Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos

On May 16, Bruce posted "Miles Mathis on art forgeries and fakes," including this as one of only two examples of such alleged fakes:

Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2023. The second image in the thread was this:

I don't think that (possibly fake) Vermeer has any particular significance to me, but the coincidence got my attention and made me scroll through the thread -- another of those miscellaneous "Nobody General" things -- where I found this:

It's the Hydra logo from various Marvel superhero movies, modified so that instead of a skull with six tentacles, it's some sort of crustacean with six pincers. The Hydra logo as a six-armed octopus was one of the syncs that established the idea of a six-legged spider or six-armed octopus as a symbol of Ungoliant. In the comments on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May  16), I describe finding (what my wife says was) a six-legged spider. I wrote:

When I got home tonight, my wife asked me to catch a spider and get it out of the house. She'd already done so once, she said, but the spider had returned.

It was a largish black female of some unfamiliar hunting species and seemed quite unintelligent, with none of the intensity or personal aura of a cane spider or a jumper.

After I had captured and re-evicted the beastie (what's that Simpsons meme where they throw the guy out the door and he comes right back in?), my wife said, "Did you notice that she only has six legs?" No, I'd scooped her up in mid-scurry and hadn't registered a leg count, but my default assumption is that a persistent black female spider with six legs is not a good omen. I half-expect poltergeist phenomena to begin again.

In a follow-up comment, I spelled out my reasons for this interpretation:

[T]he specific image of a black female spider with six legs has already been established in the sync stream as representing Ungoliant, Tolkien's portrayal of ultimate (what my circle would call "Sorathic") evil. As you know, everything is symbolic, and past syncs establish the symbolic vocabulary by which new ones can be interpreted.

The 2019 poltergeist manifested to my wife as a gigantic spider, and I successfully evicted it from our house. Thus, for a spider to be found in the house by my wife, get kicked out, and then return would seem to symbolize and thus perhaps presage the return of the exorcized geist.

So that six-armed octopus, modified to be a spider-adjacent arthropod, is quite a coincidence. A further link is that my comments about the possibly six-legged spider were on a post about Spider-Man 2, another Marvel superhero movie.

The /x/ thread also includes this image of the Star of Chaos:

This image first appeared here in "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel" (April 24) and lent its name to "The star of Kaos" (April 25) and "Jupiter, star of chaos" (April 26).

⁂

Note added: Also in that thread was this: the Devil card of the Tarot portrayed as the Cheshire Cat's disembodied grin:

Late last night I posted in "North Carolina Saves Mummy" about the fact that The Secret Language of Birthdays says the Devil is my card -- the 15th trump for those born on the 15th. The Cheshire Cat appeared here in "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) and "Cat Magic syncs" (April 21).

As I looked at that minimalist card, I noticed that most of the letters in DEVIL are Roman numerals and that they add up tp 556 -- frustratingly close to the number most closely associated with the devil, which is 666. We would need to add a C and an X to get the desired total, and I couldn't see any obvious way of doing that.

What if we count the Roman numerals at the top of the card, though? We need DCLXVI for 666, but we already have XV, so all we need is for the name of the card to include DCLI and no other Roman numerals. The simplest and most obvious way to turn those numerals into a word is to rearrange them and add an H.

A simple solution but obviously not a satisfactory one, right? Children represent innocence, so how can child be an acceptable stand-in for devil? How about The Coiled instead, since the devil is "that old serpent"? But there is nothing serpentine in the imagery on the card.

That made me think more about the imagery that is on the card. Why is the Cheshire Cat the devil? No sooner had I asked the question than it dawned on me that it's probably not meant to be the Cheshire Cat at all. Rather, it surely represents biblical language about the damned going to "outer darkness" where there is "gnashing of teeth." Searching the Bible for those key words, I was surprised to get this as the first result:

But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12).

So I guess the caption The Child fits the imagery on the card better than I had thought.

Riding the great white bird into heaven

Late last night, I posted "Spiders like flutes," which includes an image of the back cover of the 1974 Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box. I had originally only been interested in one of the tracks, "Music" (see "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil"), but the inadequacy of all online lyrics sites forced me to search for images of the album itself, serving to remind me of its other tracks as well.

The second track, immediately after "Music," is "Oh Very Young," which includes these lines:

Will you carry the words of love with you?

Will you, will you ride the great white bird into heaven?

That image of riding the great white bird into heaven was chosen to illustrate that song when it was released as a single.

Approximately four and a half hours after posting the back cover of Buddha and the Chocolate Box, I read this in Flying Saucers Have Landed:

Now one legend concerning the building of the pyramids goes on to tell how a rain of meteors struck the Earth causing great earthquakes and tidal waves but, it says, 'great white birds' descended to Earth and carried the people of the King up into the sky to safety. This legend occurs in two forms, both practically identical. One says that the people were carried off by huge white birds, the other says they were transported by 'shining stars' that fell to Earth.

Another legend tells how the tidal wave that destroyed Atlantis swept on round the world, inundating Egypt. A terrifying account is given of the fear-crazed survivors trying vainly to scale the slippery polished slopes of the pyramids, slipping back into the flood until all had perished; only those who left in the 'white birds' or 'stars' were saved.

That's an extremely specific sync -- the exact phrase "great white bird," and the birds carry people into the sky. I included one more paragraph in the excerpt above because the idea that Egypt was flooded when Atlantis was destroyed ties in with the idea that the name Egypt sometimes refers to Atlantis.

The other track from Buddha and the Chocolate Box that caught my attention was "King of Trees," in which the titular tree is cut down and its leaves burned. One of Pharazon's crimes was cutting down and burning the White Tree of Numenor. Cat Stevens sings:

I loved you, now they've come to burn the leaves

Don't burn the leaves

The guy who burns the leaves is identified as "Willie" in Art Garfunkel's song "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi":

Willie works as the garden man;

He plants trees, he burns leaves

Art Garfunkel has various synchromystical links to me. The song quoted above is from an album with the interesting title Angel Clare. Another of his albums, Fate for Breakfast, was released on March 15, 1979, the day I was born.

Black stars and White pharaohs

I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2019. The lead image, filename bowie_blackstar.jpg, is this:

Black stars are a recurring theme around here (e.g. "Strange is the night where black stars rise"), so I looked up the lyrics to Bowie's song "Blackstar." One of the annotations on the lyrics site included photos of Crowley and Bowie -- two White men -- dressed up as ancient Egyptians.

Roughly an hour before finding this, I had reposted this meme, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy":

I had written in that post:

The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun.

This sync made me think of my somewhat precognitive 2014 dream "Moses contemplating a human skull." That post also refers to "the stereotypical Egyptian headdress seen, for example, on King Tut's mummy case"

Spiders like flutes

On May 16, I posted "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie." The titular arachnid is a jumping spider, and I included a link to "Spider's oil and walking the line" (December 2023) as evidence that "I have long been aware of how special" that family of spiders is. Here is the relevant quote:

With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

Hell Hollow Wilderness Area just came up again, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy," but what I want to focus on here is the idea that the recorder is the sort of instrument that spiders like. In "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil" (May 17), I had to do an image search for the liner notes from the Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box to confirm that the official lyrics have debil rather than devil. One of the results that came up was this art from the album, which shows a spider playing a flute:

A further sync is that this is an album by a musician who goes (or rather went, before his conversion to Islam) by Cat. The Stephanie Sammann video about jumping spiders, which occasioned my post about them, says that the jumping spider's ambush method "is a lot like how cats hunt," adding later, "Jumping spiders are known to hate water. The cat analogy is still going strong here."

North Carolina Saves Mummy

We went to the northern part of the country today, and my wife drove part of the way back. While she was driving, she listened to an hour-long recording of The Mantra for Dispersing Calamities and Bringing Auspicious Good Will set to music. It's Sanskrit transliterated into Chinese, the pronunciation changing so much in the process as to render it unrecognizable. (For example, prajvala becomes boluo-ruwala.) You could be fluent in both Sanskrit and Chinese and still not have a clue what it's saying.

Dozing off in the passenger seat, I had a brief dream in which I looked up this mantra song on YouTube and found that it was from a channel called North Carolina Saves Mummy. As soon as I saw the name of the channel, I woke up.

I was born in North Carolina, thereby causing my mother to become a "mummy." She used to call me her "firstborn in the wilderness," which is how Lehi addresses Jacob in 2 Nephi 2. The Research Triangle isn't exactly the wilderness, but the Ohio home in which I spent more of my childhood than anywhere else -- where I usually tell people I'm "from" -- is now part of Hell Hollow Wilderness Area. I suppose the title I've chosen for this blog also reinforces this idea of being "from the wilderness."

In a comment on "Ladder-day Cinq," Wade McKenzie suggests that the ladder image associated with my birthday in The Secret Language of Birthdays puts me "in the position of a 'ladder-day' Jacob." He meant the biblical figure who saw a ladder to heaven, but Lehi's son Jacob also seems relevant. Wade also alludes to the fact that Secret Language associates my birthdate with the Devil card of the Tarot (the 15th trump for the 15th day of the month), which fits with the fact that the wilderness I'm from is Hell Hollow.

Incidentally, if I had to choose a Tarot card to represent my birthday, I would go with the Ten of Swords rather than the Devil. Note how closely the imagery corresponds to that of this novelty product marketed as the "Ides of March Pencil Holder":

Just an hour and 43 minutes before Wade left that comment, I had left a comment on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" referring Debbie to what I called Lehi's Heart Sutra in "The Heart Sutra, Dinderblob/Darkinbad, and Zion" (February 2025) The Heart Sutra, being a Sanskrit text that plays a central role in Chinese Buddhism, is clearly adjacent to the Chinese-Sanskrit mantra above, and that post even refers to my wife's listening to a musical version of it. That post quotes part of 2 Nephi 2:11-12 and compares it to the Heart Sutra. Although I don't quote that part in the post, v. 11 includes Lehi's addressing Jacob as "my firstborn in the wilderness."

Coming back to the name of the YouTube channel in the dream, "mummy" refers not only to a mother but also to "(esp. in ancient Egypt) a dead body that has been preserved from decay." Bill, following Daymon, understands the word Egypt to refer sometimes to Numenor, and in "Reincarnation, or something else?" (July 2025), I used ancient Egyptian imagery to illustrate Bill's proposal "that I am the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of Númenor."

The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun. The ridiculousness of the White dude dressed up as King Tut also suggests the word mummery. (That post also mentions my uncle's idea of my being the reincarnation of Byron. A few days ago, in a comment on "Under," I quoted William Blake's address "To Lord Byron in the Wilderness.")

Given that context, "North Carolina Saves Mummy" could mean that being reborn there offers the being formerly known as Pharazon a chance at redemption.

Searching Google for north carolina mummy turned up an article about "Spaghetti: The 20th Century North Carolina Mummy." Interesting name.

Asteroids and the Flood

On May 13, I posted "Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid," noted that the flooded asteroid-world in that story is described with imagery -- doves flying over the floodwaters, unable to land -- right out of the Flood story in Genesis.

Today I read this in Flying Saucers Have Landed:

Modern astronomy has calculated that, according to their rules of celestial mechanics, there should be another planet—about the size of our own—between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, Instead of a planet, however, there is a ring of cosmic dust, stones and debris called 'The Asteroid Belt'.

If such a planet did exist and was suddenly destroyed, the repercussions on the rest of the Solar System must have been catastrophic, particularly upon Mars and Jupiter. It is possible that our own universal Deluge Legends and accounts of a terrible catastrophe in which the 'stars fell from their places and rained down on the Earth' may be related to the same cause.

In Commander Toad, it is specifically stated that

There has been a disaster on a world between Jupiter and Mars. That world is an asteroid.

This disaster is a universal deluge.

Long green ships and the bad ol' debil

On May 11, as recorded in "The secret rules of Wonderland," I listened to Ragtime Rev's rendition of the minstrel song "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die" just before he was purged from YouTube. Note that the word never has been rendered neber.

On May 13, I read Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid. The very first words of the story are "Long green ships" -- meaning spaceships.

These long green ships made me think of the Cat Stevens song "Longer Boats."

I noticed that by affecting a foreign accent, one could transform "win us" to "Venus," thus making the longer boats into spaceships:

Longer boats are coming to Venus

They're coming to Venus, they're coming to Venus

Longer boats are coming to Venus

Hold on to the shore, they'll be taking the key from the door

Yesterday, May 16, one of my students wore one of those "mutant knockoff" T-shirts that used to be so common in Taiwan, simultaneously mooching off the intellectual property of Nike, Coca-Cola, and Disney. (Apologies for the low-quality image. It's all I could find online.)

Notice that the word give has mutated to gibe, the same change seen in the minstrel song.

This morning, I read this in the Desmond Leslie portion of Flying Saucers Have Landed:

As I write this, I am riding on a great green luminous spaceship, some 8,000 miles in diameter, that is rushing through the Ocean of Space at many thousands of miles per minute.

He means the Earth, which is more usually described as blue (our "Blue Boat Home"). The language he uses instead -- a "great green luminous spaceship," with its size measured in a unit of length -- reminded me again of long green ships and "Longer Boats." Thinking of Cat Stevens again so soon after seeing that "don't gibe up" T-shirt reminded me of another Cat Stevens song, "Music," which refers to the "bad old debil" -- once more replacing v with b.

When I tried to search for the lyrics online, though, I found that all the lyrics sites had "corrected" it to devil, without the consonant change that had brought the song to mind in the first place. I tried searching for many different spellings -- debel, debbil, etc. -- but still came up empty-handed. Finally I tried "cat stevens" "bad old", which still didn't work, though I did notice this in the search results:

It's about a Spaghetti Western called God Forgives... I Don't!, featuring a character called Cat Stevens, which was released in Italy just ten months and a day before the other Cat Stevens released his debut album in London. The title is a sync because on May 10, in "Just-ice and Al-ice," I posted a poem about how saying "God forgives" is a poor substitute for saying "I forgive."

In the end I resorted to doing an image search for the liner notes to Buddha and the Chocolate Box and finally succeeded in proving that I wasn't crazy (well, maybe I wouldn't go that far!). The correct lyrics really do have debil. Terrible image quality again, but good enough to confirm the spelling:

Why was it so hard to find that? I guess the greatest trick the debil ever pulled was convincing the Internet he didn't exist. (Appropriately, the famous line I modified there comes ultimately from Baudelaire, who as a Frenchman spelled his devil with a b: "La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.")

Note added: I forgot to mention the specific significance of "coming to Venus." Leslie's co-author George Adamski is notorious for claiming that the "Nordic" aliens he encountered came from Venus, a claim since rendered comically implausible by our advancing knowledge of the solar system. Just a few pages before the green spaceship reference, Leslie writes:

And if the question is asked—where did earlier [i.e., Vedic-era] space travellers go ? Venus would be the obvious answer. No other planet in our system holds such attraction for Earthlings who strive after perfection.

Another interpretive option is to note the similarity of Adamski's Venusians to Tolkien's Vanyar and conclude that their claim to be "from" the Star of Earendil was symbolic.