Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals

I recently read Shelby Van Pelt's novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Despite the fact that there are no owls at all in this novel, the Acknowledgments at the end begin thus:

My grandmother collected owls. The china cabinet on the red shag carpet in her dining room was crammed full of them. As a kid, I spent a lot of time on that carpet. . . . 

This was the 1980s, and these owls were old-school, not like the twee pastel birds that now decorate baby showers. My grandmother's figurine owls had heavy beaks. Like real owls, they conveyed little emotion.

I never knew why she loved owls, but year after year, until she passed away, I wrapped gift boxes with owl-themed brooches or tea towels. In some ways, Tova is modeled after my Grandma Anna.

Tova, the main character in the novel, does not collect owls or anything else, though one of her friends, a minor character, "for some reason that has never been fully explained, has been collecting elephants since she was a bachelorette." So beginning the Acknowledgments with an account of her owl-collecting grandmother wasn't exactly the obvious choice.

Shortly after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures -- I only read a few books in between -- I started the book I am currently reading: Mike Clelland's Stories from the Messengers: Accounts of Owls, UFOs and a Deeper Reality. I read his original The Messengers in 2022 and his novel The Unseen in 2023. Perhaps it was Van Pelt's random mention of owls that subconsciously prompted me to return to his work.

It goes without saying that the book is full of owls, but this passage I read today syncs quite specifically with what Van Pelt wrote about her grandmother:

Laura was raised in a house full of owls; the hundreds of pictures and knick knacks were there because of her mother's compulsive owl collecting. This is something I've heard a lot in my research. Someone who's had experiences with both owls and UFOs will tell me that their mother collected owls, often compulsively.

These obviously weren't real owls in Laura's childhood home, or the homes of many other young experiencers. Yet these children were surrounded by symbols, and it seems as if a subtle for on initiation might have been underway.

The Laura here is Laura Bruno, who, Clelland mentions in the text, has a blog called Laura Bruno's Blog. Since Shelby Van Pelt randomly mentioned owls in her novel about an octopus, maybe Laura Bruno, notable for her owl experiences, would mention octopuses. I searched her blog for that key word and found a December 8, 2013, post called "Whitley's Journal." That was a surprise. Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Stories from the Messengers, is another owl-and-UFO guy -- but octopuses?

In a blog that has been continuously active since 2008, only four posts contain the word octopus. One of them is also her only post about Whitley Strieber. His name is mentioned in a few other posts, but this is the only one that is about him and is tagged "Whitley Strieber." Here's how it begins:

Whitley Strieber’s “The Key: A True Encounter” offers much food for thought for these times of Awakening and the attempt to co-opt that growing consciousness. I first became aware of Strieber’s work in Madison when that book literally fell off a shelf after I mentally asked, “What else do I need to know?” It’s a short book that covers everything from a sudden planetary freeze to time travel to the prospect of an AI or alien race already controlling reality options and human evolution.

I didn’t plan to write about “The Key” today, as I was enjoying a bizarre rabbit hole of research related to octopuses and the new NRO logo people are so freaked out about. Perhaps I will share that partially written post another time, as it continues to fascinate me; however, the synchronicity train stopped firmly at Whitley Strieber station when I found the following journal entry by Whitley regarding unauthorized and secret censoring (post-proof-approval and pre-printing) of the first edition. Strieber’s careful documentation of the censored material does more to reveal an obvious agenda to co-opt and control the Awakening than anything else I’ve seen. It’s pretty startling and, imho, a fantastic sign of positive shifts that this new edition was allowed to go to print as actually submitted instead of as secretly censored.

So it's a post about discrepancies between the two different editions of Whitley's book The Key. I've posted about that myself, in "'Tim' and The Key" (November 11, 2023). I had a hunch that the exact amount of time separating her post and mine would be a significant number, so I checked. The main significance is that it can be expressed in two different ways using exactly the same digits:

• 9 years, 11 months, 1 day
• 119 months, 1 day

Those particular digits are interesting, given that Debbie, this blog's commenter laureate, has the number 1119 in her username.

I looked up the then-new NRO logo Laura mentioned. It looks like this:

I don't think I'd ever seen that before, but I instantly recognized it as the basis for what used to be the unofficial logo of /pol/.

Wondering if anyone had thought to dub that critter the Kektopus, I did an image search for that word. Apparently no one has, but one of the very few image results that came back hit on a familiar theme:

While I was at Laura's blog, I noticed that there was a link at the top to "divine doorways and porta-portals," which I clicked because "portals" had come up recently in the post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10). One of the white harts of the title was this one from a Hermit card:

The page on Laura's blog features art painted on doors. You can see 27 of these doors on the blog, several of them named after Tarot cards -- and yes, among those present is  "Door Number 21: The Hermit Portal." It features an owl:

Scrolling down, I found that Laura had written:

This portal also echoes the owl painting I did in 2010, which now hangs in our living room:

That very painting is reproduced, in full color, in Stories from the Messengers.

Okay, Laura is obviously into owls, which is why she's in Clelland's book in the first place. How much of a coincidence is it that her Hermit Portal -- the one "portal" of hers that caught my attention for sync reasons -- should include not only an owl but the very owl painting that appears in the book? To find out, I methodically clicked through and looked at every one of her "portals." Only one other -- "Door Number 24: The Two of Cups Equinox Portal" -- features an owl, and there is no mention of the 2010 painting.

The association of owls with doors or portals is not new on this blog. My July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- which played a role in brining WanderingGondola into contact with me -- I quoted Mike Clelland:

I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important. 

The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness! 

I don't see how Mormonism recovers from this shocking discovery

This showed up on my YouTube feed.

The video title is "Did Joseph Smith Steal Christian Theology and Repackage It As a New Religion?"

We should keep in mind that this is just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at this point, but what if it turns out to be true? Can you imagine the chutzpah of pretending to found a brand new religion with all these new doctrines when in fact it's secretly just Christianity? And then selling it to Christians, no less! This could absolutely destroy Mormonism if it gets out.

It kind of reminds me of this other conspiracy theory. People laughed at it, but there's actually quite a lot of evidence to back it up.

HPA and LPF

When I was a kid, there were two initialisms used in my circle that were always pronounced as if they were French: HPA ("osh-pay-ah") and LPF ("el-pay-eff"). For the former, there was a brief period where the Portuguese pronunciation replaced the French, so the H was said as "aga."

HPA came from News Norm, the handwritten newspaper with made-up stories that my youngest sister produced when she was very young. (See "Swampgas Newsboy, by Bob Dictionary") One issue included a letter to the editor demanding that the fire department do more to "make sure the firemen are not sick or HPA." She had remembered that there was a three-letter initialism that referred to hyperactivity (she was thinking of "ADD") and had guessed it was probably HPA for hy-per-active. After that, "osh-pay-ah" became a way of referring to any sort of high-strung or manic behavior.

LPF came from a brief craze for using a sewing machine to make "long pointed floppy" hats -- long, limp cones of fabric, with no brim, that were generally three to five feet long.

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What brought these two initialisms back to mind was 1 Corinthians 13. I was thinking about the difficulty of translating the key word into English -- neither charity nor love is really adequate -- and thinking about the original Greek word (agape) made me think of HPA, the Portuguese version of which sounds a lot like agape; and then HPA reminded me of LPF.

I hadn't thought about LPFs in a good long time. The LPF craze was long before I knew any Hebrew or anything about the Temple, but that's the direction my thoughts went when I thought about "ell-pay-eff" now. It made me think of a Temple formula used in the past, consisting of three syllables including "pay" and "ale." One common interpretation is that these represent the Hebrew pe "mouth" and el "god," respectively. This made me wonder if eff could also be interpreted as Hebrew. My first thought was that it could be a truncation of efes, the modern Hebrew word for the numeral zero.

God Mouth Zero? Searching for that string turned up this 1996 Smashing Pumpkins EP. Pumpkins are a long-running sync theme, so I took that as synchronistic encouragement of this train of thought.

Thinking about eff as part of a Hebrew word reminded me of something I had seen on YouTube several days ago: emerging cult leader Shane Baldwin saying that the seven "angels" to whom the letters in Revelation 2-3 are addressed represent various prophets from different times in history ("dispensation heads," for those who know the Mormon lingo), and that "the angel of the church of Ephesus" is Joseph Smith. He said he first made that connection because both Joseph and Ephesus include the string eph. Thinking about this now in the context of LPF, I noticed that Ephesus includes not just eph but the complete word ephes, "zero." In fact, since the -us (-os in Greek) is just a grammatical suffix, varying from case to case, the real root name of the city is simply Ephes -- coinciding exactly with the Hebrew for "zero."

When I went to Baldwin's channel to try to track down the video in question, I noticed a new video claiming that a near-complete Quran engraved on gold plates had been discovered and that the hosts of another Mormon podcast, Stick of Joseph, had seen the plates. Stories like this come out from time to time and usually end up being hoaxes, but it piqued my curiosity enough that I typed stick of joseph quran into the search bar and pressed enter. These two videos were juxtaposed in the search results:

I am getting so sick of these "AI"-generated thumbnails. Is there any channel left that doesn't use them? Anyway, the sync fairies will make use of whatever is at hand. The first thumbnail says AGAPE in big letters, and the second says JOSEPH. I had just been thinking about the name Joseph in connection with the word for "zero," so it seems significant that Joseph's face is blanked out in the thumbnail, making him a "zero."

Owl and deer

I ran across a reference to one Christopher Blythe, a Mormon "content creator" I hadn't heard of, so I looked him up. Not a great first impression, physiognomy-wise. Dude lowkey looks like a professional quote maker. I mean, seriously, this is a guy who owns a katana.

I found his YouTube channel, clicked on most popular videos, and saw the thumbnails. Euphoria intensifies. I couldn't bring myself to watch anything, but one of the thumbnails did get my attention:

I am currently reading Mike Clelland's Stories from the Messengers, a book about owls and UFOs, so it was the owl's eyes that first caught mine. Then I saw that it is paired with a deer. Clelland repeatedly draws symbolic connections between those two animals. I recently quoted one passage to that effect in a June 22 comment on "The Stone Woman Mystery":

Alan was well aware that owl and deer are often reported as screen memories, but why an owl in one sighting, and a deer in the other? Is there some deeper reason why these two different iconic animals arrived for these two different people on that same night?

Then I noticed the background -- blue, with trees and stars. We've seen that before, too.

If the sync fairies were trying to get me to watch that video, I'm afraid they failed. Yes, I did read that one book about yogi farm animals finding the Holy Grail, but you've still got to draw the line somewhere.

Thinking about that Hermit card again, I put hermit hart into the YouTube search bar just to see what would come up. I got an instrumental piece by Jonathan David Barlow called "Hermit Heart," with a whopping 7 views as of this writing, featuring some Tree-of-Life-adjacent imagery.

The white part of these White Trees is heart-shaped, for a punning link to the white hart.

Another book called The Tree of Life

In yesterday's "Mud huts, Communion, and the Tree of Life," I read a reference to the Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa, looked him up on Wikipedia, and discovered that he had written a graphic novel called The Tree of Life Trilogy.

Today I happened to hear someone on a podcast pronounce Sedona, the city in Arizona, as Sedoña. I'd never heard that pronunciation and wondered if anyone else pronounced it that way, so I looked the city up on Wikipedia. Apparently it's an error. It's an invented name with no Spanish etymology.

While I was looking through that article, I noticed on a list of notable people from Sedona the name Israel Regardie, the Golden Dawn occultist. I know little about this person but had assumed he was British and was surprised to see him listed there. When I clicked to see what his connection to the city in Arizona might be, I read in the second paragraph of his Wikipedia article that while in England "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Just how many people have written books called The Tree of Life?

Pete the Cat's shoes and Doc Ock's specs

This afternoon I received this message out of the blue from one of the preschool teachers saying, "William, do you have the storybook 'Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes'?"

We've never discussed that book before, and there's no reason at all for her to think I might have it, aside from the fact that I own a fair number of children's books. We've been working together for a couple of years, and this is the first time she's ever asked me if I happen to own a particular book. The reason that I'm posting about it is that Pete the Cat has been in the sync stream -- having been brought up by Bill, not me, because up until then I had no idea any such character existed. The book that came up before -- for example, in "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill" (January 16) -- was not the same one, but it also had a shoe theme: Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes.

According to Wikipedia, there have been no fewer than 87 Pete the Cat books published. It appears that only these two have shoes in the title.

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When Pete the Cat first came up on this blog, it was in connection with the theme of spectacles with mismatched lenses, which brings us to our next sync.

This evening I was skimming a /pol/ humor thread, looking for new ethically modified memes (Bruce keeps demanding more!). I didn't really find anything, but I did notice this familiar image:

You see the kind of garbage I have to wade through to find quality memes! I admit I haven't the slightest idea what this one is trying to express -- is that supposed to be the Strait of Hormuz in the background? -- but I do know that line and those spectacles, since on February 2 I published a post titled "The power of the sun in the palm of my hand," which includes this picture:

The really wild thing is that Doc Ock's specs actually have two black lenses. In the frame I screencapped, one lens appears gold because it's reflecting the light of a fire. For a second, Doc Ock is at just the right angle for only one of his lenses to reflect the blaze, and then the moment is gone. But whoever made this incomprehensible Iran meme chose to use almost the very same frame.

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Update (minutes later): That thread also includes a meme that syncs with yesterday's post "Back to the Future":

Mud huts, Communion, and the Tree of Life

On June 20, I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus," which deals with the possible meaning of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood. The next day, June 21, I posted the "earthen dwelling" meme in "Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of a meme"; and then, on June 23, in "Plus ça change éthiquement, plus c'est la même chose," a Winnie-the-Pooh meme referencing it and using the phrase "mud hut":

Today, reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about UFOs, I unexpectedly ran into a "mud hut" reference, closely followed by a reference to Communion -- the Christian ritual, not the Whitley Strieber book.

Clelland is writing about a woman called Denise Linn, who in the late 1980s was moved by an inner voice to eat three white owl feathers. (Yes, this is a strange book.) Here he quotes Denise's own account:

Without a further thought, I put the feathers into my mouth and swallowed them. (I don't recommend this. Feathers are very hard to swallow and not sanitary, but that didn't occur to me at the time.) The inner voice continued: As you have taken owl feathers into your body, the spirit of owl has permeated your being and shall always be with you.

On the next page, we read of Denise's 1994 visit to the South African Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa, who lived in what in our more enlightened times we would call an "earthen dwelling":

When Denise entered Credo Mutwa's humble mud hut, she was awestruck by his presence.

Mutwa, it turns out, has also eaten some pretty strange stuff:

Here's where things get really strange -- Credo Mutwa also claims to have eaten an alien. He tells of being given "a small lump of gray, rather dry stuff," by a friend, and told it was the flesh of a gray alien, or the "sky gods." He and his companion ate this together in a ritual ceremony . . .

Throughout my research I have equated the owl with the gray alien. For me, these have become symbolically intertwined. Like Credo Mutwa, Denise had also eaten of a being steeped in mythic powers, and in doing so, felt she had taken on the attributes of the owl.

Every Sunday, Christians around the globe partake in the rites of holy communion, the mandatory ritual of drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh. This sacrament is performed metaphorically with wine and bread.

My own recent post about Communion, you will recall, equated the flesh and blood of Jesus with the Tree of Life. Just now I looked up this Credo Mutwa character, and the opening paragraph of his Wikipedia article informs me that "His last work was a graphic novel called The Tree of Life Trilogy." Nephi's High Mountain Vision identifies the white Tree of Life with a woman who "was exceedingly fair and white." Somewhat surprisingly given that it's the work of a Black African, Mutwa's Tree of Life Trilogy uses similar imagery: