If you number years of age as some traditional people do — considering the first year not as “zero years old” but as “one,” turning “two” at the beginning of the second year of life on what we celebrate as the first birthday — Joanne Rowling Murray entered her sixtieth year on 31 July, sailing on her yacht somewhere between Greenland and eastern Canada. She’ll turn 60 in conventional counting on 31 July 2025.
Turning 60 is not a very big deal in the US or UK but it is in the Far East for astrological reasons. Chinese astrology qualifies a year using both a ten year and twelve year cycle, which, taken together, mean that the quality of the birth year reappears only at the end of 60 year combined cycle:
Also named the sexagenary cycle or the stem-branch cycle, the Chinese 60-year calendar cycle is based on the combinations of a cycle of ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches. Each year is named by a pair of one stem and one branch. The Year of Jia Zi (Jia from the heavenly stems and Zi from the earthly branches) is the beginning of the sexagenary cycle. The next Jia Zi Year will come 60 years later.
In Japan the 60th birthday is celebrated with special ceremonies, clothing, and food; the word for it, Kanreki, literally means “rebirth” because the celebrant is beginning again at his or her point of origin. I was living with a very successful Japanese man’s family in Massachusetts in May 1986 and the party on his birthday was something like what in the military is known as a “command call;” his students, business associates, publishers, family, and friends traveled from Japan, North and South America, and all of Europe to salute him. It’s a big deal.
Joanne Rowling was born in July 1965, a year qualified in Oriental astrology as ‘Yin Wood Si Ni Snake.’ The year beginning in February 2025 will have the same qualities. I suppose there are jokes about being a ‘wooden snake’ but as I was born in the year of the Yin Metal Ox, I’ll pass on throwing the first stone at her glass house.
I assume Rowling and the Murray clan will spend her birthday on their yacht floating off a beautiful beach or fjord as has become the family tradition. I thought today to review where Rowling was on her decade birthday celebrations to launch her Kanreki observances near the start of her sixtieth year. Thanks to the anonymous aggregator at The Rowling Library who put together their biographical timeline for The Presence; your efforts made this birthday compilation relatively easy.
Tenth Birthday — July 1975
Rowling’s family moved in 1974 to “Church Cottage, Tutshill, Gloucestershire, England. Rowling attends secondary school at Wyedean School and College” (TRL). Rowling at ten was living in an unhappy home. Casual Vacancy‘s Andrew Price and his painful relationships with his father Simon and mother Ruth is easily read as a transparency of the Rowling family as it was in Joanne’s teen years.
Twentieth Birthday — July 1985
The only entry for 1985 in TRL’s timeline is “Rowling studies in Paris for a year.” She has played with astrology all through her Comprehensive years and meets a couple of expatriots in Paris who are very, very serious about their star-gazing. She is in her third year at the University of Exeter and inside the seven year relationship with “Michael” that ends near her twenty-sixth birthday in 1991, the annus horribilis beginning with her mother’s death on 30 December 1990. July of 1990, though, was the time of her great inspiration: “On a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for Harry Potter appears into her mind. She starts to write that very same night when she arrives to her flat” (TRL).
Thirtieth Birthday — July 1995
Half-way to Kanreki and her “re-birth” as a “wood snake,” Rowling has her Saturn return moment as she turns thirty; “Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (TRL).The five years separating the inspiration of the Hogwarts Saga and the completion of the first book of seven include the death of mum, the break-up with Michael, the move to Portugal, a miscarriage, a marriage, and a pregnancy and child-birth while in relationship with Jorge Arantes, their separation and divorce, her return to the UK, time on the dole, and work as a teacher. Really, a ‘compare-and-contrast’ moment with Robin Ellacott’s five years between twenty-five and thirty and especially her twenty-ninth year in Troubled Blood seems in order, especially its happy conclusion on her 30th birthday.
Fortieth Birthday — July 2005
Two weeks before Rowling turned forty “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury” (TRL). Between 30 and 40, Rowling has written and published six of the seven Harry Potter novels, remarried, had two more children, established the “Children’s High Level Group” (Lumos) and Volant Charities, seen five of her books adapted by Warner Brothers into an epic movie franchise, been recognized on the Queen’s list for her contributions to literature and to philanthropy, and watched from within as her world as a lower middle class woman is exploded by global fame and incomprehensible wealth.
Fiftieth Birthday — July 2015
In July of 2015, Rowling has revealed the title of Cursed Child which is in production and of Career of Evil, which will be published that October. Between her fortieth and fiftieth birthdays, she published Deathly Hallows, Beedle the Bard, Casual Vacancy, and the first two Cormoran Strike novels, Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, collaborated with Thorn on Cursed Child, expanded her charities, and written Career of Evil. We know that she also drafted The Ickabog and began work on what would become Christmas Pig. The Warner Brothers’ film adaptations of Deathly Hallows were released in 2010 and 2011, cementing her Wizarding World as solid gold box office; Fantastic Beasts was announced as a film project in 2013 and filming began weeks after Rowling’s Big Five-Oh. Rowling left Christopher Little, her first agent, for the Blair Partnership in 2011 and ‘Rowling, Inc.,’ aka ‘Fortress Rowling’ is born. Rowling-Galbraith-Murray is at the height of her fame and peak of her progressive icon status. She was featured in the opening of the London Olympic Games in 2012…
Sixtieth Birthday — July 2025
If the Lord tarries through the election cycle in the US (and the Israelis hold off on their pledge to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power), what will be able to say about Rowling’s last ten years in July 2025?
We’ll be able to say that she published four more books in the Cormoran Strike series, to include Troubled Blood, the consensus pick as the best book in that series, she published The Ickabog during the global Covid hysteria, and most recently, The Christmas Pig, a book that I think in time will rival Dickens’ Christmas Carol both as a yuletide yarn and as her representative work as Carol is for Dickens. It has been one of the most productive writing periods of her life.
It has also been the time when she elected to enter the fray to defend women’s safe spaces and children from chemical castration and surgical mutilation in the name of “gender identity.” Those in thrall to the genderists (and the pharmaceutical companies and hospitals profiting from “transgender” mania) did everything possible to “cancel” her; her Fantastic Beasts film franchise was a casualty of that media assault in large part and her credentials as a “liberal” super-star, friend of Prime Minister Brown and President Obama, were revoked along with her Robert Kennedy ‘Ripple of Hope’ Award (Rowling returned it after a Kennedy family member accused her of transphobia and causing harm to “trans” people).
Rowling has been vindicated in her feminist position contra the gender theory extremists in this year’s Cass Review, which caused a roll-back, almost a reversal of pediatric care of those suffering from gender-related mental issues. “The review led to a UK ban on prescribing puberty blockers to those under 18” and restrictions on what had been an “unquestioning affirmative approach” to children and adolescents claiming they were “transgender.” The fight goes on with respect to men who claim to be women being allowed in previously XX women only spaces, from prisons to Olympic boxing rings, and on name-it-and-claim-it IDs for “transgender” people, but the acceptance of the Cass Review by both Labour and Conservative parties in the UK was a public turning point with the genderists now on the defensive.
Rowling is not solely responsible for this historic outcome but she deserves credit in proportion to the calumny she has endured. She has said that she hopes to be remembered as much for her philanthropic endeavors as she will be for her stories; I suspect her sacrificial stand for common sense and for the welfare and well-being of women and young people will be as large a part of her legacy.
If the Japanese are right with their Kanreki practices and her 60th birthday in July 2025 is a “rebirth” of Rowling as yin wood snake, I wonder what that phoenix-like chrysalis will involve. I think we may have seen it already in her second Saturn return alchemical re-invention as a political activist and feminist firebrand, but I’ll be following up on this post next year as we draw closer to the actual day.
Thank you again to TRL for the helpful timeline!
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