Appeared again the Hermit has

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew character, and the first several results are all Watto, a character whose Wikipedia article includes a "Comparisons to antisemitic caricatures" section.

I figured Google would probably fix that pretty quick, so I tried the search myself to see if I would get the same results. I did, mostly, but then right in the middle of the search results there was this:

The link is to -- who knew such a page existed? -- https://www.instagram.com/popular/star-wars-jewish-character/, where you can "watch reels about star wars jewish character from people around the world." None of the videos -- sorry, I mean "reels" -- appears to feature Watto or to have anything to do with Jews. It's just a random assortment of Star Wars content -- and for some reason the very first one is this one comparing Yoda to the Hermit of the Tarot. I'd never watched an "Instagram reel" and was pretty okay with that, but sync is sync, so I clicked. As expected, there was no mention of anything remotely Jewish.

Actually, come to think of it, I can supply the missing Jewish link myself. The Golden Dawn associated each card of the Major Arcana with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the letter assigned to the Hermit was, you guessed it, yodh.

The Stone Woman again

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). I had forgotten that it includes a reference to "the 'stone woman' of Mayan tradition," synching with a song that mentions Medusa and says "Will you turn to stone?" It hasn't been too long since I posted "The Stone Woman Mystery" (June 21), which deals with two different figures called "the stone woman," one of whom is a woman who turns to stone, and also includes a painting of Medusa.

You have bound yourself with oaths

I dreamt the following lines, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Unfortunately certain key words have slipped out of my memory.

You have bound yourself with oaths the [...] take.

You have made the ancient covenant the [...] make.

My sense is that the first lacuna was 'sons of Adam," but that leaves two syllables unaccounted for. I've got nothing for the second lacuna, but I understood that the two lines were expressing the same thought twice, in different words, after the manner of the prophetic poetry of Isaiah. I understood that the song referred to evil "secret combinations" rather than to any godly covenant.

With these lines of song came an image of someone who had a long string of perhaps around 150 large blue-gray ceramic beads, most of them round but some in irregular shapes suggesting bits of antler or bone. He kept it on a shelf, and it represented his having taken the oaths referred to in the song. People would see it on his shelf and be afraid of him. He wanted people to think his string of beads was thousands of years old, but I knew that in fact he had had it made very recently to replace the lost original, hoping no one would notice how new it looked.

Update: I put on some music, and one of the songs that came on was "The Voice" by the Moody Blues. The line "Make a promise, take a vow" syncs with the dream in that it is a song that repeats the idea of taking an oath twice, in different words, using the two verbs make and take.

The National Society for the Prevention of Paddington

I ran across this image on an old 4chan thread.

It caught my eye because of the red and blue spectacles and because the character's name, Hermione, suggests (but is etymologically unrelated to) Hermit. Then I realized that the wat spelling in the meme matched the actress's surname, Watson, and I ended up on her Wikipedia page. As I scrolled down, my attention was arrested by a picture of a bear sculpture decorated with butterflies, including a blue morpho, so I scanned the nearby text to see what it was.

At the end of line, my eyes jumped back to the beginning of that same line instead of to the next one, and so I read that prior to the release of film Paddington, Watson participated in a project to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Paddington.

I guess they didn't raise enough.

Seven twenty-two

I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was reading White Crows, and one of the characters checks the time and says, "It's seven twenty-two now."

Now, about an hour later, as I'm typing this, the Global Goblet is on the TV across the room, Argentina vs. Switzerland. They keep replaying a few seconds where numbers 7 and 22 are the only Swiss players on the screen.

Incipit liber primus

But Men shall remember Atlantis's name

Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,

It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell

Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.

We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old 

May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.

High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!

Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.

No soup for you! But here's a skeletal humanoid deer creature

The sync fairies just will not let up on this theme. I found this while searching for a clip-art image of a bowl of soup.

Update: The humanoid deer creature in this post is labeled GRIM STONE. apparently the stage name of a Canadian musical artist. WG left a comment saying that a character in one of the video games she plays "is a deer-man in shape if not substance" and providing a couple of links. I didn't think the character looked all that deer-like, but the second link, showing customizable "cosmetics" for the character, showed several alternate helmets. I clicked on the one that looked most antlery:

It's called the Oberon Ferosh Helmet (who names these things? Ira Gershwin?), and two designers are credited: malayu and The_Grimmrock. That latter name is obviously very close to Grim Stone.

A quick check of the other helmets shows that none of them are designed by The_Grimmrock, and when I search for "grimmrock," this helmet design is the first hit.

The double-m means his name could also be read as "the grim Mr. Ock" -- Otto Octavius before he completed his doctorate?