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.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

Last night one of the songs the algorithm lobbed my way was Madonna's "La Isla Bonita" performed in the style of System of a Down.

The repeated oxymoronic line "The sun would set so high" synched with a meme I had just seen on Barnhardt's.

As I have said in "Last night I immagined San Pietro" (May 2025), this Madonna song is closely associated in my mind with a particular scene in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, in which the dying Colonel Freeleigh, in defiance of his nurse's orders, phones Mexico City, has his friend there hold the receiver out an open window, and breathes his last while listening to the intoxicating sounds of the city one last time.

With such force did this scene come back to me that I stopped what I was doing and reread that chapter of Dandelion Wine. I then entered a reverie, in which the "yellow noon" of Mexico City merged with the dandelion wine of the title, the Colonel greedily drinking it down with his dying breath. I began reciting to myself "Enivrez-vous," one of Baudelaire's more memorable prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris, variously translated as "Be Drunk," "Get Drunk," or simply "Drink!":

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it -- it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

My mind then went to another composition called "Drink!", a song from the They Might Be Giants album Mink Car.

This turned out to have even more relevance to the scene from Dandelion Wine. The first line mentions a piñata, establishing a link to Mexico. Then this is the chorus:

Let's drink, drink, this town is so great

Drink, drink, 'cause it's never too late

To drink, drink, to no big surprise

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

What words rhyme with "buried alive"?

"Drink, drink, this town is so great" -- just as I had imagined the Colonel "drinking" Mexico City. "It's never too late" -- not until they pry the telephone receiver from your cold dead fingers, which is how that chapter of Dandelion Wine ends.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"? Trivially, a homophone is a rhyme. I recently had occasion to explain to a student that, despite the spelling, bury is pronounced like the second element of strawberry. To rhyme with buried, though, berry would need the -ed suffix, more usually attached to verbs than to nouns. Just yesterday, though, in "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," I quoted a reference to a "white tree-silver shooted, red berried." The buried homophone works here, since a person might be "shooted" (i.e., shot; Daymon often used regularized verb forms like maked) and then buried. "Read buried" could also allude to various buried records, from the Gold Plates to the secret plans of the Gadianton band.

The White Tree is, according to Nephi, the Tree of Life. If its life-giving fruit is a berry, as Daymon has it, one vivified by it could be said to have been "berried alive" -- a phrase syntactically analogous to "shot dead."

The original meaning of "buried alive" is also highly relevant. The "Apple of ashes" post mentioned the imprisonment of Pharazon -- who drank the dandelion wine of La Isla Bonita -- in the Caves of the Forgotten. Those who are buried alive typically do not remain so for long, transitioning in a matter of minutes to buried dead, but Pharazon would be an exception.

Swapping eight and eleven

My last post, "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," mentions that in the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree with white fruit but does not mention the color of the tree itself, while Nephi, wishing to have the same vision, sees a white tree but does not mention the color of its fruit. It also notes that this reversal is reflected in the two scripture references: 1 Nephi 8:11 and 11:8, respectively.

In the post before that, "Appeared again the Hermit has," I mention the Golden Dawn system of mapping the Major Arcana of the Tarot to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and I link to my 2014 post about that system. That old post is called "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength." In the standard Marseille sequence of the trumps, Justice is 8, and Strength is 11; but Waite, to make his Hebrew alphabet scheme work better, made Strength 8 and Justice 11.

Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat

I just read this in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages. The poet is apostrophizing worldly fame and commenting on its futility.

Apple of ashes to the longing lip!

Brine to the burning throat and thirsting soul!

Phantom, delusion, misty ghost of fame!

Voidest and vainest of all vanities!

Whitney's intended meaning is clear -- fame is false food and false drink, which cannot satisfy -- but the sync fairies will commandeer these things for their own purposes. The phrase "apple of ashes" made me think of some recent comments by Bill on "Gardens of pomegranates" (June 29) about an "ash tree" that bore red fruit. His first comment there begins:

Pomegranates are known for their red berries, and would seem to have a not-so-traditional link to the White Tree 

I thought that was an odd word to use for a pomegranate, but maybe technically accurate. All kinds of things, including bananas, are technically considered to be berries. Googling are pomegranates berries, I got as the highlighted result this, which also compares them to apples.

The idea of the White Tree producing red berries is, as Bill says, "not-so-traditional." I am not aware that Tolkien mentions the color of the fruits of any of his White Trees. In the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree of unspecified color which bears white fruit (1 Ne. 8:11), while Nephi sees a white tree which bears fruit of unspecified color (1 Ne. 11:8; the chapter-and-verse references capture the reversal nicely). Since Nephi's vision comes in response to his "desire to behold the things which my father saw" (1 Ne. 11:3), and since he says the tree he saw "was like unto the tree which my father had seen" (1 Ne. 11:8), it is common to combine the imagery of the two visions and arrive at a White Tree with white fruit.

Bill quotes a reference in Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated to "Galathalion, white tree-silver shooted, red berried." Actually, Bill writes Galathilion, which is the correct name of one of Tolkien's White Trees. He is quoting from a draft version of Liberated, so either the typo was introduced into Daymon's manuscript later, or else Bill inadvertently corrected Daymon's typo with one of his own. Or it's possible that Galathalion isn't a typo but a different Elvish name, incorporating thalion "steadfast, strong."

There are lots of White Trees in Tolkien. Galathilion, the White Tree of Tirion, was made by Yavanna in the image of Telperion, the White Tree of Valinor. One of Galathilion's seedlings became Celebron, the White Tree of Tol Eressea, and one of its seedlings became Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor. From a fruit of Nimloth came a succession of four different White Trees of Gondor. Asusming Daymon's reference is to Galathilion, it implies that all the other White Trees in this list would have red berries as well.

Bill goes on to write:

Nimloth, as a reminder, is the tree that Pharazon burned down (I may have mentioned that once or twice...). As such, in my own symbols it has been referred to as an "Ash Tree", as well, since it was turned to ash.

Thus the White Tree that bears red berries, suggestive of the pomegranate that "looks like a red apple," is called an Ash Tree because it was burned. In Whitney's poem, right after the "apple of ashes" line, we have a reference to burning. Since burn can be either transitive or intransitive, burning can describe either something that undergoes burning or something that burns something else. Although Pharazon, who burned the White Tree, is supposed to have ended up in the Caves of the Forgotten, in a more general sense the Numenoreans burned the White Tree, and the Numenoreans were overwhelmed by the salty sea. "Brine to the burning."

"Throat" in this synchronistic context made me think of Vico's comment, repeated several times in The New Science, that "Cerberus was called three-throated as having an enormous gullet." Daymon's version of the story of the Numenorean assault on Eressea involves ravenous wolves who seem close kin to Vico's interpretation of Cerberus.

Appeared again the Hermit has

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew character, and the first several results are all Watto, a character whose Wikipedia article includes a "Comparisons to antisemitic caricatures" section.

I figured Google would probably fix that pretty quick, so I tried the search myself to see if I would get the same results. I did, mostly, but then right in the middle of the search results there was this:

The link is to -- who knew such a page existed? -- https://www.instagram.com/popular/star-wars-jewish-character/, where you can "watch reels about star wars jewish character from people around the world." None of the videos -- sorry, I mean "reels" -- appears to feature Watto or to have anything to do with Jews. It's just a random assortment of Star Wars content -- and for some reason the very first one is this one comparing Yoda to the Hermit of the Tarot. I'd never watched an "Instagram reel" and was pretty okay with that, but sync is sync, so I clicked. As expected, there was no mention of anything remotely Jewish.

Actually, come to think of it, I can supply the missing Jewish link myself. The Golden Dawn associated each card of the Major Arcana with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the letter assigned to the Hermit was, you guessed it, yodh.

The Stone Woman again

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). I had forgotten that it includes a reference to "the 'stone woman' of Mayan tradition," synching with a song that mentions Medusa and says "Will you turn to stone?" It hasn't been too long since I posted "The Stone Woman Mystery" (June 21), which deals with two different figures called "the stone woman," one of whom is a woman who turns to stone, and also includes a painting of Medusa.