This is the third post in a series about Christmas Pig as understood through the lens of sacred art as defined by the Perennialist school. All five are about Rowling’s latest book as the crystallization and condensation of the artistry and meaning of all her work to date. The first post, ‘Jack, Jones, Peter, and John,’ introduced the idea of Rowling’s writing intentionally esoteric and spiritual art, an idea explained in terms of her given name and the conflict of Peter and John throughout her oeuvre and in Christmas Pig especially. The second part of the series, ‘Dante, Sacred Art, and the Symbolism of the Tree and Its Angels,’ advanced the thesis that Rowling is best understood as a writer of extra-liturgical sacred art a la Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Lewis with an exegesis of the tree and angel symbolism of Christmas Pig.

The next few posts will introduce the traditional, which is to say ‘theocentric,’ literary concepts of the Quadriga and Psychomachia, Rowling’s use of exteriorization with respect to objects and characters, and the symbolism of the Heart with the specific argument that the author of Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, and The Christmas Pig equates a mother’s unconditional and sacrificial love as the Logos love of the God Who is Love (1 John 4:7-12). Any one of these subjects, of course, could be a book of its own so this will be a survey by necessity but a rich one I hope.

Join me after the jump for a deep dive into Rowling as a writer of soul and Spirit allegory for the edification and transformation of her readers. Today, the Quadrigal or Four Horse Chariot reading. [Read more…]

I’m trying to get the next piece in my traditional reading of Christmas Pig done but am taking a break from the Four Chariots or ‘Garden’ interpretation to share another piece of head-canon or fan-fiction I’ve written. The first was about how the Christmas tree fell over the first time; my guess was that Holly pulled it down to cover her tracks when Toby the Dog ate the Toilet Roll Angel she’d replaced with her own ornament.

Today I want to take a shot at explaining the mysterious rage Holly feels about little boy Jack and her disproportionate response to being called a Loser by her younger step-brother. Why does she lose all her self-control and poise, the signatures of an accomplished gymnast, when a whiny kid gives her the ‘L’ sign?

I’m guessing based on things we’ve learned in Cormoran Strike and what we know of Rowling’s biography that it comes down to Holly thinking Judy Jones caused the break-up of Natalia and Holly’s dad’s marriage. And that her condition is exteriorized in the story not only as Bully Boss the Fist but as Broken Angel. Join me after the jump for how I got there. [Read more…]

I have been writing about Rowling and Dante since the publication of Deathly Hallows. Please read ‘Snape’s Green-Eyed Girl: Dante, Renaissance Florence, and the Death of the Potions Master,’ chapter 4 of The Deathly Hallows Lectures, for the central place The Divine Comedy holds in Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga. Pig, the tale of ‘The Living Boy’ in the ‘Land of the Lost,’ is in several ways a revisiting of ‘The Boy Who Lived’s adventures and a re-imagining of Horcruxes, a soul’s investment of itself in material things. As Evan Willis has demonstrated, however — in a post written in October after only listening to the new book once! — Pig is perhaps most like Potter in its debt to Dante. Join me after the jump for Evan’s nine points of correspondence and my explanation of Rowling as sacred artist! [Read more…]

Welcome to the week before western Christmas at HogwartsProfessor.com! I’ll be posting about J. K. Rowling’s new story, The Christmas Pig, every day in the coming week and we have a special guest post that will go up, next Friday, Christmas Eve, the “Night of Miracles and Lost Causes.” It promises to be a lot of fun and I look forward to sharing with you the delights beneath the surface of this wonderful tale. 

Let me start with my summary opinion of Rowling’s entry into the genre of Christmas stories.

J. K. Rowling’s Christmas Pig works as a key, a relatively small object that creates a much larger opening to a larger and new experience, with respect to her other works to date. It is perhaps her greatest achievement, a miniature — her shortest work ever, briefer than Philosopher’s Stone or The Ickabog — and cameo of her most important themes, most sophisticated artistry, and most powerful meaning about life, art, and faith. It is, in brief, a concentrated introduction to everything serious readers love about the world’s most popular writer.  Owen Barfield is supposed to have said about C. S. Lewis that “Everything he thinks is evident in anything he writes;” everything Rowling does is present in her Christmas Pig.

I suppose it goes without saying that everything posted here this week will assume that you the reader have read Christmas Pig, that you have read it recently, and that you are eager to explore it at depth. It works at four levels but I will be focusing on the allegorical and anagogical planes. There won’t be any spoiler warnings. To appreciate the depths of The Christmas Pig requires an understanding of Rowling’s writing process, of her personal history, and of extra-liturgical sacred art before jumping into the story itself. For an introduction to the premises of this week’s exegesis of this brilliant tale, join me after the jump for a look at the meaning of ‘Jack Jones,’ the name of Pajama Boy in the Land of the Living.

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I’m going to take her reticence in revealing ‘Blind Pig’s name as her not wanting to share the Murray-family-only Easter Egg of Beasts 1’s speak-easy and the resonance of Christmas Pig’s DP and CP with their BP. But I’m so glad I wrote my pig notes up before she tweeted this picture…

Two other notes to whip us back to Point One of my note, the non-magical aspect of pigs, especially to a feminist —

CP acts like something of a chauvinist pig in Mislaid in his approach to the Princess action figure. He tells her, in effect, that Pajama Boy is there to rescue her. She rebuffs him with the postmodern feminist icon she is with the assertion that she was “looking for a bit of an adventure.”

CP again is overly aggressive with more than whiff of violence with vulnerable women in Disposable when he tricks Lunchie into opening her lid so he and Jack can enter her without consent, His “Shut your lid!” when she objects to their jumping in sans invitation has more than a hint of rape. Jack is certainly unsettled by this and by CP’s telling Halley the Inhaler that, if she gives them away, that Pajama Boy will break her.

Back to the mega Christmas Pig exegesis, in which I discuss why pigs are especially apt symbolism for the story!