Sleeping on billows, and the Landsoon Welcome Doll

The tempest sync theme reminded me of a hymn that confused me as a child:

Master, the tempest is raging!

The billows are tossing high!

The sky is o'ershadow'd with blackness,

No shelter or help is nigh;

Carest thou not that we perish?

How canst thou lie asleep,

When each moment so madly is threat'ning,

A grave in the angry deep?

The winds and the waves shall obey my will,

Peace, be still.

Whether the wrath of the storm-tossed sea,

Or demons, or men, or whatever it be,

No waters can swallow the ship where lies

The Master of ocean, and earth and skies;

They all shall sweetly obey thy will,

Peace, be still. Peace, be still.

They all shall sweetly obey thy will,

Peace, peace, be still.

I've bolded the two words that were the main source of my confusion: billows and demons.

Demon is not part of the usual Mormon vocabulary -- it's always "the devil and his angels" -- and so I knew demons only as creatures in fantasy games like Hack. This hymn always made me want to ask an adult, "Wait, are demons real?" but for some reason I never did. (Hack is a link to "Minor sync: Omelette and Mormon tempest" because we kids always pronounced it "Omelette of Yendor." My mother tried many times to correct this to "am-yoo-let," but we thought that was just her Southern accent and wouldn't fly in New Hampshire.)

I didn't know what billows were but could only infer the meaning from context -- namely, the context of the Dr. Seuss book I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. As it happens, it matched that of the hymn pretty well. The narrator is caught outside in a terrible storm called the Midwinter Jicker, and "a chap in a slicker" offers him shelter in his house. He spends the night there, finally falling asleep at quarter past five, and when he awakes, the whole house is "crashing downhill in flubbulous flood." While he is thus sleeping through a raging tempest, like Jesus in the hymn, he dreams he is "sleeping on billowy billows / Of soft silk and satin marshmallow-stuffed pillows."

Thus in my mind, billows represented not an aspect of the raging tempest but the most comfortable thing imaginable to sleep on. I imagined Jesus sleeping in similar marshmallow-stuffed luxury, so soft that, to the disciples' astonishment, he managed to stay asleep even as his silk-and-satin billows were "tossing high" in the tempest -- much as the narrator in Solla Sollew wakes up only after his whole house has been carried away in a flash flood.

Another church song that I grossly misunderstood as a child was "Book of Mormon Stories." This was always sung with hand gestures, including an undulating movement for "Long ago their fathers came from far across the sea." The roundness of the movement was sufficiently different from the way I drew ocean waves (with pointed crests) that I didn't make the connection but instead associated it with "billows," which I had begun to think of as what people slept on when they were on boats. Then there was this verse:

Lamanites met others who were seeking liberty,

And the land soon welcomed all who wanted to be free.

Book of Mormon stories say that we must brothers be,

Giv'n this land if we life righteously.

Lamanites were universally understood to be American Indians back then, and the accompanying gesture was to hold two fingers up behind one's head, representing feathers. Very culturally insensitive, I'm sure. It was for this reason that I naturally turned to The Indian Book for light on this mysterious figure, "the Landsoon Welcome Doll, who wanted to be free." I knew that monsoon referred to heavy seasonal rains, and I figured that a landsoon must be something similar -- maybe heavy rains that happened inland, far from the coast. The Welcome Doll apparently had something to do with these rains. Well, I knew from The Indian Book that "it was the kachinas (kah CHEE nuhz) who sent rain" and that "Hopi men carved dolls that represented magical beings called kachinas." So, I imagined the Welcome Doll looking something like this (the ones with the crocodile-like muzzles), but with its arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome:

As I recall all this now, I realize that it syncs pretty well with "Ariel." Ariel is the spirit who causes the titular storm in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Just as the Welcome Doll "wanted to be free," Ariel responds to Prospero's question, "What is't thou canst demand?" with, "My liberty."

They shall believe the wind shall not blow the children of men.

I just read J. M. Smith's recent series at the Orthosphere on apocalyptic literature: "Servants of the Saints of the Most High," "Apocalypse is Neither Cryptic History Nor Cryptic News," and "Myth is Cathartic and Not Cryptic."

The second post in the series discusses the meaning of the biblical phrase "son of man," which basically means a human being -- as opposed to, depending on the context, either a beast or a god. (Minor sync: I recently mentioned Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski, in "To the Faithful Departed.") I discussed this myself in my 2020 post "The Messiah and Son of Man in Daniel," where I said it was just the singular of another familiar biblical expression: "the children of men."

Thinking about that dredged up a very old memory: My youngest sister, then a toddler, was sitting with an open Bible on her lap, pretending to read from it. She couldn't actually read at all at that age, so as she moved her finger along the lines of text, she ad-libbed something that I guess she thought sounded King-Jamesy:

They shall believe the wind shall not blow the children of men.

When I thought of that old improvised scripture, it seemed like it must be significant in some way -- out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, right? -- so much so that I might have ended up posting about it even without a synchronistic connection. I thought of this verse from Paul, which has all the right key words:

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive (Eph. 4:14).

Later, I was tinkering with the layout of my Words blog, and scrolling down to check if the sidebar was displaying correctly, I noticed this post, consisting of "ancient words" received by Daymon, followed by his translation:

enlarasu sutherol, speri, spole

Then the Wind happened,

being by Wind blown, scattering as grist.

Note added: Here's another scripture, particularly relevant given the apocalyptic context:

And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree (Rev 7:1).

Second note added: Another amusing juxtaposition on the Synlogos feed:

Ariel

I was listening to a recording of the Book of Isaiah while doing some routine paperwork for my school. At the very moment that I wrote Ariel -- the English name of one of my students -- Isaiah said:

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (Isa. 29:1)

That's all so far, but these minor syncs are often a prelude to things to come.

The name Ariel has appeared on this blog once before, in "Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five" (July 2025), where it refers to the character in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, who sings the song alluded to in the title. That word tempest recently appeared in "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest" (March 7), another of those "minor syncs" that ended up ramifying into something more complex.

Griffin gargoyles

With the Cherubim re-entering the sync stream, I was reflecting on the strange way certain themes or symbols are connected. The Cherubim have been identified with the Gryphon, which has been identified with the griffon vulture Odessa Grigorievna, who is linked to the Garuda, which is linked to the monstrous avian title character of Flight of the Gargoyle. From a symbol of holiness to a symbol of abomination in fewer steps than it would take you to get from either to Kevin Bacon.

Can there be any real connection between the opposite ends of that chain, though? Is sync-linking really a transitive relation?

Today I read in The King in Yellow a reference to the "ugly water-spitting griffins" of the Place St. Michel in Paris. That's a direct link between Gryphon and Gargoyle.

A third reading of the Ninbad couplet

The fourth couplet of "With?" is:

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

I wrote this with Martin Luther in mind -- the "nailer" who nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and who famously said, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

In "Up against the wall" I proposed another reading, in which Ninbad the Nailer is Trent Reznor, whose band name -- Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN -- is a link to both Ninbad and Nailer. Reznor was raised Lutheran, though oddly he is named after an ecumenical council of the anti-Lutheran Counter-Reformation. I saw hints of Luther in the lyrics to "Head Like a Hole":

Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

Today I found a third reading.

This afternoon I was reflecting on the career of Mormon, the compiler of the Book of Mormon. He led the armies of the Nephites at a time of utter moral depravity, when rape, human sacrifice, and cannibalism were rife. In the context of this pervasive evil, the nature of the last straw which finally made him unwilling to lead so wicked a people is surprising:

And they did swear by the heavens, and also by the throne of God, that they would go up to battle against their enemies, and would cut them off from the face of the land. And it came to pass that I, Mormon, did utterly refuse from this time forth to be a commander and a leader of this people, because of their wickedness and abomination. . . . they had sworn by all that had been forbidden them by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Morm. 3:10-11, 14).

Really? That was the one thing too evil for Mormon to overlook? It made me think of James's similar vehemence on the subject:

But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath (James 5:12).

Really? "Above all things"? Today, listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, I found a similar sentiment expressed in the Book of Ether:

And it came to pass that they all sware unto him, by the God of heaven, and also by the heavens, and also by the earth, and by their heads, that whoso should vary from the assistance which Akish desired should lose his head; and whoso should divulge whatsoever thing Akish made known unto them, the same should lose his life. . . . And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God (Ether 8:14, 18).

"Most abominable and wicked above all" -- not the murders and whoredoms committed by this secret oath-bound fraternity, but the fact that they had formed such a fraternity in the first place. Again the things they swore by are emphasized -- all that was forbidden by Jesus in the Sermon at Bountiful (3 Ne. 12:34-36, slightly different from the Sermon on the Mount list).

As a former member of the Great and Unabbreviable Church, and one who has been through the temple, I too have been part of a secret oath-bound fraternity. (We didn't swear by that particular list of forbidden things, but I'm not sure that technicality counts for much.) When I became an atheist in 2002, I renounced these oaths, considering myself no longer bound by promises, elicited under false pretenses, to what I had come to see as a non-existent Being. Since emerging from the mists of atheism, I am once again troubled by those oaths and have sometimes wondered if I am right to consider myself no longer bound by them. Not that keeping oaths already broken is an option anyway.

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of those who had made oaths to the Dark Lord, "under delusion and by self and Melkor deceived." Those "bound to Melkor in mind, heart, or by oath-everlasting, unbreaking" receive this message:

Do you today renounce your oaths?

Evil-taken, known to yourselves to whom made,

Or otherwise, Eru cares not --

For he promises in our work to bring about

Release from bonds evil-set to crookeding

Thy souls corrupt. If yea, then we

Shall attend to thy release, and the bond's

Unchaining, by breaking; If nay, then here

Thou remain, until summoned, by one

Whose voice thou knowest, neither denied

In the command's taking up, may you be; . . .

Some accepted this offer and were "relieved of chains." The others

who remained enchained -- as nails driven into a board, only to stand in witness, a testimony of the hammer's pounding them in -- stayed

Later we read of "orcs (as the 'nails' became)."

I think we have to see in this a deliberate allusion to the oaths of the temple, the "highest" of which are associated with the symbolism of the nail, and particularly with Isaiah's expression "a nail in a sure place" (Isa. 22:23).

The "nails" in Slumbered "remained . . . only to stand," considering themselves bound by their satanic oaths and therefore unfree.

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

Even that phrase from Isaiah suggests that release from such oaths is possible, though, for the prophet goes on to say:

In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off: for the Lord hath spoken it (Isa. 22:25).

The Tolkienian context of Slumbered made me think to look at Ninbad as Elvish. In Sindarin, nîn means "tear, weeping," and bâd means "road, way, path." Ninbad thus suggests the Via Dolorosa ("Sorrowful Way"), the path which Jesus walked, carrying his cross, to the site of his execution. In the temple, too, the "nail in a sure place" is identified with the nails used in the crucifixion. (It is widely believed, despite Reznor's denial, that the name Nine Inch Nails has a similar meaning.)

The nails were removed from Jesus' hands, but the wounds remained, even after the resurrection.

And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends (Zech. 13:6).

Magenta blossoms

In "Glorians and such," I quoted as an example of a Glorian "witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor." In the next post, "Animals dipped in food," one of the titular animals was a blackbird "in the bush with pink blossoms." One of the definitions of pink is "magenta, the color evoked by red and blue light when combined."

I was on the road in the afternoon and happened to pass a gigantic bougainvillea, climbing all the way to the top of a utility pole, an explosion of magenta blossoms. Or no, I corrected myself, not blossoms. Bracts, which are modified leaves. Though petals are modified leaves, too, so the distinction seems rather academic.

When I arrived home, my wife was out front chatting with our neighbor, who was working in her garden. I went inside first, and when my wife came in, she told me what they had been talking about: whether the colorful structures on a particular plant were flowers (the neighbor's position) or leaves (my wife's). I of course asked what plant they were talking about, thinking it must be either bougainvillea or poinsettia, but she said it was jiuchongge, a name I didn't know. I looked it up and found that it's an alternate term for bougainvillea, which I had previously known only as sanjiaomei.

Animals dipped in food

In "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," I report suddenly wanting an omelette and then finding a reference to that food in The King in Yellow. Wondering whether omelettes might have been mentioned earlier in that book, planting the idea in my head, I did a word search. There is one earlier instance:

"That's a blackbird," observed Miss Byng; "see him there in the bush with pink blossoms. He's all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says --"

Shortly after searching out this reference, I checked the latest Barnhardt Meme Barrage (I've really got to find a better source for memes now that Anglin has apparently retired), which included this:

The blackbird is a dark animal that looks as if its bill (nose and mouth) had been dipped in yellow food. The dog is a yellow animal that looks as if its muzzle (nose and mouth) had been dipped in dark food.

Yesterday I tried and failed to find a place that sold omelettes. Today, no longer looking for omelettes, I decided to lunch at a new restaurant I knew nothing about, and as serendipity would have it, it sells omelettes. The name of the restaurant is Black Man, which is a bit of a sync with the omelette-dipped blackbird, of which Miss Byng says, using the masculine pronoun, "He's all black."

Note added: My last post, "Glorians and such," connected the post "King son of Light, and black dog stars" with a dog named King in "Hometo Omleto." This suggests that King son of Light (i.e. Tar-Calion, official name of Pharazon the Golden) is the same as the black dog star. A Golden Retriever, dipped in dark material so as to appear (partly) black, seems a related concept.