Chasing Cheerful Butterflies: The Pursuit of Love in Strike 9

By Dr Beatrice Groves

In my previous blog, I noted that on the charm bracelet Rowling designed to auction for Lumos – a ‘sister’ bracelet to her own Harry Potter charm bracelet and based on her own sketches – included a butterfly charm. Rowling wrote about this charm bracelet: 

It carries a collection of unique handmade charms that allude to stories and magic, including: a winged key, a tiny spell book and (for Harry) a bolt of lightning. The most precious charm of the lot is a little jewelled butterfly, which is the logo of Lumos – a symbol of transformation and liberation, of the beauty that can emerge from dark confinement. 

There is a butterfly, likewise, in our trail of clues for Strike 9 – a butterfly that we are all hoping will also symbolise transformation, liberation and the beauty that emerges once you leave your own ink-black confinement and finally open your eyes to whom it is you truly love. Knowing that butterflies will be important for Strike 9 seems a good moment to have a look at how this ‘symbol of transformation and liberation, of the beauty that can emerge from dark confinement’ have functioned in Strike, and some of the literature on which it draws.

Primarily, of course, lepidoptera form the underlying metaphor for The Silkworm. The novel-within-the-novel is called Bombyx Mori – which is the name Rowling wanted to give her own novel likewise (although this was not something Galbraith was able to swing with his publishers!). Silkworms are the caterpillar of the Bombyx mori moth and another name for a silkworm is the “imago” of its moth. ‘Bombyx’ is the image/imago of Quine – like the silkworm he is a spinner of stories – and (or so Quine claims) full of the ‘essential innocence and purity’ symbolized in the whiteness of both silkworm and moth. But there is also a butterfly in this dark, mothy novel and it not only belongs to one of its most innocent characters, Orlando, but also holds a clue:

A sheaf of crumpled pictures came out, on an assortment of different sized and coloured papers. Neither Strike nor Robin turned them over at first, but made admiring comments as Orlando spread them out across the table, Robin asking questions about the bright starfish and the dancing angels that Orlando had drawn in crayon and felt tip. Basking in their appreciation, Orlando dug deeper… [and] laid out a picture of a butterfly through which could be seen traces of untidy adult writing on the back…. There was a list of scribbled names on the back of the butterfly picture: Sam Breville. Eddie Boyne? Edward Baskinville? Stephen Brook?

This butterfly-clue (the names being such ordinary names show that another hand is present in Bombyx Mori) appears from the dark depths of Orlando’s bag and, just like a butterfly new-born, the pictures come out crumpled. Robin will smooth out the crumpled paper of the  butterfly’s wings to try and read those names just as a butterfly straightens out its wings as it emerges from its chrysalis. It is beautifully fitting that Rowling has placed a transformative clue on the back of this crumpled butterfly.

‘Chasing her own cheerfulness like a butterfly’

William Blake wrote a very short poem called ‘Eternity’ which I copied into my ‘learn-by-heart’ poetry-book as a child:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

It seemed to me then (as it seems to me now), a good attitude to cultivate towards joy and Blake’s insight is borne out by modern happiness research, which suggests that we are happiest not when trying to be happy but when fully engaged in something else of which happiness is a by-product. In Lethal White, this truth about the evanescence of joy is symbolised by a butterfly. It is a moment of reflection in a garden when Robin, gaining a free hour to think after chucking her therapist, chases her cheerfulness like a butterfly. I love this scene (and have written about a different aspect of it before), and Robin telling herself some home truths in this rose-scented churchyard prefigures the breakthrough Strike will achieve sitting alone in the St John the Baptist church in three novels’ time (I wrote about that, the greatest chapter of the series, here). 

Chasing her own cheerfulness like a butterfly, because she was afraid it might escape, she turned up a quieter street… Peering through the opening, Robing saw a church and mossy tombs lying amid an empty rose garden in full bloom. (Lethal White)

‘Chasing her own cheerfulness like a butterfly’ is reminiscent of Blake’s winged joy and suggests that Robin is going the wrong way about things. Refusing to acknowledge what it is really is that brings her joy, she reflects in this Deptford churchyard – the churchyard where the author of one of Silkworm’s epigraphs Christopher Marlowe is buried (I love that!) – about her choice to stay with Matthew. The reader knows she needs to sit a little longer with the discomfort of her own decisions. Robin plays at being her own therapist here – understandably, given the uselessness of her first therapist. But real therapy needs another person, not just the person who is ineluctably predisposed to agree to the half-truths we tell ourselves. We have reason to believe that the Prudence-chosen sweary therapist, Dr Broccoli^{TM TSEF} will lead to Robin truly spreading her wings in Strike 9. 

We know Rowling is a meticulous planner of imagery such as these two perfectly placed butterflies. Recently, we’ve had a nice bit of confirmation (thank you @IrisThinksMeh !) that this aspect of the books comes from Rowling’s Shed – her conscious writerly craft – not simply her Lake – her creative subconscious. When Iris asked Rowling on 3 December 2025, ‘Do you plan out the alchemy/symbolic layers like colors, imagery etc far ahead as well? Everything fits so freaking perfectly all the time. I’m always in awe at the depth and the layers in your books,’ Rowling replied ‘I can’t answer that without giving spoilers…’ So, has Rowling been planting clues leading to Strike 9 with her butterflies throughout the series? 

We know that Rowling uses cratylic names with intention so it is interesting that Vanessa – a character who has rather flitted out of the story of late – is named for a butterfly. It is a name with impeccable literary credentials having been invented by Jonathan Swift from the name of his friend Esther Vanhomrigh – combining the affectionate diminutive ‘Essa’ for her first name with the start of her surname and inverting it. The name gains further literary and lepidopteral links via a Vanessa in Nabokov (as discussed here) and has likewise been  given to a genus of butterflies.

 The Nabokov link is interesting for our purposes because he is not only linked with butterflies in general (he was even more passionate about entomology than writing) but with blue butterflies in particular. We can’t read too much into Rowling’s choosing a blue butterfly as her emoticon given that if you want to do a twitter butterfly emoji blue is the colour that you have … nonetheless, it is tempting! Partly, of course, because this is Cormoran Blue Strike’s colour, and likewise because he carries specific memories that Rowling has couched in lepidopteral terms: ‘He carried memories like this from his childhood, especially those parts of it that he had spent in Cornwall: the glitter of the sea as you first saw it on a morning as blue as a butterfly’s wing’ (Career of Evil). It is the morning, not the sea, which is as blue as a butterfly’s wing, but the simile circles back to the glittering ocean, for a butterfly’s wing is covered in tiny reflective scales, sparkling like the sea. And, as we know, the sea speaks to the depths of Cormoran’s soul: ‘it just adds something to his character because he’s drawn to the sea but that has such a strong association of childhood for him. So I always see it that way, when he heads for the coast we normally find out something character wise about Strike, that’s the significance for me.’

But another reason the blue of this emoticon butterfly feels resonant is because it is ‘Nabokov blues’ with which the novelist is most closely associated, and Nabokov is someone whom Rowling has placed along with Jane Austen, Colette and E. Nesbit as a writer whose style represents an ‘untouchable ideal’ to her. 

I know about this link between Nabokov and blue butterflies because in 1922 the novelist attended my own alma mater – Trinity College, Cambridge – and a recent Art’s Week at the college was beautifully advertised with Nabokov’s blues:

The most famous of the ‘Nabokov Blues’ is the Karner Blue – described thus in his novel Pnin (1957): ‘A score of small butterflies… revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface … fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.’ Nabokov’s connection with the Karner Blue has been credited with ‘helping to motivate conservation efforts to prevent its demise.’ And, Nabokov’s research into the Polyommatus blues has also recently borne particular fruit: ‘In a speculative moment in 1945, Nabokov came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves… On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.’ Eric Overbey notes, which may likewise be relevant to Rowling’s butterfly emoticon: ‘Blue butterflies can have some of the shortest life spans of any species, and Nabokov seemed particularly fascinated by this quality of ephemeral metamorphosis.’

‘His Psyche true’

‘The poor grub… expands into a beautiful form with rainbow wings. The Greeks called it Psyche, a manifest emblem of the soul’ (R. W. Emerson, 1906)

The most famous of Nabokov’s blues was first described by Nabokov in his paper ‘The Nearctic Forms of Lycæides’ which was published in 1943 in the journal Psyche. And, of course, the name of that august entomological journal – established in 1874 by the Cambridge Entomological Club – creates a delightful connection with something else we know about Strike 9. The meanings of ‘psyche’ as both butterfly and soul are linked together in the person of the mythic Psyche, whose name has more recently has been taken by Jung and transformed into the modern meaning of the word (if Dr Broccoli is, like Prudence, a Jungian this meaning of the word will also be in play in Strike 9). The Oxford English Dictionary explains the etymology of ‘psyche’ thus:

Ancient Greek ψυχή breath, life (identified with or indicated by the breath), the animating principle in man and other living beings, the source of all vital activities, rational or irrational, the soul or spirit (as distinct from its material vehicle, the body, σῶμα), sometimes considered as capable of persisting in a disembodied state after separation from the body at death, (also) a butterfly or moth

Compare classical Latin Psȳchē, Psyche, the name of an allegorical personification of the soul, especially as occurring in the central episode of Apuleius Metamorphoses (2nd cent. a.d.). In classical literature, Psyche was personified as a beautiful mortal with whom Cupid fell in love: Venus was jealous of Psyche’s beauty and set her a series of superhuman tasks, after the last of which Psyche and Cupid were allowed to marry and Psyche was brought to heaven; she is represented in works of art as having butterfly wings, or as a butterfly. The name was extended by Plato and other philosophers to the anima mundi (see anima mundi n.), conceived as animating the general system of the universe, as the soul animates the individual organism. Developing a distinction between ancient Greek πνεῦμα breath or spirit (see pneuma n.; corresponding to Hebrew rūaḥ) and ancient Greek ψυχή soul (corresponding to Hebrew nepeš), terms often used interchangeably in Greek-speaking Judaism, St Paul used ψυχή for the lower or merely natural life of man, shared with other animals, in contrast with the πνεῦμα or spirit, used as an anthropological term in relation to the divine πνεῦμα conceived as a new eschatological gift.

As Bulfinch’s Mythology (1881) – a work of popular mythology – explains it, the meaning of soul and butterfly are beautifully intertwined.

The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness.

Bulfinch could be writing about our heroes. 

As Bulfinch likewise notes ‘in works of art Psyche is represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly’ and if you look closely at the painting Rowling has tweeted Psyche does indeed have a perfect pair of butterfly wings.

One of the reasons I am delighted by Rowling’s posting of this Psyche picture is that Keats wrote a famous poem called ‘Ode to Psyche’  and we now know that Rowling studied Keats for A-level and remains a fan. It is a poem I’ve long loved – like Rowling I studied Keats at school, and I learnt ‘Ode to Psyche’ by heart and was asked to perform it front of the class (the subject of one of the most perfect back-handed compliments I have ever received when a teacher later gushed, ‘I will never forget your recitation of ‘Ode to Autumn’). 

Keats’s knowledge of Psyche’s myth is drawn from Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary (1788): 

Psyche, a nymph whom Cupid married and carried into a place of bliss, where he long enjoyed her company. Venus put her to death because she had robbed the world of her son; but Jupiter, at the request of Cupid, granted immortality to Psyche. The word signifies the soul, and this personification of Psyche first mentioned by Apuleius is posterior to the Augustan age, though still it is connected with ancient mythology. Psyche is generally represented with the wings of a butterfly, to intimate the lightness of the soul, of which the butterfly is the symbol, and on that account, among the ancients, when a man had just expired, a butterfly appeared fluttering above, as if rising from the mouth of the deceased.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau – whose L’Amour et Psyché (1889) Rowling posted on 8 September 2025 – is one of those who depicts Psyche with butterfly wings, and Keats likewise stresses the winged-ness of Psyche – calling her ‘the winged Psyche,’ noting how her ‘pinions’ embraced those of her beloved ‘the winged boy’ and ending with a reference to her ‘lucent fans’ (shining wings). In both painting and poem the link between the two meanings of ‘psyche’ are made very clear.

Bulfinch’s Mythology notes that, in addition to Keats’s famous poem, ‘The allegory of the story of Cupid and Psyche is well presented in the beautiful lines of T. K. Harvey’:

    “They wove bright fables in the days of old,

       When reason borrowed fancy’s painted wings;

     When truth’s clear river flowed o’er sands of gold,

       And told in song its high and mystic things!

     And such the sweet and solemn tale of her

       The pilgrim heart, to whom a dream was given,

     That led her through the world,–Love’s worshipper,–

       To seek on earth for him whose home was heaven!”

‘The pilgrim heart’ is a lovely phrase for Strike 9 and Bulfinch sets out all the trials Psyche must undergo as she undertakes this pilgrimage. One of them – as discussed on TSEF – is to take a box of the beauty of Persephone to Venus and this, of course, bring us back to the charm bracelet where were began, as next to the Book of Psalms is an image of Persephone. I love the idea on the charm-bracelet TSEF episode that the hour-glass charm links, via a time-sensitive case, to Psyche’s trials which – fairytale-like – all have to be completed within the day. Lindsay, on the TSEF episode, has suggested that the Persephone charm links with the case and points to a kidnap victim, which would create a fittingly time-sensitive plot. 

In support of this idea is the fact that the first time that Rowling wrote about Persephone (in an essay which describes, with her trademark wry self-deprecation, her undergraduate studies in classical myth) she describes Persephone’s story as a ‘thrilling tale of kidnap’:

“What is the most obvious question we should ask about Theseus?” said Dr. Y, throwing the debate wide open. The question that popped instantly into my brain was, “Did he really exist?” Naturally, I did not utter it aloud. I knew that would reveal only too clearly my unsuitability to find out about Theseus. I sat in bitter silence, knowing that what he wanted was one of those not remotely obvious questions these classical types kept asking, which were always the cue for comprehensible stories to mutate suddenly into bizarre metaphors and symbols. Only the previous week a thrilling tale of kidnap starring one Persephone had turned out to be about crop storage.

A student we shall call Hugh, because that was his name, broke the silence.

“Did he really exit?” he suggested lazily.

“Exactly,” said Dr Y, with an approving smile.

A thousand curses. Just once, I could have earned an approving smile. I was sure my chance would never come again, and I was quite right.

Persephone is a beautiful goddess who is abducted by Pluto and taken down to Hades. Her mother Demeter (the goddess of Harvest) searches in vain for her and, in her mourning, forbids any plants from growing. Persephone comes back to the upper world, but Pluto has tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds and, having tasted the food of the underworld, she is forced to return for six months every year. In ancient Greece, corn was kept cool and dark by being stored underground, and, at the time of sowing, Persephone’s return to the world was celebrated as a symbol of the corn ascending from its underground storage.

Rowling, however, rebelled against this literalist reading of the ‘thrilling tale’ of Persephone’s abduction as merely an explanation for the underground storage of corn and it is interesting to note – as Persephone’s myth looks to be playing a possibly important role in Strike 9 – that Harry Potter, likewise, rejects this rationalist reduction of myth. When Hermione argues with Professor Binns that there must be a kernel of truth in the legend of the Chamber of Secrets, she appears to be following the reasoning of Rowling’s classics tutors. Professor Binns (based on one of Rowling’s most boring lecturers) must accept Hermione’s point about the literal underpinning of myth because it is his own. But Rowling is here brilliantly turning the tables on dry tutors who evacuated myth of narrative excitement. In Harry Potter’s magical world, such academic interpretation retains, rather than undoes, the fundamental joy of the story, for the literal underpinning of the myth of the Chamber of Secrets is not an explanation of crop storage but the existence of a real Chamber of Secrets. Rowling puts the magic back into myth and doing so is her own, witty act of rebellion against the hyper-literalist interpretative school she felt had stripped Ovidian myth of its wonder. In the world of Harry Potter, apparently mythic places (such as the Chamber of Secrets) and apparently mythic objects (such as the Hallows) turn out, in fact, to be fact.

The Persephone medal is joined on the same loop as the psalm charm which (as I wrote in my previous post) probably contains Psalm 23. The underworld connects these two texts – Persephone as unwilling goddess of Hades and the Psalmist walking through the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23. If this connection is realised in a literal way in Strike 9, we may yet have a kidnap victim kept underground (maybe this will be the moment for J.E. Connor’s London’s Disused Underground Stations (2001) – a book hidden on Rowling’s homepage – to shine! ). The classical underworld likewise resonates throughout Harry Potter in the repeated formula of Harry’s yearly struggle with the forces of darkness in an underground space. In the first novel of the series, the connection of these spaces with the classical underworld is made explicit through its guardianship by a three-headed dog who is charmed by music (Fluffy is Hogwarts’s Cerberus) but there is also a more subtle parallel. In Philosopher’s Stone, the trio enter this underground chamber in a chapter which begins with Snape asking them to make a Forgetfulness Potion. Like figures from classical myth, they cannot enter the underworld until they have drunk from the waters Lethe: the river of Forgetfulness. The explicit connection with the Orpheus myth in Philosopher’s Stone, in the three-headed dog who is charmed with music, links the underground spaces of Hogwarts with the classical underworld. It opens up the possibility of reading the similar underground chamber of the following novel as containing a more subtle Orpheus allusion. In Chamber, in an optimistic rewriting of Ovid’s story, Harry goes down to the underworld and succeeds in rescuing the woman who will become his beloved from death. Hogwarts’s hidden chambers resonate with the stories of the classical underworld – of the loss of Eurydice and the abduction of Persephone – and respond to the exhilaration with which Rowling first responded to such stories. In a comic touch, when Hermione, Ron and Gabrielle are ‘taken hostage’ in the uncanny, underwater world of the lake in Goblet of Fire, Rowling reused a phrase she had earlier employed about the myth of Persephone being taken down to the underworld. Rowling wrote in the 1998 essay (quoted above) of this abduction of Persephone as ‘a thrilling tale of kidnap.’ When Ron tells tall tales about his underwater trials in the Triwizard tournament: ‘at first, he gave what seemed to be the truth… One week later, however, Ron was telling a thrilling tale of kidnap in which he struggled single-handedly against fifty heavily armed merpeople’ (Chap 27). Ron’s kidnap into the dark waters of the Great Lake is a comic version of Persephone myth; I suspect we’ll be getting a somewhat darker echo in Strike 9 (but here’s hoping that, like Persphone, Ron, Hermione and Gabrielle, the kidnap victim will be returned alive).

‘The beauty that can emerge from dark confinement’

The charm bracelet is full of charms such as the ring case, the Trojan Horse and the psalm book box that hide things inside other things. I loved learning on the TSEF podcast that the original Jack-in-the-box was used to trap the devil (and can’t help noticing this is another trickster story linked with the name Jack – as is Jack the Giant Killer who traps the original Cormoran). The coffin emoticon links with this idea of containment as, in a sense, does the butterfly emoticon – a ‘symbol of transformation and liberation, of the beauty that can emerge from dark confinement’ as Rowling wrote. The Psyche story likewise has a box – rather like Pandora’s box – in which Psyche cannot help but look. But although she, like Pandora, is punished for looking into the forbidden box (which contains Persephone’s beauty) it is only sleep that comes out of it, rather than all the ills of the world. Cupid saves her by gathering up the sleep from her and enclosing it once more within the box. Psyche’s opening of the box forms a circle within the narrative, as it is a repetition of her curiosity and breaking of the fiat not to look at her lover at the start of the story – the transgression that brings on all her trials. But it is noticeable how much softer and more forgiving this myth is than so many similar myths. Unlike Pandora, who brings on all the evils of the world by opening a box, or Orpheus, who breaks the fiat not to look at his beloved and so condemns her forever to the underworld, Psyche is forgiven her transgressions. If Persephone’s charms links with the case, and Psyche’s image links with Robin, we can look forward to perhaps a happier resolution of both than the ‘wall-to-wall star-crossed lovers’ of The Hallmarked Man.

A thought to take away of the happy ending towards which we are all hastening – Psyche’s myth ends with her perfect union with Cupid and the birth of their daughter Pleasure. Or, as Keats – the most romantic of the Romantic Poets – puts it:

Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,

As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

And ready still past kisses to outnumber

At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love.

By Dr Beatrice Groves