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Nick Jeffery and John Granger focus their Hallmarked Man Week Three conversation around the mythological content of Strike 8, a subject prompted by Rowling’s 8 September tweet above. They briefly review the author’s background in mythology, from her study in school to her use of it in Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts, and Cormoran Strike. John explains the relationship of myth with Rowling’s ‘triple play’ combination of Shed tools and her ‘G-spot’ Lake and Shed wizardry that has enchanted readers for the last 25 years.

The heart of this week’s conversation, though, is John’s work since 2021 in explaining the centrality of the myth of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ to the Cormoran Strike series. Nick and John discuss its role in understanding the otherwise mysterious Hallmarked Man, especially the murder of Tyler Powell and the imprisonment of Sapphire Neagle, the various trials of Psyche in the myth and correspondences with Robin’s agonies, and the critical distinction between ‘Eros’ and ‘Anteros’ as it plays out in the lives and relationships of Cormoran and Robin. John theorizes that the Ramsay Silver murder in the vault had to take place where it does, Strike’s location “necessity,” not for any logical reason but for a profoundly allegorical one.

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It’s a relatively brief conversation, but to get the importance of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ — and Rowling is either hat-tipping, confirming sans acknowledgement, or having some fun about John’s exegesis of this myth — there is a lot of material on the subject to read! Enjoy the review or first reading of this material via the links provided and let us know what you think in the comment boxes below.

Paid subscribers to Hogwarts Professor have already received an only-in-book-form essay I wrote about the mythological template of Harry Potter, Paul Diel’s treatment of the Eros and Psyche myth per ‘Banalization’ and ‘Sublimation,’ and their invitations to a Q&A session about Hallmarked Man. If you’re a free rather than a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading that subscription to join the Hogwarts Professor Moderator Backchannels!

Referenced ‘Cupid and Psyche’ Posts:

Rowling Points to Myth of Cupid and Psyche in order to Console Strike Fans Disappointed with Hallmarked Man (8 September 2025, Nick Jeffery)

Nick shares the context of Rowling’s tweet (fan disappointment!) and the background information about the illustration she chose for it.

The Most Pleasant and Delectable Tale of the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (Apuleius)

A translation of the Silver Age Latin tale from Apuleius’ Golden Ass.

A Mythological Key to Cormoran Strike? The Myth of Eros, Psyche, and Venus (22 April 2021, John Granger)

The first post to discuss Rowling’s use of this specific myth within Cormoran Strike, it is essential reading and comes in four parts:

* a discussion of Rowling’s stated beliefs about the soul and how it is the focus of her story-telling,

* a review of her psychological artistry in Potter and the post Potter novels and screenplays,

* a synopsis of the Eros and Psyche myth, and

* a point to point look at the parallels in the story thus far with speculation about novels to come.

Robin’s Two Perfumes: The Meaning of Philosychos and Narciso (9 June 2021, John Granger)

The names of Robin’s baseline perfume, Philosychos, and the one she and Strike choose at story’s end, Narciso, both point less to the bedroom than to Robin’s allegorical, psychological, and mythological role as Psyche in the series.

Erich Neumann in his Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine describes this discipline as a “prohibition against pity” which “signifies Psyche’s struggle against the feminine nature.” …

Psyche’s last trial involves her having to confront death, a “marriage” to which she was condemned as a sacrifice at the story’s start, a meeting she can only survive by transcending her feminine qualities of nurturing and pity. She must become, if only temporarily, a narcissist to pass through Hades and return to the world of the Sun and to Cupid. The myth, in Jungian lights, is about her transcending the accidental self, here her feminine and sexual relation to Eros or Cupid, for “ego-stability” leading to “individuation,” ascent to the greater, immortal Self.

Robin as resident psychologist and loving soul is the Psyche-cipher of the Strike mysteries. She differs from the relatively passive Human Beauty of the myth in her active and determined “struggle against the feminine nature,” her “What. I. Do!” She not only wrestles with her desires for domesticity and maternity in her thinking but stands up to Strike-Cupid in their Valentine’s Day Street Fight and demands his respect or at least more considerate behavior. But she is still struggling with her difficulty to be the narcissist rather than the Great Mother when circumstances and her heroine’s journey of psychological individuation demand that.

Ink Black Heart: The Mythic Backdrop (10 September 2022, John Granger)

What Rowling is depicting in Robin’s journey through the events and mystery of Ink Black Heart include a trap set by Venus, one that takes Robin to a personal and professional underworld or hell, her survival and endurance of every temptation by her determination to be steely rather than empathetic, especially with respect to a certain “lame fellow” (!), and her re-surfacing from hell a changed person, one worthy of begrudging Venereal approval (or Zeus’ intervention — Rokeby!).

Ink Black Heart: Strike as Zeus to Robin’s Leda and Cupid to Mads’ Psyche (10 November 2022, John Granger)

These traditional portrayals of the every person’s human and divine aspects, soul and spirit as man and woman in dynamic, cathartic relationship — think Romeo and Juliet, Redcrosse Knight and Una, Cupid and Psyche — are perhaps, with her alchemical symbolism, sequencing, and coloring, Rowling’s greatest literary ‘reach’ and achievement in the Strike series, albeit one largely lost on her her vast reading audience. The deliberate conjunction-melange of archetypal psychology, mythology, and spiritual allegory in these novels is, especially in combination with her hermetic artistry, intertextual playfulness (Aurora Leigh!), and chiastic structures, testimony to the author being one of the most accomplished and challenging writers of the age in addition to the most popular (and least well understood, even by her fans).

Hallmarked Man: Freemasonry and J. K. Rowling (7 February 2024, Nick Jeffery)

The Royal Arch degree is unique in England for including the ceremony of “Passing the Veils” symbolising the path to enlightenment that a mason undergoes as he progresses in the craft. Given Peter Rowling’s upward social mobility from working class apprentice to engineer and moving from the Bristol suburbs to middle class Tutshill, it isn’t beyond reason to wonder if Peter might have been tempted by the social and career advantages that freemasonry might have offered him and exposed a young Joanne to some of the symbolism.

Edinburgh, as well as being the home of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, is also home to if not the oldest lodge in the world, then at least the one with the oldest records. Lodge of Edinburgh (Mary’s Chapel) No. 1 has minutes of meetings from 31st July 1599. There have long been arguments between this Lodge and the one in Kilwinning on the other coast of Scotland as to which is the oldest. (see IVº of the Rite of Baldwyn above)

J. K. Rowling’s ‘G-Spot’ and ‘Triple Play:’ The Lake & Shed Secret of Her Success (21 September 2024, John Granger)

I want to try tonight to explain as succinctly — and as provocatively — as possible why I think Rowling’s ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphorical explanation of how she writes offers a compelling reason for both why she writes and why readers around the world love her novels the way they do. I call this her ‘G-Spot’ and ‘Triple Play’ because it is her point of singular genius, the defining quality that separates her from contemporary story-tellers, which involves ‘Shed’ artistry of three particular literary tools, all subliminal, which work together to achieve her aims.

The Hallmarked Man’s Flood of Names, Characters, and Plots (22 September 2025, John Granger)

Rowling’s seven Shed tools — psychomachia, literary alchemy, ring composition, misdirection towards defamiliarization, Christian symbolism, mythology, and inter-intratextuality (writing about reading and writing) — are all about the transformation of the human soul by cathartic experience in the imaginative heart, i.e., our spiritual reorientation. These traditional tools alone don’t do it, of course; her capacity for creating archetypal characters that we care about in profound fashion is what gives the tools their grip on the heart.

But, if a writer uses these tools in his or her Shed, the game being played and its stakes are not in question. Everything Rowling has written to date, with greater or lesser success (largely dependent on her control of the final product, cough*Warner Brothers*cough), shares this aim. Her global popularity testifies that much more often than not she hits her target to the delight of her readers.

I assume this was her aim in Hallmarked Man. It’s early days on the full exegesis of Strike8 in light of Rowling’s Shed tools, Lake springs, and Golden Threads, but there are encouraging signs. My third reading of the book included my first ‘Aha!’ moments with respect to the mythological template of the series, the Shed tool Rowling was openly urging her readers to think about in her recent Cupid and Psyche tweet.

Jungian Interpretations of ‘Cupid and Psyche:’

* Erich Neumann: Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine (A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius)

* Paul Diel: Symbolism in Greek Mythology: Human Desire and Its Transformations (A “psychological study of the symbols condensed in the fate of the mythological hero”)

* Robert A. Johnson: SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology (An interpretation based on the myth of Amor and Psyche and based on Jungian mythological principles)

* Marie-Louise von Franz: Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (originally A Psychological Interpretation of The Golden Ass of Apuleius)

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