Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat

I just read this in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages. The poet is apostrophizing worldly fame and commenting on its futility.

Apple of ashes to the longing lip!

Brine to the burning throat and thirsting soul!

Phantom, delusion, misty ghost of fame!

Voidest and vainest of all vanities!

Whitney's intended meaning is clear -- fame is false food and false drink, which cannot satisfy -- but the sync fairies will commandeer these things for their own purposes. The phrase "apple of ashes" made me think of some recent comments by Bill on "Gardens of pomegranates" (June 29) about an "ash tree" that bore red fruit. His first comment there begins:

Pomegranates are known for their red berries, and would seem to have a not-so-traditional link to the White Tree 

I thought that was an odd word to use for a pomegranate, but maybe technically accurate. All kinds of things, including bananas, are technically considered to be berries. Googling are pomegranates berries, I got as the highlighted result this, which also compares them to apples.

The idea of the White Tree producing red berries is, as Bill says, "not-so-traditional." I am not aware that Tolkien mentions the color of the fruits of any of his White Trees. In the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree of unspecified color which bears white fruit (1 Ne. 8:11), while Nephi sees a white tree which bears fruit of unspecified color (1 Ne. 11:8; the chapter-and-verse references capture the reversal nicely). Since Nephi's vision comes in response to his "desire to behold the things which my father saw" (1 Ne. 11:3), and since he says the tree he saw "was like unto the tree which my father had seen" (1 Ne. 11:8), it is common to combine the imagery of the two visions and arrive at a White Tree with white fruit.

Bill quotes a reference in Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated to "Galathalion, white tree-silver shooted, red berried." Actually, Bill writes Galathilion, which is the correct name of one of Tolkien's White Trees. He is quoting from a draft version of Liberated, so either the typo was introduced into Daymon's manuscript later, or else a Bill inadvertently corrected Daymon's typo with one of his own. Or it's possible that Galathalion isn't a typo but a different Elvish name, incorporating thalion "steadfast, strong."

There are lots of White Trees in Tolkien. Galathilion, the White Tree of Tirion, was made by Yavanna in the image of Telperion, the White Tree of Valinor. One of Galathilion's seedlings became Celebron, the White Tree of Tol Eressea, and one of its seedlings became Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor. From a fruit of Nimloth came a succession of four different White Trees of Gondor. Asusming Daymon's reference is to Galathilion, it implies that all the other White Trees in this list would have red berries as well.

Bill goes on to write:

Nimloth, as a reminder, is the tree that Pharazon burned down (I may have mentioned that once or twice...). As such, in my own symbols it has been referred to as an "Ash Tree", as well, since it was turned to ash.

Thus the White Tree that bears red berries, suggestive of the pomegranate that "looks like a red apple," is called an Ash Tree because it was burned. In Whitney's poem, right after the "apple of ashes" line, we have a reference to burning. Since burn can be either transitive or intransitive, burning can describe either something that undergoes burning or something that burns something else. Although Pharazon, who burned the White Tree, is supposed to have ended up in the Caves of the Forgotten, in a more general sense the Numenoreans burned the White Tree, and the Numenoreans were overwhelmed by the salty sea. "Brine to the burning."

"Throat" in this synchronistic context made me think of Vico's comment, repeated several times in The New Science, that "Cerberus was called three-throated as having an enormous gullet." Daymon's version of the story of the Numenorean assault on Eressea involves ravenous wolves who seem close kin to Vico's interpretation of Cerberus.

Appeared again the Hermit has

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew character, and the first several results are all Watto, a character whose Wikipedia article includes a "Comparisons to antisemitic caricatures" section.

I figured Google would probably fix that pretty quick, so I tried the search myself to see if I would get the same results. I did, mostly, but then right in the middle of the search results there was this:

The link is to -- who knew such a page existed? -- https://www.instagram.com/popular/star-wars-jewish-character/, where you can "watch reels about star wars jewish character from people around the world." None of the videos -- sorry, I mean "reels" -- appears to feature Watto or to have anything to do with Jews. It's just a random assortment of Star Wars content -- and for some reason the very first one is this one comparing Yoda to the Hermit of the Tarot. I'd never watched an "Instagram reel" and was pretty okay with that, but sync is sync, so I clicked. As expected, there was no mention of anything remotely Jewish.

Actually, come to think of it, I can supply the missing Jewish link myself. The Golden Dawn associated each card of the Major Arcana with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the letter assigned to the Hermit was, you guessed it, yodh.

The Stone Woman again

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). I had forgotten that it includes a reference to "the 'stone woman' of Mayan tradition," synching with a song that mentions Medusa and says "Will you turn to stone?" It hasn't been too long since I posted "The Stone Woman Mystery" (June 21), which deals with two different figures called "the stone woman," one of whom is a woman who turns to stone, and also includes a painting of Medusa.

You have bound yourself with oaths

I dreamt the following lines, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Unfortunately certain key words have slipped out of my memory.

You have bound yourself with oaths the [...] take.

You have made the ancient covenant the [...] make.

My sense is that the first lacuna was 'sons of Adam," but that leaves two syllables unaccounted for. I've got nothing for the second lacuna, but I understood that the two lines were expressing the same thought twice, in different words, after the manner of the prophetic poetry of Isaiah. I understood that the song referred to evil "secret combinations" rather than to any godly covenant.

With these lines of song came an image of someone who had a long string of perhaps around 150 large blue-gray ceramic beads, most of them round but some in irregular shapes suggesting bits of antler or bone. He kept it on a shelf, and it represented his having taken the oaths referred to in the song. People would see it on his shelf and be afraid of him. He wanted people to think his string of beads was thousands of years old, but I knew that in fact he had had it made very recently to replace the lost original, hoping no one would notice how new it looked.

Update: I put on some music, and one of the songs that came on was "The Voice" by the Moody Blues. The line "Make a promise, take a vow" syncs with the dream in that it is a song that repeats the idea of taking an oath twice, in different words, using the two verbs make and take.

The National Society for the Prevention of Paddington

I ran across this image on an old 4chan thread.

It caught my eye because of the red and blue spectacles and because the character's name, Hermione, suggests (but is etymologically unrelated to) Hermit. Then I realized that the wat spelling in the meme matched the actress's surname, Watson, and I ended up on her Wikipedia page. As I scrolled down, my attention was arrested by a picture of a bear sculpture decorated with butterflies, including a blue morpho, so I scanned the nearby text to see what it was.

At the end of line, my eyes jumped back to the beginning of that same line instead of to the next one, and so I read that prior to the release of film Paddington, Watson participated in a project to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Paddington.

I guess they didn't raise enough.

Seven twenty-two

I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was reading White Crows, and one of the characters checks the time and says, "It's seven twenty-two now."

Now, about an hour later, as I'm typing this, the Global Goblet is on the TV across the room, Argentina vs. Switzerland. They keep replaying a few seconds where numbers 7 and 22 are the only Swiss players on the screen.

Incipit liber primus

But Men shall remember Atlantis's name

Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,

It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell

Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.

We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old 

May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.

High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!

Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.