Adam De Wan, Tychicus, and Joan of Arc

This morning I breakfasted at a local café. My seat was facing a large television screen on the wall across the room, on which was playing some BBC food tourism program, in which the host was visiting different chefs somewhere in Europe and sampling various dishes, including (I wasn't exactly paying attention) crayfish and a couple of pasta dishes. I later looked it up and found that it was Rick Stein's Secret France ("Rick Stein sets off on a new culinary adventure to search for France’s best-kept gastronomic secrets"), which originally aired from November 5 to December 10, 2019. I wasn't paying enough attention to tell you which of the six episodes was playing today.

The reason I was able to look the program up is that I had happened to glance up as the credits were rolling and for some reason one of the names -- that of Adam De Wan, the editor -- caught my attention and started an associative train of thought that went something like this:

De Wan. That's obviously not a French name. I bet the guy's Irish or something, and at some point the family started spelling their name with a space after the de as a sort of affectation, to make it look more aristocratic. I could probably do the same with my own name, since t is close enough to d. De Chonievich? No, the -vich is still too obvious. It would have to be de Tychon or something, which makes me think of Tychicus. . . .

What it reminded me of was when, a couple of years ago, the sync fairies had directed my attention to a particular verse in the epistles of Paul. When I looked it up, it happened to include the name Tychicus, which struck me as significant because it almost looked like a contracted and Latinized form of my own name.

Remembering Tychicus made me mildly curious as to who exactly Tychicus was and whether or not he actually did anything in the New Testament. As far as I could remember, his was just a name dropped in passing from time to time. Since I often have occasion to check Mormon scriptures as well as the Bible proper, the Bible app I usually use is one called Gospel Library, produced by the Great and Unabbreviable Church (formerly known as the Mormons) and including not only the scriptures but various church-produced magazines and manuals. Basically, it's a mobile version of the website formerly known as lds.org. I put tychicus into the search box, and one of the first hits was an article from the October 2023 issue of the magazine formerly known as the Ensign, about the program formerly known as home-teaching. Here's the opening paragraph:

Tychicus isn’t the most familiar name in the New Testament, but he was an example of ministering and serving with diligence. Although his service was at times in the background, his faithfulness made it possible for Paul to do his important work. Tychicus delivered letters to the Ephesian and Colossian Saints and comforted and encouraged them (see Ephesians 6:21–22; Colossians 4:7–8). He traveled to different areas, such as Crete and Ephesus, to help with the work, freeing leaders like Titus and Timothy to assist Paul (see 2 Timothy 4:12). Paul called Tychicus “a beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord” (Ephesians 6:21).

As an article, this one is about as boring as you would expect. As a sync, though . . . The church has published exactly one article to date highlighting the not-so-distinguished career of this very obscure biblical figure: this one, published this month, the same month that I suddenly became curious about Tychicus after -- let me stress the oddness of the train of thought -- seeing the name Adam De Wan in the credits for a BBC food program.

This was enough to make me look up my original Tychicus sync, which I mention in a comment to my own January 2021 post "Not against flesh and blood." That post is about a sync that began when I saw a T-shirt that said "ARMOR OF GOD" with a reference to the relevant passage in Ephesians. The word Ephesians had made me think of Diana of the Ephesians, and that, combined with the armor reference, had made me think of Joan of Arc -- because my December 2020 post "The white doe" hand linked Joan with Plutarch's story about Sertorius and his pet, a white fawn which he maintained "was a gift of Diana, and . . . revealed many hidden things to him." The connection with Joan was by way of Virginia Dare, since Joan's surname (originally Darc, not d'Arc) was sometimes given as Dare.

Rereading those old posts today, I thought the "armor" reference was a potential sync, since just yesterday I had seen this meme:

This combines armor with the thee/thou language of the King James Bible. The reference of course is to the 1953 Dean Martin song "That's Amore," the original line being, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." It's also amore, another verse informs us, "when the stars make you drool like a pasta e fasul." Keep in mind that what started this current sync-stream was a food program featuring pasta.

A more significant sync is that "The white doe" begins with the fact that Jeanne d'Arc was actually Jeanne Darc -- the initial d later reinterpreted as the preposition de, giving rise to the misnomer "Joan of Arc." But this current sync-stream began when I assumed something similar about BBC editor Adam De Wan -- that he was probably Irish, that his surname had probably originally been Dewan, and that spelling it De Wan as if it were an aristocratic title was probably a later affectation.

So I looked up De Wan. Sure enough, Dewan is an Irish surname. According to ancestry.com, it's a "shortened Anglicized form of Ó Dubháin or Ó Damháin." I don't really know any Irish, but I do know that dubh means black. (I think that fact has come up on this blog before, though I can't find it anywhere.) Google confirms this, using an even more synchronistically apropos synonym:

Joan's original surname was Darc, with the beginning later reinterpreted as the preposition de. The De Wan family's original name may have been "Dark," with the beginning later reinterpreted as the preposition de. (This means Adam De Wan may also tie in with old "Black Adam" syncs.)

As for the other possible Irish origin of Dewan, Damháin is obscure enough that Google thought I might be trying to search for Samhain (the Irish name for November, when Rick Stein's Secret France aired). When I confirmed that I meant what I had typed, it offered damhain-allaidh, the Gaelic for "spider." This in turn comes from the Old Irish damán allaid -- the first element of which means, of all things, "fawn"!

Another name that caught my eye in the Rick Stein credits, that of production manager Olwyn Goldsmith, may also link back to old syncs. Olwyn apparently means "white footprints." My February 4 post "An appearance of Jesus to some Ute Indians in 1920" and the posts it links to discuss the Ute god Sinawav, whose name -- according to Stan Bronson, a Mormon interpreter of Ute myth who identifies Sinawav with Jesus -- means "he who leaves footprints of light." The name Goldsmith obviously has strong Mormon resonances, too.