Hart, hermit, skeleton

Since my post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10), the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine, which includes a white hart, has been in the sync stream. Wade has repeatedly associated this card with the deer-headed skeleton in "Humanoid deer creatures" (June 20), the idea being that in this white (because skeletal) deer-headed man, the white hart and the hermit have merged into a single being.

"Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27) once again revisited the above Hermit card, this time in connection with a painting by Laura Bruno. This sent WanderingGondola to Laura's blog, where she clicked on the "Tarot Readings" page and read where Laura says, "I most often use Robin Wood’s deck."

I had looked at that page of Laura's as well, but I was already aware of the Robin Wood deck, which is fairly popular. It's broadly based on the Rider-Waite but has been "paganized," with most of the explicitly Christian symbolism removed.

(Just now, thinking about Laura Bruno and Robin Wood, I accidentally typed Laura Wood, which is the name of the lady who runs the Thinking Housewife blog. Thinking the error might be synchronistically relevant, I visited that blog and found a post called "The Federal Octopus," dated yesterday. No obvious relevance beyond the name.)

WG, though, wasn't familiar with the Robin Wood deck and looked it up. She found a review of the deck on Aeclectic Tarot. Deck reviews on that site will show a few sample cards: four of the Major Arcana, plus one card from each suit. Here are the first three cards it shows for Robin Wood:

The first card is the Magician, who is wearing a headdress made from a deerskin, complete with antlers. Right after that is the Hermit, so we have the hart-hermit pair again. The third card is Death. In Robin Wood's version, the figure of Death is (like the Hermit in the Tarot of the Divine) completely concealed in a hooded cloak. Conceptually, though, it is the Grim Reaper, a skeleton.

I was aware that Aeclectic reivews always show four Majors and four Minors. Are they always the same ones, though? Does it always begin with the Magician and the Hermit, or is that something unique to their Robin Wood review? To check this, I went to the main page for Tarot reviews and clicked on two of the four featured decks there: first the Modern Witch Tarot and then the Forest of Enchantment Tarot. I know nothing about either of those decks and chose them (rather than either of the two other featured decks) for no particular reason. The Modern Witch review showed a completely different selection of cards from the Robin Wood Review. Then I clicked Forest of Enchantment and saw this:

That's right. This is a less traditional Tarot deck, and the first card it shows -- the zero card, corresponding to the Fool -- is actually called The White Hart. One of the other cards featured in the review -- I guess it's the Ace of Wands, or maybe Swords -- features a white crow. (See my June 20 post "October 3 and 4, and white crows.")

The review also shows what the backs of the cards look like. Owls.

Grandmother Cardinal

Over lunch, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

He described a day with a tightly knit web of meaningful moments, all tying back to a quote from Whitley Strieber he'd read that morning, "...the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark." Seconds later, he heard a woman on the radio describe seeing a red cardinal, she said it was "grandma winking back from the beyond." When Joe told his wife about this little coincidence, a red cardinal landed on a branch just outside the closest window.

That caught my eye because that particular quote from Whitley Strieber -- a man who has written many books and produced many quotable lines -- gave its name to my own Strieber blog, Winking Back from the Dark.

The red cardinal is a North American bird, not something I'm going to see in Taiwan, but when I went to pay for my lunch, I saw a somewhat cardinal-like plush toy at the counter.

It's red, with a beak and a crest, but I thought maybe it was supposed to be a pterodactyl rather than a bird. After a bit of searching online, I determined that it is neither a bird nor a pterodactyl but some Japanese thing that's supposed to be an anthropomorphic carrot or something.

Anyway, it was sufficiently cardinal-adjacent that it reminded me of the Christopher Blythe video whose thumbnail I had posted in "Owl and deer" (June 26). I hadn't watched any of it, but I remembered that the title mentioned a woman named Cardinal -- synching with the cardinal in Stories from the Messengers that was "grandma." I went back to his channel to find the video. I found that it was actually the second in a two-part series called "Sherry Cardinal Talks Chief Midegah," so I went to the first one and started playing it. Just 47 seconds in, this appears on the screen:

I was watching this because I'd connected a woman named Cardinal with a cardinal that was "grandma." Now there's a specific grandmother reference. I brought up the video transcript and word-searched for grandmother. Sure enough, the grandmother is Cardinal:

Now Sherry Cardinal was the right-hand woman of a man named David Taylor, and her story is about her experience becoming acquainted with David Taylor and then eventually being appointed as chief grandmother of David's clan.

Bone screws that get loose

On Monday night, I dreamt that I had some large black screws made of plastic. You could screw them in without needing a screwdriver, just by turning the head with your fingers. I was considering using some of them to hold my clothing in place by putting the screw through the fabric and into the bone of my arm or leg. This seemed like it would be very easy to do -- again, I wouldn't even need a screwdriver -- and I had no sense that it would be painful or cause bleeding or anything like that.

What made me reconsider this plan was the thought that if I put screws into my bones too often, inserting and removing screws from the same hole repeatedly, the hole would get slightly wider over time, and the screw wouldn't fit as tightly as before. Finally, they would just fall out. Therefore, I should only put screws into my bones when it's really necessary, not for trivial things like holding my clothing in place.

I think this dream was probably inspired by a cat scratcher my wife bought may years ago, broadly similar to the one pictured below, where to assemble it you had to drive plastic screws into thick corrugated cardboard. The screws always fell out after a while and had to be put back in, and the more that happened, the looser the screws became. That was years ago, though.

The next day, Tuesday, one of my adult students showed up with her arm in a sling. She had broken a bone in her shoulder about a year ago but had long since fully recovered, so I asked what had happened. She explained that one of the surgical screws used to repair her shoulder had somehow become loose, no longer fitting tightly into the bone, and so she had had to have surgery to replace it.

The owl, the deer, and the time warp

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this picture of a Hermit card with a white hart added to it and associated it with this sort of "portal."

That post also referred to "a space/time warp" and "portals or time warps."

One June 27, I posted "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." Following links from Mike Clelland's book Stories from the Messengers, I discovered the blog of his friend Laura Bruno, and particularly her page "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." Again we have the Hermit card of the Tarot associated with a "portal," and again an animal has been added to the card -- but this time it is not a deer but an owl:

Today I read in Stories from the Messengers the story of a man named Don who went deer hunting and experienced a strange sensation:

I began to get a strange feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and everything in the forest went totally silent. It was extremely strange. It almost seemed like time itself stopped. It was as if myself and the area around me was in a bubble where everything had just stopped, as if the world was still going on around me but only outside that bubble that I was in.

While in this strange "bubble," Don sees a snowy owl flying right towards him.

As the owl glided by, I turned my head and followed it with my eyes. The owl, after looking me directly in the eyes, turned its head forward again. It flew straight down the trail I had been watching previously and disappeared into the trees. At that exact instant, a huge doe stepped out onto the trail right below the spot where the owl disappeared, and stood there.

Don shoots the doe but then has trouble finding the body. Eventually he finds it by following a red squirrel. When he finally finds the dead doe, he looks up, and the snowy owl is perched in a tree directly over the body.

Moving slowly, I began easing my way toward the doe. But the instant I moved, the squirrel ran away to a nearby tree about 30 feet away and ran up it, stopping and sitting on a limb, seemingly now oblivious to me. At the same instant the owl flew away, disappearing into the forest. The oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere went away gradually.

Don here uses that same expression, "time warp," to describe the strange atmosphere in which he saw both the owl and the deer.

This afternoon, an hour or two after reading this account, I was at the fire station filing some routine fire safety paperwork for my school. As I was leaving, I noticed that behind the fire station, some distance from the road, was an Indigenous Peoples Museum. (Taiwan is the original home of the Austronesian peoples, who later spread out to various islands from Madagascar to Hawaii.) I think I've noticed it there before, but today I felt a sudden, strangely powerful urge to go inside.

I walked through the very small museum, looking at the mildly interesting displays of textiles and weapons and musical instruments. I was the only patron, and the museum was dead silent -- a novel sensation in urban Taiwan, where true silence is a rare commodity. As I enjoyed the silence, I thought of Don's description of the "oddly silent, in-a-time-warp atmosphere" and wondered whether I would encounter any owl- or deer-related art in the museum. I didn't, though. The only animal motifs were snakes and wild boars.

Finally, as I prepared to leave the museum and go about the rest of my day, I noticed this on the wall opposite the restrooms -- not one of the exhibits, but some modern decorative art:

It shows two owls perched in a tree directly above a deer. Don also saw an owl in a tree directly above a deer. No other animals are depicted. And, due to the style of the art, the owls, the deer, and the tree all appear to be white, or off-white.

Thanks for The Art of Fugue

I was looking through some old dream logs and found this one, from January 18, 2016:

We’re saying goodbye to a young kid – blond, maybe 13 years old, who is J. S. Bach. Everyone says goodbye and thank you, and I say – because I feel like I ought to say it – “Thanks for The Art of Fugue.” It’s not very sincere, and he seems to know that, and accepts my thanks awkwardly, nodding. (It’s an afterthought. I was just going to say “Thanks. Bye.” or something like that.) I feel like I probably should have said something like “the Brandenburg Concertos” instead.

Later the same day, I read Laeth's latest post. His posts typically end with some jazz, but this one was different:

today’s musical portion is not jazz. or is it.

my favorite JS Bach is the stuff people considered as academic, exercises good for teaching, but not real music. i must have student ears. The Art of the Fugue is at the top for me. the more involved it gets, the more i like it. i prefer the versions with organ, but couldn’t find this specific one, so string quartet it is (rather than piano, which doesn’t do it justice).

it sounds to me half Wayne Shorter half Villa Lobos. Bach really invented everything.

This shares with the dream the idea that you aren't really "supposed" to like The Art of Fugue, and that preferring a different work by Bach would be a sign of better musical taste.

I've never pretended to have good taste.

Gardens of pomegranates

On June 25, I posted "Another book called the Tree of Life," the titular book being one by Israel Regardie. I quoted a Wikipedia reference to two of his books, though: "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Despite having read rather broadly in the "magical" literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, I've never read anything by or about Israel Regardie. I know him only as the guy who, in violation of his oaths of secrecy, published the Golden Dawn rituals. Commenter Wade, though, turns out to know his work much better, particularly the second title mentioned in my post:

To mention Israel Regardie brings back memories for me. . . . A juvenile infatuation with Crowley as a supposed transgressive figure led me to own a small library of books written or edited by Mr. Regardie. In my teens, his "A Garden of Pomegranates" was a veritable bible to me; I read it over and over. It's remarkable how little I can remember of it nowadays, several decades later; I remember next to nothing.

Today I was rereading Laura Bruno's post "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal" (May 2020), which came up in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals" (June 27). She compares the Tarot image to "the God Odin, who often appeared on Earth in the guise of a traveling hermit," adding parenthetically, "Sometimes I think Tania Marie and I met him in Mendocino back in 2009, where I first learned Runes."

This story of Laura's meeting a "wizard" in Mendocino and learning Runes from him is briefly recounted in Stories from the Messengers, so I knew in a general way what she was referring to, but I clicked the link and read the longer account in her post "Mendocino/Fort Bragg Vacation" (September 2009). The post ends thus:

I have not done justice to the otherworldy feeling of this encounter. I suppose I could have begun, "Two fair maidens met a werewolf on Full Moon's Eve" or "the shaman and the faeries walked together and down the road" or "a person's word is bond."

But I think I'll just say, "we tiptoed into the Pomegranate Garden, tasted the fruit and smiled."

One more usually speaks of a pomegranate orchard, and that is the usual translation of the Ramak's book (to which Regardie's title refers) and of the Bible verse to which it alludes. So the fact that both Regardie and Laura Bruno opted for garden is an additional sync.

Google's Chicxulub Easter egg

Today I discovered that if you search Google for chicxulub impact crater, as I just did, an asteroid will fly across the screen diagonally, making the window shake when it hits the bottom.

No other asteroid- or crater-related search strings seem to trigger the animation. The key word is chicxulub (or any misspelling which will be corrected to chicxulub). Seems like an oddly specific feature to include in a search engine.

I discovered this after running across this painting of the crater in an old /x/ thread. The similarity to Plato's description of Atlantis piqued my curiosity.

I previously posted about the concentric rings of Atlantis in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake" (December 2025).