I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2019. The lead image, filename bowie_blackstar.jpg, is this:
Black stars are a recurring theme around here (e.g. "Strange is the night where black stars rise"), so I looked up the lyrics to Bowie's song "Blackstar." One of the annotations on the lyrics site included photos of Crowley and Bowie -- two White men -- dressed up as ancient Egyptians.
The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun.
This sync made me think of my somewhat precognitive 2014 dream "Moses contemplating a human skull." That post also refers to "the stereotypical Egyptian headdress seen, for example, on King Tut's mummy case"
With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)
Hell Hollow Wilderness Area just came up again, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy," but what I want to focus on here is the idea that the recorder is the sort of instrument that spiders like. In "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil" (May 17), I had to do an image search for the liner notes from the Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box to confirm that the official lyrics have debil rather than devil. One of the results that came up was this art from the album, which shows a spider playing a flute:
A further sync is that this is an album by a musician who goes (or rather went, before his conversion to Islam) by Cat. The Stephanie Sammann video about jumping spiders, which occasioned my post about them, says that the jumping spider's ambush method "is a lot like how cats hunt," adding later, "Jumping spiders are known to hate water. The cat analogy is still going strong here."
We went to the northern part of the country today, and my wife drove part of the way back. While she was driving, she listened to an hour-long recording of The Mantra for Dispersing Calamities and Bringing Auspicious Good Will set to music. It's Sanskrit transliterated into Chinese, the pronunciation changing so much in the process as to render it unrecognizable. (For example, prajvala becomes boluo-ruwala.) You could be fluent in both Sanskrit and Chinese and still not have a clue what it's saying.
Dozing off in the passenger seat, I had a brief dream in which I looked up this mantra song on YouTube and found that it was from a channel called North Carolina Saves Mummy. As soon as I saw the name of the channel, I woke up.
I was born in North Carolina, thereby causing my mother to become a "mummy." She used to call me her "firstborn in the wilderness," which is how Lehi addresses Jacob in 2 Nephi 2. The Research Triangle isn't exactly the wilderness, but the Ohio home in which I spent more of my childhood than anywhere else -- where I usually tell people I'm "from" -- is now part of Hell Hollow Wilderness Area. I suppose the title I've chosen for this blog also reinforces this idea of being "from the wilderness."
In a comment on "Ladder-day Cinq," Wade McKenzie suggests that the ladder image associated with my birthday in The Secret Language of Birthdays puts me "in the position of a 'ladder-day' Jacob." He meant the biblical figure who saw a ladder to heaven, but Lehi's son Jacob also seems relevant. Wade also alludes to the fact that Secret Language associates my birthdate with the Devil card of the Tarot (the 15th trump for the 15th day of the month), which fits with the fact that the wilderness I'm from is Hell Hollow.
Incidentally, if I had to choose a Tarot card to represent my birthday, I would go with the Ten of Swords rather than the Devil. Note how closely the imagery corresponds to that of this novelty product marketed as the "Ides of March Pencil Holder":
Just an hour and 43 minutes before Wade left that comment, I had left a comment on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" referring Debbie to what I called Lehi's Heart Sutra in "The Heart Sutra, Dinderblob/Darkinbad, and Zion" (February 2025) The Heart Sutra, being a Sanskrit text that plays a central role in Chinese Buddhism, is clearly adjacent to the Chinese-Sanskrit mantra above, and that post even refers to my wife's listening to a musical version of it. That post quotes part of 2 Nephi 2:11-12 and compares it to the Heart Sutra. Although I don't quote that part in the post, v. 11 includes Lehi's addressing Jacob as "my firstborn in the wilderness."
Coming back to the name of the YouTube channel in the dream, "mummy" refers not only to a mother but also to "(esp. in ancient Egypt) a dead body that has been preserved from decay." Bill, following Daymon, understands the word Egypt to refer sometimes to Numenor, and in "Reincarnation, or something else?" (July 2025), I used ancient Egyptian imagery to illustrate Bill's proposal "that I am the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of Númenor."
The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun. The ridiculousness of the White dude dressed up as King Tut also suggests the word mummery. (That post also mentions my uncle's idea of my being the reincarnation of Byron. A few days ago, in a comment on "Under," I quoted William Blake's address "To Lord Byron in the Wilderness.")
Given that context, "North Carolina Saves Mummy" could mean that being reborn there offers the being formerly known as Pharazon a chance at redemption.
On May 13, I posted "Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid," noted that the flooded asteroid-world in that story is described with imagery -- doves flying over the floodwaters, unable to land -- right out of the Flood story in Genesis.
Today I read this in Flying Saucers Have Landed:
Modern astronomy has calculated that, according to their rules of celestial mechanics, there should be another planet—about the size of our own—between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, Instead of a planet, however, there is a ring of cosmic dust, stones and debris called 'The Asteroid Belt'.
If such a planet did exist and was suddenly destroyed, the repercussions on the rest of the Solar System must have been catastrophic, particularly upon Mars and Jupiter. It is possible that our own universal Deluge Legends and accounts of a terrible catastrophe in which the 'stars fell from their places and rained down on the Earth' may be related to the same cause.
In Commander Toad, it is specifically stated that
There has been a disaster on a world between Jupiter and Mars. That world is an asteroid.
These long green ships made me think of the Cat Stevens song "Longer Boats."
I noticed that by affecting a foreign accent, one could transform "win us" to "Venus," thus making the longer boats into spaceships:
Longer boats are coming to Venus
They're coming to Venus, they're coming to Venus
Longer boats are coming to Venus
Hold on to the shore, they'll be taking the key from the door
Yesterday, May 16, one of my students wore one of those "mutant knockoff" T-shirts that used to be so common in Taiwan, simultaneously mooching off the intellectual property of Nike, Coca-Cola, and Disney. (Apologies for the low-quality image. It's all I could find online.)
Notice that the word give has mutated to gibe, the same change seen in the minstrel song.
This morning, I read this in the Desmond Leslie portion of Flying Saucers Have Landed:
As I write this, I am riding on a great green luminous spaceship, some 8,000 miles in diameter, that is rushing through the Ocean of Space at many thousands of miles per minute.
He means the Earth, which is more usually described as blue (our "Blue Boat Home"). The language he uses instead -- a "great green luminous spaceship," with its size measured in a unit of length -- reminded me again of long green ships and "Longer Boats." Thinking of Cat Stevens again so soon after seeing that "don't gibe up" T-shirt reminded me of another Cat Stevens song, "Music," which refers to the "bad old debil" -- once more replacing v with b.
When I tried to search for the lyrics online, though, I found that all the lyrics sites had "corrected" it to devil, without the consonant change that had brought the song to mind in the first place. I tried searching for many different spellings -- debel, debbil, etc. -- but still came up empty-handed. Finally I tried "cat stevens" "bad old", which still didn't work, though I did notice this in the search results:
It's about a Spaghetti Western called God Forgives... I Don't!, featuring a character called Cat Stevens, which was released in Italy just ten months and a day before the other Cat Stevens released his debut album in London. The title is a sync because on May 10, in "Just-ice and Al-ice," I posted a poem about how saying "God forgives" is a poor substitute for saying "I forgive."
In the end I resorted to doing an image search for the liner notes to Buddha and the Chocolate Box and finally succeeded in proving that I wasn't crazy (well, maybe I wouldn't go that far!). The correct lyrics really do have debil. Terrible image quality again, but good enough to confirm the spelling:
Why was it so hard to find that? I guess the greatest trick the debil ever pulled was convincing the Internet he didn't exist. (Appropriately, the famous line I modified there comes ultimately from Baudelaire, who as a Frenchman spelled his devil with a b: "La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.")
Note added: I forgot to mention the specific significance of "coming to Venus." Leslie's co-author George Adamski is notorious for claiming that the "Nordic" aliens he encountered came from Venus, a claim since rendered comically implausible by our advancing knowledge of the solar system. Just a few pages before the green spaceship reference, Leslie writes:
And if the question is asked—where did earlier [i.e., Vedic-era] space travellers go ? Venus would be the obvious answer. No other planet in our system holds such attraction for Earthlings who strive after perfection.
Another interpretive option is to note the similarity of Adamski's Venusians to Tolkien's Vanyar and conclude that their claim to be "from" the Star of Earendil was symbolic.
The two lenses aren't actually different colors. They appear to be so at the beginning of the video from which the above still was taken because the camera angle is such that one lens is reflecting light which the other isn't. A few seconds into the video, that angle changes enough to make both lenses appear mostly black.
Approximately eight hours after posting that, I watched a Stephanie Sammann video (recommended) addressing the question of how it is even possible for something as tiny as a jumping spider to exhibit its mammal-like levels of intelligence and visual acuity.
Starting at the 15:17 mark we see a jumping spider whose two principal eyes both appear to be an amber color almost exactly like Doc Ock's left lens above. Then the spider turns its body to face the camera, and the new angle makes the principal eyes instead appear to be black. During this transition, there is a brief moment where the spider perfectly recreates the moment from my Doc Ock post:
What are the odds of a coincidence like that? I wasn't even out looking for videos about spiders. let alone thinking they might tie in with Spider-Man. The video just showed up in my feed, and I clicked because I like jumping spiders, have long been aware of how special they are -- probably the smallest animal that clearly has an individual soul -- and was curious.
These are both images of Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004).
As the title of my post indicates, in this scene Doc Ock refers to "the power of the Sun in the palm of my hand." In the Temple version of the six days of Creation, which differs from the Genesis sequence, the Sun, Moon, and stars are created on the third day, so I guess that's why UltraMormonChan chose that image. He has added pictures of the Salt Lake Temple to each lens.
My own post with the Doc Ock image also dealt with the Temple. I associated the two lenses of his spectacles with the square and compass, and I ended with this paragraph:
That video also mentions that Alfred Molina, the actor who played Doc Ock, gave names to each of his four mechanical octopus arms -- calling them Larry, Harry, Moe, and Flo. This is in a general way a link to the Mormon temple ceremony, in which there are four different hand grips, each of which is given a name (a fact that is emphasized with the repeated formula "Has it a name?" "It has").
Last night I wanted to listen to some music but didn't have anything particular in mind, so I opened the YouTube Music app and scrolled through one of the algorithmically generated playlists. My attention was arrested by this song: "25 or 6 to 4" as performed by the greatest Chicago tribute band in all of Russia:
The name of the song is a remarkable sync. Just one day before, in "These ladder days," I had written:
So what's the 116th day of the year? April 26, or April 25 in leap years.
The 25th or 26th day of the 4th month -- a perfect match for "25 or 6 to 4."
I played the song -- because, seriously, these guys rock -- and when it was finished, the next song the algorithm served up was "Love Shack" by the B-52's.
One of the first images in the music video, at the 17-second mark, is this:
It's a close-up of a face wearing spectacles with circular lenses in which a sunflower is reflected. The similarity to the Doc Ock images (one of which also came from the very beginning of a video) is obvious.
An additional link is that the Post Malone song "Sunflower" was recorded for the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which also features (a gender-swapped version of) Doctor Octopus.
I've never seen that movie. I assume Spider-Verse refers to some sort of multiverse concept, but taken literally, it reminds me of my own "spider verse," the one-line poem "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn" (December 2023, though the verse itself is much older). Revisiting that post now, I see that it includes a music video "consisting of scenes from one of the Spider-Man movies." Wait, which Spider-Man movie? Does it include -- Yes. The video begins with Spidey swinging through the city, and then it zooms out to reveal that the whole preceding scene was actually a reflection in Doc Ock's sunglasses:
