Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts Professor, the genius behind AppalachianInkling.com, Hunger Games expert, and author of Milton, Spenser and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels, joined Nick and John to discuss the Charm Bracelet that J. K. Rowling posted on her Twixter home page as a Christmas gift to her readers. She said that that the thirteen charms on nine links were a set of clues about the next Strike novel, the ninth in a ten book series. In the first Part of Elizabeth, Nick, and John’s conversation, they discussed Rowling’s charm bracelet history, speculated about why she posted this picture when she did, decided to look at each charm on the bracelet for its stand-alone meaning and its place in the nine link set, and to read the whole series as if it were a ring composition, one reflecting a nine Part structure in Strike 9. They then made deep dives into the details of each charm: the heart shaped box containing a ‘You and Me’ engagement ring, a golden diamond-laden egg, a foul anchor, two angels, and a Trojan horse. In this second Part of that conversation, the trio of Serious Strikers continue with the remaining charms on the bracelet, namely, a Jack-in-the-box, an Hourglass, a White Rose and Crocodile, a Corvid head, and a Psalter paired on the last link with the Head of Persephone. They share their thoughts, too, about the bracelet as a symbolic integer and its ring meaning. The notes below are in support of references they make mid-flight and to other resources of interest to Magic Charm Decoders! Enjoy. Thank you to all our subscribers with special gratitude and appreciations for our paid subscribers; you are the wind in our sails, the heat from our vents… Serious Strikers are reading Browning’s The Ring and the Book, charting Hallmarked Man Part Six, and reviewing the Myth of Cupid and Psyche to look for parallels in the Strike-Ellacott series. See you soon! Jack-in-the-Box Charm * Rowling claims this as her favorite charm (Nick and John in the conversation mistakenly attribute this preference to the Psalter charm): * Badly Wired Lamp ID’d it * Is it a devil — or a Racoon? * The jack in the box toy, the 'Jack' being a devil, was invented in Germany in the 16th century as a mockery of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. * The shape of this charm, the golden circular center in the inside of the open box top, represents the transcendent spiritual realm and the square bottom with its four directions, the fallen world. The ‘jack’ devil lives in the latter but is from the former. * The charm is the third latched object in the chain, the heart box and Trojan horse preceding it and the psalter at chain’s end following it — which means the ring latch and center are latched objects with surprises inside. The two interior objects at center have deadly surprises and the beginning and end eternal life interiors. The symbolism here is of the human being and its capacity via choice for either spiritual perfection in sacrificial love (anteros) or consumption by individual desires (eros). The thing hidden inside, man’s spiritual capacity or heart, is either light or darkness, the inside bigger than the outside. (John) * What is the Strike 9 connection, the analogue to the demonic Jack in the box? Is it RFM? Uncle Ted? Ilsa’s husband Nick? Polworth? * The Jack’s position is at the center of the bracelet and between the hourglass and the Trojan horse. So it’s placed between cleverness and craftiness and things that we can control and bad surprises, but also time, because we can’t control time. (Elizabeth) Hourglass Charm * tempus fugit ‘like sand in an hourglass’ * memento mori * infinite symbol * The Strike series may be a collection of mystery-story genres, each one illustrating a unique type of story, different from all the others while keeping the same core of characters and overarching narrative (cf., Rowling’s note in The Running Grave acknowledgements that that book was her “cult” book). The hourglass, then, may be Rowling’s pointer to Strike9 being a suspense drama in which the good guys not only have a challenging mission (find and rescue the missing Robin, Strike, Lucy, Pat, whomever) but have to do it before a literal deadline arrives. The Ticking Clock plot device. * If the Jack at link five is the center of the bracelet ring of nine links, how does the hourglass mirror the Trojan horse? It’s two parts? The deadline aspect? “Reveal the crazies inside before the hourglass empties”? White Rose Charm * White Rose of Yorkshire * The interior of the flower charm is a literal Turtleback or ring composition diagram. * White Rose of Dante: Paradiso Cantos XXXI and XXXII The true home of all the blessed is with God in the Empyrean, a heaven of pure light beyond time and space. Dante sees the blessed systematically arranged in an immense white rose: like a hologram, a three-dimensional image, the rose is formed from a ray of light reflected off the outer surface of the Primum Mobile (30.106-17). The queen of this white rose is the Virgin Mary, traditionally represented as a rose herself (see Par. 23.73-4). This celestial rose recalls large rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, many of which are dedicated to Mary. The image of the rose, often red, is also used to represent Christ or, in other contexts, earthly love. The white rose is symmetrically structured according to various criteria, including belief, age, and gender. One half of the rose, already full, holds those who, according to Christian tradition, believed in Christ to come (the blessed of the Hebrew Bible); the other half, with only a few seats still unoccupied, contains those who believed in Christ already come (saved Christians). Two gendered rows mark this division of the rose in two halves. In the row below Mary appear women of the Hebrew Bible (Eve, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth, and unnamed others); Beatrice is seated next to Rachel, on the third row from the top. Opposite Mary, John the Baptist heads a row of men containing Francis, Benedict, Augustine, and other Christian fathers. Mary is flanked by Adam (first man) and Moses on one side, and Peter (first pope) and John the Evangelist on the other. John the Baptist is flanked by Lucy on one side and Anna, the mother of Mary, on the other. While only adults are seated in the upper section of the rose, below a certain line the rose contains souls of blessed children, their precise location based not on their own merits (since they lacked the power of free will) but on predestination. As physical laws do not apply in the Empyrean, Dante's ability to see these figures is not diminished by distance (30.118-23; 31.76-8). * White Rose of Mockingjay (Hunger Games finale) The prevailing symbol of Catching Fire and the most meaningful token the Christ figure of the series gives Katniss is a pearl, the solid-light symbolism of which we’ve discussed before. I think Commander Paylor’s name may be our last Madge-Pearl-Mags name reference in being a “pale orb.” That gold and pearls have a similar translucency and metaphysical correspondence with the ‘Light of the World’ make the twin possibilities that much more rich — and Commander Paylor’s ascending to Panem’s Presidency that much more meaningful and appropriate. Katniss steps into the Garden with the Pearl’s blessing (“on my authority”) and discovers roses of every possible color. There are red, of course, and “lush pink, sunset orange, and even pale blue.” She knows what she wants, though; the rose colored like light, the white rose, Dante’s symbolic prelude to the beatific vision and transcendence. Just as she cuts the “magnificent white bud just about to open” “from the top of a slender bush” (ibid, p. 355), the manacled, “pale, sickly green” President Snow, our snake in the Garden, speaks. “The colors, are lovely, of course, but nothing says perfection like white.” Our story Satan, you recall, left her a white rose in District 12 in chapter 1 and dropped roses with the bunker buster bombs in Part 1 to terrify Katniss. Now we know why. He was taunting her with her end, that as a seeker’s soul he knew her goal was perfection in Christ and taunted her with it, especially when he held Peeta-Christ and understood the cartharsis and chrysalis she would have to pass through to claim it herself. Now that she is in the inner sanctuary, the High Place, he tells her the truth she could not hear anywhere else, the final, ugly truth about the cause for which Katniss had sacrificed everything. Snow reveals, just as Peeta had told her at the story’s start, that she was deceived by those she trusted. President Coin killed Primrose with a weapon designed by Gale. Having been to the Absolute center, the world navel, and taken away the beatific vision as a white rose, Katniss is no longer a seeker but the resolution of contraries, an androgyn of justice and mercy. She is above right and wrong now as the phoenix-mockingjay and hears the voice of the “murderer” on the Hanging Tree at last. She deceives President Coin at the Victors Meeting as something of an avenging angel; she becomes a murderer herself by assassinating President Coin. Peeta-Christ comes down from the tree as her savior once again and prevents her suicide via Nightlock by his out-of-nowhere intervention. * Why does the White Rose share the seventh bracelet link with a crocodile? Faerie Queene! Crocodile Charm * The Crocodile in Shed, crocodile skin handbags (Hallmarked Man) “Maybe the4 crocodile or whatever they’re keeping in the shed’s chewed its way out,” said Strike. “ (Chapter 22, p 176; center chapter of Part 2) * Crocodile entry, Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbolism Crocodile Two basically different aspects of the crocodile are blended in its symbolic meaning, representing the infl
