Synchronicity: The locusts of Joel, and the traveling man

The synchronicity fairies have been drawing my attention to the biblical Book of Joel recently, as I mentioned in my post on last month's lunar eclipse:

The lunar eclipse ("blood moon") made me think of this solar eclipse, and the combination of the two made me think of the second chapter of Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2:31).

A few days ago, I was looking through this blog's drafts folder, found an old unfinished post called "Do the locusts have a king?" [since finished] and started working on it again. It begins by quoting the bit about the locusts in Revelation 9, mentioning parenthetically that John had pinched his imagery from Joel 2.

(There was a solar eclipse yesterday, by the way, but it was not visible in Taiwan.)

Yesterday, I checked John C. Wright's blog and found this Prayer Request:

Time for a Prayer:

Father, we ask you to Thwart the plans of those who wish to destroy our Republic.

Deliver us from Marxism.

Preserve our Republic.

O God of Justice and Judgment, bring back President Trump to his rightful place.

Restore what the locust has eaten.

Be exalted, in Jesus name, Amen.

The line I have bolded is an allusion to, you guessed it, the second chapter of Joel: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25). The full text of that verse lists various types of locusts:

Then I will compensate you for the years

That the swarming locust has eaten,

The creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust --

My great army which I sent among you (NASB).

When I was a kid in Ohio, we had names for all the different local species of grasshopper. The small green ones were called Green Guys. The ones with red legs were Pigeons. The kind that are part green and part brown were called, for reasons that remain obscure, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The biggest, baddest kind, with rough sand-colored armor and chattering wings, were called Lokeys -- from locust.

I note from online ads that a TV series called Loki -- featuring the Norse god turned comic-book character, Thor's brother -- premiered a day or two ago.

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In another recent post, I relate an encounter with a cabbage butterfly which inexplicably made me think of a Masonic dialogue about traveling from west to east.

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.

In that post, I also connected this butterfly with some material from Whitley Strieber's book The Afterlife Revolution, and with a "Masonic" incident in one of his other books.

Yesterday I was once again going through my blog's drafts folder and found one called "The nihilism of Strieber's mature vision." To complete it, I needed to track down some quotes from one of his more recent books, but I wasn't entirely sure which book it was. I decided to begin by rereading Solving the Communion Enigma (2012) first. So far it doesn't have what I'm looking for, but today I read this. Strieber is talking about leaving behind his cabin in upstate New York and moving back to his hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

As we drove down the highway on that sad morning, my cell phone rang. It was an old, dear friend, the filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who had been the first person I'd told about my 1985 encounter. . . .

Now he said, "Whitley, I just saw your woman, the [alien] woman on the cover of Communion. She came up to my car and leaned in the window while I was stuck in traffic on Fourteenth Street. . . . She asked me if I was going west. I said, 'No, I'm going east,' and she said, 'Well, that's good.'"

I knew exactly what this meant. She was not only expressing gladness that Timothy was staying but also regret at my departure.

The passage I have bolded above was also highlighted by me the first time I read the book. Strieber connects it with his own move from New York to Texas, but I saw it as a Masonic reference. However, I had completely forgotten about it until I reread it just now.

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This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins. My memory of the anecdote is a bit hazy, so I suppose I should try to track down Mr. Bronson, if he's still around.