Whence Potter-Mania?: The Spiritual Content and Christian Message of the Hogwarts Saga (Eighth Day Books)

February 16, 2025 by Leave a Comment

I pledged yesterday to write three posts in sequence that together will reveal the Foundation Crime of the Strike-Ellacott series and an epicycle structure to the last three books. I had the second post sketched before I wrote up an introduction to this effort yesterday so I was hopeful I could complete it relatively easily today.

I have been sick and I relapsed. The second post, consequently, remains a challenging ambition!

So, to keep my six month streak of posting every day alive, I took my cue from a Serious Reader who was looking for the talks I gave at the Eighth Day Symposium in January 2011. The links in my original post about those talks were to Ancient Faith Radio but they apparently have been broken, i.e., the links no longer go to anything.

But the Web Archive, aka the ‘Wayback Machine,’ had saved it. I’ve been listening to it tonight in my malaise and I think it holds up. I discuss Soul Triptychs, Literary Alchemy, and Ring Composition, and, though it’s not quite the talk I’d give today, fourteen years later, it’s still challenging and fun.

So I post the Wayback Machine link here for you to enjoy! It’s another introduction to Rowling ‘Shed’ or Formalist artistry which will serve us well as we hunt for the Foundation Crime of the Strike-Ellacott series.

Enjoy!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: C. S. Lewis, Literary Alchemy, Psychomachia, Ring Composition

Does Rowling Merit the Nobel Prize in Literature? The Affirmative Argument

February 15, 2025 by 1 Comment

I had a Skype conversation with Nick Jeffery this morning during which I think we figured out where Rowling-Galbraith is going in the Strike-Ellacott series’ last three books. How we got there, though, is a pretty involved argument, a winding path to say the least.

It involves three key steps: (1) understanding Rowling as in essence a writer of detective fiction and the signature element of that kind of story-telling, (2) a review of Rowling’s works for each of the very well hidden ‘Foundation Crimes’ out of which her involved stories all spring, and (3) a first look at the Strike-Ellacott books to guess its ‘Foundation Crime’ which will explain the epicycle of the last three mysteries in the series and how Strike 10 will match up with Strikes 1 and 7.

Today, in order to make the point about Rowling as a writer of detective fiction, I will review arguments I made in September 2018 in favor of Rowling’s nomination for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Those arguments all derived from my Junior Varsity attempts as part of my PhD thesis writing to use Russian Formalist tools to interpret her work, a quest I eventually abandoned (at the pointed direction of my Viva Voce readers!). I posted those Formalist arguments, however, here at Hogwarts Professor to make the point at the time of Literature Nobel Prize nominations every year, that Rowling was an excellent candidate despite the pervasive view in the Academy that she is a hack writer for proles.

Join me after the jump for a quick survey of those arguments — and the one among them perhaps the most important for understanding Rowling’s work crafting her ‘Lake’ inspiration into story in her ‘Shed’! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Rowling’s Parallel Series Swan and Heart Structure: Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 14, 2025 by 2 Comments

I’ve recently been introduced to Louise Freeman’s Double Ring Theory of the ten book structure of the Strike-Ellacott series written by Rowling-Galbraith. It’s a lot of fun for those of us who enjoy tracking the author’s parallelism and Dr Freeman is one of the very few Serious Strikers that play the chiasmus game and build on the ring composition work done with Harry Potter. Hallmarked Man, I think, will tell us whether her preferred image or Evan Willis’ Tetractys Theory — see  ‘Why the Cormoran Strike Novels are a Ten Book Series’  and ‘Is Tetractys Theory the Best Explanation of Why the Cormoran Strike Series is Ten Books in Length?‘ — is the better model; from the little I’ve read, I prefer Mr Willis’ because of his grasp of traditional hermetic symbolism.

What I like about the double ring theory, overlooking the intricate web of parallelisms between the Strike novels Dr Freeman has detailed, is the symbol itself. If oriented on a different axis, if true, the double ring structure reflects one of Rowling’s favorite Christian symbols, namely, the ICHTHYS fish as the conjunction of heaven and earth. See ‘Rowling’s Favorite Painting and What It Suggests about Her Artistry and Meaning‘ and the explanation of the mother of pearl fish necklace pendant of Mazu Mace in ‘Running Grave, Part Nine: A Ring Reading (A).’ In a nutshell from the latter:

The fish has been a symbol of Christ since the Apostolic era, being a glyph of two intersecting circles representing heaven and earth, the seamless conjunction of which spheres is the incarnation of the Logos as Jesus of Nazareth, perfect God and perfect man. On the horizontal, this intersection of circles is the Vesica Piscis “fish vessel” or Mandorla “almond” so important to Christian iconography and vertically as below it is the ICHTHYS, Greek for ‘fish,’ that was and remains a token of recognition between Christians (the Greek word is an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior’).

If Dr Freeman is right, and, again, few if any Rowling Readers track parallels as well as she does, then its importance may be less about wedding bands than the Strike-Ellacott psychomachia of Spirit and Soul conjoined in the unconditional love of Jesus Christ as represented in the Vesica Piscis. Apologies all around if this traditional symbolism has already been discussed by Dr Freeman and others!

For those wanting an introduction to finding and understanding symbols in traditional art as well as Rowling’s work, see ‘Traditional Symbols in Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike: A Perennialist View.’ One of the symbols discussed there is that of the heart — and how appropriate is that for a Valentine’s Day post? It is so appropriate that I have spent the day playing with the Parallels Series Idea to come up with a pictorial representation of the mirrored structure of those series that yields both a pair of swans and a Cupid’s heart. Join me after the jump for all that! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Ring Composition

Who Killed Leda Strike? The East End Strike Family Syndicate and Shanker

February 13, 2025 by 6 Comments

Lindsay McCasland at the Strike & Ellacott Files (S&EF) podcast kindly responded to my post ‘Bad Dads and Peter Gillespie,’ in which she shared the url to a write-up at their website of the reasoning behind their conviction that Peter Gillespie killed Leda Strike. ‘The “Gillespie” Theory’ post has all the iterations of this idea going back, if I have followed the clues in the first post correctly that point to their ‘In the Post’ podcast, to October 2021. To my delight, a significant part of their reasoning was based on Beatrice Groves’ speculation via the rules of ring composition that Strike 7 would reveal Leda’s seeming suicide was not a suicide as were the staged murders in Cuckoos Calling and Lethal White.

Running Grave, of course, proved a disappointment in this regard (if it did have its Strikes 1 and 4 parallels and close off the seven book ring/asterisk neatly, cf., here, here, and here). If anything, Strike 7 gave us another murder staged as suicide, Charlotte Campbell’s, that will be revealed in the three book addendum epicycle to the first seven book ring. See Nick Jeffery’s ‘The Strange Death of Charlotte Campbell‘ and my ‘Charlotte Campbell Murder Mystery‘ for more on that.

The S&EF post, though, on ‘The “Gillespie” Theory’ had an extra bonus for those who read through the excellent comment thread following it. The most recent comment (or the first one made if the most recent part of the thread appears at the beginning of comments?) was a completely different theory, albeit one involving Gillespie in Leda’s death along the same lines as Lindsay McCasland’s and “Pools” ideas. The author, Gary James, has written an alternative explanation of Strike’s conception and the death of his mother in which Leda’s first husband is crime syndicate leader in London’s East End, Shanker is the child of the mafia leader and Leda, and the rhyming slang meanings of ‘Shanker’ and ‘Bunsen’ play a great part.

The platform used by S&EF does not provide links for comments the way WordPress blogs do or even a time-stamp and there is no contact information available for Gary James. He (or she writing under a pseudonym) asks at the end of his longish comment, though, for feedback on his involved theory. I have taken the liberty, consequently, of re-posting his theory after the jump in order to fulfill his request for support and criticism and to invite you to do the same. If Gary James hasn’t already been invited to a S&EF podcast to expand on his theory, I hope he is soon!

Join me after the jump, then, for the ‘Strike Crime Syndicate Theory’ as explanation of ‘Who Killed Leda Strike?’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Hero with Prosthetic Limb, Marine Friend

February 12, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Okay, the Cormoran Strike connection is a stretch. It is a heart-warming story, though, no?

Read more about Ben Baltz in this 2014 Runner’s World profile or a 2015 piece on Today, in which article his difficulty in affording the cost of racing prosthetics is discussed. There’s a Strike link, sort of.

And, no, I wasn’t able to find any more recent mention of the young man, now in his mid to late 20s, than this undated picture on the International Paralympic Committee website.

Filed Under: Uncategorized