Rowling Tweets About Congenital Blood Condition: von Willebrand Disease

[Tweet url here and here: Hat Tip to Kelly Loomis!]

Rowling had the above twixter conversation with journalist and friend Janet Murray (no known relation to husband Neil Murray) about both women’s struggles to maintain iron levels in their blood. Rowling mentions as an aside her being “diagnosed with von Willebrand’s disease” (VWD) by a haemotologist. VWD is “the most common hereditary coagulopathy in humans, affecting 1% of the population” per Wikipedia.

This was not a revelation, though her discussion of her daily concern with absorbing iron certainly was (imagine writing the haemotologist Roy Phipps scenes in Troubled Blood while surviving on a diet of 90% kale…). She had tweeted about being “born with a bleeding disorder” in December 2025 and Nick Jeffery noted at the time that it was probably VWD because of its prevalence in the population and its appearance in Strike 5. Rowling’s 9/11 tweet confirmed Nick’s Best Guess.

Nick went on from his first post to catalogue in his ‘The Troubled Blood of J. K. Rowling‘ the Blood Golden Thread’s appearances and meaning throughout Rowling’s work. That brilliant exposition was followed up by a Rowling Studies conversation on the same subject, ‘Blood: The Crimson Thread.’ If you were unaware of that strand or commonplace in nearly everything Rowling has written, it’s a fascinating study in the intersection of Rowling’s biographical Lake inspiration and her Shed artistry by which she elevates blood to a social, psychological, and spiritual metaphor.

I confess, though, I’m most interested in Rowling’s ideas about blood because of a twitter header she posted when writing Troubled Blood:

The picture to the left in that combo-header is a curious amalgam of Freemasonry, Medieval woodcuts, soft porn, and organic chemistry with the center of the picture being a molecule of hemoglobin:

Sadly, I have no Hebrew so the letters to the left of the molecule escape me. The Latin around the Eye of Providence (or is it Aberforth?) reads, Oculi Tui Recta Est In Statione Nuclear, which the machine translator says means, “your eyes are right at the nuclear power station.” I suspect it is a play on Proverbs 4:25, “Oculi tui recta videant, et palpebrae tuae praecedant gressus tuos,” “Let your eyes look straight ahead;  fix your gaze directly before you,” which would make the sense of the All-Seeing Eye’s direction be something like, “Don’t take your eyes off the nuclear power station.” 

Google images does not give a source for the image beyond noting that a print of it can be bought for $14.30 at Etsy and that a twin-themed engraving is also available, a Chlorophyll molecule centered piece with another Eye of Providence (“Implosive Compressionem”), a much larger chalice, and a rose in place of the nubile goddess:

The Greek phi I assume is for φῶς (phós) or ‘light’, so the Hebrew in the original might be Iron or Blood.

No one to my knowledge has explained the origin of these images, why Rowling chose ‘The Blood’ image as a mate for the Faerie Queene illustration, and what this has to do with the meaning of Troubled Blood or the Golden Thread of Blood in her work.

My first and so far best guess is that the original artist, one consumed with classical and hermetic symbolism, was struck by how the molecules that “absorb light” in plants and make the blood of animals fix oxygen (making life as we know it possible) both, at least as they are represented structurally, resemble the Cross of Christ. The image to the left is the “Combined Maltese Cross and cross bottony, of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus” (Wikipedia).

This would make the two anachronistic chemical centerpieces jibe with the Chalice of Communion (the Holy Grail), the esoteric single eye, the Hebrew and Greek, and the Rose, especially if understood as a Rosy Cross (cf., the Rosicrucians). The Latin caveats about Nuclear Power Stations and the Implosive Compression — beware fission and fusion reactors? — I leave for more capable exegetes to translate.

I covet as always your comments, questions, and corrections!