The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.") 

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph? 

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods.