An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge

After work this evening, I checked America's flagship meme post and saved this one:

I've never seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator, but I know enough from cultural osmosis to get the reference: the title monster can blend in perfectly with its surroundings, like a chameleon, making it virtually invisible. The meme made me think about the word chameleon itself, since the second half of the word clearly means "lion." Looking up the etymology, I find that it comes from the Greek for "dwarf lion" -- which would also be a pretty good name for a housecat. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that "Perhaps the large head-crest on some species was thought to resemble a lion's mane." Keep that lion-headed reptile imagery in mind.

Just after getting my meme fix, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post is called "'Get in the choppa!': A skin-removing Chameleon hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger" and is all about -- what else? -- the 1987 movie Predator.

William's post ends with this note:

[Note: as I was just finishing up some edits above, I looked at Predator and saw it as Pre-Dator, as in something that pre-dates.  A Being that is very old and from "Before" - Ancient - for whatever that is worth]

This made me think of two things. First, it's in the context of a Schwarzenegger movie, and people often imitate Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent by dropping the r from his first name, sometimes even spelling it Ahnold. Ages ago, in some intro-to-literature class, we read the Joyce Carol Oates story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" One of the main characters is Arnold Friend, who represents the devil or the personification of death. The teacher pointed out that if you remove the r's from his name, it becomes an old fiend. The movie Predator, the title of which William Wright read as "something that pre-dates . . . very old . . . Ancient," stars "Ahnold" -- Arnold with the r removed -- which, as the intro-to-lit teacher noted, and as Oates perhaps intended, yields an old.

The other connection I made was with Revelation 12:9. William had capitalized Ancient as if it were a title, and "ancient" is one of the titles applied to Satan in that verse: ho drakon ho megas, ho ophis ho archaios, "the Great Dragon, the Ancient Serpent." And that juxtaposition of drakon and archaios brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon.

A few months ago I watched, and posted a bit about, a series of videos by someone going by Galahad Eridanus, who created, under the influence of "angels" and psychedelics, a symbolic diagram he calls the Abraxian Cosmogram. Part of it looks like this:

Notice the two serpents labeled archon and drakon, which correspond respectively to Ahriman and Lucifer in Rudolf Steiner's system. Revelation 12:9 uses the words drakon ("dragon") and archaios ("ancient"). Drakon is obviously the same word used in the Cosmogram; archon and archaios are forms of the same word, being respectively the present participle and gerund of the verb archein ("to be the first").

Chameleon, recall, is from the Greek for "dwarf lion," apparently because the Greeks thought the chameleon looked like a lion-headed reptile. In the Cosmogram, the being with the Greek name Archon is depicted as a lion-headed serpent. This is a Gnostic symbol, often associated with the name Yaldabaoth, but in memes it is invariable given the title Demiurge. I suppose it's just a coincidence that one of the first such memes I found in an image search also happens to include a gray cat and a tree:

What's the significance of the Demiurge? Well, in his post William Wright mentions that a scene in Predator reminded him of "that strange picture that WJT has posted on his blog a few times (with Arnold running away from the reality temple)." Yeah, but whose reality temple?

Another random chameleon note. My January 7 post "My tail is dun" takes its name from a scene in the Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle, in which Dor has forced a "spelling bee" (a magical insect which can spell words) to help him write an essay. The resentful bee, though unable to misspell a word, finds a loophole by giving Dor technically correct spellings, but of homophones, not the words he clearly wants. When Dor dictates "My tale is done," the bee produces "My tail is dun."

In a comment on that post, I noted that Dor's mother is actually named Chameleon. I now note further that, just as the scene I had referred to was about spelling and used lots of homophones and homonyms, the character Chameleon was introduced in the novel A Spell for Chameleon -- that's spell in the magical sense, of course, a homonym of what the spelling bee does. The cover features a manticore -- a mythical creature with a lion's mane and the tail of a dragon or scorpion. This one has a scorpion's tail, but a manticore still seems similar in principle to the lion-headed serpent.

The idea of a "spelling bee" as an insect also makes me think of the spelling-reform project carried out in mid-19th century Utah under the direction of Brigham Young. They called it the Deseret Alphabet, deseret being a word said in the Book of Mormon to mean "honeybee." So a good English translation of "Deseret Alphabet" would be "Bee Spelling."