Yesterday Newsweek magazine posted a piece with the title, ‘JK Rowling Falls Silent as She Could Be Prosecuted in Imane Khelif Lawsuit.’ The lede was that Rowling’s absence from Twixter for ten days means she has been intimidated by a frivolous lawsuit with exactly zero chances of going anywhere into a cautious retreat lest she be punished for her feminist zeal.

As I pointed out earlier this week, it is much more likely that Rowling went on the tweeting tear that she has been on since late July in order to provoke this kind of counter-attack; as Julia Hartley-Brewer noted in The Mirror (UK), it cannot be cyber-bullying if Rowling was simply telling the truth — and a lawsuit, a serious one, would expose Khelif as a man and his women’s gold medal as fraud if it came to trial. The pictures of a man beating up a woman are so much more to the point than a man beating women in a bicycle race, swim meet, or weight-lifting contest that it is easy to see the world’s most successful story-teller grasping the potential of a court case to flip the narrative here.

But that’s not why Rowling has “fallen silent.”

A friend who tracks Rowling’s yacht via its plotting signal (no, I don’t know what that is) reported this morning that the yacht has gone so far north up the eastern coast of Greenland that it has achieved unplottable status. I’m going to assume that, if the internet cannot track the Murray family boat as they sail toward the North Pole — end of Frankenstein, anyone? — then they do not have internet connections either as they approach a magnetic pole. The odds are good, if that is true, that she hasn’t heard anything about the kerfuffle her twixting blitz about Khelif has caused, whether those thirty-plus tweets were intentionally provocative or not.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on Rowling’s shed artistry, namely, when did she begin writing ‘rings-within-the-rings’ of her novels? My first guess is Order of the Phoenix but I think a closer look at specific chapters in early Harry Potter novels will reveal much tighter rings. See you then!

I recently completed a draft chapter of a new book about Rowling’s ‘Shed’ artistry, the piece about her use of literary alchemy, the story version of metallurgical alchemy. This subtle but powerful adaptation and deployment of hermetic symbols, colors, and sequences is a parallel and complementary backdrop to the psychomachia or soul-transformation allegories of Rowling’s best works — and the key word there is “transformation.”

The key hurdle for readers trying to grasp this occult narrative tradition in English literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Yeats and Joyce, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, is getting over their received opinion that metallurgical alchemy was the science of Medieval charlatans who pursued get-rich-quick schemes to make lead into gold and an “elixir of life” for immortality. That doesn’t translate to anything that makes sense in terms of story; “literary alchemy” if thought of as “story chemistry” as the modern laboratory science taught in secondary schools everywhere is a head-scratching non-starter. English and chemistry classes today have no common ground.

Traditional, which is to say ‘theocentric,’ alchemy, however, was primarily about the soul of the alchemical adept or seeker, a natural science working to the same end as the revealed spiritual path in which the alchemist lived (there were Muslim, Chinese, Jewish, as well as Christian alchemies). It was, in brief, one of the sacred sciences within the mosaic of said traditions arts and sciences, all of which pointed to the same end, namely, purification and transformation of the soul in hope of divinization in this life or after death.

Perennialists Titus Burckhardt and Seyyed Nasr, both of whom wrote about metallurgical alchemy, put great emphasis on this key point:

Alchemy may be called the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this I am not seeking to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such as the purification and alloying of metals; their real work, however, for which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or ‘operational’ symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists on this point is unanimous. (Burckhardt 1972, 23)

Alchemy was certainly a way of enobling matter, hence its relation to sacred art. But this also means that alchemy is not just a prelude to chemistry, that it is a science of the soul in its relation to the cosmos and making use of external transformations for the sake of that inner transformation which is the ultimate goal of all the traditional sciences. (Nasr 1993, 107)

This is the shared goal of traditional sacred arts, most notably for our discussion of Rowling’s literary alchemy, in written story and staged drama. Through imaginative identification with the story hero or heroine on page or stage, the reader or audience member passes through the transformative and cathartic cycle of the alchemical work, break-down nigredo, purifying albedo, and restorative and illuminating rubedo. Just as the ‘hard darkness’ of lead becomes the ‘solid light’ of gold,’ so the metallurgical alchemist and sympathetic reader feels his soul enlightened by the logos light of the world that is at the heart of the solve et coagula process, “dissolve and recongeal,” shared by the story and laboratory traditions.

Rowling has never been asked about alchemy (!), though she has volunteered quite a bit about the importance of it to Harry Potter, claiming even that it sets the “magical parameters” of that series. Robert Terry, a long time friend of this weblog, pointed out to me recently, though, that, in her Pottermore piece about Draco Malfoy, she points directly to the key piece about metallurgical and hence literary alchemy, that it is not about manipulation of materials but the transformation of the soul for the better.

The Draco page at Pottermore is a delightful capsule review of Draco’s experience before, during, and after his years as a classmate at Hogwarts with Harry Potter, his nemesis. I enjoyed the slightly different but clarifying focus of seeing Draco’s life qua Malfoy, if there is very little new information about him in the story. The piece ends with an ‘Author’s Note,’ which suggests that the much longer summary of Draco’s life was written by Pottermore staff, perhaps from Rowling’s notes. Its psychological points about Draco’s remarkable Occlumency skills versus Harry’s inability to close his mind are invaluable, I think, for grasping Rowling’s thoughts about these two characters, the archetypal Gryffindor and Slytherine fire-and-water pair.

Robert Terry, though, wrote to me about what Rowling shared in her closing paragraphs, her ‘Author’s Note,’ for this piece, namely, new information about Draco Malfoy as a man in the years after his education at Hogwarts:

Draco had many surnames before I settled on ‘Malfoy’. At various times in the earliest drafts he is Smart, Spinks or Spungen. His Christian name comes from a constellation – the dragon – and yet his wand core is of unicorn.