Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs

Last night, some links led me back to my 2024 post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," which recounts two seemingly unrelated dreams. In the context of my February 13 post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," though, they did seem to be related. In that more recent post, I note some syncs juxtaposing the hawk/kite/Garuda with the octopus/spider. In the first of the 2024 dreams, I at first thought the vulture might be Garuda:

Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

In the second dream, the legs of the "spider mask" are actually just limp strips of cloth, making them more like octopus tentacles than like the jointed legs of a spider. The mask was

a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

This connection put the kite back in my mind, and when I went to bed, I thought again of Kipling's poem, previously featured in my February 15 post "Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free --

The poem is set in India (chil is a dated transliteration of the Hindi for "kite"), and the Kipling Society says that Mang the Bat is "a made-up name," so I don't think there can have been any intentional reference to Chinese. However, the Chinese word for "blind," 盲, is transliterated as máng, suggesting the phrase "blind as a bat."

Then a very vaguely remembered movie scene came to mind, in which a group of people were surrounding someone and taunting him or her by chanting, "You're blind! blind! blind as a bat!" but I couldn't for the life of me remember where that came from. Despite the un-Shakespearean language, my first thought was that it must be from a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, but a word search of the script turned up nothing. "Blind as a bat" is such a common expression that searching the Web for it was useless. Duplicating the word blind only yielded the Meat Loaf song "Blind as a Bat," which isn't what I was looking for. I fell asleep still trying to figure out where the chant was from.

In the morning, I thought it might be from one of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies (which would have been appropriate, given the Batman reference in my account of the spider mask dream), but again no dice. If anyone recognizes the scene, please leave a comment.

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Last night I dreamt about a wealthy but eccentric woman who maintained a private museum in her home, purporting to display "the Splendor of the Island Pharaohs." The sign outside her house gave the impression that there would be all sorts of opulent artifacts in the museum, but in fact all that was inside was a collection of desiccated mummies. I didn't go inside and didn't see these, but I imagined them looking something like this:

The public began to complain about the misleading sign, seeing it as a bait-and-switch, so she changed it to a much simpler sign that just listed the names of the Island Pharaohs.

The idea of "Island Pharaohs" of course points to Daymon Smith's belief that "'Egypt' in [Joseph] Smith's writings points to Tolkien's Numenorean empire, vast yet centered on that island."

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Isaiah 30, quoted in my last post, "On every hill," also begins with a reference to Egypt and the Pharaohs:

Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin: that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion (Isa. 30:1-3).

This chapter also includes the famous verse about those who "say to the seers, See not" (v. 10). Another kite-and-octopus link I discovered recently was the Rider-Waite Nine of Pentacles, which features a falcon (close to a kite) and a snail (the octopus's closest land-dwelling relative). In "A darker view of the Three of Pentacles," I connected the hooded falcon on the card with Isaiah's line "the seers hath he covered" (Isa. 29:10, 2 Ne. 27:5), just one chapter earlier. These references to seers not seeing obviously relate to "blind as a bat."

Upon every hill

This evening I stopped reading Words of Them Which Have Slumbered near the end of a section, having flipped forward a few pages to check. The next section, which I have yet to read, is called "Every Hill of Valinor."

Just now, on a random whim, I used a website to select a truly random verse from the King James Bible, something I haven't done in many months. I got this:

And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall (Isa. 30:25).

Desert scenes

My recent post "Half under the sea" began with this image, an adaptation of an existing meme:

Commenter NLR determined that the background image in the meme was originally a 2016 photo by Kate Ferguson of a salt flat in a Bolivian desert, as viewed from a rocky outcropping.

To this has been added a moon or planet in the upper left and the central figure, who is dressed in yellow robes and has a sun for a head. Of this figure, Bill commented, "Yes, the golden clothing is going to point right to Pharazon, of course (standing in a desert, no less)!" I suppose he emphasized the desert because he identifies me with Pharazon, and this blog is called From the Narrow Desert.

Later, I made another connection, since at the time I posted the meme I was reading Hugh Nibley's Lehi in the Desert. This, combined with the yellow-robed sun-man, made me think of my old post "Red Sun, Yellow Sun," in which I ran across this image in a children's book about flags:

I wrote:

Apparently, the man in yellow with his yellow sun is leaving the larger country represented by the red sun and becoming independent. Can a Mormon see this and not be reminded of a certain prophet, often depicted in yellow robes, leaving his country and heading east under the guidance of a yellow ball?

Yes, that's Lehi, whose time "in the desert" is the subject of Hugh Nibley's book. I posted this back in 2020, well before I had "met" Bill  and learned of his theory that the Liahona (Lehi's magical ball) is the same as Tolkien's Anor-stone, which takes its name from the Sun.

My post with the sun-man meme also included this image of an obscure "post-hardcare" album:

In a comment, Jacob G. correctly pointed out that the album art "is pretty clearly based on the Romantic painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich.

At first, my only reaction was to note that that particular painting has appeared on this blog before, in "Another light-and-dark butterfly pair" and "Flammarion," both from December 2024. Later, though, I realized that it ties the album cover to the title of my post (a line from a dream): "Half under the sea." If we follow Friedrich in calling the fog a "sea" (Nebelmeer), then both his painting and the album cover show rocky crags that are "half under the sea."

The sun-man meme is also somewhat similar in composition to these two images, with rocky land in the foreground overlooking what appears to be a white "sea." A desert seems entirely different from a foggy landscape, but as it happens Lehi in the Desert asserts the opposite:

[T]he culminating horror [in Arab desert poetry] is almost always a "mist of darkness," a depressing mixture of dust, and clammy fog, which, added to the night, completes the confusion of any who wander in the waste. Quite contrary to what one would expect, these dank mists are described by travelers in all parts of Arabia, and al-Ajajj, one of the greatest of early desert poets, tells how a "mist of darkness" makes it impossible for him to continue a journey to Damascus.

I do not vouch for Nibley's meteorological accuracy here, but this passage placing mist and fog in the desert is synchronistically relevant regardless of how correct it may or may not be.

Today I saw on Synlogos a new post by Laura Wood, "The Desert and Temptation," which caught my eye because of the desert theme and prompted me to click. It's about the temptation of Christ, with particular focus on the importance of his being in the desert when he was tempted. Accompanying the post is one of Gustave Doré's Bible illustrations:

Although Mrs. Wood's post only discusses the first temptation -- to turn stones to bread -- the illustration clearly represents a different temptation, the second in Luke's version of the story:

And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, "All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine" (Luke 4:5-7).

"All the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time" clearly corresponds to the title of that album: Everything All at Once. The general layout of Doré's engraving also matches that of the other images we have been considering: someone standing on high rocky ground in the foreground, with a panoramic scene in the background.

On the album cover and in the Friedrich painting, the person has his back to us, looking out at the view. Doré's Jesus turns away from the view and toward the viewer, and there is a halo of radiant lines around his head. In this, the Son of Man bears a certain resemblance to the sun-man:

Bill has connected the sun-man with Pharazon, who seems pretty far removed from Jesus Christ. However the temptation -- to worship the devil in exchange for power -- is the same. The question is whether or not one succumbs.

Finally, I should mention that the album cover, with the astronaut looking at the Earth, reminds me of another popular meme format:

Pizza, peace deals, and Slavic anatomical vulgarisms

These two posts appeared in close proximity on Synlogos:

Barnhardt's post is self-explanatory: The "pizza" code word used by the Scum On Top may derive from pizda, which occurs in virtually all Slavic languages as what Ann politely calls a "vulgarism for the female genitalia."

In the Didactic Mind post, "pissdill" is meant to be "peace deal" pronounced in a Russian accent. After explaining this and opining that the Russian pronunciation "sounds extremely funny and very rude," he adds this parenthetical note:

(Quick aside: “peace deal” in English sounds very much like пиздел to a Russian, which is a very rude term involving… a specific part of the male anatomy, let’s put it that way.)

For those who don't read Cyrillic, пиздел would be transliterated as pizdel. It's one of the past-tense forms of пиздеть, which can mean "to bitch" or "to bullshit," and which -- despite Didactic's claim that it refers to "a specific part of the male anatomy" -- is simply the verb form of пизда (pizda), the same female anatomical term Barnhardt's post is about.

Half under the sea

I dreamt that I was with my wife and some of our friends. I was playing a music video from the Sugarcubes album More More More! (which does not exist in the waking world), and we were singing along with what lyrics we knew. Instead of Einar Örn, Björk's co-vocalist was a woman, whom I did not recognize.

We played the video twice, so I really should be able to remember more of the lyrics, but unfortunately I've only been able to salvage a couple of lines: "Borneeeeya, I really wanna beeee ya" (which I took to mean "I want to be in Borneo") and (this was a line we all knew and sang along with) "Half under the sea!" There was also a spoken-word interlude in the middle that was a hard-to-follow poem about someone called Carlson going to the Moon and not being afraid. One of our group asked if it meant Tucker Carlson, and I said probably not because he wasn't famous yet when the song was recorded.

After I woke up, I ran a search for "half under the sea" lyrics just to see what would come up. Two of the top results were both from r/PostHardcore, one about a song called "Sky Under the Sea" by a group called Pierce the Veil (from the 2010 album Selfish Machines), and one about a group called Sea in the Sky, and particularly their 2017 album Everything All at Once and its title track. I don't even know what "post-hardcore" means, really (classification into micro-genres is not punk rock in my book), but given my search prompt it was quite a coincidence that I got two different songs from that genre, and that each juxtaposes sky (not in my prompt) with sea. (Cf. the Isle of Skye, recently referenced in "Wonderful Mountain Apes.") Each song is also the last track on its album.

The name Pierce the Veil has obvious Mormon resonances, and the album art is interesting:

Given that the song in my dream included something about someone ("Carlson") going to the Moon, the album art for Everything All at Once is even more interesting:

It's an astronaut, and he seems to be standing on one half of a landmass that has been broken in two. "Half under the sea" suggests Daymon Smith's story about Tol Eressëa (which in Bill Wright's version of the story is not an island but a planet) being split in two and half of it being sunk under the sea.

The name Everything All at Once also caught my eye because I had just read a reference to a very similarly named movie in Dean Radin's The Science of Magic:

These integrative theories suggest that psi operates unconsciously to manifest an individual's desires by continually scanning the past, present, and future. The first three flavors of these theories also assume that psi can influence the environment via PK. In so doing, a meaningful synchronicity is evoked that satisfies your desire. It assumes that perception and influence act "outside" of time, as artistically portrayed in the 2023 Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Here are the two songs, neither of which does much for me musically:

Note added: "The Sky Under the Sea" includes the line "So do that dance in the dark," linking back to Björk via Dancer in the Dark.

Unlawful possession of a cured vehicle

In "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" (December 2025) I proposed that a "cured vehicle" might be something like this:

Today I saw on Synlogos a review of some recent film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which (naturally) made me think of that Heathcliff comic where there's a huge banner with a picture of Heathcliff's face draped across the front of a house and some passersby are saying, "Heathcliff must live there." As I was trying (unsuccessfully so far) to track down that comic on Google, I found this:

This is a much better fit. It's not just a cured vehicle but an unlawful one, since it's clearly way over the ham limit.

Note: In case you don't get the joke, here's an explanation:

Update: Found it.

Wonderful Mountain Apes

My post "A feast for the god of war" made me think of the fact that in childhood I was the president of two "societies": the War Society and the Wonderful Mountain Apes Society. The latter (which was a cliff-climbing group) got me wondering whether there might be any real mountain called Wonderful Mountain, and that led me to a poem I'd never read before, "Blaavin" by Alexander Smith. It twice addresses Blaavin (Blà Bheinn on the Isle of Skye) as "wonderful mountain." These are the closing lines:

At a clear open turn of the roadway

My passion went up in a cry,

For the wonderful mountain of Blaavin

Was bearing his huge bulk on high,

Each precipice keen and purple

Against the yellow sky.

The yellow sky of the Golden Age has been a major theme recently, so this got my attention. This photo, from here, where it is captioned "Blaven at sunset, from Loch Hourn," suggests the sort of image the poet had in mind:

Since I'm giving up 4chan for Lent, I decided to give https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ one last twirl for Mardi Gras. I got "Occultism & Magick General: Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength edition" (April 11, 2018), with this image:

There's lots going here synchronistically, of course, with the Sun and Moon as the two eyes of Horus and so on, but what caught my eye in the present context was the purple-and-yellow coloration of the god. The purple parts of his body form a rough triangle, like a purple mountain against a yellow sky. There is water in the foreground, just as the image of Blà Bheinn I found was taken "from Loch Hourn." Even the name of the lake suggest Horus (Horon in Hebrew).

The post itself was something that is often reposted: a link to a massive (but sadly now defunct) online document dump known as Ape's Library because it was curated by someone using the Crowleyan moniker Ape of Thoth.

So, purple and yellow, with an Ape connection. I decided to click "Random" once more just to see what would come up. I got "/LoA/ - Law of Attraction & Manifesting General" (November 2, 2021), with this image:

A purple mountain against a partly-yellow sky, with a lake in the foreground.