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.
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.
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 . . . ."
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:
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.
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.
