Help I'm Alice

Looking at a music playlist, I momentarily misread the title of the Metric song 'Help I'm Alive" as "Help I'm Alice."

A day before I had read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he longer Alice spends underground the more her adventures start to resemble a narrative game of Doublets, in which the aim is to take 'Alice' and ensure that by the end of her story she is 'Alive'.

Doublets was a word game Carroll invented, in which the challenge is to transform one word into another by changing one letter at a time, with each intermediate step also being a word. (I used to play a very similar game as a child, the challenge typically being to get from sick to smug while passing through certain specified intermediate words on the way.)

"Help I'm . . ." makes me think of this old Calvin & Hobbes strip:

A child being shrunk down to a minuscule size takes us right back to Alice.

The juice from magical fruit

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Around noon, I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's biography of Lewis Carroll:

Carroll explored similar themes in his poem 'Stolen Waters', which he finished on 9 May 1862 . . . . It begins with a curious mixture of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', a poem Carroll finished reading that month, as the speaker, 'Sir Knight', tastes the juice from magical fruit offered to him by an apparently beautiful woman; only after kissing her does he realize that she is a had with a face that is 'withered, old, and gray'. What restores him to happiness is hearing a song about an 'angel-child' . . . who sits in a garden . . . . The surface meaning is that the speaker, having been seduced by adult experience, now realizes that he lives in a world of corruption . . . .

My stanza speaks of Jesus, in the Garden, drinking the juice of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby experiencing for himself Adam's fall from Paradise into the Lone and Dreary World. Carroll's knight likewise drinks "the juice from magical fruit" and thereby experiences the "world of corruption."

The reference to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is also interesting, as that poem was in the syncs a couple of years ago. I first posted about it on May 16, 2024, in "'Come buy,' call the goblins," where I mention having read the poem for the first time "a few days ago," bringing us very close to the May 9 date mentioned by Douglas-Fairhurst.

Garden

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Pi Days

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major spiritual experience, and the date mentioned by Browning in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." I linked to some old posts of mine (one of which was also recently linked to by WG in a comment) which mentioned July 22 as an alternative Pi Day, in connection with its being the release date of the Jordan Peele film NOPE.

At first I thought it was a sad near miss that Bill's birthday should be one Pi Day while mine is the day after the usual Pi Day. Upon reflection, though, I realized that the most precise approximation of pi on the calendar is actually the two-day period March 14-15, corresponding to 3.1415. I guess we could call that Pi Biduum, and it includes my birthday, the Ides of March.

The Ides of March is of course best known as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar. That name is another link to Browning's poem, which relates how the rats followed the Pied Piper

Until they came to the river Weser

Wherein all plunged and perished

-- Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,

Swam across and lived to carry

(As he the manuscript he cherished)

To Rat-land home his commentary,

My discovery of Pi Biduum made me wonder if anyone else had thought of it, so I ran a search for pi two days. This brought up the Wikipedia article for "Pi Day," which notes that June 28 is sometimes observed as Two-Pi Day. While visiting that page, I learned of yet another date for Pi Day: "Some also celebrate π on November 10, since it is the 314th day of the year."

Some minutes after learning the significance of November 10, I decided to read a little in the Book of Mormon. The last chapter I had finished was Alma 48, and so it happened that the very first verse I read included a reference to a date corresponding to our November 10:

And now it came to pass in the eleventh month of the nineteenth year, on the tenth day of the month, the armies of the Lamanites were seen approaching towards the land of Ammonihah (Alma 49:1).

This is the only mention of that particular date in all of scripture. That "approaching towards" is a bit of a sync, too, since none of these dates is anything but an approximation (literally a "coming near to") of the value of pi.

Update: After posting this, it occurred to me to check what, if anything, I had posted on the 10th day of the 11th month of the year '19. It turns out it was a pun post called "Near misses." The present post calls my failure to be born on Pi Day "a sad near miss."

Pebbles, specs, keys, shoon

All four of these have been somewhat interchangeable symbolically.

First, I wanted to post these two stills from Twin Peaks, shared by WanderingGondola in a comment on "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key." (That's "TIBET" written on the map in the background, Debbie.)

That's the character Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, wearing specs with a red right lens and a blue left lens, just as in the post "Red and blue spectacles." He holds a pair of golf balls that look like white pebbles and then says he is "planning a pilgrimage to Pebble Beach." White pebbles specifically being from a beach was part of the syncs in "What quartz pebbles (now with added syncs!)."

I looked up Jacoby to see if his mismatched specs had any particular significance. Under "Personality," the Twin Peaks Wiki has only this to say:

Jacoby was known for keeping cocktail umbrellas marked with dates of influential events that affected him. He is also a keen surfer. A recognizable trait of the Doc's were his glasses - one lens of which was blue, the other red.

"The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key," the post on which WG left links to the above photos of Jacoby, mentions how Lewis Carroll did with white stones what Jacoby did with umbrellas: "Carroll liked to celebrate notable days by marking them with 'a white stone.'" That post also includes a photo of white stones juxtaposed with white eggs. Some umbrellas are also in the photo, which prompted Debbie to leave a long comment (before WG's) mentioning umbrellas no fewer than 16 times.

This afternoon I saw on YouTube a new video from Uncorrelated Mormonism, called "Mormonism is Christian Magic." I didn't finish the whole thing, since he didn't seem to be covering much that I didn't already know, but two slides caught my eye. First, this one focusing on the importance of the color of Joseph Smith's seer stones (with white stones being associated with "water or seeing"):

Then there was this slide about "keys":

The illustration is a white stone statue of St. Peter holding the Keys of the Kingdom -- so the keys are themselves also made of white stone. This syncs with "The pebble key," where the same objects can be described either as white pebbles or as keys. Just to the right of this picture of two keys is a bullet point that says "D&C 129: 'three grand keys.'" This syncs with my recent post "Two keys or three?"

Coming back to the red and blue specs, this symbol quickly came to be associated with that of red and blue shoes, for example in "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill." That post mentions, in connection with colored shoes, a "sequence of colors [that] goes from silver to red to blue."

I successfully stayed off 4chan for the entirety of Lent, but now it's Easter and I'm back to my old ways -- meaning that every time I visit archive.org, I click for a random /x/ thread en route. The one I got today is called "Wizard of Oz Symbols." The original post has a photo of Dorothy in her ruby slippers and says:

Let's have a comfy thread about the occult symbolism behind the Wizard of Oz. I'll start with a question: What was the significance of the ruby red shoes in the movie? Supposedly, they were silver in the book.

That obviously syncs with "from silver to red." The post even says "ruby red shoes" instead of the more usual "ruby slippers." Although the thread was supposed to be about The Wizard of Oz, the first reply brought in Alice as well:

things like wizard of oz, alice in wonderland, etc have always struck me as psychic propaganda.

This led to lots of follow-up posts about Alice, including one that brought in Humpty Dumpty:

Lots of these "going to a magical fantasy world" stories are about sick cult activities. Many fairytales are ancient luciferian programming scripts. Notice also Peter pan "never grow up" - this is referring to the child alter personality splits that are created by the extreme abuse; they never grow up. Relevant quote from textbin link below: "HUMPTY DUMPTY'S evil speech to ALICE about how she can remain at her age - just under 8 years old forever...'two can'...this is TOUCAN programming which ANTONY RADCLIFFE speciallised in - the creation of 'child alters' frozen in time, through extreme torture. "One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty; 'but two can. With the proper assistance you might have left off (growing up) at seven.'")

Update: Speaking of umbrellas and the keys of St. Peter, this is the sede vacante symbol used on Ann Barnhardt's blog, representing the position that the current pope is illegitimate:

The king is an Enoch

While I was on the road this afternoon, my meditations took me to the prayer offered by the father of Lamoni (who we can infer was named Laman but who is called only "the king" in the text). I recited it to myself, finding that I could do so easily despite never having intentionally memorized it, and began mentally tinkering out a tentative Latin translation.

When I arrived at my destination, I had some free time and so took out one of the books I am reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley. The very first thing I read was this (brackets and ellipses in the original, boldface added):

As stated by Egyptologist J. Zandee, "Not only in Israel, but it all the ancient Near East, every king is a Messiah. . . . There is no difference in principle between the eschatological Messiah and the ruling King as the bearer of salvation. . . . The King is a god, . . . the King is the son of God. . . . The King is as the image of God on earth. . . . The King brings justice to earth. . . . [The King is] the Good Shepherd, . . . [The King is the man of Wisdom]. . . . The King is the [High] Priest [endowed with power]. . . . The King is a cosmic deity." In short, the king is an Enoch, to whom God has promised his own throne.

Moses 7:59. . . . Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . thou hast made me, and given me a right to thy throne, and not of myself, but through thine own grace.

Nibley quotes that verse from Moses because it mentions Enoch being given a right to God's throne. He juxtaposes it with an apocryphal Enoch document in which Enoch says, "God made for me a throne modeled after the Throne of Glory." His only reason for quoting the part I have bolded is to establish that God is the "thou" Enoch is addressing.

Here is the prayer of Lamoni's father, which I had been reciting to myself just minutes before reading the above passage in Nibley:

O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day. And now when the king had said these words, he was struck as if he were dead (Alma 22:18).

The parallel is quite exact. These are the only two verses in all scripture to include both "thou art God" and "know thee." More specifically, each has the words "thou art God . . . and I . . . know thee," in that order. In Moses 7:59, the speaker is Enoch; in Alma 22:18, it is "the king." Immediately before quoting the Moses verse, Nibley states that "the king is an Enoch."

If we look beyond the fragment quoted by Nibley, there is a further sync with the king's hope that he will be saved "at the last day."

And Enoch . . . called unto the Lord, saying: Wilt thou not come again upon the earth? Forasmuch as thou art God, and I know thee, . . . I ask thee if thou wilt not come again on the earth. And the Lord said unto Enoch: As I live, even so will I come in the last days (Moses 7:59-60).

This theme of God coming again upon the earth also syncs with something I read earlier today in Words of Them Liberated (in which the name Eru is applied to Jesus):

They (some) set into writings conversings with Arda’s Wild Voices, and careful to preserve as told, some others saw into those records, What was forbidden them to tell: Eru’s Return. Ever was that command, both to watch for and yet never reveal what sought all out to find, and yet was a gap read in records by those men knowing also their own enchanting promises. So surmised one silent to another, and then less silent, by gesture contriving, or crypted words, pieced as from some Oak, retelling how hunters bypassing, return always. That Return was a Theme to which all their writing bent around, never saying, always showing what was commanded, obeying; yet also seeing if by Other Tales Recounting, their audience may reveal knowing of His Return, whereto, and in what fashioned matter.

I've bolded "Wild Voices" because that is a link back to Joseph Smith's Enoch:

And it came to pass that Enoch went forth in the land, among the people, standing upon the hills and the high places, and cried with a loud voice . . . . And they came forth to hear him, upon the high places, saying . . . a wild man hath come among us (Moses 6:38-39).

There is also a hint of "wild voices" in something I read today in the third book I am currently working on, The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

[Lewis Carroll's] allusion to Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', where we are reminded that 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, | And waste its sweetness on the desert air', carried a warning that not everyone was given the opportunity to make their voice heard . . . .

A phantom Humpty

I've posted many times about times when, reading, I momentarily hallucinate a word that is not there and then discover this to have been caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. This morning I had another such experience, seeing Humpty Dumpty at the end of a page of Words of Them Liberated. Unlike most such errors I have documented, this is one I was clearly primed for, as I am currently reading a biography of Lewis Carroll and had just posted about Humpty Dumpty days ago. The proximate cause, however, was still the influence of adjacent lines.

One line ends with -mpty, and the next line (and the page) ends with two capitalized words with the initials H.D.

It is, I think, only my own copy of Liberated that would give rise to such an error. I converted an epub to a Word document, set the font size and margins to my liking, and had it printed and bound. Probably none of the book's other (few!) readers has the words lined up on the page like that.

That last line, continued on the next page, speaks of something being "hastily recorded by Heaven's Dead Men Scribes." This syncs with another book I am currently reading, Enoch the Prophet by Hugh Nibley, where the title character -- a Man ascended to Heaven, though admittedly not dead -- is "Enoch the Scribe, keeper of the records," "Enoch in his primary role of heavenly scribe," of whom Nibley writes:

But everywhere Enoch is credited with being the scribe and transmitter par excellence, "the Righteous Scribe, the Teacher of heaven and earth, the Scribe of Righteousness."