Flour Boy symbolism roundup

Cheek Holder, the highest ranking Flour Boy, is Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. His card is the Jack of Spades, corresponding to the Page of Swords in the Tarot and the Child in the Lenormand deck. The suit of swords corresponds to the element of Air and the planet Jupiter. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Butcher because a cheek is a cut of meat, and a butcher uses sword-like implements. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Chubby Checker, a name which also suggests the "jovial" figure of Santa Claus, who is chubby and checks his list twice. Bill has identified him with John (the Baptist, Apostle, and Revelator considered to be a single individual), the Elf-king Thingol, Aragorn, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Among the Beatles, he is John Lennon, the "cheeky" one and the de facto leader of the group. Of the four horsemen, he is the first, who rides a White Horse, bears a bow, and goes forth conquering and to conquer. This is a link to the Child card (Jack of Spades), since the Sun card of the Rider-Waite deck shows a child riding a white horse. Lennon also sometimes dressed in white.

Flour Boy is the Keebler Elf Elwood. His card is the Jack of Clubs, corresponding to the Page of Wands and the Whip. His suit corresponds to the element of Fire and the planet Mars. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Baker. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Buddy Holly because magic wands are traditionally made of holly wood, and the Rider-Waite deck shows its wands as budding. I have tentatively identified him with Moses, who worked miracles with a rod (magic wand) and provided "bread" (manna). Bill has proposed that Moses is also the Brother of Jared. Among the Beatles, he is Paul McCartney, de facto the second-ranking member of the band. My uncle Bill maintains that McCartney is the incarnation of the god Mars, so that fits. Debbie points out that one of Paul's solo albums is called Flowers in the Dirt and has fiery imagery on the cover, so that's a potential link to Flour ("Flower") Boy and to Fire. He is the second horseman, who rides a Red Horse and brings war, which obviously fits with Mars and Fire.

Fudge Boy is the Keebler Elf Buckets. His cards are the Jack of Hearts, the Page of Cups, and the Heart. A bucket is like a big cup, and fudge lies at the “heart” of an E. L. Fudge cookie. His suit is linked to Water and Venus. He does not appear in the tub in "Rub-a-dub-dub" and is thus implicitly the Dry Jack. The “Jack dry stolen” message is consistent with his being the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is U-2, but I don't have a good interpretation of that yet. He is Pharazon, Peter, Thomas Marsh (closely linked to the bucket) — and, in some sense or the other, me. (The details here are still developing. I believe Bill still sees me and Pharazon as separate from the other two and has us as Flour Boy. There are also various other proposed characters, such as Ingwe, which I don't yet have a good feel for.) Among the Beatles, he is George Harrison, since the name George has repeatedly been linked to Pharazon and me. Debbie notes that George sings the song "Savoy Truffle," which is named after chocolate and is thus a link to Fudge Boy. As the third horseman, he rides a Black Horse, carries scales, and brings famine. This fits with Bill's idea that Cassius, he of the "lean and hungry look," is symbolically linked with this figure. George Harrison had a solo album called Dark Horse and founded a record label called Dark Horse Records.

Finally, we have Star Boy, who is the Keebler Elf Fast Eddie. His cards are the Jack of Diamonds, the Page of Coins or Pentacles, and the Scythe. A pentacle is a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle, which links both to the name Star Boy and to circle imagery to be discussed below. In Lenormand cartomancy, the Scythe (Jack of Diamonds) represents speed, swiftness, suddenness, etc., and thus links to the name Fast Eddie. Pentacles are associated with the element of Earth and with Saturn. Saturn is associated with slowness, making it an odd link for Fast Eddie, but I’m confident it’s correct. The Scythe is a link to both Saturn and speed, and there’s also the idea that Saturn is Mercurius Senex, an alter ego of swift Mercury. In “Rub-a-dub-dub,” he is the Candlestick Maker, associated with speed by way of the “Jack Be Nimble” rhyme. In “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he is Hula Hoops. This sounds similar to Jah-ho-e-oop, a name of the Swift Messenger, and is also a link to Saturn with its rings. Bill associates the Swift Messenger with lots of different figures, including Faramir, Ether, Abinadi, and (I infer) himself. Among the Beatles, he is Ringo Starr, whose name links both to Star Boy and to the ring imagery of Saturn and Hula Hoops. In Help!, Ringo wears a ring with a large ruby on it. Since a ruby resembles a red diamond, this is a link to the red suit of Diamonds. As the last of the horsemen, he rides a Pale Horse and is identified with death, which fits with the Scythe.

The ruby ring

The idea popped into my head that the Beatles could be symbolically mapped to the four Knaves and Flour Boys. Ringo Starr would be Star Boy, obviously, and the ruby ring he wears in Help! is a link both to ring-shaped Hula Hoops and to the red suit of Diamonds, a ruby resembling a red diamond. John, the cheeky one, would be Cheek Holder, who has already been linked to the name John. The other two are not so obvious, but I guess Paul would be Flour Boy, and George would be Fudge Boy. (Unlike Bill, I identify Pharazon with Fudge Boy and have penciled in Moses for Flour Boy; the name George has been linked to Pharazon a few times.) This mapping also preserves the ranking of the Flour Boys, since everyone understands that the implicit "ranking" of the Beatles is John, Paul, George, Ringo.

After thinking about that for a minute, I went and read the 1734 Jack and the Beanstalk story mentioned in my last post, which you can read in its entirety in this blog post (scroll down to the heading "Enchantment Demonstrated in the Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean"). Although it has Jack climbing a beanstalk and a giant wanting to grind Jack's bones to make his bread, most of the other details are entirely different from the familiar version. Central to the plot is a magic ring Jack is given. The ring has "a marble red stone" on it, never called a "ruby" in the text, but in the blog post linked above, an illustration has been added, with the caption "Ruby Ring." Interesting given that I had just been speculating about Ringo as a "Jack," with his ruby ring being one of the main links.

Confirmation that Jacks are Flour Boys -- plus letting flies out

Here's a bit of sync evidence to support identifying "The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys." What does the giant say in Jack and the Beanstalk?

Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman;

Be he alive or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

In other words, the giant intends to use Jack's bones to make flour, making Jack a "Flour Boy" in the most literal possible sense.

One often runs into the variant "I'll have his bones to grind my bread," making Jack's bones the pestle rather than the flour. That makes a lot less sense, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure that the Flour Boy version was the original. I tracked down the earliest recorded version of the tale, in the 1734 edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire, and found the giant's chant on p. 45.

So yes, "I'll grind his bones to make my bread" is the original. But check out how the paragraph immediately previous begins:

And now no sooner was the Fly let out of its Cage . . .

Talk about a crazy sync! I hadn't the faintest notion that any version of Jack and the Beanstalk involved flies being let out of cages, but just yesterday I posted about catching and releasing flies in "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited." Note in particular this comment:

I began thinking up other ways of making a boring couplet saying that Tinbad the Tailor did tailor stuff. The first possibility to come to mind (better a near-rhyme than a repeated syllable) was:

Tinbad the Tailor took it in

But had to let it out again.

I was thinking only in terms with of tailoring — Tinbad took in a garment when its owner lost weight but had to let it out again when the weight was regained — but I soon realized it could also be read in terms of catching flies. Tinbad traps flies but, unlike Jinbad, doesn’t keep them.

Not only did I write about releasing an imprisoned fly, I even used the very same language -- "let out" -- as the 1734 tale. I guess I'm going to have to read the whole thing and see what other surprises it has for me.

Tinbad and Jinbad revisited

I've been thinking about these two couplets from "With?"

Tinbad the Tailor killed some flies

Which in the telling grew in size.

Jinbad the Jailer's job had glamour:

He kept the inmates in the slammer.

As explained in "Tinbad is Sartre," I wrote the Tinbad couplet with "The Brave Little Tailor" in mind. The tailor kills some flies -- "seven at one blow" -- but then tells the story in such a way as to encourage the misunderstanding that he killed seven men at one blow. Then I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose surname means "tailor" and discovered his play The Flies, which is discussed in the linked post.

The Jinbad couplet was phoned in, one of the least witty in the poem, and wasn't intended to allude to anyone in particular. The second line just spells out the literal meaning of the word jailer, and the second half of the first has no logic behind it but is just there because it rhymes with slammer. In other words, this is just a badly-written couplet. If the whole poem had been like that -- "Tinbad the Tailor's chief pursuits / Are sewing shirts and mending suits" -- it wouldn't have been worth writing. It's uninspired filler.

Or is it? The assumption underlying posts like this one, where I revisit something I myself wrote and try to mine it for unguessed-at meaning, is that the poem was in some sense inspired -- that it expresses thoughts and ideas that were not my own when I wrote it. And that goes for the filler, too -- perhaps especially for the filler. (The Jinbad couplet must have been channeled; there's no way I would write schlock like that!)

My reason for revisiting Tinbad now was originally because of the "tin" theme in recent syncs, but then I realized that killing flies has also taken on synchronistic importance. In the Liza Lou story in "The devil's best friend is a blue butterfly," a devil (originally very large) takes the form of a fly, is imprisoned in a jug of molasses, and is then swatted and killed by the Parson. Then two days later, I posted "Pigs and the grail," which unexpectedly ended up including the Samson Mystery Pig -- a toy which involves trapping a fly in a tiny celluloid pig with a bottle-shaped body. The implied death of the fly was emphasized in the image I included in the post -- an article condemning the Mystery Pig as a "cruel" toy that "teaches children to kill."

And this imagery of a a devil trapped in a bottle brings us to Jinbad. Jinn-bad. How did I not see that before? An ordinary jailer's job has no glamour at all, but it's hard to think of a more glamorous "job" than Aladdin's -- that of keeping a jinn, or genie, imprisoned in a lamp so that it can grant his every wish. Aladdin's genie was kept in a lamp, but similar stories abut a genie in a bottle are so familiar as to be a cliché. (If I had been thinking this way when I wrote the couplet, I would have made it inmate, singular.)

Tinbad and Jinbad are a contrasting pair, just like Finbad and Binbad, or Hinbad and Rinbad. Tinbad kills the demonic "flies"; Jinbad imprisons and exploits them.

Jeffrey Epstein's hair was filled with cameras, including one above his head

So I misread a headline the other day, misreading not one but two words, with the first error facilitating the second. It actually said lair and bed.

For a split second, though, it made sense. A very suspicious person might search your clothing for hidden spycams, but they'd never think to check the hair.

Stately Bev

Just before waking, I had a strange little dream. I saw a woman standing perfectly straight against a featureless white background. “Your attention, please,” said a disembodied male voice. “This is Stately Bev.” Bev stood there for several seconds, staring straight ahead with an expressionless face. Then she turned 90 degrees to her left (my right) and again stood perfectly still and expressionless, offering a profile view. It looked almost as if she were having police mugshots taken. I understood that I was being shown this person so that I would be able to recognize her in the future.

Bev looked to be in her thirties and had a face one would call handsome rather than pretty. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had something of a puritanical air about her. She wore a long cream-colored dress of 19th-century cut and had her hair up in a bun. She seemed rather tall, though the featureless background made that hard to judge. She reminded me somewhat of Homily Clock as depicted in the original pen-and-ink illustrations for the Borrowers series.

I have no interpretation of this so far, but it’s a good rule of thumb that when a dream begins with “Your attention, please,” you should remember it and write it down.

The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys

In "The fourth Knave," I took the nursery rhyme "Rub-a-dub-dub," in which the men in the tub are "knaves all three," noted that Knave is another name for a Jack in a deck of cards, and proposed that the fourth Knave, the one who is not in the tub, is the "dry Jack" referred to in the "Jack dry stolen" message. Due to the "stolen" reference, I identified the dry Jack as the Knave of Hearts who, in another nursery rhyme, "stole those tarts." I did not at that time propose playing-card identities for the other three Knaves -- the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker -- as no obvious mappings suggested themselves.

"Tin, elven saints, and Flour Boys" brought in another foursome: Cheek Holder, Flour Boy, Fudge Boy, and Star Boy. With one exception, these all bear the title Boy, which is the original meaning of Knave (cf. German Knabe). At the end of that post, I suggested that Cheek Holder, who holds his cheek with one hand and a heart with the other, might correspond to the Knave of Hearts, but again no obvious mappings came to mind for the other three.

Things really got cooking in the comments on "Remembering the 2000 Official Chubby Checker Website," a completely random post not intended to have anything to do with the Knaves or the Flour Boys. Bill, though, decided Chubby Checker reminded him of Santa Claus (that chubby checker-twice of lists), whom he had previously identified with "Thingol-John." He found confirmation of this in the fact that Checker's real name is Ernest Evans. Evan is a form of the name John, and Ernest suggests Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. Then I proposed Keebler-Elf identities for three figures in Bill's story, and Bill expanded it into this mapping:

Cheekholder = Ernie = John-Thingol

Flour Boy = Elwood = Pharazon (Flower Boy)

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Thomas Marsh/ Peter

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Swift Messenger/ Faramir

I'm not totally on board with those mappings, as I still tend to assume that Pharazon and Marsh/Peter are the same Being, but it's a good start, and it's given me enough to finally plug in all four Knaves, both in the nursery rhyme and the deck of cards. Here are my proposed mappings:

Cheek Holder = Ernie = Butcher = Jack of Spades = Page of Swords

Flour Boy = Elwood = Baker = Jack of Clubs = Page of Wands

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Dry Jack = Jack of Hearts = Page of Cups

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Candlestick Maker = Jack of Diamonds = Page of Pentacles

See how that all falls into place?

Beef cheeks are a cut of meat, so naturally the Butcher is the one who would be holding a cheek. A sword is similar to a butcher's knife. Thingol has been the owner of more than one important sword. (Pop-in-the-Jack with his sword may also be relevant.)

Flour Boy is the Baker for obvious reasons. Bill's addition of the name El-wood provides the needed link to the suit of Clubs/Wands.

Fudge Boy is Buckets, and the Dry Jack is the Jack of Hearts. A bucket is a sort of cup, providing a link to the Italian suit. Also, the fudge is at the center, or "heart," of an E. L. Fudge cookie.

Star Boy is a natural link to the suit of Pentacles, since a pentacle is a five-pointed star. Candlesticks and stars are conceptually similar, being sources of light, and the two images are linked in Rev. 1:20. The title Fast Eddie is what cements the Candlestick Maker identification, though: "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick."

One more angle. Here's one of my comments from the Chubby Checker post:

I should mention that what made me think of Chubby Checker and his old website was that Billy Joel song sung by the Background Brethren. (This is Joel's version; I can't remember whether the Brethren's adaptation included Chubby.)

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

Lots of potential for a cicada-read there. I spontaneously read Buddy Holly as lowercase "buddy holly" -- a budding holly plant. Space monkeys are a familiar theme. "Hula hoop" sounds like something out of Joseph Smith's GAEL (cf. Ho-e-oop).

I quoted four lines of "We Didn't Start the Fire" -- the lines beginning with Buddy Holly, Hula hoops, U2, and Chubby Checker. I identified Buddy Holly with the suit of Wands, as explained in "Buddy Holly, deer, and Happy Days." Bill had already linked Chubby Checker to Ernie and thus, in my mapping, to the suit of Spades/Swords. I noted in my comment that Hula hoop reminded me of Ho-e-oop from Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. In the same thread, I identified Fast Eddie with the "swift messenger" from that same document, not realizing that there was a link. One of the names given to the Swift Messenger is Jah-ho-e-oop. So that's Star Boy.

That leaves U2 for Fudge Boy. I can't see any logic behind that connection at present, but perhaps something will emerge. (Billy Joel's reference is to the U-2 incident of 1960, but for sync purposes the Irish rock band is also relevant.)

Bill has suggested that the Four Horsemen -- both the biblical originals and the characters in the 2013 film Now You See Me -- might also be in the mix, but I don't have anything on that yet.

Note added: U2 may simply be a double-U, or W, a letter which is prominently displayed on the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups, and thus a link to that suit.