The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)

So I was listening to various songs from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence, and YouTube decided that what I really wanted to listen to next was a Fleetwood Mac song called "The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)."

Fleetwood Mac is a band I associate with synchronicity because one Christmas when I was a teenager, I gave my father a Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a T-shirt that said "Only you know if you're hungry" -- and he gave me the same Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a sweatshirt said "Only you know if you're hungry"! Despite that, I don't really know their music very well and had never heard of this particular song.

The first thing that caught my attention was the picture that accompanied the song on YouTube -- a naked guy on a white horse, suggesting the Sun card of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

Looking up the picture, I found that it was from the cover of the 1969 album Then Play On -- which was strange, because "The Green Manalishi" wasn't on that album and wasn't even recorded until 1970. After a bit of searching, though, I found that it was included as one of four "bonus tracks" on the Deluxe Edition of Then Play On released by Rhino Records (!) in 2013.

The phrase "two prong crown" also caught my attention. I have been reading Unsong, and in the novel the devil has a weapon called a bident ("like a trident, but with two points instead of three"). The name caught my attention because of its similarity to the name of a certain American politician.

Yesterday, when one of my readers suggested a possible astrological significance of the date January 8, 2021, I had to consult an ephemeris. I was 99% sure which astrological symbol represented Pluto, but I looked it up just to be sure. The reference work I consulted explained that the symbol consisted of "Pluto's circle and a cross or bident." Up to that point, I had assumed that the bident was Scott Alexander's invention, but it turns out it's been a standard attribute of Hades/Pluto all along. In my astrological post, I gave bident the parenthetical definition "like a trident with only two prongs" -- similar to Alexander's wording, but (for no particular reason) using the word prongs instead of points.

So when serendipity threw a "two prong crown" my way (crowns being like tridents in that they generally have more than two prongs), I sat up and took notice.

What about the titular "manalishi," though? Is that even a word? Did they mean maharishi or something?

I looked it up, of course, but before I get into that, let me remind you that in my recent post God and dog at the Panama Canal, I had occasion to mention the coin sídhe, legendary faery dogs of Celtic folklore. And, unlike the Black Dogs that are their counterparts in England, the coin sídhe are green.

According to Infogalactic, this is how "The Green Manalishi" came to be written:

[Peter] Green has explained that he wrote the song after experiencing a drug-induced dream, in which he was visited by a green dog which barked at him. He understood that the dog represented money. "It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song."

This is not a coinsídhence, because nothing is ever a coinsídhence.