Over at Rintrah, Radagast argues against relying too heavily on the "just the flu" argument against birdemic tyranny. When you argue against forced masking, distancing, lockdowns, pecks, etc. because they are ineffective, or because the virus isn't dangerous enough to warrant them, you are implicitly conceding that similarly tyrannical measure would be acceptable if they were more effective, or if a more deadly virus were to appear -- which, sooner or later, will happen.
By focusing too much on statistics and facts -- and I have often been guilty of this myself -- we imply that that is all our objection to tyranny is based on. We imply that when faced with the question, "Should we turn the world into a police state?" the proper response is, "Well, that depends. How many lives would it save?"
Statistics are important, Radagast concedes, but birdemic protestors
don’t go there because they are convinced the IFR is 0.17% instead of 0.8%. They don’t go there because they believe the herd immunity threshold lies at 25% instead of 90%. They don’t even go there because there is no significant correlation between lockdown stringency and excess mortality. And ultimately, they don’t even go there because they believe the WEF wants to implement a Great Reset.
No, those people go there, because what happened in March 2020, is incompatible with what we are. They reject it, the way your body would reject a pig’s heart implanted under your rib-cage. They reject it, because lockdowns are incompatible with Western values. Those values are interwoven with who we are as individuals, so many of you will have rejected it without even comprehending why.
"Western values," of course, is like saying C.E. instead of A.D. We all know what it really means.
A product of our Christian heritage is that we reject cruelty against individuals with a strict passion, even when it would benefit the societal good. This is what you and your ancestors have learned, what you had ingrained into your souls, for over a thousand years.
Yes, I am talking here about a notorious Jewish hippie, a young troublemaker who angered the pharisees. A man who went around violating Levitical law, by touching people with leprosy. What’s hard-coded into our brains, is empathy for individuals. It’s easy to forget that Christianity teaches that Jesus was both God and Man, a man who didn’t just bail you out of hell, but lived a life by example.
And whether you are today a Christian, a heathen, an atheist, a follower of the path of Dharma or something else entirely, the reality remains that you have grown up in a culture that is Christian in its essence, like the proverbial fish who fails to recognize water he has always lived in. And the great innovation that Christianity brought to the Roman empire, is the fundamental dignity of the individual.
Radagast is apparently not a Christian himself, and the points he chooses to emphasize are somewhat different from those I would focus on, but his central point remains: The Global Totalitarian Coup of 2020 is wrong, not ultimately for any statistical or medical reason, but because it is fundamentally anti-Christian -- or, in other words, Satanic. No debate over details can ever lose sight of that fundamental truth.
Suppose the birdemic were ten times as deadly as it really is. Suppose masks worked. Suppose "safe and effective" were not a punchline but a literally accurate description of the pecks. Ultimately, at the level that matters, nothing would be different. God would still be God. Satan would still be Satan. Totalitarianism would still be evil. You would still have to choose.
As it is, God has made it easy for us. But if he decides to make it hard, we will still have to make the same choices, and to understand clearly the foundation on which those choices are really based.
At the time, the number 430 had no apparent significance; actually, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't the 427th anniversary of 4/27. However, yesterday (as documented in "Some sort of incoherent synchronicity going on"), knick-knack paddywhack synchronicities led me to reread my 2019 post "The numbers in the Genesis 5 genealogies." At the end of that post, I noted that for some unknown reason, Joseph Smith had modified these numbers slightly so as to make Enoch live for 430 years rather than the traditional 365.
Incidentally, Joseph Smith includes a version of this genealogy in his Book of Moses. All the numbers are the same except for Enoch's. Where Genesis has 65 + 300 = 365, Smith gives 65 + 365 = 430. I have no idea what motivated this slight and seemingly irrelevant modification, but it is interesting to note that even in changing the numbers he preserved the obviously significant number 365.
So there's the number 430, and in connection with the prophet Enoch. In "Call me Ishmael," I explained how Enoch is related not only to Dee generally and his "Enochian" system but specifically to the image of a killer whale on a hill. In that post, I refer specifically to Joseph Smith's version of the story of Enoch.
It hadn't occurred to me until today that 430 was an "Enochian" number. The sync fairies had to jog my memory by making Rod Dreher get a tattoo and then having someone post about a poorly designed "I love my dog" sticker in an irrelevant comment to a tweet about Trump. They certainly do move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform!
I've sort of been anticipating some kind of big Dee's-whale coincidence today, but now it looks as if the sync fairies will have a second chance on April 30.
I just now skimmed the Wikipedia article for "April 30" to see if anything important had happened on that day. This jumped out at me:
2013 – Willem-Alexander is inaugurated as King of the Netherlands following the abdication of Beatrix.
Why did that seem so significant? Because in my April 12 post "April 27 and the whale," I had posted about that same king in connection with that date.
One of the dearest holidays in the Netherlands is King's Day, when the Dutch honor the birthday of King Willem-Alexander. Every April 27, nearly a million people dress in orange -- the country's national color -- to attend concerts, watch boat parades, and shop at huge outdoor markets.
So Willem-Alexander was born on April 27 and acceded to the throne on April 30. Although he is now the King of the Netherlands, his title at birth (held until April 30, 1980) was Prince of Orange-Nassau. This is a link to "Sloop John B."
We come on the sloop John B My grandfather and me Around Nassau town we did roam . . .
Still not sure where this is going, but the sync fairies show no sign of dropping it.
In my April 16 post "Be he moth or be he bird," I discussed the They Might Be Giants song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth," which was based on Jonathan Lethem's "The Moth of the Bee of the Birds." The TMBG song mentions "Sleep of Reason Corporation," and I noted that this is a reference to Goya.
They Might Be Giants pinch the bee/bird/moth combo but otherwise completely rewrite the song. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is about the hummingbird moth -- a sort of moth which resembles a sort of bird which resembles a bee. This chimerical creature becomes a symbol of the breaking down of boundaries, of things that should be utterly distinct blurring together, and of Goya's "sleep of reason" that produces monsters.
Last night, I watched the Babylon Bee sketch "A Babylon Bee Update From Twitter Jail."
The video begins with Kyle Mann showing off the tattoos he got in Twitter Jail and ends with him (offscreen) saying to Elon Musk, “Hey, would you do us a solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” This ties in with my recent "Christian tattoo" sync.
Here's one of the comments to the video (square brackets in the original):
Considering Musk watches the Babylon Bee and right after BB got banned Musk announced publicly what his plans where you could say The Bee inspired the Musk to the Bird [which even if it's not true it's fun to say]
Musk is phonetically close enough to moth to make this a hit on the bee/bird/moth theme. (TMBG of course predicted Twitter long ago with "Birdhouse in Your Soul," featuring a blue canary.)
Today I was reading a banned book by an excommunicated academic -- it is probably most prudent not to mention either by name -- and I found this:
The Masters of War want you to believe them, because your fear and terror will always help fill their coffers -- and get them ready for their next war. May the Power of Truth cause the shadows of the night to flee away! Our common security comes from the building of bridges of trust, friendship and mutual understanding, not in armaments. One thinks here of the picture by Goya, "When Reason Sleeps, Monsters Are Born." Let us not live in the sleep of reason.
On April 22, I received an email about the fact that the conservative blogger and birdemic enthusiast Rod Dreher had just gotten a tattoo -- of a cross, on his forearm.
Two days later, on April 24, someone I know, a non-religious person who has no tattoos, told me that she had decided to get a tattoo -- of a cross on her forearm. She has never heard of Dreher and was certainly not influenced by him. Weird coincidence.
Today, April 26, I was thinking about the idea of a cross tattoo as a fashion statement with no religious meaning, and it made me think of this:
That's a juxtaposition of two clippings from the October 2, 2001, issue of the Columbus Dispatch; an example of the "subliminal comics" art form I was into at the time (as discussed here). I remembered that I had posted about that particular subliminal comic before, so I tried to find it by searching my own blog for the word knick-knack -- but all that came up was my 2019 post "Missile man."
When I was a very young child, I labored under the misapprehension that "this old man" -- you know, the fellow who had a knick-knack paddywhack with which he played knick-knack on, among other things, my thumb -- was actually called "missile man."
After that, I heard the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, which made me wonder if Trump was back on the platform yet, so I went to Twitter and searched for the name Trump. I don't know why the very first result that came up was a tweet from nine days before, but it was.
Trump didn’t win the election. Dr. Fauci didn’t create Covid. Biden isn’t to blame for the price of gas, the supply chain or inflation. There’s no caravan coming for your wives. No one is teaching your kids CRT or grooming them to be gay or transgender.
I found this mildly amusing because of the unintentional ambiguity. "These are lies" could be read as meaning that the above statements (i.e., the statement that Trump didn't win the election, that Biden isn't to blame for inflation, etc.) are lies. I clicked to see the replies, wondering if anyone else had noticed the same thing -- and for some unaccountable reason, one of the replies was this:
I have expanded and revamped by 2010 analysis of English translations of Dante and published it as a page so that I can update it by adding more translations in the future.
Conclusion: The most faithful translations are those of Longfellow, Singleton, Mandelbaum, and Sinclair. Esolen, Carson, Binyon, and Ciardi are the worst.
We have this sign to remind students not to leave the fan running.
“Save Our Earth!” Because, although you can’t see any pollution coming out of the fan itself, it’s understood that the fan uses electricity, which comes from power plants, which mostly burn coal. You’re “saving our earth” by indirectly causing less coal smoke to be pumped into the atmosphere.
Isn’t it interesting how the same people who understand that effortlessly — who know that of course running an electric fan all the time is bad for the environment — also tend to think that electric cars are the best thing since low-flow showerheads?
I guess if I really want to get serious about Saving Our Earth, I should consider investing in a fan that runs off a 1,000-pound rechargeable lithium-ion battery instead of plugging directly into the wall. I hear those are great for the environment.
In my January 4, 2021 post “Dark ambiguity,” I noted mainstream propaganda’s efforts to associate Trump with the word dark. Today AC linked to a long Newsweek article about #DarkMAGA memes, commenting that the attempt to make #DarkMAGA happen was obviously a continuation of this same campaign.
I’ve written about the dark/d’Arc link many times, so I was intrigued to see the word arc in the Newsweek piece; it quoted an Expert with the obviously fake name Tim Squirrell saying that the #DarkMAGA concept was a “sort of anime arc.” This especially jumped out at me because someone had recently emailed me a picture of a 2006 Japanese video game with what might be described as a “sort of anime Arc” on the cover.
This made me wonder if anyone had ever tried to make “Dark” an official Trump nickname by calling him Donald John “Dark” Trump (which would of course contain a hidden Jeanne d’Arc). I did a Google search for “donald john dark” — not bothering to add the surname — and it brought up a Reddit thread in which someone had written “In the film ‘Donnie Darko’ the boy’s name is Donald John DARK-O” — but the thread was about Trump and how his presidency had been foreshadowed by “predictive programming” in movies and such. The OP was a link to this YouTube video from October 2020.
The video tries to link Donnie Darko to Trump, showing the scene where a big anthropomorphic rabbit says the world will end in “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds.” The sum of those four numbers is 88, it informs us, which is the English gematria value of the name Trump! Really scraping the bottom of the coincidence barrel if you ask me. Then it shows photos of Trump at an Easter event next to someone in an Easter Bunny suit. When I saw that, my reaction was that it was meaningless because I had recently seen a very similar photo with Biden, meaning that probably every president poses with the Easter Bunny for Easter.
Now the spooky part. Right after watching that video, I searched Twitter for #DarkMAGA just to see what would come up. One of the first results was a link to an upcoming livestream that was going to discuss a long list of current-events topics, including “media warns of #DarkMAGA.” The stream wasn’t live yet, but for some reason I clicked the link anyway. That channel’s most recent YouTube video, posted just minutes before I watched it, was this:
Is that weird or what?
Possibly relevant: I recently posted about the appropriateness of the recent Chinese years of the Rat, Ox, and Tiger — and Bruce Charlton left a comment asking what my prediction was for next year — the Year of the Rabbit.
After another long hiatus, Richard Arrowsmith has a new post up, about how the Fire Nation attack is synchronistically related to various recent and upcoming movies.
I find these sync videos a lot of fun to watch, but I've never attempted one myself -- partly because I lack the skillz, but mostly because (with a few notable exceptions, like "Goat-killing American Jedi") my syncs relatively rarely involve movies.
I posted "Noah's eyes" on April 12 of last year, speculating that humans may originally have had eyes like chimpanzees (brown irises and black sclerae) and that Noah may have been a mutant introducing blue irises and/or white sclerae into the gene pool.
This was based on a passage from Mauricio Berger's Sealed Book of Mormon.
And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years, and begat a son, and named him Noah . . . and when he saw the newborn child, he perceived that his eyes were different, and he was afraid that Noah would be the son of a watcher, but the Spirit of the Lord rested on Lamech, comforting his heart by making him know that he was not a descendant of the watchers, but it was the beginning of a new human progeny.
I had been reading Berger's Sealed Book because it had the endorsement of the highly intelligent John P. Pratt, but by the time I posted "Noah's eyes," I had already concluded that the book was very obviously fraudulent. Nevertheless, when I read that bit about how "his eyes were different," it rang true.
Well, it turns out that Noah's "different eyes" are a legitimately ancient tradition, found in a fragment from the Book of Noah which has come down to us as part of the Enoch literature. (This is presumably Berger's source, since he is obviously familiar with the Book of Enoch.)
And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son. And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness.
And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah. And he said unto him: 'I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious. And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels, and I fear that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth. And now, my father, I am here to petition thee and implore thee that thou mayest go to Enoch, our father, and learn from him the truth, for his dwelling-place is amongst the angels.'
Nothing seems more likely than that Noah's "bright" (blue/white) eyes should have been progressively exaggerated over time until they became eyes that lit up the whole house like the sun when he opened them.
The Resurrection is the single most important Christian doctrine. "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" (1 Cor. 15:14).
Direct contact with resurrected beings is possible, and it is possible to know for certain that this doctrine is true.
Last November, I thought of some lines from Walt Kelly's old malapropism-driven comic strip Pogo and tried to track them down online. In the strip I was thinking of, one of the characters says, "A frog's not a bird. It's a behemoth!" and another character responds with,
Oh, be he moth or be he bird, He's the prettiest frog I've ever heard.
I couldn't remember anything about the context, not even which two characters had this little exchange (Churchy and Howland maybe?), so I thought I'd try to find the strip.
Unfortunately, Calvin and Hobbes is the only comic cool enough to get its own search engine, so I had to use regular Google. When I put be he moth or be he bird into the search box, all that came up was the They Might Be Giants Song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth." As a long-time TMBG listener, I knew that song well, but I had never made the connection to the Pogo line. It's quite a striking one, though; how often do you find be(e), moth, and bird juxtaposed like that?
The TMBG song was almost certainly not inspired by some obscure Pogo strip from who knows how long ago. (My mother has scads of old Pogo books from the forties and fifties, and I read them all many times as a child.) They credit Jonathan Lethem as their source, one of his "promiscuous songs" (free lyrics for bands to use or adapt) called "The Moth of the Bee of the Birds," which is about a sort of sexual Bartleby who "would prefer not to" have anything to do with the birds and the bees.
Pollinate? I’d prefer not to I’d prefer anything to being the moth of the bee of the birds
Find a mate? I’d prefer not to I’d prefer anything to bee-ing, to bird-ing the moth of the bee of the birds . . .
They Might Be Giants pinch the bee/bird/moth combo but otherwise completely rewrite the song. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is about the hummingbird moth -- a sort of moth which resembles a sort of bird which resembles a bee. This chimerical creature becomes a symbol of the breaking down of boundaries, of things that should be utterly distinct blurring together, and of Goya's "sleep of reason" that produces monsters.
I made a note of this Pogo/TMBG connection back in November but didn't post about it because it didn't seem connected to anything else. Now, though, the word behemoth has appeared in the sync-stream, and things are different. I posted about behemoth, and its connections to Enoch and to killer whales, in a post titled "Call me Ishmael" -- the famous opening sentence of Herman Melville's greatest novel, Moby-Dick. Melville's greatest short story is without question Bartleby, The Scrivener, and its defining line is, "I would prefer not to."
There's also the fact that the Pogo cartoonist's name is Walt Kelly.
In my recent post "April 27 and the whale," I mentioned encountering that date -- the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision and my post about my own whale dream -- as the date of a Dutch holiday on which people wear orange to honor their king. As detailed in that post, this was a synchronicity because I had twice recently encountered the book title The King in Orange. The King in Yellow is of course a much better known title, and at first I thought the "orange" version was simply a mistake, but then I happened to hear an interview with the author of a book actually called The King in Orange -- and he spent much of the interview talking about Pepe the Frog!
I mention this because of the Pogo reference to "the prettiest frog I ever heard" and because "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" includes a similar reference to something orange-not-yellow.
Got a brand new shipment of electrical equipment
It's addressed to the bottom of the sea
Send a tangerine-colored nuclear submarine
With a sticker that says STP
Windshield wiper washer fluid spraying in the air
Head lice under hats lie in the headlights everywhere
Subatomic waves to the underwater caves
Of the bee of the bird of the moth
The Beatles made a yellow submarine famous, but here we have an orange one.
"The underwater caves of the bee" is also significant, because just last November I was writing about underwater bees: "What a weird and evocative image -- swarms of honeybees crossing the ocean as if in 'a whale in the midst of the sea'! (Bees in the belly of the beast is also a link to Samson.)" Note that I linked the Book of Mormon image of bees in a "whale" (actually a submarine) to Samson's finding bees in the carcass of a lion. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" associates a submarine with a bee in an underwater cave. Dee's whale roared "like a cave of lions." Whales, bees, caves, lions. I have even associated John Dee with the bee via "Sloop John B," making Dee and Bee interchangeable.
One final note: I first became aware of The King in Yellow back in 2000, because someone had used a Markov chain program to created a computer-generated mashup of The King in Yellow and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as similar hybrid works like Alice in Elsinore. Such chimerical texts are very much in the spirit of "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth."
Back in 2014, I dreamed of seeing a whale with many eyes on TV, and the dream "came true" the next day when I saw a very similar image in a Keanu Reeves movie on TV. It seemed like such a pointless thing to be made precognitively aware of, and I commented at the time, "None of my precognitions so far have been of anything that could even remotely be considered important or meaningful."
That was eight years ago. The arc of the synchronistic universe is long, but it does sometimes bend toward meaning.
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In a comment yesterday, Carol has alerted me to the possible relevance of "The Beast Below," an episode of Doctor Who which was first broadcast on April 10, 2010. I've never seen it, or any other Doctor Who episode, but judging from Carol's summary and others found online, I think she's right.
"The Beast Below" is set in the distant future (29th century), when Earth has become uninhabitable due to solar flares. The British population, led by Queen Elizabeth X, survives aboard the gigantic Starship UK. They are all unaware of the fact that their starship has been built around the body of a "star whale" which serves as its means of propulsion, and the whale is controlled by sending painful electrical impulses into its brain. It is believed that if they stop torturing the whale, it will break free and the people of Starship UK will be doomed. This unpleasant fact is revealed to each citizen from time to time, at which point they must choose either to accept it and have their memory of the revelation erased or else register protest and -- well . . .
Amy is taken . . . to one of many voting booths set up on the ship . . . . She is shown a video about the truth of Starship UK, and then asked if she wants to protest the truth or forget it, the latter causing her short-term memory to be wiped. Amy chooses to forget, and creates a video to herself to prevent the Doctor from learning the truth, before the mind wipe. The Doctor is curious as what "protest" will cause and activates it, sending him and Amy into the maw of a giant creature below the ship. The Doctor induces the creature to vomit, allowing them to escape back to the ship. The Doctor and Amy meet Queen Elizabeth X, known as Liz 10, the ruler of the ship.
The Doctor's meeting a Queen Elizabeth parallels Dr. Dee's relationship with Elizabeth I -- and just like Dee, the Doctor enters the maw of a otherworldly whale and survives. As you can see in the illustration at the top of this post, the "star whale" shares an unwhalelike feature with the many-eyed whale (also called a "beast") I saw in my 2014 dream: "feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish."
In "The Beast Below," it is eventually discovered that the star whale came to Earth willingly, moved by compassion, to help the people of the UK escape, and that none of the torture had ever been necessary in the first place. The people had thought they had captured this beast and forced it to serve them, but in fact the whale was motivated by selfless love and willingly endured the unnecessary tortures inflicted on it by the ignorant humans. In the end, the torture is stopped and the starship continues on its way. It is decided that the people should no longer be kept in ignorance of the whale. Amy recites this rhyme:
In bed above, we're deep asleep
While greater love lies further deep.
This dream must end, this world must know:
We all depend on the beast below.
I don't know if the allusion is intentional, but to me this calls to mind Zarathustra's roundelay (Nietzsche), which I translated in 2019.
O man, give ear! Deep midnight speaketh; canst thou hear? "From sleep, from sleep, From dreaming deep I woke and rose; The world is deep, More deep than day would e’er suppose. How deep her woe! Joy—deeper still than heartache, she. Though woe cry, 'Go!' All joys long for eternity— For deep on deep eternity!"
"In bed above, we're deep asleep" also calls to mind the chorus of the Barenaked Ladies song "Brian Wilson," which recently came up in connection with Dee's whale.
Because I'm lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did
Well I am lying in bed
Just like Brian Wilson did, yeah
Carol ended her comment with this:
Final point: John Dee's whale was God - Doctor Who's star whale was a savior, responding to the cries of frightened children.
Carol is not the only one to have made this connection. When I was searching for an image of the star whale with which to illustrate this post, one of the first hits that came up was an old post by Carmen Andres called "The great love of star whales and God." Andres writes:
I’m thinking more of the idea of a being enduring suffering of great proportions and yet responding not by withdrawing life giving and sustaining power and salvation but increasing it. I see that a profound echo of Jesus, who came to earth in love and compassion to save us from destruction and darkness. Yet none of us understood; even the best of us who did not abandon him did not comprehend who he really was and what he could do, and the worst of us tortured and executed him. And after voluntarily enduring unimaginable pain and suffering, he could have justly and understandably abandoned us, even destroyed us. But instead he explodes with abundance—with a profusion of unimaginable love, life and salvation.
I also think of a passage in Joseph Smiths's writings, about -- who else? -- Enoch, in which the Earth itself is the longsuffering "beast below":
And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?
And when Enoch heard the earth mourn, he wept, and cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth? Wilt thou not bless the children of Noah? (Moses 7:48-49)
I come back again to Dee's vision of a whale on a hill, "roaring like a cave of lions." In the angels' interpretation, the hill is the world, the waters are the bosom of God, and the whale is the Spirit of God. Why is the Holy Spirit -- more often characterized as a gentle dove or a still, small voice -- roaring like a cave of lions? Is it not a cry of pain? A beached whale is in agony. The Spirit of God leaves its natural home in the bosom of God and enters this corrupt and broken world, the devil's domain, suffering whatever is necessary to save God's children. "Knowest thou the condescension of God?" (1 Ne. 11:16). "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4:30).
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In "The Beast Below," the people are "deep asleep," wilfully deluded, having chosen to make themselves forget the uncomfortable fact of their dependence on the suffering whale. Despite their status as "sleeper," they are not passive and surrendered but precisely the opposite: They have seized the whale by force and tortured it into doing what they want -- not realizing that none of that was ever necessary, that it had come to them of its own free will and wanted to help them all along. This ties into the LSD theme of the current sync-stream and William Wildblood's 2017 post "Drugs and Spirituality." Taking psychedelics is of course an attempt to lose oneself, to abdicate will and enter an egoless state in which things just happen -- but Wildblood points out that it is at the same time an attempt to force a transcendent state.
The point is that it is an artificial means to try to take the kingdom of heaven by storm and therefore a fundamentally irreligious thing to do. It is putting your will above God’s. If he wants you to experience transcendent states he is perfectly capable of giving them to you. However he knows the strong likelihood that a person gets attached to these states and loses the reason for being on the spiritual path in the first place which is to get closer to God through the heart not by means of drugs. The latter will make the former more difficult not less so.
I have never used drugs, but many years ago when I was tempted to try to force things through roughly analogous "magical" means, I used to chide myself with a line from the Book of Job: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?" -- the point being that what is forced is not real, that if you can draw it out with a hook it's not the genuine Leviathan. I haven't thought about that for years, but now how strange it seems that I should have chosen landing a whale, of all things, as my metaphor!
To the Doctor Who line "In bed above, we're deep asleep" the synchronicity fairies have added "just like Brian Wilson." The name Brian is thought to derive from the Old Celtic element bre, meaning "hill"; and Wilson is of course from Will (the first element of William), meaning "will, desire." There is a clear connection here to idea of forcefully drawing a whale out of the water and up onto a hill -- which is what Brian Wilson was symbolically attempting with his drug use. In Dee's vision, though, the whale comes to the hill of its own accord.
And suddenly The Firmament and the waters were joyned together, and the Whale CAME, like unto a legion of stormes: or as the bottomless Cave of the North when it is opened: and she was full of eyes of every side.
The Prophet said, Stand still, but they trembled. The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions
In "Whale Music," I noted Brian Wilson's (and Dee's) characterization as a naked man. This connects with another part of William Wildblood's drug post.
You see, drugs operate in the world of experience but spirituality, true spirituality, the spirituality of the saints, is a matter of innocence meaning precisely that it is a natural not artificial expression of what you are inside.
Nakedness is innocence -- in animals, babies, and prelapsarian man -- but for a grown man to go naked is an artificial attempt to force or simulate innocence (a self-contradictory pursuit), to crawl back into the womb or return to Eden. Drugs, seen as an artificial way of simulating the spontaneous mystical consciousness of primitive man, are the same sort of thing.
On April 6, I left this comment on my own post:
I could swear that when I checked the THC website last night, the latest episode was called “The Book of Enoch,” but I just checked it again now to get the link, and it’s not there. I must have dreamed it.
This drove me crazy for a week. I knew I hadn't dreamed it. I could even remember the background illustration -- what looked at first like three dark, hunched figures, until two of them resolved themselves into the wings of the other. I thought the episode must have been posted and then removed for some reason, maybe because Carlwood had accidentally posted it too soon. I kept checking THC every day to see if it would reappear, but it never did. Last night the mystery was finally resolved, when I happened to click the wrong thing on YouTube and found that the April 6 "Book of Enoch" show wasn't on THC but on Jonathan Pageau's channel: "The Book of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Modern Crisis." I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but he begins by talking about the fall of Adam and Eve.
There's a sense in which the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was going to be given to Adam and Eve ultimately, but the reason why it made them fall was because they took it too fast. They took it through an act of desire. It says that, you know, the woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, and so she reached up and grabbed it for herself, and because of that gesture of taking it for yourself and taking it in desire, that is what will ultimately lead to a fall.
In other words, they tried to draw out Leviathan with a hook -- or, as William Wildblood puts it, to "take the kingdom of heaven by storm." They took by force what God was actually willing to give them, just like the people of Starship UK torturing the star whale.
The ideal is to be the opposite of our metaphorical "Brian Wilson," or of the citizens of Starship UK; to do the opposite of lying in bed naked doing drugs, the opposite of torturing a star whale into submission an then lying to yourself about it. ("For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.") This dream must end, this world must know. The ideal is to be fully awake and conscious, knowing what we do and why, and at the same time to be fully surrendered to God.
What's it about? Here's how Margot Mifflin's 1990 review in The New York Times, titled "Bad Vibrations," begins.
The story of the Beach Boy Brian Wilson is a tangled yarn of excess, knotted with the kind of pathetic drama only actors and rock stars seem capable of living. Brian Wilson has been riddled with mental problems, is 96 percent deaf in one ear, has snorted an entire gram of cocaine in one breath, used to keep his piano in a sandbox and, in the early 1970's, stayed in bed for the better part of four years. His Beach Boy brother Dennis kidnapped his own child and then killed himself by diving - drunk - off a yacht. His father was a jealous opportunist who, in 1969, for easy money, sold the rights to every song Brian Wilson had ever written. Add wealth, fame and a steady diet of drugs to his biography and you get a story that would strain credulity even if it were printed as fiction.
Paul Quarrington's ''Whale Music'' is, redundantly enough, a fictionalization of Brian Wilson's life.
This nimble portrait of a rock 'n' roll legend turned Beverly Hills eccentric will amuse anyone who's followed the misfortunes of real-life ex-superstars.
So there are Hills as well as whales.
The cover of the first edition shows a naked man at a piano, and nakedness is mentioned in the Penguin blurb, too.
Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music."
In the account of Dee and Kelley's whale vision, the angels say that "the naked man is Dee."
So, despite one commenter's misgivings, I don't think "We come on the sloop John Dee" was noise. There seems to be a real connection there.
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Note added: Apparently Brian Wilson is really big in Toronto -- hometown not only of Paul Quarrington, author of Whale Music, but also of Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, who wrote a song called "Brian Wilson." Here's the cover art:
Here we find Brian Wilson juxtaposed with the word naked and with, if not exactly a whale, at least a large air-breathing fish (since smoking implies lungs).
Craig Davis commented that when I talk about John Dee, it always makes him think of the Jimmy Buffett song "Ellis Dee (He Ain't Free)." For me, the song it always puts in my head is "Sloop John B" as sung by the Beach Boys on Pet Sounds.
See how the mainsail sets
Thinking about this led me to the Wikipedia article for "Pet Sounds" because I had a hunch that it might have been released on April 27. It wasn't, but I did find this:
"Run, James, Run" was the working title for the instrumental "Pet Sounds", the suggestion being that it would be offered for use in a James Bond movie.
The reader will recall that the current sync-storm began when I heard someone compare James Bond to John Dee (supposedly "the original 007").
I also found this:
In April, after consuming a full dose of LSD, Wilson had what he considered to be "a very religious experience" and claimed to have seen God.
This caught my attention because the first time I heard about Dee's whale experience, it was presented as a vision of God: "And at one point they even meet God, and God is not an old man with a white beard up in the clouds. God is a whale covered with eyes." And Dee's experience was also in April -- specifically, on April 27, 1584.
Trying to find more details about the precise date and content of Wilson's experience, I searched for brian wilson lsd vision of god and found this carefully constructed timeline. Lo and behold:
April 26 or 27, 1966
This webpage contends that Brian Wilson drops acid for the third time on the beach located in Lake Arrowhead, California. Brian contemplates the riddle and finds the answer to the riddle he was presented with in December. It is the ultimate religious experience ("...this trip was the ultimate in LSD joyrides--everything it was supposed to be, four hours of enlightenment and spirituality") from which a new "reborn" Brian Wilson emerges. Part of the enlightening spiritual experience is the conceiving of the Beach Boys' next album and single.
April 26 is the date of my own dream about a many-eyed whale, which I posted about the next day, April 27, which is also the date of Dee and Kelley's similar vision.
Wilson's April 26 or 27 acid vision was experienced as "the answer to the riddle he was presented with in December." Here, according to the same website, is the riddle.
Several days before Christmas 1965
Brian suffers what he considers an acid flashback in the Pickwick Bookstore. It is a totally unexpected experience.
"I couldn't even remember why I'd gone to the store. It was spooky. I walked into the store anyway. The clerk, who knew me, said hello and mentioned that he was crazy about "Barbara Ann," which was all over the radio. Moving slowly into the aisles, I concentrated on reading the book titles and their authors....I paged through books... I stared at the pages, tried to read, but the letters all vibrated on the pages and I couldn't make sense of anything. Then I saw the books melting down the shelves, dripping like wax down the side of a candle. The room began to spin. I was in the center of a giant spinning top. Turning, turning, turning. The moment was completely surreal.
"As the buzz subsided into a manageable burned-out sensation, I remembered Loren [Schwartz] once explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning. What had mine meant? I had driven to the bookstore, looking for what? Inspiration? Instead, I'd seen books melting, unable to grasp the knowledge contained in them. If that was a riddle, I wanted to know the solution."
"Hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning." That's how I feel about the whale vision. It seems like it ought to mean something, but I have not yet found the solution.
Today one of my adult English students, wanting to practice his pronunciation, had selected a couple of articles from an English magazine to read aloud to me so that I could listen and make any needed corrections. The first, an article about tourism in Amsterdam, included this paragraph:
One of the dearest holidays in the Netherlands is King's Day, when the Dutch honor the birthday of King Willem-Alexander. Every April 27, nearly a million people dress in orange -- the country's national color -- to attend concerts, watch boat parades, and shop at huge outdoor markets.
As I have posted before, April 27, 1584, was the date of John Dee and Edward Kelley's vision of a many-eyed whale on a hill, representing the spirit of God; and on April 27, 2014, I posted an account of my own dream of a many-eyed whale. Not until this year would I discover that I had posted it on the 430th anniversary of Dee's similar vision.
Here in the article is April 27 again, and specifically April 27 as an anniversary.
The mention in the paragraph of people wearing orange for King's Day also caught my attention. On March 6 of this year, I had posted some AI-generated pictures of book titles and invited readers to guess what the titles were. One of the books I had chosen was The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, an 1895 book of horror stories which was one of H. P. Lovecraft's major influences. I know of the book but have never read it, and I can't say why it came to mind. Anyway, the AI illustrated it in a rather straightforward fashion -- a crude human figure dressed in yellow, wearing a crown -- but one of my readers bizarrely guessed "The King in Orange." I assumed this was a simple error; it never occurred to me someone might have written a book about the King in a different color.
Many of my Dee/whale syncs have been mediated by Greg Carlwood's podcast The Higherside Chats. A few days ago, I was browsing the archives and found one that was an interview with John Michael Greer, whose name I knew from having read an article or two years ago on his now-defunct Archdruid Report blog, so I gave it a listen. The name of the show, from May 2021, was "John Michael Greer | Political Sorcery, Will, & Weaponized Magic" -- and it turned out to be about his 2021 book called, yes, The King in Orange, about the "magical war" leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Pepe the Frog and all that).
The second article my student read was about the four-leaf clover, and he made a very strange mistake:
According to legend, in the fifth century, Saint Patrick used clovers to explain the Holy Trinity to the ancient Irish. And the ancient Celts believed that four-leaf clovers offered magical protection against whale.
"Against evil," I corrected. "Oh, against evil." How often do people misread evil as whale?
So there's a whale, coming hot on the heels of the date April 27. But the reference to the Holy Trinity in connection with the number four was a sync, too. See, last night I had put "john dee" into the search box on YouTube and clicked on one of the first results that came up, called "The Incalculable Genius of John Dee." Despite the title, the video's main topic is the theory that Edward de Vere wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, and that those works contain many coded references (created with the help of Dee and Dee's ideas) to that fact. The presenter, Alexander Waugh, focuses on this quote from Dee:
We demonstrate here that the Quaternary is concealed within the Ternary. O God! pardon me if I have sinned against Thee by revealing such a great mystery in my writings which all may read, but I believe that only those who are truly worthy will understand.
Waugh comments, "Well clearly, that great mystery as far as the Ternary is concerned is about the Trinity," and then goes on to talk about the ways various Elizabethans contrived to find the numbers three and four in their names. Dee, for example, often signed his name "Δ" (it is thus that he is referred to in the account of the whale vision) -- delta being both a triangle (the Ternary) and the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet (the Quaternary).
To be honest, I had thought that the Dee/whale sync stream had pretty much run its course, but here it is popping up again.
In his recent General Conference address, "Following Jesus [sic]: Being a Peacemaker," Elder Neil L. Anderson, apostle of the Latter-day Society Against the Use of Nicknames and Abbreviations, reports:
In February, a headline in the Arizona Republic stated, "Bipartisan bill supported by Latter-day Saints would protect gay and transgender Arizonans."
We, as Latter-day Saints, are "pleased to be part of a coalition of faith, business, LGBTQ people and community leaders who have worked together in a spirit of trust and mutual respect."
This bill which enjoys the official support of the Church, HB 2802, is "bipartisan" in the classic sense of being both stupid and evil.
Much of it is about expanding "non-discrimination" laws to include "sexual orientation and gender identity," and to apply even to the very smallest businesses (previously, businesses with fewer than 15 employees were exempt). This means that if an LPGABBQ person applies for a job, you must either hire them or else be prepared to prove that they were rejected for some reason unrelated to sexual neurosis or ideology. (The CJCLDS supports it because there is an exception for religious organizations -- rules for thee but not for me.) This is bad but not shocking, as such tyrannical laws, applied to various other protected classes, are nothing new.
Here's the shocking part:
A. It is unprofessional conduct for a health provider to provide conversion therapy to a patient or client who is younger than eighteen years of age.
B. Subsection A of this section does not apply to [clergy, parents, or grandparents when acting as such, even if they also happen to be health providers].
C. The regulation of conversion therapy is of statewide concern and is not subject to further regulation by a county, city, town, or other political subdivision of this state.
D. For the purposes of this section:
1. "Conversion therapy":
(a) means any practice or treatment that seeks to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient or client, including mental health therapy that seeks to change, eliminate or reduce behaviors, expressions, attractions or feelings related to the patient's or client's sexual orientation or gender identity.
(b) does not include a practice or treatment that does not seek to change the patient's or client's sexual orientation or gender identity, including mental health therapy and that meets the following:
(i) is neutral with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity.
(ii) provides assistance to a patient or client undergoing gender transition.
Got that? If it has been decided (by, perhaps, one of the trans teachers schools will be forced to hire) that your kid is trans, the only treatment it will be legal for health providers to offer is "assistance . . . undergoing gender transition."
The CJCLDS leadership supports this. They support it so much that they made an exception to their usual stance of political neutrality to make an official statement endorsing it.
The New York Times published this infographic on September 11, 2020.
Who are these 25 people? Below is the name, company, and race/ethnicity of each. For a few I was unable to find specific ethnic details and had to classify them as generic whites.
Paul Buccieri (A+E Networks Group) - White gentile
Karey Burke (ABC) - Other white
Jennifer Salke (Amazon Studios) - Other white
Jamie Erlicht (Apple) - Other white
Zack Van Amburg (Apple) - White gentile
Kelly Kahl (CBS) - Other white
David Stapf (CBS Television Studios) - White (no details available)
Nancy Daniels (Discovery Channel) - White (no details available)
Dana Walden (Disney Television Studios and ABC Entertainment) - Other white
Charlie Collier (Fox) - Other white
Kelly Campbell (Hulu) -White gentle
Ted Sarandos (Netflix) - White gentile
Jim Gianopulous (Paramount Pictures) - White gentile
Tom Rothman (Sony Pictures Entertainment) - Other white
Jeff Frost (Sony Pictures Television Studios) - Other white
Kathleen Finch (TLC and HGTV) - White (no details available)
Donna Langley (Universal Filmed Entertainment Group) - White gentile
Alan Bergman (Walt Disney Studios) - Other white
Alan Horn (Walt Disney Studios) - Other white
Toby Emmerich (Warner Bros. Pictures Group) - Other white
Peter Roth (Warner Bros. Television Group) - Other white
Casey Bloys (WarnerMedia and HBO Max) - White gentile
Wonya Lucas (Crown Media Family Networks) - Black
Pearlena Igbokew (NBCUniversal Television Studios) - Black
Jessica Rodriguez (Univision) - Hispanic
How systemically racist is this? Well, let's compare the racial/ethnic makeup of this group of top execs with that of the American population as a whole.
Take a look at the rightmost column. If the number is higher than 1, that group is overrepresented among top Hollywood and TV execs; if it is lower than 1, the group is underrepresented. In a fair world, one without systemic racism, every number would be exactly 1. What do we see instead? That the number for whites is 1.5 -- a whopping 50% higher than it would be in a fair world! Blacks, on the other hand, have a measly 0.7, showing that they are systematically excluded from positions of power in Hollywood.
It's an outrage! Why is no one talking about this?
Those of you who are on the same page as me, Bruce Charlton, William Wildblood, and Francis Berger, but who don’t have blogs of your own, head over to the monthly discussion thread at New World Island and say whatever’s on your mind. Our friend Carol is getting lonely over there!
After a few days of the synchronicity fairies harping on the the idea of the whale as a metaphysical symbol, it is inevitable that one's thoughts should turn to Moby-Dick. I read Moby-Dick back in 2006, and it blew me away. I thought I was probably going to keep reading and rereading it for the rest of my life. As things have played out, though, I never did read it again. The same goes for Paradise Lost, which I read at about the same time.
(Why did I pick up Moby-Dick in the first place? Because someone had told me, without elaborating, that he thought I might be Herman Melville reincarnated. That never really panned out, either.)
Anyway, about the name Ishmael.
When I left the Mormon Church, which was four years before I had read any Melville, my newfound atheism coexisted uneasily with an absurd but unshakable feeling that I was doing what God wanted me to do. (Nowadays, I think that may have been true. God needed to get me out of the institutional church to which I was so tightly bound, and only a total loss of faith would do the trick.) At that time, a passage from the Book of Mormon came to mind, ripped from its context, and I applied it to myself (which is what Nephi said we should be doing with scripture anyway!).
And Aaron said unto the king: Behold, the Spirit of the Lord has called him another way; he has gone to the land of Ishmael, to teach the people of Lamoni.
Now the king said unto them: What is this that ye have said concerning the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, this is the thing which doth trouble me (Alma 22:4-5).
"The Spirit of the Lord has called him another way" -- that was the exact feeling. But what was "the Spirit of the Lord"? What could any of that possibly mean to an atheist. Behold, this is the thing which did trouble me.
The Aaron and Ishmael mentioned in the passage I have quoted are not the familiar biblical figures, but the occurrence of the name Ishmael nevertheless made me think of Genesis.
And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction.
And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren (Gen. 16:11-12).
As a firstborn son who had just officially made himself the black sheep of the family, to live as "a wild man" unmoored from institutions, I identified with this Ishmael, too, and I read all the biblical connotations of Ishmael into the Book of Mormon line about being "called . . . another way . . . to the land of Ishmael."
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Remembering all these things today, I realized that there is another figure who is called a "wild man" in Mormon scripture: the biblical prophet Enoch.
And it came to pass that Enoch went forth in the land, among the people, standing upon the hills and the high places, and cried with a loud voice, testifying against their works; and all men were offended because of him.
And they came forth to hear him, upon the high places, saying unto the tent-keepers: Tarry ye here and keep the tents, while we go yonder to behold the seer, for he prophesieth, and there is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us (Moses 6:37-38).
The name Enoch is of course a link, in very general terms, to John Dee and his "Enochian" system -- but what I saw when I read this was the mention of Enoch "standing upon the hills." Later, at the end of Joseph Smith's Enoch narrative, God receives Enoch "up into his own bosom" (Moses 7:69). The language reminded me of what the angels said to Dee: "The Hill is the World, The waters are the bosome of God, . . . The Whale is the spirit of God." This links Enoch not only to Dee, but specifically to the center of the current sync-storm: Dee's whale on a hill.
Dee did not specify what kind of whale it was, but the sync fairies have associated it specifically with the orca, or killer whale -- and, as I shall explain presently, Enoch = Behemoth = killer whale on a hill.
The Enoch-Behemoth connection comes from the apocryphal book of 2 Esdras.
Then didst thou ordain two living creatures, the one thou calledst Enoch, and the other Leviathan;
And didst separate the one from the other: for the seventh part, namely, where the water was gathered together, might not hold them both.
Unto Enoch thou gavest one part, which was dried up the third day, that he should dwell in the same part, wherein are a thousand hills:
But unto Leviathan thou gavest the seventh part, namely, the moist; and hast kept him to be devoured of whom thou wilt, and when (2 Esdras 6:49-52).
Leviathan, the great sea monster, is always paired with Behemoth, the great monster of the land. Here, for some reason, the name Enoch is used instead, but the context makes it obvious that it means Behemoth, not the prophet. And note that hills are mentioned again -- Enoch's domain is "wherein are a thousand hills."
But surely it is Leviathan that is to be identified with the whale, not Behemoth! Melville continually refers to whales as Leviathans, and it is even the word for "whale" in modern Hebrew. Whatever Behemoth might have been, it obviously wasn't a whale, right?
Well, I grew up reading not only the Apocrypha but also old D&D manuals, so I can tell you that Behemoth is a whale -- and not just any whale, but specifically a killer whale on a hill. This is a scan from the 1980 edition of Deities and Demigods. (Fortunately, you can find anything on the Internet!)
How perfect a match is that? Behemoth -- alias Enoch -- is portrayed as "a killer whale . . . that inhabits the plains and hills," and its inclusion in a book called Deities and Demigods also implies that it is in some sense -- like Dee's whale on a hill and Miller's orca -- a god.
Also, although the Behemoth picture itself was drawn by Paul Jaquays, check out the name of the first illustrator credited on the title page.
Back in 1998, when there was such a thing as a Mormon missionary and I was one, there was a cassette tape called "Orca Horizons" which lots and lots of us owned. It had been introduced by that one kind of New-Agey elder, the one who had a "sound-light entrainment device" to induce altered states of consciousness without breaking the Word of Wisdom, and it consisted of the 1997 Kierre Lewis album Horizons (piano arrangements of Mormon hymns) overlaid with a recording of the chirps and whistles of killer whales. Everyone made a copy, including me.
This album came to mind due to the synchronicity described in the last post, where, just after reading about John Dee and Edward Kelley seeing a whale that represented God, I listened to an interview with Dr. Richard Alan Miller in which he said "that orca was God."
I just looked up Horizons and found this summary on the Desert Book website:
In this debut album, pianist Kierre Lewis brings a fresh new sound to her interpretations of such familiar and favorite hymns as 'Lead Thou Me On,' 'All Creatures of Our God and King,' 'The Spirit of God,' 'Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,' 'Our Savior's Love,' and the ethereal 'If You Could Hie to Kolob.'
The Spirit of God -- word for word, exactly what Dee's angels said the whale represented.
This afternoon (March 31) I caught myself humming the 2010 Gorillaz song "On Melancholy Hill" -- and then I realized why. The song contains the lines, "Up on Melancholy Hill / Sits a manatee." I had just been reading an account of John Dee and Edward Kelley's 1584 vision, in which "The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions." A marine mammal on a hill -- whether whale or manatee -- is certainly an unusual enough theme!
This evening after work, I checked Greg Carlwood’s podcast, The Higherside Chats, which the reader will have gathered I have been listening to fairly often these days. There was a new episode up, an interview with someone called Dr. Richard Alan Miller. For some reason, instead of listening to it, I suddenly had the idea that I should search the archives and see if there were any other interviews with the same guy. There was one, from March 28, 2016, and I started listening to it.
Dr. Miller turns out to be an extremely eccentric polymath who has been involved in all sorts of different scientific and magical projects, one of which involved trying to communicate with dolphins.
GC: Something I hoped you could elaborate on was your past with John Lilly, you were working with dolphins.
RAM: Oh, yeah, well that's a Carl Sagan project. Everybody watching dolphin and their clicks and whistles, even in the movie Our Man Flint, you had a language . . . being able to talk to dolphin. Our Man Flint, there's an old one, after James Bond! Dolphin, actually, their clicks and whistles are a more advanced form of language than even Hebrew. They brought me in, I was in Berkeley for, oh shit, maybe 10 days, and within 10 days I had been recording, had the sounds, and looking for structure in the cadence form using scopes and, you know, old shit like that. And I noted that there was encoding and code cipher within their language. Their language had less redundancy than even Hebrew.
GC: Wow.
RAM: Well, yeah. Yeah! You know, the Sepher Yetzirah and how you relate sounds to words. The dolphin are possibly 10 times more efficient in their language as a form of Clifford algebra. And because of the way they compress it in sonar, a lot is transferred in a burst, and a lot of information. And that's because their brain is actually physically bigger than man -- and who's higher on the food chain? Orca has a cerebral cortex that's twice the size of man, and that mammoth cetacean is actually firing 60 percent of it at any given moment, which by definition, we would say that that orca was God -- not our God, but that which cannot be known, as a definition.
That's right, he just said a whale was God. On another old THC interview I recently listened to, with Jason Louv in 2018, Louv had summarized Dee's experience thus: "And at one point they even meet God, and God is not an old man with a white beard up in the clouds. God is a whale covered with eyes from head to toe."
I didn't notice it at the time, but typing up a transcript for this post, I notice that, in the lead-up to his statement about a whale being God, Dr. Miller brings up James Bond out of the blue. What got me interested in John Dee in the first place? Hearing (also on THC, an episode from 2020) that John Dee supposedly signed his letters "007." (I've since been informed that this may have been made up by Dee biographer Richard Deacon, who was a friend of Ian Fleming's.)
RAM: And now I'm coming in as a biblical scholar, I'm a tzadik, Hermetic Kabbalism, and I'm a physicist, . . . and I am here to tell you we don't have a clue. In my opinion, there may be as many as at this moment at least four mammals that are more evolved technically than man. And when we talk about -- all four have bigger braincases. Turns out they're cetacean, and all four of them are better designed for their habitat than man is in his biosphere. So what does that suggest in terms of hierarchy and lifeforms? And here's the last piece of that curveball, when I have seen orca hunting dolphin. That means it's about food chain. How's that feel? Not food from the gods, but food for the gods!
GC: So you got dolphin and orca in there, what are the other two?
RAM: Well, your pilot whale and manatee. All four have, yeah, those four mammals, and now -- then you have gorillas. A gorilla doesn't have as big a braincase, but an elephant does. . . .
I paused the podcast as soon as I heard the word "manatee." That's when I realized I was going to have to type up a transcript and post it, and I wanted to note the time. When I pressed play again, the very next sentence mentioned "gorillas" -- for no real reason; he just mentioned them and then immediately switched to talking about elephants.
I sitll have no idea what the point of all this is, but the sync fairies are certainly pulling out all the stops!
