Synchronicity: Mandrakes, Herschel Walker, and the Narmer Palette

In my recent post "Election prediction assessment," I discussed links between the Fool card of the Rider-Waite Tarot and the Georgian football player turned politician Herschel Walker. The Fool card depicts a man walking and is thus linked to the name Walker. It also happens to be traditionally associated with the planet Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel -- who had originally wanted to call the new planet "the Georgian Star" after his patron, King George III. Back in the 1980s, Herschel Walker was actually promoted as "the Georgian Star," with explicit reference to the astronomer Herschel (erroneously called "William Herschel Walker"!) and his discovery of Uranus. From an old New York Times article:

Four Atlanta businessmen have come up with a plan to make money off the fame of Herschel Walker, the University of Georgia football star, but it may not be within National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. The group has printed and plans to place on sale posters featuring a black football player in a Georgia uniform with the words ''The Georgian Star.''

To avoid violating N.C.A.A. rules, the group, Accolade Inc., has blurred out Walker's features and number. N.C.A.A. rules forbid an individual player's name, picture or number to be used in a commercial venture. The poster sells for $6 and, according to Avery McLean, the school's marketing director, the plan calls for the university to receive 6 percent of the revenue from every poster sold. But it appears that the N.C.A.A. will not permit Georgia to be involved in the promotion. ''We have not approved the poster in question,'' said Dave Berst, the N.C.A.A.'s director of enforcement. ''It appears that the poster is contrary to N.C.A.A. regulations.'' The poster tells the story of Sir William Herschel Walker, the Briton who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. Wanting to honor his king, George III, Sir William named his discovery ''The Georgian Star.'' In time, scientists changed the name to Uranus.

So that's a pretty direct link between the Fool card and the names Herschel, Walker, and Georgia. Furthermore, the Fool's white rose resembles the white Cherokee rose which is Georgia's state flower, and the white dog calls to mind the white bulldog that is the mascot of the University of Georgia football team.

In a comment on my own post, I added:

The Phantom, the comic strip character and proto-superhero created by Lee Falk, often goes by "Mr. Walker" (always with a footnote explaining that this is "for 'The Ghost Who Walks'"). Like the Fool, the Phantom is always accompanied by his faithful dog. I thought of the Phantom recently when mandrakes came up in the sync stream, since Lee Falk was also the creator of Mandrake the Magician.

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/10/synchronicity-mandrakes-and-el-kanah.html

That post linked mandrakes to El Kanah. A later post linked El Kanah to a black celebrity and a Georgia football team. (See the comments for the football reference.)

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/11/kanye-and-el-kanah.html

Today, preparing to write a follow-up post on the Fool's links to both George Walker Bush and Herschel Walker, and the implications for 2024, I decided to look up fool in the Online Etymology Dictionary, even though I basically already knew the etymology. Now what I normally do is type et, let autocomplete give me etymonline.com/, type w and get etymonline.com/word/, and then manually type in the word I'm looking up. I do this all in the address bar, without ever visiting the OED home page. This time, though, for whatever reason, I did go to the homepage -- and right there under "Latest Stories" was an article with the title "MANDRAKE ROOTS." Of course I clicked on it.

I have no idea how it got that title, since it makes no reference to mandrakes at all -- but guess who it does make reference to!

How did the moons of the planets get classical names? It can't have been a relic of classical times, because the satellites weren't known before telescope technology, in the 17th century. Their discoverers tended to name them after patrons, real or hoped-for, which led to an embarrassing lot of petty European tyrants honored with celestial bodies. . . . William Herschel proposed giving the multiplying moons suitable proper names out of mythology, a proposal readily accepted by the other astronomers and in use by 1848.

Not only a reference to Herschel, but to astronomers' naming new heavenly bodies after their patrons -- just as Herschel himself had originally wanted to name Uranus after George III.

The comment quoted above mentions "El Kanah" in connection with mandrakes. This name entered the sync stream via Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham, which lists "Elkenah" among the gods worshiped by the pagan Egyptians -- or that's what I had originally written. Rereading the Book of Abraham, I find that Elkenah and the other Egyptian-looking gods, including "the god of Pharaoh, king of Egypt," are actually said to have been worshiped by the pagan Mesopotamians! This extremely bizarre idea led me to the Wikipedia article on "Egypt–Mesopotamia relations." As I skimmed it, I noticed that a particular illustration kept being repeated.

The Narmer Palette didn't mean anything in particular to me at the time, but the repetition, together with the distinctive iconography, made it memorable.

Today I checked the Junior Ganymede blog, where the most recent post was titled "Today" and had no text, just a photo of some flowers. There was a single comment, implying that Kent Budge had died and leaving a link.

I clicked the link, and it was indeed an announcement of the death of Kent Budge --  but it began with this image: