Cities of Enoch and black stars

On February 24, I downloaded Hugh Nibley's book Enoch the Prophet, which I haven't read since childhood but still remember quite well.

On March 1, I posted "Strange is the night where black stars rise."

Last night, I checked The Higherside Chats and found an episode, published March 4, called "Wayne McRoy Jr. | 2026 Synchromystic Metadata, the Enoch Polarity, & the Black Star." So of course I had to give it a listen. The black star of the title is some sort of electromagnetic anomaly, and the Enoch Polarity refers to the two Enochs of the Bible: the son of Cain, after whom Cain named the city he built; and the son of Jared, who ascended to Heaven. McRoy identifies the former with an underworld city in the form of a black cube, and the latter with the heavenly Jerusalem described by John of Patmos, in the form of a white cube.

In Mormonism (e.g. the Nibley book), Enoch son of Jared is inseparable from his city, Zion (i.e. a heavenly Jerusalem), which ascended to Heaven with him, but this aspect of the Enoch legend is unique to Mormonism. Nibley devotes much of his book to drawing parallels between Joseph Smith's Enoch material and the apocryphal Enoch literature, but none of those parallels involves the City of Enoch, of which the apocryphal writers know nothing. For a non-Mormon like McRoy to associate Enoch with a city is very unusual.

That Enoch, both in and out of Mormonism, is known primarily as one who ascended to Heaven, adds synchronistic meaning to the juxtaposition with a Black Star. My March 1 post, about "where black stars rise," also mentioned Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising and my own post "Ascending to the black star."

Donuts coffee

On the road early this morning, I somehow got to thinking about doughnuts. I'm not sure what started this train of thought, but I was thinking about how doughnuts used to be a fairly regular feature of my life, how common it used to be to bring a box of them to the office or classroom, and how long it had been -- a decade at the very least, probably closer to two -- since I'd had a proper doughnut.

Is that just because I live in Taiwan now, I wondered, or is the decline of the doughnut a worldwide phenomenon? I remembered hearing that Dunkin Donuts is just called Dunkin now and is thought of mainly as a coffee shop. And didn't Tim Hortons also start off as a doughnut shop? It seems that doughnut shops survive only by shifting their focus to coffee.

When I arrived home, my wife asked me to pop back out and buy her a coffee. When I asked which of two nearby coffee shops she would prefer, she said, "What about Donuts? Do they have good coffee?"

Donutes (as it is actually spelled, though everyone pronounces it with a short u) is a coffee shop that also sells various baked goods, though not, as one might expect, doughnuts. My wife had never had their coffee before but randomly decided to try it today.

Breadcrumbs and an (implied) iron pen again

My March 12 post "Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs" was about a synchronicity involving the three themes in the title. One of the iron pens involved was one with which things "may be written, upon plates of brass."

Yesterday, I read in Joseph Smith's Seer Stones:

If the record and the stones buried by the brother of Jared were somehow connected to the plates of Ether, then we would simply need to follow the textual breadcrumbs left by the discovery of Ether's record. . . . but they give no indication that Ether inscribed any portion of the [brother of Jared's] all-seeing vision onto his twenty-four plates . . . .

No avian epigraphs, but we do have that word breadcrumbs juxtaposed with inscribing things on metal plates, which is what the "iron pen" was for.

Not to be charmed

For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord. When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me.

-- Jeremiah 8:17-18

"Observe this motion: Clench the fist,

Pull taut the tendons, flick the wrist -- 

For thus did Paul of Tarsus shake

Into the flames the biting snake;

And thus did flex, escaping harm,

His bitten but unswollen arm.

The saints of old have shown the way;

Read thou their deeds and do as they."

What courage now can Paul inspire,

Who shook the serpent into fire?

The poisoned fangs that pricked his hand,

They pale before this poisoned land!

The air and water, bread and meat,

All that we breathe and drink and eat,

Is poisoned through and through, and all

Is worse than in the days of Paul.

And though I do as Paul, 'tis written,

Did when I myself am bitten --

A miracle? A single snake.

What difference can it even make

If shaking off the serpent, I

Breathe in relief a poisoned sigh,

And at the fireside take my seat

To warm my hands in poisoned heat?

And all is vain, and all is loss.

None in the end escape the cross.

And all is vain, and all is loss.

None in the end escape the Cross.

Stones as seeds

Today I read in Words of Them Liberated a reference to a Silmaril as a "gem-pip sprouting" into a yellow flower, a stone become a seed.

Hours later, I read in Joseph Smith's Seer Stones that

Joseph Smith planted his seer stone like a seed, which grew to become the immovable oak of Mormonism.

Three syncs from When Women Were Birds

I've just finished reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams -- a good read overall, though perhaps a bit too Creative Writing for some tastes.

I started reading it at about the same time that I started Words of Them Liberated, and in "Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs" I noted the coincidence that both books begin with a short epigraph invoking birds and emptiness. A further sync between the two books is that Words has this image at the beginning, written in a strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read (Rúmilian, as rendered by Polish artist Karolina Stopa):

Birds contains a section about Nüshu, a secret writing system once used by women in a single county of China. The book includes an image of this strange vertical script that vanishingly few people can read:

Besides the general conceptual similarity, both scripts incorporate groups of dots, and both were written by women.

In "Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition" (January 22), I noted a sync having to do with "fire kasina" -- the practice of staring into a candle flame for a period of time and then closing your eyes and focusing on the afterimage of the flame. This is supposed to be able to produce intense visions comparable to a psychedelic experience.

Terry Tempest Williams describes doing something very similar in a church:

I lit a tall, thin taper and placed it in a cast-iron clip molded in the shape of a scallop. The Virgin glowed. The gold pattern on her gown was meant to illuminate light, not to impress. The church became darker as the flame intensified. I stared at the flame. I closed my eyes, but the flame remained, still and numinous, and I recalled a poet's line after just such a gesture: "Now, you have seen eternity."

Shortly after I had started reading When Women Were Birds, I published "A prayer," which begins with these lines:

The players bow; the watchers rise.

The program printed on the page

Has reached its end, and now no eyes

But God's alone are on the stage.

The central image of Birds is the author's mother's journals, which she left to her, and which all turned out to be entirely blank. Throughout the book, a meditation on X will be punctuated with the sentence "My Mother's Journals are X." There are nearly a hundred such sentences in all, most of them scattered throughout the book and interspersed with narrative vignettes, but in Chapter LI -- which I read two days after publishing the above poem -- we are treated to a long list of them, one after another, from which I quote this extract:

My Mother's Journals are a stage.

My Mother's Journals are scenes painted white.

My Mother's Journals are programs never printed.

Cello dream

I had a dream with no visual component, just music: a single cello playing, with great intensity and virtuosity, the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends." It's been in my head all day -- the cello version from my dream, that is, which appears not yet to exist in the waking world, though I did check YouTube just in case.

Although there were no visuals or vocals, I understood that the cellist was someone who hasn't crossed my mind in many a year: Ester Bloom, whose name sounds like it should be some sort of phenomenon in organic chemistry and who was a blogging collaborator of mine more than a quarter of a century ago. One of her poems from back then was specifically about how she couldn't play the cello and how God had given her "a cello to be instead of to play."