The "sin" at Cain's door

Today we take a break from our regular synchronicity programming for a random bit of Bible criticism. (This was going to be a parenthetical aside in a post on my Book of Mormon blog, but it grew too big for its britches.)

After Cain's offering is rejected, but before he murders Abel, the Lord speaks to him:

And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him (Gen. 4:6-7).

Virtually all of the 50-some English translations available at Bible Gateway are unanimous on how v. 7 is to be interpreted. Here, for example, is the New International Version:

If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it [sin] desires to have you, but you must rule over it [sin].

I have never studied Hebrew and hesitate to contradict all the Bible translators in the world, but -- no, scratch that, I don't hesitate at all. Rushing in where learned fools fear to tread is what we do around here, and the universally accepted reading of this verse is flatly impossible. Here's the interlinear translation from Bible Hub:

The red squares I have added are to draw attention to the fact that the noun translated as "sin" is feminine, but that the KJV is correct in using the masculine pronoun and possessive in "unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." These words cannot possibly have "sin" as their antecedent.

I said virtually all Bible translations interpreted this verse the same way. The one exception is Young's Literal Translation -- which, as it says on the tin, goes with the literal reading even when its meaning is obscure:

Is there not, if thou dost well, acceptance? and if thou dost not well, at the opening a sin-offering is crouching, and unto thee its desire, and thou rulest over it.

Even the YLT sacrifices strict literalness here in order to emasculate "his" and "him" so that they can refer to a feminine noun. Another feature of the YLT was a eureka moment for me, though: not "sin" but "a sin-offering." I checked the Hebrew word in question in a concordance, and it does seem to mean "sin-offering" far more often than "sin." This reading also fits better with the verb immediately following, which Strong's glosses as "to crouch (on all four legs folded, like a recumbent animal)." The noun "sin-offering" refers to the animal itself -- e.g. "he shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin offering, and slay the sin offering" (Lev. 4:29). If the noun can mean either sin or a sacrificial animal, and the verb is one associated with four-legged animals, what's more likely? That Cain's sinful tendencies are being implicitly compared to an animal lying in wait for him, or that the Lord is talking about an actual animal?

It makes perfect sense. The Lord begins by saying, "Why are you so upset?" He's not warning or threatening Cain; he's comforting him. "Why are you so upset? If you do right, you will be accepted; and if you do something wrong, you can easily obtain forgiveness through a sin-offering."

As for the masculine possessive and pronoun, I think they can only refer to Abel. It's impossible not to notice the similarity of these two passages:

Unto the woman he said, . . . thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Gen. 3:16).

And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him (Gen. 4:7).

The first is always understood to mean that the woman is subordinate to her husband and subject to his authority. But when the same formula is used one chapter later, it means something completely different? No. I think the meaning of the Lord's words to Cain can be paraphrased like this:

Why are you so upset about your offering not being accepted? If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. And if you have done something wrong, you know the way to obtain forgiveness. And why should you be jealous of Abel? He's your younger brother and will always be subordinate to you and subject to your authority.

Joseph Smith, of course, had a very different interpretation from what I am proposing here. Connecting the masculine possessive and pronoun with "sin" as most people do, he understood it to mean that Satan wanted to have Cain:

If thou doest well, thou shalt be accepted. And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door, and Satan desireth to have thee; and except thou shalt hearken unto my commandments, I will deliver thee up, and it shall be unto thee according to his desire. And thou shalt rule over him (Moses 5:23).

Adam Clarke's Bible commentary and its supposed influence on Joseph Smith is a trendy topic in Mormon studies circles these days, so I wondered if Clarke had interepreted that verse along the same lines as Smith. When I looked it up, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, no, Clarke actually agrees with me! So now it's me and Adam Clarke against all the Bible translators in the world. Here's what Clarke has to say about v. 7:

If thou doest well - That which is right in the sight of God, shalt thou not be accepted? Does God reject any man who serves him in simplicity and godly sincerity? But if thou doest not well, can wrath and indignation against thy righteous brother save thee from the displeasure under which thou art fallen? On the contrary, have recourse to thy Maker for mercy; לפתח חטאת רבץ lappethach chattath robets, a sin-offering lieth at thy door; an animal proper to be offered as an atonement for sin is now couching at the door of thy fold.

The words חטאת chattath, and חטאת chattaah, frequently signify sin; but I have observed more than a hundred places in the Old Testament where they are used for sin-offering, and translated ἁμαρτια by the Septuagint, which is the term the apostle uses, Co2 5:21 : He hath made him to be sin (ἁμαρτιαν, A Sin-Offering) for us, who knew no sin. Cain's fault now was his not bringing a sin-offering when his brother brought one, and his neglect and contempt caused his other offering to be rejected. However, God now graciously informs him that, though he had miscarried, his case was not yet desperate, as the means of faith, from the promise, etc., were in his power, and a victim proper for a sin-offering was lying (רבץ robets, a word used to express the lying down of a quadruped) at the door of his fold. How many sinners perish, not because there is not a Savior able and willing to save them, but because they will not use that which is within their power! Of such how true is that word of our Lord, Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life!

Unto thee shall be his desire, etc. - That is, Thou shalt ever have the right of primogeniture, and in all things shall thy brother be subject unto thee. These words are not spoken of sin, as many have understood them, but of Abel's submission to Cain as his superior, and the words are spoken to remove Cain's envy.

Clarke doesn't mention the grammatical gender mismatch, but aside from that he says pretty much everything I have said in this post. Pretty smart guy, that Adam Clarke.

Red and blue shoes on the Hanged Man

My last post, "Sync bananza," included this image, originally from my 2022 post "Break on through to the other side":

In order to make it correspond more closely to the Flammarion engraving, I used the mirror image of the Tarot card, as is obvious if you look at the Roman numeral at the top: IIIV. Seeing this image again reminded me that some old Marseille-pattern Tarot cards actually printed a certain Roman numeral in mirror image on purpose, giving the Hanged Man the number IIX instead of XII. The reasons for this are obscure, but it is generally thought to have something to do with the figure's upside-downness.

Looking through my Tarot de Marseille files to find examples of this, I unexpectedly found something else: Here is the Hanged Man card from the deck printed by François Héri in Solothurn, Switzerland, in 1718:

Besides being numbered IIX, this card has a red shoe on the Hanged Man's right foot and a blue shoe on his left. This is quite unusual. I have 20 Marseille-pattern Hanged Man cards in my files, of which only 6 have mirror-image numerals. Of the 20 cards, 15 give the Hanged Man two red shoes, and 4 give him matching shoes of another color (blue or tan). Only Héri gives him mismatched shoes -- and he just happened to choose the correct colors and put them on the correct feet.

Sync bananza

Yesterday's post "Turn around, bright eyes" included this photo of an empty oil pastel box:

First, I failed to note earlier that the brand name is Potato Cat in English, 土豆貓 in Chinese. In "Same aloo gobi (actually different aloo gobi every time)," I noted that aloo (Hindi for "potato") was not only transliterated but also translated differently on the two menus I saw: once as 洋芋 ("ocean taro") and once as 馬鈴薯 ("horse bell potato"). Here we have a third Chinese word for "potato": 土豆 ("earth bean"). In Taiwan, that's actually a dialect word for "peanut," but it means "potato" on the Mainland, which is apparently where these pastels were made. (Notice also the simplified character 画, where the Taiwanese would use the traditional 畫).

Since different ways of rendering "potato" in Chinese had just come up in connection with aloo gobhi ("potatoes [and] cauliflower"), I wondered what the Hindi for "cat" might be. It's billi. So Potato Cat would be aloo billi -- what you might say to your hounds when you're hunting roe deer in western France.

In yesterday's post, I noted the significance of the blue book with a gold heart on the cover but said I wasn't sure how the word Banana on the spine fit in with that symbolism. Actually, it fits perfectly. Vidya is a major gap in my cultural literacy, but luckily I've got Bill and WG to fill me in when necessary. It turns out that "Breaking Through (Heart of Gold)" is the main theme song of the 2025 Nintendo game Donkey Kong Bananza.

Bananza isn't just the name of the game. The word also appears in the lyrics, shortly after the only mention of a "heart of gold":

Look at us, so big and small

Two together through it all

Heart of gold, a wish come true

You and me, unbreakable

Bananza

Bananza

Other parts of the lyrics are interesting, too. The first line is:

This strange world, it's so vast and deep

Which reminds me of a translation from Nietzsche I did back in 2019:

O man, give ear!

Deep midnight speaketh; canst thou hear?

"From sleep, from sleep,

From dreaming deep I woke and rose;

The world is deep,

More deep than day would e’er suppose.

How deep her woe!

Joy—deeper still than heartache, she.

Though woe cry, 'Go!'

All joys long for eternity—

For deep on deep eternity!" 

Although the lines quoted earlier refer to "Two together through it all," another repeated line is:

We'll strike a chord that's gonna break us free

Two can't make a chord; it takes at least three. This syncs with something that happened this morning. I was listening (again!) to "Aloo Gobi" by Weezer and came to these lines:

You are not alone

You are not alone

Someone else will be there with you, be there with you

You are not alone

Be there with you, be there with you

You are not alone

As this was playing, a stack of books on my desk caught my eye:

I saw "We Are NOT Alone, Child of Fortune." As I have mentioned before, "Child of Fortune" is the meaning of my last name, Tychonievich. "You are not alone" can be true if there are just two people: you and someone else. "We are not alone," like a chord, requires three.

At the bottom of the stack is The Secret Language of Birthdays, which I have posted about before ("Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes"). I bought that book for the newspaper clippings the previous owner had put in it, but in the context of the present post, what is significant about it is the cover art, which is a colorized version of a detail from the Flammarion engraving:

The Donkey Kong Bananza song, remember, is called "Breaking Through (Heart of Gold)." The Flammarion engraving depicts someone "breaking through" into another world, and I included this image in my 2022 post "Break on through to the other side":

Coming back to the "strike a chord" reference, though, the heart of gold has been associated with one particular chord: A minor (ACE). In fact, my "bright eyes" post quoted and linked to my 2024 post "I've been A minor for a heart of gold." That post begins by referring to an earlier post with a nearly identical title, "I've been a miner for a heart of gold," and cautioning the reader not to confuse the two. The idea of a pair of "twin" posts with nearly but not precisely identical titles also came up in the "bright eyes" post.

More Donkey Kong lyrics that got my attention:

You and me (We're my favorite band)

My hand in your hand

Given that the song has "Heart of Gold" in the title, this is a link to the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias":

Wind in the willow's playin' "Tea For Two"

The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue

Strangers stoppin' strangers, just to shake their hand

Everybody's playing in the heart of gold band, heart of gold band

That song has come up a lot, but most recently I think in "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age," because the Fats Domino song "Blueberry Hill" also references a song being played by the "wind in the willow" -- and that brings us to the strangest connection with the Donkey Kong lyrics.

When "Blueberry Hill" first came up, I remembered a Tori Amos song that said, "Too bad 'Blueberry Hill' was premature." When I looked it up, though, I found that I'd always misheard it. The song is "Mr. Zebra":

The final line is in fact:

Too bad the burial was premature, she said and smiled

The meter of the song requires Tori to stress the last syllable of burial, making it sound like "berry hill," and I guess I just hallucinated "blue" to make the lyrics make some sort of sense.

Here's how the song begins:

Hello, Mr. Zebra

Can I have your sweater?

'Cause it's cold, cold, cold

In my hole, hole, hole

And here are lines from the Donkey Kong song:

When it all seems so dark and bleak

When the hole looks so cold and deep

So they both have a cold hole and a roundabout connection to "Blueberry Hill." Not that impressive -- until I scrolled down on the lyrics site I had been using and saw this:

Yes, this same video game has another song called "Zebra Bananza" -- played, apparently, when Donkey Kong transforms into a zebra. I guess he transforms into lots of different animals in this game -- there's an "Ostrich Bananza" song, an "Elephant Banaza" song, and so on -- but "Zebra Bananza" was the one the lyrics site thought I might also like.

Jonah yet again

In "There again! There she blows right ahead, boys! -- lay back!" I discuss the synchronicity of attending a particular church twice in a two-month period and being treated to sermons on the Book of Jonah both times.

Today -- nine days after the second Jonah sermon -- I found that the preschool had just ordered a new book for the children. It's not about Jonah -- it's a just-so story called Why Does the Big Whale Have Such a Small Throat? -- but it features a whale swallowing a man, the man staying alive inside the whale's belly, and the whale vomiting him up on a beach. In an unexpected twist, the man sort of "hijacks" the whale, refusing to come out of its belly until it has delivered him to a beautiful beach in England. Here's a video of someone reading the story. It's all in Chinese, with no subtitles available, but I think the pictures should enable even those ignorant of that language to follow the basic plot.

Miss South Carolina

Yesterday I spontaneously thought of the scene in Idiocracy where Dr. Lexus, after diagnosing Joe ("You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"), offers his prescription:

After searching out that clip -- I just wanted that clip, not the larger scene of which it is a part -- I thought I'd check Ceiling Fan Man  I found this short video, which intersperses clips of a speech by some WEF nudnik with one by the woman who will always be the only Miss South Carolina in our hearts:

These are both clips of people talking without actually expressing any ideas, so I thought it was a bit of a minor sync.

The real sync came today. A couple of days ago I received an email that mentioned the Weezer song "Pork and Beans" (to which I will reply soon, God willing and the crick don't rise), and so today I played the music video for that song, which I had not seen before:

Here's a still from the Weezer music video:

This is a reenactment -- one of the music video's many references to then-recent memes and viral videos. In the original 2007 interview, the man holding the microphone had short hair and was clean-shaven, and the sash just said "South Carolina." That's some incredible casting, though. Here's the real Miss South Carolina as she appears in the Ceiling Fan Man mashup:

In the Weezer video, Miss South Carolina grabs the microphone, which turns into a lightsaber:

Later more lightsabers show up, including a drummer using two lightsabers as drumsticks:

I kept hoping I would see someone with lightsabers coming out of his ears, but no dice.

Wearing bees

Sara Mapelli of Oregon meditating in her "bee blouse"

I'm currently rereading Daymon Smith's Words of the Faithful. One of the main characters, Izilba, is introduced as someone who used to "drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees." This rather extraordinary behavior of hers is mentioned just once in passing and never explained. Its strangeness, together with the fact that it is one of the first things we learn about Izilba, makes it very memorable, and even though the cloak of honeybees plays no role in the rest of the story, it's still the first image that comes to mind when I think of Izilba.

Today, one of my very young students somehow managed to misspell dress as bee.

Turn around, bright eyes

Her eyes, and a single glance seduces,

Are merry and bright like an octopus's.

-- Unto Deep

In "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves," I recounted seeing the name Marcellus while looking for something else in Book VI of the Aeneid. In an added note, I mentioned a book I saw someone reading later that day in a café: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. The book caught my eye because seeing people reading in public is relatively rare these days ("Old Holden never guessed, I bet, / How goddam phone-y life would get"), and because the cover had both English writing and a big orange octopus.

In my last post, "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," also paired an octopus with remarkable brightness -- Doctor Octopus, with one eye looking remarkably bright, talking about the power of the Sun:

Thinking about octopuses and the power of the Sun reminded me of something I read in René Guénon somewhere, about how the octopus represents Cancer and the summer solstice, while the dolphin represents Capricorn and the winter solstice. The makara is the connecting link between the dolphin and Capricorn, I think, but I don't remember the logic behind the octopus-Cancer mapping. (As it happens, the lines I quote at the beginning of this post, comparing a woman's eyes to those of an octopus, are about a woman born under the sign of Cancer. I hadn't yet read Guénon when I wrote that poem. The connection was an empirical one.)

By Guénon's logic, if the octopus corresponds to the bright Urim eye, the dolphin should be associated with the dark Thummim eye. As it happens, less than a week ago I posted this image juxtaposing dolphins with a dark eye, in "My plans for a sync experiment."

The title of this post comes from the Bonnie Tyler song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," with a weird music video showing lots of people with glowing eyes.

I was only thinking of bright eyes at first, but then I realized that total eclipse imagery is not unrelated to the spectacles syncs. My 2024 post "Turning suns into black holes" featured two photos that were stuck inside my secondhand copy of Antonin Artaud's book The Peyote Dance. One was in it when I bought it, inside a handmade envelope glued to the inside of the back cover:

The other photo was one I'd put there myself to use as a bookmark -- a photo of my own bloodshot right eye given to me by an ophthalmologist:

A red right eye fits the sync pattern. But, though it's not very clear in the photo, my irises are blue -- so the eye in the photo is simultaneously red and blue, just as the Sun in the other photo is both bright and dark.

Ophthalmology came up earlier today, in the post "Twins, twins, and more twins," which was about two professors of ophthalmology (both named Thomas, meaning "twin") who for some reason collaborated on a study of telepathy between identical twins.

The reason I posted my "black hole sun" photo was that it had a "twin" -- a very similar photo posted by Bill Wright on his since-deleted blog:

In fact, the post was itself a "twin," one of two posts with almost exactly the same title. As I wrote:

I have pinched my title (only changing the capitalization so as to conform to the FTND style guide) from William Wright's February 29 post "Turning Suns into Black Holes."

(Note: The style guide has since been updated. We capitalize Sun and Moon in most contexts now.)

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" is from this album:

This is driving me crazy, because I know I've very recently seen a very similar image, with laser's coming out of someone's ears -- a man's, I think -- but I can't for the life of  me remember where. Someone's blog? YouTube? 4chan? A dream? If anyone has any leads, drop a comment. I think it may have been some sort of AI-generated Star Wars video where a character had lightsabers coming out of the sides of his head, but I can't find anything like that in my watch history; maybe a dream.

I ran across this at my school today. One of my employees had bought some oil pastels, transferred them to a different container, and left the empty box on a shelf.

It caught my attention because one of the eyes in the spectacles looks like an octopus's.

Then I noticed that he's reading a blue book marked with the golden heart. I recently emphasized the blueness of the Book or Mormon in "The blue and scarlet books," and back in 2024 I posted, in "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," part of a poem by Theodore E. Curtis which, apostrophizing the Hill Cumorah, refers to the Book of Mormon as its "heart of gold":

And Moroni, clothed in glory

Crowns your visage old,

To reveal the ancient story

Written in your heart of gold.

The book also says "Banana" on the spine. Not sure how that fits in with the rest of the symbolism.

"Bright Eyes" is also the name of an Art Garfunkel song, which I believe came up on Bill's blog, and which was released on an interesting date.

Art Garfunkel is another AG, too.