Many are my notable aliases in many countries

Google is being weird again.

Odin, Elias, and the Hermit

Today is Wednesday, and one of the things the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine reminds me of is a picture I drew many years ago representing that day of the week. I no longer have those pictures of the days of the week, but I remember that one very clearly. Since Wednesday is associated with Hermes/Mercury and Odin/Woden, and with the third day of creation, when the stars were created, my picture depicted a man with a cloak, broad-brimmed hat, and staff, walking alone under a starry sky. The similarity to the Tarot card is obvious.

I am currently reading Orson F. Whitney's book-length poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. In Canto II, Elias himself appears, as the Soul of Song, and is compared to a hermit (eremite):

The spirit's garb -- for spirit so he seemed -- 

Fell radiant in many a flowing fold;

A robe antique, by modern limners deemed

Befitting monk or eremite of old.

This reinforces the Odin connection, since both Elias (Elijah) and Odin are typically depicted as accompanied by ravens. Searching just now for images of Odin walking, I found several with ravens and one with something even more synchronistically apropos:

This (non-traditional, and presumably algorithm-generated) depiction has Odin not only accompanied by a hart but wearing antlers of his own, making him one of those "humanoid deer creatures" we've been hearing so much about.

An interesting coincidence is that Canto VII of Elias (which I have not yet read) is titled "The Arcana of the Infinite." Given the tradition of referring to the cards of the Tarot as the Major and Minor Arcana, and given that many dictionaries give "God" as one of the definitions of the noun Infinite ("Endless is my name," Joseph Smith has him say), this corresponds pretty closely to The Tarot of the Divine, the name of the deck whose Hermit card has recently been at the center of the sync-web.

Another coincidence is that the part of Elias I read today included "thy desert blooms" (an allusion to Isaiah 35, whence also "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart"), followed a few lines later by "One and Pure in Heart." One suggests the Hermit, a solitary, while Pure in Heart could be symbolized by a white heart (see "White harts").

Another Odin link is "The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing," which emphasizes the runes on Laura Bruno's Hermit Portal painting. Odin is supposed to have been the one who discovered runes. Bruno explicitly compares her hermit to Odin and also suggests that the man who taught her runes may have been Odin in disguise.

White harts

Wade has expressed the opinion that the Hermit with the White Hart "depicts a hopeful moment, and is a hopeful sign."

One of the preschoolers was wearing this T-shirt, which suggests the White Hart by way of the homophone heart, and associates it with hope. (The image is a reconstruction; I didn't take a photo.)

At 1:13 this afternoon, I took this photo of a saddlebag on the scooter stopped in front of me at a red light.

Those look almost more like antennae than antlers, but the animal is clearly meant to be a white deer. The Chinese takes the expression 一路平安 -- "have a safe journey," literally "one road safe" -- and replaces the character 路 "road" with the homophone 鹿 "deer."

Five minutes later, at 1:18, I took this photo of a glass door with a decal on it which looks like a leftover Christmas decoration: a snowman with the head of a white reindeer, with a heart on its chest.

Then shall the lame man leap as an hart

In an email last night, I wrote:

The hart/hermit theme is still developing, but I think it likely has to do with Isaiah 35. "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart" -- cf. the hermit, who walks with a stick. The desert is a major theme of the chapter.

I hadn't had that idea until I wrote it. It just came out as I was writing the email.

Exactly 200 minutes after I sent that email, Wade left a comment on "Seven twenty-two," saying in part:

What do the 7 22 syncs mean? Tomorrow (where I am) is 7/22, could that be it? Might the scene from the movie [Pulp Fiction] actually be the principal import of the syncs? That idea, in lieu of a better, ought to be given sober consideration. Namely, it's too early--in the movie, it's too early but it doesn't take long for them to return to the door and knock--but you/we/someone will soon pass through a door that gives rise to a reflection upon providence and luck. Might it even result in a decision to "walk the earth?"

I don't think I've actually ever watched Pulp Fiction all the way through, so I didn't immediately get that "walk the earth" was a line from the movie. It was clearly a reference to something, though -- the Frozen Man? the Duke of Earl? Allen Mandelbaum? -- so I searched my blog for the phrase (in quotes) to see what would turn up.

Blogger's search function is terrible (one reason I've mostly stopped using.diacritics is that searching for Eliphas won't return any results with Éliphas), so the second result, "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy" (July 2024), didn't actually include the search string. But it did include a lengthy quotation from Isaiah 35, beginning with the very verse I had quoted in my email: "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart . . . ."

The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing

I saw this today on Peter Grant's latest meme post:

It shows a person in a hooded green robe, a lantern, an owl, runes, and a green octopus-like Cthulhu doll.

Here is Laura Bruno's "Hermit Portal" painting, which I first posted on June 27, in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." It also shows a man in a greenish robe, a lantern, and an owl.

Here is a detail, showing the runes on the Hermit's staff and on the hem of his robe.

And here is the green octopus-like creature that appeared together with the Hermit Portal in my post.

This octopus has been given the face of Pepe or Kek. This is a link to the well in the meme, since back in 2021, in "The Emperor's orb," I linked Kek to the Frog Prince that retrieves a golden ball from a well.

So that's quite a lot of connections between the meme and my Hermit Portal post. The meme's reference to "the Chosen One who saves the kingdom" is also relevant to the ongoing sync theme of Pharazon as interpreted by Daymon Smith. In Words of the Faithful, Pharazon has the title "Chosen One" carved into his belt, and it is anticipated that he "would restore the land and its people to the glory that was sung of the gods in yesteryears."

Shortly after seeing the meme, I was checking /pol/ -- yes, the board for which the green Kektopus above is the mascot -- and ran across another of those humanoid deer creatures which keep being associated with the Hermit.

Mostly unrelated, but I'll just include it here. Last night, the YuuTube Music algorithm served up this song:

What caught my eye was the "A.C.T." Those letters, encoding 1320, were a sync theme back in 2023, for example in "Random syncs: Ace of Swords, 1320." The track title also made me think of "prayer in sea" -- De Profundis, or Jonah -- and then the lyrics turned out to include this:

Hey, when seas will cover lands

And when men will be no more

Don't think you can forgive you

Obviously another Atlantis connection.

I was right

Mark Docherty says so, in a post titled "Tyconius was right." The name is also spelt Tychonius (and sometimes misspelt as Typhonius, apparently!), and the Russian spelling, Тихоний, matches my surname very closely. Quoting a former pope, Docherty writes that

for Tyconius, it is not the infidels who will “fall away” but rather the true believers, who will withdraw from the evil within the Church. A paradoxical reversal indeed.

I did indeed say something pretty much like that in my 2020 Christmas post.

I think "underpopulation" is an understatement

I'm old enough to remember when each of these countries had tens of millions of people.