The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building

It's apparent, as noted in "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs," that the sync fairies are symbolically identifying the Swiss Temple in Bern with the Empire State Building, but it hasn't been clear why. Trying to figure out the connection, I watched the 42 trailer a few more times.

The end of the trailer features the Jay-Z track "Brooklyn Go Hard." The first time around, I didn't catch the lyrics beyond "I'm Jackie Robinson," so I figured it was a song about the ballplayer, perhaps even written specifically for this biopic. Well, not exactly. Aside from the refrain of "Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard," here are the lyrics that appear in the trailer:

I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them

I jack, I rob, I sin,

Ah, man, I'm Jackie Robinson

'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen

So Jay is punningly saying that he's Jackie Rob-'n'-sin, an artful Brooklyn dodger, because he fathers and abandons bastards; commits carjackings, robberies, and sins; and traffics in cocaine without being incarcerated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the black liberation Robinson represents -- Jackie Robinson led the way, and look where blacks are today! I don't think Robinson himself had any criminal background -- in his era it had yet to become the norm -- but either way, it's an odd and not exactly respectful soundtrack choice for a movie that portrays him as a hero.

I knew what base meant because at one point I had looked up the etymology of based. Before a series of repurposings -- by Lil B, 4chan, and W. M. Briggs -- transformed it into an expression of approval with right-wing connotations, based referred to a basehead, a user of a particular type of cocaine. How exactly does "freebase" cocaine differ from the common or garden form, though? I realized I didn't know, and looking it up led to a breakthrough in interpreting these syncs:

freebase /ˈfriːbeɪs/ noun: freebase cocaine

cocaine that has been purified by heating with ether, taken by inhaling the fumes or smoking the residue.

Ether! You may remember that the reason 42 caught my eye was because of syncs relating that number to the Book of Ether, documented in my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr." The phrase "forty and two years" occurs three times in Ether 10, referring to three different things, and nowhere else in the Book of Mormon.

Following a sudden hunch, I looked up how long the Empire State Building had been the tallest building in the world:

The longest world record held by the Empire State Building was for the tallest skyscraper (to structural height), which it held for 42 years until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in October 1970.

Before discovering this Ether connection, I had been trying to connect The Swiss Family Robinson with the Book of Mormon. The family has four sons, just like Lehi's when he left Jerusalem, and Bern can be linked to Jerusalem because the Bern Switzerland Temple district, oddly, includes Jerusalem.

A better link, though, is with the Jaredites (whose story is told in the Book of Ether). Lehi flees Jerusalem, but the Jaredites flee the Great Tower -- a much closer link to the Empire State Building than Bern is to Jerusalem. The Jaredites also bring lots of livestock across the sea, as do the Swiss castaways.

The people's language is confounded at the Great Tower, making it the likely source of the Tower of Babel story in the Bible (or, for skeptics, vice versa). This aspect of the story is a link to the Swiss Temple. I have mentioned several times that it was the first LDS temple to present the ceremony in the form of a movie. The reason for this change was that, unlike all previous temples, the Swiss Temple had to perform ceremonies in multiple different languages, and a film was the easiest way of dealing with that.

While the Tower of Babel was simply "a tower whose top may reach unto heaven" -- cf. our term skyscraper -- the Great Tower was "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven": not just a tall building but a means of transportation, suggesting Zecharia Sitchin's theory that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship. The video for "The Statue Got Me High" portrays the Empire State Building as a spaceship, quite literally taking its inhabitants into the heavens. See my November 1 post "The Empire State Building -- in space!"

Also, in Hercules in New York, it is from the Empire State Building that Hercules ascends to heaven -- or to Olympus, anyway.

Another thing that caught my eye in the 42 trailer was a building labeled Ebbets Field -- where the Dodgers used to play, apparently. It's an odd name, so I looked up the etymology. It means "son of Isabel" or "son of Elizabeth." The original son of Elizabeth was John the Baptist (who, like the Jaredites, is associated with the honeybee), but the connection I made was with the Björk song "Isobel." I started listening to Björk shortly before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films came out, and I associate "Isobel" with the scene where Gandalf escapes from Isengard. There are these lines from the third verse:

In a tower of steel

Nature forges a deal

To raise wonderful hell

Like me, like me

But the key line is from the chorus:

Moth delivers her message

In the Peter Jackson movie -- though I don't remember it from the novel -- Gandalf escapes from Saruman in the tower of Orthanc in Isengard by sending a moth out as a messenger to summon an eagle.

I note parenthetically, as a sync probably intended for William Wright -- see "The Honey Maid (OR: What crazy people see on graham cracker boxes and Oreos)" -- that when I looked up the above video clip for inclusion in this post, I first had to sit through an ad for Oreo cookies.

I'm not touching this -- I'm ignoring new syncs, remember -- but there it is in case Mr. Wright wants to conclude anything from it.

Saruman in Isengard has already been connected with the orb-pondering Zeus seen in Hercules in New York.

I listened to Björk back in the days when people bought CDs, so I had never seen the music video for "Isobel" until today:

It's a black-and-white video prominently featuring organ pipes -- just like the Woodkid video for "Iron":

The "Iron" video ends, as the "Run Boy Run" video begins, with a shot of the Swiss Temple. The word iron derives from the Old English isen, as in Isengard. William Wright has already connected the organ pipes in the "Iron" video with Saruman, in his November 1 post "Stones and Keys, Part 3: The Voice of Saruman":

The man reading from his book of keys (Saruman) is first juxtaposed with those organ pipes.  As he reads and speaks, we see cuts to the pipes, continuously zooming in on them.  Are they playing?  It is hard to say right off the bat, since the music of the actual song is playing.  But I believe what we see here, or at least one thing, is the voice of Saruman being piped through those organ pipes.

So that's some interpretive progress, anyway. The Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building represent the Great Tower, and Saruman seems to be involved as well.