Follow-up on antlers, crosses, and the Liahona

In general, I have my Romantic Christian posts, which are read, commented on, and linked by my fellow Romantic Christian bloggers (e.g. Bruce Charlton, Francis Berger, and William Wildblood); and I have my synchronicity posts, which have dominated the blog in recent months, and which get engagement mostly from a different set of readers (e.g. Debbie, William Wright, and WanderingGondola). There's not normally a huge amount of cross-pollination between these two groups.

My most recent sync-post, though, "A cross between two antlers, and the Liahona spindles," not only includes Frank's blog in the syncs but led to a response post there, "Going Where We Need to Go Versus Going Absolutely Nowhere." Frank discusses the Liahona and legends relating to the white stag and the stag with a crucifix between its antlers. Then, before quoting Bruce Charlton, he mentions in passing that Bruce "has also been connected to the antler/crucifix/St. Eustace in a meme, of all things." I followed the link to Frank's 2021 post about that meme. Notice his choice of words in describing the meme's effect (underlined in red by me):

Quite synchronistically interesting in light of the image I posted which caused him to revisit that old meme:

As I noted in my last post, this image was presumably intended as a reference to a kind of cocktail called a Jägerbomb, but the sync fairies can commandeer anything for their own purposes.

In the context of the Liahona, a sacred artifact described in the Book of Mormon, it is perhaps relevant that that book is often abbreviated as BoM. Back when I was a Mormon missionary, some of my associates would even thus abbreviate it in speech, pronouncing it bomb.

In Taiwan, the game of Hangman -- where you guess letters in a target word or phrase, and with each wrong guess a body part is added to the hanged stick figure -- is commonly played in a different form, called Bomb, where there is a cartoon bomb with a segmented fuse, and one segment of the fuse is erased for each wrong guess. So there's another link between the cartoon bomb and the hanged/crucified man.

In its classic Marseille form, the Hanged Man of the Tarot is hanged between two branches with many protruding stumps, suggesting the antlers of a stag:

Later in my antlers post, I posted a photo of a cross on a pair of automatic sliding glass doors, so positioned that when the doors opened the cross would be split in half. In a comment, William Wright wrote:

I had just posted on "X marks the spot" while thinking (though not stating) that the X in question may not necessarily lead to the actual 'place', but a door or entrance to that place.

The cross on the doors was oriented as a +, not an X, but today I happened to see this on the gates of a construction site near my home:

This is the same concept -- a cross centered on the place where two doors meet, such that opening the doors will split it in half -- but this time the cross is in diagonal X orientation.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my antlers post seemed to draw together two different circles of readers of this blog. I thought of this in terms of the two crosses coming together, as discussed in "What's the second key?"

The wallpaper in the hallway just outside my personal chapel shows a bamboo forest with the sun shining through it. Today I noticed for the first time that the rays of the sun make it look like an eight-pointed star, suggesting the union of two crosses, so I took a photo. Earlier, I had passed a parked car with BEE on the license plate and taken a photo of that. Later, when I opened the photo app on my phone, the two thumbnails were so positioned as to make it look like a single photo, with the BEE car driving toward the eight-rayed sun:

Compare that to this image, which I posted in "What's the second key?"

In the Book of Mormon, the Liahona was used to guide a ship across the sea to the Promised Land. In the Ward Radio video I embedded in my last post, someone says that Hugh Nibley proposed that the word Liahona comes from a Hebrew or Egyptian word meaning "queen bee."

I normally take Hugh Nibley's linguistic speculations with a shaker or two of salt, but interestingly Frank recently linked to "By the waters of Mormon: an open letter to Christian Esoterists," a (highly recommended) essay by a non-Mormon writer from Portugal who calls Nibley "one of the most important intellectuals not only of Mormonism but of the 20th Century."