Rowling describes herself as an “intensely spiritual person,” her core belief is in an “eternal soul,” and her obsession is with “mortality and morality.” Psychomachia, the soul’s preparation for death and eternal life in the spirit, consequently, is what she writes. Look for it in Ink Black Heart.

But what kind of spiritual exteriorization do we find in Strike 6? Is it Shakespearean allegory, the dynamic of a man and woman, each soul being spirit to the other, or a Jungian anima-animus integration for psychic unity and integrity?

In Cormoran Strike, unlike the Hogwarts Saga’s soul triptych, this is represented as a Shakespearean soul-spirit male-female pairing a la Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, and Antony and Cleopatra in which each is a suffering soul to which the other is spirit. Robin, who plays the part of Psyche or ‘soul’ to Strike’s Anteros and Castor in the mythological drama (see 5 below), is the smaller bird for the most part to her partner the sea-giant Cormorant, but also is Una or spirit to his Red Crosse Knight.

Given the heavy Jungian pointers in Troubled Blood (see ‘Troubled Blood: A Jungian Reading’ for that), it will be tempting to read Ink Black Heart  as a Jungian might — and perhaps this is exactly what Rowling is hoping we do. The psychomachia can be a Jungian anima-animus allegory of archetypes and I will be reading Strike6 with one eye focused on seeing if this is where she goes.

Discuss.

Rowling is a writer with the hermetic formula solve et coagula tattooed to her right wrist. It’s there as a reminder that her personal and professional aim is self-transformation and re-invention in her own life and to foster the same in the reader’s experience of her stories. She does this in large part through her deployment of alchemical sequences and symbolism, most notably the black-white-red stages of metallurgical alchemy. Strike’s agony in Troubled Blood was his dissolution or nigredo akin to Harry’s in Order of the Phoenix. The events of Ink Black Heart will be the ablutionary albedo or ‘white stage,’ in which he will be cleansed of delusion and prepared for the final chrysalis and revelations of the rubedo or ‘red stage.’

True or False? Has Strike 6 proven to be an alchemical brew filled with the albedo standards of “swans, albedo standards, silver, moonlight, water, rain, snow, and booze galore”? Something else hermetic — or not at all?

The Parallel Series Idea (PSI) holds that Rowling-Galbraith is writing her Cormoran Strike novels so that they include deliberate echoes of themes, topics, and plot points with their equivalent number in the Harry Potter series. For discussion of those parallels between the books, see the HogwartsProfessor PSI Pillar Post for a collection of links. 

If PSI holds for Ink Black Heart, we should find a host of common points between Strike6 and the sixth Harry Potter novel, Half-Blood Prince. Please share your discoveries in the comment thread below!

As Beatrice Groves wrote in her Ink Black Heart predictions post, we have reason to think there will be parallels and echoes of Silkworm in Strike6:

Ink Black Heart contains a similar sounding (and similarly unsexed) pseudonym ‘Anomie’, but the main reason for expecting this topic is the Parallel Series and Ring theories: the idea that the structure of the originally-planned seven Strike books, like the Harry Potter books, are composed in a ring. If this is correct, then Ink Black Heart will echo Silkworm – a theory which has already had a major predictive bullseye in assuming that we’d see an important text-within-a-text in Ink Black Heart (something we predicted back in December). Even more strikingly this text-within-the-text shares its name with Rowling’s novel (just as Bombyx Mori did – as the Latin name for Silkworm) and its author (just as in Silkworm) is the murder victim.

Please share the Strike2-Strike6 echoes you have found in the comment thread below!