Fever dreams and syncs: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more

I've been out of commission for a bit with a case of food poisoning, and it had the effect of turning my dreams into something more like delirium or schizophrenia than like ordinary nocturnal dreams. The visual element was not lifelike at all but consisted solely of constantly changing symbols and diagrams, and I felt that these were being expounded with great clarity and that suddenly I got it The overall feeling of the experience was similar to that attending a dream I had a few years ago which enabled me to perceive Mozart's Magic Flute as a single unified whole, an audible diagram of great complexity and symmetry -- or perhaps more like what the fellow in the John Linnell song feels when he realizes that Montana is really just a leg, with the round part just the way you would espect. I can't really remember much of the content of this supposed revelation -- likely because there is no there there -- but at the time it felt as if the mysteries of the universe were being unfolded to my view.

Central to the dream was the symbol D∞D and its variants D&D and 484 -- and a significant portion of the dream constituted a direct death threat from the synchronicity fairies if I dared to share any of what had been revealed to me. The allusions to extinct species like the dodo and the T. rex were veiled threats, you see, and one of the meanings of D&D was "Death & Death" -- referring to One Death and Seven Death, characters from the Mayan Popol Vuh. And one and seven make eight, as do four and four. (The Chinese words for "four" and "death" are near-homophones, a fact that is the basis of many East Asian superstitions.)

Back on February 23, I received an email about the Rosary from someone whose email address includes the string "1and7," which I suppose is what put my in mind of such Popol Vuh pairs as One and Seven Death and One and Seven Hunahpu.

During the dream, I felt that I had a moral duty to disregard the death threats. Upon waking, I found that I couldn't remember enough of the forbidden knowledge to share it anyway.

Today, after the fever dream, a bit of random link-following led me to the MythoAmerica article "50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America." In the article, these two pictures are juxtaposed:

The most famous Native American "Hero Twins" are of course One and Seven Hunahpu. The text accompanying these pictures was "To bring up an old Conan tweet: America is rife with very ancient, un conquered spirits. They incarnate often onto our plane." One of the comments on the linked tweet was this:

The Popol Vuh for our times pic.twitter.com/cNmaGKV1V3

— Hernan Cortes (@CyberPunkCortes) April 30, 2022

In case you don't recognize them, those are the late Bogdanoff Twins, the subjects of many a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory -- including, as with the Native American Hero Twins, "beliefs about them having supernatural abilities."

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On a different note, my recent Venus flytrap post included a reference to the Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" meme, which made me think of this famous variant:

This in turn made me think of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap where someone is waiting for the band at an airport, holding up a sign that says "Spinal Tarp." I tried to find a picture of this but found that I had misremembered. In the movie, Lt. Hookstratten (Fred Willard) says, "You are Spinal Tarp?" but it's not written on a sign. The sign says, "Spinal Pap."

That's when I remembered that carnivorous plants had already appeared in the sync-stream recently, in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the Grail," which discusses an H. G. Wells story about a carnivorous orchid and a poem by my uncle William John about a carnivorous rose. My uncle's poem includes these lines:

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps

Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction

Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

The "spiny paps" are juxtaposed with the word matrix -- the name of the 1999 movie directed by the Wachowski Brothers. While not twins, the Wachowskis have a certain amount in common with the Bogdanoffs -- for example, goofy hair and extreme surgical modification of their appearance.

One of the brothers now wears white-guy dreads, like the Island Boys and the Mississippian Hero Twins (local equivalents of One and Seven Hunahpu). One of the Matrix sequels features white dreadlocked twins:

As the sync fairies would have it, I recently posted about The Matrix in "Knock, knock, Neo" (February 27). This was a follow-up to "Green Door 101," because Neo lives in an apartment with a greenish door labeled 101. In my flytrap post, Debbie had noted how that plant combines green doors and red doors in one.

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

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On February 23, Greg Carlwood posted an episode of The Higherside Chats called "Analog | Newspaper archive anomalies, oddities underground, radium secrets, & Lodestone 101." I made a mental note to listen to it later because of the appearance of the number 101, but I didn't get around to it until today. The "Lodestone 101" segment is using 101 in the sense of "introductory course"; the guest lays out his theory that many ancient religions revolved around the worship of magnetic stones, with the Kaaba in Mecca and the Benben of Egypt being two examples. (He also associates the names Cuba and Kaaba; the Island Boys are from Cuba.)

Immediately after listening to the THC episode, I decided to read some more in the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading. I've been reading it as an ebook on my phone but had taken a break during my illness, in the middle of the story "Jimmy Goggles the God." The story is about a man who, because he is wearing a diving costume (nicknamed Jimmy Goggles), is mistaken for a god by the ignorant [dark-skinned indigenous people] of Papua. When I opened up the Kindle app, this is the "page" it was on. I have of course added the highlighting after the fact.

So their religion revolves around the worship of a "blessed old black stone," exactly as described in "Lodestone 101."

The dark-skinned indigenous people's misapprehension that the narrator is not "a British citizen" but an otherworldy being ties in with "Britain as another planet."

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I should note in passing that the logo used on the charging stations of Gogoro, a popular electric scooter brand here in Taiwan, associate the two poles of a battery (or lodestone) with the lemniscate:

This also makes me think of Roger Anthony's "Negpos the Lion" symbol. The lemniscate an the lion are juxtaposed in the Strength card of the Tarot.