Now Chil the Kite brings home the nightThat Mang the Bat sets free --The herds are shut in byre and hut,For loosed till dawn are we.This is the hour of pride and power,Talon and tush and claw.Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting allThat keep the Jungle Law!
I was reciting what I could remember of this to myself as I rode my motorcycle, and when I arrived home I sat down to read the nigh-unreadable Words of the Faithful. I turned a page and thought I saw the italicized word garuda in the text, but it turned out to be instead the somewhat visually similar gunwudu. (What I quote below is, believe it or not, a single sentence!) [Note added: actually two sentences.]
Well, in that day the wandering dead spirits oft were captured, ensnared, or mislead [sic] into the deep places, Lower Airs of confusing orientation; whereby light itself may be held in awe, fear, reverence, for the faces it brings to memory, or the searing recall of one's deeds to those trusting; or beyond our knowledge, as strangers needless brought to grieve. So death by the sinister gunwudu, the fearful dread of a dark dragon form, disbanding and scattering its fumes across the town-settlement: Death indeed for all folk in those lands a terror beheld; and elves were little spoken of, and often in disregard; weak things, incapable of delivering even themselves from Sauron's thralling reach.
Gunwudu appears only one other time in the text, in the grapholalia section in the back, where the author translates it as "Hell-dragon," apparently from gunn "dragon" and Udûn "Hell." The fact that I had initially misread the word as garuda struck me as a minor sync, because in "All the pebbles I have seen" I quoted the Donovan line "Dragon kite in the sky" and said it "got my attention because Garuda is a kite."
Now the really weird part. When I searched for the text of the Kipling poem so that I could include it in this post, I found it on the Kipling Society website, but my Yiddish-corrupted mind thought tush must surely be a misprint for tusk, so I decided to check another website for a second opinion. I clicked on the second link in my search results, Poetry Nook, and experienced a very bizarre glitch.
Although the address bar clearly said "https://poetrynook.com/poem/now-chil-kite-brings-home-night," the text the page displayed was not that poem but something entirely different I'd never heard of, a short poem numbered 66 and attributed to someone with the fake-sounding name Michael Wigglesworth:
Thus he doth find of all Mankind,
that stand at his left hand,
No mother’s son but hath misdone,
and broken God’s command.
All have transgress’d, even the best,
and merited God’s wrath,
Unto their own perditi-on
and everlasting scath.
This turns out to be the 66th stanza of a very long poem called The Day of Doom Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement, by the totally real New England Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth.
I hit Ctrl-R, and the page loaded properly, displaying the Kipling poem. I didn't think to screenshot the glitched version, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I solemnly affirm that this really happened. I checked my browser history and verified that I had visited no other Poetry Nook page than the Chil the Kite one. Even more bizarrely, I have not been able to find the Wigglesworth stanza on the Poetry Nook site at all. I went through all 14 pages of search results for Wigglesworth, and it's not there.
Getting some other random poem instead of Chil the Kite would have been weird enough, but look again at the Kipling poem and the Wigglesworth stanza. They are each eight lines with precisely the same meter and rhyme scheme -- iambic tetrameter lines consisting of two rhyming parts, alternating with trimeters -- and they are even formatted in exactly the same way, with even-numbered lines indented by two spaces. (The only difference is that Kipling capitalizes the indented lines, while Wigglesworth does not.) As Debbie likes to say, What are the odds? Furthermore, the gunwudu sentence is, like the Wigglesworth stanza, about the spirits of the dead coming to a bad end.
I have absolutely no idea how to explain what happened.
Since the coincidences are already well into impossible territory anyway, I thought I might as well push my luck and see if the phrase "Day of Doom" appeared in any of Kipling's poetry. A search turned up "La Nuit Blanche," which begins thus:
I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?
What follows is apparently an account of fever-dreams or delirium, with the poet's hallucinations including a "Blood Red Mouse" (cf. "Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice"). Curious about the story behind it, I checked the Kipling Society's Readers' Guide, which has this to say:
This is an account of delirium, reminiscent of Kipling’s later “The Mother’s Son” which follows “Fairy-Kist” in Limits and Renewals. It also has an echo of “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898, author of Alice in Wonderland) and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
Seriously? The first thing they say about it is that it's reminiscent of "The Mother's Son"? As you can see above, the phrase "mother's son" appears in the 66th stanza of The Day of Doom and nowhere else in that very long poem.
La Nuit Blanche means "the sleepless night" in French. The Chil the Kite poem is about nocturnal animals spending the night hunting rather than sleeping.
Note added: I've looked up "The Mad Gardener's Song." I'm sure that I've never read the entire poem but that I have seen these lines quoted:
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
I can't think where, though. Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins for some reason come to mind as likely suspects, but I don't think it was actually either of them. I remember the key point was the repeated formula "He thought he saw . . . He looked again, and found it was . . . ," and that this was being used to make some point about cognition or perception. Can anyone help me out here?
From Josie's bedroom Klara has a good view of the Sun's progress across the sky, and comes to believe that he goes to his nightly rest within a farmer's barn that stands on the horizon.
From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh (“black”).
There is a remarkable association between the names of Lehi and Ishmael which ties them both to the southern desert, where the legendary birthplace and central shrine of Ishmael was at a place called Be'er Lehai-ro'i. Wellhausen rendered the name "spring of the wild-ox jawbone," but Paul Haupt showed that Lehi (for so he reads the name) does not mean "jaw" but "cheek," which leaves the meaning of the strange compound still unclear.
They’re not psychopaths. They don’t have a disease of the soul. They are, rather, paradopaths, or individuals who have surrendered their spirits to forces of greater evil. At the lower levels, they seek wealth, women, power, and fame. At the higher levels, they seek to transform themselves into what the Bible describes as “unclean spirits”.
One interpretation is that this division is merely political, but that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Genesis already describes ethnic and territorial separations using the verb parad (Gen 10:5). In Gen 10:25, however, the verb palag is used, a term associated with splitting or cleaving. The lexical shift suggests that something more structural than ordinary dispersion is in view.
The one thing everyone knows about Lassie -- even if, like me, they've never read the book or watched the TV series -- is that when little Timmy falls down the well, he sends Lassie to get help, which she does by barking until someone follows her to the well and saves Timmy. That's who Lassie is: the dog who ran to get help for someone who had fallen.
I was trying to find a suitable picture of Timmy telling Lassie to go get help, but all I could find were various parodies. Eventually, I found this YouTube video claiming that this iconic episode never actually happened. Apparently it's some sort of Mandela Effect.
The YouTube channel I found thus was Ceiling Fan Man. I would go on to discover that Ceiling Fan Man joined YouTube on August 6, 2019 -- the very day (accounting for the time-zone difference) that my own ceiling fan was destroyed by a poltergeist. As related in "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist," this geist claimed to be the devil, said its purpose was death, and manifested visually to my wife as an enormous spider. The symbolic (and perhaps more than just symbolic) connection to Ungoliant, the being Bill Wright has identified with Colleen, is obvious.
I was thinking about all that early this morning, and I reread the post about how I discovered Ceiling Fan Man while looking for the apparently nonexistent Timmy-in-the-well episode of Lassie. I had been looking for something like this:
Less than an hour later, I was asked to read a story to the preschoolers: Wake Up, Sun! by David L. Harrison (on YouTube here). A dog and a pig (see "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" for the Lassie-pig connection), having woken up in the middle of the night, think that it is morning but that the Sun has gone missing. Perhaps it has fallen down the well.
But of course the Sun has not in fact fallen down the well, just as Timmy in fact never did so.
The idea of the Sun being at the bottom of a well is symbolically interesting, though. It suggests the Heart of Gold deep underground, and also Zenos's prophecy that the Sun would be shut up in a sepulchre, causing three days of darkness. (See "Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul.")
When I read the line about "precious stones for Colleen", the image that actually came to my mind was Ungoliant. Specifically, the scene in which, after she and Melkor kill the Two Trees, Melkor is forced to give Ungoliant all of the Elvish gems and precious stones he stole from Formenos. It was based on an agreement Melkor was forced to make in order to recruit Ungoliant's help. She made him give her all of his stones, except the Silmarils, which he refused and almost was destroyed by her over it.Anyway, so I associated this Colleen with Ungoliant, and I then tried to see if there was a name connection that could help explain the instant association. Colleen simply means "woman, young girl", so not super specific or helpful. However, I then remembered a word game I had done with Ungoliant some time ago, and it seemed to make sense.As you know, both roots of Ungoliant's name - Ungol and Liante means "Spider", which seems strange to have Spider-Spider as the name. Ungol, however, can refer to something else. I actually tied it to Uncle Jay (my Ungol - Unkle game), and thus also Ahab at the time (which means Uncle).Ungol, in one Elvish language, can mean "Darkness", primarily from Ung- but we can get after it from a different angle looking at the root "Gol". We see this root in Thingol, and it means a "Cloak", which is an apt part of Ungoliant's name meaning in that she is specifically mentioned as being able to cloak herself and others in a cloud of darkness that allowed them to evade detection. So, Ungol (Ung-gol) literally means "dark cloak", and thus Ungoliant "Dark Cloak Spider". At least that is what one version of her name I've arrived at.In any case, it is interesting because a form of Gol is Coll/ Kol, meaning the same thing (which also gets back to the Unkle-Unkol word game). And Coll- is obviously right there as a root in ColleenSeemed to fit, at least backing into it.February 12, 2026 at 9:02 AM
The Dark Cloak Spider also fits well with the Octopus symbolism. The Octopus evades detection by use of its dark cloud of "ink".The ink, to me, is also highly symbolic since Ungoliant has and will use "ink" - as in the things that are written - to take away light and truth, as in with the Book of the Lamb.February 12, 2026 at 9:06 AM
The singer/songwriter of the song you feature here "The Summer Day Reflections", also seems to tie into this theme.Donovan Leitch.Donovan means "Dark/ Black".Leitch is an interesting pairing. At first, it looked like it simply meant "Doctor", but even that is more complicated as it can refer to sorcery, per Etymonline, with words like "Enchanter, Conjurer" or "one who speaks magic words". So, something like a Wizard, perhaps. The Dark Wizard.But, it turns out the name has a folk etymology that connects this name with Leeches, which seems natural. Some argue it came about because doctors use to be the ones who would apply leeches to suck people's blood, and thus the bloodsuckers got the name Leech/ Leitch from the doctors themselves. Who knows.But it is interesting to have this reference to a Leech, or "Bloodsucking aquatic worm". Ungoliant has been directly compared to a Vampire in other interesting symbols and songs (e.g., Vampire Weekend), the most famous kind of bloodsuckers.So, an aquatic Dark Bloodsucker is what Donovan Leitch can give us.Which then makes the title of the song also interesting in looking up various meanings of "reflections".February 12, 2026 at 11:49 AM
And I have a good solve for the full name Colleen now looking at the back half of the name, so this is looking pretty solid.As mentioned, Coll- in Elvish is "Cloak"."Line" (the "Lin" would be said just like the Leen in Colleen, then add the "a" sound at the end thanks to the e), can mean "Cobweb", it turns out. In the discussion on Eldamo for this word, it was said to derive from the earlier, primitive "sligne", which meant "spider, spider’s web, cobweb".So, Colleen understood in the form of the Elvish Coll-Line can mean "Cloak Spider". I should have seen it earlier, actually, because if you take off the "Ung" part of Ung-Gol, which gives you the "Dark/ Black" definition, you are left with Goliante for her name, or Koliante. You can hear Colleen in that name, particularly as you leave off the -te, which gets you back to something similar to that original "Line" form."Precious stones for Coll-line"February 12, 2026 at 12:03 PM
As this post makes connections to a passage involving Joseph of Dreams, and those song lines came about through the Three of Pentacles -- its meanings including learning, growth and collaboration -- I'm inclined to think there's a much more positive connotation to "Colleen" than Ungoliant, of all entities.February 12, 2026 at 12:30 PM
I've been thinking more on the Three of Pentacles/ Coins here and its role in that phrase the came to William's mind and the tie in to my hypothesis regarding Ungoliant.The card features a Stonemason, which is interesting given some of the recent LDS temple endowment symbolism (the endowment is said to be based on Freemasonry rites, which trace back to the stonemasons guilds).This could be a tipoff to what the Book of Mormon calls Secret Combinations. When the Book of Mormon was first published, that term was so tied to Freemasonry in the US, many assumed the book itself was anti-Masonic and thus a product of its day, particularly given how the book's Combinations had secret signs and oaths they gave.William, you recently brought up Cain again, interestingly, citing Moses 5, which has some interesting things to say about Secret Combinations, and that Cain first instituted them among men. In that chapter, the author speaks of those combinations working in the dark:"For, from the days of Cain, there was a secret combination, and their works were in the dark, and they knew every man his brother."The Three of Pentacles shows these men working literally in the dark - the men are juxtaposed against a completely black background and environment while they discuss their plans. As WG notes, the card can refer to collaboration, which is a synonym for or same meaning as combination, in that you have a group of people united and working toward some end. In the case of the Secret Combination, this collaboration was held together via oaths and signs, and with the ultimate objective to "get gain".The LDS endowment prior to 1990 had penalties associated with breaking the oaths, which involved hand motions where recipients would slit their own throats and disembowel themselves, in that they would die in those ways if they broke the oath. This gets right at how Satan first sets up the Secret Combinations with Cain, who is forced to promise "by his throat" and die if he revealed Satan's secret:"And Satan said unto Cain: Swear unto me by thy throat, and if thou tell it thou shalt die; and swear thy brethren by their heads, and by the living God, that they tell it not; for if they tell it, they shall surely die"Again, these types of penalties are found both in Freemasonry and in earlier versions of the LDS endowment, so the presence of a Stone Mason in the Three of Pentacles, and them all working in the dark, at least teases at the possibility that this 'collaboration' is not necessarily ultimately good.And Secret Combinations bring us right back to The Great and Abominable Church, and its Mother Ungoliant, who is also called the "Mother of Abominations". In that story in Moses 5, Cain's works were specifically called abominations. And on the Three of Pentacles, the men are working on/ in a Cathedral or Church.February 13, 2026 at 12:32 AM
While [Miriam and Doral were] thus contemplating the ends of each choice, and the fruits of wise decisions thus far received, a hawk or phantom of one, flown over high up, descended in a swoon, and landed, wrestling a many tentacled sea-creature. When come upon by the women, curious to discover such an odd thing (as one) from the sky fallen, to vapor they turned, being blown away west upon a breeze, as if running to the falling sun thither. Of the eight tentacles, but seven were seen to remain, and the wing of the bird was broken, clipped and tangled in a mesh.
This morning I was, for complex psychological reasons, listening to a vaporwave remix of "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry. At the same t...
