An owl in a basket

Here is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer, which I most recently posted here in "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch" (July 4).

And here is a photo I took today (July 11) of a decoration on the exterior wall of a vegetarian restaurant.

Decorations from a Tree of Acorns

I dreamt that I had bought secondhand a very rare privately published hardcover book titled Decorations from a Tree of Acorns: A Version of "The Paper". Its orangish-brown cover, with the title written in gold inside a black rectangle, seemed to be imitating the aesthetic of the first edition of the Book of Mormon. No author was credited.

When I started reading it, most of the content was very familiar, and I soon realized that "The Paper" of which it was a version was Mike Clelland's original paper on owls and UFOs, which was later expanded to book length and published as The Messengers (which in the dream was conflated with its sequel Stories from the Messengers). I was excited at the prospect of finding in it "lost" material that Mike had not been "allowed" to include in the commercially published version. Paging through it, I did see some new-to-me content, including several reproductions of ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform texts, and some Mesopotamian art portraying the lion-headed Anzu bird.

I understood that Decorations from a Tree of Acorns was code for Stories from the Messengers, and that the cryptic title was to allow people to read it without making it obvious that they were reading a book about owls and UFOs.

Before going to bed last night, I had been thinking about two things. First, the major typhoon currently in Taiwan had reminded me of my first experience with a tropical cyclone: Hurricane Gloria, which hit New Hampshire, where I was then living, on September 28, 1985, and which would later become inextricably linked to my mental image of Marduk battling Tiamat. Second, I had for no obvious reason been thinking of my dream "Nineteen years inside the sphere," which I later understood to have reference to "The Death of Nelson" (the dream was hours after the death of Russell Nelson but before it had been announced in the media) and wondering if I was about to have another such significant dream. Only now, looking it up, do I see that I posted that dream on September 28, the anniversary of Gloria hitting New England.

Thus, after last night's dream, as I was trying to figure out the logic of changing "the Messengers" to "a Tree of Acorns," my thoughts turned to Nelson's successor as leader of The Church Formerly Known as Mormon, Dallin Oaks. His name obviously references a tree of acorns, and he bears the title Apostle, meaning "messenger." The appearance of the book in my dream suggests a Mormon connection.

It occurs to me now that the name Dallin Oaks encodes the Valley of Elah, where David killed Goliath. Dallin means "valley-dweller," and the Hebrew word elah, which modern scholars say means "terebinth," is usually rendered "oak" in the KJV.

As I am writing this post, something completely random has popped into my head -- lines from a Robert Graves poem I last read decades ago. I include them here in case they should turn out to have some relevance:

Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back

The white caribou

I took this photo this past Wednesday (July 8) outside Caribou Cafe, which is also where I took the June 15 photo is "Humanoid deer creatures."

The white hart -- or white caribou, I suppose -- is stationed in front of a door, or portal.

The fact that it's specifically a caribou, or reindeer, led me to make some connections. Caribou is a link to Cherubim, which comes from the Akkadian karibu, as noted in "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window" (June 2024). I made a pun on reindeer and Mithrandir in "Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir" (May 24). Mith means "gray," so a gray randir (reindeer) -- but of course Gandalf the Grey later becomes Gandalf the White. Way back in 2018, in a comment on Bruce's post "Tychonievich's Meditations on a Tarot," I had written, "Mithrandir should clearly be the Hermit, I think."

These reindeer-related contemplations also led me back to my 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective," which begins by mentioning that I had recently gone 50 hours without sleep.

Shortly after rereading that old post, the algorithm suggested a song I'd never heard: "Welcome Home, Son" by Radical Face. I listened to it.

The lyrics begin thus, linking to the 50 hours without sleep:

Sleep don't visit, so I choke on the sun

And the days blur into one

The song triggered a vivid mental image of running through a wood after a white hart, trusting that it would lead me "home." After I'd listened to the song, I looked at some of the comments, and this one struck me:

This song reminds me of those moments when I trust my horse and I start galloping in the field and I let go and outstretch my arms, the wind blowing on my face, cooling down my worries of falling, the sun shining on my back, warming me on the cold day. Trusting an animal with your life is the best feeling. I love him.

The reference to "trusting an animal with your life" synched with my mental image of following a hart and trusting it. The comment ends with "I love him," with him referring to a horse. The name Philip -- which my 2020 post identifies with "a Christmas reindeer" -- means "horse-lover."

Here is the album cover art from the Radical Face song:

And here's one of the "time warp images" from "Love pop, baby, love pop" (September 2024), recently reposted in "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10):

Update: About an hour after posting this, with its "days blur into one" reference, I read this in White Crows:

The night it had happened felt like the distant past, but had occurred only a matter of days ago. How many days? Sheppard could figure it out if he looked at a calendar, but right this second, he didn’t know. Events, time, emotions, everything had melted together.

DeerHermit

The juxtaposition of a hermit with a hart, sometimes merged into a single "humanoid deer creature," has been a sync theme recently. Thus this sign caught my eye as I passed it on the road this morning:

It says DeerHer, written as a single word with no space. If Her is understood to be a truncated form of the word Hermit, then we have our hart-hermit combination. DeerHer is a shop that specializes in wedding cookies (it's traditional in Taiwan to give boxes of assorted cookies to wedding guests), which is pretty far removed from the idea of a hermit, but it's typical of the sync fairies to repurpose things like that.

The Tarot card known as the Hermit in most French and English decks was in the oldest lists of Tarot trumps, which are in Italian, known as Time, or the Old Man. This made me think of the Chinese deity known as the Old Man of the South Pole, who is portrayed as an old man with a white beard and a staff, and who is often accompanied by a deer. In Journey to the West, it is specified that this is a white deer, but it is not normally portrayed as white in art. Here is a Japanese portrayal:

Scrambled serendipity

In yesterday's post "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch," I revisited an old 2019 post in which a book titled Serendipities manifested "a strange sort of anti-serendipity": The book caught my eye because the cover art was a painting I had recently posted about, but it turned out to be a version of the painting that lacked the key feature I had been interested in.

Today, a motorcyclist wearing this T-shirt was right ahead of me on the road for several minutes. (This is not my photo. I found it online.)

At first it looks as if it says SERENDIPITY, but the P and the R have been swapped, and the second E has been modified to the visually similar F. Below this SEPFNDIRITY is "DODF", which is harder to decrypt. My best guess is that it is a modification of "POOF" -- a sound effect associated with things appearing or disappearing as if by magic, which is somewhat related to the concept of serendipity.

Africa has its own time

This evening, I saw a textbook article, for reading comprehension practice, about the Ethiopian calendar and how it differs from the Gregorian.

About an hour later, I saw a /pol/ thread titled "TIL Africa has its own time," with a screenshot of an article about "African time" as a reference to Africans always being late for everything. (Lots of places and cultures make that joke about themselves.) The jannies appear to have deleted the thread before it was archived, since I can't find it now.

The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch

The Hermit card of the Tarot has been in the sync stream recently, including this "Hermit Portal" painting by Laura Bruno, which features an owl -- a bird which does not appear on most Hermit cards.

In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the Magician.

Today it occurred to me that this was something that had come up before: different versions of a depiction of a hermit, with and without an owl, and in conjunction with the Magician card of the Tarot.

The most famous and influential hermit in history is indisputably St. Anthony the Great, whose hallucinatory "temptation" in the wilderness has attracted the attention of artists from Gustave Flaubert to Salvador Dalí to Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch revisited the theme more than once, and while the St. Anthony Triptych in Lisbon isn't my favorite depiction of that saint by that artist, it entered the sync stream in "U.E. echoes A.E." (October 2019). I wrote:

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

As far back as "The Magician: Preliminary thoughts" (October 2018) I had recognized a connection between Bosch's Conjurer painting and the Magician card of the Tarot. Here is a detail showing the conjurer with his dog and owl:

And here is a detail from the Lisbon St. Anthony Triptych, showing the same two animals, and confirming that the owl is indeed an owl and not a monkey.

Around the time I was writing about these Bosch paintings in connection with the Tarot, I ran across an English translation of a book by Umberto Eco called, appropriately Serendipities, with the St. Anthony Triptych on the cover. As reported in the 2019 post, I bought the book "on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art," only to discover later that it was actually the vastly inferior (fake, in my opinion) São Paulo St. Anthony Triptych, and that the element that had drawn my attention to that painting in the first place -- the owl -- was conspicuous by its absence.

I commented:

[I]t's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.

Since you asked, my favorite depiction of St. Anthony, and my second-favorite Bosch after The Conjurer, is the Madrid Temptation.

Dalí's painting shows a fanatic. This one shows a saint, one who has come to terms with the goblin-haunted world in which he finds himself and with the "minor presences, riff-raff of consciousness" (Irish Murdoch's phrase), weird but ultimately harmless, that accompany him in his meditations.