Running Grave: The Occult

Running Grave Placeholder Post, Number Seven! The Wild Side of Strike7 —

It’s something of a Publication Week tradition here at HogwartsProfessor to provide an online space for Serious Strikers to share their discoveries as they find them, an alocal place for specific topics we have explored here in the past. It’s a community gathering place — and each placeholder creates a record of findings for topics that otherwise become hopelessly jumbled in the threads of various posts. The seven I am posting for Running Grave are:

• The Gaffes
• Deathly Hallows Parallels
• Cuckoo’s Calling Parallels
• Lethal White Parallels
• The Ghosts
• Literary Alchemy
• The Occult

I confess I had to make a hard choice when I got to number seven on my list of placeholder posts. I’m really looking forward to reading Running Grave, having read the first eleven chapters several times in the last few weeks, because of my interest in the Psychomachia, the Jungian archetypal content with the advent of sister Prudence, and the backdrop mythology of Leda and the Swan, Castor and Pollux, and, most important, Psyche and Cupid. I don’t think these subjects lend themselves to finds or spottings, however, so I elected to go with ‘The Occult.’

What I mean by that slippery word with respect to Running Grave is do we see in the text references to or suggestions of occult practices such as tarot card readings, astrological symbols and natal chart readings, necromancy (!), or divinatory practices such as I Ching yarrow stalk throwings? If we do, what do they tell us?

Every Part and chapter in Styrike7 begins with an epigraph from the I Ching; I have not read more than the first eleven chapters of the yo-yo previewings, but I suspect this will be akin to the previous books, Troubled Blood and Ink Black Heart, in which novels there is no reference to the source of the epigraphs but which books reflect that source material in meaningful ways. The depths, in brief, are in the epigraphs.  Given the divinatory nature of the I Ching in common usage, I think we should be looking for embedded references to such occult or psychic sphere-penetrating practices.

I’m almost hopeful that we will get a second chance to read Rowling’s clues the way she tipped her hand in Strike5 via the illustrations in Talbot’s True Book. I doubt it, but I’m confident that if the opportunity presents itself and I miss it, the Serious Strikers in the HogwartsProfessor reading audience will spot it and share it here. Thank you in advance for that!