Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision

I was at a bookstore yesterday to place an order for some textbooks, and I happened to see these two books displayed together.

In the context of the Greek name Zeus, the phrase a dick suggests ádikos, “unjust.” Since Zeus was proverbially just, this would be a blasphemous inversion of a common piety, analogous to Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

In my recent post "A forgotten literary movement," I recounted a dream in which I asked one person after another to help me remember the name of an early 20th-century literary movement. The only name I could remember associated with the movement was Francis Scott Key, which I knew wasn't right. No one was able to help me with the name of the movement, except one person who suggested, "Wasn't there a group of writers around that time called the Schmucks?" Upon waking, I guessed that the "Francis Scott Key" I had been thinking of must have been the early 20th-century novelist Francis Scott Key ("F. Scott") Fitzgerald.

In the above display, Fitzgerald is juxtaposed with the word dick. In my dream, it had been suggested that "Francis Scott Key" might have been part of a group called the Schmucks -- and schmuck is the Yiddish counterpart to dick, meaning both "penis" and "contemptible person."

I have never read anything by Fitzgerald, but I do own one of his novels: the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Tender Is the Night. On the back cover, between the title and the summary, is the boldface quote, "Help me, help me, Dick!" -- Dick Diver being the main character, based on Fitzgerald himself.

On the Fitzgerald book in the photo above, a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on Fitzgerald's head. In a few recent posts, including "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," I have discussed a Time magazine cover in which a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on the head of Kamala Harris. I commented that the cup on her head made me think of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, who wore a cup-shaped headdress. Originally a combination of Osiris and the bull-god Apis, this god was later combined with Zeus and worshipped as "Zeus-Serapis."

(My earlier posts have associated the white cup both with the owl and with Serapis. Last night, I happened to see a random shitpost on /x/ which had a picture of a German woodcut of a bull-headed Moloch idol and said, “This is Moloch. His name is pronounced MOE-lock. He is an owl. That is all.” Yesterday, someone emailed me some of Royal Skousen’s textual research on the Book of Mormon. Among its new-to-me conclusions was that the name printed as Mulek in the BoM as we have it is a scribal error, and that this character’s correct name is Muloch, interpreted by Skousen as a variant of Moloch. In the /x/ thread, an anon argued that Moloch was itself an error for the common noun melek, “king.”)

"Zeus is a dick." Dick is Fitzgerald's fictional alter-ego. Zeus is Serapis. Fitzgerald is portrayed as Serapis.

In the posts about the white Starbucks cup, one of the commenters mentioned that the name Starbuck comes from Moby-Dick., which brings us to the next thing that caught my eye yesterday.

A whale juxtaposed with the word vision. This made me think of the synchronistic saga of the whale with many eyes. Eyes are organs of vision, and I had also used that word repeatedly with reference to Dee and Kelley’s whale experience. See for example “I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s many-eyed whale vision.”

Then I noticed that the word could also be read as VI Sion. I had recently read the seven Penitential Psalms aloud in Latin, and they include a few references to Sion (the Latin spelling of Zion). The first Penitential Psalm is Psalm VI, and the sixth is De Profundis, which alludes to Jonah’s prayer from within the belly of the whale.

Then I thought that V. I. Sion could stand for Veni in Sion, “come to Zion.” At the same time, V. I. is 5 followed by 1. In Isaiah 51, we read “Et nunc qui redempti sunt a Domino revertentur, et venient in Sion laudantes,” “Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion” (v. 11). Just two verses previous, the Lord is addressed as the one “that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon” — Rahab being a sea monster similar or identical to Leviathan, and thus a link to the whale.

Later that day, we visited some of my wife’s relatives. Our young nephew showed me a children’s book about sea creatures, opening up to a page that had a picture of a whale shark mislabeled (in both Chinese and English) as a “great white shark.” When a whale is called a great white, that’s obviously another link to Moby-Dick.

The TV was on, and there was a trailer for some sort of romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. In one scene, the Clooney character is reluctant to swim with dolphins, saying, “Are you sure they’re not sharks?” but is persuaded to jump into the water. The scene then cuts to him saying, “I can’t believe I got bit by a dolphin!”