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."

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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.

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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.

Not to be charmed

For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord. When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me.

-- Jeremiah 8:17-18

"Observe this motion: Clench the fist,

Pull taut the tendons, flick the wrist -- 

For thus did Paul of Tarsus shake

Into the flames the biting snake;

And thus did flex, escaping harm,

His bitten but unswollen arm.

The saints of old have shown the way;

Read thou their deeds and do as they."

What courage now can Paul inspire,

Who shook the serpent into fire?

The poisoned fangs that pricked his hand,

They pale before this poisoned land!

The air and water, bread and meat,

All that we breathe and drink and eat,

Is poisoned through and through, and all

Is worse than in the days of Paul.

And though I do as Paul, 'tis written,

Did when I myself am bitten --

A miracle? A single snake.

What difference can it even make

If shaking off the serpent, I

Breathe in relief a poisoned sigh,

And at the fireside take my seat

To warm my hands in poisoned heat?

And all is vain, and all is loss.

None in the end escape the cross.

And all is vain, and all is loss.

None in the end escape the Cross.

Stones as seeds

Today I read in Words of Them Liberated a reference to a Silmaril as a "gem-pip sprouting" into a yellow flower, a stone become a seed.

Hours later, I read in Joseph Smith's Seer Stones that

Joseph Smith planted his seer stone like a seed, which grew to become the immovable oak of Mormonism.