My interest having been piqued by a mention of Bruce's blog, I tried to track down a digital copy of Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree. Failing to find one, I instead downloaded the one Wendy Berg book I was able to find: Gwenevere and the Round Table. Scrolling through it rapidly first to get the lay of the land, I stumbled upon this, which seems to be from some sort of visualization exercise:
[Gwenevere] is standing where a stream of milk-water runs down the beach and into the sea. It flows over a bed of tiny white pebbles. She steps into the stream, and begins to walk upwards through its flowing water. She indicates that you should do likewise. You walk over to it. It is running fast over the white polished quartz pebbles, forming tiny whirlpools and eddies which splash into the air and catch the light. You kneel down and dip your hand into it, expecting it to be icy cold. But the water feels like dry, powdery snow flowing past your fingers. You look through the water to the stream-bed but it is hard to gauge the scale of what you are seeing. You can see your hand in the water, and the white pebbles, but they seem to lie a vast distance away, as if the stream bed lay within the stars.
The sound of the water fills your ears. It is like tiny silver bells, ringing faintly but rhythmically. There is an underlying rhythm, a pulsating, as if you are hearing the music of the stars.
Gwenevere continues to walk up the stream, moving effortlessly through the milk-white water. You step into the stream and follow her. You have eyes only for the white stream, and the sparkling quartz pebbles of the stream bed. You carefully watch your step to keep your balance, your eyes on the water swirling past your feet. It has a mesmerising effect. You feel as if you are leaving the earth behind you and walking out into the stars.
As I was waking up this morning, there came to my mind a certain part of the Mormon temple ritual, in which the initiate, being asked by one representing God if he will give him certain key words, replies, "I will, through the veil." As I entered the fully waking state, I thought of the similarity to the dialogue with Claire in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus."
I read a few pages of Liberated over breakfast and found this:
It must never be there two, only, son. A third ever masked masquerades in wait, and shall whisper as through veil straightaway -- riddles saving, simple plain counsel, providing.
In my last post, "Clavis avis, clavis Dav'is," I noted that I had posted an image of a bird with a small golden key in a post called "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," and I connected this with a scene in Johnny English Reborn in which Johnny compares the "small key" that will allow him to defeat his enemies with the "pebble" that brought down Goliath.
Joseph Smith's Seer Stones, by Michael Hubbard MacKay and Nicholas J. Frederick, quotes two sources that refer to the seer stones or spectacles as pebbles. Lockwood R. Doty describes the Prophet's discovery of his white seer stone thus:
Soon after locating here the Smiths, father and son, were employed by Clark Chase to dig a well. While engaged in this work, a white, glossy pebble, resembling a human foot in shape was found. The future prophet kept the pebble and soon pretended to have discovered that it possessed supernatural powers. In the pebble he claimed to discern happenings in distant places and to read the course of future events. This pebble became known as the "peek stone."
And David Whitmer gives this description of the specs:
In translating from the plates, Joseph Smith looked through the Urim and Thummim, consisting of two transparent pebbles set in the rim of a bow, fastened to a breastplate. He dictated by looking through them to his scribes.
In Lucy's Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Family Memoir, edited by Lavina Fielding Anderson, the Prophet's mother calls the specs a "key":
I trembled so with fear, lest all might be lost . . . . Joseph saw this, and said, "Do not be uneasy, mother, all is right -- see here, I have got a key."
I knew not what he meant but took the article of which he spoke into my hands, and, upon examination, found that it consisted of two smooth three-cornered diamonds set in glass, and the glasses were set in silver bows, which were connected to with each other in much the same way as old fashioned spectacles . . . .
That of which I spoke, which Joseph termed a key, was indeed, nothing more nor less than the Urim and Thummim (pp. 378-39, 389).
Thus is the same object called both "pebbles" and "a key." The Doctrine & Covenants also associates a white stone with the Urim and Thummim and with the language of keys:
Then the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17, will become a Urim and Thummim to each individual who receives one, whereby things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms will be made known; and a white stone is given to each of those who come into the celestial kingdom, whereon is a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. The new name is the key word (D&C 130:10-11).
As mentioned in my last post, syncs have often involved a pair of keys: one associated with red and gold; the other, with white, green, and silver. The first is the Rosary, while the identity of the second remains speculative. In the quotations above, though, the seer stone is white and specs are set in "silver bows." (A "bow" is also part of a key.)
The pebble-key link might also have something to do with Peter, whose name means "stone" (considered by some commentators to mean specifically "pebble"). As Matthew tells it, he receives with this name the promise of keys:
And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matt. 16:18-19).
(Apologies for the genitive mutilation. It's called poetic license, okay?)
In "Clavis avis" -- Latin for "the bird's key" -- I posted this picture, noting that a third rhyme was provided by the last name of the artist, Davis.
Despite that third rhyme, I did not immediately connect it with the earlier "Key of David" syncs, even though those were focused on Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which uses the same Latin word for key.
The picture above, which I originally got from the Duckstack post "Spite Kite," first appeared here in the post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen." Because of the bird-snake-hand imagery, together with the fact that Garuda is a kite, I linked it with this book on Tibetan Buddhism:
So the Davis painting shows a bird holding a small golden key, and I linked it to a book on Tibetan Buddhism. Not until last night did I make the should-have-been-obvious connection to "The Tinleys and the Small Key of David." That post features another Tibetan Buddhist book -- The Small Golden Key by Thinley Norbu -- and connects it, with its reference to Vulture's Peak, to my story about two knights named Tinley and a griffin that lives on a mountain peak. That post also includes this quote from Johnny English Reborn, in which Johnny is talking about a small key:
Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.
Johnny compares the small key to, of all things, a pebble. The Davis painting with the small key originally appeared in a post called "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen."
The reason I bought the Thinley Norbu book in the first place was that, as described in my post "What's the second key?", I was pursuing the symbolism of a set of two keys, one of which is the Rosary, with the other key unidentified. The two keys were associated with color contrasts: gold vs. silver, and red vs. white (as in "Sync homework: Dead Reckoning") or green. I assumed that the Rosary was the red key, since roses are red. Norbu's book had caught my eye because of its reference to a golden key. Not until today did I think to look up other books Norbu had written. Lo and behold:
I started a post on my Book of Mormon blog -- gave it a title, "So as by fire," and pasted a list of scripture references I wanted to deal with -- and then saved the draft and went to teach my final class of the day. As I was writing today's date on the board, I thought, for no obvious reason, "March 25, so nine more months till Christmas." A second later, I realized that that made today Annunciation Day -- i.e., the day Jesus would have been conceived if he was born on Christmas Day, assuming a pregnancy of exactly nine calendar months. Mormons have nothing like a liturgical calendar, so I rarely notice such things (though a dream about Annunciation Day is what started the whole "Chip Monks" thing). When I returned to the computer after the class, one of the other tabs I had left open was the Synlogos feed, which had been updated while I was away. One of the new posts, from Catholic blogger Mark Docherty, was titled "Feast of the Annunciation: 'By the fire of your charity, by the unction of your humility, you have drawn the Divinity to come within you.'" The quote in the title is from St. Catherine of Siena, who says in part:
O Mary, vessel of humility, you were pleasing to the eternal Father, and in His own singular love, He has captivated you and drawn you to Him. By the fire of your charity, by the unction of your humility, you have drawn the Divinity to come within you. . . .O Mary, my sweet love, you opened to the eternal Divinity the door of your will, and the Word immediately became incarnate within you. By this you teach me that God, who created me without my help, will not save me without it . . . but knocks at the door of my will and waits for me to open it to Him.
It was by "fire," says St. Catherine, that the Blessed Virgin opened the door to God, thereby teaching us that God can only "save" us if we do the same. Since my post is going to be about references to being "saved by fire" in the Book of Mormon (I'll add a link here once it's published), that's a solid sync.
Just after I had typed most of the above, a student came into my office to ask a question about her high school homework. It was a reading comprehension exercise, and the reading passage was an advice column called "Jesse Cohen Says." The "Chip Monks" link above goes to a word search for that phrase on this blog, and the first post that comes up is "Jesse Eisenberg: the connecting link between Chipmunks and Bigfoot." (It's about the "Case of the Missing Acorn." The acorn recently came up in "Stones as seeds" as a symbol of Joseph Smith's seer stone.) The sync of a Jesse with a very Jewish surname prompted me to run a search for "jesse cohen says" just on the off chance that it was a real column. The top three results were all for the same news story, dated May 2, 2014: "Graffiti Tag Found on Dead Whale in Atlantic City." An ad the bottom of the page (no longer there when I refreshed, and I didn't get a screencap) showed some female celebrity standing in front of a wall that had the Virgin logo inside a red heart, so positioned as to appear as if it were crowning the woman's head -- a sync with the Blessed Virgin and her "fire of charity."
The whale in the story was found on May 1, just four days after I posted my many-eyed whale dream ("A beast with many eyes") on what I would discover years later was the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision. The graffiti tag on the whale said "ΤΕΦ 94," and Jesse Cohen was a spokesman for the Jewish fraternity presumed to be responsible. My whale dream included a precognitive link to the film 47 Ronin, and 94 is twice 47. Jesse Eisenberg, incidentally, starred in The Squid and the Whale.
This was originally going to be a brief sync prescript to my BoM post, but it got too long and involved for that, and now I've written this instead of writing the post. Well, as someone once said, tomorrow is another day.
Last night I put on some music on my phone while washing dishes. Since my hands were wet, I just let the algorithm do its thing after the initial selection. The Metric song "Help I'm Alive," from their 2008 album Fantasies, came on:
Appropriately given the album title, this song triggered mental imagery of near-hallucinatory vividness. As I heard Joules Scott-Key's drumbeat and Emily Haines's opening lines
I tremble (tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble, tremble)
They're gonna eat me alive . . .
I saw proud Achaean warriors, horsehair crests waving, training for battle under their Blue Sun, and with the repeated line "Beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer" I could hear the stamp of marching feet, the clang of spear-butts brought down on the rock in unison, and the ringing kiai of stout Diomedes, lord of the war-cry. For a few moments I was totally immersed in this scene. When I emerged from the world of god-like Homer back into my own, I glanced at the phone screen and immediately paused the song and took a screenshot:
That's clear Blue Sun imagery (which does not appear earlier in the video, when I had my fantasy), with a stamp that reads "Son of Righteousness." That's not a biblical phrase but one from the Book of Mormon, and a problematic one. I've been deep in the book's Zenos material recently (see my massive March 19 post "Identifying the 1 Zenos texts"). My earlier (2024) post on the subject ended with this:
The one loose end that remains is the Book of Mormon's use of "Son of Righteousness" instead of "Sun of righteousness." Malachi has Sun, and I think I've made a pretty good case that Zenos used Sun as well (with the Sun's three-day entombment in a sepulchre causing the three days of darkness). Since the two words are homophones in English but entirely dissimilar in Hebrew, it's hard to see how the Sun-to-Son swap could have been made by anyone other than the English-speaking Joseph Smith. That, I believe, is now the only unsolved problem relating to Malachi material in the Book of Mormon.
That I saw "Son of Righteousness" just after a fantasy about the Sun is a further coincidence. If we want to press the syncs, we could imagine the prophet living among Greeks who knew him as Xenos, "the foreigner," and think of his entombed Blue Sun emerging from the sepulchre in a different color, like Gandalf the White.
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Shortly after this, I went to bed. I dreamt that I was hiking in northeastern Ohio with my wife, my parents, my sister Crystal and her husband, and the Portuguese writer Laeth and his wife. Laeth had (in the dream) written a book, which Crystal was reading, about the very landscape through which we were hiking, which helped us to see it through re-enchanted eyes.
As we were hiking, we saw an old ruined building, and Laeth said he could feel spiritual energy coming from the stones of which it was constructed. As we got closer, though, we found to our disappointment that it was not made of stone but of concrete.
"Yes," said my father, "but where did the material for the cement come from?"
It hit me with the force of an epiphany: "Kirtland. From the gravel yards of Kirtland."
"The Talking Quartz of Kirtland," said my father, and he began talking about this remarkable stone. They gray flint beds of Kirtland harbored two types of quartz crystals: "mute quartz," which was pink, and "talking quartz," which was white and occurred in impressive diamond-like and feather-like formations. It was called "talking quartz" because of its great spiritual power, through which people felt it "spoke" to them. Later we visited one of these flint beds and observed the two types of quartz ourselves.
I commented that the rocks of Utah, despite their great beauty and the fact that they, too, were used in sacred architecture, had no spiritual link except to the dinosaurs -- I still had a red "dinosaur stone" I had picked up near Moab, Utah -- while the stones of Kirtland had human and divine resonances unlike anything to be found out west.
I do not really have a "dinosaur stone" in waking life, but I am scarcely the first to have experienced the palpable presence of saurian ghosts in the redrock deserts of southern Utah. I remember the frisson of recognition when I first read Teruhisa Tajima's postscript to his 1994 art book Dinopix:
In the fall of 1992, I visited the small town of Moab, Utah. . . . Early one morning I visited Arches National Park in Utah. Far off in the orange-colored morning mist, on the other side of the plain, I saw figures of nocturnal raptors hurrying home, exhaling their white breaths. I thought I had seen a Brachiosaurus cast the shadow of its long neck, so characteristic of the lightning dragon, on the gigantic rock surface, deeply reddening in the morning sun. When I saw with my own eyes the answers I was about to obtain, I struggled not to be hasty. . . . I was particularly eager to reproduce the gigantic creatures whose images had been imprinted on my mind while I was in Moab. I was persistently concerned with how to realize the visions I had of them there.
The idea of the Talking Quartz of Kirtland was so utterly convincing that when I awoke, I immediately got online to check whether there really were quartz deposits there. Apparently not, though there are some in nearby Geauga County, also part of the early Mormon stomping grounds. My initial search for quartz mines in ohio turned up a place called Fantasia Mining.
This is synchromystically significant because the title of Laeth's first novel is Phantasia. An earlier dream, recounted in "A turquoise stone; and suns, moons, and armies with banners," had already connected that novel with crystals. (The rest of that post title also syncs with my fantasy of the Achaean army under their distinctive Sun.)
Also perhaps relevant is a verbal dream I had a long time ago -- early 2000s, maybe -- in which a voice introduced a city called Quartslagen, "incorporating both white quartz and pink jasper elements," which was "built on a common love based on a common trust" and was "under the benign governance of the Anathoth, the Monothoth, the Benathoth, and the Torothoth."
Another link to the Talking Quartz may be the recent reference to Simon Peter in "Filling Peters' shoes." I have been reading and writing about "seer stones" recently, but the literal meaning of the name Simon Peter is "hearing stone."
This is a highly improbable sync, on a very specific and extremely unusual theme.
Yesterday, I read this in Hugh Nibley's Enoch the Prophet:
The Prometheus of Aeschylus takes place at the ends of the earth (line 1): no wholly human character appears in the play. Prometheus is being crucified for the crime of showing too much affection (philanthropia) for the human race and betraying the secrets of heaven to mortals. (Lines 28-38, 104ff.) The once heavenly Zeus has in his ambition become cruel and tyrannical; only Prometheus has the courage to resist and champion suffering mankind. The chorus enters in a spaceship -- an aerial chariot -- weeping and shedding their tears upon the mountains. (190ff.)
There was an endnote after the word crucified, which I checked -- because, as most people know, Prometheus's punishment was not crucifixion but being bound to a rock and having his liver eaten out by an eagle. Nibley's note reads:
His punishment differs from typical Roman crucifixion only in being on stone instead of wood. He is "raised up on high" (1.277), "nailed" (21, 56) sleepless in a standing position (32), and pierced with a spear-head (64).
Today, I read in Words of Them Liberated a scene in which the character Maunsh (who is apparently Moses) encounters a group of people whose feet have been nailed to logs:
Some hours passed before he heard the shrieks, and light darting upward, then shooting near passed; to follow, yet not direct, til he upon the scene a-stumbled, women and men, tied hand to tree, and feet into logs, nailed, howled, then changed to silence, fearing --
Like Prometheus, these unfortunates are both bound and "nailed."
Then -- I think, for as always the writing is not exactly clear -- the logs to which they are nailed turn out to be, in Nibley's words, "stone instead of wood":
And he brought a long nail from out a bag around his waist, and set its point on the foot-arch of Maunsh's neighbor rope wrapped; then with hammer as hand, Aule drove the spike direct into the stump -- no, a stone, unsplit.
"Call your Partner," and as directed the neighbor shrieked, then to see walk into the light circle, from out a shadow somehow, the Partner, and this one also, Ki-Abroam took by its paw-claw-arm's end, and while it stood willingly, tied the body to a tree high timbered, and straight, and then did he again set his spike, and drove it down, til the being was held, stone-bark;
Nibley emphasizes that Promethus is "raised up on high" and "in a standing position." Here, too, the crucified being "stood" and was affixed to "a tree high timbered."
In the paragraphs that follow, a monstrous bird of prey appears, which I think also somehow turns out to be made of stone or wood or something. Anyway, whatever the details, it syncs with the eagle that is so central to Prometheus's "crucifixion."
For me, nailing is always associated with Ninbad the Nailer, who is Martin Luther. In my recent dream "Joseph the Tirielist," Luther came up as "this guy who like hated logic." Nibley writes of Prometheus resisting Zeus and of the chorus arriving "in a spaceship" to comment on the result of that rebellion. Likewise, in the dream, Mark appeared in a low-flying airplane to ridicule Joseph, saying, "So after having put Luther in his place, he takes on God himself!"
In "A third reading of the Ninbad couplet," I included a picture of Luther, hammer in hand, nailing his theses to the wooden door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. In "A darker view of the Three of Pentacles," I included a picture of that card, with a remarkably similar layout to the Luther picture. On the left, a man hammering something into the door or wall -- wood or stone -- of a church. On the right, two others looking on.
In both of those posts, the imagery was connected with dark oaths and what the Book of Mormon calls "secret combinations."
The design, with its central pillar, also suggests a silver tree -- a Tree of Pentacles if you will -- with the three pips as its fruit.
Note added: Immediately after publishing this, with its reference to "an aerial chariot," I received an email with an article titled "Chinese company creates flying taxi prototype" (something someone wanted to use in an English class). In "Just how far did Hinbad and Rinbad travel?" -- referencing character from the same Ulysses-derived poem that gave us Ninbad the Nailer -- I associated Hinbad's "yellow car" with both a taxi and Elijah's flying chariot of fire.
