Happy First Birthday, Hallmarked Man!

September 13, 2026 by Leave a Comment

In celebration of the first anniversary of The Hallmarked Man’s publication, I created an annotated index of everything written at Hogwarts Professor or discussed in Rowling Studies podcasts since last September, an index with urls to the relevant posts all neatly arranged by subject matter for easy perusal.

The ‘Index for the Hogwarts Professor Hallmarked Man Index’ looks like this:

  1. First Thoughts, First Findings, First Fandom Theories, First Flights of Cupid and Psyche
  2. The Big Finds: Shanker’s Secrets, The Incest Golden Thread and Series Backdrop, and the Letter ‘G’ Revealing the Series Structure (with Rowling Extras)
  3. The Projects and Partners: Hogwarts Professor exclusive Deep Dives into Rowling’s Artistry and Meaning and the New Voices Speaking Here and Nowhere Else

Check it out at ‘Happy Birthday, Hallmarked Man! A Hogwarts Professor Celebration‘ over at the Substack sister site — and let me know what you think in the comment boxes below!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

The New Hogwarts House Emblems for HBO+ Harry Potter TV Adaptations

September 10, 2026 by Leave a Comment

 

[Hat Tip to Sad-Ad-9273 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for these screen catches!]

Nick and John got 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. 

[Hat Tip to LightAngel452 at r/HarryPotteratHBO for the brilliant graphic! LightAngel also picked up on the alchemical symbols.]

You can read those three posts, the subject of their conversation, via these links:

Or you can just jump right into the conversation via the questions, notes and links to be found at the Substack page!

Just want to know what they discovered?

Rowling, Inc., is of course following a professional marketing pathway to foster interest, anticipation, even excitement among Harry Potter fans around the world. The Bread Crumbs they are dropping in the Forbidden Forest to draw us in include Rowling tweets, HBO+ trailers, and feature events in all of which we get something like contact with the new Hogwarts as imagined by Bronte Studios and HBO+.

What Nick and John found and explore at some depth is the quality of these glimpses and what they suggest is Team Rowling’s intention and priority in these adaptations done fully under auctorial control as compared with the Warner Brothers film adaptations of yesteryear. To their delight, the three emojis Rowling deployed and the four new Hogwarts House emblems are rich with traditional symbols.

Have a listen for what they discovered and what it means for the second wave of Potter Mania!

Filed Under: HBO+ TV Adaptation

The Symbolism of the Letter G in Hallmarked Man: Is It the Key to Unlocking the Strike Series Structure?

September 9, 2026 by Leave a Comment

[Left image source, Right image source]

‘Coloration’ is a term used to describe background information that lights or shades the foreground material in such a way that the reader’s experience of the narrative is moved in a particular direction subliminally. ‘Coloration’ is not exclusively about colors, though that can play a part as in alchemical sequence symbolism; it is at least as much about prevalent symbols and types that create contact, if you will, between the immaterial referents, the greater realities, which the symbols represent and the reader’s imagination. C. S. Lewis’ use of traditional astrological tokens for the seven planets in each of his Narniad novels as detailed in Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia is all about coloration, as is Charles Williams’ use of Tarot imagery in his archetypal thrillers and Rowling’s use of Christian and alchemical symbolism in her Potter and Strellacott series.

In that author’s latest novel, The Hallmarked Man, there is a peculiar emphasis on, a much repeated reference to the letter ‘G.’ It is done in such a way that the reader who is struggling with the story’s multiple suspects, with a bevy of new characters with names that sound like other characters’ names, and with a bizarre and inexplicably complex (can you say ‘convoluted’?) murder does not have the focus or attention band-width sufficient to pick up consciously. Which means that it penetrates only the unconscious mind, the alocal locus of coloration’s effect.

C. S. Lewis famously observed in an essay on The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version that “An influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep,” i.e., will not have a lasting or profound effect. Whence Twain’s injunction to writers to instruct their readers not overtly, which instruction they will resist instinctively, but only covertly, implicitly rather in explicit heavy-handedness.

[Source: Jeremy Harwood’s heavily illustrated, oversized, coffee table book, The Freemasons]

To explore the possibility that Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal didactic message to her readers in Hallmarked Man involves the letter ‘G,’ I am first obliged to provide evidence of the frequency of this image and examples of how the Freemasons interpret this letter as provided within Strike 8 and from properly Masonic texts.

That is the bulk of the first post in this series, which ends with reasons why this isn’t a sufficient explanation for all the ‘G’s.

The Symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in ‘Hallmarked Man’ (Part One): Why did Rowling-Galbraith flood her Strike 8 story-line with references to the letter ‘G’?

In Part Two of this three part Deep Dive I review other meanings ascribed to the letter by traditional and other sources before I  explain the effect of its use by Rowling-Galbraith as coloration in the book.

The Symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in ‘Hallmarked Man’ (Part Two): Rowling-Galbraith is Working the Subliminal Route to Transform Her Readers via Their Unconscious Imaginative Experiences of Repeated Symbolic Freight

In Part Three, Nick Jeffery and I talk about the Letter G and why it matters especially with respect to the structure of the series.

A Conversation about the Symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in ‘Hallmarked Man’ — Nick and John become G-Men!

Would you believe the Tetractys, Tetragrammaton, Gammadion Cross, and the shape of the Strike-Ellacott decalogy are involved? It’s all there, believe it or don’t, in the letter ‘G’ and the Murdoch silver hallmark…

 

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

HBO’s Harry Potter and the Alchemical Symbols

September 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

This week, HogPro all-pro Suzanna Schwartz pointed my direction to the house crests displayed at the franchises Back to Hogwarts event in London. These were exciting for two reasons. Finally, us Ravenclaws have our eagle and house colours returned to us and each shield had an arcane and mysterious symbol added to the top.

Suzanna points out that the base of each symbol relates to the elements of earth, air fire and water.

Western alchemy makes use of the four classical elements. The symbols used for these are:

  • Air 🜁 ()
  • Earth 🜃 ()
  • Fire 🜂 ()
  • Water 🜄 ()

Wikipedia

In Hufflepuff’s symbol there is a clear cup above the earth sign, and two bars at an angle that might be taken for elements of the letter H.

To the top of Ravenclaw’s air symbol is a curved V that could be a stylised diadem and elements of the letter R sideways.

Gryffindor’s fire sign has what looks to be a sword, but try as I might, I cannot make that rocking horse look like a G.

Slytherin’s symbol is much easier to decipher forming at the same time, a ring a capital S and a snake.

Let me know in the comments below what your interpretations of these signs might be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The HBO+ Potter Trailer: The Meaning of Rowling’s Heart, Owl, and Lightning Bolt

September 3, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Yesterday, Rowling tweeted the new trailer for the HBO+ Bronte Studios adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. She included a heart emoji, an owl, and a lightning bolt as her only commentary. Nick Jeffery will be sharing his thoughts about the new Hogwarts coat of arms and four House heraldry recently posted (lots of alchemy, I’m told) at the HogwartsProfessor Substack site tomorrow.

I just wanted to put up this brief comment today that the heart can mean Rowling is pleased with the trailer, the owl can just be a reference to Hedwig or that this is an important message for you straight from the Hogwarts owlery, and the flash of lightning could just be a signature of The Boy Who Lived, whose facial scar is in the shape of a jagged line.

I think they’re all those things, but, as with ‘Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweek,’ there’s a lot beneath what Rowling offers as throw-aways that you can see by taking a second longer look.

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!)

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.

Cheers!

Filed Under: HBO+ TV Adaptation