Ariel

I was listening to a recording of the Book of Isaiah while doing some routine paperwork for my school. At the very moment that I wrote Ariel -- the English name of one of my students -- Isaiah said:

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (Isa. 29:1)

That's all so far, but these minor syncs are often a prelude to things to come.

The name Ariel has appeared on this blog once before, in "Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five" (July 2025), where it refers to the character in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, who sings the song alluded to in the title. That word tempest recently appeared in "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest" (March 7), another of those "minor syncs" that ended up ramifying into something more complex.

Griffin gargoyles

With the Cherubim re-entering the sync stream, I was reflecting on the strange way certain themes or symbols are connected. The Cherubim have been identified with the Gryphon, which has been identified with the griffon vulture Odessa Grigorievna, who is linked to the Garuda, which is linked to the monstrous avian title character of Flight of the Gargoyle. From a symbol of holiness to a symbol of abomination in fewer steps than it would take you to get from either to Kevin Bacon.

Can there be any real connection between the opposite ends of that chain, though? Is sync-linking really a transitive relation?

Today I read in The King in Yellow a reference to the "ugly water-spitting griffins" of the Place St. Michel in Paris. That's a direct link between Gryphon and Gargoyle.

A third reading of the Ninbad couplet

The fourth couplet of "With?" is:

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

I wrote this with Martin Luther in mind -- the "nailer" who nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and who famously said, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

In "Up against the wall" I proposed another reading, in which Ninbad the Nailer is Trent Reznor, whose band name -- Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN -- is a link to both Ninbad and Nailer. Reznor was raised Lutheran, though oddly he is named after an ecumenical council of the anti-Lutheran Counter-Reformation. I saw hints of Luther in the lyrics to "Head Like a Hole":

Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

Today I found a third reading.

This afternoon I was reflecting on the career of Mormon, the compiler of the Book of Mormon. He led the armies of the Nephites at a time of utter moral depravity, when rape, human sacrifice, and cannibalism were rife. In the context of this pervasive evil, the nature of the last straw which finally made him unwilling to lead so wicked a people is surprising:

And they did swear by the heavens, and also by the throne of God, that they would go up to battle against their enemies, and would cut them off from the face of the land. And it came to pass that I, Mormon, did utterly refuse from this time forth to be a commander and a leader of this people, because of their wickedness and abomination. . . . they had sworn by all that had been forbidden them by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Morm. 3:10-11, 14).

Really? That was the one thing too evil for Mormon to overlook? It made me think of James's similar vehemence on the subject:

But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath (James 5:12).

Really? "Above all things"? Today, listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, I found a similar sentiment expressed in the Book of Ether:

And it came to pass that they all sware unto him, by the God of heaven, and also by the heavens, and also by the earth, and by their heads, that whoso should vary from the assistance which Akish desired should lose his head; and whoso should divulge whatsoever thing Akish made known unto them, the same should lose his life. . . . And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God (Ether 8:14, 18).

"Most abominable and wicked above all" -- not the murders and whoredoms committed by this secret oath-bound fraternity, but the fact that they had formed such a fraternity in the first place. Again the things they swore by are emphasized -- all that was forbidden by Jesus in the Sermon at Bountiful (3 Ne. 12:34-36, slightly different from the Sermon on the Mount list).

As a former member of the Great and Unabbreviable Church, and one who has been through the temple, I too have been part of a secret oath-bound fraternity. (We didn't swear by that particular list of forbidden things, but I'm not sure that technicality counts for much.) When I became an atheist in 2002, I renounced these oaths, considering myself no longer bound by promises, elicited under false pretenses, to what I had come to see as a non-existent Being. Since emerging from the mists of atheism, I am once again troubled by those oaths and have sometimes wondered if I am right to consider myself no longer bound by them. Not that keeping oaths already broken is an option anyway.

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of those who had made oaths to the Dark Lord, "under delusion and by self and Melkor deceived." Those "bound to Melkor in mind, heart, or by oath-everlasting, unbreaking" receive this message:

Do you today renounce your oaths?

Evil-taken, known to yourselves to whom made,

Or otherwise, Eru cares not --

For he promises in our work to bring about

Release from bonds evil-set to crookeding

Thy souls corrupt. If yea, then we

Shall attend to thy release, and the bond's

Unchaining, by breaking; If nay, then here

Thou remain, until summoned, by one

Whose voice thou knowest, neither denied

In the command's taking up, may you be; . . .

Some accepted this offer and were "relieved of chains." The others

who remained enchained -- as nails driven into a board, only to stand in witness, a testimony of the hammer's pounding them in -- stayed

Later we read of "orcs (as the 'nails' became)."

I think we have to see in this a deliberate allusion to the oaths of the temple, the "highest" of which are associated with the symbolism of the nail, and particularly with Isaiah's expression "a nail in a sure place" (Isa. 22:23).

The "nails" in Slumbered "remained . . . only to stand," considering themselves bound by their satanic oaths and therefore unfree.

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood

And did the only thing he could.

Even that phrase from Isaiah suggests that release from such oaths is possible, though, for the prophet goes on to say:

In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall the nail that is fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; and the burden that was upon it shall be cut off: for the Lord hath spoken it (Isa. 22:25).

The Tolkienian context of Slumbered made me think to look at Ninbad as Elvish. In Sindarin, nîn means "tear, weeping," and bâd means "road, way, path." Ninbad thus suggests the Via Dolorosa ("Sorrowful Way"), the path which Jesus walked, carrying his cross, to the site of his execution. In the temple, too, the "nail in a sure place" is identified with the nails used in the crucifixion. (It is widely believed, despite Reznor's denial, that the name Nine Inch Nails has a similar meaning.)

The nails were removed from Jesus' hands, but the wounds remained, even after the resurrection.

And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends (Zech. 13:6).

Magenta blossoms

In "Glorians and such," I quoted as an example of a Glorian "witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor." In the next post, "Animals dipped in food," one of the titular animals was a blackbird "in the bush with pink blossoms." One of the definitions of pink is "magenta, the color evoked by red and blue light when combined."

I was on the road in the afternoon and happened to pass a gigantic bougainvillea, climbing all the way to the top of a utility pole, an explosion of magenta blossoms. Or no, I corrected myself, not blossoms. Bracts, which are modified leaves. Though petals are modified leaves, too, so the distinction seems rather academic.

When I arrived home, my wife was out front chatting with our neighbor, who was working in her garden. I went inside first, and when my wife came in, she told me what they had been talking about: whether the colorful structures on a particular plant were flowers (the neighbor's position) or leaves (my wife's). I of course asked what plant they were talking about, thinking it must be either bougainvillea or poinsettia, but she said it was jiuchongge, a name I didn't know. I looked it up and found that it's an alternate term for bougainvillea, which I had previously known only as sanjiaomei.

Animals dipped in food

In "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," I report suddenly wanting an omelette and then finding a reference to that food in The King in Yellow. Wondering whether omelettes might have been mentioned earlier in that book, planting the idea in my head, I did a word search. There is one earlier instance:

"That's a blackbird," observed Miss Byng; "see him there in the bush with pink blossoms. He's all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says --"

Shortly after searching out this reference, I checked the latest Barnhardt Meme Barrage (I've really got to find a better source for memes now that Anglin has apparently retired), which included this:

The blackbird is a dark animal that looks as if its bill (nose and mouth) had been dipped in yellow food. The dog is a yellow animal that looks as if its muzzle (nose and mouth) had been dipped in dark food.

Yesterday I tried and failed to find a place that sold omelettes. Today, no longer looking for omelettes, I decided to lunch at a new restaurant I knew nothing about, and as serendipity would have it, it sells omelettes. The name of the restaurant is Black Man, which is a bit of a sync with the omelette-dipped blackbird, of which Miss Byng says, using the masculine pronoun, "He's all black."

Note added: My last post, "Glorians and such," connected the post "King son of Light, and black dog stars" with a dog named King in "Hometo Omleto." This suggests that King son of Light (i.e. Tar-Calion, official name of Pharazon the Golden) is the same as the black dog star. A Golden Retriever, dipped in dark material so as to appear (partly) black, seems a related concept.

Glorians and such

My last post, "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," dealt with two seemingly unrelated syncs: one about omelettes, and one about the word tempests in the Book of Mormon and a Mormon writer named Tempest. But perhaps they are related after all, via Walt Whitman. Though the review, linked on A&L Daily, which occasioned the sync compares Terry Tempest Williams to Emerson, the publisher's page for her book compares her first to Whitman:

You know, I was almost going to read that book, just out of synchronistic curiosity, but I'm afraid that blurb has soured me on it. "Beauty, climate change, and transformative moments of hope"? That's what we in the trade call the shit sandwich technique.

Anyway, Whitman. My last post suggested that the omelette sync might have something to do with Hometo Omleto (Humpty Dumpty). Searching my blog for omleto, I found that one of the posts to use it was "Tennessee Walts, plus that dog-stealing alien in New Jersey again," which begins thus:

William Wright's May 4 post "Liberty Bell Follow-Up: The Liberty Bowl" begins with a reference to his "post earlier today on the Walts" -- meaning two different people named Walt: Walt Whitman and a TV character called Walter White.

Regarding that Terry Tempest Williams book that I'm probably not going to read, what exactly does the title refer to? According to the review:

The book was born from a pandemic-induced dream in which a professor asked Williams if she remembered the vow she had made "to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians." When Williams awoke, the dictionary offered no clarity, leaving her to define Glorian through her own Emersonian inquiry into lived experience. Williams ultimately defines a Glorian as an encounter with élan vital ("vital momentum") -- a meeting with grace, like witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor.

She was told in a dream that she had vowed to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians, and so she went ahead and gave it the old college try in her waking life. I respect that. (I think Bruce should have written Oh Colonel Flastratus!, too.) If I had been the one to have that dream, I would have gone a completely different direction with it. Instead of ants and magenta blossoms, my mind immediately went to Spenser and assumed "the Glorians" referred to a dynasty named after the Faerie Queene herself. Specifically, I thought of this little verse that begins Book 2 Canto X:

This chronicle the knights read begins with Brute and ends when "gentle Alma seeing it so late, / Perforce their studies broke." This association of Brute with studies made me think of my 2024 post "Étude brute?", so I reread it. That post quoted the line "When I dream, I dream about books" (from one of Bill's dreams, which he thinks was about me) and recounted a vision (dream-adjacent) in which I was told of a particular book, "This book is the Cherubim. Not the Book of the Cherubim, but the Cherubim themselves."

Given the phrase "cherubims of glory" (Heb. 9:5) and the way Ezekiel's cherubim are inseparable from "the glory of the Lord," I think there may be some connection there. Terry Tempest Williams's "Glorians" are apparently encounters with nature that come with the force of revelation -- "visitations from the holy ordinary," as the subtitle puts it -- which, together with the Cherubim link, made me think of Traherne:

The brightness and magnificence of this world, which by reason of its height and greatness is hidden from men, is Divine and Wonderful. It addeth much to the Glory of the Temple in which we live. Yet it is the cause why men understand it not. They think it too great and wide to be enjoyed. But since it is all filled with the Majesty of His Glory who dwelleth in it; and the Goodness of the Lord filleth the World, and His wisdom shineth everywhere within it and about it; and it aboundeth in an infinite variety of services; we need nothing but open eyes, to be ravished like the Cherubims. Well may we bear the greatness of the World, since it is our storehouse and treasury. That our treasures should be endless is an happy inconvenience: that all regions should be full of Joys: and the room infinite wherein they are seated.

If The Glorians is anything like Traherne, I want to read it. But I don't think you can write like Traherne and write about the greenhouse effect. As Bertie Wooster once said about being a successful dictator and designing women's underclothing, it's "one or the other, not both."

Rereading the original "Hometo Omleto" post, I see that it, too, deals with the Cherubim. It also features a dog, and in the first comment, Bill writes:

The dog can be a reference to Sirius (the Dog Star) which will come up at some point over on my blog if I can get to it.

The Dog Star -- specifically the Black Dog Star -- recently resurfaced in "King son of Light, and black dog stars." That post title uses King as a name, a translation of the name Vasily. The dog in the "Hometo Omleto" post is named King.

Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest

This morning, while far from home, I suddenly wanted an omelette -- that specific dish, which is not at all common here in Taiwan. I tried to think of any restaurants in the area that might have such fare on their menu, but in the end I gave up and got something else instead. While waiting for my food, I decided to read a bit in The King in Yellow. I finished the page I was on, turned the page, and saw this:

While Elliott briefly outlines the projected excursion to La Roche, Hastings delightedly ate his omelet, and returned the smiles of encouragement from Cécile and Colette and Jacqueline.

Eggs have of course been a sync theme from time to time, and even omelettes in the form of Hometo Omleto.

In the early afternoon, I was listening to an audio version of the Book of Mormon while I did some housework. I am so familiar with the book that I've passively memorized many parts, and I often find myself reciting along with the audio recording. Today, I heard, "Yea, it shall come in a day when there shall be heard of fires," and then joined in for the rest of the clause: "and tempests, and vapors of smoke in foreign lands" (Morm. 8:29). As I finished my housework at that point, I paused the recording there, and that was the last verse I listened to.

Immediately after that, I booted up my computer and had a random whim to check Arts & Letters Daily, of which I have not been a regular reader since its glory days under the late lamented Denis Dutton. The first link under "New Books" had this text (boldface in the original):

An Emerson for our times? Terry Tempest Williams’s “epic documentation of the Glorians” is full of celestial beings and desert miracles... more »

Tempest is a pretty unusual name, and it was one of the words I had just been reciting along with Moroni. I clicked the link and read a couple of paragraphs, but it didn't grab me. I was still curious about the name, though -- besides the tempest link, Terry has also been an important name -- so I looked Terry Tempest Williams up on Wikipedia. I discovered that she (it's a she, unlike Terry the Giant Irishman) is a Mormon -- or a member of the Great and Unabbreviable Church, anyway, albeit a "feminist" one -- which strengthens the sync, given that it was in the Book of Mormon that I had encountered the word tempest. A&L Daily has nothing to do with Mormonism, and the linked article said nothing about Williams's religion.

Note added: The cover of the Williams book linked on A&L Daily has an eclipse in a yellow sky: