Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Dark Maga, Dark Magus


Possible sync development here.

Sunday, March 27: I post "The New Orleans Saint"; the sync fairies are yet again drawing my attention to Joan of Arc.

Monday, March 28: I become aware of the #DarkMAGA meme.

Tuesday, March 29: John Dee pings my radar and I start reading a biography of him. Hours later, I get sync feedback.

Dark = d'Arc. I've posted on this before.

Maga (feminine of magus) means "witch" -- which is what Joan's enemies accused her of being.

According to Wikipedia, John Dee's surname comes from the Welsh word for "black." In other words, his name was John Dark. Dee is commonly referred to as a "magus."

No idea where this is going, but I'm keeping my eyes open.

1 comment:

Ben Pratt said...

Wm,

For whatever reason I keep coming back to John D. Lee, which is of course pronounced John Dee Lee. His middle name was Doyle.

Lee's surname is English and comes from the dative form of Old English leah, meaning a meadow or clearing.

Lee is apparently named after his maternal grandfather John Doyle, who descends from Dubliners. According to Wikipedia, the Irish surname Doyle comes from Dubhghall, composed of 'dubh "black" + gall "stranger"' and applied to Danes. This is as opposed to the "fair foreigners" called Fiannghall, as in Fingal County in Ireland and Felix Mendelssohn's The Hebrides AKA Fingal's Cave Overture. "Fair foreigners" was applied to Norwegians and eventually Scottish Gaels in the Hebrides. Anyway, that first element "dubh" is cognate with the Welsh "du", source of John Dee's surname.

Naively going with the first of each of these meanings, except selecting Dark to echo your comment above, John D. Lee's name meaning would be written out as John Dark Stranger Meadow, which is striking considering that Lee was the only alleged participant to be convicted for the massacre of California-bound emigrants from Arkansas at Mountain Meadows in Utah during the Utah War. Dark Stranger Meadow, indeed.

All the above might mean nothing, but it's interesting anyway.

Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting

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