Filling Peter's shoes

In the dream recounted in "Joseph the Tirielist," someone called Peter "gave me a comically large pair of black hiking boots and said, 'Now you have to put these on!'" As I thought about this later, in waking life, this idea of being asked to put on much-too-large footwear made me think of the expression about being "unable to fill someone's shoes." Bill Wright at one point entertained the idea that I was the reincarnation of St. Peter, and the idea that I would ever be able to "fill the shoes" of the Prince of the Apostles is of course laughable. Another of his past-life proposals for me was the Tolkien character Ingwë, who "was ever held the High King of all the Elves," so the dream could involve a pun on "High-King" boots. (Now, of course, Bill's preferred theory is that I am some sort of malevolent shapeshifting cockroach. What can I say? "Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.")

This idea of being unable to fill the shoes of one's own past self also syncs with the lines from Tennyson's Ulysses which I quoted earlier today in "Ulysses, dark horses, seer stones, Ki-Ab, Elbereth, the Eye of Horus, leaves of gold, and Cherubim":

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses is of course yet another of my proposed alter egos -- though I think only symbolically and not as a literal reincarnation -- and if I were as delusional as this present post clearly shows me to be, I might take the liberty of capitalizing Tennyson's will and taking it as a reference to myself.

There is one reference to black (in the blacksmith's sense) footwear in the Bible, in Moses' final blessing to the Tribe of Asher:

Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be (Deut. 33:25).

Asher is also enjoined to wash his feet in olive oil (v. 24), and in the Fourth Gospel much is made of the washing of Peter's feet (John 13:6-10).

The second part of v. 25 means "you will be strong for as long as you live." This is clearly relevant to Tennyson's elderly Ulysses, who laments that he has "not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven" but reassures himself that he is still "strong in will" -- or, if the conceit be granted, "in Will."

Bill will be champing at the bit to say this, and I wouldn't want to tempt him to break his vow of silence, so I'll point it out myself: Ar-Pharazôn -- yes, another of my alter egos, currently the main one as far as Bill is concerned -- pretty literally "moved earth and heaven," as his actions directly resulted in a radical rearrangement of the world's geography. And in Daymon Smith's writings, Pharazôn is associated with iron footwear: When he invaded Tol Eressëa, as Daymon has it, he was accompanied by "the Nazgul Three," who "for feet . . . wore helmets of iron." (Helmet is of course as much a reference to my name as will is.)

Ulysses, dark horses, seer stones, Ki-Ab, Elbereth, the Eye of Horus, leaves of gold, and Cherubim

It's been a sync-heavy day, and the afternoon is still young. Let's see if I can get everything documented in a somewhat easy-to-follow fashion.

As I was falling asleep last night, I for some reason started mentally reciting to myself the closing lines of Ulysses, by a Tennyson who, no mean poet in his own right, was for the moment channeling a god: the incomparably great Dante, who walked with Homer and Virgil as their equal the shady groves of Elysium.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

That closing line began to meld in my mind with the Four Powers of Éliphas Lévi -- to know, to will, to dare, and to be silent -- conjuring to mind, just at the moment I entered the fully sleeping state, a fleeting vision of the whirling Cherubim.

Around noon I had some business to attend to in Taichung, and as I usually do when business takes me there, I lunched at the Uptowner, which has the best lox-and-schmear omelettes you'll find on this little island. (Yes, I'm still on an omelette kick. And a lox-and-schmear kick.) As I entered the restaurant, Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" began playing in the background. The repeated lines "So you want to play with magic? . . . Baby, do you dare to do this?" made me think again of Ulysses and Éliphas Lévi and the Four Powers.

Katy Perry appeared on this blog this past January, in "Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition," which began with the Eye of Horus and included this still from the "Dark Horse" music video:

The next song up was Lady Gaga: "Don't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro," a line that would stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon. The only person of that name that I know anything about is Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose painstakingly reconstructed Tarot de Marseille -- created in partnership with Philippe Camoin, scion of the fabled house of Conver -- was one of the first decks I owned. It ended up, for complex psychological reasons, at the bottom of the Olentangy River. (I was still conflicted about the magnetic pull of the Tarot back then and was periodically swearing off what I still thought of as "the occult.") I've been trying to attract a new Marseille-pattern deck into my life, but so far without success. I thought Alejandro calling my name might be a sign that it was on its way, but so far, no.

I recently finished reading Joseph Smith's Seer Stones, which ends with an appendix collecting a very large number of contemporary accounts of the Prophet's specs and seer stones. One of these, from an 1835 Cleveland Whig article citing W. W. Phelps, stuck in my memory because of the strange error it contained:

We are credibly informed that the Mormons have purchased of Mr. Chandler, three of the mummies, which he recently exhibited in this village; and that the prophet Joe has ascertained, by examining the papyrus through his spectacles, that they are the bodies of Joseph (the son of Abraham,) and King Abimeleck and his daughter.

Who would know the relatively obscure biblical name Abimelech and yet think Joseph was the son of Abraham? Speaking of Ulysses (though a different work by that title), that's right up there with Leopold Bloom's misremembering a story about Isaac and Jacob as being about Abraham and his son Nathan.

I mention this here because while I was waiting for my omelette, I took out Words of Them Liberated and read (it was a short wait) a single page. The Words books have a lot to say about Joseph and Abraham (usually referred to by his Amestrahan name Ki-Abroam) but, like the Cleveland Whig, pass over Isaac and Jacob in silence (though it is perhaps implied that Dyacôm is Jacob). The single page I read happened to include this paragraph, in language Joyce-like in its convolutions:

And Ki-Ab pondered the wisdom rooted and over the well's corners, aflow; not all from the writings, he reconsidered earlier tongue lashings -- called up by the records daily heavier, to heft; but there is much at rest apriori his readings, and awakened by -- and the boy slept well, while Ki-Abroam looked upon Varda's Weave recalling when as a more-man-full, he lost in flight, gazed in awe at her band the sky circumpacting, holding forth to meet then, jewels two, pocketed where in a den was his own father -- in flesh, and singly incongruent with that kinship -- self slain; jewels for gazing afar and for inquiry, of what-whom, guessing alone could conjure up; for the respondents never answered, when asked name or residing at;

This seems to be referring to a pair of seer stones, like Joseph Smith's spectacles. Abraham is referred to by the abbreviated name Ki-Ab. The Whig juxtaposes Abraham with King Abimeleck, another Ki-Ab. Another detail from the Whig article, which I didn't notice until I copied it out for this post, is that it refers to a Mr. Chandler. In last night's dreams ("Joseph the Tirielist"), I unexpectedly ran into Mark, a friend from my teen years. I didn't mention his last name but am now compelled by the sync fairies to do so: Chandler.

As recounted in that dream post, upon waking I thought Tiriel might be a Tolkienian name and looked it up on Eldamo. As it is an inflected form and not a headword, my search initially turned up only palan-tîriel "far-gazer," a variant of  palan-díriel, from the hymn A Elbereth Gilthoniel, which begins thus:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel

Eldamo translates these lines as follows:

O Elbereth who lit the stars
from glittering crystal slanting falls with light like jewels
from heaven on high the glory of the starry host
to lands remote I have looked afar

In the paragraph from Liberated that I have quoted above, Ki-Ab gazes in awe at "Varda's Weave," which apparently means the Milky Way. Elbereth is another name for Varda. The paragraph also refers to the seer stones as "jewels for gazing afar," a direct link to palan-tîriel.

Meanwhile, back in the Uptowner, the next song up was "Maneater" by Hall & Oates, which includes these lines:

Money's the matter
If you're in it for love, you ain't gonna get too far

This is also the message of Madonna's "Material Girl," which Joseph misquoted in my dream to explain what he meant by tirielist.

I finished my lunch and walked to a nearby bookstore, where I needed to select some new textbooks for one of my classes. On the way, I passed this advertisement on a wall:

It says "Eye of Horus" and has a cropped photo of King Tut's mummy case, with only a single blue-lined eye visible. The similarity to the "Dark Horse" still is obvious. It's the "wrong" eye -- the black or blue-green Eye of Horus is the left eye -- but it also matches this image from my earlier post that included the Katy Perry still:

Like the King Tut poster, the above image places the left Eye of Horus on our left, which would actually make it the right eye of the person we are looking at.

While I was at the bookstore, two books caught my eye: Wild Horses and Birds of Prey. Opening up the former at random, I found myself looking at what I later ascertained (by paging through the whole thing) was the only photo of a black horse in the entire book:

Thinking I might have similar luck with Birds of Prey, I opened it, too, to a random page and landed on a kite, recently the most prominent bird of prey in the sync stream:

Later, a third book caught my eye because of its title:

I had just been thinking about gold plates and "leaves of gold," because revisiting A Elbereth Gilthoniel had reminded me of another Tolkien song, the one that begins thus:

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:

I posted about this in "Leaves of gold unnumbered" (January 2024), where I connected the leaves of gold with the gold plates.

Later, I checked some blogs and found a new Orthosphere post by J. M. Smith (does the J stand for Joseph, I wonder?) called "No Branch is Free of Yellow Leaves." He meant that every branch of Christianity is in decline, yellow leaves being the sign of an unhealthy tree, but in sync context I naturally thought again of "leaves of gold" in the sense of gold plates. In the Book of Mormon, branch usually refers to the tribes of Israel. "Are we not a branch of the house of Israel?" Nephi asks his brothers (1 Ne. 15:12). In my 2023 post "Who were the 13 luminous beings Lehi saw in his Jerusalem vision?" I wrote:

If Joseph -- in the form of the book kept by his tribe, the plates of brass -- will go forth unto all nations, what of the other 11 starry beings who also go forth? Well, according to Nephi's later prophecies, each of the other tribes will also produce a holy book, and these, too, will go forth to the world.

In other words, every branch of the House of Israel will produce its own "gold plates." No branch is free of yellow leaves.

In my 2024 post "Lassie Come Home," commenting on my vision of book which somehow is the Cherubim, I wrote:

Ezekiel's Cherubim represent (among many other things) the Twelve Tribes of Israel united in a single body. Combine that with the quote from 2 Nephi 29 above -- when "the house of Israel shall be gathered home . . . my word also shall be gathered in one" -- and I think I understand what this book, the Cherubim, represents.

This of course syncs with the brief glimpse of the Cherubim mentioned near the beginning of the present post.

Joseph the Tirielist

I dreamt that as I was getting ready to leave the preschool after my morning classes, I met another White American there, who introduced himself as Joseph and said he was from one of the Midwestern states. (He said a particular state, but I don't remember which.) He was printing out some vocabulary flash cards and asked, "So do you use cards?" and then several follow-up questions. He said he was applying for a job and would do a teaching demo on Monday. I said I'd be there on Monday and would probably see him.

As I was leaving, Joseph told me where I could find him online and said, "On my socials, you'll find lots of Golf Luther content -- you know, they're golf jokes with Luther."

"You mean Martin Luther?"

"Yeah, I think so. Luther was apparently this guy who like hated logic."

"The devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore."

A look of blank incomprehension. I gathered that he knew absolutely nothing about the historical Luther. Luther was for him a stock character representing illogic, and he made Luther jokes the way one used to make Polack jokes.

"So I guess you're a Catholic?" I said.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"It's really only Catholics that see Luther that way. Protestants admire him, since he started their Reformation. So the majority of American Christians respect Luther."

"No, wait, I'm not a Catholic."

"You aren't?"

"No. I'm a tirielist." He pronounced it like materialist minus the first syllable, but I imagined it being spelled the way I have written it.

"You know," he continued, proceeding to sing a line from the Madonna song, "cause we are living in a tiriel world."

"You mean a materialist? Someone who rejects the supernatural?"

"Yeah, a tirielist."

As I walked home (it was night now), I passed a parking lot, where a cop was having two suspected drunk drivers walk in a straight line, at which they were both failing miserably. The drunks were making excuses. "I think we were probably drinking tea," one said. "Yeah," agreed the other, "I'm pretty sure it was tea."

The cop was unimpressed, and one of the drunks lost his temper and shouted at him, "You're a black Barbary pirate!" (All three men were White.)

I thought this was an incredible coincidence and that I would have to tell Debbie about it. (In waking life, Debbie, who is part Black, had emailed me the day before the dream about the discovery that she is the 11th-great-granddaughter of the Dutch Barbary pirate Jans Janszoon.)

When I was nearly home, I passed a tent that had been set up on the side of the road, and a voice from inside said, "So, William, when are you transferring out of Minneapolis?" I recognized the voice of Mark, who was a close friend during my teen years in Ohio. He had (in the dream) visited me in Taiwan some weeks before, and I was surprised to find him still in Taiwan. Had he been camping out outside my house all that time, and I had been ignoring him?

I had something urgent to do in my house, so I said, "Just a minute, Mark," and went into the house first. When I came back out, Mark was no longer in the tent but was piloting a low-flying Cessna 172, from which he was speaking with a megaphone. He had apparently somehow overheard my conversation with Joseph and was ridiculing him.

"So after having put Luther in his place, he takes on God himself!" he said. And then, in what I took to be a parody of low-IQ atheist talking points, he shouted histrionically, "Where's abortion in the Bible? Where is it?" (In waking life, Mark is himself an atheist.)

As I was waking, I thought in the hypnopompic state of these lines from Yeats: "Now his wars with God begin / At stroke of midnight, God will win."

⁂

In an earlier dream segment, my parents had been visiting Taiwan, and I took them to the top of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. The building was rocking like a boat, but I assured them that it was supposed to that, and that it was an anti-earthquake measure. While there, we ran into one of my students, called Peter -- the one whose shoe cubby appeared in "Leo, Egbert, Peter" -- who gave me a comically large pair of black hiking boots and said, "Now you have to put these on!"

I was trying to convince my parents to visit a Chinese temple, which they were at first unwilling to do. I explained that it would not be a religious visit, that we would just be there to take in the art and architecture as a cultural experience -- "just like you would visit a cathedral if you were in Europe," I said. They finally agreed, but I then realized I had no idea where to take them. I had been thinking of the Queen of Heaven Temple in Lukang, but we were in Taipei, and I didn't know any temples in Taipei.

Later, my father was pouring everyone glasses of champagne. He said to me and my wife, "I'm going to mix mine with weaker alcohol, but you'd probably like yours mixed with stronger alcohol, am I right?" I understood that this was his letter-of-the-law way of circumventing the Mormon prohibition on "strong drink." (What's weaker than champagne? Beer? And who mixes anything with champagne?) This is totally unlike my father in waking life, who follows the Word of Wisdom very strictly -- eating meat sparingly, abstaining from caffeinated sodas, etc. -- but it fits with the way he was portrayed in my dream "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance," where he was trying to tell me that smoking pot was consistent with his religion.

⁂

Upon waking, I thought Tiriel sounded very Tolkienian and might be the name of some obscure female character. It turns out it's not a name but is good Sindarin, meaning, depending on the diacritics used, either "gazing" or "having gazed."

I wondered if Joseph, who is neither Catholic nor Protestant but invents a new -ism of his own, might represent Joseph Smith. He appeared as something of a buffoon in the dream, but Smith was famously uneducated and may have appeared that way to some of his contemporaries. It's also probably not a coincidence that my two brothers are named Luther and Joseph, and that while Luther is a staunch CJCLDSian, Joseph is in fact a materialist.

Those breadcrumbs again

Greg Carlwood trying to sell the idea of psychedelics as a path to God:

But the whole idea of DMT being out there, it's almost like Hansel and Gretel, like God left some breadcrumbs: Hey, if you want to find your way back home, it's all over nature. It's littered all over the place, so if you get lost, just ingest this, and we'll meet again, and then you can go back to your life knowing that you are part of the bigger creation.

The show was released on March 10, but I didn't listen to it until March 21. I posted "Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs" on March 12 and, like Carlwood, explicitly cited Hansel and Gretel. That post refers repeatedly to Words of Them Which Have Slumbered. Carlwood's guest speaks of waking from a "pharmaceutical slumber."

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.