fault in not doing such work herself, I must take some part of the blame because I have too long neglected the duties of HogwartsProfessor weblog archivist.