A butterfly Mason?

Sometimes I write something I think is just too bizarre to publish -- and then I usually publish it anyway, and as often as not I soon get an email from some stranger saying, "You too? What an amazing coincidence!"

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Early this afternoon, I was sitting in my living room. We have a large window in the front, but it was a very sunny day and the curtains were drawn. Suddenly, my tomcat Geronimo (a highly accomplished jumper) got between the window and the curtain and started jumping up on the glass again and again like a maniac. My wife said there must be a bird or something outside, so I popped out to take a look.

It wasn't a bird; it was a white cabbage butterfly, steadily beating its wings and flying directly into the windowpane. The glass was of course an impassable barrier, but it wouldn't alter its course in the slightest, and the result was that it just sort of hovered there. Now everyone knows that a normal butterfly's flight path resembles that of a drunken skywriter. Straight lines are simply not in their repertoire; nor is this sort of persistence when confronted with an impassable obstacle. Nevertheless, it persisted.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east. (I'm not a Freemason, but one picks up these things.) The feeling that I was somehow having this dialogue with the butterfly -- ridiculous on its face! -- was unmistakable. The whole time, the butterfly kept flying persistently straight into the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass, a highly neurotic tomcat kept bouncing up and down like a superball.

Finally I snapped out of whatever passing trance the butterfly had put me in and gently shooed it away from the window. It immediately resumed normal butterfly behavior, and the cat settled down.

Checking a compass later, I found that it had indeed been flying at a perfect 90-degree azimuth, from west to east.

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The weird feeling that I had been "communicating" (if reciting a stock dialogue can be called that!) with the butterfly made me remember that last year I had experienced a synchronicity in connection with the idea that the spirits of the dead can appear as moths -- I had read about this in Whitley Strieber's Afterlife Revolution and then heard the same thing shortly thereafter from a Taiwanese associate. Well, I thought, this was a cabbage butterfly, not a moth, but it's close anyway.

When I looked up my old post about the moth synchronicity, though, I found something that I had forgotten. The post showed the cover of The Afterlife Revolution -- illustrated with a picture of a white cabbage butterfly!

I ended the post thus:

I wonder how common this association is? I know Aristotle used the same Greek word to refer both to the soul and to the cabbage butterfly. (By coincidence, this same species of non-moth appears to have been chosen by Strieber's entomologically confused cover illustrator.)

I had forgotten that about Aristotle, too, but he does in fact use the word psyche ("soul"), in History of Animals 5.19, as a name for those insects that arise "out of those caterpillars which arise on leaves of green, especially on those of the cabbage-plant."

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Coming back to the ridiculous idea of a butterfly being a Mason, I remembered that Freemasonry's central symbol is the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that in the Rudyard Kipling story "The Butterfly That Stamped," a butterfly stamps its foot and makes King Solomon's palace (close enough!) disappear and then reappear. (It is actually Djinns that do this, but Solomon has arranged for them to make it look as if the butterfly is making it happen.)

Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, "Stamp again, little brother. Give me back my Palace, most great magician." . . . So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.

Then I thought about the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations.

Building up foundations sounds like a mason's work, does it not? Buttercup is a bit like butterfly, but not quite close enough to be satisfying. Ah, but what's the very first thing Wikipedia has to say about the Foundations? "The Foundations were a British soul band." Soul = psyche = cabbage butterfly.

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Since Whitley Strieber had entered into this synch-stream, I thought of his "nine knocks" incident, documented in Chapter 11 of his book Transformation (a synonym for butterfly-style metamorphosis). Strieber recounts how he was at home, reading an essay by John Gliedman about quantum entanglement, when he noticed that his two cats were beginning to behave strangely, as if they are terrified.

The cats' fear didn't make sense to me at all. I decided there must be some animal outside, perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gleidman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality.

In his book A New World, Strieber refers back to this incident and connects it with Freemasonry.

I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry where when someone is elevated to the 33rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted.

He repeats this assertion in The Super Natural.

Also, when entering the thirty-third degree, a Mason must knock on the door of the lodge nine times in three groups of three.

I know basically nothing about the higher degrees of Masonry, but certainly "three distinct knocks" is a thing, and it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes did three groups of three. Anyway, the point here is that Strieber, just like me today, (1) saw his cats behaving strangely, (2) assumed it was because of an animal outside, and then instead (3) observed something which he connected with Masonic ritual.