Why the Cormoran Strike Novels are a Ten Book Series

Mythological Clues and Tetractys Parallelism with a Touch of Tarot Reveal the Strike Series Structural Echoes with Rowling's First Ten Book Set

So, last Friday’s HogwartsProfessor post explaining why John Granger thinks the next Strike novel will be the climax or conclusion of the series though it is the seventh of ten books has set up my claims here fairly elegantly, and for that I’m grateful.

My core contention today is that, in agreement with Parallel Series Theory, The Running Grave will be the Deathly Hallows equivalent, but that this does not place it as series climax or conclusion. Instead, I see it as Deathly Hallows parallelisms recast in Running Grave as the belly-of-the-whale Nigredo for the series.

I argue this from two fronts: that this is precisely what the mythological substructure of the series would lead us to anticipate, and that, given what Rowling has written outside of the Strike books, we should expect the series to be structured according to the numerological symbol of the Tetractys (the number 10 presented as a 4x4x4 equilateral triangle; bottom layer of 4, next layer of 3, next layer of 2, top layer of 1, for 10 in total), and, in part, according to the common use of the Tetractys as a Tarot spread.

Mythological Expectations: Enter Castor and Pollux with White Horses

Rowling tends to write her stories with an underlying mythological foundation. The Potter books were structured after the Orestes myth, centering on the young inheriting the struggles of the older generation, overcoming that inherited problem, and by this remaking the world in a more humane image. The last three books introduced as secondary underlying story the image Snape’s Dante to Lily’s Beatrice. Snape, acting as the underworldly Hermetic figure, guides the course of events in 5-7 to their happy conclusion from behind the scenes.

These are tied together into the Aeschylus epigraph in which “dark gods beneath the earth” are invoked to help the children end the family curse. Goblet, acting as ring-narrative center, prefigured the centrality of the Orestes myth through the cratylic naming of Bartimaeus (“son-of-honor”) Crouch Jr. killing his parent while being disguised throughout the year as Alastor (mythological name for the spirit of an ancestral inherited curse) Moody. Other works by Rowling have a similar mythological foundation, notably The Christmas Pig’s structure following, yet again, Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The Strike books follow two mythological substructures. The first noticed and the most emphasized in the books so far: Leda and the Swan and the Gemini, Castor and Pollux. The second to be noticed, and more subtle, is the series as reworking of the story of Eros and Psyche. Presuming that these are taken as narrative foundations, what should we expect?

The opening of the story of the Gemini is set in the “filler” material between the second “act” of Greek mythology (The Age of Heroes leading up to the Heraclean defeat of the Giants) and the third “act” (The Trojan War and its aftermath). The Gemini marry the daughters of Leucippus (whose name means “white horse”!) who had been betrothed to marry another set of twins, Lyceus and Idas. The tensions between the Lyceas and Idas and the Gemini increase until reaching a breaking point in which the Gemini attempt a cattle theft that goes poorly, leading to Lyceas and Idas leaving Helen of Troy unguarded in the company of Paris, prince of Troy (cue the Trojan War).

During the ensuing fight, Lyceas and Idas are killed, Castor is mortally wounded, and Zeus had to step in to keep his son Pollux from being killed. By agreement with Zeus, Castor and Pollux agree to share the one immortality they had between them by alternation, each spending half their time in the underworld and the remainder of the time above. This finishes the “filler” material between Hercules and Troy, initiating the Trojan War (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis having been the occasion for the throwing of the apple of discord which led to the abduction of the unwatched Helen by Paris). The next place the Gemini appear is as judges, as the Hermetic “dark gods beneath the earth” in Euripides’s version of the story of Orestes.

As I read the parallels to the Strike books, we have Strike (Pollux the Boxer) and Robin (Castor the tamer of Horses/Cars) take Robin and Strike (the Leucippides) away from Matthew and Charlotte (Idas and Lyceas). My consequent prediction: in Running Grave, we will see a disastrous wedding somehow involving a sibling of Strike (Prudence as Helen, perhaps; directly in parallel to the wedding at the start of Hallows), and an attempt by Strike and Robin to steal something from Matthew/Charlotte that will go terribly wrong. In the aftermath, which should involve Rokeby/Zeus stepping in to help, Strike and Robin will be divided between the office and constant undercover or on-the-run operations (underworld equivalent).

This forms a very nice parallel to Hallows, particularly the Gringotts theft attempt and undercover entry into Hogwarts. I see this myth pointing to a distinct difference between the two series: where the wedding in Hallows was the alchemical wedding of the Rubedo stage of the alchemical work, I predict that the wedding here will function as the primary trigger of an Nigredo whose aim is to produce an across-worlds separation between the two main characters, as Castor and Pollux were divided between the underworld and above. The next time we will see them fully united is probably in book 10, following two books centering on a political catastrophe triggered in Running Grave (Trojan War equivalent), in a case somehow involving Strike’s nephew Jack (Orestes as son of Castor’s sister Clytemnestra/Lucy).

That Running Grave will act as a kind of conclusion, resolving much of the tensions already developed, follows from the wedding and theft concluding the groundwork story of the Gemini; that this functions in the wider story as a catalytic division and beginning of central narrative to come follows from the separation of the Gemini at this point, the Trojan war (fairly major event) that is triggered, and the eventual reunion after the war at Orestes’s trial.

Mythological Expectations: Eros, Psyche, Venus, and Zeus Take Center Stage

I think a similar conclusion is derived from looking carefully at the story of Eros and Psyche. The beauty of Psyche incites the envy of Venus, who sends Eros to make her fall in love with a monster. Eros falls in love with Psyche instead, and oracular directions are given that Psyche is to be left on a cliff from which she is brought to meet Eros secretly. Eros only appears to her at night, and Psyche is not permitted to know who he is (thus avoiding discovery by Venus). One night, after being persuaded by her sisters, Psyche brings a lamp to see who he is as he sleeps. Drops of the tallow from the lamp fall on Eros, wounding him and waking him up. He flees and is held captive by his mother Venus. Psyche begins to wander the world, before being set a series of tasks by Venus in her wrath, including a descent into the underworld. Eros, healed of his wound, escapes from his mother. With the help of Zeus, Eros and Psyche are reunited and married.

That admittedly bare-bones summary of the story points instructively to what we should expect.

• The tallow scene centers upon the revelation of who Eros is and is the resolution of the central mystery that had been in play throughout the story to that point, centering in no small part of a revelation concerning his mother.

• This, while a clarification, is the moment of division between Eros and Psyche.

• They then face a series of trials/captivity separately, notably including a descent into the underworld.

In parallel, if we expect the revelation of the central mystery of Leda’s Death in Running Grave, we should expect it not to have the character of plot resolution for the series, but as the moment of division between Robin and Strike.

While there are some parallels between the closest-to-romantic scene of Robin and Strike in Troubled Blood and this division point (as has been previously theorized), we should expect the tallow-equivalent scene to be more centrally placed at the moment of revelation-of-mother-related-backstory.

Thus, by parallel series theory, where the revelation of Lily’s backstory in Snape’s memories caused the Rubedo unification of Harry and Voldemort in Harry’s self-sacrificial descent into the underworld, the revelation of Leda’s backstory will be the moment of Nigredo division of Strike and Robin leading to their separation preceding Robin’s later descent into the underworld as task. Their reunification around book 10 we should expect to happen with the help of Rokeby/Zeus. I have no clear guess as to who exactly will play the Venus equivalent, in part because I think that centers on exactly what is revealed about Leda.

Tetractys Ring-Narrative Structure: The Sacred Geometry of Ten and a Touch of Tarot

This leaves the problem of how we reconcile this Nigredo Running Grave with the ring narrative structure we have seen in the series so far and with the all-but-proven parallel-series theory. I still think these fit, but our theorizing up to this point has left a handful of gaps in the explanation:

            1. Why, if Troubled Blood was going to be the Nigredo Order equivalent, was it comparably dark but with far more aquatic motifs than would be expected in a Nigredo?

            2. Why, if The Ink Black Heart was going to be the Albedo Half-Blood Prince equivalent, was it so pervasively dark in its tone, breaking down the characters to their most essential (in Nigredo stage fashion), and not providing the backstory insight into the series conclusion we expected as book 6 equivalent?

            3. Why, if the primary parallelisms we expect according to ring narrative are 1-4-7, 2-6, and 3-5, do we see, in both Strike and Potter books, such a strong referential tie of books 1 to 5 and such a strong structuring of book 6 according to a relatively minor scene from book 1 (Half-Blood Prince’s structuring according to Snape’s first potion lesson, Ink Black Heart having its central plot revealed by Strike’s walk past the Freddy Mercury Statue in Cuckoo’s Calling)?

Is there a consistent way of putting all these together? Maybe not. I arrived at my current idea as I was reading back over my last post on the Heart-role in Mathematics. We have focused on the chiasmus (ring-narrative as fundamentally cross-shaped) as foundational structural archetype. We have grown to expect Alchemical/Astrological structures to inform the nature of these books. But we have done relatively little with the Numerological side of anagogical symbolism. If this were a ten-book series, what should we expect from a traditional numerological perspective?

I regularly teach the Pythagorean cult as the introduction to the history background I give my Geometry class. If you remember the “Pythagorean Theorem”, A² + B² = C², you have run across one of their great discoveries. They were a mathematical cult in ancient Greece that held that the fundamental supernatural Archetypes that constituted the world were the Numbers. Working from this they noticed things like the fact that strings of length ratio 1:2 when plucked gave the same note an octave apart, strings in length 2:3 made the perfect fifth, and strings in length ratio 3:4 the fourth. From these three ratios (1:2:3:4) they were able to derive our Western twelve note chromatic scale and eight note scale in the various modes, still standard in Western music today.

1 (the “Monad”), 2 (the “Dyad”), 3 (the "triad”) and 4 (the “tetrad”) were, for the Pythagoreans, the primary principles of the world, producing everything by their ratios. Together, according to Pythagorean belief, they formed the holy Tetractys, the all-encompassing 10 (1+2+3+4). Pythagorean hymns to the number 10 in this form survive. They arranged it as a four-by-four-by-four triangle like so:

The top row is the Monad, the second the Dyad, next from bottom the Triad, and the Tetrad as the base.

• The Monad, the One, represented the unity of Being, of God, and the coincidentia oppositorum.

• The Dyad was read as the Masculine/Feminine, Yin/Yang, potency/act division.

• The Triad was interpreted as past/present/future, sulfur/mercury/salt, creator/preserver/destroyer, or Nigredo/Albedo/Rubedo.

• The Tetrad was the four elements (Earth/Air/Fire/Water) or the four contraries (Cold/Moist/Dry/Hot).

Within the wider Hermetic tradition, this was seen as an image of the Alchemical process itself. Ascending the Tetractys, one started with the contraries, worked via the operation of the three principles, culminating in the Alchemical Wedding (the Monad) of the opposed sides of the Dyad (Philosophical Silver and Philosophical Gold). This has also been applied as a Tarot spread, with the Tetrad read as the four elements, the Triad as past/present/future or creator/sustainer/destroyer, the Dyad read as Yin/Yang (your situation passively/actively), with the Monad as the signifier card.

Applying this to Rowling’s works, I am going to make the claim that Rowling is currently at work on her second Tetractys series-spread, with Harry Potter, Casual Vacancy, The Ickabog, and The Christmas Pig forming the first, and the Strike books forming the second. In each of these, she has started writing the triangle from the bottom, from the Tetrad.

In the Harry Potter books, we spend the first four books setting up the world (The elements), while facing various attempts by Voldemort to return. Chiasm within the Tetrad predicts 1-4 parallels. The remaining three books center on the battle against Voldemort, with Snape playing his Hermetic role behind the scenes. Here, as the intention was to conclude with 7, the Triad is written as the Nigredo/Albedo/Rubedo of books 5, 6, and 7. This is in addition to, not in competition with, the seven-based ring-narrative structure. It does, however, explain some of the connections between books that were unexplained. 5-1 connection is natural as 5 is above 1, while giving extra strength to the 7-4 connection on the other side. 6 is at the center of the whole Tetractys, a knight’s move away from the vertices of our triangle at 1,4, and 10. The Snape centric book is at the Tetractys-center of the series, explaining the centrality of his introduction in 1 to the structure of 6.

Following the Harry Potter books, outside of the Cormoran Strike series, Rowling wrote a deeply political pair of books, a political tragedy (The Casual Vacancy) and a political fairy tale (The Ickabog). They both pick up roughly where Half-Blood Prince ended (the book immediately below them in the Tetractys), with an early death of a noble figure (Barry Fairbrother and Mrs. Dovetail) beginning the works. Both center on the relations between a pair of insider and outsider regions (Pagford/Fields, Cornucopia/Marshlanders). Both center on a technologized fake entity (the Ickabog-foot Ickabog/Ghost of Barry Fairbrother). These seem excellent candidates for a supplemental Dyad to Harry Potter’s Tetrad and Triad.

And then The Christmas Pig, structured according to Dante (reflecting via knight-move our Tetractys center in Snape at 6), plays the role of the Monad. Here the autobiographical Lake-and-Shed central theme in Rowling’s work of Loss in relation to motherhood is dealt with directly as the central driving theme of all 10 books. 1-6-CP knight-moves through the center presents the Dantean narrative across our Tetractys, 4-6-CP presents the noble unexpected sacrifice (Cedric/Dumbledore/CP). This Christmas Pig Monad thus works as the core of what all other nine books sought to express.

We thus get the Tetractys formed by an original series of 7 with its native ring-structure with 3 in addendum, but abiding by the interrelationships that we would expect if originally planned as a 10-book set.

It is worth noting that if this 7+3 Tetractys for the first set were shown, this would be a wonderful confirmation of Coleridgean influence. If one reads Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the central word “Albatross” occurs exactly 7 times, each in a context that matches the traditional numerological meaning of the numbers 1-7. When, in later editions, Coleridge wrote official margin summaries for the poem, the word “Albatross” occurs three times in those summaries, even producing a few awkward circumlocutions, again in accordance with the associated numerological symbolism.

 With the Strike books, we again ascend the Tetractys, in parallel with the first 10.

Cuckoo’s Calling through Lethal White as the Tetrad, set up the world, getting the characters into a good position with the agency (ending the fourth book with our main characters finally in a manageable position and in good relationship with the police). 1-4 parallelism is again expected by chiasmus within the Tetrad. Analysis tying each of these to the four classical elements could probably be done.

Troubled Blood through Running Grave act as the Triad, in direct parallel with Order through Hallows. The key to reading these as a Triad is provided, I suggest, in Troubled Blood itself; read these as the Triad in the Tetractys Tarot Spread, which is equivalent to the three-card spread, with “the first representing ‘the nature of the problem,’ the second, ‘the cause,’ and the third, ‘the solution.’”

The “nature of the problem” looks to the past, to the facts of the case, the “cause” looks to what is actively, presently doing things, “the solution” looks to future action. Troubled Blood is the cold case, looking back to the past for the nature of the problem, aquatic in its foundational material chaos. Ink Black Heart is the of-the-moment problem, looking past illusion to the causes underlying it. I’ll predict Running Grave will center on seeking a solution to a future problem, a case in which the effort is to prevent a future crime. That Rowling has centered her planning on these time-based structures for 5 and 6 was revealed in her Twitter response when directly asked about our 5/6 flip theory:

5/6/7 as past/present/future seems built into how she has “always” planned the series. The I Ching works as epigraphs beautifully for seven, being a divination method (future focused) centered on the Yin/Yang division, introducing the Yin/Yang divide to come in the Dyad. I suggest that the reason these three books have been so dark is that they together form the Nigredo for the series, breaking down the main characters to their foundations. Note the 1-6 knight-move here again, with Ink Black Heart as Tetractys center, which explains the centrality of the Freddy Mercury scene.

Predictions from Mythological and Numerological Premises

If what we have is not “Parallel Series of Seven” but “Parallel Tetractys”, we should expect Strike 8 and Strike 9 to parallel Casual Vacancy and Ickabog as the Dyad.

If my mythological read is correct, we should expect a grand political event (“The Trojan War”), potentially viewed from Strike’s perspective in 8 and Robin’s in 9. Such a separation would be an idea time for the purification of Robin and Strike (and time for Strike to heal from his wound; health improvement is coming). Both Casual Vacancy and Ickabog are aquatic in tone, from the Good Samaritan test at the river to the watery Marshlands. Consequently, I think these two books will function as the series Albedo.

Book 10 of the second Tetractys, the tenth Strike novel, then will parallel The Christmas Pig. Here we would have, again, if my mythological read is correct, Jack as a central character as Orestes needing vindication by the Gemini. This would time the descent into the underworld of Robin/Psyche to parallel Jack’s descent into the Land of the Lost in Christmas Pig. This book would fill the alchemical role of Rubedo.

Pseudo-Summary

This theory, having only arrived in my head within the last month, is obviously in need of more support. Suggestions are welcome. But the gist I think holds up:

• Rowling wrote Harry Potter as a seven-book series that she supplemented with three books to bring it to completion as a 10-book Tetractys spread.

• The Strike books, originally intended as a ten-book series, were written in parallel with the first Tetractys, such that one would reach a point of dividing crisis at the end of the Triad Nigredo (rather than a series conclusion or climax), to be followed by two political books in an Albedo Dyad, and a central-theme signifier book in a Rubedo Monad.

That’s my thought, but it’s more than possible that, in the words of Albus Dumbledore, “… I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron.”