I have forgot much, Cynara!

On January 26, in "The blue and scarlet books," I posted this photo of a shelf at a used bookstore:

I was interested in only two of the books in the photo: Scarlett and Sacré Bleu. The former is a sequel to Gone with the Wind, and the title of that novel is prominently displayed on the spine, much larger than the author's name. In my post, I associated Sacré Bleu with the Book of Mormon (a sacred text typically bound in blue) and noted that the author's name resembles the first syllable of Monmon.

Today, looking for a table showing the word count of each chapter in the Book of Mormon, I ended up on this page (which looks "AI"-generated and is not recommended; I'm just linking it for documentation), where I found this infographic:

The parallels with my bookshelf photo are uncanny. I was only interested in two of the books in my photo, and that was because they were associated with particular colors. Two of the books in the infographic also stand out because of their colors -- the others are all a similar tan color -- and these correspond perfectly to the two important books in the photo. The Book of Mormon, the third book from the right, was the book I had associated with Sacré Bleu, also the third book from the right. Immediately to the left of the Book of Mormon is a larger book, Gone with the Wind, which unlike the other novels does not have the author's name on the spine. Immediately to the left of Sacré Bleu is a book that also says Gone with the Wind on the spine, but it is not by Margaret Mitchell, and the author's name is downplayed, in much smaller type than the other words on the spine.

I've never read Gone with the Wind, so what that title makes me think of is not so much the novel itself as the Ernest Dowson poem from which it takes its name, "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." Here is the relevant stanza:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The words I've bolded make me think of the Mormon-adjacent story created by Daymon Smith and Bill Wright. Bill is focused on an object he calls the Rose Stone. The word throng -- used again and again, often in odd and unnatural contexts -- is one of the distinctive features of Daymon's Words books, the first of which is called Words of the Faithful. The "lost lilies" of Eressea, consumed by the "sick" Numenoreans, is a plot point from those books that Bill has brought up repeatedly.

The title of that Dowson poem, or part of it, has appeared on this blog before, in "Oh mark I am."

The appearance of War and Peace in that infographic may also be relevant in connection with "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences." Its position corresponds to that of The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley in the photo. Since Burke means "fortress" and Cowley means "cow pasture," Burke and Cowley is a reasonable fit for War and Peace.

Note added: I see that this post title has contributed to a bit of Synlogos feed poetry:

Breaking news: Dice obey laws of probability

I took a first stab at the experiment described in "My plan for a sync experiment." I rolled a pair of dice 1,000 times and entered each roll into a spreadsheet. Of the 2,000 total die rolls, this was the distribution of the different faces:

• One: 355 rolls (17.75%)
• Two: 312 rolls (15.60%)
• Three: 331 rolls (16.55%)
• Four: 324 rolls (16.20%)
• Five: 347 rolls (17.35%)
• Six: 331 rolls (16.55%)

Given those frequencies, the chance of rolling dubs (i.e. both dice showing the same face) is the sum of the squares of the above percentages, which comes to 16.70%. (I did that math instead of assuming a 1/6 probability because these are cheap dice and unlikely to be perfectly fair.) In fact, I rolled dubs 164 times. That's slightly but not significantly lower than the expected 167. So, absolutely zero evidence that I roll dubs more often than I ought to.

Which is of course not remotely surprising or interesting. But if you would have published the results of an experiment if they had been surprising, there is a moral obligation to publish anyway if they turn out not to be surprising. Hence the current post.

It's possible in principle that some very slight anomaly would become visible with a much larger number of trials, but the contingency is a remote one. I'm not inclined to spend any more time on this hypothesis.

My plan for a sync experiment

I've been reading some of Dean Radin's books on psi research, which got me to wondering once again if there might be any way of demonstrating statistically that I experience many more coincidences than I "ought" to just by chance. I think it's indisputable that I do, in some sense -- but in what sense? Do more coincidences actually happen to me in some objective sense, or does it just mean that I'm unusually good at noticing the sorts of things that are actually happening to everyone all the time?

In order to isolate the actual occurrence of coincidences from the noticing of them, it is necessary for the experiment to focus on clearly defined events that can be classified as coincidences or non-coincidences by some objective criteria. And since a control in the usual sense is impossible, it is necessary that the coincidences we are looking at should have a probability that can be calculated mathematically and does not have to be obtained empirically.

So I decided to go with dice. If you roll two dice and get doubles, that's a coincidence -- two semantically related but causally independent events occurring together -- and one that has a probability that can be calculated a priori. It doesn't even matter if the dice aren't perfectly fair. After obtaining the data -- a long list of rolls -- we count the total number of ones rolled, the total number of twos, and so on, and from that we can calculate the null probability of rolling dubs. Then we can count the actual number of dubs rolled and see if the results are significant. It's a simple, clean experiment, and I should have thought of it ages ago.

While I was planning out the experiment in my mind, I had to go to the bathroom. I'd never noticed the logo on the plastic trash can in there, but this time it caught my eye and seemed like a good omen:

That logo also reminds me of something else -- a book I've known about for a long time but haven't yet gotten around to reading:

Coincidentally, just two days ago (January 26) Seallion posted a sync video that discusses the Illuminatus! trilogy.

And not long before that (January 20), I had posted some eye-in-the-triangle images in "More Urim and Thummim syncs."

So it appears that the sync fairies approve of this experiment. Stay tuned for the results.

The celestial smile and the Golden Age

I had lunch in a cafe today, and one of the songs that played in the background was "The Moon Is Made of Gold" by Rickie Lee Jones:

I noticed the song and looked it up because of the unusualness of the metaphor. Normally, the Sun is associated with gold, and the Moon with silver. Then I remembered that the same imagery is used in the Frank Sinatra song "Blue Moon," in which the blue Moon of the title is "turned to gold."

On Oswald Wirth's Tarot card, the Emperor's breastplate has the Sun on the right breast and a Moon on the left. In "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," I identified these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's "breastplate of judgment" and with the square and compass on the breasts of the Garment of the Holy Priesthood.

More recent syncs (see for example "More Urim and Thummim syncs") have added more symbols to this schema. The summarize the ones relevant to this post:

• Urim = Sun = gold = red lens for the right eye = square on the right breast of the Garment
• Thummim = Moon = silver = blue lens for the left eye = compass on the left breast of the Garment

[Note added: After publishing this, I noticed I had accidentally written "gold lens for the left eye" -- the blue Moon turning to gold again! I've corrected it.]

In a recent comment on "Taking both pills," WanderingGondola provides two links. The first is this image:

As WG notes, the colors are backwards. Saturn, the golden planet, is shown as blue, while Neptune, the blue planet, is shown as gold. If the planets were shown in the correct colors, it would match our schema, with red/gold for the right eye and blue/silver for the left. The inversion syncs with the blue Moon turning to gold. A golden Neptune also syncs with my poem "The Golden Age," which reimagines blue-haired Poseidon (Neptune) as a blond. That poem also features a blue Sun, again paralleling the blue Moon turning gold.

What really got my attention, though, was the name given to this triple conjunction: Celestial Smiley Face. Having no Mormon background, WG was almost certainly unaware that "celestial smile" is Mormon slang for the neckline of the Garment when visible through one's outer clothing. Here, for example, is Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, a Mormon, displaying a "celestial smile":

Here is the second thing WG linked:

Again we have an inversion of the expected colors, this time including a blue Sun, for an even more direct link to "The Golden Age."

A pretty good year for burning CDs

A few days ago, Anne Barnhardt posted this meme, about a Zoomer too young to understand what it means to "burn" a CD:

Today I read a new post by Leo called "Pretti Good," referencing the names of the two latest media-martyrs in Minneapolis. He's not the first to have made the obvious play on words.

(Both were 37. The joke about who dies "pretty young" is left as an exercise for the reader. I've already posted enough stuff in questionable taste today.)

Leo's post put the 1994 Tori Amos song "Pretty Good Year" in my head.

The lyrics about someone named Greg stood out to me. The name means "awake," and I assume Pretti and Good are being presented in the media as what detractors would call "woke." Another form of Gregory is egregore, which before it became a term of art in esotericism referred to the Watchers from the Second Book of Enoch.

One of the lines in "Pretty Good Year" is "Greg, he writes letters and burns his CDs" -- but I didn't connect that to the CD-burning meme until, curious about who "Greg" was, I turned to the SongMeanings site. Greg is about who you would expect him to be, but these comments got my attention:

They point out something I'd never thought about -- that CD-burning technology wasn't available to the general public in 1994, and so Tori must have meant literally burning CDs with fire. I didn't discover this song until 2001 and had never thought twice about the CD-burning reference. I'd made the opposite mistake to that of Chloe in the meme. Chloe's cousin was talking about writing music files to a CD, but Chloe, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant incinerating CDs. Tori Amos really was talking about incinerating CDs, but I, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant writing. A very neat little sync.

In my last post, "Red in their foreheads," I mentioned having read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon this morning. In the afternoon, I kept reading in the Book of Alma and got as far as chapter 8, where the city of Ammonihah is first mentioned. Although I haven't reached chapter 14 yet this time around, I've read the book dozens of times before and know what ends up happening in Ammonihah: They burn records (and people), and Alma and Amulek have to watch:

And they brought their wives and children together, and whosoever believed or had been taught to believe in the word of God they caused that they should be cast into the fire; and they also brought forth their records which contained the holy scriptures, and cast them into the fire also, that they might be burned and destroyed by fire.

And it came to pass that they took Alma and Amulek, and carried them forth to the place of martyrdom, that they might witness the destruction of those who were consumed by fire (Alma 14:8-9).

Thinking about Tori Amos, I remembered that she adopted the alter ego Scarlet for one of her albums, and the word scarlet has been in the sync stream (see "The blue and scarlet books"). I ended up skimming her Wikipedia page and discovering her 2011 album Night of Hunters, the title track of which is set to music by Domenico Scarlatti -- yet another person named "scarlet"! I gave it a listen.

In keeping with the "Greg" theme, the lyrics repeat the lines "Watching over / Keeping watch" many times.

Red in their foreheads

This morning, I read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon, which contains this passage:

And the Amlicites were distinguished from the Nephites, for they had marked themselves with red in their foreheads after the manner of the Lamanites; nevertheless they had not shorn their heads like unto the Lamanites.

Now the heads of the Lamanites were shorn; and they were naked, save it were skin which was girded about their loins, and also their armor, which was girded about them, and their bows, and their arrows, and their stones, and their slings, and so forth.

And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men (Alma 3:4-6).

Most Mormons have understood Lamanites to mean "American Indians." As I read this today, I noticed for the first time the irony of a red mark on the forehead being a distinctive Lamanite trait. Today such marks are associated with the other sort of Indian. In fact, I have often seen people use the parenthetical clarification "dot, not feather" to specify that they mean Indians sensu strico rather than Native Americans -- a clarification that takes it for granted that that latter do not typically have red dots on their foreheads.

Two verses down is one of several references in the book to the Lamanites being "cursed" with dark skin. Although this verse says "dark," the more usual expression is "skin of blackness." I thought, not for the first time, how odd this was if the Lamanites are indeed supposed to be Indians. As far as I know, it has never been common to think of American Indians as "black"; they've always been "redskins."

Passages like this have, for obvious reasons, often been condemned as "racist" and offensive -- not so much to the Indians as to Black people in the usual sense of that word. There was recently a minor hooha in Mormon-critical circles about the fact that certain partial translations of the Book of Mormon into African languages had conveniently omitted the bits about the "skin of blackness."

While I was eating lunch today, I had a sudden mental image of a 4chan catalog page on which one of the images was the face of a mandrill. It had the feel of something potentially precognitive, so shortly after lunch I went to my computer to skim the images on the /pol/ and /x/ catalogs (the only boards I view with any frequency) for mandrills. I didn't find any mandrills, but I did find this:

Here are the two images that caught my eye, both from overtly "racist" threads with slurs in the captions:

I first noticed the photo of Kash Patel, edited to have a red dot on his forehead. There are lots and lots of Indian hate threads on /pol/ these days, but red-dot imagery isn't very common; images associating Indians with shit are much more popular.

Then I noticed that the Black man two threads over also appears, due to the lighting, to have a red mark on his forehead. He was in the news for murdering his White girlfriend, and the thread is mostly condemning the murder victim as a "mud-shark" who "burned the coal and paid the toll." Note that Alma 3 also pronounces a curse on white Nephites who "mingle their seed" with black Lamanites.

The Black man has a red nose as well as forehead, which is somewhat of a link to my mandrill image. Past posts here have drawn attention to the mandrill's red nose. When I searched this blog for rednose, the first result was "When only the goblins are out," which says:

In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose.

The same post also references the mandrill-headed D&D monster Demogorgon, which brings us to the only other somewhat mandrill-adjacent image I found in my skim of the two catalogs:

That's an "AI" slop rendition of the Demiurge, depicted as a snake with the head of a lion. For comparison, this is what Demogorgon look like:

Lions and mandrills have been connected before. In "The sons of Horus and the Four Living Creatures, and more syncs," I map the lion to the baboon-headed son of Horus and also refer to "the mandrill (basically a baboon)."

The /x/ thread with the slop-Demiurge is titled "Alawite Ancient History of the World. Demiurge, Djinn, Archons, and Loosh Farm." The "Loosh Farm" reference is a bit of a sync, as I woke up this morning with the Spinal Tap song "Sex Farm" in my head.

You've heard the term "copycat"?