Knock, knock, Neo.

In The Matrix, Neo receives a series of strange messages on his computer: "Wake up, Neo." -- "The Matrix has you..." -- "Follow the white rabbit." -- "Knock, knock, Neo." Immediately after this last message, there are two knocks at his door, and he goes to answer it.

Neo lives in Room 101. The actual color of his door is not very clear, but the lighting makes it appear greenish. In "Green Door 101," I ran into a 4chan post emphasizing the gematria value of green door -- which is, in S:E:G:, 101. I even noted in that post that 101 is also the value of Neo, the One, but without remembering that Neo actually lives at No. 101.

Neo is greeted by a group of people, only two of whom have names: Choi and Dujour, apparently alluding to the French choix du jour, "choice of the day." (Choi's name is not pronounced as French but as the Cantonese for "vegetable," as in bok choy. This reminds me of something I happened to see on TV years ago: a white man with a Chinese tattoo that says jie lan, another Chinese cruciferous vegetable, saying "I do have a few things in common with a lizard.")

Neo and Choi have this little exchange:

Neo : You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?

Choi : All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.

Mescaline. Not any of the other hallucinogens he might have mentioned, but specifically the one that inspired Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. As related in my post "'The Door in the Wall' by H. G. Wells," Huxley's references to that Wells story in The Doors of Perception were what led me to download and read it -- and the titular door turns out to be green.

Dujour is wearing a lot of unusual jewelry (neck rings), and at the end of the scene Neo notices a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. This, coming after the "Follow the white rabbit" message on his computer, is what makes him decide to accept Choi's invitation to go out with them.

In "Lewis Carroll syncs," I noted a reference to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in a novel called Green Doors.

After noticing all this, I went to a shop to pick up something my wife had ordered. There was only one other customer there: a woman with a lot of unusual jewelry (probably a total of 20 or more earrings) and a shoulder tattoo (not a rabbit). Dangling from her purse were two tiny stuffed rabbits (not white). On the back of her jacket were two big letter Ds -- not together like "DD," but sort of randomly located. No, I didn't follow her or anything.

After this, I went back to the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading (which I downloaded, remember, because of a book about mescaline). The next one up was "The Red Room." I thought the Red Room might have a red door, but the only specific door reference was to a "baize-covered door," and one gathers from Jane Austen and others that English doors of that description were typically green. Before entering the Red Room, which is supposed to be haunted, the narrator is told repeatedly, "It's your choice" (choix du jour). In the end, it is decided that the room is haunted not by a ghost but by Fear itself.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is where you are subjected to whatever it is that you fear the most.

The other 666 restaurant

On January 6, I posted "Roast beast for lunch, roast Beast for dinner," noting the coincidence of having eaten on the same day at two different restaurants with a street address of 666. Ten days later, I posted "The Doors," in which one of those two restaurants, Cafe D&D, began to play a prominent role in the sync-stream.

Today, for the second time, we had dinner at the other 666 restaurant -- at the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Taichung. I hadn't noticed it before, but their logo prominently features an eight-pointed star:

The other part of the logo -- a globe with lines of latitude and longitude -- also syncs with D&D, since the vertical line divides the circle into two D-shaped hemispheres.

The branch I dined at -- the one numbered 666 -- is the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. On October 17, 2022, I had a dream in which laurels featured.

I dreamed that I was visiting a hunting lodge that had bottles of "owl wine" for sale -- a generic term, not a brand name. This was an amber-colored white wine which I thought looked like Tokay and would therefore probably be too sweet for my taste. Later in the dream I looked up why it was called "owl wine" and found that bay leaves were used in the wine-making process, and that the name originated when an Italian word meaning "laurel" was mistranslated as owl. (I think this Italian word was lava or lavva or something like that.)

If the 666 hotel were mistranslated in the same way, it would be called Evergreen Owl. Oddly enough, when I went to the hotel website so I could screenshot their logo, I saw this in the footer.

That's the logo for Tripadvisor, which of course is going to appear on a lot of hotel websites -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's a green owl with lemniscate eyes. The double-o of the Tripadvisor logo coming right after the Facebook f  also brings to mind Mr. T, whose trademark line is sometimes rendered "I pity da foo'."

Note added: That latitude-and-longitude globe has also been paired with the Green Lantern symbol.

Yellow, pterodactyl, UFO, St. Valentine’s Day

When I posted “Green Lantern’s yellow pterodactyls — and my own,” I searched my own blog to see if I had ever mentioned the yellow pterodactyls before. I had, only once, in my 2020 post “A Pterodactylus and a globe of light.” In that post, I relate my experience of “seeing” a black pterodactyl in early February, noting that I ordinarily picture those animals as yellow. I then go on to describe seeing a glowing white object in the sky shortly thereafter, “either St. Valentine’s Day or the day after.”

Today it occurred to me to search the /x/ archive on 4plebs to see if anyone else had ever had a yellow pterodactyl experience. The search string yellow pterodactyl returned only one result, from 2017, beginning, “I’ve seen a UFO, a pterodactyl, and a ghost.” The word yellow appears in the description of the UFO. He saw the pterodactyl “this year Valentine’s Day.”

Possibly relevant: In a comment to my recent post “What if Dot got in the Green Door,” I connect the story title “Bad Cat” with my sister Kat Valentine because BAD = 214 = St. Valentine’s Day.

Green Lantern’s yellow pterodactyls — and my own

In order to get my hands on the story posted in "Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!" (from Green Lantern vol. 2 #30, July 1964) I had to download a huge zipped file of more than 200 Green Lantern comic books. Although the alien pterodactyls from that story are obviously not supposed to be recurring villains -- the story ends with them giving up all attempts to interfere on Earth, since any such interference will be impossible for the next 100 million years -- I nevertheless thought I should look through all the other issues I had downloaded to see if they did reappear after all.

They don't, but there's another alien pterodactyl story in vol. 2 #88 (March 1972). Yes, that's number eighty-eight. Like the first pterodactyl story, it's written by John Broome and penciled by Gil Kane, but it's a completely different race of alien pterodactyls this time. Instead of pterodactyls on a distant planet trying to arrange for Earth pterodactyls to take over Earth, we have pterodactyls on Venus menacing cavemen on Venus, and Green Lantern is sent to save his fellow humans. Apparently humans and pterodactyls just sort of spontaneously evolve on lots of different planets.

In #30, Green Lantern can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because of the "energo-shield" their leader has created using his "super-mentality." In #88, he can't use his Power Ring against the pterodactyls because they're yellow. The color yellow, as you may know, is Green Lantern's kryptonite. His power is basically unlimited unless it involves anything yellow.

In #30, Green Lantern defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them -- taking them back to the Mesozoic, where they see a very scary T. rex that weakens the "super-mentality" enough to allow Green Lantern to strike. In #88, he also defeats the pterodactyls by scaring them.-- conjuring up a giant illusory hawk which chases them into a cave, and then collapsing the entrance to the cave.

In #30, the pterodactyls are referred to as pteros -- and I noted that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as Tarot, namely 74. In #88, they are called bird-raiders or just raiders, and raiders also has an S:E:G: value of 74. (The longer name, bird-raiders, has an S:E:G: value of 107 -- which is the value of The Tarot, and of each of the three parts of the Tarot: the trumps, the Minor Arcana, and the the Fool card.)

Just hours before discovering this Green Lantern story, I read H. G. Wells's 1896 short story "The Sea Raiders," which also uses the word raiders to refer to monstrous animals (man-eating cephalopods in Wells's case). Wells came up in the last Green Lantern pterodactyl post, too.

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The main thing that got me, though, was the fact that the story is about yellow pterodactyls. I mentioned in my last post that "pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me." Well, it's specifically yellow pterosaurs -- even more specifically, quite small yellow pterosaurs, possibly juveniles of Pterodactylus or some closely related genus (not the giant Pteranodon-type animals of the Green Lantern stories).

"Ghosts of pterosaurs" -- for lack of any better way of describing a sort of experience I am really at a loss to classify -- have been an occasional feature of my life for a long time, especially when I lived in Maryland, although I've had two experiences of this type in Taiwan as well (one of which I have blogged about), but my big "pterodactyl experience" took place around 2002 or 2003 at Ohio State University, when touching a fossil caused me to have a very brief but extremely vivid vision of a living pterodactylus, bright yellow in color, in its natural habitat, with a few others flying about in the background. The sheer alienness of the scene -- the color of the sky, the quality of the light, the humming of the insects, the feeling of goodness -- overwhelmed me. It lasted a second or two and was gone, and I was left with an intense feeling of grief -- that that world was gone, that all the pterodactyls were dead, that the universe would go on forever without them. (I was an atheist at the time.)

That little yellow pterodactylus has been there in the back of my mind ever since. I think about it every time I read Isaiah's vision of the seraphim, imagining resurrected and glorified pterodactyls singing "Holy, holy, holy" around the Throne. I have sometimes used Flavius Pterodactylus as a username, the etymological meaning of Flavius being "yellow." I don't know why this particular creature is resurfacing now -- particularly through the goofy medium of a Green Lantern comic book! -- but it's got to mean something. A yellow pterodactyl can never be for me anything other than a good omen. Teros, not Deros.

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Here's the story. I'm only posting the part that takes place on Venus, not the frame story about Green Lantern's love life.

Green Lantern pterosaur time-tunnel story here!

I finally managed to track down the complete story of Green Lantern, the pterosaurs, and the time-tunnel. It wasn't easy to find, but if you've got WILL POWER you can overcome every obstacle and difficulty in life!

The synopsis I read earlier, which said Green Lantern was facing alien pterodactyls, was an oversimplification. There are intelligent alien pterodactyls in the story, but they live many light years away and can't invade Earth directly.  However, they have the technology to observe distant worlds, and millions of years ago, they noticed that primitive pterodactyls had evolved on Earth. Wanting to ensure that their kind will dominate that distant planet, they direct "a blot of instantaneous M-energy" toward Earth, knowing that "when the M-energy strikes one or more of our race on Earth, it will endow them with super-mental powers! They and their descendants will be able to conquer all their enemies with ease!" I'm not too clear on how they ensured this M-energy would hit pterodactyls and only pterodactyls, but you know what they say: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from bad writing.

However, the best-laid schemes o' alien pterodactlys gang aft agley. Having lost sight of the Earth for millions of years due to an "ionic disturbance," the alien pterodactyls finally regain contact and are dismayed to discover that Earth no longer has any pterodactlys at all! Apparently their energy beam missed! Well, mistakes happen, and space villains are notoriously bad at aiming their ray-based weaponry. Luckily, there is a Plan B for bringing about an Age of Pterodactyls on what is for them Planet B.

To give their "brethren on Earth a second chance to conquer the planet," the alien pterodactyls first send a "time-reversal beam" which temporarily sends a small area of the Earth back to the Mesozoic, causing a small number of pterodactyls to reappear. They then send a second M-energy beam, and this time they succeed in striking a pterodactyl! Armed with "super-mentality," this pterodactyl takes control of the other, still primitive, pterodactlys and begins wreaking havoc in the 20th century. His super-mentality also enables him to create an "energo-shield" which makes him and his fellow pterodactyls invincible, even against Green Lantern's Power Ring.

Since it is the "super-mentality" of their leader that makes the pterodactyls invincible, Green Lantern needs to find a way of sapping the lead ptero's mental force through fear. That's where the time-tunnel strategy comes in. He leads them through the time-tunnel back to the Mesozoic, where they encounter their ancient ancestral enemy, the T. rex. The fear this induces weakens the super-mentality enough to allow Green Lantern to defeat them, after which he returns to the 20th century.

Conveniently, just after this, Earth passes out of the alien pterodactyls' "scanner sight -- not to return again for 100 million years!" It's not clear why this is a big deal to a species that has time-travel technology, but apparently it is. The ptero king says, "I propose we abandon our hope of making our fellow-pterodactyls masters of Earth! Nothing else to be done," to which his subjects reply, "We agree, O superior one, we agree!" The End.

And thus we see the triumph of those who have Will Power over those who do not. If those space-pterodactyls had been a little less quick to abandon hope -- if they had only realized the importance of keeping on doing the thing that has you licked -- we might all be speaking ptero right now. Will Power, boys and girls, gets you what you want. Lack of Will Power loses you what you've got.

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Throughout this story, Green Lantern refers to his enemies by the abbreviated name ptero. This is obviously a sync with Tero, former surname of Mr. T, and with the Deros and Teros of the Shaver Mystery. Like the alien pteros, the Deros use various sorts of "rays" as their main weapon.

Ptero is also interesting because of the gematria connection. (As noted before, Green Lantern, time-tunnel, will power, and pterosaur all add up to 133 in S:E:G:.) Pterosaurs have at times been a sort of personal totem animal for me, and a very long time ago (c. 2003?) I noticed that ptero has the same S:E:G: value as its homophone tarot, and I even designed a handful of "ptero cards."

Pterosaurs in a superhero comic also reminded me of this classic meme:

What's the name of this pterosaur guy Spider-Man is talking to? Sauron. What is Green Lantern's only weapon against the pterosaurs? The Power Ring.

When I went to Know Your Meme to find the above meme, I found this:

This meme format reminded me a lot of something from "Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern," from the same comic book issue as the time-tunnel story. I'll upload it later and add it to this post. For now, you get this instead:

Update: Here it is.

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And now, finally, what you came here to see:

I don't know about you, but I would totally shell out for tickets to see a movie version of this.

Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!

In "Green Door, Green Lantern," that B-list superhero came to my attention because the emblem on his chest (in the Silver-Age version) looks like 101, the S:E:G: value of the phrase green door.

Searching for green lantern time travel, I had found a page from a comic book in which Green Lantern travels back in time and sees a T. rex. Later, trying to find the full story online, I ended up browsing a lot of old comic books. I found this in Green Lantern #1.

When you've spent enough time playing around with gematria, you develop a sort of sense for it, just like some mathematicians can tell if a large number "looks prime" even before doing any calculations. As soon as I saw this page, I could just somehow see that will power and Green Lantern had the same S:E:G: value, even though I couldn't have told you what that value was. I did the math and confirmed it.

Will power = Green Lantern = 133.

Following a second hunch, I calculated the S:E:G: for the title of H. G. Wells's most famous novel.

The Time Machine = 133

The Green Lantern comic I had been looking for -- unsuccessfully -- was this one:

Green Lantern's "time-tunnel" is obviously a close cousin to Wells's machine, and sure enough:

time-tunnel = 133

S:E:G: is what drew my attention to Green Lantern in the first place -- but the number 101, not 133. In my original "Green Door 101" post, I had noted this:

Eight six = 101. Eight is the lemniscate, and six as in 666, a number which is also part of this sync stream.

Why "eight six"? Why not "six eight"?  Just a lucky random choice, I guess. After discovering that The Time Machine is 133, I naturally checked the name of its author:

H. G. Wells = 86

H. G. Wells is 86; eight six is 101; 101 is the Green Lantern logo; Green Lantern is 133; and 133 is The Time Machine, which is by H. G. Wells. What is impressive is not that such a convoluted six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection exists, but that I discovered it so quickly and easily.

The "eight six" connection made me curious about the gematria values of other spelled-out numbers, which led to this mildly interesting coincidence:

one three three = 146

one four six = 146 

"One three three" was the first number I tried, and it led me directly to a number that encodes its own gematria value. A decade or so ago I made an exhaustive search for such numbers, and there aren't many of them. I only found two, if memory serves:

two hundred and fifty-one = 251

two hundred and fifty-nine = 259

I had only looked at fully written-out numbers of the above type, though -- "two hundred and fifty-one," not "two five one" -- and so had not discovered 146.

Consider praying the Rosary.

That's it, really. That's what I want to say in this post -- and I say it particularly to those of my readers who might not have considered it, including those who are not Catholic, as I am not Catholic, including my Mormon brothers and sisters. The Holy Dominican Rosary is one the most precious gifts the Roman Church has given the world. It is there for anyone who wishes to make use of it. God will let you know if you are one of these.

I strongly recommend praying it daily. I strongly recommend using Latin. I strongly recommend using a physical rosary, preferably one with wooden beads. Ash Wednesday would be a perfect time to start. Plenty of information for beginners is readily available online.

To those who balk at "praying to Mary," consider the following: Was Gabriel wrong to say, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee"? Was Elisabeth wrong to say, "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb"? Is it ever wrong to ask a fellow Christian to pray for you now and at the hour of your death? Have the answers to any of those questions changed because Mary is now in Heaven?

Just consider it. That's all I'm saying.

Green Door, Green Lantern

In "Green Door 101" (February 11), I note that the S:E:G: value of green door is 101.

In "DD, hourglass, lemniscate, gate, time" (February 12), I point out "the geometric relationship between the DD-hourglass and 101."

Back in March 2022 I posted about "Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass," noting that the lantern carried by the Hermit on the Tarot card was originally an hourglass. The hourglass-lantern connection was revisited in "Hourglass and hexagram" (February 9).

Look back at that 101 diagram. Remind you of anything?

Note also that the DC logo is pretty close to the DD-hourglass.

The DC character Jade, the daughter of the original Green Lantern, has worn both the Green Lantern emblem and the eight-pointed star.

I don't know bupkis about Green Lantern, but a lot of these superheroes time travel, don't they?

Ha! Lucky guess!

Note added: The cover makes it clear that the portal back to another time is a green one.

Tintin T. rex, Timey-wimey T. rex, . . . collect them all!

Belgian comic-book character Tintin is called 丁丁 in Chinese.

Tin is not a possible syllable in Chinese, and Ting sounds like a girl's name, so the best they could do was Ding-ding. You know, like a bell. A tin bell. Like a tinker would make.

The character 丁 is the fourth Celestial Stem, and as such is used to translate the letter D when used in an ordinal sense -- that is, when A, B, C, and D are used in the sense of "one, two, three, four," as in an outline or on a multiple-choice test. For example, Serie D football is rendered 丁級 in Chinese. So if you wanted to go Backstroke of the West on poor Tintin and translate his Chinese translation back into English, he'd be called DD.

The largest pharmacy in my town is named after Tintin.

Notice how the sign has a T followed by the Rx pharmacy symbol: T. rex. I'm not sure what the T is there for, unless it stands for Tintin. (Years ago, this pharmacy had the English name Tintin on its sign in addition to the Chinese, but it was taken off a long time ago.) Note that we've already connected the T. rex with the Tin Lizzie (Zeus lizard).

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Comments are not searchable, so I haven't had the patience to track them down, but some time ago there was a comment by Bruce Charlton on this blog which dismissed unusual conceptions of time with a phrase like wibbledy-wobbledy timey-wimey stuff. Something like that; I'm sure timey-wimey was in there. I believe it's the standard term in Britbongistan.

More recently, WanderingGondola left a comment that also referred to timey-wimey stuff. I think it was about a 4chan comment that had been posted earlier than the post it was replying to, "implying that some timey-wimey stuff is going on." Either she was humorously referencing Bruce's earlier comment, or else Australian English is much more British than I've been led to believe!

(If any of my indefatigable readers can track down either of the timey-wimey comments, do post the link in the comments.)

Today, I spotted this at my school:

That's a T. rex-like dinosaur paired with the word little, so it counts as a mini T. rex. (It's a weird picture, too. Is that a floating bowling ball? And why is it raining Christmas trees?) As for the other word, it looks a bit timey-wimey, doesn't it, old chap?

Possibly relevant: the uail, the wolcano, and the other bric-a-brac of the Right.

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Update: My readers have informed me that timey-wimey is a Dr. Who reference, which explains my ignorance. I never did much like medical dramas.

I'm feeling excluded.

"Inclusion," in a single screenshot:

This is from an organization that was in the news recently for vandalizing the works of Roald Dahl (removing such offensive words as black, white, fat, and attractive), so I went to their website to send them some hate mail -- er, I mean some diverse mail expressing my own differing viewpoint as informed by my lived experience as person of diverseness.*

I guess I'm not the only one. The "contact us" page on the site is now blank, although the Wayback Machine shows that it didn't use to be. Oddly enough, their donation buttons are still operational.

Also scrubbed from the current site, but still viewable on the Wayback, is the list of individuals involved: directors Jessi Parrott, A. M. Dassu, and Heather Lacey; and founders Beth Cox and Alexandra Strick. (Hmm, one "diverse" group is rather surprisingly conspicuous by its absence. Almost every single time.)

As the unexpurgated Dahl himself put it, "I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women."

*I can't be diverse because I'm white, you say? Fool, I'm Ukrainian. Beat that!**

**I hope the inclusionnaires appreciate how I self-censored and went with "fool."

Powers of three, modern dismissal of miracles, relationships with the so-called dead

Yesterday, as mentioned in "242, and crabs," seeing a reference to the eight points of the compass made me think that if there were eight directions in a two-dimensional space, the number of directions for any n-dimensional space would be the nth power of three minus one (because the center is not a direction). I calculated these in my head up to the fifth power of three.

Today I read the H. G. Wells short story "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham," which is about how the titular old man successfully switches bodies with a young man named Eden after making him his heir, the idea being that Elvesham's body will die, and Elvesham (in Eden's body) will inherit his own possessions and continue his life as a healthy young man.

The story is narrated by Eden. When he wakes up to find himself in Elvesham's body, he thinks it must be a dream and tries to go back to sleep. He has recourse to a curious alternative to counting sheep:

I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.

How often do people count through the powers of three? I'd say that's a pretty remarkable coincidence.

There's more, though. Yesterday I also participated in an email discussion with some of my Romantic Christian blogging associates about the advisability of speaking openly of miracles. Bruce Charlton expressed the opinion that, while telling miracle stories may have been helpful at most other times in history, it was usually net-harmful in the modern West because people assume atheistic materialism and reject miracles out of hand, so that a miracle story generally has no other effect than damaging the credibility of the person who tells it. I responded that, while assumptions are important, people do sometimes update them in response to experience, and that a materialist who never hears of any miracles is unlikely to question his axioms.

Continuing with Mr. Eden's reaction to the strange situation in which he finds himself:

Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass current.

In the end, though, the evidence of his own experience forces him to update his assumptions:

I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear case of man's detachability from matter.

A specific instance of Bruce's opinion about sharing miracles, and how the advisability of doing so has changed over time, can be found in his post of the day before yesterday, "Contact with the (so-called) dead - past and present." In this post, he dismisses spiritualism as unlikely to be helpful but says contact with the resurrected dead is a different matter:

For some people, in some situations, contact with one or more of the resurrected dead may even be their primary spiritual task. 

For a start, it can be a vital source of spiritual guidance.

He goes on to say that this sort of contact has its potential pitfalls as well, but that many of these can be avoided by maintaining a policy of secrecy, "by not disclosing to others with whom we have contact, and keeping secret their information and guidance."

The day I read that post, I had also read H. G. Wells's story "The Moth," which is about an entomologist who is haunted by a mysterious moth which he believes to be the vengeful ghost of a rival entomologist with whom he had feuded. This, combined with Bruce's post, made me think of Whitley Strieber's book The Afterlife Revolution, detailing his ongoing relationship with his late wife, who he believes often appears in the form of a moth. So confident is Strieber of the reality of this ongoing relationship and communication that he lists his wife as a co-author of the book, even though it was written entirely after her death.

Last night, I was working in my study when I suddenly heard a loud thump behind me. Turning around, I saw that one of my books had spontaneously fallen off the shelf: an English translation of Oswald Wirth's Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge. -- The Tarot of the Medieval Image-makers, badly translated as The Tarot of the Magicians. I had read the book only once, four years ago, but I decided right then that I should read it again. I was about to turn to the first chapter but had a strong impression that I should instead go back and read the preface. I did so.

The preface is all about Stanislas de Guaita, the French poet and Rosicrucian. The two men met in 1887, when Wirth was 27 and de Gauita was 26. Wirth learned the Tarot and the French language from de Guaita and created his first Tarot deck under the Frenchman's guidance two years later. De Guaita died young, in 1897, and Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge was not published until 1927, three decades after de Guaita's untimely death. Nevertheless, Wirth presents the book as having been written in collaboration with his late friend.

I am convinced that the master for whom the veil of mystery was lifted, does not abandon his colleague who is straining to discern the truth. . . . Our true initiators often do not reveal themselves to our senses, and sometimes remain as silent as the symbolic compositions of the Tarot, but they keep watch on our efforts at deciphering, and as soon as we have found the first letter, they can mysteriously prompt the second to put us on the path of the third. Guaita certainly helped me, for my thought calls to him so that between us a telepathic connection is established. The relationship between one mind and another is in the nature of things, that has nothing in common with the classic or modernized necromancy in the form of spiritism. . . .

Like Raphael and Mozart, Guaita was to die young. It was granted to me to live on, but the incomparable friend, the inspiring master, has never died for me. His thought remains as mine; and with him and through him I aspire to initiate myself into the secret things. We collaborate secretly, for he who has gone encourages me to pursue his work . . . .

I am conscious of never having ceased to be the secretary of Stanislas de Guaita . . . whose acts continue, for nothing is lost in this sphere of strength.

May the reader be grateful to Stanislas de Guaita for the ideas which I express, and indulge his pupil who sets them forth here.

I am convinced that this kind of thing is far more common than most people imagine.

Lear, the Byrds, and 242

In "242, and crabs," I noted that, just as there are a total of eight cardinal and intercardinal directions (compass points) on a two-dimensional map, there would be 242 such directions in a five-dimensional space.

Thinking about a five-dimensional space led me to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Fifth Dimension," which took me to the Byrds album of that name. Side one begins with "5D (Fifth Dimension)" and ends with "I Come and Stand at Every Door." Side two begins with "Eight Miles High" and ends with "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)."

"I Come and Stand at Every Door" begins thus:

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead

Today, searching my own blog for the word dove, I reread "Syncs courtesy of Laura Wood (and 4chan)" (September 2022). Laura Wood and a 4chan anon had both quoted Revelation 3:20. Mrs. Wood's post was titled "The Knock at Every Door." A short time after that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and found that the latest post was called "Contact with the (so-called) dead - past and present."

Revelation has the S:E:G: value 121. Two references to Revelation makes for two 121s, which is 242.

"Eight Miles High" includes the line "Rain gray town, known for its sound." London is famously gray and foggy. Earlier today, I posted "Britain as another planet," ending with a reference to the classic 4chan greentext that began the tradition of referring to Britain as Bongland.

At least on 4chan, then, the rain-gray town is indeed "known for its sound" -- the sound being BONG!

In the greentext, no one has a watch, no one knows what time means -- but the time is "seven bong." The Byrds song "I Come and Stand at Every Door" continues:

I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

For the ghost-child, as for the inhabitants of Bongland, there is no time, but also the time is seven. My reference to the bong story was in connection with the Muse music video "Sing for Absolution," which ends with a view of a London as thoroughly destroyed as Hiroshima, but with Big Ben still standing.

In the comments, "for the benefit of any readers from planet n00b," I posted a link to a Reddit thread about the bong greentext. One of the comments was this:

And now we finally get around to the Lear connection: the juxtaposition of "trees" (r/trees is a pothead forum) and "bongs." In "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear, the two titular animals "sailed away, for a year and a day / to the land where the bong-tree grows." This tree also appears in Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose": "A light on the bong-tree stem it throws / And those who watch at that midnight hour . . . ."

"2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" has no lyrics other than "Go 'n ride the Lear Jet, baby" repeated again and again. According to Wikipedia, "The song was inspired by the band's friendship with John Lear, son of jet manufacturer Bill Lear, and the title is a reference to the registration number of Lear's own personal jet, which was N242FT."

Shortly after learning that, I checked The Secret Sun, where the newest post was "I Didn't Meme to Turn You On." One of the memes posted there was this one:

There's "fox trot" as in the Byrds' Lear Jet song, and midnight is the hour when people watch the Dong with the Luminous Nose throw light on the bong-tree stem. The Dong is perhaps a cousin to the Sleepy Manchurian Candidate with the Luminous Eyes.

In "Lear's i' the town" (January 21 -- that's 121), I posted, among other things, a comment someone had left alluding (with reference to my having eaten at two 666 restaurants) to the closing lines of the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," and my uncle William John Tychonievich's own such allusion at the end of his poem "Closing the Hemisphere":

And what rough beast,
Its hour come round last,
Pilots a Lear jet to oblivion?

Yeats's original rough beat slouches towards Bethlehem at the end of a stanza that begins:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

As already noted, revelation is 121 in S:E:G:. So is second coming. Two 121s makes 242.

The post was called "Lear's i' the town" in reference to an earlier post, "'No coincidences' implies a single-author creation" (November 2021). In that post, I tried to use the fact that that line from King Lear includes the word Israel spelt backwards as an example of a true coincidence.

Another example I used was the chance occurrence of the acronym SMILE in the Book of Mormon ("to be spiritually minded is life eternal") and in a random BBC story ("lethal microbes that killed so many in London's East End in the mid-Victorian period"). Edward Lear was born in London and lived  during the Victorian period.

I recently posted ("No B in Harley-Davidson" and "The seal of Melchizedek," February 9 and 18) about seeing "Keep smiling" juxtaposed with 666 twice: once in a barber shop, and once in one of the 666 restaurants that prompted my commenter to adapt Yeats.

242, and crabs

In "The Doors" (January 16), I note that the S:E:G: values of the four basic constituents of material reality are all combinations of the digits 4 and 7: space (44), time (47), energy (74), and matter (77). The sum of those four numbers is 242.

In "Hurry up the cakes" (January 22), I recount running into a picture of a moon landing cake together with a black Special Forces jersey with the number 242 on it. The number 242 was a sync because of the connection to the number mentioned in "The Doors." The moon landing cake was a sync because of a recent comment (also January 22) in which, responding to a picture of the three wise men in a blue desert, WanderingGondola noted the unusual color and (evidently alluding to the expression "blue moon") wrote, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?" Well, either a desert or a dessert.

In "'The Open Doors' syncs" (January 26), I encounter a reference to the song "Blue Moon" on page 242 of a book called Revelations. I note that, since the S:E:G value of revelation is 121, the number 242 represents two revelations.

Today I had lunch at a cheap dumpling chain called 八方雲集. The name is a four-character idiom meaning "gathering from all over" -- literally "clouds gathering from the eight directions," referring to the the cardinal and intercardinal points of the compass. It occurred to me that eight directions in two dimensions was an instance of a more general rule: in an n-dimensional space, there will be a total of 3ⁿ - 1 cardinal and intercardinal directions. For three dimensions, the number is 26; for four dimensions, it is 80; for five dimensions, it is 242.

There's an election coming soon in Taiwan, and while I was out randonauting yesterday I passed many campaign posters. In order to make voting more convenient for illiterate people (really!), each candidate is assigned a number. For almost the entirety of my ramble, the only ads I saw were for candidates number 6 and 8. I took note of this because those two numbers have been synchronistically relevant of late, and because for some reason both candidates included the same English word, super, on their billboards.

I just kept seeing 6 and 8, 6 and 8, again and again. Finally, right at the end, I caught a glimpse of some different candidate numbers in the distance.

It's not an ad for an individual candidate, but for the ruling (anti-China, pro-globohomo) Democratic Progressive Party. It features three of their candidates who are running for different positions, which is what makes it possible for two of them to have the same number. At the bottom of the billboard is a reminder to vote yes in the referendum to give 18-year-olds the vote

This last one isn't about 242, but I'm just going to tack it on here. It's a striking enough coincidence to post about, but not striking enough to get a post of its own.

I passed a seafood wholesaler that has two huge crab sculptures on the exterior wall. Seconds later, I stopped at a red light and saw a couple of bumper stickers that made me snap a photo and then turn around and photograph the seafood shop, too.

These are the stickers:

The Chinese reads 陸蟹出沒減速慢行, "land crab area, slow down." KTNP is Kenting National Park, in a part of Taiwan quite far from where I live. When I searched for the Chinese to try to get clear images of the stickers, the first result was this.

That says "101T Kenting," then the text of the sign, and then the photographer's name. I haven't been able to find out what "101T" means in this context, but in my February 11 post "Green Door 101," I noted that the S:E:G value of Cancer the Crab is 101.

Here's the seafood place, maybe 200 meters from where I saw the crab-sticker car. Like the car, it features two different crab species, one on the left and one of the right.

I guess there is a 242 connection after all, since the S:E:G: for crab is 24. Two crabs would be 24 × 2.

Note added: This post sent me to YouTube to rewatch the Onion classic "Experts Agree, Giant, Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat." This showed up in the sidebar:

I know it's hard to believe now, but The Onion actually used to be pretty good. It was the Babylon Bee of its time.