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!

My copy of Ink Black Heart arrived at 5 PM yesterday and I have not yet penetrated its 1,012 pages (!) sufficiently to comment beyond “there are five ‘parts’ with a prologue and coda ‘latch’ which promises another seven part ring.” I’ll be looking for the murderer in disguise hiding out in plain sight somewhere in Part 3.

As promised, I’m posting “placeholders” here for the next ten days or so for Serious Strikers to share their thoughts and discoveries as they read or listen to Ink Black Heart. Here is the preliminary list of those posts in the sequence they will go up. (I will post the first three today in order to facilitate discussion here and to prevent enthusiasts from posting great ‘finds’ on the wrong threads.)

1. 1. Gaffes
   2. Silkworm Parallels
   3. Half-Blood Prince Parallels
   4. The Alchemical Albedo
   5. Psychomachia: Jung or Shakespeare?
   6. The Epigraphs
   7. The Tell Tale Heart
   8. Ghosts!
   9. The Scent of Narciso: the Mythic Backdrop
   10. Rowling’s “Double-Voiced” Text: A Literary Vocation vs Biology and Culture
   11. Strike Characters on Twitter

 Please let me know if there are other topics you want to include on this list. I will be posting an ‘Ink Black Heart’ link at the top of the Pillar Post Post column on the HogwartsProfessor home page beneath which you’ll be able to find and easily access all these placeholders rather than have to search the site for them once they sink below the horizon.

Today, the gaffes. Please share the continuity errors, Parker-Porter name slips, Afghanistan-Iraq misplacements, etc., that you find on the comment thread below. Rowling-Galbraith some time ago pledged (sort of) that she was hard at work fixing the mistakes her crew of editors had found, but the first pages released last week had an unforced error with respect to when the confrontation with Oakden happened in the American Bar. That mistake suggests that there is a mother-lode of Flints out there for attentive readers to find and share here with others. Have at it!

I passed my viva voce examinations yesterday. Thank you to all those who have written with their best wishes and congratulations. I have six months to write my “substantial revisions” to the thesis, a task that will compete for my attention with reading Ink Black Heart and discussing it here with you all.

Of all the characters playfully enjoying the run up to publication day on Twitter, none is more intriguing than Anomie. He has tweeted only thirty two times since joining twitter in June, including the deleted “Sister from another mr.” tweet, which is a possible misidentification for Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. It is notable that an image search for “Mary Elizabeth Coleridge” delivers a photograph for Mary Mapes Dodge and another of Emily Dickenson, explaining both the error by Anomie and our Headmaster. I can in fact only find one genuine photograph of Coleridge online.

 

There are several clues that Anomie has left. An Emily Dickenson poem, shortly after the audio snippet was revealed:

Tweet, tweet. pic.twitter.com/sQ8ymi4AjN

— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 14, 2022

And a snippet from Cattulus 8– advice to himself.

Time flies. https://t.co/gqZ9DsMo4I

— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 21, 2022

There are of course the pictures we discussed on Monday to which Anomie left the following cryptic reply:

Look again. Look closer. Look not at the words.

Yes, I believe this is the same Anomie that posts on Twitter, where he has left similar messages:

The trick is always to look beyond the silhouettes and look in the shadows. https://t.co/SDogOm8Ty7

— Anomie (@AnomieInkBlack) August 11, 2022

What do you think these messages are hinting at? Let me know in the comments down below!