Scrambled serendipity

In yesterday's post "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch," I revisited an old 2019 post in which a book titled Serendipities manifested "a strange sort of anti-serendipity": The book caught my eye because the cover art was a painting I had recently posted about, but it turned out to be a version of the painting that lacked the key feature I had been interested in.

Today, a motorcyclist wearing this T-shirt was right ahead of me on the road for several minutes. (This is not my photo. I found it online.)

At first it looks as if it says SERENDIPITY, but the P and the R have been swapped, and the second E has been modified to the visually similar F. Below this SEPFNDIRITY is "DODF", which is harder to decrypt. My best guess is that it is a modification of "POOF" -- a sound effect associated with things appearing or disappearing as if by magic, which is somewhat related to the concept of serendipity.

Africa has its own time

This evening, I saw a textbook article, for reading comprehension practice, about the Ethiopian calendar and how it differs from the Gregorian.

About an hour later, I saw a /pol/ thread titled "TIL Africa has its own time," with a screenshot of an article about "African time" as a reference to Africans always being late for everything. (Lots of places and cultures make that joke about themselves.) The jannies appear to have deleted the thread before it was archived, since I can't find it now.

The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch

The Hermit card of the Tarot has been in the sync stream recently, including this "Hermit Portal" painting by Laura Bruno, which features an owl -- a bird which does not appear on most Hermit cards.

In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the Magician.

Today it occurred to me that this was something that had come up before: different versions of a depiction of a hermit, with and without an owl, and in conjunction with the Magician card of the Tarot.

The most famous and influential hermit in history is indisputably St. Anthony the Great, whose hallucinatory "temptation" in the wilderness has attracted the attention of artists from Gustave Flaubert to Salvador Dalí to Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch revisited the theme more than once, and while the St. Anthony Triptych in Lisbon isn't my favorite depiction of that saint by that artist, it entered the sync stream in "U.E. echoes A.E." (October 2019). I wrote:

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

As far back as "The Magician: Preliminary thoughts" (October 2018) I had recognized a connection between Bosch's Conjurer painting and the Magician card of the Tarot. Here is a detail showing the conjurer with his dog and owl:

And here is a detail from the Lisbon St. Anthony Triptych, showing the same two animals, and confirming that the owl is indeed an owl and not a monkey.

Around the time I was writing about these Bosch paintings in connection with the Tarot, I ran across an English translation of a book by Umberto Eco called, appropriately Serendipities, with the St. Anthony Triptych on the cover. As reported in the 2019 post, I bought the book "on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art," only to discover later that it was actually the vastly inferior (fake, in my opinion) São Paulo St. Anthony Triptych, and that the element that had drawn my attention to that painting in the first place -- the owl -- was conspicuous by its absence.

I commented:

[I]t's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.

Since you asked, my favorite depiction of St. Anthony, and my second-favorite Bosch after The Conjurer, is the Madrid Temptation.

Dalí's painting shows a fanatic. This one shows a saint, one who has come to terms with the goblin-haunted world in which he finds himself and with the "minor presences, riff-raff of consciousness" (Irish Murdoch's phrase), weird but ultimately harmless, that accompany him in his meditations.

What pandemic, Hal?

I've been reading Trish MacGregor's novel White Crows. Hal is a person from the distant future who has time-traveled back to c. 2022.

Sometimes, when they'd been preparing for this trip, they'd gotten -- or remembered -- data that had contradicted what they currently had known about the twenty-first [century]. He remembered, for instance, that when he was in his teens, his mother had told him that once they were ready to leave . . . they would have to choose a year other than the early 2020s because a pandemic would be raging. But no one had mentioned pandemic in subsequent years and clearly, no pandemic raged now.

Not long before his mother was killed . . . he'd asked her about that pandemic in the early 2020s. She'd looked at him, frowning. What pandemic, Hal?

I thought this was incredibly witty and was a bit disappointed when the novel went on to offer explanations in terms of alternate timelines and the Mandela Effect -- because it's such an accurate portrayal, only slightly exaggerated, of our current reality, without any need for sci-fi shenanigans.

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes.

At the moment, the last post in the algorithm-generated "Poplar posts" list at the bottom of this blog is "Chubby Checker, god of quads" (August 2025). I clicked on it and, scrolling through the comments, found this one from Gondola:

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes. Those Temperance and Hermit links are particularly interesting with fresh eyes.

She was referring to my old post "Green Door, Green Lantern" (February 2023), which references the Hermit card of the Tarot. She was saying that the Hermit theme from 2023 had taken on new meaning in 2025. I happened to reread that old comment just now, when the Hermit theme is yet again taking on new meaning.

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the crucifix!

I don't know why I happened to remember such a thing, but when I looked at the calendar this morning, it occurred to me that today would have been the 99th birthday of the late great Gene Ray, commonly known as the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, the discoverer of Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous Four-Day Time Cube. Rest in power, Dr. Ray.

He's remembered as a net.kook, of course, but I've always believed he had a genuinely good soul, and I like to imagine that since passing he's found his way to "sun-up."

These passing reflections on the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human were reinforced a few hours later, when in my daily scripture reading I happened to read two references to how Abram/Abraham was "ninety years old and nine" (Gen. 17:1, 24). These are the only two references in all of scripture to that particular age.

Thinking about Dr. Ray made me think of the "16 Wise Insights" video, by one of his disciples:

Whoa, lasers are coming out of the cars!

Whoa, more lasers are coming out of the cars!

As though the cars are laser machines that fire lasers at will, as though they had revolted against their very purpose of driving on roads and have elected laser projection as a preferable aim, they are emitting a lot of lasers!

And that reminds me of something I meant to post a couple of days ago but forgot. This past Tuesday, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

A particularly radiant canvas from 1847, Stigmata of St Francis by Bartolomeo Della Gatta, shows a beautiful barn owl looking away as St Francis gets zapped by the floating apparition of Christ on the cross. There is something so bizarre about this image, I mean, there are thin little laser beams shooting off a glowing crucified Jesus hitting each point of stigmata on the saint.

Here's the painting he's referring to:

Later that evening, I saw this on AC. It also appears at first glance to show a laser beam coming out of a crucifix.

I looked up St. Francis and discovered that, although he died on October 3, his feast day is October 4. I recently posted about this pair of dates, in "October 3 and 4, and white crows" (June 20).

Hart, hermit, skeleton

Since my post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10), the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine, which includes a white hart, has been in the sync stream. Wade has repeatedly associated this card with the deer-headed skeleton in "Humanoid deer creatures" (June 20), the idea being that in this white (because skeletal) deer-headed man, the white hart and the hermit have merged into a single being.

"Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27) once again revisited the above Hermit card, this time in connection with a painting by Laura Bruno. This sent WanderingGondola to Laura's blog, where she clicked on the "Tarot Readings" page and read where Laura says, "I most often use Robin Wood’s deck."

I had looked at that page of Laura's as well, but I was already aware of the Robin Wood deck, which is fairly popular. It's broadly based on the Rider-Waite but has been "paganized," with most of the explicitly Christian symbolism removed.

(Just now, thinking about Laura Bruno and Robin Wood, I accidentally typed Laura Wood, which is the name of the lady who runs the Thinking Housewife blog. Thinking the error might be synchronistically relevant, I visited that blog and found a post called "The Federal Octopus," dated yesterday. No obvious relevance beyond the name.)

WG, though, wasn't familiar with the Robin Wood deck and looked it up. She found a review of the deck on Aeclectic Tarot. Deck reviews on that site will show a few sample cards: four of the Major Arcana, plus one card from each suit. Here are the first three cards it shows for Robin Wood:

The first card is the Magician, who is wearing a headdress made from a deerskin, complete with antlers. Right after that is the Hermit, so we have the hart-hermit pair again. The third card is Death. In Robin Wood's version, the figure of Death is (like the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine) completely concealed in a hooded cloak. Conceptually, though, it is the Grim Reaper, a skeleton.

I was aware that Aeclectic reivews always show four Majors and four Minors. Are they always the same ones, though? Does it always begin with the Magician and the Hermit, or is that something unique to their Robin Wood review? To check this, I went to the main page for Tarot reviews and clicked on two of the four featured decks there: first the Modern Witch Tarot and then the Forest of Enchantment Tarot. I know nothing about either of those decks and chose them (rather than either of the two other featured decks) for no particular reason. The Modern Witch review showed a completely different selection of cards from the Robin Wood Review. Then I clicked Forest of Enchantment and saw this:

That's right. This is a less traditional Tarot deck, and the first card it shows -- the zero card, corresponding to the Fool -- is actually called The White Hart. One of the other cards featured in the review -- I guess it's the Ace of Wands, or maybe Swords -- features a white crow. (See my June 20 post "October 3 and 4, and white crows.")

The review also shows what the backs of the cards look like. Owls.