On October 27, I posted "Gold and silver keys," about this symbol of the papacy. The latter post also included two images -- Waite's Hierophant card and the Vatican City coat of arms -- featuring the triple tiara formerly worn by popes. Less than 12 hours ago, I posted "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," a sync post about Francis Bacon (both the Elizabethan statesman and the 20th-century "artist").
This morning I checked the weekly DS meme dump. One of the memes was this photo of a novel. The cover art shows a building labeled "Columbine High" and says "you'll just die."
This obviously must have been published before the name Columbine became synonymous with school shootings. Guess who showed up in the search results when I Googled it:
It's weird that the Bacon reference was highlighted in the search results, as it's just one comment in a thread that otherwise has nothing to do with him. I had to press Page Down 12 times to find it.
Returning to the meme post and scrolling down a bit, I found a picture of Jesus giving the two papal keys to Martin Luther:
And, scrolling down a bit more, this image featuring a triple tiara:
Ordinarily, finding the papal keys and the papal tiara juxtaposed wouldn't be a coincidence at all, but in this case I think it is. The meme with the tiara obviously has no direct reference to the papacy. It's just a random weird/creepy image, referencing Denver Airport conspiracy theories. (Columbine is in a suburb of Denver, by the way.)
I Googled denver airport conspiracy. First result:
Happy Halloween.
Note added (12:40 p.m.): This Francis Bacon stuff reminded me of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle sketch about a feud between Shakespeare and Bacon, so I looked it up and watched it. I'd forgotten that it features a play called Romeo and Zelda:
Today I was checking something on Know Your Meme and saw "Knowledge is power. France is bacon" up in the trending section. Since syncs with the name Francis have been a thing recently, I clicked. Here's the "Origin" section:
On October 28th, 2010, Redditor OrdinaryPanda submitted a post to the /r/AskReddit subreddit, which asked what words or phrases other Redditors misunderstood as children. In the comments section of the post, Redditor Lord_Baron confessed to mishearing the quote "Knowledge is power – Francis Bacon" as Knowledge is power, France is bacon." Prior to being archived, the commented accumulated over 7,600 up votes.
Since one of my earlier Francis syncs had involved a pope and a famous painting (Pope Francis gluing himself to The Creation of Adam in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel"), this made me think of a different Francis Bacon, the painter best known for his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. (I hate that painting. While it may show a bit more technical skill than Duchamp's mustached Mona Lisa, it's the same basic idea -- only Bacon's sacrilege is greater, since Diego Velázquez's original is far greater than the Mona Lisa.) On a whim, I looked him up on Wikipedia:
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Heh, "one of the giants of contemporary art." Yes, that's the mot juste.
So, there's a bit of symmetry. On October 28, I happened upon an old receipt dated October 30, 1984. (See "Oops, did I mess up one of those anniversary syncs?") Today, October 30, I found this sync about October 28. (I wrote most of this post at around 10:30 p.m. on October 30. Then I was interrupted and didn't get around to finishing it until after midnight.)
Know Your Meme credits "France is bacon" to someone called Lord_Baron -- a double title that syncs with Count von Count and the Duke of Earl -- but it's actually a mistake. The reddit screenshot provided clearly shows the username as Lard_Baron, presumably meant as a pun on "oil baron."
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After writing all of the above but before publishing, I ran an image search for diego velazquez pope innocent x. My initial plan was just to find a high-resolution photo of it and look at it -- it's a great painting, one of my favorites -- but I got sidetracked.
Recently, I was about to see a painting by a favourite artist that I had never viewed in the flesh—the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Diego Velázquez in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Yet amid my excitement was a hint of trepidation. Two things provoked it. First, the fear of disappointment. Just before my visit, the artist Mark Leckey had confided in our A brush with... podcast how he had journeyed to view Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling but found that he “couldn’t see it”. He said: “I made this pilgrimage. And then it was denied by the crowds and everything else. It was just horrible.”
One of the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel" was Francis Berger going to see the Sistine Chapel. Frank had said that "From a purely museum visit perspective, it was a disaster."
Going back to the image search results, another of the first ones was a blog post pointing out that Innocent X in the portrait looks like Gene Hackman. I clicked that one, too. Since in this post I had just written that the Velázquez portrait was much better than the Mona Lisa, I was surprised to see the juxtaposition in this "Pope Gene Hackman X" post:
Gene Hackman was in the sync stream two years ago. In fact, I did a sync post titled simply "Gene Hackman."
In yesterday's post "Light shining through yellow flowers," I discuss the etymology of pupil. It comes from a Latin word meaning "small child," and the ocular sense comes from the fact that if you stare into another person's pupil, you can see a tiny person -- your own miniature reflection -- in it.
I was curious about that because I had just started reading Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil. Although the juxtaposition with Iris should have been enough to make me think of the ocular sense of pupil, what actually made me think of it was the Galahad Eridanus videos I had recently watched, which include these lines about a solar eclipse:
Ascend, O moon Into the sun Eclipse's eye Thy will be done. Lo, Abraxas! To thy pupil cometh sight, For from thy shadow shineth light!
The idea of a "little man" in one's pupil put a song in my head: Pink Floyd's "The Gnome," which begins with these lines:
I want to tell you a story 'bout a little man, if I can
In my April 2021 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," I had associated that song -- or rather a reference to it by Terence McKenna -- with a scene from the Tintin comic book Prisoners of the Sun, in which there's a speech bubble from Tintin full of dozens of stars and squiggles and other random symbols -- like comic-book "swearing," but unusually prolonged -- after which he says, "Hip-hip-hooray!" This had synched with McKenna talking about "visible language" and "a new way to say hooray."
I went to bed with "The Gnome" in my head, and I dreamed about poring over that Tintin speech bubble, trying to decipher the secret meaning of his "visible language."
In the morning, naturally, I had to look it up and see if there was in fact any secret meaning to be deciphered. I had forgotten the immediate context, which turns out to be highly synchronistically relevant:
Tintin speaks his "visible language" just after noting "an extraordinary coincidence" in a scrap of newspaper. What he has read, we later find out, is the date of an upcoming total solar eclipse in South America. He uses his foreknowledge of this eclipse to take advantage of the superstitions of the Inca and prevent them from sacrificing him to the sun.
Just yesterday, as related in the post "In which I read the news," I saw a scrap of newspaper blowing across the street and felt the urge to pick it up and read it. The paper was dated April 21, 2023, but what I found significant in it were references to two then-future dates: April 27 and April 22. Tintin also found a future date in his newspaper.
The two dates mentioned -- April 27 and April 22 -- were significant to me because they were anniversaries. I've been having lots of anniversary syncs lately. Then I remembered that the reason I'd been reading an old Tintin book back in 2021 was that someone had emailed me a scan from it -- and I'd received the email on what turned out to be the anniversary of its original publication. What date was that? I looked it up, checking my old post "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles'":
I've just discovered that Le Temple du Soleil, from the English translation of which the above scan is taken, was originally published serially in Tintin magazine -- and the final installment was published on Thursday, April 22, 1948. I received the email with the scan in the early hours of Thursday, April 22, 2021, and posted it here later the same day. The panels in question are near the end (on page 59 of 62 in the English version), so I assume that they were part of the final installment and that I received and posted them on the anniversary of their original publication.
Here are the panels I was emailed:
The accompanying comment, connecting Tintin's eclipse with the birdemic and peck, was this:
I reckon we are seeing this exact same thing playing out. The eclipse corresponds to the "deadly birdemic", and Tintin's god-like powers correspond to the peck. Now that most people are pecked, all They need to do is reduce media coverage on the "cases" and make out as if the peck has saved the day. The bridemic will vanish (miraculously), and they will then write history according to their narrative, using it as artillery in the pro-peck propaganda war as an example of how effective GM pecking is.
That's not quite how things ended up playing out, but the eclipse/peck connection is highly relevant.
After having visions of an eclipse, Galahad Eridanus looked up the date of the next solar eclipse and found that it would be December 14, 2020 -- in South America, like Tintin's.
The first birdemic peck to be administered to a member of the public, outside of clinical trials, was given to nurse Sandra Lindsay at Long Island Jewish Medical Center on December 14, 2020.
Note added (4:24 p.m.): Just after posting this, I checked /x/ and found this:
Prisoners of the Sun was originally titled Le Temple du Soleil. Demiurge comes from the same Gnostic vocabulary as Abraxas. I can't make out what is inscribed on the ceiling above the sun, but it begins with A and ends with S.
Today I finished Whitley Strieber’s Majestic, rereading it for the first time in 20 years, and started, a day early, Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil, which I have never read.
Yellow flowers, evening primroses, are a recurring theme in Majestic. The walls of the crashed saucer, for example, appear to be made of waxed paper with yellow flowers pressed into it. Later, the protagonist finds himself in a hall made of the same material:
We went down a hall that was more a tunnel it was so low. I could see that it was made of paper of the same type that formed the inner walls of the ship we had found. Light came through it from the outside. The yellow flowers pressed into the paper seemed almost alive, so vividly did they glow.
Today I read this on p. 6 of The Philosopher’s Pupil:
He lifted up his head. He was in his bed in his room at home, and the daylight was showing through the curtains, present in an insubstantial pattern of yellow flowers.
Whitley and Iris! Sync makes strange bedfellows indeed.
Earlier today I looked up the etymology of pupil, wondering why the aperture of the iris should have the same name as a student. Both senses come from the Latin for “small child.” The ocular sense comes from the fact that you can see a tiny reflection of yourself, as if a miniature human being, in another person’s pupil.
As it happens, I wrote about this phenomenon back in March 2021. As it happens, it was in a post about Whitley Strieber:
You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!
I was motorcycling down a fairly empty road when an old piece of newspaper blew across my path. The sentence "That's for you" appeared in the center of my skull (not as a voice, but with the clarity typical of telepathic communications), so I turned my bike around, found the paper, and took some photos of it.
When I got home, I realized that I had somehow neglected to photograph one part of it, so I immediately went back out there, tracked down the paper (which had blown some distance down the road in the intervening time) and rectified the omission. I guess that's sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but it felt urgent.
The news was about six months old.
I had begun the day by thinking about "anniversary syncs," and the most impressive of these to date has been the one about the many-eyed whale. On April 27, 2014, I posted about a dream in which I saw a whale with many eyes. Much later, in 2022, I discovered that John Dee and Edward Kelley had had a vision of a whale with many eyes on April 27, 1584. When I saw the date April 27 on the paper, therefore, it jumped out at me. The date of the paper itself was April 21, 2023, but one of the ads mentioned the 27th:
It's an ad for the True Jesus Church, a Chinese Pentecostal movement. By the way, check out the "neutral point of view" on their Wikipedia page:
The headline says "The distance between us and God." The program is as follows:
4/25 Not far from God
4/26 Behold the Lamb of God!
4/27 Love in our life
4/28 Hymn sermon: The peace given by Jesus
4/29 Reflections on the five loaves and two fishes
4/30 The prayer of Gethsemane; Foot-washing ceremony / Holy Communion
Christianity is a small minority religion in Taiwan, so finding the date 4/27 in a Christian context is particularly unusual. Note that 4/30 is close by; my whale and Dee's were separated by exactly 430 years.
The other thing that caught my eye -- the one I somehow forgot to photograph and had to go back for -- was this:
This is about an Earth Day event and gives the date April 22, 2023. On April 22, 1996, I met "Beatrice." As with her Dantean namesake, we only met briefly, scarcely spoke, and never had any sort of relationship, but she became an important symbol in my mind and a source of poetic inspiration for many years. Dante only met Beatrice twice, with the second meeting occurring on the ninth anniversary of the first:
When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person (La Vita Nuova III).
The date on the paper -- April 22, 2023 -- is the 27th anniversary of my first and only meeting with "Beatrice," 27 being a multiple of nine.
The picture of the three interlinked rings also struck me as significant, since the overlapping portions approximate the "Triforce" shape introduced into the sync-stream by Wandering Gondola with a comment on my October 24 post "William Wright is back and he's bringing syncs." In a later comment on the same post, she brought in the theme of additive and subtractive primary colors:
Watching the Tom Petty video, I saw its triangles and strings are red, yellow and blue, the typical "subtractive" primaries of colour theory. The Triforce's attributes (power, courage and wisdom) usually correlate to red, green and blue respectively, and those colours are the primaries of the "additive" colour system used by most screen technologies.
The concept of primary colors is typically illustrated with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles:
The Triforce was introduced because I had made a connection between three triangles and the number 333. Three threes have a sum of 9 and a product of 27. A week or two ago I happened to watch one of those "people are stupid" videos on YouTube; the guy stops people on the street and asks them, "What's three times three times three," to which many of them unhesitatingly answer, "Nine."
The three interlocked rings are called "Borromean rings" because they were used in Milan to represent the union of the Visconti, Sforza, and Borromeo families. I picked up this factoid at some point in my research on the Tarot, the oldest surviving decks being the ones commissioned by the Visconti-Sforza family.
The juxtaposition of rings with a name so similar to Boromir naturally makes one think of this:
Note added (4:52 p.m.): Just after posting this, I ran a Google image search for triforce venn diagram to see if anyone else had made the connection. The sixth result was this:
I read six of the seven Harry Potter books back before The Deathly Hallows had been written, and I never got around to reading it later. I had never encountered that symbol before. I searched for deathly hallows symbol and found this article (published October 30, 2017; see October 30 in my last post):
The eye radiating light -- juxtaposed with the Triforce -- was featured in my October 25 post "Lines radiating from a triangle."
After skimming the Sun article, I decided to check /x/. First post in the catalog:
I saw Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil on my shelf tonight and thought to myself, "I'll most likely start reading that on Monday. I will have finished the Strieber and the Rilke by then and can put another iron in the fire."
Could I actually read it, though? I tried to reread one of her books a few years ago -- A Fairly Honourable Defeat, I think -- and just couldn't do it. All the characters seemed tiresome and obnoxious, and the authorial voice actively annoying, and I gave up after just a few pages. I used to find her books delightful. Couldn't put them down. I don't know if it was just my mood that day or some more permanent change, but it was like her spiritual wavelength and my own now differed by an augmented fourth.
With that experience in mind, I thought I'd better take down The Philosopher's Pupil now, flip to a few random pages, and see whether or not my body still rejects it.
I opened it up and found that there was a bookmark, left there by the previous owner -- a good long time ago, apparently, as when I unfolded it I found it was a receipt dated October 30, 1984:
Was I supposed to find this on Monday -- October 30, when I anticipate starting the book -- and be suitably impressed? Did I just do the synchronistic equivalent of finding one of my presents hidden in the closet a few days before Christmas?
No, synchronicities can't be spoiled "by chance," since "chance" is exactly what they ae made of. The bookmark was between pages 28 and 29, and as I type this sentence the clock in the corner of my computer screen informs me that it is precisely 12:00 midnight, the moment dividing the 28th of October from the 29th. Plus I see there's a reference to "the saucer" on p. 28, and looking back at the previous page confirms that this is indeed "an unidentified flying object, a large luminous tilted saucer." I wasn't expecting that in an Iris Murdoch novel! Curiosity status: piqued.
And now I'd better click "Publish" before it's 12:01.
I had a healthy interest in weaponry as a child, and I certainly knew what a scimitar was, but I didn't make the connection that the cimeters in the Book of Mormon were a variant spelling of the same thing. I figured it was an untranslated word, like curelom, and referred to some distinctive Lamanite weapon for which there was no English name. When I was about seven or eight, I was pretty sure that a curelom was a Triceratops and that a cimiter looked like this:
I was never very good at explaining this to people. "I think it was like a Frisbee with spikes on it, on the end of stick" -- and they would always imagine something like a mushroom!
I think his ricking-stick probably has a spherical head, though, in which case it would not be a true cimeter. And if it does have a disk-shaped head, he's using it wrong. Obviously, you're not supposed to swing a cimiter like a tennis racket!
Starting on October 8, I've had a persistent feeling that I need to spend some time working through the symbolism of the Pope/Hierophant card of the Tarot, but so far I've mostly dismissed it, only doing the most cursory of work. One weird thing that did get my attention was that, while Waite decided to ditch the traditional title Pope in favor of the pagan Hierophant, at the same time he actually added more explicit papal symbolism to the card. For example, none of the earlier Pope cards I've looked at (Visconti-Sforza, various Marseille-style decks, Oswald Wirth) feature the crossed keys which are a standard symbol of the papacy, but Waite puts them in:
Weird, right? Why pretend that this is a "hierophant" but make him look even more papal than before? I know I said "for example," but actually the keys are the only instance of this I've found. In other respects, Waite's is a very traditional Pope card, with no other major innovations. So the question of those keys has been in the back of my mind.
Yesterday, William Wright posted "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" He begins with a picture of the coat of arms of the Holy See and discusses the crossed keys, finding particular significance in the fact that one key is gold and the other silver. (Waite drops the ball here; his are both gold for some reason. Weird for a Golden Dawn type to miss a chance to throw in some extraneous Duality. See the contrasting habits of the two monks, for instance.)
This got my attention, given my recent (if a bit half-assed) interest in the crossed keys as a papal symbol. After I finished work tonight, I decided to get back on Mr. Wright's blog and read the post again. While I was rereading it, a little message from Windows popped up in the corner of my screen. It was only on the screen for a few seconds before disappearing, and it was all in Chinese, so I didn't really catch what it said, but I did notice the little icon that accompanied it:
Since I wasn't quick enough to get a screenshot, I had to search various helpsites about Windows 7 to find a copy of the icon to include here. (The one I saw was much smaller, though, like favicon dimension.) It seems the icon appears to warn you that you're about to be automatically logged off or that your password is going to expire. My computer isn't set up to do either of those things, so I'm sure what the message could have been about. If it ever shows up again, I'll catch it before it disappears.
Update: Here's another image I found online, which shows precisely the same icon I saw, same dimensions and everything:
Update (October 30): The message showed up again, and I screencapped it before it disappeared:
The Chinese says, "Enable Windows now. The activation period has expired. Please click this message to get started."
Lots of Samoans have told me this. I’ll go easy on the eye-dialect to keep it readable, but you should be reading it in the heaviest Samoan accent you can manage:
The D in trucks stands for dumb, because trucks make you dumb.
The R stands for ridiculous because doing trucks is so ridiculous.
The U stands for ockly, because you look so ockly when you are doing the trucks.
And the Chee? The Chee stands for crazy!
Cue uproarious laughter. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the same group of Samoans tell this one to each other, but somehow it never gets old.
I just wanted to make sure no one takes the psychedelic-adjacent content of some of my syncs as an endorsement. Stay away from that stuff.
As William Wright says, your body is there to protect you if you don’t mess with it, so don’t. Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.
In William Wright's post yesterday "Michael Jackson and the Stone," he relates a dream in which he saw a big baby carriage inside a Mormon church and believed that the Sawtooth Stone (a supernatural stone which is the main focus of his blog) was hidden inside it.
So, Michael (Jackson) in possession of a shrouded, newly-born Stone entering church a little late, and having to take a seat in the back, but likely with some things to say. Who knows, maybe he entered a Fast and Testimony meeting and can find a chance to head on up to the pulpit (for those not familiar, this is a meeting where there is essentially an open microphone and anybody can go up to speak).
So the Stone is a baby, and there may be a chance to testify. This put a song in my head that I haven't heard or thought of in a good long time: "Rock and Roll Religion" by Billy Tyger. (That's my uncle, William John Tychonievich, who quite literally believes in a rock-'n'-roll religion.)
"Rock, baby, testify / Rock till you get that heavenly high . . . ."
I converted this from audiocassette to YouTube just for you, by the way. You will be the first Internet People ever to hear it.
The October 24 post "William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs" introduced the 1992 They Might Be Giants song "The Statue Got Me High" into the sync-stream. I connected it with this photo I took last year:
I had originally posted this photo in "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," the name Dick being the central connecting link. A white Starbucks cup had been in the sync-stream at that time, and the name Starbucks comes from Moby-Dick. Dick Diver is Fitzgerald's autobiographical character in Tender Is the Night. The cup on Fitzgerald's head made him look like Serapis, which is a link to Zeus. Zeus Is a Dick tied in with the John Dee "God is a whale" theme. Oh, speaking of whales, "The Statue Got Me High" is from this album:
I had linked the photo of the two books to "The Statue Got Me High" because a giant white teacup and saucer feature prominently in the music video, and because of the line "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."
Last night, someone posted on /x/, asking "How do I have psychedelic experiences without taking any drugs?" -- a statue getting you high would be one obvious example of this! -- with this accompanying picture:
One of the commenters identified the man in the picture: "That's Philip K. Dick receiving info from VALIS. True story." VALIS is God. The name Philip has been in the sync-stream, associated with headlessness.
A couple of days ago I started reading Rilke, my previous exposure to his work having been limited to cultural osmosis. I posted one of his poems on my Book of Mormon blog on October 24. Not until this present post brought in the name Apollo and the theme of headlessness did I think of what is arguably his best-known poem (not among those I've read recently, but everyone knows it), which may have been one of the inspirations (Don Giovanni being the other obvious one) for "The Statue Got Me High":
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
From the music video for "The Waiting" (1981) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:
Note that all three of these have a "time" theme: Past, present, future. Ocarina of Time. Waiting.
In the Galahad Eridanus video, the object is a rotating octahedron, often appearing, as in the screenshot above, as two triangles, one upright and the other inverted. Seen from another angle, an octahedron can appear as four triangles: a central triangle with each of its edges shared by one of the other three:
The Legend of Zelda "Triforce" symbol can be seen as consisting either of two triangles (a large upright one and a small inverted one) or of four (the central inverted triangle sharing one of its edges with each of the other three). And of course one can also ignore the negative-space inverted triangle and see it as three triangles -- that being the point of the name Triforce.
Look back at the Zelda screencap. The radiating lines are blue, and the central inverted triangle appears blue, too. Rotate it 90 degrees to the left, and you have what we see in the Tom Petty video. The blue triangle seen above is one of a set of three triangles, as in the Triforce:
There's perhaps a nod to Crowley in this theme, too:
Nothing in that logo is original to Crowley. The Eye of Providence, in a triangle, radiating light, is a ubiquitous theme (and no, it's not exclusively Masonic).
"The Statue Got Me High" -- the TMBG song I associate with a Triforce-like image -- says "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye." Beams being sent into eyes, rather than radiating from them, are covered in the Eridanus video, too:
Note added: The Walk the Moon video "One Foot" (posted by William Wright here) includes somewhat similar imagery:
Further note added (October 28): John A. Keel's book The Eighth Tower came up in an /x/ thread, so I looked it up on Anna's Archive. Here's the cover art:
Yesterday I happened to be discussing psychedelic drugs with the logistics staff of an auto parts company (I wear many hats), and on the way home I passed Presbyterian church, which caught my eye because its burning-bush logo synched with something I had been thinking about earlier. My brother Luther likes to say that Presbyterian literally means "cowboy" -- since presbys, the Greek for "elder," may originally have meant "one who leads the cattle." That, combined with the recent discussion, made me think of Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro's graphic novel Peyote Cowboy, which I have never read but know about because he's always talking it up on his blog.
Then I realized I hadn't checked that blog in well over a year. I popped over to see what was new. The second-newest post, "Unidentified Flying Tableware" (October 15), featured this cartoon:
I suppose the greenness of the aliens in the Bizarro cartoon also syncs with the Jaredites, since more than one skeptic of the Book of Mormon has wondered, given Joseph Smith's interest in stones, whether the Jaredites and Nephites were inspired by green minerals.
Note added: Dan Piraro's October 8 post also seems like a link to "The Statue Got Me High":
I'm not sure what's supposed to be going on here. The statue is sculpting itself, but what happened to the artist? He's fainted from shock? He's dreaming that the statue is sculpting itself? The statue killed him?
The statue made me die
The statue made me die
It took my hand, it killed me, and it turned me to the sky
Whatever happened to the guy, he's lying face-up, turned to the sky.
I woke up this morning with no memory of any dreams but with the lines that form this post's title in my head.
It's a quote from Buck Owens. Back in the 1990s there was a brief article about him in the local paper (either the Lake County News-Herald or the Cleveland Plain Dealer; my parents subscribed to both). It had a photo of him with the quote printed in bold beneath it. Here's a reconstruction:
I don't know much about Buck Owens, but I know what I like, and I decided that this -- the highlighting of the content-free quote, the look on his face, the way the guy was dressed -- was just about the best thing the News-Herald (or possibly Plain Dealer) had ever published. Well, except for that even more quotable one about the guy who ate 25 eggs every day "for complex psychological reasons."
"I know [insert vague statement], no doubt. I'm not really sure how I feel about it" became a catchphrase in my family and circle of friends, and a very versatile one. I pioneered that. I'm not really sure how I feel about it.
That was a long time ago. Why was it in my head when I woke up this morning? I know there must have been some reason, no doubt. . . . Anyway, I tried my best to track down the original article on the Internet but, unsurprisingly, failed. I did find the photo, though -- from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, into which he was inducted in 1996, so I suppose that was the occasion for the article.
Later in the morning, I checked some blogs and found a new post by William Wright: "Sync-fairies and writing again," in which he describes how his syncs have been interfacing with mine (including, most strikingly, a persistent delusion that he himself is literally a drowning boy in an Itladian-type scenario). He introduces these reflections with this:
In that Sync-fest post, the Jaredite-UFO-saucer points he was making weren't the only thing that caught my attention. He devotes significant space to this concept of a 'Drowning Boy'. This stood out to me for reasons I will explain below, before transitioning into some open thoughts on these syncs and how I feel about them (preview: I am not sure how I feel).
Precognition? Telepathy? Synchronicity? Just a very common turn of phrase which may not actually have been pioneered by Buck Owens? I know it must be one of those things, no doubt. . . .
William Wright mentions at one point becoming rather distressed by the invasion of the sync fairies into his life, and that playing a role in his decision to stop blogging. I know of at least two other cases in which readers of this blog have ended up with psychological issues with a little help from my friends. Is it irresponsible of me to share all this stuff so openly? I was bred en bawn in a brier-patch, but for those less accustomed to high strangeness it can be rather shattering.
One of Buck Owens's hit songs, I learned today, was called "Ruby (Are You Mad)." That, combined with the idea of hard-to-articulate feelings, made me think of this famous question posed by the late Charles Manson. Whatever you think of him -- murderer, patsy, spook, or something else -- he was undeniably a gifted orator.
If you calculate the S:E:G: value of this post's title (i.e., add up the ordinal values of its constituent letters, where A = 1 and Z = 26), you'll find it adds up to 365. According to Genesis, that's how many years Enoch lived before "God took him" (Gen. 5:23-24), and it's also the value of the name Abraxas in Greek isopsephia. I discovered, or contrived, this many years ago.
In the past few days, I discovered the YouTube channel of Galahad Eridanus and watched all his videos. He talks a lot about Abraxas, emphasizing not only that his name adds up to 365, but that it consists of 7 letters -- thus encoding a year and a week simultaneously. (He mentions this in more than one video, and I can't be bothered to check which ones. Just watch them all; there aren't many of them, and they're all very well done.)
Today, I randomly decided to weigh myself. Our bathroom scale is an odd one. It gives weights to the tenth of a kilogram, but some bizarre malfunction causes it to display double the weight of whatever is put on it. I tested this pretty thoroughly when the malfunction first started (which was during a period of poltergeist activity) and confirmed that it is still perfectly accurate so long as you divide the number it gives you by two.
Today it informed me that I weigh 147.3 kilograms. Dividing that by two, we get 73.65 -- that is, 7 followed by 365.
At the same time that I've been watching videos about Abraxas and dealing with all these syncs, I've also been working (as a sort of tangent that spun off from my study of the Book of Mormon) on a radically different timeline for the biblical Exodus, which presupposes that the Israelites were in Egypt for a far shorter time than the 430 years given in Deuteronomy. This grew organically out of my Book of Mormon work and has nothing to do with the Abraxas stuff.
According to Joseph Smith, Enoch didn't live 365 years; he lived 430 years -- 65 years before the birth of Missile Man and 365 after.
All those John Dee whale syncs seem to be bubbling back up to the surface. Whales are appearing again, as are Aleister Crowley (who claimed, credibly in my opinion, to be Edward Kelley reincarnated), Choronzon, magical stones, etc.
Slow down, sync fairies! I can only keep track of so many threads at once.
Yesterday's post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr" left me on the lookout for synchronistic occurrences of the numbers 42, 126 and 333. I was mostly expecting to see those numbers themselves, maybe on license plates or something, but another idea also popped into my head with a curious clarity: Three triangles could represent 333.
I never saw any of the expected numbers. Nor did I run into three triangles anywhere.
William Wright proposes that the first element in the name Moriancumer refers to Moria -- the Dwarrowdelf of Tolkien, subject of the Song of Durin -- and that there is a hidden reference in the Book of Mormon to the Brother of Jared, like Gandalf, opening the gates of Khazad-dûm by uttering the password friend.
William Wright stopped blogging on September 17, announcing that he was finished. When I visited his blog on October 19 to get the Brother of Jared link, that was still where things stood.
Wandering Gondola's comment of this morning ends with this paragraph:
While writing this I thought to check William Wright's blog, and found he's posting again. (A second small sync: Another Will Wright is famous for simulation games, most notably The Sims, which lets players create and somewhat control virtual people. Not-quite-free men!)
Her use of the variant form Will Wright led me to make a connection I hadn't before: I am currently reading Whitley Strieber's novel Majestic. An air force base called Wright Field, often shortened to Wright, is mentioned many times; and the main character's name is Will Stone. Stones -- supernatural, capitalized Stones -- are a central theme on William Wright's blog.
I went straight to Mr. Wright's blog and read his first post since he resumed blogging: "The Great Pumpkin and 'waiting.'" It was posted on October 20, the day after "Syncfest," and it mentions the same Brother of Jared story I mentioned there:
I look to the story, or rather my updated story, of the Brother of Jared to demonstrate the truth of that sentence I just wrote. He moved a mountain by faith. In an earlier post, I suggest that the mountain that he moved was actually Durin's Door in order to access the mines of Moria, obtain Mithril that could be fashioned into stones, and have Jesus fill those stones with light.
That could be a striking coincidence -- or, more likely, he reads this blog, and my shout-out influenced his decision to start posting again. Be that as it may, it certainly is a striking coincidence that Mr. Wright ends his post by talking about three triangles in a Tom Petty music video:
In the video, there are 3 colored triangles and also loose colored string on the set. At the midpoint of the video (about the 2 minute mark), we find Petty singing in front of a black backdrop. He then proceeds to smash through this backdrop to reveal a member of the band behind it. With that band member is the red triangle, and the red string now seeming to extend out from both him and the triangle. We then see the blue triangle with the same band member now with blue string, and lastly the yellow triangle, but this triangle is inverted and now, to me at least, resembles more something like a jewel or diamond.
And then I suddenly remembered what "three triangles" had meant to me decades ago.
Approximately 20 years ago, when my brother and I were rooming together in college, he asked to borrow my battered copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion. When he was near the end, he brought it to me, showed me one of the pages, and said, "Why on earth did you write 'The Statue Got Me High' in the margin?"
Well.
In 1994 or thereabouts, I discovered They Might Be Giants and Whitley Strieber, in that order. The first time I listened to the TMBG song "The Statue Got Me High" (from the 1992 album Apollo 18), it just absolutely scared the bejesus out of me. As soon as I heard the very brief instrumental intro before the singing starts, I got goosebumps and my mouth went dry, and it jogged loose a free-floating memory, unattached to anything else, of looking up at my bedroom ceiling and seeing three small triangles of bright white light, themselves arranged in a triangular pattern. I still don't know why, or why I had such an extreme emotional reaction to that image. I decided the song was "satanic" but from time to time felt the urge to listen to it again anyway -- which would always leave me terrified and vowing never to play it again.
Communion also scared me to death. I guess I spent quite a lot of time being scared to death in those days. But nothing scared me more than the shock of recognition when I read this passage, from a transcript of an abductee support-group meeting:
Sam: Does anybody ever experience light without any source? You see it on the wall or on the ceiling. It could be in a triangular shape or round. Sometimes I see a triangle. Three triangles together on the ceiling. Has anybody else seen that?
Notice that the comment that led me to William Wright's "three triangles" post was on a post of mine with "ceiling lights" in the title. Part of Mr. Wright's explanation for his decision to start blogging again is "I just find stones are on my mind constantly, even as I go about other things. It is just always there."
Now check out some of the lyrics to "The Statue Got Me High":
The stone it called to me
And now I see the things the stone has shown to me
A rock that spoke a word
An animated mineral it can be heard
. . .
And now it is your turn
Your turn to hear the stone and then your turn to burn
The stone it calls to you
You can't refuse to do the things it tells you to
Fortunately I am no longer capable of being scared to death, but this is still really, really weird.
In the dream, I was back in the house I grew up in (and that my parents still live in). I was talking with my dad about something, and I started to say something like "It just feels like things are close, because I can hear you guys upstairs on your ceramics making a lot of noise". As I was saying this, my dad's face transformed into that of Keanu Reeves as the character of Neo in the Matrix movies, which was a bit strange, and I found that it was difficult to tell whether the words I said were coming from me or the person I was now facing as Neo. As soon as I became aware of this, I woke up.
In the video for "The Statue Got Me High," as the intro is playing -- the part that freaked me out so much when I first heard it and made me remember the three triangles -- the camera zooms in on a giant ceramic cup and saucer:
As they sing, "And now I see the things the stone has shown to me," we see this:
This video was made seven years before The Matrix, but it certainly seems to prefigure it:
After reading Mr. Wright's posts, I found a new comment from Wandering Gondola -- who plays lots of video games so I don't have to -- pointing out that my three triangles in a triangular configuration suggest the Triforce from the Legend of Zelda franchise. It's a bit different (Zelda on the left, a reconstruction of what I saw on the right) but certainly suggestive:
Zelda made me think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and then I seemed to remember that Fitzgerald had appeared on this blog once before. He had indeed, in the October 2022 post "Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision," featuring this image:
What's that on F. Scott's head? Look familiar? The image on the Zeus Is a Dick book also suggests a line from "Statue": "The monument of granite sent a beam into my eye."
In my 2022 post, I connect this juxtaposition of Fitzgerald and dick with Tender Is the Night -- a novel in which the main characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, are based on the author and his wife, Zelda.
Oh, by the way, the F stands for Francis.
I've also just noticed that "Statue" contains an indirect Michelangelo reference: "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie" -- alluding to the apocryphal story about Michelangelo saying he created his masterpiece by "just chipping away anything that doesn't look like David."
