The felling of the White Tree

We often talk about White Trees around here --- the Tree of Life from the Book of Mormon and the various White Trees in the works of Tolkien. These were most recently juxtaposed in "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat" (July 19), a post which was -- appropriately, as we shall see -- occasioned by a passage in Orson F. Whitney's 1904 poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. That post emphasized the fact that Nimloth, one of Tolkien's White Trees, was in Bill's words "the tree that Pharazon burned down."

Strictly speaking, Nimloth was not "burned down," but rather felled and then burned. As The Silmarillion tells it, "the King yielded to Sauron and felled the White Tree," after which "the first fire upon the altar Sauron kindled with the hewn wood of Nimloth."

The White Tree from Nephi's vision in the Book of Mormon is never felled or burned -- but in Whitney's poem it is. Referring to Nephi's High Mountain Vision, the poet writes:

    All this and more the prophet-prince foresaw;

    Messiah's self -- Jehovah -- Him beheld, --

    The Perfect One, in whom was found no flaw,

    Though slander as an ocean round Him swelled.

    Life's deathless tree -- deathless, though demon-felled;

    The crash resounding to this far-off shore,

    Whose winnowed remnant welcomed Him, revealed

    In risen glory, when had ceased the roar

Of wrecking tempests, flung His radiant face before.

(Retelling the High Mountain Vision in Spenserian stanzas is something I would do. I'm kind of bummed that Whitney beat me to it.)

The language I have bolded is all figurative, of course. The white Tree of Life is made to represent Jesus himself, "demon-felled" because executed at the instigation of the Jews, who had raised a swelling "ocean" of calumny against him, and yet still "deathless" because of the Resurrection. The crash of the falling tree "resounding" in the distant West is a reference to the great destruction unleashed on the Book of Mormon lands shortly after the death of Christ.

It's a somewhat strange choice of imagery, especially since the execution of Jesus involved raising a "tree" (as the Cross is often poetically called) rather than felling one. It's also a misreading of Nephi, for whom the White Tree pretty clearly represents the Virgin rather than her Son (see "You, Lady, are the Tree"). By "coincidence," though, Whitney's poetic language -- published when Tolkien was still a schoolboy -- presages the latter's own White Tree story. Tolkien's White Tree is felled at the command of a demon (Sauron, the equivalent of a fallen angel), and yet lives on as the successive White Trees of Gondor, grown from its fruit. The felling of the Tree represents Pharazon's choice to serve Sauron, which has repercussions for the distant West (Tol Eressea and Aman), and which results in the downfall of Numenor, "an ocean round [it] swelled."

Many are my notable aliases in many countries

Google is being weird again.

Update: I published this post at 10:59 a.m. Exactly 47 minutes later, at 11:46, I photographed this logo, which was on the backpack of the motorcyclist stopped in front of me at a red light.

My reason for posting the Google search-result screenshot above was the strange inclusion of "Gandalf the Fresh" (any relation to Chilled?), but it also includes the word Istari -- "Wizards," singular Istar. The backpack logo also includes the string ISTAR. The company is apparently called Jiayi Star, and an image search shows that they typically put a space between the two words.

For whatever reason, the version of the logo that I photographed has no space. Furthermore, the IA lines up with the same letters in the Google screenshot.

If we reanalyze the logo as JIAY-ISTAR, what does the first part mean? It's close to Jay, a name which has come up before -- Jay Leno, Roy Jay, and perhaps most relevantly, "Blue Jays" as a reference to Tolkien's Blue Wizards, two of the Istari.

In Chinese transliteration, the i in jia indicates palatalization; it's a single syllable that might be rendered jyah. This reminds me of how Daymon Smith renders the Book of Mormon name Jacom as Dyacom.

I mentioned that I took the photo 47 minutes after publishing the original version of this post. I had just been thinking of the number 47 because it is the S:E:G: value of both hart and stag, and also of time -- Time being the earliest recorded name for the Tarot trump now known as the Hermit. I also happen to be 47 years old at the moment, and this past 7/22 was Bill's 47th birthday.

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.