Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast

Nick Jeffery and John Granger met on Wednesday this week to talk about John’s epic ‘Index to the First Year of Reading Hallmarked Man’ that was posted a week ago. Both were delighted (and a little surprised?) by the range and depths of the work done here and elsewhere to unpack the eighth Strellacott mystery, easily the most carefully planned and unique of the Strike series.
Below are the ten questions Nick and John asked one another, brief versions of their answers, and links to points they made for listeners wanting to read more about the subjects and previous work mentioned. The conversation ended with a big THANK YOU to the Hogwarts Professor subscribers and the announcement of an announcement (!) coming next week of Real Time conversation with those supporters.
Enjoy this conversation and the links below to highlights from the previous year - and stand by for some exciting news about the coming year’s work at Hogwarts Professor!
Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Ten Questions, Answer Notes, and Links:
[Nota Bene: Nick’s questions to John are in Blue and John’s to Nick are red; Links with bullet points are Nick and John ‘Rowling Studies’ podcasts; non-bulleted links are posts.]
1 -- Happy Anniversary, John! Can you believe it’s been a year since Hallmarked Man was published? What Should we do in commemoration of the Strike Fandom Holiday?
* Three things? First, note how much our thinking about the Strike series has changed from our expectations about Strike 8 to our ever growing appreciation of the complexity and mysteries of Hallmarked Man;
* Next, maybe this is just me, but I wanted to chart somehow that progression and change from date of publication to where we are now, if only to get a clearer picture of where we’re headed – and
* Last, I want to have some kind of party, right? Some kind of gathering, the virtual kind obviously, to celebrate the milestones and our direction as readers --
2 -- So, Nick, I spent my weekend collating an Index of our Hallmarked Man Year’s Greatest Hits. The most shocking piece for me, frankly, was the amount of material we put up in the first months in addition to our podcasts. Do you remember the feeling of a second Kanreki blitz?
* Nick notes: stories of publisher bread crumbs and gaffes, ‘Robin is Sterile’ and ‘Charlotte was Murdered’ strikes, and fandom shock, disappointment and confusion;
* Our ‘hot takes’ here, reader speculations, beginning of Lake and Shed readings
From Hallmarked Man Index Post:
First Impressions: Overwhelm, Cryptonyms
* Three Cheers for The Hallmarked Man! Thoughts After the First Reading
* The Hallmarked Man: A ‘Blitz’ Lake and Shed Reading (with a few Golden Threads)
Hallmarked Man’s Flood of Names, Characters, and Plots
The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part Three
Hallmarked Man as Key to Series Ending, Difficulty Intentional
* Hallmarked Man’s Three ‘Whose My Daddy?’ Set-Ups to Shock Readers in Strikes 9 and 10
* Why Hallmarked Man is the Best Cormoran Strike Novel and Will Be Considered the Key to Unlocking the Series’ Mysteries
Cupid and Psyche Template
* The Hallmarked Man’s Mythological Template
* Valentine’s Day Special: The Cupid and Psyche Myth within the Cormoran Strike Series: Both a Series Template and Traditional Delivery System for the Fundamental Choice in Human Existence, Eros vs Anteros
3 -- Rowling spurred that, John, with writing a very challenging book but also via the Cupid and Psyche tweet. Which of the flood of Fan Theories we discussed did you find the most intriguing?
* Ryan Murphy is Charlotte Campbell’s ‘Dirty Bomb’And Other Mind-Blowing Cogent Arguments and Ideas from Hogwarts Professor Readers
* Robin Ellacott’s Imminent Death and Its Out of This World Effect on Strike: The Christian Text-Within-the-Text of Running Grave Subtly Suggests the Ultimate Twist in Cormoran Strike’s Transformation
4 -- Talking about Robin’s Immanent death and the Charlotte Campbell ‘Dirty Bomb’ were fun, but, Nick, the Fiona and Katya revelations about Shanker may have been the Peak of the Year’s Finds and Reveals, no?
The Mysterious Suicides of Leda Strike and Charlotte Campbell Revisited Post Hallmarked Man: Has Fiona Down Under Revealed the Murderers of both Strike’s Mother and Milady Bezerko? Was a Busted Drug Deal with Gangsters and Campbell-Longcaster Incest and Adultery behind it All?
Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker: Katya Slonenko’s Deductions from Shanker Comments about His Dear Old Dad in ‘The Hallmarked Man’
* Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ Leda Strike’s Tattoo, Her First Husband’s Real Name, and The Dress: A Conversation with Katya Slonenko about Her Strike-Ellacott Theories and Others from Reddit’s r/CormoranStrike Community
5 -- That was like reading Strike 9 in advance, John, wasn’t it? Shades of ‘Robin is Sterile’! But the wheels almost fell off the cart when it came to the Incest speculation. Funny that it was a Golden Thread through all her work, though, not just Hallmarked Man...
Incest Notes and Theories
* Jonny Rokeby was both Cormoran and Charlotte’s Father: The Incest Twist Rowling Has Hidden Inside the Strike Series
* Is Rowling’s Incest ‘Golden Thread’ the Key to Her Cormoran Strike Finale? That Seems to Be the Strong Trend in the Theories Offered by Serious Strikers at Hogwarts Professor
6 -- But, Nick, what a Year for a Trip to the Lake -- Rowling’s Charlie Kirk tweets, the Charm Bracelet, the Congenital Blood Disease -- was your cup running over?
JKR — VWD!
Rowling Tweets About Congenital Blood Condition: von Willebrand Disease
* Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s Tweets after the Shooting of Charlie Kirk
The Troubled Blood of J. K. Rowling: Blood as a Golden Thread in all her Works
* Blood! The Crimson Thread: Exploring the Lake Inspiration of Blood in the Works of J. K. Rowling
The Christmas Charm Bracelet Conversations with Elizabeth Baird-Hardy:
* The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part One)
* The Christmas Charm Bracelet of Strike 9 Clues (Part Two)
Rowling Tweets about Changed Beliefs — and Her Beliefs about “Religious Faith”
Perhaps the most important of Rowling’s revelations in the past year were the ones she made about her beliefs consequent to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Specifically on 12 September 2025 she wrote about the beliefs she has changed, in which tweet she concluded with thoughts about God and “religious faith:”
The distinction implicit in Rowling’s “God conundrum” is between (a) “religious faith,” conformity to the beliefs and practices of a specific revelation, and (b) belief in God. Her posture of enlightened agnosticism with respect to God, being unable to believe “without seeing proof,” while acknowledging the “God-shaped vacuum inside me,” an existential proof of same she experiences, is, frankly, only sophistry. It is verbiage draped over her all-too-human inability to reject those core beliefs she has qua postmodern that religious faith requires she reject for communion with God.
[If you struggle earnestly and honestly with these same issues, I recommend to you what I would to Rowling as I have to Nick, namely, that you read James Cutsinger’s Advice for the Serious Seeker and Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. What Chesterton said about Christianity is as true about “religious faith” in general, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting but found difficult and left untried.” Pedestrian agnosticism and adolescent atheism today are less markers of sophistication and thoughtfulness, being ‘above the herd,’ than unthinking captivity to the zeitgeist and to one’s unexamined beliefs.]
7 -- That was a Big Year for us Lake Dwellers, John, but Hogwarts Professor, I think, will always be a Shed site until Rowling agrees to an interview with Veritaserum. And the Shed work we did with Hallmarked Man was significant; what was your favorite part of that?
‘The Group Adventure of Charting Hallmarked Man’ (Fourteen Posts) was a landmark event in Rowling Studies, frankly, and a proof that Strike 8 was one of if not THE most carefully planned novels — which proof serves as a corrective rebuke to readers who thought it was a careless melange of confusing and conflicting plot lines, the “worst of the series.”
* The Group Adventure of Charting Hallmarked Man’s Rings: Part Ten and Epilogue, Chapters 117-127 (post to the other thirteen posts in this series are at the bottom of this post)
8 -- For me the Gang of Five independent Ring Reading of Hallmarked Man will always be the stand-out of the past year. But you brought the Lake into the Shed with your Read-Along-with-Nick Book club this year! Two epic poems by the Brownings, a Bildungsroman classic by Dodie Smith, and another C. S. Lewis template -- what was the goal and what was the highlight for you in those readings?
Nick’s Reading List Online:
Rowling’s Admitted Literary Influences (December 2020)
Important Side Texts: The Ring and the Book, Aurora Leigh, I Capture the Castle,‘Till We Have Faces
The Ring and The Book – A Rowling Reading
* What the Hallmarked Man Epigraphs Reveal About Rowling-Galbraith’s Artistry and Meaning
A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh
* Talking About ‘A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh‘
A J. K. Rowling Reading of I Capture the Castle
* The Most Influential Book Rowling Read as a Child Wanting to Be a Writer is Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle
‘Till We Have Faces
C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part One) Is ‘Till We Have Faces’ the The Thematic Template for the ‘Strike-Ellacott’ Series?
C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’ and Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series (Part Two): John Granger’s thoughts on the seven points of intersection between CSL’s retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth and JKR’s use of the same myth as a psychomachian story template
* A Spirited Conversation about Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike Series and C. S. Lewis’ ‘Till We Have Faces’: What does the 1956 re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth tell Serious Strikers about Rowling’s re-imagining of the same tale
9 -- Our Paid Subscribers, John, had the opportunity to read Livingston’s Traditional Theory of Literature with you. That took up a lot of your band-space, I know, because it led to your Symbolism of G posts. Why did you think republishing Livingston on Coomaraswamy was so important?
In brief, Nick, it was because the most important work we did in Rowling Studies, I think, was not the exercise in Ring Reading that served as a demonstration of what we already suspected, but the synthesis change in how we read Rowling, namely, a shift in our Critical Perspective and Orientation. That was represented by our reprinting The Traditional Theory of Literature by Ray Livingston and our printing currently my PhD thesis draft on this same subject.
The Livingston part of this Hogwarts Professor project for Paid Subscribers served as an in-depth introduction to the Perennialist interpretation of fiction, the counter and correction to Critique and to the profane reading of sacred art-in-story. It is the republication by chapters of The Traditional Theory of Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1962), a book by Ray Livingston that makes reading the otherwise inaccessible Ananda Coomaraswamy the transformative experience it is.
If you want to grasp what Rowling is all about, why she has chosen the Shed tools she has and what those choices reveal about her Dante-esque intentions as a writer, you need to wrestle with The Traditional Theory of Literature. Or you can read my PhD thesis draft on the same subject, ‘A Revelation of the Real: A Perennialist Reading of J. K. Rowling’s Work’!
Chapter Seven: Conclusion and Appendix
(links to all the other posted chapters are at the beginning of this post)
10 -- Nick, you talk about our Guests on the podcasts, please, and our Guest Posts. I think that’s an essential part of what we do here, but coming from you, one of the great discoveries of Hogwarts Professor, it will mean a lot more
Podcast Guests and Guest Posts:
Dimitra Fimi
* Reading Rowling as Myth Maker and Myth Re-Writer: A Conversation with Dr Dimitra Fimi
* ‘Sleep Tight, Evangeline,’ Miniature Psalters, and the Head of Persephone: A Conversation with Dimitra Fimi: Nick and John sit down with the renowned Tolkien scholar to quiz her about the meaning of Rowling’s yuletide charm bracelet, mythological templates, and Strike9 title
Ed Shardlow
Guest Post: The Pride of Lions in ‘The Hallmarked Man’: Ed Shardlow discusses the many lions on the surface, behind a corner, or well-concealed within Rowling-Galbraith’s Eighth Cormoran Strike Novel
Hallmarked Man Notes: The Christmas Charm Bracelet Decoded, Tod Jameson and the Ectopic Pregnancy, and Venetian Blinds: Ed Shardlow shares his ‘Nuggets of Silver’ about over-looked meanings in Rowling-Galbraith’s Hallmarked Man
* The Hidden Narratives and Interpretive Ciphers Beneath the Surface Story of Hallmarked Man: Ed Shardlow speaks with Nick Jeffery and John Granger about Stories inside the Strike 8 Story that Re-tell the Story and Explain Its Meaning
The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog: Strike 8 and Rowling’s Fractured Fairy Tale are Parallel Texts
* The First Seven Strike Novels Paralleled Their Seven Harry Potter Equivalents; What Rowling Work Did The Hallmarked Man Parallel? Ed Shardlow makes the Argument in Conversation with John and Nick that Strike 8 is a Fun Re-Visiting of the Themes, Scenes, and Characters of Rowling’s ‘Ickabog’ Fairy Tale
Katya Slonenko
Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker: Katya Slonenko’s Deductions from Shanker Comments about His Dear Old Dad in ‘The Hallmarked Man’
Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike’s ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salts’ Pudenda Tattoo: Strike Fandom’s Leading Tattoo Artist Explains What Tattoos Mean in the Strike Novels and Explores Why Cormoran’s Mum Would Put a Song Title in Ink Where She Did
* Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ Leda Strike’s Tattoo, Her First Husband’s Real Name, and The Dress: A Conversation with Katya Slonenko about Her Strike-Ellacott Theories and Others from Reddit’s r/CormoranStrike Community
Solomon Schmidt
* A Pen to Change the World: Conversation with Solomon Schmidt, Rowling-Galbraith Biographer (Part One): Nick Jeffery and John Granger talk with Solomon Schmidt about the Adventure of Writing a Rowling Biography Today
* A Pen to Change the World: Conversation with Solomon Schmidt, Rowling-Galbraith Biographer (Part Two) — Nick Jeffery and John Granger talk with Solomon Schmidt about what he’d ask Rowling as a biographer if given the chance --and he asks them what they would ask, with and without Veritaserum
Conclusions: First Anniversary Status Quo
Three conclusions to an overly long Hallmarked Man Year One Review:
1. It’s Been a Great Year! I think we’re well positioned for Strike 9 and for another year of discoveries via a Slow Mining of Strike 8.
2. Next Year Promises to be Even Better! It may be a little slow in Strike fandom relatively speaking, but, with rumors of a Christmas Pig animated special and trailers for the adaptations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the air, we’re going to be very busy here. And —
3. We’ll Be Breaking New Ground Here as Always! We have found an online platform to host online courses and classes for sharing the heights, depths, and breadth of traditional reading, not to mention practical seminars in how to identify and use the tools that Rowling deploys.
All of which classes will be free or at a Close-to-Free discount for our Paid Subscribers here. That’s our thank you for your generosity and in acknowledgement of your brilliance. Stay tuned!
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

Nick and John get together to discuss three HogwartsProfessor posts about the All New Hogwarts House Emblems and Rowling’s commentary via three emojis about the recent trailer for the Bronte Studios adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. You can read those posts via these links:
The HBO+ Potter Trailer: The Meaning of Rowling’s Heart, Owl, and Lightning Bolt
HBO’s Harry Potter and the Alchemical Symbols
The New Hogwarts House Emblems and Their Alchemical and Plant Symbolism
Or you can just jump right into the conversation via the questions, notes and links below!
Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Ten Questions Guiding this Conversation: Nick in Red, John in Blue
1. G’day, John! Great to see you, your chin, and hairline again! You posted a short piece over at the HogwartsProfessor weblog this week about a seemingly meaningless Rowling tweet that shared a new trailer for the HBO+ adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She only ‘wrote’ three emojis, but, even though you wrote was only several paragraphs long, it said a lot. Why do such a deep-dive into these perhaps offhand fan-servicing signals?
* All the signals or emojis are traditional symbols, so, offhand or not, they're markers of the choice a serious reader has to make about understanding Rowling's work properly;
* Is it literary sacred art as her Shed tool choices suggest or just creative personal expressions for our diversion and entertainment?
* Rowling is signaling us, as you say, that it is the former with these three emojis.
* T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ (InterNet Poem)
We had the experience but missed the meaning
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
in a different form
2. Let’s take a closer look, then! The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt -- what does the Rowling fan, from “ten years old to seventy,” see right away before they stretch for the traditional meaning?
* Heart – Rowling is pleased; we should be, too; heart as sentiment, love token.
* Owl – Hedwig in Stone, important message being delivered, ‘pet’ project of Rowling’s.
* Lightning Bolt – The Boy Who Lived’s signature mark, news out of the blue or ‘news flash’
3. And there’s more? What traditional meanings do these emojis have?
* The Heart to Rowling is a lot more than a token of sentiment. It is a Golden Thread in her work that the Heart is a pulsing symbol of the human spiritual capacity. Only the Eye does as much heavy freight of meaning lifting in her work and I think the Heart surpasses the Eye ultimately in importance except insomuch as she elides their meaning. Read The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center for discussion of the symbolism and the Golden Thread.
* The Owl, too, is an ancient and dynamic symbol, the reason frankly there is a Hedwig rather than Hedwig being the meaning of the token. Rowling clearly draws on her experience of owls in Greek mythology (and reading of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad drawing on the same source) in making the owl the vessel of communication and supernatural perception in her Wizarding World. None of the letters written by her witches and wizards need to be addressed because an owl is so attuned to everyone and everything that it is able effortlessly to understand where it needs to go, God’s own GPS. What is usually described as a symbol of Wisdom is clearly much more a revelation of a mind able to grasp the great interconnectedness of things which in turns takes us back to the Eye and the Heart — and what Rowling is trying to bring to readers in her transformative literature. (Contrast this Greek mythology symbolism with what owls represent in Christian scripture; quite the gulf between Athens and Jerusalem there!)
* But the wisdom piece is there, too! Rowling is writing at four levels of story that correspond with the four ways of human knowing, of which the last and most important is gnosis or wisdom, the so-called anagogical layer of meaning that no less a light than Flannery O’Connor said was the whole point of writing and reading. If you’re writing for the Heart or to illumine the Eye of the Heart, the goal is transformative imaginative experience fostering wisdom.
* And the Lightning Bolt? The forehead scar, the mark of Orestes, the Greek hero who avenged his father’s betrayal and murder, is another polyvalent and profoundly spiritual cipher as a lightning bolt. In it simultaneously the reader experiences simultaneously as we do in a thunder storm albeit imaginatively (1) sudden illumination or enlightenment, (2) from above, the heavens, the super-conscious realm, and, most important, (3) a reorientating shock, a cathartic shaking, the jolting moment that jars us out of our psychological rut and cage to see the world afresh with our ‘eye of the heart.’
* Rowling’s three emojis on her tweet about the fun trailer below can be read as fan servicing variations on the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘hand-clapping’ using tokens associated with the books. No doubt about that reading.
* I think it as important to note, however, the possibility that Mrs Murray is signaling to the HBO+ audience as well as the international of readers that this adaptation is about trying to reproduce as much as is possible in an iconoclastic medium some replica of the imaginative and transformative experience to be had in the books. The Heart, the Owl, and the Lightning Bolt all point to that experience and depth of meaning.
4. Which segues nicely to your brief post, Nick, on the HBO+ adaptations and its choices in how to represent the four Hogwarts Houses: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin. (”Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweek,” anyone?) Can you review what the books say are the proper representations, the heraldic glyphs most appropriate to each house?
5. Has Rowling added content or context for why she chose those specific representations?
[Anelli-Spartz Interview discussion of four elements]
JKR: But they’re not all — don’t think I don’t take your point, but — we, the reader, and I as the writer, because I’m leading you all there — you are seeing Slytherin house always from the perspective of Death Eaters’ children. They are a small fraction of the total Slytherin population. I’m not saying all the other Slytherins are adorable, but they’re certainly not Draco, they’re certainly not, you know, Crabbe and Goyle. They’re not all like that, that would be too brutal for words, wouldn’t it?
ES: But there aren’t a lot of Death Eater children in the other houses, are there?
JKR: You will have people connected with Death Eaters in the other houses, yeah, absolutely.
ES: Just in lesser numbers.
JKR: Probably. I hear you. It is the tradition to have four houses, but in this case, I wanted them to correspond roughly to the four elements. So Gryffindor is fire, Ravenclaw is air, Hufflepuff is earth, and Slytherin is water, hence the fact that their common room is under the lake. So again, it was this idea of harmony and balance, that you had four necessary components and by integrating them you would make a very strong place. But they remain fragmented, as we know.
More on Elements and Humours at HogwartsProfessor:
* Ben Jonson’s Every Man and His Humor
* The Crimes of Grindelwald Group Portrait: A Study in Temperaments
6. Where did the Warner Brothers film adaptations depart from and stick to the page-and-interview House heraldry?
* The animal representations as often as not are facing in the wrong direction, sinister rather than dexter and vice versa; AND
* The Ravenclaw eagle of the books became a raven and their House colors become dark and light shades of blue rather than blue and copper.
7. But those corrections aren't the most interesting changes or corrections in these new House shields, are they? What are the extras we're given that weren't suggested in the original texts but implicit in the interview material?
[Hat Tip to Sad-Ad-9273 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for these screen catches!]
* Note the vegetation in the Banners and the Emblems: the acorns in the Gryffindor mean the Oak tree is its symbol; the white berries in Slytherin suggest holly, per Sandra Miesel Kopec, the laurel tree seems a match for Ravenclaw and ivy for Hufflepuff;
* Check out a website devoted to these things, ‘What Do Leaves Represent on a Coat of Arms,’ for the meaning of these plant associations with each house or share your own ideas in the comment boxes below!
8. What is with the ornamentation on those triangles? The Slytherin circle, the sideways line and paleolithic horse on Gryffindor, the Ravenclaw ‘V,’ and the Hufflepuff cup and ‘V’? Are these Founder’s treasure tokens that become Horcruxes? If so, are there traditional meanings as well as plot points, e.g., Tarot Card qualities?
[Hat Tip to LightAngel452 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for the brilliant graphic! LightAngel also picked up on the alchemical symbols.]
* The Emblems material that gets heady involves the melange of symbols and signs in their respective headboards;
* Slytherin has an easily discerned ‘S,’ the suggestion of the House’s signature serpent, and the Horcrux locket of Salazar Slytherin;
* Ravenclaw’s header with a little head turning and squinting has an ‘R,’ the V inserted looks like a diadem, and simultaneously it has what looks like an eagle in flight from a distance;
* Gryffindor does not seem to include the ‘G’ we’d expect, but the Sword of Gryffindor, and the paleolithic horse a Medieval knight be riding are evident;
* Hufflepuff gets the best of the lot, though, with its distractingly obvious cup obscuring how the ‘V’ within the inverted triangle and its bisecting line yields both the stripes of a badger and Helga Hufflepuff’s initials!
* That’s great stuff, Nick, but the real catch, I think, was what you shared in your post about the alchemical symbols for the Four Elements, the triangles illustrated in the Wikipedia page for such things and in The Book of Alchemy (Chapter 9, ‘The Four Elements,’ pp 111-128 [pdf numbering]; Air triangle 119, Water, Fire, Star of David 115, Earth “no predetermined figure” 113-114)
* The meaning of those triangles, especially their direction and the bisecting lines in the symbols for Earth and Air, can be found in Titus Burckhardt’s Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, a book we can be pretty sure Rowling read because the Penguin paperback available when she was a Comprehensive student featured Rubeus Hagrid, hermaphroditic giant, with a dragon, both astride a Golden Snitch, on its cover:
* Burckhardt explains that the symbols are understood correctly in their harmonious combination or elision as the Seal of Solomon (‘Star of David’) [pp 74-75];
* The bisecting lines of the Earth and Air symbols is from the base lines of the triangle in the Seal that brings the whole into balance;
* Which representations align perfectly with Rowling’s attempt to explain the Four Houses as the Four Elements and how the goal or telos of each is its harmonious integration with the others, i.e., the Seal of Solomon;
* We may not be able to say that Rowling told Bronte Studios to use these symbols on their respective Hogwarts House emblems, but its undeniable I think that the HBO+ adaptations are going to be risibly rich in traditional symbolism that most readers may or may not notice but which they will not ‘get’ without some serious study.
9. And, John, you’re putting up a post later today about the New Potter Mania and how it will look like the old Potter Mania and still be qualitatively different. We’ll probably do a whole show to talk about that but what are the highlights?
* Not today, but very soon!
10. And I see you’re putting up material for the Paid Subscribers on just that subject?
* Paid Subscribers will be receiving chapters from the Perennialist PhD thesis draft I wrote that Dimitra Fimi rescued from the fireplace;
* I’m meeting with an online course platform owner today that I’m all but certain will be hosting the Wizard Reading Formula classes I gave in 2017 which will be free to Paid Subscribers;
* And which will serve as a run-up to and acid test for our ten week week ‘Lake, Shed, Golden Thread’ course that will launch in 2027, maybe even at Christmas time 2026 for folks to give themselves their friends and family as presents
* Stay tuned!
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

Nick Jeffery and freshly Shorn & Clean Shaven John Granger sit down to discuss John’s two posts about the symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in Strike 8. Part One of the series did the necessary work of demonstrating that, yes, the letter ‘G’ is all over Hallmarked Man, from the online guess that the murderer carved that initial into ‘William Wright’s back to the Witness G echoing with Green-jacked Gorilla-bearing man and a bit of calligraphic terrorism on the Agency door at street-level. The first also covered the accepted Masonic interpretations of why the ‘G’ is featured in the Compass and Square symbolism of their fraternity.
Part Two was a deep dive into more esoteric meanings given to the ‘G’ by Freemasons and by Rene Guenon, notable Perennialist, and into what associations Rowling-Galbraith tried to make between the seventh letter and the key hallmark of the book. It concluded with three answers to “So What?” including some fun speculation about a possible shape for the series, a shape highlighted in Strike 8, and with a discussion of whether Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal artistry with ‘G’ worked or failed.
Perhaps the biggest take-away of this series of posts was to introduce subliminal coloration as the common denominator of Rowling-Galbraith’s signature seven Shed tools. Nick and John open their conversation about the letter ‘G’ with that subject and everything they discuss in the end folds back into that covert artistry.
As always, the Dynamic Duo covet your comments and feedback as the best follow-up to their conversation. Please jump right in!
Hogwarts Professor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Ten Questions and Relevant Links
1. Okay, John, let’s talk coloration. You mentioned some examples in famous authors’ work in Part One of your deep dive into Letter G Symbolism in Hallmarked Man; do we have coloration in Harry Potter? Another Strike novel?
* ‘Donegality’ in Planet Narnia, Michael Ward, the subliminal artistry of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad;
* From ‘Literary Alchemy: Sacred Science, Sacred Art, and the Alembic of Story’
C. S. Lewis, according to Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, also felt appreciating the “manner of the author,” his “various special tricks,” especially those connected to creating atmosphere, were critical to understanding the style of the Greats.
Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be ‘cryptic, significant, full of voices, and the mystery of life.’ Lovers of romances go ‘back to fruit tree for its taste; to an air for… what? For itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere – to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness’ (Ward, 16).
Donegal was one of Lewis’favorite vacation spots as a child in Northern Ireland. Ward defined Lewis’ stylistic atmosphere as his ‘Donegality:’
By donegality we mean to denote the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. The donegality of the story is its peculiar and deliberated atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavor; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text… the more influentially to inform the work and so affect the reader (Ward 75).
Ward’s concern is especially with Lewis’ character Aslan, in whom this donegality is “concentrated and consummated” as a “Christologically representative character” (Idem), but the thesis of Planet Narnia is that the “kappa-element,”[xiv] Lewis’ phrase for the informing, hidden “tutelary but tacit” style of a work, is astrological symbolism, each of the Narnia chronicles representing one of the seven traditional planets. Ward argues that Lewis’ subliminal artistry, the “inner weave” or style of his work in Nabokovian language, is the embedded mythological and astral metaphors to be found beneath the surface of each story. Twain is supposed to have said, “”If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach, but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.” Lewis, believing as he did that “an influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep” (Lewis no date), wrote in astrological glyphs to reach covertly his reader’s unconscious depths or noetic heights.
* ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows’ in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, John Granger, and, briefly, here, and 2010 lecture at New York Public Library; and
* ‘The Cross Symbolism of Troubled Blood,’ John Granger
2. You list those eyes and crosses and I confess it didn’t strike me on my first and repeated readings that there were so many of those. What made you notice all the ‘G’s in Strike 8?
* I confess that I didn’t make anything of the letter ‘G’s repeated appearances in Hallmarked Man until I saw that Rene Guenon, the most famous and profoundly metaphysical of the first 20th Century Perennialists, had written a brief essay in his youth, ‘The Letter G and the Swastika.’ I made that discovery inadvertently when looking for something else in Fundamental Symbols, a posthumous collection of his writing (downloadable as pdf here).
3. Let’s play ‘Name a G passage;’ I’ll start with the G supposedly carved into William Wright’s back and you name another until we’re both out of examples...
Robin’s research into the death of ‘William Wright’ in the Ramsey Silver shop vault begins with an online observer saying out of the blue that a ‘G’ was carved into the victim’s back and that this was tied to the Secret Word of Freemasonry and the legend of Hiram Abiff’s martyrdom. Rowling-Galbraith has Robin mention this to Murphy at their first unofficial briefing on the case and Murphy all but explodes; he denies it was a ‘G’ and says he heard it was a “hallmark” instead.
The letter is associated with Freemasonry as their symbolic center (GAOTU) via a telephone message and in Strike’s meeting with ‘Hiram’ Hardacre.
We learn after Robin’s being attacked in Harrow’s that she was ‘Witness G’ in her rapist’s trial, the letter being to her something like a secret identity.
Strike not long thereafter finds a blood Red Letter ‘G’ painted on the street level door to the Agency which he hopes is a Masonic terrorist marker rather than the pointed suggestion that the Angel of Death is coming for Witness G.
I’d add that the Gorilla mask and doll of the Green jacket man that haunt Robin have some of their subliminal effect on her and the reader because of the initial guttoral sound of ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Green.’
4. The Freemason connection is the most interesting one even though the Masonic G isn’t carved into Powell’s back (it’s a Salem Cross and the only other twice played symbol is the orb and cross pendant Strike buys for the charm bracelet Christmas present). Who knew that the capital ‘G’ was such a big deal in Masonry?
5. At the end of Part One, I thought you’d pretty much covered the symbolism and were going to close in Part Two with what God and Geometry are about in Hallmarked Man, hence the coloration. Instead you wrote that the G being a one-letter acronym wasn’t enough. Why not?
* not Masonic -- no edges!
* not ancient Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit,
* not tied to craft symbolism,
* not a symbol!,
* the catechism answer “By letters four and science five, this G aright doth stand in due art and proportion’.”
6. So was Guenon’s essay the key to Rowling’s use of the letter ‘G’?
* Yes and no!
* His Symbolism of the Cross, Lord of the World, and The Great Triad chapters help a lot but from ‘The Letter G and the Swastika’ we learn that
* yod is God is gamma,
* catechism answer means four gammas or four yodhs which both yield swastikas (gammadion cross),
* GAOTUmeans Christ the keystone/cornerstone,
* the sequence of jumps from letter ‘G’ to Murphy’s Salem Cross...
7. Who backed Guenon up on this connection so you weren’t using the Perennialist hammer to drive in a screw or fasten a bolt?
* Cockburn, Crypto Curry, Albert Pike (via Tamara/Tamspells!)
8. If I accept the preponderance of ‘G’s in Hallmarked Man as coloration/Donegality (I do) and the meaning of the symbolism per your readers (I’m withholding skeptical judgement), what effect was this supposed to have on me the reader so I can tell you if it worked or not? If it was supposed to confuse me, boffo job!
* Nabokovian potustoronost,
* numinous quality in the air,
* Robin as ‘Witness G, ‘
* Strike channeling Tyler Powell at finish in Ironbridge
9. Will we see Freemasonry and its symbolism in Strikes 9 and 10?
Maybe! [Rowling-Galbraith] certainly has made us long for a big pay-off with respect to ‘G;’ see Sarah Keeler’s idea that it may be a pointer to Gillespie reappearing in Strike 9. I love that possibility and it certainly is in keeping with the HogwartsProfessor working thesis that Hallmarked Man is what it is to set up the next two books. If we’re going to see characters and themes bleed between the first book of the last three and its successors, why not its symbolism?
If I had to bet money on it, though, I think we probably won’t see more Freemasonry or Big ‘G’ payoffs. It kills me to say that given the investment I’ve made in books about the Masons (they’re on a shelf beneath the dust-collecting little library on Mormon history and scriptures I collected while writing about Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight books). I just cannot see her weaving the Mason characters from Hallmarked Man into story lines that give us resolution with respect to Charlotte’s and Leda’s supposed suicides twenty some years apart, Shanker’s family history, and the mysteries around Strike’s time with the military police, especially the IED that nearly killed him.
10. I thought you promised not to get into the Strike Series Shape Sweepstakes? You’ve already said you think it’s a seven part ring with a triangle-trilogy addendum and in Part Two you give us a Harry Potter shape for the decalogy structure -- or is it Christmas Pig?



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Late last month, John shared two theories about the Cormoran Strike series of novels, both from Katya Slonenko, a member of the Reddit r/CormoranStrike online fandom: Dementia, Jewelry, and a Nine Inch Cock: The Mystery of Shanker’s ‘Old Man,’ His Given Name, and Why He’s Never Killed Jeff Whittaker and Katya Slonenko: Leda Strike's 'Mistress of the Salmon Salts' Pudenda Tattoo. John corresponded with Katya while preparing those posts and invited her to join him and Nick for a discussion of her ideas, of life as a Redditor, and her thoughts about Rowling’s artistry and meaning. She accepted the invitation but said she wouldn’t be free until July to talk.
Hence the wait! As expected, though, speaking with her about her own journey to expertise in Rowling Studies, her ideas about the clues Rowling has embedded so carefully within the first eight books and especially in Hallmarked Man, and the Reddit posts of which she thinks Hogwarts Professor readers need to be aware was well worth the wait.
You’ll want to read those posts from June before listening to get the most out of this conversation, but, regardless of your preparation, John and Nick believe that every Serious Striker and Rowling Reader will be charmed and challenged by Katya’s remarkable insights, generous spirit, and winsome personality. The conversation includes three other Reddit community posts — about Leda’s ‘Carnival’ dress (Arachulia), about the real name of her first husband, and about the Harry Potter tattoo Rowling-Galbraith hid on a Strike novel character’s shoulder — which took the discussion above and beyond the two Katya theories in the June posts.
Nick and John close the conversation by inviting her back and they hope readers here will share the questions they want us to be sure to ask her on her return visit in the comment thread below. Or just ask her yourself! As she demonstrated on the threads beneath the June posts, she is generous with her time in responding to other Strike fans.
Can’t wait for more Katya Slonenko? Follow her at r/CormoranStrike, on Instagram (Tattoos!), on FaceBook, and check our her older, longer posts on Medium…
The Ten Plus Questions with Links
1. Welcome, Katya, and thank you for joining us! The serious readers at Hogwarts Professor have been buzzing about your Shanker and Leda r/Cormoran Strike Reddit posts and we’re thrilled to be able to talk with you about those ideas. First, though, tell us about your first Rowling reading experiences and how you started posting on Reddit about the Strike series.
2. I’m guessing that Reddit Strike fandom may be as unfamiliar to Hogwarts Professor readers as it was to me. What is it about the Pelican_Girl and TopRequirement670 moderated posts and that international community that you love the most?
3. Shanker! I confess -- I hadn’t given him a thought really beyond a doppelganger twin for Strike before Fiona from Adelaide introduced me to the ideas that he had to be involved in the death of Leda Strike and that the Riccis were also somehow party to it. Ed Shardlow shared your Reddit post on the subject and my mind was blown; you made a compelling case soon after the publication of Hallmarked Man last year that Shanker is a Ricci, the illegitimate son of Nico ‘Muccy’ Ricci, but to avenge Leda Strike’s death he has become a Met or MI5 informer.
Let’s start with the four pointers that Shanker gave Strike in one conversation that he is a Ricci-by-blood and what made you think of that connection:
* Shanker’s statement that his father had dementia or was senile;
* Shanker’s report that his dad taught that jewelry was the way to a woman’s heart;
* Shanker’s claim that his ‘old man’ was said to have a “nine inch cock;” and
* Shanker’s saying that his begetter “‘ad kids wiv abou’ ten diff’rent women.”
4. I see the trigger now that you’ve detailed it but you dug and made four more connections that were buried in the texts of the series’ other books:
* Shanker’s knowledge of the Ricci clan, especially Mucky,
* his Strike-witnessed working with Mucky in drug deals,
* “he deals cocaine and is good with a knife;” and, best of all,
* the reaction Robin had to both Shanker and Luca at their first meeting, the fun-house mirror upside-down reflection of the attraction half-siblings feel for another intuitively. Robin is viscerally repulsed and afraid of the half-sibling Ricci boys.
We cannot not see these connections after you point them out, but they’re nigh on invisible until they’re pointed out! Why do you think you saw them when we missed them -- and why do you think Rowling has taken such care to make them invisible in plain sight?
5. And Shanker is an MI5 informant? Where does that come from?
5.5 Let’s not forget that you also make an intelligent guess, the first one I’ve heard, about what Shanker’s given name really is, one based on the names of Nico Ricci’s two children out of ten for whom we have names.
* Katya shared not only her reasoning about why Shanker’s name is John or an Italian variant of the Evangelist’s name but also her theory about the parentage and name of the other remaining character in the series who also remains nameless: the mysterious ‘Strike’ with whom Leda ran away from Cornwall! (Be sure to read the comment thread for Redditor conversation about other possible Ricci children…)
6. Your thoughts about Shanker all feed into theories about Leda Strike and her mysterious death in the end, which brings us to another aspect of her life and death about which you’ve brought an important and unique perspective. I’m talking about the Mistress of the Salmon Salt tattoo. Did you know anything about tattoos, Katya, before writing this piece?
7. As a tattoo artist yourself, what do you make of Leda’s tattoo placement?
8. Tattoos are meaningful, powerful reflections or revelations of the person’s interior life or self-understanding (see the post about Katya’s ‘Salmon Salt Tattoo’ theory for much more on this). What do you think this tattoo communicates about Leda? Is it another example of Rowling’s text-within-the-text or a variant of her using cryptonyms to signal important information about a character’s inner life?
What Tattoos Mean in Cormoran Strike and a Catalog of Examples
* From Katya’s 2023 ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt Revisited:’
I hear you asking - why can’t Leda’s be just a tattoo, without any deeper meaning to it? That’s because all the other tattoos in the Strike books have meaning and provide a clue to their wearers’ characters.
Here are some examples:
* Kelsey Pratt’s One Direction tattoo is an obvious link to her being a One Direction fan. (How Leda’s tattoo is different? She chose the name of the particular song, not the more generic name of the band, to be tattooed on her)
* Laing’s rose pierced with a dagger bluntly means violence to women. Rose is a woman in the language of symbols, while the dagger is… well, a dagger.
* Polworth’s St Piran’s cross means he’s a Cornish patriot. I’ll be surprised if it also doesn’t mark him as The Hanged Man (a symbolic bearer of a cross)
* Portia Bayliss’s trident refers to her Caribbean roots
* Edie had a small black heart on the knuckles because she was the creator of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ cartoon.
* Zoe’s tattoos are of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ characters she identifies with.
* Pez Pierce has The Beatles quote around his neck - Strawberry Fields was (is?) a place in Liverpool.
* Union Jack, a skull, and a Nordic “Chaos” rune give a good impression of what the Turisaz character will be about (all tattooed on visible spots like head or neck - he wears them proudly!);
* Same with Algiz and Uruz, sans the Union Jack and the skull.
* Noli Seymour’s tattoo stands for “Golden Prophet”. It denotes her connection to the Universal Humanitarian Church and her status there as the current Golden Prophet.
* An ace of spades was inked onto his left cheek, and a tattooed tiger covered his throat. - Jordan Reaney’s tattoos are pretty telling, too.
* Not a character, but still - JK herself has a tattoo, “Solve et Coagula”, which means - “I’m a writer of an alchemical detective series!” :D
So you see, all these tattoos are chosen to reflect their owners’ personal histories. That’s generally a feature of Rowling’s writing: if she describes a character, every little detail works for the portrait she wants to paint. There are no details put there “just because” - everything is important. How the characters dress and speak, what they eat and drink, what music they listen to, and what tattoos they have tell us something about the character.
What does Leda’s tattoo contribute to her portrait?
Nothing!
In Career of Evil, when we learn of its existence, the tattoo adds literally nothing to Leda’s portrait. Why is it mentioned in the story to which it makes zero contribution, except for serving as a plot device enabling the killer’s obsession?
Because it will be important later.
* Katya shared in her answer her theory from experience that Rowling-Galbraith had secretly marked a character as a Harry Potter fan by giving her a shoulder tattoo that Potter-heads would recognize!
9. Rowling’s Solve et Coagula tattoo: what do you think she is telling the world about herself? Is there a correspondence or tie between the author’s tattoo and its placement and Leda’s?
10. Whittaker quotes a line from the Salmon Salt song by the Blue Oyster Cult — “She was the Quicklime Girl” — while testifying at his trial on murder charges; what do you think that tells us about her death? Does it suggest it was suicide or murder? Do you think Whittaker did it?
11. And another one to make eleven! You thought at one point because of the meaning of ‘Mistress of the Salmon Salt’ that we had to take seriously the possibility that Leda herself was a serial killer. But you’ve changed your mind. Why is that?
* In addition to her own thinking on this subject, Katya shared yet another Redditor theory, this one from Arachulia about The New Dress that Aunt Joan said was the real reason that Leda had left her Nancarrow home in Cornwall with the mysterious ‘Strike.’ Enjoy!



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(Credit: Telegraph article, June 2017, J.K. Rowling at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation party in 2007, wearing a floral diamond necklace and matching earrings, cf., Christmas Pig)
Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling (Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us again to discuss what challenges he faced in collating and synthesizing almost thirty years of interviews for his biography. He also shares the three questions he’d ask The Presence if she’d consent to an interview, questions that he thinks she might answer; Solomon turned the tables on his interviewers who had to improv questions they’d ask without being told their interview with Rowling was over.
The necessary links to the book’s Amazon page and to the two Hogwarts Professor reviews are here:
* A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.com)
* A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling (Amazon.co.uk) Uk Edition
* A Pen to Change the World – the Biography of J. K. Rowling by Solomon Schmidt (Nick Jeffery)
* Book Review: A Pen to Change the World - The Life of J. K. Rowling (John Granger)
Five Questions for Solomon Schmidt, Author of A Pen to Change the World:
5. I said you didn’t get to interview Rowling, which is true, but you did have access to all her interviews that she has done 1997 to the present as well as the interviews and articles with her family, friends, fans, and business associates. How did you find, assemble, and sift through those interviews?6. If you had been allowed inside the gates of Fortress Rowling and you were only allowed three questions, what would you ask her? (This is a game John and I regularly play, and usually John’s questions would get him thrown out of an interview!)7. What discoveries that you made in your research were the most exciting to you?8. Rowling has said repeatedly through the years that the critical negative events of her life that reshaped her thinking and her work were the death of her mother and the abusive relationship she had with her first husband. Agree or disagree? What do you think were the most important positive turns in her life?9. Very few people I meet don’t have a fixed opinion about Rowling; the world seems to love and hate her in equal measure with little grey area between the two: adoring fans and political allies on the one hand and those that despise her work, her political efforts, or both. Where do you fall in that divide and how hard was it to represent the other point of view in your biography?10. I assume you’ve started researching your next biography though you’ll be neck deep in this book’s launch for a few months. What will you be working on next?


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