King son of Light, and black dog stars

This afternoon, although I was eager to continue pursuing an exciting new train of thought on my Book of Mormon blog, I had a sudden urge to go hike the skywalk at Eight Trigrams Hill first. I hadn't been there in many months, and I had something else I very much wanted to spend my time on instead, but we take random whims seriously around here. As a result, the Book of Mormon will now have to wait while I deal with some urgent synchromystical business.

Shortly after I began my hike, I realized something significant about my name. My father is Louis, and his father was William, whose father was Louis, and so on -- a long line of alternating Louises and Williams, each named after his paternal grandfather. But that line goes back to Transcarpathia (a part of the Ukraine then under Austrian rule), where the alternating names were Luka and Vasily. When my ancestors came to America, they adopted English names which, while not really etymological equivalents, sounded vaguely similar. So although I am William the son of Louis, there is a very real sense in which I was named after Vasily the son of Luka.

Vasily (English Basil) means "king." Luka (Luke) means "light." As Bill recently had occasion to mention here, Pharazon's official Quenya name -- which he never used, having like my ancestors replaced it with a not-very-exact equivalent in another language -- was Tar-Calion. The prefix Tar- means "king." Calion means "son of light." I have in the past resisted Bill's efforts to tie me to a Tolkienian supervillain, but you've got to admit that's a pretty perfect correspondence.

Speaking of Pharazon the Golden, and of Bill's earlier identification of him with Peter the Apostle, during my hike I saw several of these slippery-when-wet signs, showing an all-yellow man struggling to walk on water:

Later I saw another all-yellow man, at a parking lot:

That's a Buddha (the hill is home to the country's largest Buddha statue) pointing upwards and wearing star-shaped spectacles. Although the specs are yellow like the rest of him ("Look at the stars . . . yeah, they were all yellow"), it seems likely that they represent dark sunglasses, thus linking to "Strange is the night where black stars rise" (a line from, appropriately, The King in Yellow).

The original syncs that kicked of Richard Arrowsmith's Black Dog Star blog back in 2009 (I'd link them, but the images in his old posts are no longer viewable) had to do with three interrelated themes, tied together by the initials PP (as in "pay to park"? or "Pharazon-Peter"?): a dog's paw-print (cf. "Bark, Peter" in "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance"), a pair of pentacles, and Peter Parker. (Note that Bill has accused me of being a "spider man" in a much more negative sense.) I posted my own instance of this "Black Dog Star trifecta" back in 2023. As the blog name indicates, Arrowsmith would come to connect these syncs with the idea of a black star. One of his early syncs was a movie still of a dog (Scooby-Doo) wearing black star-shaped sunglasses just like those of the parking Buddha.

After my hike, I returned to where I had parked my motorcycle (for free; only automobile drivers have to pay the parking Buddha) and found that someone had parked a scooter right next to my space, with this helmet (the helmet itself being of course a link to my name):

That's a dog wearing sunglasses, flanked by a pair of black stars. What are the odds?

Strange is the night where black stars rise

The King in Yellow, which I am currently reading for sync-related reasons, repeatedly mentions the black stars in the skies of Carcosa, the first mention being in the Author's Dedication, which quotes Cassilda's Song from the play for which the book is named:

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

                                               Lost Carcosa.

Black stars rising got my attention, since just a few months ago I read Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (mentioned in many posts here). Last June, I posted "Ascending to the black star," which connected the Elvish root amu, meaning "up(wards)" or "to raise" with a particular part of a Scrabble board, leading to the black star in the board's center. Rather than the interpretation given in the post title, this could also refer to the black star itself rising.

This morning, on the way to a café for breakfast, I was behind another motorcyclist, on the back of whose black hoodie was a large light-gray star, inside which were two black stars and the words "DARK HARVEST." I didn't get a photo and wasn't able to find an image of that exact hoodie online, but the design was similar to this, the only differences being the color scheme and the fact that there were only two smaller stars:

As I entered the café, the background music playing the Malena Stark song "A Little Bit of Faith," the chorus of which begins, "Oh, there must be more." That word more has come up in two recent dreams (see "Half under the sea" and "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance"). In comments on both of those posts, Bill pointed out that more is a homophone for the Elvish root mor, meaning "black, dark, darkness."

While that song was playing, I checked Ann Barnhardt's latest Meme Barrage on my phone, and one of the memes referenced Scrabble:

In Chinese, the characters for "star/planet" and "great ape" are homophones. Chimps are called "black apes" (as distinguished from "big apes," or gorillas, and "red-fur apes," or orangutans), so the word for "chimpanzee" sounds exactly like "black star." This makes me wonder if this movie (which I may or may not have seen; I can't keep them all straight) might be synchronistically relevant.

By the way, how was that poster not condemned as one of those "racist dog whistles"? Or perhaps it was. I can't say I've been paying attention.

And yes, Debbie, I see the Golden Gate Bridge on the poster.

Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance

I dreamt that I was out and about in the city and was seeing small (roughly goose-sized) pterodactyls everywhere, just casually, they way you would see birds. (I saw birds, too.) I thought, How can people doubt that there are still pterodactyls around? They're right there in plain sight! I saw them clearly and in a perfectly ordinary way and was confident that I was not hallucinating or anything.

Then I woke up from this dream-within-a-dream. I was in a very large bedroom with two queen-size beds, one at each end, with a wide space between them. From the ceiling above my bed were hung, on what looked like fishing line, hundreds of little pterodactyls made of hard plastic, in all colors and representing the whole gamut of pterosaur species. The other end of the room was similarly decorated, but with white origami cranes instead of pteros.

I remembered that I was visiting my parents. They must have specially decorated the room for my visit. I understood that the bed with the paper cranes was for my brother Luther, who was not present. (Later I commented to my mother that "'Director of Birds' just has a different feel from 'Director of Flying Reptiles.'")

I got up and told my mother about my dream and about how once I woke up I realized where the dream imagery had come from. "But didn't you notice the pterodactyls when you arrived?" she asked, seeming hurt that her work had not been appreciated. "I guess not," I said. "I probably just went to bed without turning on the light." (In fact I had no memory of arriving or going to bed.)

My parents now lived in what they called a retirement community but looked more like an extremely luxurious resort. They were dressed in their Sunday best, but instead of going to church, they wanted to show me some of the entertainments the place offered. The first of these was the foil game.

We were each given what looked like a sheet of aluminum foil, about a foot square. Although it looked like foil, it was as limp and supple as silk, and I figured it must be some sort of chain mail so fine that the individual links were invisible. Each of these had an image on it in subtle relief, and somehow it stayed on the foil no matter what you did to it. You could wad it into a ball and open it again, and the relief image was still there.

My parents wanted to start playing, but no one had explained the game to me, and I had no idea what to do. They said I could just figure it out as I went, but I kept insisting on an explanation. Finally, my mother demonstrated. Her foil image was of part of a woman's face, and she found a stone statue of a woman that matched it perfectly and placed the foil on that part of the statue's face. That was the object of the game: to find something in the community that matched your foil image and place the foil on it. The community was really enormous, and I worried about getting lost, but in the end I decided to give it a go.

My foil had a Buddha's face on it, and above the face it said, in capital letters, "MR. DEE EE." After some exploring, I found in the community a very ancient stone temple, somewhat reminiscent of Angkor Wat, and up at the very top of the building I spied what I was looking for: a Buddha's face and the inscription "MR. DEE EE."

The trouble was how to get up there to place my foil. I tried various ways of climbing up the building, but the stones kept crumbling under my feet. Finally, I gave up, saying that I was doing serious damage to this ancient monument and that it just wasn't worth it. Could we maybe do something else instead?

"Okay," said my mother. "Maybe you'd like to try a fake séance."

"Is there any other kind?"

As we were walking to the fake séance place, my father said, "Now, you're going to be 'possessed' as part of this, but don't worry about it. None of it is real."

It took three people to participate in a fake séance. It was me and two other people my age, not my parents. We had to climb up some stairs to a high platform, on which was a sort of flexible rubber pedestal supporting what looked like three vertically-oriented sleeping bags made of foam rubber. Each person stood in one of these bags, with only the head protruding. This set-up, it was explained, was so that we could move and thrash about while in a trance without any danger of falling or hurting ourselves.

To begin, we three leaned in toward the center of the set-up, so that our foreheads were touching in the middle. We were told to relax. After about a minute of silence, one of the other participants murmured, "Bark, Peter." There was another silence. Was someone supposed to bark? I tentatively made a soft barking sound, like a very polite dog. Then I felt some spiritual force welling up in me from the pit of my stomach -- the promised "possession," apparently -- and I began barking in earnest. I then entered a full trance state (another altered state within an altered state). I was talking and shouting and flailing about but had no consciousness of what I was saying.

When I emerged from the trance, I was informed that I had "won" the fake séance. I had delivered a most remarkable and varied discourse, and the audience loved it. I also learned that while I was entranced, a supercomputer had been generating in real time a video to accompany what I was saying, which was displayed on a cinema-size screen for the audience. Apparently I had done impressions of several famous people, including Al Capone and Elon Musk, which together with the visuals from the computer were utterly convincing. I had also discoursed at length on the movie Flight of the Gargoyle, and now several members of the audience expressed an interest in seeing it even though (or perhaps because?) it was unspeakably evil and abominable and had been banned all over the world (cf. The King in Yellow).

After the performance, an elderly couple came up to me. They were impressed with how knowledgeable I had seemed to be about virtually everything, and they had several questions about things I had said in my trance. Unfortunately, I was unable to remember anything I had said and couldn't help them. The man then mentioned that he and his wife had been trying to learn more about the history of jazz.

"Ah, the book you want for that is --"

"What? Don't tell me you know about the history of jazz, too!"

"The book you want," I continued, "is by a Portuguese guy whose pen name is L-A-E-T-H."

"Laeth."

"Right. I can't remember the title right now. I think it might just be called The History of Jazz. Anyway --" (The book I was thinking of was Sketches of Alice, which is not in any way a history of jazz.)

"And it's a history of jazz?"

"Well, it's hard to classify. It's utterly unique, really. But I think you'll find --"

At this point I was interrupted by the guy who ran the fake séances, who presented me with a book-length transcript of what I had said during my trance, illustrated with stills from the computer-generated video. Exactly what I had wanted.

I started to flip through it. I noticed that the first line had been mistranscribed: It said "Bark Street" instead of "Bark, Peter." Most of the transcript was in English, but one section was in a language I couldn't read but which looked from the characters used to be Icelandic or something similar. I had spoken in tongues, apparently.

About a quarter of the pages were entirely black. The director explained that this was the free transcript. If I wanted the unredacted version, I would have to shell out 40 dollars. I was about to pay but then realized that I had forgotten to exchange money and only had Taiwanese currency. Both of my parents took out their wallets and began counting out an improbably large number of banknotes. I saw that this was because the American currency had been completely redesigned. It was now in Monopoly-money colors like most other countries and was in strange denominations like the 47-cent bill.

Later, I was sitting with my father, and he asked if I had tried various remedies to stop snoring. I told him I hadn't bothered. He said that he now smoked marijuana to stop snoring and that it was very effective. (This is totally out of character for my real father, a strait-laced Mormon for whom even caffeinated soda is an illicit drug.)

"And do you know why I do it?" he said, becoming animated. "Because I finally realized that our religion is more!" (cf. More More More! in "Half under the sea")

"You mean that thing about Mormon meaning 'more good'?"

"More. Just more. Further light." (a Masonic phrase also used in Mormon ritual)

"Famous last words."

"Achilles."

"Goethe."

Later, my father got up on the stage and did a routine about how some prominent fringe Mormon (Denver Snuffer maybe, or someone analogous) "isn't going anywhere" and the church needs to adapt to incorporate such people. As he spoke, the computer was generating holographic "costumes" for him which kept changing. At one point he had green hair.

And then I woke up.

Weird scenes, and a gem on a brow

I've just read Paola Harris's Conversations with Colonel Corso. I quoted it in my November 2025 post "He's got a whole new world in his hands" after searching for a source for the "new world if you can take it" line, which I knew only third-hand from Whitley and others, but I didn't get around to reading the whole thing until a couple of days ago. In that post, I commented:

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

Now that I've actually read the book, I know that the gold mine in which the Colonel encountered the alien was in Red Canyon, New Mexico. So that weird scene was inside both a gold mine and a canyon.

The book also includes this drawing by the Colonel of the entity he encountered there. Notice the distinctive headband it is wearing.

In the book, it is explained that this "silver-like" headband had "a stone in the middle of it, an interface."

This put me in mind of Tolkienian imagery -- Eärendil, the spacefaring Mariner with the Silmaril "bound upon his brow" -- and sure enough, the day after I finished Conversations with Colonel Corso, I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of Dior dying with "the gem yet upon his brow." I don't think either Tolkien or Daymon makes explicit how the gem was thus bound, but one readily imagines a headband of "silver-like" mithril. Many UFO writers, most notably Jacques Vallée, have taken an interest in parallels between their field and that of elf and fairy lore.

The gem on Eärendil's brow was the Morning Star, Venus, which Bill recently brought up in comments on "Island Pharaohs again, twice."

Arnor

About a week ago, I bought a new pair of shoes. I'd never heard of the brand before, but they're comfortable and seem very durable, so I'm happy with them so far.

Actually, that but should probably be an and, since lack of recognizable branding is a major selling point for me. How I abominate all those swooshes and bitten apples and those little badges on the fronts of automobiles! What kind of culture tolerates this stuff? I buy brandslop* when necessary but always give it the Cayce Pollard treatment where possible. The main reason I'll never ever buy an iPhone again is that even if you remove or cover up all the logos, kids can still recognize it from the way the camera lenses are arranged or something. Now I've got some no-name Chinese thing, fully Pollardized, and feel much more at ease with it.

My new shoes are almost completely Pollardized -- the logos were stitched on and could be easily removed -- so all that remains is ARNOR written on the back.

I've been transcribing all of Daymon Smith's "ancient words" to a blog preparatory to tackling a linguistic analysis. (The main benefit of the blog format is the sidebar links for cross-referencing where the same word is used elsewhere. Today I started the ninth set of words, where Daymon's translation twice (9:2 and 9:4) references the "Arnor Stone" in contexts where (although Stones of Arnor are a thing, too) it is pretty clearly a typo for "Anor Stone."

*

Another bird-of-prey octopus juxtaposition, in The King in Yellow

My February 23 post "Desert scenes" dealt with people in yellow clothing: the sun-man, Lehi, and of course Pharazon. This brought to my attention the fact that I have never read The King in Yellow, so I decided to rectify that omission. I got an epub from Anna's. It's in the public domain, so there have many editions by many publishers, with a wide variety of cover art. Not until I downloaded and opened my epub did I discover that I had happened to select what is apparently the only edition to feature octopus imagery on the cover:

Not only does the King's robe terminate in tentacles, but the Moon is positioned just right so that the King and Moon together approximate the shape of an octopus's whole body. Although the yellowness of the King is right there in the title, the octopus part of him is more of an orange. Directly below this orange octopus imagery is the name Robert, which means "fame-bright." This made me think of another book that recently entered the sync-stream (see "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves" and "Turn around bright, eyes"): Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I posted the cover of the Chinese edition, because that was the form in which I first saw it. For some reason, the cover art on the Chinese edition is the mirror-image of the original English, so that the octopus is facing the same direction as the "octopus" on the cover of The King in Yellow:

I started reading The King in Yellow today. On page 35 I ran across this:

"That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat," he explained; there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. . . ."

At first, only the Octopus jumped out at me, but then I noticed that the Falcon was there, too. Birds of prey juxtaposed with octopuses have been a recurring theme lately. First, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen" (February 13), a Donovan song mentioning a kite was interpreted by Bill as having to do with spider and octopus symbolism; then I read about a hawk wrestling an octopus in Words of the Faithful; and then I saw a kite and an octopus juxtaposed on the Duckstack. In "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs" (February 25), I discovered a similar juxtaposition -- a Garuda-like vulture and an octopus-like "spider mask" in my 2024 dream post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" and also noted a somewhat related theme on the Nine of Pentacles, where a falcon appears together with a snail (snails and slugs being the closest terrestrial relatives to the octopus). Now here it is yet again, with the names of these two torpedo boats.

Island Pharaohs again, twice

Just yesterday, I posted "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs." In that post, I took "the Island Pharaohs" (from a dream) to be a reference to the rulers of Numenor, taking it for granted that of course the real Pharaohs, who lived on the African mainland, had nothing to do with islands. In the dream, these Island Pharaohs were "desiccated mummies," and to illustrate what I imagined them looking like, I included this picture of Keith Richards and Ramesses II.

Today I had a private tutoring session with an adult student. She uses a magazine designed for students of English, with a recommended reading schedule. However, due to some recent business trips and such, we're way behind schedule, so as it happened today -- the day after I posted about Island Pharaohs, with a photo of Ramesses II -- we discussed the article for January 15-17. Here's the first page:

The first thing that caught my eye was the illustration in the upper right corner, which is a statue of none other than Ramesses II.

This same Pharaoh's name also appears in the text, in boldface, in connection with an island:

On Agilkia Island, I'd continue toward Abu Simbel, home to giant statues and temples built by Ramses II.

I'd never heard of Agilkia, but apparently it's an island in the Nile. Ramesses never built anything there; rather, according to Wikipedia, it is "the present site of the relocated ancient Egyptian temple complex of Philae."

Two paragraphs later, there is a reference to the Greek island of Paros:

The Greek islands have been on my radar primarily because I have a friend in Athens. I love the idea of skipping Santorini and Mykonos and opting for low-key Paros.

Paros is pretty close to Pharaohs, especially if you consider that the Hebrews and the Egyptians themselves pronounced that title with a hard /p/ rather than an /f/ sound. The word translated "Pharaoh" in our Bibles is transliterated as Parʿō.