Many a Melchizedek

Yesterday morning (June 1), I woke up with the phrase "many a Melchizedek" in my mind, though with no memory of any dream that may have put it there. It comes from my 2021 post "Lives, the universes, and everything" (coincidentally posted on my 42nd birthday), in which I imagine God saying this to Moses:

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

What put that in my mind? A few things likely played a role. As discussed in "Charlie Kirk, Ulysses, and twin flames" (May 24), I had been thinking about "the idea that a soul can split into two." I had also been thinking -- see "A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi" (May 30) -- about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. Closely related to a guy named Guy is a man named Adam, which is a Hebrew noun meaning "man." The passage quoted above was inspired by God's statement in the Book of Moses that "the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many" -- not "man" but "many." What I can't say is why I woke up thinking specifically of the line about Melchizedek, rather than Adam or Moses. Indeed, I'm not sure why I included Melchizedek as an example in that 2021 post in the first place.

Later that day, I lunched at a restaurant called D∞D, whose street address used to be 666 but which has since relocated across the road to 663. I parked right next to this scooter:

That's the word Many juxtaposed with a symbol suggestive of what has been called the Seal of Melchizedek (i.e., an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares).

In preparation for this post, I searched my blog for the phrase "many a melchizedek". Even when you use quotes, Blogger's search function will return posts that use all those words but not that exact phrase. Thus, the first result was "The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)" (February 2023). Note that lots of is synonymous with many. The first sentence in that post is this:

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves.

The scooter photo above, which is what prompted the search, was taken at D∞D -- two Ds and a lemniscate. Later in the post I mention the restaurant by name:

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

As I scrolled down, I found that one of the Seal of Melchizedek syncs in that post was a scooter identical except for the color scheme to the one above.

In the 2023 post, the word Many was not one of the syncs; I was just interested in the Seal of Melchizedek.

Another search result was "Lear, the Byrds, and 242" (February 2023), which quotes these lines from a Byrds song:

I'm only seven although I died

In Hiroshima long ago

I'm seven now as I was then

When children die they do not grow

At that point I had not yet read The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhusrt, where one may find this passage:

There is a nasty moment in Through the Looking-Glass when Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how old she is, and she tells him, '"Seven years and six months."' '"An uncomfortable sort of age,"' he replies, before going on thoughtfully, '"Now if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven'".' Of course, the only way a real girl could do this would be by dying . . . . In reply to Alice's indignant remark that '"one ca'n't help growing any older'", Humpty Dumpty grimly points out that "One ca'n't, perhaps . . . but two can"' . . . .

This is a direct link to the Byrds song, in which a child leaves off at seven by dying, but Humpty's remark about "one" and "two" links back to the idea of split souls and "many a Melchizedek." In Carroll, Humpty adds, "With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven," making it clear that by "two" he means Alice and someone else. Douglas-Fairhurst doesn't quote that part, though. As he quotes it, Humpty's remark could also mean that Alice could do this if she were two people rather than one person.

Melchizedek is associated in the Epistle to the Hebrews (7th chapter, appropriately enough) with the idea of agelessness:

Melchisedec, king of Salem, . . . without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually (Heb. 7:1, 3).

Less than zero, and vomited text

The phrase "less than zero" entered the sync stream with my post "The Jolly Switzer" (April 29). Searching my blog for the name Bret (as in Bret Harte, author of "The Jolly Switzer") had led me to Bret Easton Ellis and his novel Less Than Zero. Just the day before, Vox Day had published a post also titled "Less Than Zero" (April 28). Then a couple of days later, as recorded in "Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego" (May 1), I had occasion to look up the 2002 movie Ice Age and found a posted dominated by the tagline "Sub-zero heroes."

Last night I read Laeth's latest installment of aphorisms, ".diminished discords (xvi)" (May 31). I highly recommend it as even more than usually insightful, but for the purposes of this post, what I'm interested in is this:

is there a good reason to be against machine vomited text but for machine vomited images or sounds? doesn't make sense to me.

The reference is to the productions of Fake Intelligence software, but what is relevant here is the precise wording I have bolded.

Today I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 277, one of the human characters says that he "gives fewer than zero shits about" someone. On the same page, just three paragraphs later, we find this description of an overly long message:

The whole screen is filled with word vomit when he changes his mind and backspaces the characters. It's too much for a text message.

⁂

Note added: This idea of vomited text reminded me of a passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene. I was going to quote it, but my conscience objected. If you're going to read Spenser, you have to read it all, starting at the beginning. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. The slow, rhythmic, and, yes, boring stanzas create the necessary twilight atmosphere in which weird and wonderful things can happen. Even his most vivid and astonishing lines lose their color in isolation and simply must be experienced in their natural habitat. Quoting a stanza or two of Spenser is like playing a three-second clip of the "best part" of a symphony. So if you want to know what I'm referring to, start at the beginning, and read until you get to it. It's in the first canto.

Whale-watching from the desart

In "Whale-watching from the shore" (July 2018), I wrote:

This has been a weirdly persistent theme in my dreams for the past couple of years: taking a walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs for the express purpose of “seeing the whales.” And I do see them, looking down from the cliffs, dozens of them — rights and humpbacks and others of that general type, breaching and spouting and lobtailing away.

(So far as I know, there’s no place where you can actually watch whales from the shore. Something that big obviously requires deep water.)

Commenters informed me that there are in fact places where you can watch whales from the shore, and one linked to a Deseret News article, the apparent headline of which (as preserved in the text of the now-dead link) was "LDS missionary from Utah dies after fall from cliff in Australia." A second link, which still works, is to a July 24, 2018 Newsweek article identifying it as a "popular whale-watching cliff."

Revisiting that old post and the links just now, I took note of the date July 24. Yesterday's post "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" featured a photo by one Colette Saint Yves, and I had looked her up and discovered that she was born Hortense Lagrange on July 24, 1987. I suppose that it is also relevant, given the Deseret/Utah angle, that July 24 is Pioneer Day, commemorating the arrival of the Brighamite Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley.

My main whale-watching dreams were from the 2016-2018 period, but the theme has occasionally recurred since then. I recount another such dream in "Whales and narrow roads" (September 2024), in which I see -- indirectly via telepathic contact with a "professor" who is looking at it -- "the Humpback Whale," which is "the size of a railway station." In "To Tirza" (September 2025), Tirza is a lake at which I anticipate viewing whales from the shore. I later discovered, and noted in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," that "To Tirzah" is the title of a poem by William Blake.

Why am I revisiting all this now? Not because I've had another such dream, but because this morning I read about whale-watching from the shore in Remarkably Bright Creatures:

"Aye, look!" Ethan brakes slightly, gesturing to a dirt road turning off the highway. "You ever want to go whale-watching, there's a brilliant spot down there. Took a lady friend once. We saw orcas frolicking around like wee kittens. Quite a sight. . . ."

In the afternoon, I visited one of my usual used bookstores, but it was unusually hard to find a parking space, prompting me to turn down a nearby street I'd never been on in search of one. I ended up parking opposite this: 

It's a big picture of a humpback whale, on the wall of a café called L. Z. DESSART. Under that name is the palindrome STRESSEDESSERTS, and then the Chinese name of the place, 無框架甜點 (wu kuangjia tiandian, "frameless desserts"). Since there is nothing beginning with L or Z in either the transliteration or the translation of the Chinese name, I'm not sure where the English name came from, but I had just posted about those two letters yesterday in "The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared."

In the old whale-watching posts I had been reviewing just before seeing the L. Z. DESSART sign, we had a Deseret News article, a post called "Whales and narrow roads" (c.f. this blog's title, From the Narrow Desert), and a William Blake poem. I think of desart is a distinctively Blakean spelling (much like tyger). Other poets of the era used it, too, of course, but their spelling tends to be modernized by editors, while Blake's does not. For example, Maolsheachlann recently posted "Favourite Poems: Ozymandias" (May 24), reproducing Shelley's poem with the spelling desert even though the original had desart. Most online poetry sites do the same.

Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion

In "A very pale White guy with a Phrygian cap" (May 23), I referred to my habit of clicking for randomly selected /x/ threads as a "sort of cleromancy" -- meaning divination by casting lots. It's not really proper divination as I practice it, though, since I generally just click without any question in mind.

This evening I decided to try it as actual divination, with a query. Having just received an email wondering about Debbie's "part in things" -- meaning the question of why the sync fairies brought us together and what role she is meant to play -- I concentrated on that question and clicked for a random thread. I got this one from October 3, 2013. The OP just says "Lets go. Creepy gif/images thread. gimme your best" and opens with this image:

It appears to show a woman levitating, which fits. Debbie frequently mentions levitation, and one of the first things she told me when first began communicating in 2021 was that she had started having levitation dreams in 1965 and that a past-life reader had told her in 1974 that she had "had the power of levitation" in a past incarnation. A reply in the /x/ thread identified the photo:

This is by Colette Saint Yves, a French photographer. I think it's called Levitation.

The attribution appears to be correct. See for example "Ten pictures by… Colette Saint Yves."

Then I noticed the date of the post: October 3. Wait, wasn't that the date that Debbie first contacted me? I searched my email and found that first message. It's timestamped October 4, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., which would still have been October 3 in Debbie's time zone. She begins with "My name is Debbie and today I found your blog while researching a dream that I had today" -- and follow-up messages make it clear that the date of the dream was October 3, 2021.

Revisiting that old email exchange just now, I found that Debbie's second email to me, sent the next day, mentions both levitation and "a 1960's TV show called The Ed Sullivan Show." In my last post, "Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs," I quoted a passage from Remarkably Bright Creatures in which a Sullivan family takes in an eight-legged crab which they name Eddie.

I'm not sure my question has really been answered, but it's definitely been acknowledged.

⁂

The OP on the /x/ thread had two direct replies, one of which I have already quoted. The other just says "is this one legit?" When I clicked to see that one, I noticed another message a little further down on the screen:

I hadn't scrolled through the thread at all at this point. I had only clicked for the two direct replies. When I saw the post circled above, though -- "oh fuck, that freaked me the fuck out as a kid" -- I immediately knew what it was referring to: the scene in the 1989 film Communion in which a Gray peeks out from behind a door. Kids get freaked the fuck out by any number of things, of course, but somehow I knew with complete certainty that the post was referring to that particular scene in that particular movie. I clicked to see what it was replying to, and confirmed what I already knew:

I had been primed to think of that because last night I was thinking about Alfred Molina -- the actor who plays both Otto "Doctor Octopus" Octavius and Marcellus the octopus -- and had the thought that the Communion movie (starring Christopher Walken, with a soundtrack by Eric Clapton) was directed by someone named Molina. I had misremembered; the director's name is Philippe Mora, not Molina. But in looking that information up, I had somehow ended up not on Wikipedia or IMDb but on a 2008 blog post called "Communion | kindertrauma," which focuses on that very scene. Here's the opening paragraph:

What is up with COMMUNION, the 1989 CHRISTOPHER WALKEN movie based on WHITLEY STRIEBER's best seller about alien abduction? A thread on IMDb's discussion board for the film entitled "Worth seeing for one scene" currently has 91 responses. Somebody hit a nerve. The scene in question takes place early in the film where WALKEN, as STRIEBER, wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders aloud if there is another presence in the room. His suspicion is validated in the form of a half obscured, dark-eyed alien face staring back at him. Many who had watched the film as children claim that this scene still remains the scariest that they have ever witnessed, some revealing that it still haunts them even to this very day. It is undeniably eerie, but its real strength lies in the fact that it strikes a familiar, recognizable cord. Who amongst us, especially as children, has not awoken in the dark with just such a feeling? Squinting our eyes, trying to make out shapes, perhaps not being too comforted by what we imagine we see lurking in the shadows.

I never watched that movie until I was in college, but I got my own Communion-induced "kindertrauma" in book form. Far and away the scariest thing I've ever read. Whit originally wanted to call the book Body Terror, which would have been truth in advertising.

Whit has also experienced levitation, by the way, and wrote about it in Transformation.

Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs

In "The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion" (May 2025), I discuss this image from an English book for preschoolers:

I noted that the black bug looks a lot like a spider but quoted some kids saying this about it:

"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.

"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."

I then noted Bill's objection to this reasoning:

Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy.

I conceded his point:

I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.

So we have a ladybird with four legs instead of the usual six, and a spider with six legs instead of the usual eight. As mentioned above, Bill has seen the octopus as being essentially the same symbol as the spider, and the same is true of the crab.

Last night I read this in the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, the title of which refers to the octopus.

At sunset, Sowell Bay’s public beach teems with rock crabs. One summer when Erik was small, the Sullivans were on an after-dinner walk when Erik found one who, by some cruel fate, had lost its hind legs on one side. Naturally, he insisted on bringing it home. He named it Eight-Legged Eddie because it was supposed to have ten limbs and was missing two.

This repeats the theme of arthropods with two fewer legs than the usual number, and the eight-legged crab also reinforces the symbolic connection between the crab and the spider.

The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared

Last night I listened to a Zion Media video about the Mentinah Archives, a.k.a. Nemenhah Papers, which I guess would be classified as channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha. That made me think of the channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha my own circle is into -- Daymon Smith's Words books -- so I searched YouTube with various keywords to see if his books had any footprint on that platform. Apparently not, or not the channeled books, anyway. Putting in a broader search for book of mormon tolkien, I found this Ganesh Cherian video, released on May 26:

I'm familiar with Ganesh, who mostly comes to boring anti-Mormon conclusions but notices some interesting facts along the way. His work prompted my January 2025 post "The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10," for example. So I gave it a listen. This part caught my attention:

Alma 37 also talks about the directors that Joseph is using, including a seer stone called Galezem, which Joseph uses later as a code word to refer to himself in Doctrine and Covenants revelations. 

It really is a pity that we don't have the lost manuscript. It would tell us so much about the development of Joseph and his world view and this mythical world that he is creating in the moment. But we are fortunate to have The Hobbit which tells us a lot about Tolkien's early adventurous spirit and the ways that he expanded that then on into the Lord of the Rings series.

One of the cute similarities between The Lord of the Rings and the Book of Mormon is the idea of quests and the fact that there are four usually young men sent out to perform some kind of incredible task. In the Lord of the Rings, these four young men are Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and they're sent on this grand quest by none other than Gandalf the Grey, who's this great wizard who during the process elevates into Gandalf the White with his increased knowledge and understanding. In the Book of Mormon, it starts off with Lehi as a visionary prophet who sends his four sons, Nephi, Sam, Laman, and Lemuel, to retrieve the records of his people. And this is repeated again when King Mosiah sends his sons Aaron, Ammon, Omner, and Himni off to the Lamanites to preach to them and to recover them to the true nature of the gospel. And then with the Jaredites in the book of Ether, there are four sons of Jared, who's kind of the founder of this new world, and his sons' names are Jacom, Gilgah, Mahah, and Orihah. The idea of a wise seer sending out four companions to find treasure, to uncover something special, or to inhabit a land is a really interesting idea that permeates the Lord of the Rings and throughout the Book of Mormon,

The sons of Lehi and the sons of Mosiah both work as groups of four men sent on some sort of mission or quest -- but the four sons of Jared? Except for Orihah, who goes on to become a king, they literally don't do anything at all in the Book of Mormon. They list the four names, and that's it. Seeing this as a parallel to Tolkien is pretty weird. In Daymon Smith's work, though -- which is what occasioned the search that led me to this video -- the four sons of Jared are much more substantial characters, particularly Jacom.

The other thing I've bolded in the transcript above is the error Galezem. In fact the word is Gazelem in the Book of Mormon, and Gazelam in the Doctrine and Covenants. The specific error Ganesh makes here -- putting z in the place of l and vice versa -- is also an indirect link to Daymon's channeled work. When I started posting about William Alizio on this blog, Bill mentioned that he kept misremembering the name as Azilio. It turns out that this error was caused by his familiarity with Daymon's work, as Daymon twice uses the word azilio in the writing-in-tongues portion of his first Words book.

A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi

In a comment on yesterday's "Julio-Claudian octopods and cats named Cat," I wrote:

I happen to be feeding a stray tom these days in addition to the permanent-resident felines. It is my practice to name everything, though, so the stray is called Timofey.

One of my own toms is called Scipio on account of his uncanny facial resemblance to a particular bronze bust of that general, so there's an indirect link to Octavius and Marcellus. I don't suppose it's terribly common to name either cats or octopuses after figures from Roman history.

Cat as a name has been in the sync stream in the person of Cat Stevens. I suppose a guy named Guy (Fawkes) is also not dissimilar to a cat named Cat. It's a pity he never got to meet the gal named Gal (Gadot).

That's actually an oversimplification of how Scipio got his name. When we first took him and his sister in, I immediately saw the black tom's resemblance to this bust of Scipio Africanus and wanted to name him after it. (Apparently, the bust is no longer believed to depict Scipio.)

However, my wife had already named his sister Arizona because of a dream she had had, so she thought the brother should be named after a state as well. Just then, the black tom started rolling around on the floor, which made me think of the Doobie Brothers song:

Old black water, keep on rollin'

Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?

And so he was named Mississippi. I didn't even notice at the time the similarity to Scipio (which we Americans pronounce with a silent c; really, Brits? Skippy-o?). Later, both cats' names were abbreviated. Arizona became Zoe, and my wife at first started calling Mississippi Missy. I insisted that was too girly for a tom, though, so his abbreviated name became Sippi instead, and this soon evolved back into the name I had originally proposed: Scipio.

After the mention of Scipio, my comment talks about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. After I posted that, it reminded me of the They Might Be Giants song "They'll Need a Crane," which I hadn't listened to in many years. The two main characters in the lyrics are referred to as Lad and Gal as if those where their names:

Lad's gal is all he has

Gal's gladness hangs upon the love of lad

The love of lad

Some things gal says to lad 

Aren't meant as bad but cause a little pain

They cause him pain

At that time I just thought this. I didn't listen to the song, didn't look up the lyrics, and didn't write or even say anything about it. Nevertheless, when I opened up the YouTube Music app this morning and put on one of the algorithm-generated playlists, the third song it played -- after "Norwegian Wood" and Eric Clapton's "Change the World" -- was "They'll Need a Crane." Immediately after that was Emily Linge singing "Proud Mary" by CCR.

I'm not really familiar with "Proud Mary," but once it started I recognized it as something I'd heard before. The chorus, like that of "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers, says "keep on" and "rollin'" and is about the Mississippi River.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

Proud Mary keep on burnin'

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river