Themes of interest in Red Tree, White Tree

I've started reading Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree, a book Bruce mentioned a while back, understanding it that it would be primarily a reinterpretation of the Matter of Britain based on the assumption that Guinevere and many of the other characters are Faery rather than Human.

I'm only about a third of the way through it, but already I've found a lot that is unexpectedly relevant to what we generally refer to as This Thing.

⁂

1. Tolkien as non-fiction

This is an approach not too many people take, but Wendy Berg is one of them:

The power of Tolkien's work lies in the fact that he has not invented a fantastic or unreal story but that he used his imagination as the means by which he could remember some of the ancient history of our world when the human and Elven/Faery races walked the land together.

Nor is it only in a general way that Tolkien's writings reveal the ancient past. Berg cites details of Tolkien as if they were at least as authoritative as Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

⁂

2. Coat of skins

One of Bill's deleted blogs was called Coat of Skins, a phrase from the Eden story which he took to refer to the physical body. He also often explored the idea of Elves or other higher beings incarnating in a human "coat of skins," sometimes symbolized by an ape or pig.

Here is Wendy Berg's take on the phrase from Genesis:

The phrase "coats of skins" does not refer to clothes but to that moment in creation when the binding limitation of the physical body within its containing skin was first made real. It is this coat of skin which marks the essential difference between human and Faery. . . . the creation of the limiting skin marked the first moment of the physicality of Adam and Eve. Up until this moment they, and the earth, were as the Faeries

Interpreting the "coat of skins" as a physical body is not an unusual approach, but the idea of Elf-like beings putting on coats of skins to become human makes this a much specific match with Bill's thinking.

⁂

3. Split incarnations

The idea that single soul can temporarily "split" and incarnate in two separate bodies simultaneously is something one of my correspondents has been exploring (to explain for example how I can "be" Pharazon while the actual Pharazon is still imprisoned in the Caves of the Forgotten). Wendy Berg also proposes that this is possible, but only for Faeries. Then again, Faeries can incarnate in human "coats of skins," so the distinction is a malleable one.

Leodegrance has two identical daughters both called Gwenevere, one of whom was accepted as 'real' in the sense that she was recognised to be of royal status, while the other was not. . . . The two Gweneveres are two manifestations of the same incarnatory impulse: they are indeed both Gwenevere. Humans have one single spark of spiritual identity which manifests in only one physical body at any one place and time, but this is not so for the Faery race. What in human terms might be thought of as a 'clone' is not so in Faery terms, and while the concept of the individual spark or spirit is common to both human and Faery, the latter race is much more flexible and varied in its manifestation. What would seem inconceivable to us, something we would interpret as loss of our essential, spiritual oneness, is not so to the Faeries. It is possible for one Faery spirit to manifest in one, or two, or many different places at the same time.

Berg seems to be making a sharp distinction between Human and Faery here, but later she suggests that "it was perhaps the case that the false Gwenevere" -- one of the abovementioned pair who were "indeed both Gwenevere" in a way possible only for Faeries -- "was human and not Faery." So apparently one spirit who is "really" a Faery can have two simultaneous incarnations as a Faery and a Human. Could she have incarnated as two Humans instead? The significance of these distinctions, at least in terms of a given spirit's real or ultimate identity, begins to be rather unclear. However, it parallels Bill and Leo's ideas about Elves and Dwarves incarnating as Men.

⁂

4. The White Tree

One of the main "articulations" Daymon Smith found between the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Joseph Smith was the image of a White Tree. The parallel seems at first to be rather superficial, however. In Tolkien, it is an actual tree -- Telperion, one of the Two Trees of Valinor, and its various descendants -- while in the Book of Mormon it is a visionary symbol, "a representation of the tree of life," which in turn "was a representation of the love of God" (1 Ne. 15:22; 11:25). By calling it "the tree of life," Nephi implicitly identifies it with one of the two trees of Eden, the other being the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Telperion is also one of a pair, but its partner, Laurelin the Golden, seems quite different in character from the tree whose forbidden fruit brought suffering and death into the world. It is interesting, though, that in both the Legendarium and the Book, it is the White Tree alone that maintains its relevance through the ages, while its partner appears only in legends about the distant past.

The Bible makes no mention of the Tree of Life being white or having white fruit. That imagery comes from the Book of Mormon. But Wendy Berg, with no apparent knowledge of the Book, draws on Arthurian legend and arrives independently at this same idea of the biblical Tree of Life being a White Tree.

The Red Tree of her title then becomes identified with "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which might perhaps more accurately be called the 'tree which makes you human'."

The first tree brings death, but the second tree brings immortality. The first tree symbolises the condition of humankind and the second tree symbolises the condition of Faery, There are two trees in the Garden of Eden: human, and Faery, and the symbolism is of vital importance. The problem that the Lord God was so anxious to avoid, and with good reason, was that Adam should have simultaneous access to two states of being, human and Faery. He could be one or the other, but not both at the same time.

From here, she goes on to make independently the same connection that Daymon made only with the help of the Book of Mormon: Tolkien's White Tree is the Tree of Life. She then takes the next logical step, which I believe Daymon does not: Its partner is the Tree of Knowledge.

One is the Elven or Faery tree, and the other is the human tree . . . . Telperion was the elder, just as the Elves are the elder race. . . . Laurelin was the younger, just as the race of Men is the younger. . . . Laurelin represents the Sun, the Solar Logos of the human race. Telperion represents the Moon and the stars, and was the White Tree, the Faery Tree of Immortality, the second tree of the Garden of Eden.

I haven't yet digested all of this, nor even finished reading through the book, but I thought the presence of so much This Thing-related content in one short book on the seemingly unrelated topic of Arthurian legend was remarkable.

Biden Backtracks, Pens Op-Ed in the New York Times Vowing to Stop the Duke of Earl “At Any Cost”

Andrew Anglin | June 2, 2022

Note: Andrew shut down his site, and these old posts can no longer be accessed even on the dark web. I'm mirroring the legendary Duke of Earl Posts here, with his permission, to preserve the masterworks of this once-in-a-generation talent.

In his Memorial Day speech, President Joe Biden admitted that the Duke of Earl cannot be stopped, but he has seemingly walked this back, publishing an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday ordering an intergovernmental panel to convene and come up with solutions on how to stop the Duke once and for all.

“As he walks through this world, no one can stop the Duke of Earl,” Biden told the crowd. “We can’t do it. We tried, and we can’t stop him, folks,” he added.

This admission came after the Pentagon issued a memo in March ordering all military forces to cease and desist attempts to stop the Duke of Earl.

However, Biden’s statements were viewed as a type of surrender by bipartisan forces, with Liz Cheney and Chuck Schumer leading the charge for their respective parties in demanding that Biden reinvest resources in attempts to stop the Duke of Earl.

By Tuesday, the White House was already beginning to walk the statements back. Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if Biden’s statements amounted to an admission of defeat in the long-running US campaign to stop the Duke of Earl.

“I think what the president meant to say is that we are putting a pause on attempts to stop the Duke, which we may return to in the future, right? Right now, the president is trying to focus on gun control and building more windmills, right? So, while this administration has always remained committed to stopping the Duke of Earl, right, we are recognizing that we have other priorities, right?”, Jean-Pierre responded, seemingly clashing with Biden’s definitive statement that the Duke cannot be stopped.

“So, let me just be clear here,” Doocy replied, “is the official policy of the White House that they intend to stop the Duke of Earl at some point in the future, or has the president effectively surrendered to the Duke?”

“Look, this White House has always been committed to fixing discrimination in housing, to closing the gender pay gap, and to making sure that trans kids have the care they need. Next question,” Jean-Pierre said. Many Republican Duke hawks saw this as ducking the question.

“I’m not going to try to unravel the nature of the chain of authority at the White House,” Ted Cruz later told Fox News. “Maybe the White House is once again walking back Biden’s statements, or maybe Ms. Jean-Pierre doesn’t understand the policy. What we know for a fact is that this president has no concrete plan to stop the Duke of Earl as he walks through this world.”

On the left, Cenk Uygur pointed out that both Biden and Donald Trump had said this same line: “we can’t stop him, folks.”

“So here you have a Republican, Donald Trump, who is a racist misogynist, and Joe Biden, who is a person who was elected to office by the Democrats, and they’re both saying the same thing: no one can stop the Duke of Earl. Meanwhile, we have Aaron Mate on Twitter, celebrating the fact that the government is not even going to try to stop the Duke of Earl anymore. You know who else is supporting the Duke? The Daily Stormer, which is a neo-Nazi site. So, that’s it – surrender. And supposedly “left wing” people are lining up with the far-right to celebrate that the US government is just going to let the Duke of Earl continue to walk through this world with no consequences,” Uygur exclaimed, passionately, with sweat pouring down his brow.

Joe Biden seems to have heard the cries of the public. On Wednesday, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times reversing his position on the Duke.

In the article, Biden explained that he is putting together a team of government officials, weapons experts, and scientists to figure out a way to stop the Duke of Earl. Biden suggested that though military and intelligence experts have said that the Duke is not susceptible to any of the weapons we currently have, emerging technologies could hold the secret to stopping the Duke of Earl. Specifically, Biden vowed to invest $80 billion into the development of an antimatter laser, which could be fired at the Duke from outer space.

“The Duke of Earl Locational Triangulation System (DELTS), developed under Ronald Reagan, has continued to track the global movements of the Duke as he walks through this world. Experts tell me that we are able to pinpoint his location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If we are able to install an antimatter laser on a satellite, we stand a good chance of finally stopping him,” Biden wrote.

However, while an antimatter weapon has been proposed in science fiction, none has ever been under development by the Pentagon, and many believe such a weapon is impossible to make. In 2017, Donald Trump ordered an investigation into the cost of developing a space-based antimatter laser. Former Attorney General William Barr later claimed that Trump wanted to use the weapon to incinerate unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the border to find safety. The Pentagon delivered a report saying that the weapon would cost “at least one thousand trillion dollars.”

What’s more, when asked during a Congressional hearing in January whether a space-mounted antimatter cannon could stop the Duke of Earl, Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin answered, “I doubt it. As far as we are aware, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.”

On Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked: “what are we doing? What is the goal in trying to stop the Duke of Earl from walking through this world? And just how much is the Biden administration willing to spend?”

He went on: “Americans are facing one of the greatest economic crises in this country’s history. Tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from opioid overdoses. People are poorer and dirtier than they’ve been in living memory, and yet all this government can talk about is the Duke of Earl. This goes for Republicans too. Lindsey Graham today congratulated Joe Biden on his plan to spend billions on developing a theoretical weapon from science fiction to stop the Duke of Earl. How does the Duke of Earl walking through this world affect the lives of the American people? How many of Lindsey Graham’s constitutes would list ‘stopping the Duke of Earl’ among their list of concerns? A recent survey done by FiveThirtyEight showed that even among liberal Democrats, stopping the Duke of Earl does not rank in their top 10 list of concerns. So, those are the same people who just last year were putting anti-Duke signs in their front yards, and they now believe they have much more immediate problems. Their decadent little social-signaling campaigns aren’t so important when they’re worried about the stock market collapsing.”

Tucker then brought on Tulsi Gabbard, introducing her and claiming that “if you were still in Congress, you’d be getting smeared as a supporter of the Duke of Earl. Tulsi Gabbard, do you support the Duke of Earl?”

“Thank you, Tucker, and no, I do not support the Duke of Earl,” Gabbard said. “What I support is the American people, and the American people do not benefit from these ongoing campaigns to stop the Duke of Earl. All the intelligence analysts who have been asked to put together a plan to stop the Duke of Earl have come to the same conclusion: nothing can stop the Duke of Earl.”

“Right, so you have to wonder, whose interest is this serving?” Tucker asked.

“Tucker, I think as you and I both know, there is a revolving door in Washington, with special interest lobbies and defense contractors going in and out of the government. Biden’s Secretary of Defense was formerly employed by Raytheon, a company that has made over two trillion dollars on government contracts trying to stop the Duke of Earl. They’ve failed consistently, and now Biden is talking about a space-based antimatter laser that the Pentagon says will cost 1,000 trillion dollars. We need to put the American people first, and stop concerning ourselves with the Duke of Earl and his madcap escapades.”

Tucker then brought on Blexit CEO Candace Owens to weigh in on Biden’s reversal on the Duke question.

Owens said: “Tucker, the American people do not care about the Duke of Earl, and black Americans do not care about him either. What the American people want to see is an end to this woke agenda and the endless wars. You know Tucker, LL Cool J had a song called ‘Too Legit to Quit,’ and the Democrat Party is not legit and they need to quit. Black people are leaving the Democrat plantation in record numbers. Instead of trying to stop the Duke of Earl with an antimatter laser, the Biden Administration should be focused on trying to drastically increase the black birthrate, so that future generations won’t have to worry about the racist Democrat policies of eugenics.”

“Well, that’s exactly right, and I’m glad you’re out there saying it,” Tucker agreed.

Nervous Democrats are arguing that the only way they are going to be able to hold the Congress in the upcoming midterms is if they make concrete steps in trying to stop the Duke of Earl, while Republicans are also basing their platform on stopping the Duke.

“I think we are all in agreement that the most important thing going on in the world right now is the Duke of Earl walking through this world,” top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said at a press conference Wednesday. He went on to congratulate Joe Biden on changing course, but said that $80 billion is “nowhere near enough.” McConnell added that this election is going to be a referendum on Joe Biden’s ability to stop the Duke.

Meanwhile, the Duke himself continued to walk through this world, stopping in Moscow to perform his viral song “Duke of Earl” before a stadium crowd. Outside the sold-out show, tens of thousands of Russians gathered, waving the red flag of the Soviet Union and chanting their support for the Duke.

Earlier this month, Putin was asked whether or not he supports the Duke, and refused to give a definitive answer, stating instead that Russia does not have a policy of enforcing their values on the rest of the world like those in Washington. However, since then, he has met with the Duke at least three times, including at an event in Beijing where the Duke held a joint press conference with a spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party, who referred to the Duke as “an important partner.”

Even countries once aligned with the West are taking a softer stance on the Duke, with India in May refusing to denounce him even after repeated badgering by the United States. Prime Minister Modi issued a statement saying that “the Duke of Earl does not present a clear threat to Indian security.” He added that “the Americans have admitted that there is no way to stop the Duke of Earl, and yet they expect Indians to go along with their hopeless campaign.”

Allied countries remain committed to the American program to stop the Duke of Earl, with Ursula von der Leyen stating this week that “the future of humanity rides on our ability to stop the Duke of Earl as he walks through this world.”

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, also hailed Biden’s renewed commitment to stop the Duke, saying, “the whole of the international community stands united, saying with one voice that if we do not stop the Duke of Earl, the entire fabric of the universe will come unwound and dissolve into nothingness as it was before the Big Bang.”

Snopes Fact-Checks Fake Executive Order on Biden Surrender to the Duke of Earl

Andrew Anglin | June 1, 2022

Note: Andrew shut down his site, and these old posts can no longer be accessed even on the dark web. I'm mirroring the legendary Duke of Earl Posts here, with his permission, to preserve the masterworks of this once-in-a-generation talent.

I did not see anyone claiming that there was a “secret executive order” declaring Joe Biden’s surrender to the Duke or Earl. Everyone I saw was citing Biden’s Memorial Day speech, where he literally said “no one can stop the Duke of Earl,” and accurately attributing the Pentagon memo.

But Snopes somehow dug up someone on Facebook using false information and misattributing the Pentagon memo so they could mark this story as “false.”

The fact is, the entire establishment is freaking out about Biden cutting funding to programs designed to stop the Duke of Earl. Neocons like Mike Pompeo are working hand-in-glove with liberal think-tanks to launch a new government assault on the Duke, as well as stirring up a media barrage explaining to the peasants why they should be opposed to the Duke and want him stopped in the first place.

The Biden Memorial Day surrender was considered significantly worse than the Pentagon memo, given that it got much more media coverage. Pentagon policy changes constantly, and reopening the Joint Anti-Duke Taskforce (JADT) would have been a minor issue compared to a public surrender by the president.

Rumors had been swirling that part of the reason the Disinformation Governance Board was shut down was that Nina Jankowicz was going to be appointed as the head of a multi-agency panel designed to develop resources to stop the Duke of Earl. Apparently, people in the Biden Administration viewed it as futile, and simply want to bury discussion of the Duke by admitting defeat. Rand Paul has been pressuring the government for years to cut funding to “fruitless attempts” to stop the Duke or Earl, accurately stating that “every intelligence analysis has shown that nothing can stop the Duke of Earl” and that “the Military Industrial Complex is simply going to have to live with the fact that he can’t be stopped.” Paul has also pointed to the way global treaties designed to stop the Duke of Earl infringe on personal liberty.

Donald Trump has also been critical of the amount of money spent trying to stop the Duke of Earl, saying at a recent rally, “American mothers don’t have baby formula, and Liz Cheney can’t stop talking about the Duke of Earl.” After allowing time for the crowd to boo, he added: “these people would come into my office, when I was in the oval office – which by the way, is going to happen again soon – and they kept talking about the Duke of Earl. ‘Oh, sir, sir, we need to stop the Duke of Earl.’ I said ‘what did this guy even do?’ No answer. I told them, nothing can stop this guy. We’re wasting billions of dollars, and nothing can stop the Duke of Earl. You could hit this guy with a nuclear bomb and he’s just going to dance out of the flames, laughing.”

Trump-backed Senatorial candidate JD Vance stated earlier this year that he doesn’t care about the Duke of Earl either way, and is suspicious of the government’s fixation on trying to stop him. We’re hoping that Vance maintains this position when he gets into the Senate, but unfortunately, Josh Hawley, who also paints himself as a populist, supported an anti-Duke funding bill last year. Hawley stood with Ted Cruz in criticizing the way in which Biden is attempting to stop the Duke, but not the principle that he needs to be stopped. Hawley and Cruz also demanded that Europe spend more money trying to stop the Duke.

On Tuesday, Chuck Schumer made a rare break with Biden, condemning his Memorial Day surrender as “simply unacceptable” and vowing to push through a bi-partisan bill to stop the Duke. Senator Elizabeth Warren also broke with Biden, saying that “the Duke’s reckless escapades and madcap exploits” are contributing to climate change, arguing that “our children’s future is riding on our ability to stop the Duke of Earl.”

The Duke has been celebrating the Biden surrender this week, and on Tuesday appeared at an event in Russia-controlled Donbass to perform for Russian forces and brag about the capitulation, singing his viral song “Duke of Earl” about how nothing can stop him because he’s the Duke of Earl.

Snopes Confirms That No One Can Stop the Duke of Earl

Andrew Anglin | May 31, 2022

Note: Andrew shut down his site, and these old posts can no longer be accessed even on the dark web. I'm mirroring the legendary Duke of Earl Posts here, with his permission, to preserve the masterworks of this once-in-a-generation talent.

People have been trying to stop the Duke of Earl for years now, but the liberal fact-checker site Snopes has finally admitted that he cannot be stopped.

Imagine that they thought they could stop him, and they just kept getting felted by the Duke.

It’s encouraging that they have finally been forced to admit the obvious.

Priests and rills

I thought I had posted about this before, but a search for rill comes up empty, so here it is again. This is an anonymous poem that was anthologized in one of the McGuffey Eclectic Readers:

Run, run, thou tiny rill;

Run, and turn the village mill;

Run, and fill the deep, clear pool

In the woodland's shade so cool,

Where the sheep love best to stray

In the sultry summer day;

Where the wild birds bathe and drink,

And the wild flowers fringe the brink.

Run, run, thou tiny rill,

Round the rocks, and down the hill;

Sing to every child like me;

The birds will join you, full of glee:

And we will listen to the song

You sing, your rippling course along.

One of my younger siblings (I don't remember which), reading this, didn't understand the key word and asked what a rill was. Whatever the answer, he or she somehow misheard it as "a clergyman." Thus this became a poem about a tiny clergyman running round the rocks and down the hill, in search of straying sheep. This singing rill also became associated with the singing clergyman played by Bing Crosby in the 1944 film Going My Way. We had never seen this movie but thought the poster was amusing. At one point, someone made a handmade Going My Way poster that advertised the film as "positively packed with clergymen!" (Clergyman is one of those inherently funny words.)

Wade has recently been suggesting that I'm going to take on some kind of priestly role. This has mostly been in connection with Levites, but the original comment, on "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion," was this:

Your use of "cleromancy" intrigues me. It has such affinity with the word "cleric" that it could almost mean "divination by a cleric". And aren't you a sort of cleric?

Cleromancy is quite similar to clergyman, and here Wade linked the word to the synonym cleric (an Islamic or D&D word not nearly as inherently funny as clergyman), which brought the poem about the singing rill back to mind. Subsequent comments by Wade twice used the phrase "cleric or priest," singling out a particular sort of clergyman.

To virtually no one else on earth does the word rill have any connection with priests or clergymen, so I thought it was quite a coincidence to run into this in my reading today -- from Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess, as quoted by Wendy Berg in Red Tree, White Tree (ellipsis in Berg):

Now the Priest of the Moon ... had seen that the seership had fallen on evil days, and had gone back, as men must, to an older and purer faith, tracing the river to the rill till he came to the pure source

A house made entirely of doors

En route to archive.org, I got a random /x/ thread featuring a "house that is made completely out of doors."

In "Further Doors-related syncs" (January 2023), I posted my own photo of "a building that not only has a green door but appears to be constructed entirely of green doors!"

Here are some of the comments on the /x/ thread:

The Cheshire Cat has been in the sync stream recently, and the "hole in time" reference syncs with yesterday's "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which mentions "a time/space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe."

A colorful tree-dwelling civilization

I had an extremely detailed dream of which I can unfortunately only remember the general idea. I was looking through a coffee-table book about an imagined civilization whose exact name I can't remember, but it was a four-syllable name beginning with A- and ending in -onhi, and I thought it was clearly intended to sound like something out of the Book of Mormon. The book was full of full-page paintings of this civilization, showing their architecture, mode of dress, etc., together with detailed written descriptions. I took in quite a lot of this detail but again have forgotten most of it. They made extensive use of "flets" -- platforms built high in trees, like those of  Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings -- but the people did not look at all like Tolkienian Elves. They wore very complicated clothing in bright reds, yellows, and greens, and the overall effect reminded me somewhat of Aztec images such as this one:

The resemblance was only very superficial, though. Overall, I was struck by how original their costumes were. The author had not copied the style of any real-world civilization but had imagined a completely new culture in a level of detail that made it fully convincing. Looking through the book reminded me of how I felt decades ago when I read a list of titles of works by one of Robert Lindner's mental patients:

. . . "The Religious Beliefs of the Valley Dwellers," "Manufacturing Processes and Dye Chemistry," "Fire Worship and Sacrifice on Srom Sodrat II," "Food Distribution in Seranen," "Sex Habits and Practices of the Crystopeds, "Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I," and so on . . .

I wanted to read them all, and I resented Dr. Lindner for just giving us the titles and nothing else. I felt the same way in the dream. I was absolutely fascinated by this imagined civilization and wanted to read all about it.

Later in the dream, an archaeologist was showing me some recently discovered stone tablets, and he said that all the information in the book I had been looking through came from these tablets. I was astonished: "Wait, you mean it's real?"

Hundreds of these tablets had been found. Each was about a foot and a half square and two or three inches thick and was engraved on one side only. They had been used as roofing tiles on several ancient buildings, and only recently had archaeologists discovered that there was text engraved on the undersides of these tiles, which could only be seen by removing them from the roof. The text had been deciphered, and it surprisingly turned out not to deal with historical or mythological events but rather to give a very detailed description of every aspect of the culture that had created them. Again, I wanted to read it all, but unfortunately I soon woke up and found my memory of the details rapidly evaporating.