Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this

Some people call them snake-eyes, but to me they look like mice

-- They Might Be Giants, "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes"

In my post "Jonas, Jason, Sonja," I quoted Unsong and linked to an earlier post ("American politician spontaneously combusts") which had quoted the same passage. The earlier post had quoted three paragraphs, though, of which the later one only quoted two. The third paragraph was:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

This is explaining why George W. Bush spontaneously combusted: because Dylan Alvarez, of the terrorist organization Boojum, had hacked his teleprompter to include the name Sonja Horah, thus tricking Bush into pronouncing the "Mortal Name" -- Jahorah, said in the novel to be the true pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton -- which causes instant death to any who utter it.

Saying Sonja Horah, then, is fatal because it is also Son Jahorah -- the syllable Son followed by (what is in the novel) a name of God. This construction -- son plus a name of God, without an intervening of (as we should say "the Son of God") -- made me think of this revelation reported by early Mormon apostle Orson Pratt:

There is one revelation that this people are not generally acquainted with. I think it has never been published, but probably it will be in the Church History. It is given in questions and answers. The first question is, "What is the name of God in the pure language?" The answer says, "Ahman." "What is the name of the Son of God?" Answer, "Son Ahman -- the greatest of all the parts of God excepting Ahman." "What is the name of men?" "Sons Ahman," is the answer. "What is the name of angels in the pure language?" "Anglo-man."

I've always wondered about this. Was it meant to be an alterative etymology of "Son of Man," with "Son Ahman" being misinterpreted as "Son o' Man"? Anyway, the parallel with Sonja Horah is interesting.

The Unsong passage quoted is also of course a modification of the ending of the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark":

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Though it has since come to refer to sarcasm, the word snark was originally coined by Carroll as a "portmanteau" (another Carrollism) of snake and shark. In the context of a post connecting Jonas (swallowed by a big fish) with the dove and Sonja with the serpent, this seems significant.

From the snake-shark, my mind jumped to the extinct reptilian "sharks" known as ichthyosaurs. There is in some of C. S. Lewis's juvenilia, published in a book called Boxen, a character known as "Mr. Icthus-oress" (or sometimes "Ick-this-oress") who "made his fortune playing the harp and got his name by fighting an icthus-oress." Although there is no indication that Mr. Icthus-oress is himself a mouse, his two sons are Tom Mouse and Bob Mouse. (Once, when my brother and I had occasion to attend a Scientology meeting under false names and false pretenses -- a highly entertaining experience! -- we signed in (yes, you have to sign in) as Thomas Maus and Robert Maus. Perhaps someday a Co$ operative, going through some old cold-case files, will find this post and think, "Aha! We've finally got you, 'Robert Maus'!")

Who else is known for playing the harp and got one of his names by fighting a monstrous reptile? The god of the lyre, Pythian Apollo -- who got that name by fighting the Python. Just as Mr. Icthus-oress was the father of two mice, Chryses in the Iliad prays to "Apollo of the Mice" (Apollo Smintheus, from smintha, an Aeolian dialect word for "mouse"), and archaeologists have discovered bronze mice used in connection with the worship of Apollo. Another of Apollo's epithets, Mousegetes, means "leader of the Muses," but look at the first five letters of the transliteration! (In Latin as in English, but a single letter differentiates a muse from a mouse.)

Obviously Apollo didn't have a son named Bob (though Socrates did, Lamprocles being a perfect Greek "translation" of the name Robert), but if Aleister Crowley is to be trusted (there's an "if" for you!), he did have a son named Tom. Here is the Great Beast expounding on the Kabbalistic meaning of the nursery rhyme "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son":

This is one of the more exoteric of these rimes. In fact, it is not much better than a sun-myth. Tom is Toum, the God of the Sunset (called the Son of Apollo, the Piper, the maker of music)

This "Toum" must be the Egyptian god Atum -- occasionally thus translilterated -- who was specifically the god of the setting sun (cf. the etymologically unrelated word autumn, the sunset of the year). I have never heard of Atum being called the Son of Apollo, but such an identification in the interpretatio graeca seems prima facie plausible -- that a subordinate sun god like Atum would be declared the son of the main sun god. Calling Apollo "the Piper" reinforces, by way of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the rodent connection.

It is perhaps worth noting in passing that Crowley also did "Hickory Dickory Dock" ("The mouse is the Ego; Mus, 'a mouse,' being only Sum, 'I am,' spelt Qabalistically backwards") and "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" ("The pumpkin is of course the symbol of resurrection, as is familiar to all students of the story of Jonah and the gourd").

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Coming back to "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son," I currently own an orange and white cat called Q*bert, though these days he is just as often called Cucumber. This is partly because of the phonetic similarity in English, and partly because in Chinese the stereotypical name for a "yellow" (including orange or ginger) animal  would be 小黃, and the Chinese word for "cucumber" is 小黃瓜. Cucumbers are of course cucurbits -- fellow members with the pumpkin of the gourd family -- and cucumber even bears a certain resemblance to kikayon, the original Hebrew name of Jonah's "gourd."

Q*bert is my second orange and white cat. The first, a family pet when I was a young child, was called Tom. One of my brothers (not 'Thomas Maus,' the other one) used to call him Tom-Tom the Drum-Drum -- a double "Tom" followed by a reference to a musical instrument. Q*bert, then, may be considered somewhat interchangeable with Tom Mouse (Atum), son of Mr. Icthus-oress (Apollo) and brother of Bob Mouse. This is confirmed by the realization that if Q*bert had a brother, he would very likely be called R*bert -- or B*b to his friends. Our cat Tom had a sibling, a potential stand-in for Bob Mouse. She was called Mariel, after a book my sister had just read at the time: Mariel of Redwall, one of a series of Brian Jacques novels about -- of all things! -- anthropomorphic mice. One of these mice -- appearing only in Mariel and not in any of the 21 other Redwall books -- is a dormouse called Bobbo: Bob Mouse.

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Thinking about Tom and Bob Mouse -- and connecting Tom and Bob with tohu and bohu -- reminded me of the Dark Mice. This is from a November 8, 2015, entry in my sync log.

[This] morning, I watched lots of Mark Dice videos on YouTube. Mark Dice does two kinds of videos: asking people on the street questions and letting them make fools of themselves, and Illuminati conspiracy stuff.

At around 6:30, watched Spectre, the new James Bond movie. While we were in the theater, before the movie started, I noticed that “Mark Dice” was an anagram/spoonerism of “dark mice,” and I dwelt on that phrase for a while . . . .

Before the movie, there was a commercial involving a girl and her parents all wearing Mickey-Mouse-ear headbands (actually Minnie Mouse in the girl’s case, complete with a polka-dot bow).

In Spectre, there’s a scene where Bond is going to spy on a meeting of the titular secret society. He’s stopped by a bouncer who asks who he is, and he replies (in Italian, with English subtitles), “I’m Mickey Mouse.” Later, when they discover Bond spying and try to kill him, the same bouncer guy says, “Ciao, Mickey Mouse!”

In another scene in Spectre, Bond is sitting in a chair in a hotel room, and a mouse appears. Bond pulls out his gun, points it at the mouse, and says something like, “What do you want? Who sent you here?” The mouse runs away into a hole (which later leads to Bond’s discovering a secret room).

Later that night, went out to . . . take a walk. “Dark Mice” came back to mind, and I was thinking of making a “Dark Mice” tarotesque card. I was also thinking about the one-legged golden chicken (probably because V mentioned a strange dream earlier). Thought first of a card with the Chicken, with two dark mice in the background, then of the Chicken and Dark Mice as two separate cards. Thought about how the Chicken was one of the three symbols of evil in Bhavacakra, and also of how a one-legged golden chicken was sort of connected to the three-legged golden toad. On my walk I ran across an actual toad –– the first I’ve seen in years, and the first ever in our neighborhood. Shortly thereafter, I realized that Mickey and Minnie –– two black mice –– were the “dark mice,” and I noticed the connections with the Bond film. Then, on my way back, I passed a house with a large lighted window, silhouetted in which were what looked like two large cut-outs, of Mickey and Minnie Mouse –– such a creepily precise echo of the whole “dark mice” train of thought that it spooked me . . . .

It also occurs to me that Mickey ears as a symbol of Illuminati mind control are prominent in the types of videos that Mark Dice makes, though I don’t know if Mark himself has commented on that particular symbol. . . .

In the car on the way home from the movie, talked about different Bond actors. Gwen mentioned Dr. No as the first Bond film. Later, at home, searched for “James Bond” + “mice,” and found that characters called the “Three Blind Mice” -- black men, and therefore dark mice -- try to kill Bond in Dr. No.

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Why do I spend so much time pursuing these convoluted coincidence-driven trains of thought (if "thought" is even the right word), when so few of them reach any intelligible conclusion? The easy answer is "because I must" -- but that's not really true. This is something I choose to do (and I chose to do it much less in the past), and that choice must have some motivation.

Another easy answer is that it's just a meaningless and perhaps slightly pathological hobby -- that, just as playing a violent video game gives one a fake version of the satisfaction of defeating one's enemies, without the inconvenience of actually fighting, so synchromysticism offers an ersatz "eureka" feeling without requiring the hard work of making actual discoveries about the real world. I don't really believe that, though. I really do think I'm doing something potentially important, not just engaging in meaningless self-indulgence.

While the majority of my sync-connections seem to lead nowhere, I think that the discipline of noticing connections, and of being aware of things that just "pop into my head," makes me more receptive to revelation when it does come. I'm casting my net -- asking, seeking, knocking -- maintaining a constant attitude of "Are you trying to tell me something?" "For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not" -- so said Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, the only friend of Job whose speech was not condemned by God. Being alert for things that turn up "once, yea twice" is listening for the voice of God.

I also think that coincidence as such -- particularly the troublesome, seemingly-oxymoronic category of the meaningful coincidence -- is something of great potential metaphysical importance, and that I need to keep thinking about it until I figure it out. While I obviously have great sympathy with those who say that "there are no coincidences," I find that a very hard philosophical pill to swallow.  How could there possibly be no coincidences? That seems very close to being logically impossible. I have a hunch that philosophically assimilating the "meaningful coincidence" will have metaphysical ramifications every bit as wide-ranging as assimilating the concept of "free will."