Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
The Four ‘Lake’ Pillars of understanding Jo Rowling, the Seven Shed Tools she uses, the Twelve golden Threads — Nick Jeffery and I launched our month long series of Lake and Shed readings on 1 July last year with the engaging introduction above.
Enjoy!
Rowling’s Twitter page header is going through some turnover. Last week we were treated to a statue of Robert Raikes:
Read about that at Farting Sofa. Yesterday? A picture of Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum in London:
New picture, new cameo, the latter with The Presence sporting some new Potter-esque specs — or are the round glasses and pensive look a pointer to the round glasses on Freud’s desk and the couch in his office? Is that the look of a Freudian analyst or analysand?
That’s one crowded desk. You can read about the desk and a few of its pieces here, again from the Freud Museum. A clearer shot of the statuettes he looked to for inspiration while writing and speaking with patients:
There’s been a book written about this Garden of Idols in miniature. The video produced for the book launch has an even better view of the desk top collection:
I’m really not into the Twitter header Hunt-for-Clues game. It’s an over-crowded field and, frankly, it’s a little demeaning to be salivating and meditating over each new breadcrumb that Rowling-Galbraith has dropped from her table in playful fan servicing.
That being said, here are my obligatory three thoughts, oblivious to what fandom has already revealed about Rowling’s relationship with the desk. I ask your forgiveness in advance for my cluelessness if the Twitterati among Serious Strikers have already broken the code on this header.
First, in that menagerie of gods, goddesses, and jade Chinese screens, there is a lot of Eros, seven statues if you’re counting. Venus rates another four. One might think that Freud was a Jungian (ho!) or upset the Jungians by noting that Carl was certainly a Freudian, albeit one one in-recovery for the greater part of his life.
Second, the obvious idea about Freud’s desk appearing in the inter librum period before Strike 9 is that we’re going to make a trip to the Freud Museum sometime in Sleep Tight, Evangeline (it’s in London) or meet a Freudian. Pretty clear candidate for that, right?
Ever since the publication of Hallmarked Man in which Robin asks Prudence to recommend a psychologist for help with her disintegrating mental state, it’s been my working assumption that Dr Donleavey, a Jungian analyst, recommended another Jungian analyst. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the full-spectrum Prudence urged Robin to consult with a Freudian psychoanalyst. The swearing makes sense if that’s the case as well as the direct approach Prudence says she’s noted for.
Third and last, why the quick turnover in Twitter headers? I have no idea. Well, that’s not true; I have an idea but it’s pretty silly.
Louise Freeman Davis concluded a post early yesterday with the note, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Dr. Broccoli is a Jungian like Prudence and actually talks with Robin about alchemy?” I commented, “I share your hope that Robin’s analyst ‘goes there’ in Strike 9.” And almost instantly Rowling posted the picture of Freud’s desk.
Correlation meaning causation, voila, cause and effect: Rowling wanted us to know that we were way off track and moved her posting of Freud’s desk up on her marketing-breadcrumb-posting queue to send the message post haste.
I suspect that Rowling may have posted the new header before I was sent word about it (5 PM US Eastern Time) which of course would blow up any possibility that my absurd conjecture, whose premises include one about Team Rowling following Strike fandom postings closely, is true. But it was a seeming fun-coincidence synchronicity.
Analyze all that, please, in the comment boxes below.
MuggleNet.com is, with The Leaky Cauldron and The Harry Potter Lexicon, one of the few Harry Potter fandom websites with an international following and more than a quarter century of reporting, commenting on, and celebrating everything to do with the Wizarding World. These sites were daily stops from Generation Hex during Potter Mania, 1999 – 2012, the years the books and first film film adaptations appeared.
In July 2020 with the advent of the Trans Wars, however, MuggleNet broke with Rowling, Inc., with which entity they had previously served as an unpaid marketing extension, in fidelity to their beliefs that human beings can become the other sex by believing they are. MuggleNet made this move, all but declaring the author of the Harry Potter series ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ on their site’s posts and podcasts, by linking arms in a brotherly boycott with every other fandom site (except this one and The Rowling Library).
The difference in those closed ranks, though, was that the founder of MuggleNet, Emerson Spartz, had sold his website in 2020 to Topix Media Lab, a magazine and paperback book publisher that had already been printing Potter titles with MNet cooperation for years. The new owners oversaw a reformatting of the site and published a wave of new book titles but for the most part retained its staff of many years, most of which were technically volunteers, and its large archive of posts and podcasts.
In September 2025, though, Topix decided to clean house and start over. They fired everybody and in April 2026 wiped the site clean of its past. As The Leaky Cauldron’s ‘Amanda Kirk’ wrote last week in a piece titled ‘MuggleNet Has Become a Horcrux:’
In 2020, the site changed ownership to a company, Topix Media Lab, that had been in partnership with MN for its print publications. For some years after the sale, operations at the site appeared similar from the outside, albeit with a seemingly bigger push for ad revenue by Topix. In September 2025, Topix emailed MN staff to inform them that their services were no longer required. Staff numbers had fluctuated but some had remained dedicated to MN for nearly 20 years. Unless the owners planned to shut down MN, why abruptly dismiss all that institutional knowledge and devotion? The mystery deepened when Topix posted an ad on LinkedIn looking for a single full-time paid staff member to run the site. Qualifications listed for the position included an MBA.
The staff decided to fight back in court — and watched Topix guard its legal flank in April by dropping all their “volunteer” labor efforts overboard of the site with a new MuggleNet in everything but name: [Read more…]
Three quick notes about this news!
Let me know how you read these migraine inspired bon mots to her followers on Twixter!
Warren Farha died last night. If you’ve heard of Warren or had the pleasure to meet him, if you don’t live in Wichita, Kansas, odds are it is because of Eighth Day Books, an independently owned bookstore in a quirky private residence whose every shelf contains at least a month’s worth of challenging reading, fiction and non-fiction, that will provoke and raise up your thinking about what it means to be human.
Read the wikipedia page about Eighth Day Books or the New York Times 2015 profile (unlocked by Rod Dreher) after taking the Sorina Higgins quick guided tour of the store above. Hogwarts Professor is a weblog for Serious Readers; Eighth Day Books is a pilgrimage site for such people. Like few other places I have been and even fewer business establishments, Eighth Day Books reflects a single person with a vision of a possibility that no one else saw and which grew to include an international and local community of other faithful, intelligent people whose lives were changed by it.
I was invited by Eighth Day Books to be the featured speaker at the first Eighth Day Institute symposium sixteen years ago. I met Warren then, met him again when I spoke a few years later at the Orthodox cathedral in Wichita, and once more most recently at a St John’s College graduation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each time I was impressed by his quiet solidity and sobriety, a perceptible depth of character beneath kindness and a sense of humor that was much more about thoughtful smiles and the connection of eye contact than guffahs.
The topos of grief is to say, ‘The world is a better place because of Warren Farha; the world will be less a place of joy and fraternal love in his absence.’ This is true, of course, and profoundly so however cliched the sentiment may seem especially to those of us who were blessed to meet him, even incidentally as my meetings were. I trust that the thoughtful people at Eighth Day Books will continue to run the business as Warren did and that readers here, if they have not been there already, will visit the store in person or via its website.
My take-away from Warren’s life and Eighth Day Books, though, is from the sui generis genesis point of the operation. As he explained it years ago in a talk he gave about vocation: [Read more…]
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